Weird Things, Weird World

A blog dedicated to the weird, wonderful and woeful happenings of Earth: news and politics, science and religion, art and music, animals and humans, subcultures, history, psychology, human rights, everything! Enjoy the world and all of it's harrowing beauty.

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People with severe depression have a disrupted “biological clock” that makes it seem as if they are living in a different time zone to the rest of the healthy population living alongside them, a study has found.

It is the first time that depression has been linked unequivocally to the internal circadian clock of the human brain, which regulates the body's day-and-night cycle over a 24 hour period, scientists said.

The researchers found that they could estimate a healthy person's time of death to within a few hours by analysing the activity levels of a set of genes - whether they are switched on 'high' or 'low' - within certain regions of the deceased brain.

However, this correlation broke down when they analysed the autopsied brains of people who had suffered from depression. Their gene activity bore little relationship to the hour of death, which indicated they suffered a severely disrupted sleeping pattern, the scientists found.

(Link can be found above for full story)

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Daft Punk -- Phoenix

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Zhan Zhuang is a form of Qi Gong developed around 2,700 years ago.

This particular form has you stand like a tree and draw energy from your breath.

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Insanely amazing video of Bulgaria's Boyanka Angelova's gymnastics routine. This is jaw-dropping!

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"Join us as physics teacher/Glass Explorer Andrew Vanden Heuvel takes a classroom on a virtual field trip into the Large Hadron Collider."

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VICE Series on HBO:

This episode has features on the rampant political assassinations in the Philippines and child suicide bombers in the Middle East.

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Addicted to these videos: Erin Gibson hosts short segments on Current TV's Infomania exploring the tropes, advertising and everything in between that is targeted at women in such a comedic way. Seriously, these videos are hilarious and anyone that you choose to watch from the list is guaranteed to make you laugh.

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Coil -- "The Snow (As Pure As)"

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The coolest music in the world: Listen to Siberian ice drummers use frozen Lake Baikal as an incredible musical instrument

In minus 20C, they found by pure chance that the one metre thick ice has a distinctive and haunting rhythm all of its own, the coolest music on earth.

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Right view is normally explained in terms of the four noble truths. In this discourse, Ven. Sariputta expands the discussion in several directions.

He begins by focusing on two concepts that underlie the structure of the four noble truths: the dichotomy of skillful and unskillful action, and the concept of nutriment.

Focusing on the dichotomy of skillful and unskillful action draws attention to a general principle of cause and effect — the fact that actions give results — and to the particular role of action in determining one's experience of pleasure and pain: Unskillful actions lead to pain, skillful actions to pleasure. The search for the root of skillful and unskillful actions leads ultimately to the mind, because the presence or lack of skill in any action is determined by the mental state motivating it. Thus the issue of skillful and unskillful action provides in a nutshell some of the basic principles of the four noble truths in terms of causality, wise and unwise uses of causality, and the dominant role of the mind in the causal chain leading to happiness or pain.

The image of "root" carries further implications. Because the function of roots is to draw nourishment from the soil, the natural question is: Where do the roots of skillful and unskillful behavior draw their nourishment? This is why the next topic in the sutta is nutriment, which is of two sorts, physical and mental. And implicit in the idea of nutriment is the possibility for a strategy to use nutriment skillfully: If the mental state being nourished is unskillful, it can be overcome by depriving it of nutriment; if it's skillful, it can be fostered by feeding it more (see, for example, SN 46.51). This points to the possibility of training the mind through a strategy of selective feeding and starving, while the analysis of mental nutriment shows precisely which events are most basic in the mental food chain: contact, intellectual intention, and consciousness.

Ven. Sariputta combines the issues of skillfulness and nutriment by approaching the topic of nutriment with a fourfold framework: nutriment, its origination (nutriment, in turn, has its own food), its cessation (the possibility of starving it of that food), and the path of practice leading to its cessation (the way to starve it). This line of thinking leads naturally to the next topic, in which this same framework is applied to the focal issue of the Buddha's teaching — suffering and stress — yielding the four noble truths. In this way, Ven. Sariputta shows how the four noble truths derive from the two topics of skillful/unskillful and nutriment.

It's interesting to note that both these topics figure prominently in discourses directed at young people. The Buddha's instruction to Rahula in MN 61 focuses on skillful and unskillful behavior; the first of the Novice's Questions (Khp 4), on nutriment. Seeing how basic these concepts are to understanding the role of causality in putting an end to suffering, the Buddha taught them to young people as an entry into the Dhamma. In this sutta, Ven. Sariputta shows how these topics can perform the same function for adults.

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Venezuela Accuses U.S. of Plotting Coup After Deadly Post-Election Protests

Venezuelan President-elect Nicolás Maduro has accused the United States and opposition of planning a coup against him after seven government supporters were killed and 60 people were injured in clashes after the election. Venezuela’s National Electoral Council has certified Maduro’s victory, but opposition candidate Henrique Capriles is refusing to accept the results. The Venezuelan opposition says it has collected more than 3,200 reports of problems and campaign violations that could have swayed the vote, but the Union of South American Nations said Sunday’s election was free and fair. Several Latin American nations have already congratulated Maduro on his victory, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba and Nicaragua.

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Pope Francis reaffirms crackdown on U.S. nuns

ROME — Pope Francis has backed the Vatican's doctrinal crackdown on a major group of American nuns, reasserting the Roman Catholic Church's conservative approach to various social issues in a move that could cool the warm reception he has received from some liberal Catholics since taking office last month.

