"NASA's Dawn spacecraft will have plenty of mysteries to investigate when it begins orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres next month, as the probe's latest photos attest.

Dawn's most recent images of Ceres, taken Feb. 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) away, show an abundance of craters on the dwarf planet, as well as numerous bright spots that have scientists baffled.

"As we slowly approach the stage, our eyes transfixed on Ceres and her planetary dance, we find she has beguiled us but left us none the wiser," Dawn principal investigator Chris Russell of UCLA said in a statement. "We expected to be surprised; we did not expect to be this puzzled."

The new photos, which have a resolution of 4.9 miles (7.8 km) per pixel, are the sharpest ever taken of Ceres, NASA officials said.

A large, flickering white spot was also visible in photos Dawn took of Ceres last month.

"We can confirm that it is something on Ceres that reflects more sunlight, but what that is remains a mystery," Dawn mission director and chief engineer Marc Rayman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told Space.com via email at the time."===http://www.space.com/28579-ceres-bright-...hotos.html

"Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a powerful new psychotherapy technique which has been very successful in helping people who suffer from trauma, anxiety, panic, disturbing memories, post traumatic stress and many other emotional problems. Until recently, these conditions were difficult and time-consuming to treat. EMDR is considered a breakthrough therapy because of its simplicity and the fact that it can bring quick and lasting relief for most types of emotional distress.

EMDR is the most effective and rapid method for healing PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) as shown by extensive scientific research studies.

The EMDR therapy uses bilateral stimulation, right/left eye movement, or tactile stimulation, which repeatly activates the opposite sides of the brain, releasing emotional experiences that are "trapped" in the nervous system. This assists the neurophysiological system, the basis of the mind/body connection, to free itself of blockages and reconnect itself.

As troubling images and feelings are processed by the brain via the eye-movement patterns of EMDR, resolution of the issues and a more peaceful state are achieved.

How Does It Work?

The therapist works gently with the client and asks him/her to revisit the traumatic moment or incident, recalling feelings surrounding the experience, as well as any negative thoughts, feelings and memories. The therapist then holds her fingers about eighteen inches from the clients face and begins to move them back and forth like a windshield wiper. The client tracks the movements as if watching ping pong. The more intensely the client focuses on the memory, the easier it becomes for the memory to come to life. As quick and vibrant images arise during the therapy session, they are processed by the eye movements, resulting in painful feelings being exchanged for more peaceful, loving and resolved feelings."===http://www.emdr-therapy.com/emdr.html

http://plus.maths.org/content/what-infinity

EXCERPT: [...] This kind of infinity is what the ancient Greek mathematician Aristotle called a potential infinity: it's definitely there, but you will never actually meet it face-to-face. You just can't get to the end of those never-ending lists or expanses.

Aristotle also thought of another kind of infinity, called an actual infinity. This would be something you could measure, say the temperature of an object, in a particular place and time. Nobody has ever seen such an actual infinity, and indeed Aristotle thought that actual infinities don't exist in the physical world. To this day, physicists don't know whether he was right or wrong....

Does learning new information increase the mass of the human brain? Does information contain energy? How can something without mass or energy make a difference? What is the ontic state of information? Does it have objective properties that allow us to measure it, quantify it, and estimate its magnitude? Can it exist without consciousness? Is information about information still information? Is there anything BUT information about information? How much information is contained in a single wave of light? Is lack of information a form of information? If information amount is increased when it is received, why is it not lessened when it is transmitted? If information cannot be destroyed, then where does it go when objects are destroyed?

"When absinthe -- also known as the Green Fairy -- was banned in France, Switzerland, the Un­ited States and many other countries in the early 1900s, it had become associated with illicit behavior. In fact, it was accused of turning children into criminals, encouraging loose morals and inspiring murders. That regular old alcohol received similar treatment during the Prohibition period in the United States turns out to be pretty apropos: We now know that properly manufactured absinthe -- an anise-flavored, alcoholic drink -- is no more dangerous than any other properly prepared liquor.

What about the tales of hallucinations, Oscar Wilde and his tulips, family massacres and instant death? Not absinthe's fault, technically speaking. Absinthe does have a very high alcohol content -- anywhere between 55 and 75 percent, which equates to about 110 to 144 proof. It makes whiskey's standard 40 percent (80 proof) seem like child's play, which is why absinthe is supposed to be diluted. Absinthe is not a hallucinogen; its alcohol content and herbal flavor sets it apart from other liquors.

Traditional absinthe is made of anise, fennel and wormwood (a plant), and various recipes add other herbs and flowers to the mix. The anise, fennel and wormwood are soaked in alcohol, and the mixture is then distilled. The distillation process causes the herbal oils and the alcohol to evaporate, separating from the water and bitter essences released by the herbs. The fennel, anise and wormwood oils then recondense with the alcohol in a cooling area, and the distiller dilutes the resulting liquid down to whatever proof the absinthe is supposed to be (based on brand variations or regional laws). At this point, the absinthe is clear; many manufacturers add herbs to the mixture after distillation to get the classic green color from their chlorophyll.

The chemical that's taken all the­ blame for absinthe's hallucinogenic reputation is called thujone, which is a component of wormwood. In very high doses, thujone can be toxic. It is a GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid) inhibitor, meaning it blocks GABA receptors in the brain, which can cause convulsions if you ingest enough of it. It occurs naturally in many foods, but never in doses high enough to hurt you. And there's not enough thujone in absinthe to hurt you, either. By the end of the distillation process, there is very little thujone left in the product. Modern science has estimated that a person drinking absinthe would die from alcohol poisoning long before he or she were affected by the thujone. And there is no evidence at all that thujone can cause hallucinations, even in high doses."===http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovat...sinthe.htm

"In the words of the great scholar of Buddhism, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy: “Everything past is unreal, everything future is unreal, everything imagined, absent, mental . . . is unreal. . . . Ultimately real is only the present moment of physical efficiency.”

But really, is the present even real, in the sense of something that just objectively occurs? Think about it. You're sitting in the park gazing at a tree. The tree and you with it are conceived by you as happening all at the same time. You are embedded in this moment of immediacy. But were that so, would you even be able to experience the tree? The tree first of all is being. That presumably takes time. Then the light of the sun hits the tree reflected over to your eyes. That takes time too. Our eyes wander over the entirety of the tree and grasp it as one thing. One pattern or shape. Then it takes time for your brain to process those light signals as "tree standing over there."

The tree has to cause our own perception of it to be present to us. But by the time it does this what we construct as "there" isn't really the tree as it is in itself. It is a sensory-based construct of a touchable, seeable whole being AS IF it were unconstructed and occurring simultaneous to our moment of awareness. But this construct is AFTER the tree. It's in the past of the tree, projected out beyond us in a fictional time in which the tree and us and everything in the park is supposed to exist all at once.

The present is thus conceived as one static moment. A freezeframe of all things together at once. But such is impossible. Such a state would result in all things being eternally in the dark and solipsistically isolated from each other. There is no tree, me, the park, and the light waves at one moment. Being here and now is an accumulative process over time, an organic confluence of successive micro-instants creating the illusion of timeless simultaneous coexistence. The present is an illusory artifact of our own awareness, positing itself as a whole happening moment that never begins and never ends and contains everything as objectively present to us.

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson

Our galaxy is presently being sucked towards a region of space we can't see and have no clue about. Noone knows why. Are we all doomed? Get the scoop on the Great Attractor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qeOhJ9dbg

http://www.today.com/health/peanut-patch...2D80506626

EXCERPT: For those plagued with peanut allergies, protection may eventually come in the form of a patch worn on the skin, a new study suggests....