Ig Nobels Feature Exploding Colonoscopies, Left Leaning Views of Eiffel Tower

"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative ? and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

I think you have misunderstood the Ig Nobel Prize. It's not intended to mock the recipients. It's intended, partly, to reward basic (and sometimes not so basic) research into areas you'd otherwise forget might benefit from research.

"Are you ridiculing science?
No. We are honoring achievements that make people laugh, then think. Good achievements can also be odd, funny, and even absurd; So can bad achievements. A lot of good science gets attacked because of its absurdity. A lot of bad science gets revered despite its absurdity."

http://www.improbable.com/ig/ [improbable.com]

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/D6WVdlRvsp8/ig-nobels-feature-exploding-colonoscopies-left-leaning-views-of-eiffel-tower

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Video: Paul Ryan booed at AARP conference (cbsnews)

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Decades later, Brooklyn has its own pro team again

Pedestrians pass the main entrance to the Barclays Arena in New York, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012 as workmen complete their cleanup for Friday's ribbon-cutting ceremony. A new chapter in Brooklyn's history Friday when the Brooklyn Nets new arena will open, just across the street from the spot where the Dodgers owner once tried to build a baseball stadium that never saw the light of day. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Pedestrians pass the main entrance to the Barclays Arena in New York, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012 as workmen complete their cleanup for Friday's ribbon-cutting ceremony. A new chapter in Brooklyn's history Friday when the Brooklyn Nets new arena will open, just across the street from the spot where the Dodgers owner once tried to build a baseball stadium that never saw the light of day. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn's official borough historian, at his home where he has an extensive Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia collection on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012. After decades without a professional sports team following the Dodgers move west, Brooklyn is hitting the major leagues again with a new arena and the Brooklyn Nets' NBA franchise. Schweiger says the new stadium will help replace the sense of loss felt longtime residents for many years after the Dodgers left. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Ebbets Field Apartments, once home to the Brooklyn Dodgers and now home to thousands, is viewed from where second base would have been, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012 in Brooklyn, N.Y. After decades without a professional sports team following the Dodgers move west, Brooklyn is hitting the major leagues again with a new arena and the Brooklyn Nets' NBA franchise. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

HOLD FOR FRIDAY STORY BY MEGHAN BARR--Jerome Stewart, 15, wears a Brooklyn Nets cap as he walks home from school past the Ebbets Field Apartments, home of the former Brooklyn Dodgers, on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012 in Brooklyn, N.Y. "I used to be a Knicks fan" said Stewart, "but switched to the Nets." After decades without a professional sports team after the Dodgers moved west, Brooklyn is hitting the major leagues again with a new arena and the Brooklyn Nets' basketball franchise. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Ebbets Field Apartments, once home to the Brooklyn Dodgers and now home to thousands, is viewed from where second base would have been, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012 in Brooklyn, N.Y. After decades without a professional sports team following the Dodgers move west, Brooklyn is hitting the major leagues again with a new arena and the Brooklyn Nets' NBA franchise. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

NEW YORK (AP) ? It was like a death in the family for Brooklyn baseball fans when their beloved Dodgers left the borough behind in 1957 for the California coast.

Times were grim for Brooklyn back then. Residents were leaving en masse for the suburbs. Crime was on the rise. And there was little hope that the borough's plight would improve.

"When the Dodgers left, it was another punch in the face to the fact that Brooklyn's best days may not be ahead, but may have been behind us," said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who was 12 years old at the time. "It was depressing."

After decades without a professional sports team, New York City's ascendant borough hit the major leagues again on Friday with the opening of the Brooklyn Nets' new arena. The state-of-the-art, 18,000-seat arena will be officially christened Sept. 28 with a rap concert by Nets co-owner and native Brooklynite Jay-Z.

Supporters cheered Friday as the lights were turned on during a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Developer Bruce Ratner said he was glad the arena is finally open after its completion was delayed by multiple lawsuits and by the economic downturn, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the project has created more than 1,500 jobs.

The austere-looking arena has all black seats and metal hanging lights. The polished wooden floor has a herringbone design with the Nets' new black and white logo in the middle.

Just as the Dodgers' departure was a harbinger of difficult times ahead, the opening of the Barclays Center is a symbol of Brooklyn's astonishing rise in recent years as a sought-after destination for people from all over the globe.

Basketball is now the sport du jour here, not baseball. And in a stroke of irony, the new stadium was built directly across the street from the spot where Dodgers President Walter O'Malley wanted to erect a new ballpark to replace Ebbets Field, the team's home that was later demolished.

"When they left, that's when I washed my hands of baseball," said 72-year-old Fred Wilken, who was so distraught by the loss of his hometown team that he stopped watching sports altogether. "For years we supported them, we came down here. And then all of a sudden they decide to leave."

The Dodgers were the golden thread that tied Brooklyn together in those days. The fabric of the team was woven into the neighborhood.

About two miles from the new Nets' Arena, the hallowed ground where Ebbets Field once stood is now a massive brick apartment building in a neighborhood of Caribbean immigrants.

