Do Tumbleweeds Actually Blow Around In The Southwest Or Is That A Myth…?

The Björketorp Runestone & Curse

The Björketorp Runestone is one of many standing stones (menhir) located in Bleking, Sweden and is one of the world’s tallest runestones, measuring 13.7 feet (4.2 m) high. It is part of a stone circle with two other blank standing stones, with several other solitary stones in the surrounding regions. Most scholars date the runestone’s inscription to the 7th century AD. It’s carved with a type of runes that form an intermediate version between the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark. The runestone is inscribed on both sides, the shorter message appears to say “I foresee perdition” or “prediction of perdition” and the longer side’s inscription (pictured) translates as:

“I, master of the runes(?) conceal here runes of power. Incessantly (plagued by) maleficence, (doomed to) insidious death (is) he who breaks this (monument). I prophesy destruction / prophecy of destruction.”

Local lore says that the curse came true at one point. Long ago, a man wanted to move the runestone so that he could have more room to farm, so he piled wood around it to attempt to heat the stone and then crack it with water. The weather was calm with no wind at the time, but as soon as he lit the fire a sudden gust came and lit the man’s hair aflame. He dropped to the ground to put it out but his clothes caught fire and the poor man died in agony. The flame around the runestone, however, was miraculously extinguished, as if someone had smothered the fire.

(Image caption: Two Aplysia sensory neurons with synaptic contacts on the same motor neuron in culture after isolation from the nervous system of Aplysia. The motor neuron has been injected with a fluorescent molecule that blocks the activity of a specific Protein Kinase M molecule. Credit: Schacher Lab/Columbia University Medical Center)

Select Memories Can Be Erased, Leaving Others Intact

Different types of memories stored in the same neuron of the marine snail Aplysia can be selectively erased, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University and published in Current Biology.

The findings suggest that it may be possible to develop drugs to delete memories that trigger anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) without affecting other important memories of past events.

During emotional or traumatic events, multiple memories can become encoded, including memories of any incidental information that is present when the event occurs. In the case of a traumatic experience, the incidental, or neutral, information can trigger anxiety attacks long after the event has occurred, say the researchers.

“The example I like to give is, if you are walking in a high-crime area and you take a shortcut through a dark alley and get mugged, and then you happen to see a mailbox nearby, you might get really nervous when you want to mail something later on,” says Samuel Schacher, PhD, a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry at CUMC and co-author of the paper. In the example, fear of dark alleys is an associative memory that provides important information—e.g., fear of dark alleys—based on a previous experience. Fear of mailboxes, however, is an incidental, non-associative memory that is not directly related to the traumatic event.

“One focus of our current research is to develop strategies to eliminate problematic non-associative memories that may become stamped on the brain during a traumatic experience without harming associative memories, which can help people make informed decisions in the future—like not taking shortcuts through dark alleys in high-crime areas,” Dr. Schacher adds.

Brains create long-term memories, in part, by increasing the strength of connections between neurons and maintaining those connections over time. Previous research suggested that increases in synaptic strength in creating associative and non-associative memories share common properties. This suggests that selectively eliminating non-associative synaptic memories would be impossible, because for any one neuron, a single mechanism would be responsible for maintaining all forms of synaptic memories.

The new study tested that hypothesis by stimulating two sensory neurons connected to a single motor neuron of the marine snail Aplysia; one sensory neuron was stimulated to induce an associative memory and the other to induce a non-associative memory.

By measuring the strength of each connection, the researchers found that the increase in the strength of each connection produced by the different stimuli was maintained by a different form of a Protein Kinase M (PKM) molecule (PKM Apl III for associative synaptic memory and PKM Apl I for non-associative). They found that each memory could be erased – without affecting the other — by blocking one of the PKM molecules.

In addition, they found that specific synaptic memories may also be erased by blocking the function of distinct variants of other molecules that either help produce PKMs or protect them from breaking down.

The researchers say that their results could be useful in understanding human memory because vertebrates have similar versions of the Aplysia PKM proteins that participate in the formation of long-term memories. In addition, the PKM-protecting protein KIBRA is expressed in humans, and mutations of this gene produce intellectual disability.

