People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

“Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “… In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice…”

One of the strangest satellites in the history of the space age is about to go into orbit. Launch date: Feb. 3rd. That’s when astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will hurl an empty spacesuit overboard. The spacesuit is the satellite — “SuitSat” for short.

“SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm,” explains Frank Bauer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Some of our Russian partners in the ISS program, mainly a group led by Sergey Samburov, had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites.” SuitSat is a first test of that idea.

“We’ve equipped a Russian Orlan spacesuit with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power,” says Bauer. “As SuitSat circles Earth, it will transmit its condition to the ground.”

Unlike a normal spacewalk, with a human inside the suit, SuitSat’s temperature controls will be turned off to conserve power. The suit, arms and legs akimbo, possibly spinning, will be exposed to the fierce rays of the sun with no way to regulate its internal temperature.

“Will the suit overheat? How long will the batteries last? Can we get a clear transmission if the suit tumbles?” wonders Bauer. These are some of the questions SuitSat will answer, laying the groundwork for SuitSats of the future…

(Thanks to R Stevens and Heidi MacDonald for sending this)

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“Cigarettes are my food,” said Frank Zappa. And then he died of testicular cancer. Which came as no surprise to anyone who’d heard him wanking in recording studios for thirty years, but still. Anyone who names his kid Moon Unit is plainly asking for his balls to rot off. Because there is such a thing as karma. Welcome to the concept of universal payback.

I quit smoking when I was thirty. There then followed three years of medical holocaust. I had a cold for a year, I developed a terminal allergy to housedust, my mouthwas ravaged by some hideous infection that stopped me eating anything harder than soup, I collapsed and was kept chemically unconscious by pain medication for a mouth, my circulatory system tried to kill my brain… And this, understand, is from NOT smoking.

I cannot deny my genetics. I cannot fight that which was hard-wired into me by my father’s tea-coloured, nicotine-riddled seed. You go ahead and pretend that car fumes are magic stardust and the greatest threat to life on earth is cigarette smoke. But the ineluctable, medical truth of the matter is that if I do not smoke I will DIE.
___
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California has become the first US state to classify second-hand tobacco smoke as a toxic air pollutant.

The decision by the California Air Resources Board puts drifting smoke in the same category as diesel exhaust, and could lead to tougher regulation.

cigarette smoke
MADE THIS MAN IMMORTAL

ViaDisquiet: Kettel releases a 56-second track on kracfive’s MP3 rotor that is a sudden little burst of summer in a London park, all plinky strings and piano and flute and a tiny snatch of laughter at the end, and it shouldn’t work at all, but it’s a weirdly brightening thing… play it with the PlayTagger, it’s only 800K…

“Tussen” – Kettel

An earthquake off the northeastern coast of Japan could kill up to 2,700 people and trigger a 72-foot tsunami, a Japanese government panel has predicted.

The government’s Central Disaster Management Council focused on the Japan and Chishima trenches in the Pacific Ocean and created eight scenarios involving different locations, seasons, times of day and wind speeds, the Asahi Shimbun reported Thursday.

The worst case, in terms of casualties, would be if the Pacific Plate pulled down the North American Plate, causing a temblor with a magnitude of 8.6 off the coast of Iwate prefecture in northeastern Japan at 5 a.m. on a winter’s day. It would not cause extensive land shaking, but could trigger a tsunami that reached the Pacific coast of Japan in about 30 minutes. The panel predicted waves of up to 22 meters, or more than 72 feet, by the time they reached shore.

The maximum overall death toll would be 2,700. The number of casualties would be greater in the winter because the temblor could cause avalanches and more accidents on icy roads.

A magnitude 8.6 earthquake is predicted to occur in the area every 500 years.

Huge tentacles with eight-eyed cocks on the end snake out of the ground to penetrate schoolgirls until they explode, at which point the giant robots armed with brightly-coloured vagina-guns
are deployed.

I may possibly have embellished the last bit. But not much.

SHE’S FROM AWAY is Hope Larson’s new comic strip for Nova Scotia weekly THE COAST. Obviously, if you’re in Halifax, obtain the thing on paper. For the rest of us, Hope’s putting up each new piece up at the link every week.

Suntan oil, which can change the sex of fish, is present in our food and drinking water. The Independent website has reported that experts have discovered male hornyhead turbot and English sole feeding next to sewage on the Californian coast. Both species are undergoing gender transformation into females and a chemical identified in sunscreens is being held responsible…

two-cocked, three-vagina’d Hornyhead turbot
found slapping around LA hobo for vodka money
insisted name was “Kitty LaPlage” on arrest

A picture of me in the pub every single day of my life, brought to you by the magic of Flickr and the awesomely shitty camera in my Treo 600. Bone tired after being woken up by a flower delivery. I imagine the delivery girl was expecting a mourning family, rather than a naked 37-year-old man with most of his hair missing and a beard pointing in three different directions at once showing no more command of language than a mongoloid Neanderthal with an itchy arse and unexplained liver pains. You could see in her eyes the sudden stark fear of being clubbed, dragged in by her hair and impregnated with my gene-deficient and leg-waving primitive seed before being dismembered with a flint tool of some kind and lightly cooked over a makeshift campfire out back.