"We still haven't gotten over it," admitted Ron Schweiger, Brooklyn's official borough historian, whose basement is stuffed with Dodgers memorabilia. "I tend to think they never moved. They're on an extended road trip."

Why O'Malley moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the 1957 season was, at its core, a question of dollars and cents. O'Malley wanted the city to help subsidize the new stadium, and the city refused. Fast-forward to the present: the $1 billion Barclays Center has received millions in public money.

With its deliberately rusted steel exterior, the new arena looks like a spaceship that cruised in for a landing in Brooklyn's busiest transportation and shopping hub. There are chain stores galore. A Modell's sporting apparel store across the street is stocked with racks full of team apparel in the Nets' new black-and-white color scheme and the logo designed by Jay-Z himself. Rivalry-stirring T-shirts proclaim: "New York Divided."

The city is banking on Brooklynites' deep-rooted sense of borough pride to win over new fans. And the championship-hungry Nets are hoping their new Brooklyn home will turn the tide for a franchise that has been largely overshadowed by the New York Knicks.

But gone are the days when sports allegiances were dictated by zip code. Brooklyn is a tight-knit borough no more: It is a deeply diverse community of many nationalities and income brackets.

Large swaths of Brooklyn are actually starting to look a whole lot like Manhattan. The borough of about 2.5 million residents draws its own share of tourists who want to stroll down Brooklyn Heights' charming brownstone-lined streets or shop in Williamsburg's chic boutiques.

Celebrities live in Brooklyn now. It is home to fashionable hipsters and upscale beer gardens and well-heeled mothers pushing expensive baby strollers down the street. Brooklyn is no longer just a place to live ? it's a place to visit.

"Brooklyn had an image as the underdog upstarts, which the Dodgers exemplified," said Henry Fetter, author of "Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball." ''I think Brooklyn no longer has that image. And the Nets don't necessarily exemplify that."

At the end of the day, as the wins pile up, the fans will follow. A new generation of Brooklyn children will grow up with the Nets, just as their grandparents and great-grandparents grew up with the Dodgers. But fans are a more fickle species nowadays.

A group of young men shooting hoops across the street from Ebbets Field Apartments vowed to remain loyal to the Knicks, despite being born and raised in Brooklyn.

"If they had Dwight Howard, they would've been the team of New York," said 23-year-old Mario Volcin. "They would've been the best team of New York. The Nets don't really have enough pieces."

In a winner-take-all kind of town, being second-best just doesn't cut it. And as any Dodgers fan would tell you, old loyalties die hard. But even the old-timers are willing to give this new team a chance.

"I can't see this as atonement. Too many years have gone by for that," said Schweiger, the historian. "But I definitely intend to go to a bunch of the games. In fact, I already have a Brooklyn Nets T-shirt."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-09-21-Brooklyn-New%20Arena/id-402cad5dc054461caa53f44fb4714c55

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Fear can be erased from the brain, research shows

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2012) ? Newly formed emotional memories can be erased from the human brain. This is shown by researchers from Uppsala University in a new study now being published by the academic journal Science. The findings may represent a breakthrough in research on memory and fear.

Thomas ?gren, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, has shown, that it is possible to erase newly formed emotional memories from the human brain.

When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process. In other words, it can be said that we are not remembering what originally happened, but rather what we remembered the last time we thought about what happened. By disrupting the reconsolidation process that follows upon remembering, we can affect the content of memory.

In the study the researchers showed subjects a neutral picture and simultaneously administered an electric shock. In this way the picture came to elicit fear in the subjects which meant a fear memory had been formed. In order to activate this fear memory, the picture was then shown without any accompanying shock. For one experimental group the reconsolidation process was disrupted with the aid of repeated presentations of the picture. For a control group, the reconsolidation process was allowed to complete before the subjects were shown the same repeated presentations of the picture.

In that the experimental group was not allowed to reconsolidate the fear memory, the fear they previously associated with the picture dissipated. In other words, by disrupting the reconsolidation process, the memory was rendered neutral and no longer incited fear. At the same time, using a MR-scanner, the researchers were able to show that the traces of that memory also disappeared from the part of the brain that normally stores fearful memories, the nuclear group of amygdala in the temporal lobe.

'These findings may be a breakthrough in research on memory and fear. Ultimately the new findings may lead to improved treatment methods for the millions of people in the world who suffer from anxiety issues like phobias, post-traumatic stress, and panic attacks,' says Thomas ?gren.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Uppsala University.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

---

Journal Reference:

1. T. Agren, J. Engman, A. Frick, J. Bjorkstrand, E.-M. Larsson, T. Furmark, M. Fredrikson. Disruption of Reconsolidation Erases a Fear Memory Trace in the Human Amygdala. Science, 2012; 337 (6101): 1550 DOI: 10.1126/science.1223006

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/84p1EiKFFlo/120920141155.htm

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Syrian TV: Helicopter crashes near Damascus

BEIRUT (AP) ? A Syrian military helicopter crashed in a rebellious suburb of Damascus on Thursday, state-run TV said, but the circumstances in which the aircraft went down were not immediately clear.