The Vatican said in a statement Monday that Francis had reaffirmed the doctrinal evaluation and criticism of U.S. nuns made last year by the Holy See under his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The assessment accused the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents most U.S. female Catholic orders, of promoting "radical feminist themes" and ignoring the Vatican's hard line on same-sex marriage and abortion.

At the time, the Vatican dispatched an archbishop to rewrite the group's statutes and set up reeducation programs to bring nuns back into line, alleging that leaders of U.S. orders had challenged the church's teachings on women's ordination and ministry to homosexuals.

The move was denounced by Pat Farrell, then the head of the organization, as creating "pain and scandal." Protest vigils were held outside churches, and a petition attacking the Vatican's decision attracted 50,000 signatures.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious represents about 57,000 sisters, or 80% of U.S. nuns.

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Women have long been told that a good bra can help support the chest, relieve back pain and prevent sagging.  However, a new 15-year French study reveals the opposite: bras do little to reduce back pain and, over time, they can actually make breasts sag even more.

Researcher Prof. Jean-Denis Rouillon, a sports science expert from the University of Besançon in eastern France claims that "bras are a false necessity," according to The Local.

"Medically, physiologically, anatomically - breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity," said Rouillon. "On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra."

Rouillon and his team spent years measuring the changes in the breasts of 330 women using a simple slide rule and caliper at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (University Hospital) in Besançon, where he carried out his research.

He found that no evidence that bras helped ease back pain. Instead, he found that the chest supports could even add to the problem.

According to The Connexion, the findings suggest that breasts would gain more tone and support themselves if no bra was used.  Researchers explain that bras limit the growth of supporting breast tissues, leaving the breast to wither and degrade more quickly.

The study found that women who took off their bras for good experienced a 7mm lift in their nipples each year they didn't wear a bra.  Researchers also found that bra-less women developed firmer breasts and saw their stretch marks fade.

Some of the women who took part in Rouillon's study told France Info that not wearing a bra helped ease their back pains.

Capucine, a 28-year-old participant in Rouillon's study, swears by the results and hasn't worn a bra for two years.

"There are multiple benefits: I breathe more easily, I carry myself better, and I have less back pain," Capucine said, according to France Info.

However, Rouillon says the findings do not mean all women should throw away their bras.

"It would be dangerous to advise all women to stop wearing their soutien-gorge as the women involved were not a representative sample of the population," Rouillon said, according to The Connexion.

While his initial results "validated the hypothesis that the bra is a false 'need'," he says that women who have been wearing bras for a long time would not gain any benefit from stopping now.

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Meditation's positive residual effects

A new study has found that participating in an eight-week meditation training program can have measurable effects on how the brain functions even when someone is not actively meditating. In their report in the November issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, investigators at Harvard Medical School-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston University (BU), and several other research centers also found differences in those effects based on the specific type of meditation practiced. “The two different types of meditation training our study participants completed yielded some differences in the response of the amygdala — a part of the brain known for decades to be important for emotion — to images with emotional content,” says Gaëlle Desbordes, a research fellow at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and at the BU Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, corresponding author of the report. “This is the first time that meditation training has been shown to affect emotional processing in the brain outside of a meditative state.” Several previous studies have supported the hypothesis that meditation training improves practitioners’ emotional regulation. Although neuroimaging studies have found that meditation training appeared to decrease activation of the amygdala (a structure at the base of the brain that is also known to have a role in processing memory and emotion), those changes were only observed while study participants were meditating. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that meditation training could also produce a generalized reduction in amygdala response to emotional stimuli, measurable by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants had enrolled in a larger investigation into the effects of two forms of meditation: mindful attention meditation and compassion meditation. Based at Emory University in Atlanta, healthy adults with no experience meditating participated in eight-week courses in either mindful attention meditation — which focuses on developing attention to and awareness of breathing, thoughts, and emotions — and compassion meditation, a less-studied form that includes methods designed to develop loving kindness and compassion for oneself and for others. A control group participated in an eight-week health education course. Within three weeks before beginning and three weeks after completing the training, 12 participants from each group traveled to Boston for fMRI brain imaging at the Martinos Center’s state-of-the-art imaging facilities. Brain scans were performed as the volunteers viewed a series of 216 different images — 108 per session — of people in situations with either positive, negative, or neutral emotional content. Meditation was not mentioned in preimaging instructions to participants, and investigators confirmed afterward that the volunteers had not meditated while in the scanner. Participants also completed assessments of symptoms of depression and anxiety before and after the training programs. In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress. In the compassion meditation group, right amygdala activity also decreased in response to positive or neutral images. But among those who reported practicing compassion meditation most frequently outside of the training sessions, right amygdala activity tended to increase in response to negative images, all of which depicted some form of human suffering. No significant changes were seen in the control group or in the left amygdala of any study participants. “We think these two forms of meditation cultivate different aspects of mind,” Desbordes explains. “Since compassion meditation is designed to enhance compassionate feelings, it makes sense that it could increase amygdala response to seeing people suffer. Increased amygdala activation was also correlated with decreased depression scores in the compassion meditation group, which suggests that having more compassion towards others may also be beneficial for oneself. Overall, these results are consistent with the overarching hypothesis that meditation may result in enduring, beneficial changes in brain function, especially in the area of emotional processing.” (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/meditations-positive-residual-effects/)

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In Dzogchen traditions, dakinis, female spiritual forces, are an absolutely integral part of the teachings. The teachings are often originally written in the mysterious cipher called the “language of the dakini” or the “twilight language.” These teachings are transmitted, concealed and protected by dakinis. Without a deep connection with the dakini, the texts cannot be deciphered.

“Women of Wisdom” by Lama Tsultrim Allione (via calmabidingphotography)

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2012.