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Nigel

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15 minutes ago, A'Villan said:

A Catholic Mason?

Mah Ha Bone?

Is this voodoo like business you are sending my way?

Come one ol' Brummy, ol' pal, we're both Bulls fans here, I swears I'll be good from now on and I won'ts tells no ones.

Tell no one what ?  I'm an atheist so I don't believe in a Grand Architect and  don't I believe myself to be a deity who can alter reality through the power of thought and ritual either. 

I just find it interesting in the same way I find Sumerians and Hinduism interesting.  This isn't the thread for it mind you.

 

Edited by Brumerican
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Just now, Brumerican said:

Tell no one what ?  I'm an atheist so I don't believe in a Grand Architect and  don't I believe myself to be a deity who can alter reality through the power of thought and ritual either. 

I just find it interesting in the same way I find Sumeria and Hinduism interesting.  This isn't the thread for it mind you.

 

I was just being silly and somewhat nonsensical. Don't mind me. And you're right, no need to clog up the thread with it.

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  • 2 months later...

I worked in a Masonic Hall for a year during Uni and it was quite interesting. It was mostly retirees or slightly older single guys who attended as their main way of socialising. As with most groupings of people, some were fantastic and others absolutely awful.

Unfortunately I never saw anything sinister, although I obviously didn't get to stay in the Temples while they did their stuff...I will always remember the guy I found in the kitchen in his robes and when asked what he wanted said "I was just looking for olive oil we need for a ceremony". After that it was always hard not to imagine them all whipping off their robes and Greco-Roman wrestling once the doors close.

Now for what I found this thread to post!

New Scientist - Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time

Quote

Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.

Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it “a little surreal” when they first did it. He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result.

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.

EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.

A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.

At normal body temperature – about 37°C – our cells need a constant supply of oxygen to produce energy. When our heart stops beating, blood no longer carries oxygen to cells. Without oxygen, our brain can only survive for about 5 minutes before irreversible damage occurs. However, lowering the temperature of the body and brain slows or stops all the chemical reactions in our cells, which need less oxygen as a consequence.

Tisherman’s plan for the trial was that 10 people who receive EPR will be compared with 10 people who would have been eligible for the treatment but for the fact that the correct team wasn’t in the hospital at the time of admittance.

The trial was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA made it exempt from needing patient consent as the participants’ injuries are likely to be fatal and there is no alternative treatment. The team had discussions with the local community and placed ads in newspapers describing the trial, pointing people to a website where they can opt out.

Tisherman’s interest in trauma research was ignited by an early incident in his career in which a young man was stabbed in the heart after an altercation over bowling shoes. “He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly he was dead. We could have saved him if we’d had enough time,” he says. This led him to start investigating ways in which cooling might allow surgeons more time to do their job.

Animal studies showed that pigs with acute trauma could be cooled for 3 hours, stitched up and resuscitated. “We felt it was time to take it to our patients,” says Tisherman. “Now we are doing it and we are learning a lot as we move forward with the trial. Once we can prove it works here, we can expand the utility of this technique to help patients survive that otherwise would not.”

“I want to make clear that we’re not trying to send people off to Saturn,” he says. “We’re trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.”

In fact, how long you can extend the time in which someone is in suspended animation isn’t clear. When a person’s cells are warmed up, they can experience reperfusion injuries, in which a series of chemical reactions damage the cell – and the longer they are without oxygen, the more damage occurs.

It may be possible to give people a cocktail of drugs to help minimise these injuries and extend the time in which they are suspended, says Tisherman, “but we haven’t identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet”.

Tisherman described the team’s progress on Monday at a symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences. Ariane Lewis, director of the division of neuro-critical care at NYU Langone Health, said she thought it was important work, but that it was just first steps. “We have to see whether it works and then we can start to think about how and where we can use it.”

Slightly gutted at the line in bold as it's the main reason I clicked it! Still an absolutely incredible advance that hopefully leads to numerous breakthroughs in medical science.

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2 hours ago, Sam-AVFC said:

I worked in a Masonic Hall for a year during Uni and it was quite interesting. It was mostly retirees or slightly older single guys who attended as their main way of socialising. As with most groupings of people, some were fantastic and others absolutely awful.

Unfortunately I never saw anything sinister, although I obviously didn't get to stay in the Temples while they did their stuff...I will always remember the guy I found in the kitchen in his robes and when asked what he wanted said "I was just looking for olive oil we need for a ceremony". After that it was always hard not to imagine them all whipping off their robes and Greco-Roman wrestling once the doors close.

Now for what I found this thread to post!

New Scientist - Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time

Slightly gutted at the line in bold as it's the main reason I clicked it! Still an absolutely incredible advance that hopefully leads to numerous breakthroughs in medical science.

Shameful clickbait journalism strikes yet again.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 month later...

