Longevity Depends Much on the Personality, Say Scientists

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/25/2013
Posted in: Health. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Do you want to live a long, happy life? Not a problem! Scientists have found thatlongevity depends on personality and mindset of the person. You can now safely say that happiness is not a result of living longer, butliving longer is a direct result of a joyful existence. So a happy life automatically becomes longer.

Of course, the main contributor to longer life are inherited genetic traits, which was proven in the past, but researchers from Boston University (USA) have suggested that people who live longer are different from the rest of population in their psychological and behavioral traits. The scientists decided to find out what these traits may be.

The experiment involved 246 centenarians whose psychological traits such as openness, friendliness and level of neurosis were examined. The hypothesis was that the centenarians possess certain personality characteristics, which constitute the ability to live longer. In particular, the individuals who lived longer had a very high level of extraversion and low level of neurosis. Female centenarians have been found to be particularly friendly to other people.The rest of the centenarians’ traits were no different from ordinary people.

The studies have also confirmed the fact that children of centenarians have a very high likelihood that they themselves will live longer lives. This is a genetic factor that provides 120% protection of centenarians’ offspring from premature death and from diseases such as diabetes and heart conditions. But is personality also hereditary? It seems that it is the direct consequence of nurturing and upbringing. Children simply follow their parents’ steps, especially the in friendliness and openness to the world, which, as scientists believe, play significant role in their health and living a longer life.

Scientists hypothesize that individuals with better communication skills suppress their emotions more rarely and suffer fewer breakdowns, which helps them cope with stressful situations. And numerous friendships they establish help them maintain a positive outlook on life. Thus, according to scientists, psychological characteristics are as important as genetic traits when trying to explain why people live longer. The author of this study is Thomas Perls.

Similar results were obtained by psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh (USA), who conducted their study not on people who lived longer, but on ordinary people. Their eight-year experiment included about a hundred thousand volunteers. Numerous psychological tests, and the life of participants were thoroughly analyzed, which helped in establishing a link between life expectancy and friendliness, coupled with optimism.

The head of this research, Dr. Hilary Tindle, said that during these experiments they were able to establish a connection between certain personality traits and health conditions. For example, a cynical attitude towards other people and anger correlate with high blood pressure and elevated levels of cholesterol. In addition, friendly people usually pay more attention to their physical health and therefore are less likely to suffer from excessive weight.

Scientists and physicians from the British Heart Foundation, in turn, found thatcardiovascular system suffers the most from being upset or angry. This happens due to the fact that negative emotions result in release of testosterone in the body, otherwise known as aggression hormone, and its high levels disrupt the functioning of various body systems.

Jealousy can also have a negative impact on health. It was discovered by American psychologists, who published the results of his study in a recent issue of The Psychological Science. In particular, they found that jealousy is literally blinding, that is, it can deteriorate our eyesight! Lovers who took part in this study, were asked to identify the unattractive landscapes, interspersed with beautiful landscape images. Partners were sitting side by side, and after a while the men were asked to estimate random images of women. As a result, it was found that women exhibiting signs of jealousy were unable to detect the unattractive scenery.

Of course, learning to have a constant positive attitude is not easy, because our habits to judge, be aggressive and criticize cannot be eradicated right away. But our personality is a very flexible trait, because it heavily relies on our view of the world. And our personal views about the world and people surrounding us can be changed.

POSTED FROM LEARNING MIND

Lost Underwater City Uncovered

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/25/2013
Posted in: Ancient Civilization, History, Science. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

A lost city and vital port known as Heracleion to the ancient Greeks and Thonis to ancient Egyptians was thought to be nothing but a memory until a team from the European Institute for Underwater Archeology (IEASM) discovered the mystical city submerged in the Mediterranean Sea.

Traces of Thonis-Heracleion were found four miles off the coast of Egypt, 30 feet below the Aboukir Bay in 2000. The team, under French underwater archaeologist Dr. Frank Goddio’s direction, discovered many ruins, among them a monolithic chapel, a giant red granite statue of the god Hapi and the largest known concentration of ancient ships. It was the chapel that tipped off Goddio that it was in fact the lost city.

“The archaeological evidence is simply overwhelming,” says Sir Barry Cunliffe, eminent archaeologist at Oxford University in a release. “By lying untouched and protected by sand on the seafloor for centuries they are brilliantly preserved.”

Goddio and IEASM’s 13-year excavation was documented in “Egypt’s Sunken City – A Legend Is Revealed,” a special scheduled to air on French and German TV network Channel Arte on May 11.

A panel of experts weighed in on the team’s finds at a conference at Oxford University earlier this year, but they are still unclear on how exactly the ancient city sunk. Goddio’s team believes liquefaction of the soil at spots near the Aboukir Bay due to the pressure of large buildings on the clay and water could have caused the submergence.

The team also believes it could have been due to an “unusually high flood” or an earthquake either in combination with liquefaction or by itself that could have caused the city to sink.

VIEW PHOTOS AND VIDEO AT WEATHER.COM

If your brain were a computer, how much storage space would it have?