“Memory erasure has the potential to alleviate PTSD and anxiety disorders by removing the non-associative memory that causes the maladaptive physiological response,” says Jiangyuan Hu, PhD, an associate research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at CUMC and co-author of the paper. “By isolating the exact molecules that maintain non-associative memory, we may be able to develop drugs that can treat anxiety without affecting the patient’s normal memory of past events.”

“Our study is a ‘proof of principle’ that presents an opportunity for developing strategies and perhaps therapies to address anxiety,” said Dr. Schacher. “For example, because memories are still likely to change immediately after recollection, a therapist may help to ‘rewrite’ a non-associative memory by administering a drug that inhibits the maintenance of non-associative memory.”

Future studies in preclinical models are needed to better understand how PKMs are produced and localized at the synapse before researchers can determine which drugs may weaken non-associative memories.

One day a voice rings out from everywhere at once: “Thank you all for participating in the LIFE beta. The servers will be shutting down and undergo a wipe in preparation for a full release of the game.”

When you wake up from a long nap and don’t know what year it is.

Video by Barnaby

Human Drug Addiction Behaviors Closely Tied to Specific Impairments Within Six Large-Scale Brain Networks

Specific impairments within six large-scale brain networks during drug cue exposure, decision-making, inhibitory control, and social-emotional processing are associated with drug addiction behaviors, according to a systematic review of more than 100 published neuroimaging studies by experts at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published Wednesday, June 6 in the journal Neuron.

Drug addiction is a disorder that encompasses not only excessive drug-seeking and taking, but also fundamental changes in cognition and emotional processing. It comprises core clinical symptoms and behavioral manifestations including a chronically relapsing cycle of intoxication, bingeing, withdrawal, and craving that propels uncontrollable drug use despite adverse consequences and a reduction in the pleasure derived from the drug. While much of the early research on drug addiction focused on understanding the rewarding properties of the drug, recent research has made it increasingly clear that cognitive and emotional impairments support the initiation, escalation, and maintenance of the cycle of addiction. A better understanding of the underlying impaired neural mechanisms in human drug addiction is critical to paving the way for the development of more targeted, evidence-based treatment interventions and timely prevention approaches.  

The Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution (iRISA) model, first published in 2002 by Rita Goldstein, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Director of the Neuropsychoimaging of Addiction and Related Conditions research program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Nora Volkow, Director of NIDA, proposed that impairments of two broad neuropsychological functions—response inhibition (a cognitive process that permits individuals to inhibit their impulses) and salience attribution (the property of tagging something as valuable or important)—and their underlying neural substrates contribute to the cycle of addiction across a broad range of substances of abuse. The iRISA model uses multiple neuroimaging modalities including magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalogram (EEG) and derived event-related potentials, positron emission tomography, and neuropsychological testing to explore the underlying neurobiology of human drug addiction and the shift to excessive salience attributed to the drug and drug-related cues at the expense of other salient reinforcers as associated with impaired self-control (especially in a drug related context) and increased drug taking in drug addicted individuals.

“We conducted the current review to update the iRISA model with the most recent evidence from the neuroimaging literature by systematically reviewing 105 task-related neuroimaging studies published since 2010,” says Dr. Goldstein, last and senior author of the paper. “We found consistent impairments in brain function in six large-scale brain networks during performance of different tasks. While the involvement of these specific brain networks was task-specific, we generally observed that in a drug-related context (e.g., during exposure to drug cues) drug addicted individuals had increased engagement of the brain networks underlying decision making, inhibitory control, and social-emotional processing, but a blunted response during non-drug related tasks, as predicted by the iRISA model.”

Specifically, the Mount Sinai study team assessed brain function in drug addiction across a number of brain networks, including findings from whole-brain analyses of significant group differences. They organized the results across six large-scale brain networks that showed impairment of brain function in addiction, encompassing the “reward network,” which includes subcortical and cortical brain regions activated during the appraisal of subjective value; the striatal “habit network,” which underlies learning of automated behavior; the “salience network,” regions involved in (re)directing attentional resources toward salient stimuli; and the “executive network,” which supports the selection of possible behavioral responses (often also named the inhibitory control network).

