http://hubpages.com/hub/your-second-brai...your-heart

"A second brain in the heart is now much more than a hypothesis. Prominent medical expert like Doctor Maurice Renard and others discovered that that recipients of heart transplants are inheriting donors' memories and consequently report huge changes in their tastes, their personality, and, most extraordinarily, in their emotional memories. Today new science is testing the theory that the heart is involved in our feelings. So what have they discovered so far?"

"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."

Is this quote of Wittgenstein's really plausible?

What implications does this statement have for awareness in animals that lack language? If they lack words, how can they know anything? (My dog, now sadly deceased, certainly seemed to know where to find her food bowl.)

Does it imply that the many kinds of supposedly ineffable experience and knowing are impossible? These range from mystical experiences, through aesthetic experiences, to knowing what the color red looks like and what love or fear feel like.

(Given the richness and texture of my experience, I wonder how much of it I could ever put into words.)

Last week's round of artilect phobia:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Elon-Mu...id/599915/

"I don't think anyone realizes how quickly artificial intelligence is advancing. Particularly if involved in recursive self-improvement ... and its utility function is something that's detrimental to humanity, then it will have a very bad effect," Musk, speaking at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, said....

http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/antikythera-finds

"...The Antikythera wreck was first discovered in 1900 by sponge divers who were blown off course by a storm. They subsequently recovered a spectacular haul of ancient treasure including bronze and marble statues, jewellery, furniture, luxury glassware, and the surprisingly complex Antikythera Mechanism. But they were forced to end their mission at the 55-meter-deep site after one diver died of the bends and two were paralyzed. Ever since, archaeologists have wondered if more treasure remains buried beneath the sea bed.

Now a team of international archaeologists including Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Theotokis Theodoulou of the Hellenic Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities have returned to the treacherous site using state-of-the-art technology...." WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2...102672.htm

"A lot of people used to believe that something special happened in Europe and this is where humans became truly modern," says Aubert, who is the lead author on a paper appearing today in the journal Nature. He says until now cave paintings at El Castillo in Spain were accepted as the oldest reliably dated rock art -- at around 41,000 years old. But the story has now changed with Aubert and colleagues' dating of 12 hand stencils and two animal paintings that appear in big limestone caves at Maros, Sulawesi. "Now we can say that modern humans were making cave paintings in Southeast Asia as well, 40,000 years ago," says Aubert.

Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought, new evidence suggests

"While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier....

Atomism from the 17th to the 20th Century

"...The mechanical philosophy differed from the atomism of the Greeks insofar as it was intended to apply to the material world only and not to the spiritual world. Apart from that major difference, the world-views are alike. Fundamentally there is just one kind of matter characterised by a property that serves to capture the tangibility of matter and distinguish it from void. Boyle chose absolute impenetrability as that property. There are insensibly small portions of matter that, whilst they are divisible in thought or by God, are indivisible as far as natural processes are concerned.

"Boyle, misleadingly drawing on another tradition that will be discussed in a later section, referred to these particles as minima naturalia or prima naturalia. Here they are referred to as atoms, a terminology only very rarely adopted by Boyle himself. Each atom has an unchanging shape and size and a changeable degree of motion or rest. All properties of the material world are reducible to and arise as a consequence of the arrangements and motions of the underlying atoms. In particular, properties possessed by macroscopic objects, both those detectable directly by the senses, such as colour and taste, and those involved in the interaction of bodies with each other, such as elasticity and degree of heat, are to be explained in terms of the properties of atoms. Those properties of atoms, their shape, size and motion, together with the impenetrability possessed by them all, are the primary ones in terms of which the properties of the complex bodies that they compose, the secondary ones, are to be explained. Such explanations involve the fundamental laws of nature that govern the motions of atoms.

"Not all of the mechanical philosophers were mechanical atomists...."

Researchers Compare Efficacy of “Natural” Bed Bug Pesticides

"... When the researchers sprayed the 11 non-synthetic pesticides directly on bed bug nymphs, they found that only two — EcoRaider (1% geraniol, 1% cedar extract, and 2% sodium lauryl sulfate) and Bed Bug Patrol (0.003% clove oil, 1% peppermint oil, and 1.3% sodium lauryl sulfate) — killed more than 90 percent of them. None of the non-synthetic insecticides had any noticeable effect against bed bug eggs except for EcoRaider, which killed 87 percent of them.

While these lab results may seem promising, the effectiveness of both products is probably much lower in actual settings because it is extremely difficult to spray any product directly on bed bugs because of their ability to hide in tiny cracks and crevices...."