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/25/2013
Posted in: Science, Technology. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

The comparison between the human brain and a computer is not a perfect one, but it does lend itself to some interesting lines of inquiry. For instance: what is the storage capacity of your brain?

The answer to the first question – how much storage space is there inside the average human head? – varies considerably, depending on who you ask. Some estimates come in as low as 1 terabyte, or approximately 1,000 gigabytes. These days, you can purchase an external hard drive with twice that capacity for under a hundred bucks.

Another commonly cited estimate puts the figure at closer to 100 terabytes of storage. Slate’s Forrest Wickman explains the reasoning behind this number:

The human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons [Ed. note: closer to 86-billion, actually, but now we're just being nitpicky]. Each of these neurons seems capable of making around 1,000 connections, representing about 1,000 potential synapses, which largely do the work of data storage. Multiply each of these 100 billion neurons by the approximately 1,000 connections it can make, and you get 100 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of information.

The reasoning behind the 100-terabyte estimate has its flaws. It assumes, for example, that each synapse stores 1 byte of information. In reality, each one could conceivably store more or less than that. Consider, for example, that a synapse can exist in more states than either on or off. As we’ve explained previously:

Your basic synapse is a connection between two neurons: a presynaptic neuron, and a postsynaptic neuron. Presynaptic neurons release neurotransmitters, which dock with receptors on the postsynaptic neuron and activate what are known as ion channels in the postsynaptic cell membrane.

Ion channels are like a neuron’s gatekeepers; they allow charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium into and out of the cell, and are thought to play an important role in the regulation of synaptic plasticity, i.e. the strengthening or weakening of neuronal connections over time.

All this is to say that when neurons talk to one another, there’s more regulating their communication than a simple on/off switch.

READ FULL ARTICLE AT IO9

The Hunt for Alien Megastructures

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/25/2013
Posted in: Science, Space, Technology. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

When most people think about searching for extraterrestrial intelligences, they imagine someone like Ellie Arroway searching the skies for radio transmissions. But what about looking in other ways? Perhaps a highly advanced alien civilisation might build structures large enough for us to see.

Top image: A depiction of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Credit: Hill/Wikimedia Commons

Vast structures, constructed on astronomical scales by advanced civilisations, is what the field of astroengineering is all about. This, admittedly, sounds audacious – and for the human race right now, it is. For us, astroengineering is still very much the realm of thought experiments, theoretical calculations, and science fiction. So it may be surprising to know that certain astronomers have made some quite serious attempts to look for astroengineered artifacts around other stars. With telescopes becoming ever more sensitive, and images being taken of exoplanets, the idea is starting to captivate imaginations once more.

In 1960, Freeman Dyson published a paper entitled Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation. His suggestion was that any megastructure constructed around a star should show itself by emitting more infrared light than it should. The solution was, simply, to look for any sources of infrared which appeared artificial.

Dyson put forward the ideas that any potentially advanced civilisation may need a tremendous amount of power to sustain itself. A method he proposed was to build a vast array of satellites which would enclose an entire star to harvest its energy – a concept which later came to be known as a Dyson sphere. While the concept wasn’t taken too seriously by Dyson himself, it was a powerful enough notion that it garnered a lot of attention.

Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as looking for infrared light. Many stars, our own included, are surrounded by a disk of dust, and that dust emits plenty of infrared. To find a Dyson sphere, you need to look for a specific signature of infrared light, emitted at just the right set of wavelengths.

And that’s just what an ongoing project, headed by Dick Carrigan at Fermilab, has been doing. Astronomers regularly survey the sky to see what they might find, and Carrigan has been hunting through infrared data to search for Dyson spheres. To date, the project has a handful of candidates, but nothing definitive. Not yet.

But infrared isn’t the only way to spot Dyson spheres. In 2012 Geoff Marcy, an exoplanet researcher, was given a grant to hunt for evidence of Dyson spheres in data recorded by Kepler. In principle, any large artificial objects in orbit around other stars should be detectable in exactly the same way exoplanets are.

READ FULL ARTICLE AT IO9

THE BRYAN CALLEN SHOW #43 – JIMMY BURKE!

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/25/2013
Posted in: Comedy, Podcast. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Bryan sits down with best friend and Prince of New York, Jimmy Burke. They discuss a variety of different topics, focusing around the fighter life. Jimmy Burke comes from a fighter family. His father was a boxer and is in the Boxing Hall of Fame in New York.

Twin Stars Are Closer to Earth Than Thought

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/24/2013
Posted in: Science, Space. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Imagine if you could see a car’s headlights from more than 20 miles away. Those must be some headlights! It might even throw your whole understanding of headlights into question – how could there be any thisbright? But then, you realize that the car wasn’t 20 miles away, but just 2; instantly, things make sense again.

This is how scientists solved an astronomical mystery involving not headlights, but a double star system named SS Cygni. It’s a kind of system known as a dwarf nova, which is made up of a white dwarf star and a red dwarf star orbiting each other. Over the years, astronomers had seen a variety of dwarf nova systems and thought they understood their mechanics: The more massive white dwarf pulls gas off its companion and into a flat disk surrounding the white dwarf. Occasionally (about every 49 days in SS Cygni’s case), the flow of material changes and causes instabilities in this disk, which causes a powerful outburst of energy.

