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2019-03-282019-03-28

Dogs can smell your emotional state

Psychology

Date: October 2017

Source: Nature

Science had already shown that dogs can see and hear the signs of human emotions. A new study focused on the evidence that dogs are sensitive to the human’s attentional state when producing facial expressions, and concluded that : “Dogs’ production of facial expressions is subject to audience effects, and can be tailored to the human attentional state suggesting some communicative function and are not simple emotional displays based on the dogs arousal state.“

Heavy smoking can damage vision

Health & Medicine

Date: January 2019

Source: ScienceDirect

It has already been demonstrated that cigarette smoke contains numerous compounds that are harmful to health and has been linked to a reduction of cortical thickness, involving such areas as the medial and lateral frontal cortex and a decrease in activity of the occipital cortex. Some studies investigated the effects of cigarette smoking on cognitive function, but few have evaluated the effects of cigarette smoking on spatial and color vision. A new study tends to indicate that heavy long-term smokers (i.e. tobacco addiction users) have lower contrast sensitivity and poorer color discrimination abilities than their non-smoking peers.

Sleep increases chromosome dynamics in neurons

Biology, Health & Medicine

Date: March 2019

Source: Nature

Sleep increases chromosome dynamics that clear out DNA damage accumulated during waking hours. A new study shows that sleep can heal DNA damage induced by many causes, including radiation, oxydative stress, . . . According to current state-of-the-art, sleep process is still far from being understood : “Nevertheless, the core cellular function of sleep is unknown, and there is no conserved molecular marker to define sleep across phylogeny“, “. . . however, why sleep has evolved and which fundamental ancestral functions it regulates, remain enigmatic.“

Meteorit Impact 12,800 years ago confirmed

Earth Science

Date: March 2019

Source: Phys.org

A major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch (12,800 years ago), causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning) got additional findings from a Chilean site. According to the on-going study called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, traces of the multiple impacts have been found in the Americas, Europe, and up to Greenland where a major crater has been recently spotted.

Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown Over Consciousness Ideas

Biology

Date: March 2019

Source: Quanta Magazine

Identifying consciousness in the physical realm is one of the strongest push from the scientific community, in order to validate the materialistic model. This article talks about a new initiative to narrow down the landscape of possibilities :

“Now a new project currently under review hopes to close in on some answers. It proposes to draw up a suite of experiments that will expose theories of consciousness to a merciless spotlight, in the hope of ruling out at least some of them. If all is approved and goes according to plan, the experiments could start this autumn. The initial aim is for the advocates of two leading theories to agree on a protocol that would put predictions of their ideas to the test. Similar scrutiny of other theories will then follow.

The Physics Still Hiding in the Higgs Boson

Physics

Date: March 2019

Source: Quanta Magazine

No new particles have been found at the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs boson in 2012. This article highlights the depth of the unknown for modern Science about the basic building blocks of the Universe : “But physicists understand little about the omnipresent Higgs field, or the fateful moment in the early universe when it suddenly shifted from having zero value everywhere (or in other words, not existing) into its current, uniformly valued state. That shift, or “symmetry-breaking” event, instantly rendered quarks, electrons and many other fundamental particles massive, which led them to form atoms and all the other structures seen in the cosmos. But why? Why should the universe decide to have this Higgs presence all over?”

Our planet’s Orchestra with drums !

Earth Science

Date: February 2019

Source: Nature

New discovery has found the first direct and unambiguous observational evidence that the magnetopause (boundary layer between the magnetosphere and the surrounding plasma) vibrates in a standing wave pattern, like a drum, when hit by a strong impulse.

2019-03-252019-03-25

A case of Karma : Revenge of the Incas

Anthropology, Archeology, History

Date: March 2019

Source: ScienceDirect

55 million indigenous people died following the European conquest of the Americas beginning in 1492. A new study demonstrates that the Great Dying of the Indigenous
Peoples of the Americas led to the abandonment of enough cleared land in the Americas that the resulting terrestrial carbon uptake had a detectable impact on both atmospheric CO2 and global surface air temperatures in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.