I am not a morning person.

Thanks to Marvel and DC for the flowers. I will eat them later with some charred dinosaur meat.

I’m in a pub in south-east England. You think I’m not surrounded by fucking dinosaurs every day of my life?

– W

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Jennifer Dziura
makes me smile

Men find everything about me intimidating. That experiment has too many variables. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. That’s Latin for “I can crush you utterly — with my will or my thighs — and then will be heard across the land the weeping of your kinfolk and the lamentation of your entire village as they flee in fear.”

Forgot about this: Laurenn McCubbin & Joyce Carol Oates have a short piece in the comics anthology SEXY CHIX, on release this week from Dark Horse Comics.

“…the sexy chix in question are the writers and artists behind the comics, respresenting some of the best and brightest talent contributing to the medium of comics and graphic novels today. With stories ranging from mainstream adventures to hilarious comic shorts to heart-wrenching autobiography, Sexy Chix is devoted to the under-recognized contingent of female cartoonists in an overwhelmingly male-oriented industry. It’s about time these divinely talented creators get to tell the stories they want to, and the result is an exquisite variety of artistic visions and styles.”

There’s a preview of the whole book over here — I have a few other friends in the book, too, and I’d really encourage you to search it out and take a look. But look at these panels from Laurenn’s collaboration with Oates:

Joshua Philip Martin was in his fourth day on the job as a rescue-squad worker in Russell County when, in a playful mood, he decided to reach into the front seat of the ambulance and zap one of his co-workers with the defibrillator paddles.

Yesterday, in Russell Circuit Court, a judge convicted Martin, 25, of involuntary manslaughter…

The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world.

Some other research groups that study climate change rank 2005 as the second warmest year, based on comparisons through November. The primary difference among the analyses, according to the NASA scientists, is the inclusion of the Arctic in the NASA analysis. Although there are few weather stations in the Arctic, the available data indicate that 2005 was unusually warm in the Arctic…

Russia is planning to mine a rare fuel on the moon by 2020 with a permanent base and a heavy-cargo transport link, a Russian space official said Wednesday.

“We are planning to build a permanent base on the moon by 2015 and by 2020 we can begin the industrial-scale delivery… of the rare isotope Helium-3,” Nikolai Sevastyanov, head of the Energia space corporation, was quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency as saying at an academic conference.

The International Space Station (ISS) would play a key role in the project and a regular transport relay to the moon would be established with the help of the planned Clipper spaceship and the Parom, a space capsule intended to tug heavy cargo containers around space, Sevastyanov said.

Helium-3 is a non-radioactive isotope of helium that can be used in nuclear fusion. Rare on earth but plentiful on the moon, it is seen by some experts as an ideal fuel because it is powerful, non-polluting and generates almost no radioactive by-product.

At Penn State University, researchers are finding new ways to harness the power of the sun using highly-ordered arrays of titania nanotubes for hydrogen production and increased solar cell efficiency.

“Basically we are talking about taking sunlight and putting water on top of this material, and the sunlight turns the water into hydrogen and oxygen. With the highly-ordered titanium nanotube arrays, under UV illumination you have a photoconversion efficiency of 13.1%. Which means, in a nutshell, you get a lot of hydrogen out of the system per photon you put in. If we could successfully shift its bandgap into the visible spectrum we would have a commercially practical means of generating hydrogen by solar energy. It beats fighting wars over middle-eastern oil…”

University of Pittsburgh researcher Alexander Star and colleagues at a California-based company, Nanomix, Inc., have developed devices made of carbon nanotubes that can find mutations in genes causing hereditary diseases, they report in the Jan. 16 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. This method is less expensive and takes less time than conventional techniques.

Carbon nanotubes are rolled-up sheets of graphite only a few nanometers wide-about the width of a molecule of DNA. The researchers used these nanotubes’ electrical properties to find a particular mutation in the gene…

Melyssa Anishnabie:

In the New York Press:

I was naked when I first met Dean Haspiel. I was modeling for a life drawing class when the attractively grizzled Haspiel—he looks like an Ashcan School boxer—swaggered in, surrounded by his fanboy entourage. What I didn’t realize was that Haspiel was one of New York’s top underground comic artists. If I had, I might not have spent a 20-minute pose with my middle finger up, pointed straight at him…