But Hubble observations of SS Cygni in 1999 and 2004 put it at 519 light-years away. At that distance, researchers thought that its outbursts were far too bright to fit with their understanding of these systems, calling the theory into question. But a paper published today in Science shows that the system is really just 372 light-years or so away, so the brighter-seeming outburst (and dwarf nova theory as a whole) makes sense again.

The international collaboration of authors aren’t certain why their calculated distance was different from the previous one, but they do have a guess. In astronomy, one of the simplest ways to measure the distance of an object is to take advantage of parallax, the effect that results when you look at something from multiple points of view. Just as your thumb appears to jump around against the background if you hold it up and study it with each eye individually, a distant object will jump around against the background when seen from opposite points along Earth’s orbit around the sun. The reason for the discrepancy in distances might be what the various scientists used as the background over which SS Cygni “jumped.” The previous measurements used stars within our galaxy, but the new measurements used much more distant and uniform objects beyond the Milky Way. The authors also looked at the system’s radio waves, a more reliable and relatively error-free observation method compared to the previous optical measurements.

On a citizen science note, the authors of this study were aided by the observations of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, a group of amateur astronomers. The group claims to have witnessed each of SS Cygni’s outbursts since its discovery in 1896. More recently they have alerted the team each time the periodic changes in the star system’s output began, allowing the scientists to study them in greater detail.

POSTED FROM DISCOVER MAGAZINE

Psychoneuroimmunology & The Placebo Effect

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/24/2013
Posted in: Science, Life, Health, Evolution, Futurism. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment

There is an entire legitimate and well-researched branch of medicine called psycho-neuro-immunology which studies the effect of thoughts and emotions on human biochemistry. Biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton actually left his tenured University position to pursue his research in this fascinating field.

“Until recently, conventional medicine dismissed the role of the mind in the functioning of the body, except for one pesky exception – the placebo effect, which demonstrates that the mind has the power to heal the body when people hold a belief that a particular drug or procedure will effect a cure, even if the remedy is actually a sugar pill with no known pharmaceutical value. Medical students learn that one third of all illnesses heal via the magic of the placebo effect. With further education, these same students will come to dismiss the value of the mind in healing because it doesn’t fit into the flow charts of the Newtonian paradigm. Unfortunately, as doctors, they will unwittingly disempower their patients by not encouraging the healing power inherent in the mind.”  -Dr. Bruce Lipton, “Spontaneous Evolution”

The placebo effect cures one-third of all illnesses.  This is a staggering statistic – It means that a wide range of health problems can be cured by our minds!  In fact many ailments are literally created, sustained, and eventually healed via completely non-physical processes involving the mind and emotions.  Acne, allergies, angina pectoris, rheumatoid and degenerative arthritis, asthma, cancer, the common cold, diabetes, fever, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, radiation sickness, seasickness, ulcers, and many more diseases have all been cured using a mere placebo.  This of course strikes another blow at the root of the western medical paradigm which traditionally teaches health as a purely physical bio-chemical phenomenon.  The non-physical psycho-emotional aspects of health are dismissively disregarded.

“In numerous cases patients are cured simply by taking the placebo alone and with no genuine supporting medication whatsoever.  This works because the patient sincerely believes, beyond any doubt in the mind of the patient that the placebo is in fact real medicine that will cure them.  In this case the patient has subconsciously used their own imagination upon themselves, but the result is exactly the same, often to the considerable surprise of doctors and all others concerned; a complete cure.  The patient visualized themselves as being cured as a direct result of taking what they believe to be an effective medicine, in turn influencing the energy of the inner bodies, thereby manifesting as an observable cure within the physical body.  This process works both ways of course and there are people who unwittingly become ill due to the subconscious use of creative visualization and of the imagination generally and thought processes generally.  This occurs when a normally healthy person strongly believes they are, or should become ill for some reason, perhaps out of guilt, or for example as happens in the case of someone considered to be a hypochondriac.  This belief coupled with the person subconsciously and very often intensively imagining and believing themselves to be ill, will in turn attract that illness.” -Adrian Cooper, “Our Ultimate Reality” (563-4)

Experiments have shown that even an injection of caffeine will put caffeine-sensitive patients to sleep if they believe that they are receiving a sedative.  People with multiple personalities can change eye color, turn off/on allergies, and even have multiple menstruation cycles for each personality.  Under hypnosis people can control heart rate, body temperature, visual acuity, and will away scars and birthmarks.  If humans are simply biochemical machines as the western medical paradigm professes, and our beliefs/subconscious plays no role in bodily health, how can such physical effects possibly come about from non-physical causes?

READ FULL ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTEAN CONSPIRACY

THE DUNCAN TRUSSELL FAMILY HOUR #68: NATASHA LEGGERO!

Posted by higherthinkingprimate on 05/24/2013
Posted in: Comedy, Podcast. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a Comment

Duncan talks about his visit from the FBI.  A surprise visit from Brendon Walsh.