According to Kevin Dutton, author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, psychopaths are well-equipped to deal with all kinds of nasty crises. Sending thousands of troops to war, for instance, is not something that many people can easily carry on their conscience, Dutton points out. Psychopaths tend to simply "be people who are able to get the job done, who are less morally squeamish."

So how does this apply to the moral conundrums of daily life?

Dutton explains the so-called trolley problem, a test in which the responses of psychopaths differ greatly from that of normal people.

If psychopaths are utilitarians at heart, how doers that affect their judgment in other scenarios. To answer that question, Dutton presents a number of variations on the trolley problem in the video below.

For instance, imagine that you are a transplant surgeon who had the ability to save many lives by taking one. Or, for that matter, would you kill a baby if you knew he would grow up to be Hitler?

Dutton lays out these scenarios here:

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

London:

Advocates said the 'cultured meat' could solve a range of environmental, human health and animal welfare issues attributed to the farming of livestock.

Research leader Professor Mark Post, a vascular physiologist at Maastricht University, said the demonstration was a proof-of-concept and cultured meat could realistically be on supermarket shelves within 10 to 20 years.

The development of the 'world's most expensive burger', funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, recalls Star Trek's vision of the 'replicator' — a machine that could grow meat using only the ingredients in air.

Sceptics have labelled Professor Post's invention ''Frankenburger''. The public perception of the meat as the stuff of science fiction will be a challenge to its acceptance among consumers, said Professor Post.

They seem small, insignificant, surreal. Guess what? That's exactly how we look to them. Here's our pale blue dot, from Saturn. You might have to squint.

The above image was released today by NASA; it was taken by the Cassini spacecraft, some 900 million miles from home. It's as stark a reminder as any of our place in the solar system, just one small star in someone else's sky.

It's also a rare find; it's very difficult to capture pictures of the Earth from this distance because we're so relatively close to the Sun.

Pointing sensitive detectors in direct view of that much brightness doesn't result in much of an image As NASA explains, this view came during an opportune moment, when Saturn had slipped behind the sun and shielded the view.

Want to feel even smaller? Here's the Earth next to the moon, also from Cassini.

By all accounts, Shai Agassi, the founder and original CEO of Better Place, Israel's bankrupt electric car company, is an extremely charismatic man. His charm had politicians, venture capitalists, celebrities and non-automotive industry reporters slobbering over him. Everyone wanted to get their picture taken with the man who would transform Israel's auto industry into the first electric powered industry in the world and transform the start-up nation into the transportation hothouse for the world.

Agassi's vision was simple and easy to understand.

By 2020, half of Israel's cars would be battery powered electric cars supplied by his company, Better Place. We would replace our internal combustion engines, powered by oil produced by our worst enemies, with batteries produced by Better Place. Better Place would overcome the technological deficits of batteries that are only capable of powering a car for short distances by building battery changing stations throughout the country. Instead of filling up our tanks with gas, we would replace our battery.

And our enemies would go bankrupt.

Though not quite a reality yet, this scenario isn’t too far off. In addition to dissolvable electronics, scientists have now built a biodegradable remote-controlled, power-harvesting circuit, described May 17 in Advanced Materials, and are already testing absorbable thermal electronics in rodents.

This biocompatible remote-controlled circuit is an important step toward building dissolvable electronics that could function as “electroceuticals,” devices that perform therapeutic roles and then disappear. Such roles could include stimulating nerve and bone growth, helping heal wounds, delivering drugs, or acting as antibiotics.

“In each case, the device needs to function only for a timeframe set by a healing process. As such, the ideal scenario is for the device to simply disappear afterward,” said John Rogers, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois. Last year, Rogers described the development of a water-soluble, silicon-based circuit that completely dissolves in water; earlier this year, his team produced tiny LEDs that can be injected into the brain.

The remote-controlled circuits are fashioned on super-thin silk and are responsive to radio frequencies. The team builds the capacitors, inductors, and resistors using water-soluble and biocompatible materials: silicon nanomembranes, which work as semiconductors; magnesium, which already plays an important role in biological systems; silicon dioxide or magnesium oxide as insulators; and silk, for the substrate upon which the circuits are crafted.

Every summer, a pitched battle of wills unfolds within the acorns and hollowed-out twigs of the Northeastern United States. A dark, bulbous-headed ant called Protomognathus americanus invades these tiny abodes and plucks the pearly brood of ants in the genus Temnothorax.

