What would you say if you had been in a vegetative state for 12 years? 39-year-old Scott Routley has been able to communicate to doctors that he is not in any pain, marking the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-damaged patient has been able to give direct answers regarding their care and treatment.The communication was done with doctors who are monitoring his brain activity through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans.
What a strange condition to be visited by your perfect double, your doppelganger. Dr. Oliver Sacks, in his new book on hallucinations, calls these episodes "autoscopic doubles," and he cites a number of cases from medical history.Luckily, autoscopic doubles obey certain rules. "The autoscopic double is literally a mirror image of oneself, with right transposed to left and vice versa, mirroring one's positions and actions," says Sacks.
The American public loves underdogs, the outlier or even outcast who defies convention and is proven right.Dr. Claude Wischik may be just that. He believes that a protein called tau, which forms twisted fibers known as tangles inside the brain cells of Alzheimer's patients, is largely responsible for driving the disease.
If you haven't seen the movie "Up", you should. It's a cartoon but it tells a more authentic love story in a three-minute montage than every Katherine Heigl movie combined.And it has inspired a 2,500 mile trip for Jonathan Trappe. The only thing keeping him up? 365 helium balloons.Balloonists have wanted to cross the Atlantic for decades but there is a 'demon in the air' and five have died while no one succeeded. Trappe got attention flying across the English Channel so he is crowd-sourcing the funding for this new, much more expensive endeavor. He also expects to set an altitude record in the process - 25,000 feet up.
Archaeologists have unearthed an almost 2,400-year-old treasure in an ancient Thracian tomb in northern Bulgaria. The Thracians lived in Bulgaria and parts of modern Greece, Romania, Macedonia, and Turkey from 4,000 B.C. until they were wiped out and assimilated by invading Slavs in the 7th century AD.The treasure was found near the village of Sveshtari, 250 miles northeast of Sofia, team leader Diana Gergova said. Among the artifacts, dating back to the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century B.C., were gold jewelry and applications for horse trappings, a tiara with reliefs of lions and fantasy animals, as well as four bracelets and a ring.
What exactly should they do when a despised English monarch is found under a provincial car park?He wasn't buried under a car park, of course. He was buried in a monastery, which was disbanded by King Henry VIII when he created the Anglican Church so he could get a divorce. Richard's story came at the end of the War of the Roses, he was the last Plantagenet king, so the people of York think he should be buried there. A minority contends he should be moved to London to be with his wife but Leicester is saying they should keep him where he has been for more than 500 years. Reburying him as a Catholic is far less controversial today than the potential tourism money.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) issued a warning that the public should not consume the Clef Des Champs brand organic products described below because these products may be contaminated with Salmonella bacteria (no one hospitalized yet, thankfully).Organic Ginger Ground rootOrganic Curry Spices Culinary Mix (3 sizes)Organic Spice Cake Culinary mixOrganic GingerThe manufacturer, Herboristerie La Clef Des Champs Inc., Val-David, Quebec is voluntarily recalling the affected products. More info on Salmonella, if you need it.
Is organic food grown without pesticides? Of course not, that would be silly, the yields would be 10%.Then why do so many organic food buyers think they have no pesticides? Mostly because a $29 billion industry relies on that sort of casual deception. And Dr. Oz helps.
The Schrödinger equation, devised in 1926 following a huge international effort by many scientists, describes the 'beautiful and surprising' ways that light and matter behave when they interact at the smallest scale. Ithas led to much of the technological development of the modern world, for example fiber optics that create the Internet's backbone, solar panels, GPS and electron microscopes. Now it is getting some attention for it. A 14-day marketing campaign by Imperial College London artist-in-residence Geraldine Cox and quantum physicist Professor Terry Rudolph shows off the equation for drivers and pedestrians in London.
Want to hear the world's first blooper?You can, along with the oldest recording of an American voice and the first-ever recording of a musical performance. It is now digital, not on tinfoil. The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme. "Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.
