There is an area close to the left ear, in the ‘temporal lobe’, that, when stimulated via strong magnetic fields, triggers religious feelings, visions of bright lights at the end of a tunnel, and, at a certain frequency, the feeling of the presence of somebody next to oneself, or somehow present, although subjects are in another room and separated from the researchers. This area is damaged in patients with the kind of schizophrenia that Vincent Van Gough suffered. His attacks of deeply religious visions started a few years before he died.

 

Nearly everyone is familiar with emoji, those popular icons that appear in text messages, emails and social media platforms. Emoji are often used as light-hearted adjuncts to text, or to soften the blow of a message.

Emoji can be viewed as overly simplistic in some contexts. For example, government officials were questioned when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop conducted an interview using just emoji, and described Russian President Vladmir Putin using an angry face  

Though CO2 emissions have plummeted in the United States, as developing nations achieve prosperity they will want air conditioners, sanitation and food - and those all require energy. They sure are not going to let already wealthy nations tell them they must be stuck with solar panels.

So climate change may still happen, at least if energy technology stops and fossil fuel use does not. If so, how will plant species will respond to climate change? A 16-year experiment may provide answers. Of course, the experiment is small, the size of two football fields inside the Garraf National park southwest of Barcelona, but it is home to many protected species. So even if it can't model an ecosystem it can model part of one.

In 2007, there was a ban that increased happiness for married women, but not men, according to the British Household Panel Survey.

Transport proteins called efflux pumps, and their role in creating drug-resistance in bacteria, could lead to improving effectiveness of drugs against life-threatening diseases and perhaps even bring defunct antibiotics back to prominence.

When pharmacy professionals — rather than doctors or nurses — take medication histories of patients in emergency departments, mistakes in drug orders can be reduced by more than 80 percent, according to a recent paper.

Injuries resulting from medication use are among the most common types of inpatient injuries at U.S. hospitals, affecting hundreds of thousands of patients every year. Errors in medication histories can lead physicians to order the wrong drug, dose or frequency.

ABC News recently suspended Brian Ross (four weeks without pay) for fabricating an unsubstantiated story that matched his ideological beliefs about Republicans and President Donald Trump and which caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plummet. This was not the first time he had turned his wishful thinking into action, he also blamed the Aurora, Colorado shooting on the Tea Party. It was, however, the first time ABC instituted some accountability for his work.

It was nice to find John Duffield's review of my book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab" in the Amazon site today.

An experiment designed to study neutrinos at the Gran Sasso Laboratories in Italy is under attack by populistic media. Why should you care? Because it's a glaring example of the challenges we face in the XXI century in our attempt to foster the progress of the human race.
What is a neutrino? Nothing - it's a particle as close to nothing as you can imagine. Almost massless, almost perfectly non-interacting, and yet incredibly mysterious and the key to the solution of many riddles in fundamental physics and cosmology. But it's really nothing you should worry about, or care about, if you want to lead your life oblivious of the intricacies of subnuclear physics. Which is fine of course - unless you try to use your ignorance to stop progress.

Once more many people are getting scared as a result of the recent North Korea test which puts the whole of the US in range.  The headlines say it puts all of US in range. You have to read carefully to discover it was probably a lightweight mock warhead. The way over hyped news stories about North Korea scare vulnerable young children and adults. So I write this to help put it in perspective. Also to explain why there is no way North Korea want to attack the US with a nuclear weapon. Nor does the US have any military options involving an invasion of North Korea, and both sides know that.