Researchers have observed rebellion among Temnothorax curvispinosus ants (amber),  which care for their slave-raiding masters, Protomognathus americanus (black).

The pilfered offspring return with the raiders to their nests, then hatch and grow up to become live-in slaves, tasked with the feeding and care of their slothful masters and their masters’ brood.
Because the lives of these ant slaves are so hopeless — they have no chance to reproduce, after all — scientists long assumed they would find no benefit in rebellion. “They are an evolutionary dead end,” explains biologist Tobias Pamminger of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany.
Which is why Pamminger and his colleagues were puzzled by the insidious ways they saw slaves turning the tables on their masters. The slaves will just stop feeding and cleaning the young ants in their care, leading them to die. Sometimes, a group of slaves will incite an all-out revolt and dismember the young in a gruesome game of tug-of-war. Now, in a multiyear survey across four Northeastern states, Pamminger has found that about 60 percent of the slave-reared brood in the care of the slave species die, compared with just 20 percent of the young in free-living colonies. Rebellion is real.

And this observation squares with evolution after all. While mutinous slaves may not be able to save themselves, by rebelling they can reduce the number of slave masters who prey on nearby relatives. After spending five years working with and studying the “oppressed,” Pamminger says it’s good to know that resistance isn’t futile.

THE head of Adana’s Health and Education Associations for Autistic Children has made a right prat of himself by claiming that atheism was a form of autism.

Sociologist Fehmi Kaya is reported here as saying:

Autistic children do not know how to believe in God because they do not have a section for faith in their brains. That is why they don’t know how to pray, how to believe in God. It is necessary to create awareness [or religion] in these children through methods of therapy.

Autism associations around Turkey are said to be outraged, with individuals and associations slamming his remarks. The President of the Association of Protection of Autistic Children (ODER), Engin Güngör described Kaya’s remarks “unfortunate”.

“I do not know what purpose the statement serves,” Güngör said, adding that the media should think twice before publicising such garbage.

This is a statement that could upset around 3.5 to 4 million people,. We believe that the press should feel the responsibility of that as well, and should look better into these things before publishing them.

Kaya said that his remarks had been taken out of context, with news reports “fixating on autism”.

The message I wished to give was not about autism and atheism, but to highlight that these children cannot communicate, cannot form empathy, live in their own worlds and are isolated. I meant that we should take them out of their isolation with proper therapy methods.

But Kaya wouldn’t let go of the “faith” thing, saying development came in layers and that as autistic children developed further socially and mentally, a dimension of faith would also be developed.

For decades, neuroscientists have been searching for an unmistakable signal of consciousness in electrical brain activity. Such a sign could determine whether minimally conscious or anesthetized adults are aware—and when consciousness begins in babies.

Studies on adults show a particular pattern of brain activity: When your senses detect something, such as a moving object, the vision center of your brain activates, even if the object goes by too fast for you to notice. But if the object remains in your visual field for long enough, the signal travels from the back of the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which holds the image in your mind long enough for you to notice. Scientists see a spike in brain activity when the senses pick something up, and another signal, the “late slow wave,” when the prefrontal cortex gets the message. The whole process takes less than one-third of a second.

Researchers in France wondered if such a two-step pattern might be present in infants. The team monitored infants’ brain activity through caps fitted with electrodes. More than 240 babies participated, but two-thirds were too squirmy for the movement-sensitive caps. The remaining 80 (ages 5 months, 12 months, or 15 months) were shown a picture of a face on a screen for a fraction of a second.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sid Kouider of CNRS, the French national research agency, in Paris watched for swings in electrical activity, called event-related potentials (ERPs), in the babies’ brains. In babies who were at least 1 year old, Kouider saw an ERP pattern similar to an adult’s, but it was about three times slower. The team was surprised to see that the 5-month-olds also showed a late slow wave, although it was weaker and more drawn out than in the older babies. Kouider speculates that the late slow wave may be present in babies as young as 2 months.

A kidney "grown" in the laboratory has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine, US scientists say.

Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far.

A study, in the journal Nature Medicine, showed the engineered kidneys were less effective than natural ones.

But regenerative medicine researchers said the field had huge promise.

