These are just plain weird. Evidently there are unknown very fast creatures that hate churned up sea water:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJWeVLs40Bg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25RTDXFNWY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW9dk4xs83Q

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...stery.html

EXCERPT: Peering into the heart of the Milky Way, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has spotted a mysterious glow of high-energy X-rays [...] "Almost anything that can emit X-rays is in the galactic center," said Perez. "The area is crowded with low-energy X-ray sources, but their emission is very faint when you examine it at the energies that NuSTAR observes, so the new signal stands out."

Astronomers have four potential theories to explain the baffling X-ray glow, [...] none of these theories match what is known from previous research, leaving the astronomers largely stumped. "This new result just reminds us that the galactic center is a bizarre place," said co-author Chuck Hailey of Columbia University. "In the same way people behave differently walking on the street instead of jammed on a crowded rush hour subway, stellar objects exhibit weird behavior when crammed in close quarters near the supermassive black hole."

The team says more observations are planned. Until then, theorists will be busy exploring the above scenarios or coming up with new models to explain what could be giving off the puzzling high-energy X-ray glow....

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/alternative...=synd_digg

EXCERPT: [...] Jim was starting to doubt the attitude fostered at conferences like Defeat Autism Now!, where he first learned about chelation. He cringed when he heard of parents mortgaging their homes to pay for wildly expensive and unproven treatments. Alarms went off when parents and doctors would advocate dangerous protocols—hyper-dosing with vitamin A, using extreme forms of chelation. When he spoke out against them, a prominent conference organizer took him aside and warned him never to criticize anyone’s approach, no matter how crazy or dangerous it seemed.

It was in the grip of these doubts when, inside Goofy’s Kitchen, Jim and Louise returned to their table from the buffet and noticed 6-year-old David hadn’t come with them. They saw him standing at the buffet, devouring a waffle. The Laidlers feared the worst. “We’d been told that the slightest smidgen of gluten would crash him,” Jim says. “It was absolutely devastating to watch.” But by the end of the vacation, they realized David was fine. Nothing happened.

When they returned home, the Laidlers took David off his restrictive diet, and he continued to improve—rapidly. Louise stopped Ben’s supplement regimen—without telling Jim—and Ben’s behavior remained the same. Then, after months of soul-searching, Jim Laider took to the internet to announce his “de-conversion” from alternative medicine—a kind of penance, but also a warning to others. “I had this guilt to expunge,” Jim says. “I helped to promote this nonsense, and I didn’t want other people to fall for it like I did.”

The Laidlers’ story is a microcosm of the changing debate over so-called alternative medicine and its cousin, integrative medicine. In 2007, Americans spent $2.9 billion on homeopathic medicine, a treatment based on the belief that minuscule amounts of what causes symptoms in a healthy person will alleviate symptoms in someone who is ill. From nutritional supplements to energy healing to acupuncture, treatments outside the medical mainstream are big business. But the vast majority of scientists find much of alternative medicine highly problematic.

[...] the fight came to a very public head when a group of doctors sent an open letter to Columbia University, demanding the school remove Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has used his syndicated TV show to promote integrative medicine, including nutritional regimens, homeopathy, and reiki—a form of energy healing that claims to use “universal life force energy” to “detoxify the body” and “increase the vibrational frequency on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels.”

[...] Whenever mainstream medicine has little to offer, other sources offer a dizzying array of options. Call it a market for hope. Autism, ALS, Alzheimer’s, terminal cancer. There’s no shortage of claims that these intractable conditions can be treated using approaches that conventional Western physicians fail to consider.

Loosely categorized as “alternative medicine,” the approaches include nutritional supplements, dietary regimens, detoxification protocols, acupuncture, energy healing, homeopathy, chiropractic, traditional Indian medicine, and whatever else has anecdotal support yet remains unaccepted by the larger scientific community.

[...] Steven Novella is a neurologist who, like David Katz, works for Yale Medical School. Though they share an employer, their perspectives on medicine differ drastically. Novella talks a bit like an astronomer who can’t believe his department has hired an astrologer. [...] Novella readily acknowledges flaws in our current healthcare system. There’s not enough government research funding, which means corporations have disproportionate influence on the development of new medications. Overtaxed doctors don’t have enough time with patients, forcing them to deliver difficult diagnoses without taking sufficient time to take to answer questions and provide comfort. Doctors, especially surgeons, often have a needlessly gruff and dismissive bedside manner. Reimbursement tends to reward procedures. The list of shortcomings he provides is endless.