In northern Syria, shelling and gunfire continued to echo across a border region, a day after rebels seized control of a strategic crossing on the Syrian-Turkish frontier.

Syria's rebels have captured several other border crossings into Turkey, as well as one into Iraq, but Wednesday's seizure of the Tal Abyad post is believed to be the first time they have overrun a frontier post in the northern province of Raqqa.

Thursday's shelling and gunfire, however, suggested fighting was still going on in the area.

In Akcakale, on the Turkish side of the border, a large explosion was heard and in the distance in Syria, military vehicles were seen rushing toward the blast scene as smoke billowed from the area.

Tension was high as Turkish police vehicles escorted reporters covering the events in Syria away from the border. Turkish security forces were also seen moving local residents and cordoning off the area closest to Syria.

Some irate Turkish residents lunged and threw stones at a car carrying an APTN cameraman and at least two other media vehicles. It was not immediately clear what caused their anger.

In a brief report, Syrian TV said Thursday's helicopter crash took place southeast of Douma, a Damascus suburb that has witnessed repeated military crackdowns to purge fighters seeking to topple President Bashar Assad. No further details were made available.

"We heard the sound of several explosions and some gunfire, and a few minutes later, we were told that a helicopter had crashed," said Mohammad Saeed, an activist in Douma.

Also in Damascus, soldiers raided a Palestinian refugee camp where many Syrians from other parts of the country's capital and its suburbs have found shelter from the fighting, arresting dozens of people in a sweeping operation, the government and opposition groups said.

Syrian TV said an army unit conducted a "special operation" during which about 100 gunmen were captured in the Palestinian refugee camps of Yarmouk and Palestine in Damascus. It gave no further details.

The Local Coordination Committees activist network said gunfire and several casualties accompanied the raid. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said three people were killed and dozens of others were arrested when troops stormed parts of the Yarmouk camp that has become home for many residents of Damascus' Hajar al-Aswad district, an area that saw heavy fighting between rebels and government troops in recent days.

In a statement late Wednesday, the opposition Syrian National Council declared districts in southern Damascus a "disaster area." It said days of artillery shelling and pounding by helicopter gunships have left the besieged areas destroyed and cut off from the rest of the city, with no water or electricity.

The SNC called on the international community to work toward stopping the shelling immediately and allowing the Red Cross to evacuate the wounded. It added that the "international and Arab reaction to what is happening in the world's oldest inhabited city is absolutely not enough."

The Syrian government has increasingly been using helicopters and other aircraft in its fight against an 18-month-old rebellion against the Assad rule. Rebels have claimed to have shot down helicopters and warplanes in the past, although the regime has blamed most of the problems on mechanical difficulties.

Saeed, the Douma activist, said Syrian MiG warplanes and helicopter gunships had been flying low over the southeastern part of the neighborhood before Thursday's crash. Speaking via Skype from Douma, he said the helicopter crashed in a district known as Tal Kurdi near a factory for household items.

Rebels in Syria are fighting mostly with light weapons. Still, they are increasingly claiming success in downing government aircraft.

In the first week of September, rebels said they shot down a MiG aircraft in Abu al-Dhuhour, an area in the northwestern province of Idlib. On Aug. 13, rebels claimed to have shot down a regime MiG-23 warplane and captured the pilot in Deir el-Zour. Syria said the pilot ejected after a technical malfunction in the fighter jet.

___

Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria and Umut Colak in Akcakale, Turkey, contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-tv-helicopter-crashes-near-damascus-080336315.html

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Kate Middleton: Pregnant (On Photoshopped Tabloid Cover)!

Kate Middleton is pregnant, according to Star Magazine. Given their blatant doctoring of the photo of her on its new cover, however, we have our doubts.

Also, its Star Magazine.

Given that Kate will one day (hopefully) produce the next heir(ess) of the British royal family, there will always be speculation and gossip and it's all fun.

Photoshopping a baby bump onto Kate Middleton pictures, though? That's gotta be a new, shameless low, even by their immeasurably low standards:

Wow, her belly sure grew quickly from one nanosecond ago.

As you can see, Star's BOMBSHELL photo appeared with the headline: “It’s Twins”.

It’s not. Nor was it the last time this celeb "news" magazine tried to make it so.

For whatever reason, the magazine erased her ring from the cover in addition to altering the shape of her abdominal region. No idea why that was necessary.

At least they've tried to capitalize on the Kate Middleton topless scandal, teasing pics that aren't inside. Well done all around! What will they come up with next week?

We can only imagine, but one thing's for sure: It won't be accurate. In the least.

Here's a look at some of the past non-pregnant Kate Middleton tabloid reports:

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/09/kate-middleton-pregnant-on-photoshopped-tabloid-cover/

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Reporter Tries, Fails to Interview Baby

Can't a guy go to the town fall harvest festival in peace anymore? Yeesh.

You gotta watch the clip below and see the look given by a scared and thoroughly confused baby to a reporter trying to "interview" it for the local news.

This is actually the expression most of us have when we see reporters ...

 

Reporter Scares Baby

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/09/reporter-tries-fails-to-interview-baby/

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