At low statistical significance... but a real hint at how matter came to be. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01000-9

"It was long thought that antiparticles would behave in the same way as particles in a mirror world made of antimatter, but since the 1960s we have known that quarks and antiquarks break this particle–antiparticle mirror symmetry1,2. Writing in Nature, the T2K Collaboration reports possible findings of violation of this symmetry by leptons3."

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  • 1 month later...
Quote

The Earth's magnetic field is weakening between Africa and South America, causing issues for satellites and space craft.

Scientists studying the phenomenon observed that an area known as the South Atlantic Anomaly has grown considerably in recent years, though the reason for it is not entirely clear.

Using data gathered by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm constellation of satellites, researchers noted that the area of the anomaly dropped in strength by more than 8 per cent between 1970 and 2020.

"The new, eastern minimum of the South Atlantic Anomaly has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing vigorously," said Jürgen Matzka, from the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

"We are very lucky to have the Swarm satellites in orbit to investigate the development of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth's core driving theses changes."

One possibility, according to the ESA, is that the weakening field is a sign that the Earth's magnetic field is about to reverse, whereby the North Pole and South Pole switch places.

The last time a "geomagnetic reversal" took place was 780,000 years ago, with some scientists claiming that the next one is long overdue. Typically, such events take place every 250,000 years.

The repercussions of such an event could be significant, as the Earth's magnetic field plays an important role in protecting the planet from solar winds and harmful cosmic radiation.

Telecommunication and satellite systems also rely on it to operate, suggesting that computers and mobile phones could experience difficulties.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/earth-magnetic-field-satellites-space-a9528571.html?fbclid=IwAR3WhZEfstMY9THNCpc1IY7_JEhmD48e1y-bgQb5fiypX62tCAh9jlQRR9E

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I think the pole flip threat story is about as old as the discovery of north and south magnetic poles.

Just like aggressive super alien shape shifters, giant meteor strike and series 32 of Britain’s Got Talent, it’s shit, there’s nothing you can do about it, so It’s not something to worry about.

 

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I'm not really sure why the idea of sudden global magnetic polarity change has caught on in the mass psyche,

Full explanation with citations. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4728

Quote

So what about these reversals of the polarity? It doesn't mean that the flow of molten iron all comes to a stop, and then reverses. Among all of these many convective currents, with varying densities of magma, varying temperatures, and all straining against the Coriolis forces, occasionally the system stumbles and goes into a chaotic tumble. It's a slow-motion train wreck of turbulence that takes thousands of years: currents colliding and twisting around each other, until they finally resume their orderly vertical flow. Half the time — like a random flip of a coin — the newly formed alignment of currents is in the opposite direction of what it was before. The electromagnet has been reversed.

 

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Neat simulations suggest/reveal that the dinosaurs were really unlucky.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-05/icl-das052520.php

"Our simulations provide compelling evidence that the asteroid struck at a steep angle, perhaps 60 degrees above the horizon, and approached its target from the north-east. We know that this was among the worst-case scenarios for the lethality on impact, because it put more hazardous debris into the upper atmosphere and scattered it everywhere - the very thing that led to a nuclear winter."

Full details here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15269-x

Edited by villakram
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3 minutes ago, villakram said:

Neat simulations suggest/reveal that the dinosaurs were really unlucky.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-05/icl-das052520.php

"Our simulations provide compelling evidence that the asteroid struck at a steep angle, perhaps 60 degrees above the horizon, and approached its target from the north-east. We know that this was among the worst-case scenarios for the lethality on impact, because it put more hazardous debris into the upper atmosphere and scattered it everywhere - the very thing that led to a nuclear winter."

* Volcanic winter.

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57 minutes ago, limpid said:

* Volcanic winter.

right... and they reside in England too, so it's not like they don't have anything unpronounceable from recent memory as reference.

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Guess it goes in here but NASA have released a 4K video of the moon

conspirisy theorists look away now as video contains images of the landing module and  moon rover 

 

 

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9 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

Launch aborted at T -17 minutes.

Bad weather.

Can’t believe I sat through two hours of those supremely annoying presenters only for it to get canned. 
Next time I’m just tuning in five minutes before launch. 

Edited by choffer
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20 hours ago, tonyh29 said:

conspirisy theorists look away now as video contains images of the landing module and  moon rover 

 

Does it show the Nazi base on the other side?

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4 minutes ago, choffer said:

Can’t believe I sat through two hours of those supremely annoying presenters only for it to get canned. 
Next time I’m just tuning in five minutes before launch. 

At least you were not there on site like The Donald and Mrs First Lady was.

Ready to bask in the glory only to have it postponed.

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7 minutes ago, choffer said:

Can’t believe I sat through two hours of those supremely annoying presenters only for it to get canned. 
Next time I’m just tuning in five minutes before launch. 

Yeah it took me a couple of minutes to realise I had to mute the babble and the shiny smiley super super positive filler chat.

Turned the sound back up on 21 minutes to listen to some moron telling us we’re waiting for weather info when he was clearly talking over the top of the weather info.

Makes you realise why they have so many mass shootings.

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