Two additional networks, which were not discussed in prior reviews of the iRISA model, were found to be relevant to brain function in drug addiction: the “self-directed network,” which is activated during self-directed/referential cognitive processes, and the “memory network,” involved in flexible, multi-cue learning and memory.

“Our review is the first systematic approach to integrate what we know about the function of each of these networks into a comprehensive model underlying drug addiction symptomatology across the addiction cycle,” says Anna Zilverstand, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and first author of the paper. “We demonstrated common deficits underlying drug addiction independent of the primary drug of choice, which are associated with measures of daily, real-life, drug use and which predict onset, escalation, and relapse into drug use. Our work could inform the development of treatments specifically targeted to alleviate these brain-behavioral deficits.”

In a twisted form of a "soulmate" story, people are born in pairs where only their counterpart is able to kill them. If you kill your counterpart, you forfeit your own death and thus become immortal.

Homestuck is the best webcomic ever made.

This is because Homestuck took full advantage of its medium. It’s a webcomic, it doesn’t have the same limitations as a normal comic. It was more like an event than a book. Even when people go back, read all of homestuck years after today, it won’t be the same. Homestuck is and always was about the community. The frantic fanart drawing, discussions, theory crafting, all of it.

For me, the ending felt off because Homestuck’s thing was that it was always ongoing. There was always another twist waiting around the corner, always some hidden meaning.

This time there isn’t anything. We did it. They did it. The game is over.

We won

The Hand is here! Where is Voigt’s dinner? GUMBY IS HERE ALSO

Fucking SCIENCE

18 Science Facts We Didn't Know at The Start of 2017

We've learned so much already.

1. Lungs don’t just facilitate respiration - they also make blood. Mammalian lungs produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, which equates to the majority of platelets circulating the body.

2. It is mathematically possible to build an actual time machine - what’s holding us back is finding materials that can physically bend the fabric of space-time.

3. Siberia has a colossal crater called the ‘doorway to the underworld’, and its permafrost is melting so fast, ancient forests are being exposed for the first time in 200,000 years.

4. The world’s first semi-synthetic organisms are living among us - scientists have given rise to new lifeforms using an expanded, six-letter genetic code.

5. Vantablack - the blackest material known to science - now comes in a handy ‘spray-on’ form and it’s the weirdest thing we’ve seen so far this year.

6. It’s official: time crystals are a new state of matter, and we now have an actual blueprint to create these “impossible” objects at will.

7. A brand new human organ has been classified, and it’s been hiding in plain sight this whole time. Everyone, meet your mesentery.

8. Carl Sagan was freakishly good at predicting the future - his disturbingly accurate description of a world where pseudoscience and scientific illiteracy reigns gave us all moment for pause.

9. A single giant neuron that wraps around the entire circumference of a mouse’s brain has been identified, and it appears to be linked to mammalian consciousness.

10. The world’s rarest and most ancient dog isn’t extinct after all - in fact, the outrageously handsome New Guinea highland wild dog appears to be thriving.

11. Your appendix might not be the useless evolutionary byproduct after all. Unlike your wisdom teeth, your appendix might actually be serving an important biological function - and one that our species isn’t ready to give up just yet.

12. After 130 years, we might have to completely redraw the dinosaur family tree, thanks to a previously unimportant cat-sized fossil from Scotland.

13. Polycystic ovary syndrome might actually start in the brain, not the ovaries.

14. Earth appears to have a whole new continent called Zealandia, which would wreak havoc on all those textbooks and atlases we’ve got lying around.

15. Humans have had a bigger impact on Earth’s geology than the infamous Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago, and now scientists are calling for a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene - to be officially recognised.

16. Turns out, narwhals - the precious unicorns of the sea - use their horns for hunting. But not how you’d think.

17. Human activity has literally changed the space surrounding our planet - decades of Very Low Frequency (VLF) radio communications have accidentally formed a protective, human-made bubble around Earth.

18. Farmers routinely feed red Skittles to their cattle, because it’s a cheap alternative to corn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