Frédéric Chopin, composer of "The Last Waltz" and poet of the piano, suffered from tuberculosis and regularly hallucinated.

Even for those in the Romantic Revolution, like Liszt, Schumann and Victor Hugo, among others, Chopin was considered frail and hypersensitive and somewhat of a mad genius.   Tuberculosis would claim him at age 39 but a paper published in Medical Humanities says that his hallucinations were not madness, but rather temporal lobe epilepsy.  Hallucinations typically feature in seizure disorders, they say.

A software that can drastically reduce CO2 emissions (and energetic costs) on computers all over the world has been developed by Portuguese scientists and is freely available to anyone interested.

Do you live for moments where "you're so absorbed by the task at hand that you lose track of time and place"?  Some call this 'the zone', psychologists call it Flow, and I'll pointlessly coin a acronym, 'SPS' (super productive state).  CSM guest blogger Trent Hamm has some insights on how to flip [your] mental switch and find 'the zone'.  Why flip that switch?

"figure out how to get in the zone and do it as often as possible. If you can do that, everything else really is secondary. You will find success."

Well, we now know what a Cargo Cult is, and we are now up to date on the recent research into the Nasca Lines. What I haven’t brought you completely up to date on is the actual Ancient Alien Theory explanation of the Nazca lines. The History Channel sums it up pretty succinctly:

“The Nazca Lines

 

Etched into a high plateau in Peru’s Nazca Desert, a series of ancient designs stretching more than 50 miles has baffled archaeologists for decades. Along with simple lines and geometric shapes, they include drawings of animals, birds and humans, some measuring more than 600 feet across.

Did dinosaurs appear and replace other animals?  At least in one South American valley, there's no indication that the dinosaurs appeared and wiped out other animals, which has been the prevailing hypothesis for the origin of dinosaurs based on fossils from North America and elsewhere in the world.

Dating of new dinosaur fossils and volcanic ash around them by researchers from has led them to cast doubt on the idea that dinosaurs appeared and opportunistically replaced other animals. They seem to have existed side by side and gone through similar periods of extinction.

The dynamics behind signal transmission in the brain are extremely chaotic. 

The brain codes information in the form of electrical pulses, known as spikes. Each of the brain's approximately 100 billion interconnected neurons acts as both a receiver and transmitter: these bundle all incoming electrical pulses and, under certain circumstances, forward a pulse of their own to their neighbours. In this way, each piece of information processed by the brain generates its own activity pattern. This indicates which neuron sent an impulse to its neighbors: in other words, which neuron was active, and when. Therefore, the activity pattern is a kind of communication protocol that records the exchange of information between neurons.

A potentially new form of public finance and public insurance may lie in institutions of community jury banking.  Jury banking is a new concept, as far as I can tell, though it is a combination of immigrant loan pools, and microfiance schemes.  Immigrant loan pools because immigrants tend to get together as small communities and pool money, lending this money to a single person as startup capital for a business.  THis is why south asian and east asians can afford to buy delis and taxis.  The money the business makes is partially returned to the loan pool and more money is available to new immigrants.  The return rates are high and dafault rates low, because everyone in the pool knows each other.  In the jury finance case, the loan pool is seeded by the state,

The scientific literacy of the American student has been dropping for quite some time now, and we often hear about this serious problem (here and here and, oh, over here).