More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

“We initially dismissed it as mechanical failure,” says Texas Auto Center manager Martin Garcia. “We started having a rash of up to a hundred customers at one time complaining. Some customers complained of the horns going off in the middle of the night. The only option they had was to remove the battery.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/hacker-bricks-cars/#ixzz0mARNoE7J

Chamberland joined NASA as a bioengineer in the mid ‘80s, just as the manned space program was starting to thunder forward. But rather than looking up to the stars, he began looking down – deep down. As a developer of the agency’s Advanced Space Life Support Systems, which monitors the safety for all off-planet habitation pursuits, Chamberland soon became a lead proponent of research on an idea being floated by NASA at the time: using the sea as a testbed for space exploration. Before long, this homegrown explorer would become one of the country’s leading proponents of undersea habitation, and an advocate for what he calls the “space-ocean analog.”

An aquanaut and Mission Commander on seven NASA underwater missions, Chamberland has also pursued landmark research in bioengineering and become a prolific writer ofscience books and sci-fi novels. But it was his work for NASA that resulted in his harvesting of the first agricultural crop in a manned habitat on the sea floor, and led to his designing and construction of the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, a two man undersea habitat off Key Largo. The little permanent submarine has been visited by a range of curious futurist explorers, including James Cameron and TV producer Rod Roddenberry, Jr.

The rest is here.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted_p1.html

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/03/journal-education-and-media-in-a-resilient-society.html

Oh yes, she’s on the hate list, but I won’t look for or post the video they’re talking about.

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.

“This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.

The rest is here.

Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.

Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural.

The rest is here.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The rest is here.

The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived atCeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training.

The rest is here.

Nobody connected those accidents to the difficulties he had in school as he acted out, stopped talking for three months and cried daily for two years. As an adult, he seemed to be a thriving, successful stockbroker, until traumaticbrain injury from a 1999 soccer accident led to seizures and sidelined his ability to talk to people and stay on task, it seemed, for good.

Two realizations have turned his life around at 42. First, he realized that braininjuries were behind the troubles he had had all his life. And second, he read about brain plasticity — the concept that the brain can heal and learn at all ages.

“It was a relief,” says Hayner, who credits his 2008 training at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth for helping to restore abilities that he thought were long gone. “It helped me regain my self-esteem and self-confidence. It gave me hope.”

Neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to adapt and change through life, is gaining increased traction in medical circles.

The rest is here.

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/cyber-war-hype/#ixzz0mALU5EeZ

ANYWAY!…

WHEN talking about our feelings, we often use expressions that link emotions with movements or positions in space. If, for example, one receives good news, they might say that their “spirit soared”, or that they are feeling “on top of the world”. Conversely, negative emotions are associated with downward movements and positions – somebody who is sad is often said to be “down in the dumps”, or feeling “low”.

According to a new study published in this month’s issue of the journal Cognition, expressions such as these are not merely metaphorical. The research provides evidence of a causal link between motion and emotion, by showing that bodily movements influence the recollection of emotional memories, as well as the speed with which they are recalled.

The rest is here.

I remember sitting with my mom watching two shows as a child – one being MASH, the other Designing Women. I always loved the later, however, for one character – the badass, spunky, no-nonsense Julia Sugarbaker.

RIP, Dixie Carter. You were a part of my childhood and one that I will miss.

Julia is PISSED!

You Tell ‘Em, Julia!

And one of my favorites:

Tricomi et al took 20 pairs of men. At the start of the study, both men got a $30 payment, but one member of each pair was then randomly chosen to get a $50 bonus. Thus, one guy was “rich”, while the other was “poor”. Both men then had fMRI scans, during which they were offered various sums of money and saw their partner being offered money too. They rated how “appealing” these money transfers were on a 10 point scale.

What happened? Unsurprisingly both “rich” and “poor” said that they were pleased at the prospect of getting more cash for themselves, the poor somewhat more so, but people also had opinions about payments to the other guy:

http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/03/is-your-brain-communist.html

A pilot from Mathewson’s squadron at Creech Air Force base guided his drone over the Ranger position. The Predator had never been used in a hot battle to support ground troops, and the Air Force controller embedded with the Rangers was hesitant to let it fire.

To prove its accuracy, the Predator crew launched one of its two Hellfire missiles at an empty hilltop. The hit was accurate, but it left the drone with only one missile. The pilot steadied his plane and squeezed the “pickle” button on his stick, setting loose his last missile and obliterating the Taliban machine-gun nest. “We would have all died without the Predator,” the controller recalled months later to Air Force officials.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022703754_4.html?sid=ST2010022801204

I’ve long believed this – being a non-dualist I don’t believe that spiritual experiences are fully external. Yes, I do think there is a spiritual reality – but that doesn’t presuppose that our brains and genes have something to do with it as well.

Cosimo Urgesi of the University of Udine and his colleagues combined pre- and post-surgical personality assessments with advanced lesion mapping techniques to correlate changes in self-transcendence with brain structures in a total of 88 patients with brain tumours of different types and severity. 24 of the patients were being treated for high-grade glioma, which arises from astrocytes and is malignant; 24 had low-grade, or benign glioma; 20 were having a second operation to treat highly aggressive recurrent glioma; and 20 had meningioma, which arises in the membranes enveloping the brain but does not affect the brain itself.

Within each of these four groups, approximately half of the patients had tumours located toward the front of the brain in the frontal and temporal lobes, while in the rest the tumours were further back, around the junction between the occipital, temporal and parietal lobes. During formal interviews conducted prior to the surgery, they asked each of the patients about aspects of their religion-related behaviour and experiences. Some of the questions were designed to measure three different aspects of self-transcendency: creative self-forgetfulness, or the ability to “lose one’s self” in the moment; transpersonal identification, or the extent to which one feels connected to other people and to the natural world; and spiritual acceptance, or belief in a supernatural power.

The rest is here.