Novella says that recognizing flaws in our healthcare system doesn’t mean giving up on rigorous standards for medicine.

But Novella says that recognizing flaws in our healthcare system doesn’t mean giving up on rigorous standards for medicine.

Novella is particularly perturbed that a degree from a naturopathic college—where there is no agreed upon standard of care—counts towards board certification in integrative medicine. As he points out, naturopaths, like the one who misdiagnosed his patient’s ALS as chronic lyme disease, embrace homeopathy, sometimes as a cure for autism. They are also open to chelation treatment and fear of vaccines. “There’s lots of changes that we need to make,” he acknowledges. “But as Paul Krugman says, when the public believes in magic, it’s springtime for the charlatans.”

British epidemiologist Ben Goldacre believes much the same thing: “Just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn’t mean magic carpets really fly,” he writes in his book Bad Pharma. It’s a great line and a good rule for critical thinking about implausible approaches to medicine. But it doesn’t solve the problem of uncertainty and despair...

Brains and animalism

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/...alism.html

EXCERPT: Animalists hold that we are animals. It is widely accepted by animalists that if a brain were removed from a body, and the body kept alive, the person would stay with the bulk of the body rather than go with the brain. I wonder how much of the intuition is based on irrelevant questions of physical bulk. Imagine aliens who are giant brains with tiny support organs—lungs, heart, legs, etc.—dwarfed by the brain. I think we might have the intuition that if the brain were disconnected from the support organs, the animal would go with the brain. In the case of beings that dwarf their brains, it feels natural to talk of a certain operation as a brain transplant. But in the case of beings that are almost all brain, the analogous operation would probably be referred to as a support-system transplant. Yet surely we should say exactly the same thing metaphysically about us and the aliens, assuming that the functional roles of the brains and the other organs are sufficiently similar. This isn't a positive argument that we'd go with our brains. It's just an argument to defuse the intuition that we wouldn't....

- - - - - - - -

Duplicating the Universe

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...verse.html

EXCERPT: I've been thinking about two forms of duplication. One is duplication of the entire universe from beginning to end, as envisioned in Nietzsche's eternal return (cf. Poincare's recurrence theorem on a grand scale). The other is duplication within an eternal (or very long) individual life (goldfish-pool immortality). In both cases, I find myself torn among four different evaluative perspectives. For color, imagine a god watching our universe from Big Bang to heat death. At the end, this god says, "In total, that was good. Replay!" Or imagine an immortal life in which you loop repeatedly (without remembering) through the same pleasures over and over. Consider four ways of thinking about the value of duplication...

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/c...ion-155175

EXCERPT: The ability to move in water is key to existence for many species so it may not be a surprise that so many species have converged on swimming. What is intriguing is how diverse creatures have evolved to swim with elongated fins using the same mechanical motion that optimizes their speed. The Persian carpet flatworm, the cuttlefish and the black ghost knifefish are nothing like each other - their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, before the Cambrian period - but all three aquatic creatures converged evolutionarily on the same swimming, according to a new study uses a combination of computer simulations, a robotic fish and video footage of real fish....

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...s-excerpt/

EXCERPT: [...] That sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach after looking at your postholiday credit card bill is a vivid example of the brain-gut connection at work. You’re stressed and your gut knows it—immediately. The enteric nervous system is often referred to as our body’s second brain. There are hundreds of million of neurons connecting the brain to the enteric nervous system, the part of the nervous system that is tasked with controlling the gastrointestinal system. This vast web of connections monitors the entire digestive tract from the esophagus to the anus. The enteric nervous system is so extensive that it can operate as an independent entity without input from our central nervous system, although they are in regular communication. While our “second” brain cannot compose a symphony or paint a masterpiece the way the brain in our skull can, it does perform an important role in managing the workings of our inner tube. The network of neurons in the gut is as plentiful and complex as the network of neurons in our spinal cord, which may seem overly complex just to keep track of digestion. Why is our gut the only organ in our body that needs its own “brain”? Is it just to manage the process of digestion? Or could it be that one job of our second brain is to listen in on the trillions of microbes residing in the gut? [...]

This will be the subject of tonight's Sharktank on ABC. A car that runs on compressed air. What a concept!

https://youtu.be/0RBl1LFUQ4c

Don't know what this could be. The shape is odd, there's flashing lights, and there's red and bluish purple and white lights. Did it just disappear? Or did it disperse?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWI9-Gumzs