"There's a feeling that the research has to be done by a government, that it costs billions of dollars and that 3,000 smart people can't be wrong."

In a fascinating new interview, the CEO of General Fusion explains why he believes today's cheap digital signal processors have now actually become powerful enough to control a fusion energy-generating plasma reaction!

This could create a virtually unlimited source of clean energy. "Those involved in science should be curious, but it's easier to just dismiss us." Working with just $9 million from private investors and a $12.9 million grant, General Fusion is currently finishing their components, and in 2011 they'll assemble the reactor. And if his company succeeds, they'll revolutionize the energy industry.

"Electric plants in the United States take three trainloads of coal a day, but you could run a fusion reactor with one truckload of heavy water for a year."

Would you join the zombies?

George Romero once said, if faced with a zombie apocalypse, he'd run out and join them. This article traces the secret appeal of collaborating with world-conquering zombies, and suggests zombie-mania is becoming a real social force. "For many readers and viewers of zombie stuff, the zombies are what you practice on while preparing for the real uprisings to come."

Besides zombie literature like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and George Romero's new upcoming zombie movie, Marvel even launched a line of superhero comics called... "Marvel Zombies". And people are staging zombie-themed flash mobs on two different continents...)

But zombie message boards inevitably turn to discussions about real-world survivalism tactics, which has its own appeal. "The iconic zombie horde isn't just a stand-in for a terrifying undifferentiated Other, but a symbol of how we might shamble and shuffle toward liberation... Zombies will wear the monkey suits they were buried in, or the tattered uniforms of their old day jobs, but they don't have to dress to impress or keep up appearances."

It may also be a secret reflection on the political stalemate of our time, since "characters who escape the zombies often find themselves confronting a corrupt human authority even worse than the undead."

"In a zombie apocalypse, there are only two choices. Go down fighting, and not for humanity but rather for canned goods and isolated mountain cabins. Or you can find the awe within the horror, the freedom of a sort that can only be enjoyed by former slaves, and do what George Romero once said he'd do if the zombie apocalypse came to his door: go out and get bitten."

Would you join the zombies?

Was Alice in Wonderland and Victorian fairy art and lore in general inspired by actual experiences with mind-altering fungi?

The first well-documented hallucinogenic mushroom experience in Britain took place in London’s Green Park on 3 October 1799. Like many such experiences before and since, it was accidental. A man subsequently identified only as ‘J.S.’ was in the habit of gathering small field mushrooms from the park on autumn mornings, and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished eating, the world began to turn very strange. J.S. found black spots and odd flashes of colour bursting across his vision; he became disorientated, and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help. but within a hundred yards he had forgotten where he was going, or why, and was found wandering about in a confused state.

© Mike Jay

By chance, a doctor named Everard Brande happened to be passing through this insalubrious part of town, and he was summoned to treat J.S. and his family. The scene that he discovered was so bizarre and unfamiliar that he would write it up at length and publish it in The Medical and Physical Journal later that year. The family’s symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses and breathing becoming fluttering and laboured, then returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. They were all fixated on the fear that they were dying, except for the youngest, the eight-year-old Edward S., whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was ‘attacked with fits of immoderate laughter’ which his parents’ threats could not subdue. He seemed to have been transported into another world, from which he would only return under duress to speak nonsense: ‘when roused and interrogated as to it, he answered indifferently, yes or no, as he did to every other question, evidently without any relation to what was asked’.

Dr.Everard Brande would diagnose the family’s condition as the ‘deleterious effects of a very common species of agaric [mushroom], not hitherto suspected to be poisonous’. Today, we can be more specific: this was clearly intoxication by Liberty Caps (Psilocybe semilanceata), the ‘magic mushrooms’ which grow plentifully across the hills, moors, commons, golf courses and playing fields of Britain every autumn. But though Dr.Brande’s account of the J.S. family’s trip would not be forgotten, and would continue to be cited in Victorian drug literature for decades, the nineteenth century would come and go without any conclusive identification of the Liberty Cap as the species in question. In fact, it would not be until Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, turned his attention to hallucinogenic mushrooms in the 1950s that the botanical identity of these and other mushrooms containing psilocybin, LSD’s chemical cousin, would be confirmed.

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/03/01/mu...

In a review of recent research, international experts say there is increasing evidence that fake treatments, or placebos, have an actual biological effect in the body.

The doctor-patient relationship, plus the expectation of recovery, may sometimes be enough to change a patient’s brain, body and behavior, experts write. The review of previous research on placebos was published online Friday in Lancet, the British medical journal.

“It’s not that placebos or inert substances help,” said Linda Blair, a Bath-based psychologist and spokeswoman for the British Psychological Society. Blair was not linked to the research. “It’s that people’s belief in inert substances help.”

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/02/19/pl...

MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences.

This was well captured in a 2009 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues, that argued: “…these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained.”

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/02/23/ca...

‘DARKNESS OVER ALL’ – JOHN ROBISON AND THE BIRTH OF THE ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY

At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-standing reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics, and had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would eventually contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year, his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world and co-opting them into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of ‘darkness over all’.

Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2009/11/09/th...

THE TIME MACHINE AND THE BIRTH OF CINEMA

In October 1895, the twenty-nine year old H.G.Wells was in the first flush of his fame and success. The Time Machine, serialised the previous year, had appeared in book form over the summer, and was heading for the Christmas bestseller lists on the back of reviews that were already proclaiming its author a ‘man of genius’. Publishers and magazines were scrabbling over the rights to his future work, and outlines and sketches for The Island of Dr.Moreau and War of the Worlds were being briskly circulated on both sides of the Atlantic. Robert W PaulBut the most curious approach that Wells received that month was from a designer of electrical and optical instruments named Robert W. Paul, inviting him to his offices at 44 Hatton Gardens to discuss a patent that he was developing to bring the Time Machine to life before the eyes of the paying public.

© Mike Jay

What Paul had in mind was not strictly a movie, as the projected motion picture was yet to be invented: the Lumière Brothers’ historic Cinématographe exhibition at the Café de Paris would not take place until December 28 of that year. Yet in other respects it was far more than a movie, a multimedia extravaganza involving magic lanterns, viewing carriages, wind machines, flicker-strips and futuristic stage sets that remains unrealised even today. Like the Lumières – and indeed many technicians across Europe and America – Paul had the projected moving image in his sights, but his route of approach towards it was unique, and Wells’ concept of the Time Machine uniquely suited as its subject matter. For Paul had realised that he was attempting to do precisely what Wells’ protagonist, the Time Traveller, had done: design a device for travel in the fourth dimension.

To read the full article go to http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/02/11/ad...