2019-03-252019-03-31

The Origin of the Elements

Physics

Date: February 2019

Source: Physics Today

What are the basic constituents of our universe, our world, our body, . . . From where came the building blocks of our “material” world, the elementary particles ? How Science classified them ? This paper recapitulates decades of interdisciplinary research in astronomy, chemistry, and nuclear physics to determinate from where came the elements.

2019-03-252019-03-25

What is Life ?

Biology

Date: January, 2019

Source: New Scientist

All the signs are you’re alive: you respond to stimuli, you’re using energy, your cells are reproducing. Yet plenty of things around you obviously aren’t alive, despite ultimately being made of the exact same atoms. Physics or biology alone can’t explain the difference, and in the first of a new occasional series of “Big Questions”, physicist-turned-biologist Paul Davies marries concepts from the cutting edge of both disciplines to come up with a big answer – one that takes us outside the bounds of the laws of nature as we know them.

2019-03-252019-03-25

Meat Production affecting the eco-system

Earth Science, Health and Medicine

Date: November, 2018

Source: The Lancet

Meat production doesn’t just affect the ecosystem by production of gases, and study now question the system of production’s direct effect on global freshwater use, change in land use, and ocean acidification. A recent paper in Science claims that even the lowest-impact meat causes “much more” environmental impact than the least sustainable forms of plant and vegetable production.

Another study from the International Agency For Research On Cancer assessment has identified a “strong” link between red meat and the mechanistic evidence for carcinogenicity.

2019-03-252019-03-25

Homo Sapiens Evolution

Anthropology

Date: January, 2019

Source: Trend in Ecology and Evolution

The view that Homo sapiens evolved from a single region/population within Africa has been given primacy in studies of human evolution. However, developments across multiple fields show that relevant data are no longer consistent with this view. A new study shows that Homo sapiens evolved within a set of interlinked groups living across Africa, whose connectivity changed through time.

A manuscript of an essay from Mme Blavatsky was published in The Theosophist, Vol. LXXXIII, N° 11, August 1962 – also available in BCW XIII, p.326, where she described the early races of Africa

2019-03-252019-03-25

Connecting People’s Brains

Health and Medicine

Date: January, 2019

Source: Science Alert

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people to share their thoughts.

Mme Blavatsky wrote (The theosophist, Vol. III, N° 4, January 1882) : “The phenomena of sensation and volition, of intellect and instinct are, of course, all manifested through the channels of the nervous centres, the most important of which is the brain. . . Yet while this physiological office is distinguished, or divided by Science into three kinds – the motor, sensitive and connecting – the mysterious agency of intellect remains as mysterious and perplexing to the great physiologists as it was in the days of Hippocrates. The scientific suggestion that there may be a fourth series associated with the operation of thought, has not helped towards solving the problem; it has failed to shed even the slightest ray of light on the unfathomable mystery. Nor will they ever fathom it unless our men of Science accept the hypothesis of DUAL MAN.“

2019-03-252019-03-25

Could Our Immune System Be Controlling Our Behavior?

Health and Medicine

Date: July, 2016

Source: Futurism.com

We all like to think of ourselves as totally unique, independent individuals, in charge of our own destinies. But new research has found evidence that our behaviour, and maybe even our personalities, could be influenced by something totally unexpected – our immune systems.

Theosophical literature often points out that our personal consciousness is not a single entity but, rather, the sum total of many different influences, including our bodies, elementals, skandhas, the higher consciousness, and more.

2019-02-082019-03-25

The ancient Science of the Druids

Health and Medicine

Date: December, 2018

Source: Phys.org

Soil from Ireland long thought to have medicinal properties contains a previously unknown strain of bacteria which is effective against four of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA. This area was previously occupied by the Druids, around 1500 years ago.

Madame Blavatsky, talking about the Science of the Druids, said (Isis Unveiled, Vol. I, p.18) :

“On the dead soil of the long by-gone past stand their (the druids) sacred oaks, now dried up and stripped of their spiritual meaning by the venomous breath of materialism. But for the student of occult learning, their vegetation is still verdant and luxuriant, and as full of deep and sacred truths, as that hour when the arch-druid performed his magical cures, and waving the branch of mistletoe, severed with his golden sickle the green bough from its mother oak-tree..”