Kidneys filter the blood to remove waste and excess water. They are also the most in-demand organ for transplant, with long waiting lists.
The researchers' vision is to take an old kidney and strip it of all its old cells to leave a honeycomb-like scaffold. The kidney would then be rebuilt with cells taken from the patient.

This would have two major advantages over current organ transplants.

The tissue would match the patient, so they would not need a lifetime of drugs to suppress the immune system to prevent rejection.

It would also vastly increase the number of organs available for transplant. Most organs which are offered are rejected, but they could be used as templates for new ones.

Scaffolding

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken the first steps towards creating usable engineered kidneys.
They took a rat kidney and used a detergent to wash away the old cells.

The remaining web of proteins, or scaffold, looks just like a kidney, including an intricate network of blood vessels and drainage pipes.

This protein plumbing was used to pump the right cells to the right part of the kidney, where they joined with the scaffold to rebuild the organ.

It was kept in a special oven to mimic the conditions in a rat's body for the next 12 days.

When the kidneys were tested in the laboratory, urine production reached 23% of natural ones.

The team then tried transplanting an organ into a rat. Once inside the body, the kidney's effectiveness fell to 5%.

Yet the lead researcher, Dr Harald Ott, told the BBC that restoring a small fraction of normal function could be enough: "If you're on haemodialysis then kidney function of 10% to 15% would already make you independent of haemodialysis. It's not that we have to go all the way."

He said the potential was huge: "If you think about the United States alone, there's 100,000 patients currently waiting for kidney transplants and there's only around 18,000 transplants done a year.

"I think the potential clinical impact of a successful treatment would be enormous."

'Really impressive'

There is a huge amount of further research that would be needed before this is even considered in people.
The technique needs to be more efficient so a greater level of kidney function is restored. Researchers also need to prove that the kidney will continue to function for a long time.

There will also be challenges with the sheer size of a human kidney. It is harder to get the cells in the right place in a larger organ.

Prof Martin Birchall, a surgeon at University College London, has been involved in windpipe transplants produced from scaffolds.

He said: "It's extremely interesting. It is really impressive.

"They've addressed some of the main technical barriers to making it possible to use regenerative medicine to address a really important medical need."

He said that being able to do this for people needing an organ transplant could revolutionise medicine: "It's almost the nirvana of regenerative medicine, certainly from a surgical point of view, that you could meet the biggest need for transplant organs in the world - the kidney."

People who often say they’re "too busy" or "crazy busy" sound like buzzing busy signals. And when you start sounding like an appliance, it makes it hard to connect with you. My reaction to your busy signal is much like that of Mindy Kaling, who sees stress as non-conversation:
Likewise, going on about how busy you are isn’t conversation and doesn’t lead anywhere — except making your conversation partner bored, or worse, peeved. People who act super busy send the same message, making time spent with them never feel quite whole. Interestingly, I find that most people who are legitimately occupied — with their work, or family, or art, or what-have-you — rarely play the “too busy” card, or go out of their way to make time for meaningful connection exactly because they’ve been busy.

The Meaning Behind “Busy”

When you go on to other people, or to yourself, about being so busy, you’re often engaging in doublespeak. Let’s dig a little deeper to translate what you actually mean when you get in the habit of saying or acting like you’re too busy:

I matter. Being busy means I’m needed and significant in this great big universe. Though going around literally telling people, “I matter!” and expecting some sort of substantive conversation to result would be really weird, I’ll just say “I’m busy!” instead.

I am super-important. Doling out complaints and explanations about being too busy is the express line to a mini-ego trip. It’s going beyond “I matter” to “I matter… more than you” despite the fact that nobody ever wants to hear this.

I’m giving you an easy excuse. This is one of the easiest outs for stuff I don’t want to do. Alternatively, I’ve spent a lot of time being distracted or stuck, but this excuse allows me to feel OK with it.

I’m afraid. I keep relentlessly busy because I suffer from FOMO, or fear of missing out. I’m scared that I don’t matter, that I’m not important, that I’m not needed, so I’m going to spend my time on distracting stuff that doesn’t really matter, that’s not all that important, where I’m not actually needed.

I feel guilty. There’s fulfilling, meaningful stuff that I actually do want to do but I can rationalise it away instead of confronting challenges or changing direction. Alternatively, I think being busy is such a valuable quality that I’ll overbook myself to the point where I feel guilty for not getting to everything or for spending time on anything that doesn’t fit into a limited definition of “productive.”

