The Place Where Forever Ends


The idea of living forever has held great fascination for many great minds,
but just like the pursuit of a perpetual motion machine it is an impossible dream,
and for the same reasons.


Image source: Wikemedia, public domain.


Here are some basic logical requirements of living forever. 


In order to live forever one must first be alive.

A study in the March edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, senior-authored by Jerome C. Wakefield, empirically challenges the effectiveness of psychiatrists' official diagnostic manual in preventing mistaken, false-positive diagnoses of depression. This isn't the first time that Wakefield has challenged the DSM criteria for diagnosing depression. His first assault caused such controversy that the criteria were slightly tightened, but DSM-V is on the horizon and I suspect psychiatrists are busy pushing their particular niche obsessions.

Climate Crook : Scam! Scam! Scam!


Followers of my blog will no doubt guess that this article is about Godfrey Bloom -
he of the famous quote:
"There appears to be a woeful lack of candour and commonsense in modern day politicians."

I have already written something of his own Woeful Lack Of Candour.

This is a follow-up.

On 31 December 2009, Fabrice Bellard announced that he had set a new world record for the most number of digits of the number pi. His algorithm has calculated the first 2.7 trillion digits of this famous mathematical constant, beating the previous record of 2.5 trillion digits set earlier in the year.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, approximately 20 percent of Americans believed that then-Senator Barack Obama was a Muslim despite news stories that attempted to debunk the rumor, according to a study in The Journal of Media and Religion.

The study analyzed data from a survey of more than 2,400 people taken at three points during the campaign to see if exposure to news media helped correct misperceptions about Obama's faith.

The findings are consistent with psychological studies on selective memory that show that people tend to discount facts that are inconsistent with their preexisting beliefs. People are also less likely to remember information that conflicts with their beliefs.

Scientists writing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society say they have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in SMM J1237+6203, a galaxy in the early Universe.

The researchers observed the massive galaxy as it would have appeared just three billion years after the Big Bang when the Universe was a quarter of its present age.

According to their findings, the galaxy exploded in a series of blasts trillions of times more powerful than any caused by an atomic bomb. The blasts happened every second for millions of years, the scientists said.

A new study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that people in good health are almost twice as likely to be interested in sex compared to those in poor health. Sexual activity has health benefits and is linked to living longer, but the new study investigated how general health impacts the quality of sex.

The study also estimate how many remaining sexually active years healthy men and women have left.

The results revealed that at the age of 30, men have a sexually active life expectancy of nearly 35 years and for women it's almost 31 years. At 55, this figure changes to almost 15 remaining years for men and 10 years for women. This gender difference diminishes for people with a spouse or intimate partner.

Researchers from Kuwait University predict that world conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014 — almost a decade earlier than some other predictions.

The team explains that scientists have developed several models to forecast the point at which oil production reaches a maximum and then declines, and some put the date at 2020 or later. One of the most famous forecast models, called the Hubbert model, accurately predicted that oil production would peak in the United States in 1970.

University of California, San Francisco researchers have uncovered a crucial mechanism that encourages alcohol consumption after extended abstinence.

Previous work has suggested that people, places, and objects associated with alcohol use are potent triggers for eliciting relapse and that cravings for both alcohol and drugs can increase across protracted abstinence. However, the specific molecular mechanisms that underlie pathological alcohol seeking are not well defined.

Some chickens appear to be male on one side of the body and female on the other, and researchers writing in Nature this week say they know why.

It was previously thought that sex chromosomes in birds control whether a testis or ovary forms, with sexual traits then being determined by hormones.

The authors of the new study, however, identified differences between male and female cells that control the development of sexual traits. The scientists have named the phenomenon, cell autonomous sex identity (CASI).

The findings may also be relevant to why males and females differ in behavior and in susceptibility to disease.