The worship of busy-ness as such a virtue is where the trouble begins, providing the foundation to its indiscriminate use as a front or an excuse. It’s easy, even enticing, to neglect the importance of filling our time with meaning, thinking instead that we’ll be content with merely filling our time. We self-impose these measures of self-worth by looking at quantity instead of quality of activity.

Break Free

In the children’s book (that every adult should read), The Phantom Tollbooth, the protagonist Milo comes across the frightening, faceless Terrible Trivium, a “demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.” Milo and his friends fall under his spell, agreeing to perform busy-work like moving a huge pile of sand from one place to another, grain by grain, using a tweezer. The Terrible Trivium’s explanation for this terrible fate?
What a scary thought! So if you find yourself feeling frazzled, habitually explaining away things with a busy status, it’s probably time to slow down and pay attention to the important, difficult stuff. Examine what is keeping you so busy compared to what you really should and want to be doing.

Here are a couple ways to start:

Track yo’ self. In the quest to better connect your attention and action, do an attention audit. Track your time using a tool like Harvest or a time log spreadsheet. Break down how you spend time on the computer with RescueTime. Or see how you answer the questions of “What did you get done today?” and “What did you pay attention to today?” over time using iDoneThis.

Change your language. We like this tip from Laura Vanderkam. Instead of putting things in terms of time and activity, frame them in terms of priority:
Another thing you can do is once you have a clearer handle of your priorities and how you want to spend your energy, change your definition of “productivity” to encompass those things.

Press pause. Not only do we need to rest and renew, we also have to slow down and pause to acknowledge our feelings, celebrate our accomplishments, and gain some insight. Brené Brown explains how people stay busy out of habit and fear. She recommends letting go of “exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth” and allowing us to explore what matters:
Do less and feel more joy. The opposite of the fear of missing out, as Anil Dash so beautifully wrote, is the joy of missing out. Pay attention to what’s in front of you, and you’ll gain control and find joy.
Feel more joy. Learn how to do less. Stop spreading yourself so thin by saying “no” more, by saying “no” to being busy, and by meaning “yes” more fully.

Mentally simulating the actions of others is thought to be a key component of empathy. Yet new research suggests that our so-called mirror neurons may also expose hidden divisions. A study published in October in the journal PLOS ONE reveals that these copycat neurons do not reflect all people equally.

Mirror neurons were discovered in the early 1990s, and their existence was a neuroscientific revelation: brain cells not only fire when we perform a given action, they also fire when we see someone else doing the deed. Much subsequent work has suggested that mirror neurons undergird social cognition. Now emerging research is finding that our mirror neuron system distinguishes between people
who are physically and culturally similar and those who are not. The new work probed these differences further. In the study, investigators asked 17 young adult Jewish men to review the biographies and photographs of eight individuals who physically resembled the participants. Half these characters, portrayed by actors, were identified as neo-Nazis. The subjects reported they strongly disliked the anti-Semitic characters but not the others. Next, the participants underwent functional MRI scans while watching a video of each character drinking from a water bottle. The researchers focused on the ventral premotor cortex, a region typically active when we carry out an action or watch someone else do so. They found that neurons in this region activated differently when subjects viewed detestable and likable characters.

Because mirror neuron activity is thought to be a very basic part of brain function—and it can be seen in many animals besides humans—the new finding supports the notion that our brain is predisposed to distinguish “us versus them.” This distinction can be beneficial, encouraging caution around those with harmful intentions, or dangerous, further entrenching prejudices. To weaken unwelcome biases, lead author Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, suggests that exposure and perspective taking could go a long way.


This article was originally published with the title Mental Mirrors Reflect Hatred.

Lean steak is low in fat and cholesterol and high in protein — qualities normally considered healthy. But eating a lot of it can still cause heart disease. Researchers have now laid the blame on bacteria in the human gut that convert a common nutrient found in beef into a compound that may speed up the build-up of plaques in the arteries.

The results are published in Nature Medicine today. Co-author Stanley Hazen, head of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, says that the study could signal a new approach to diet and health. In some cases, an individual’s collection of intestinal microbes may be as important to their diet as anything on a nutrition label, he says. “Bacteria make a whole slew of molecules from food,” he says, “and those molecules can have a huge effect on our metabolic processes.”
Consumption of red meat has been found to increase the risk of death from heart disease, even when controlling for levels of fat and cholesterol. To find out why, Hazen and his colleagues gave the nutrient l-carnitine — found in red meat and dairy products — to 77 volunteers, including 26 who were vegans or vegetarians. One committed vegan even agreed to eat a 200-gram sirloin steak.

Tests showed that consuming l-carnitine increased blood levels of trimethylamine-N-oxide (TMAO), a compound that, evidence suggests, can alter the metabolism of cholesterol and slow the removal of cholesterol that accumulates on arteries' walls.

But even when they took l-carnitine supplements, vegans and vegetarians made far less TMAO than meat eaters. Fecal studies showed that meat eaters and non-meat eaters also had very different types of bacteria in their guts. Hazen says that a regular diet of meat probably encourages the growth of bacteria that can turn l-carnitine into TMAO.

Double checking

To further make the case, researchers checked the levels of l-carnitine in the blood of nearly 2,600 people who were having elective heart check-ups. By itself, the nutrient didn’t seem to make a difference. However, people who had high levels of both l-carnitine and TMAO were prime targets for heart disease, further evidence that it’s the bacterial alchemy — not the l-carnitine alone — that poses the real threat.

Finally, the researchers found that feeding l-carnitine to mice doubled the animals' risk of developing arterial plaques, but only when the mice had their usual gut bacteria. When the animals were treated with gut-clearing antibiotics, l-carnitine in the diet did not encourage plaques.

Daniel Rader, director of preventive cardiovascular medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, says that the study makes a “fairly compelling” case that intestinal bacteria feeding onl-carnitine increase the risk of heart disease.

The finding should give pause not only to meat lovers, but also to people who take l-carnitine supplements, which are marketed with the promise that they promote energy, weight loss and athletic performance, says Hazen. “None of those claims have been proven,” he says. “I see no reason why anyone needs to take it.”

LOS ANGELES—For this year’s “World Homeopathy Awareness Week,” the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) issued a strong statement against the misleading advertising of homeopathic medicines and called on Congress to close the loophole exempting these quack products from certain FDA regulations.
“So-called homeopathic remedies may be the only products given a free pass to say they’re intended to treat disease, without any proof at all that they work.” JREF President D.J. Grothe said.

“Drugs have to be tested for safety and potency before they can be sold. Supplements have to carry disclaimers, telling consumers that their claims have not been evaluated by the FDA. Homeopathy is exempt from these requirements because of a law passed more than 70 years ago. It’s time to close the loophole and make manufactures of these quack medications play by the same rules as everyone else.”

On Feb. 5, the JREF put $1 million on the table for any manufacturer or homeopath who could demonstrate that their homeopathic products were effective under fair observing conditions. In the months since, none have come forward to claim the prize.

The JREF invites consumers to send a message to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which oversees the FDA, and ask them to close the loophole that allows misleading claims by manufacturers of quack medicine: http://bit.ly/close-it

The facts about homeopathic remedies:

• No Ingredients: Homeopathic remedies are so extremely dilute that most do not contain a single atom of their claimed active ingredient. The most popular homeopathic remedy, oscillococcinum, is based on a dilution of one part duck liver to 10^400 parts of water. 10^400 is the number 1 with 400 zeroes after it. To make such a dilution, you’d have to mix a single molecule of duck liver with more matter than exists in the entire known universe.
  
• No Testing: Homeopathic remedies are exempted from regulations requiring drugs to prove they’re effective and accurately labeled with respect to dosage and potency. What’s more, homeopathic remedies were never even tested by their inventors to make sure they work. Homeopathic remedies are invented by a process homeopaths call “proving”: they give a substance to a healthy person, observe the symptoms it causes, and then take it on faith that homeopathic doses of the same substance will cure those symptoms. For example, coffee causes sleeplessness—that’s all homeopaths need to know in order to prescribe homeopathically-diluted coffee as sleeping pills, called “coffea cruda.” According to homeopathic principles, there’s no need to test whether it actually helps anyone sleep.
  
• No Facts: Major pharmacy chains like CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid sell useless homeopathic products right alongside real medicine, with no warning to consumers. Manufacturers and retailers profit by denying customers the facts they need to make up their minds. U.S. law exempts homeopathy from certain rules that govern drugs and nutritional supplements, so manufacturers can market homeopathic remedies for the treatment of illnesses despite the fact that reputable studies show homeopathy to work no better than dummy pills made of plain sugar.