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Comatose male patient in hospital.

Heart attack doctor asks, is death now reversible?

If new findings in resuscitation techniques hold up, says Sam Parnia in his new book, brain conditions now deemed irreversible may be reversible

Resuscitation specialist Sam Parnia, reflects in his new book, Lucid Dying (Hachette, August 6, 2024), on the recent discovery that brains can be resuscitated hours after death. From the sample pages offered at the book’s Amazon site, we learn that in 2019, a writer at prominent science journal Nature sent Parnia a copy of the embargoed results of a study of pig brains from a slaughterhouse, kept alive for hours after death. “I was left totally stunned and speechless” he recounts: For at least a decade, I had tried to draw attention to the fact that our concept of life and death should be redefined. Death should no longer be viewed as a specific black-and-white moment. Instead, it should be Read More ›

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overwhelming information data explode out of head of young human brain, too much media, too much information, maximalism, news, social media addiction - coping strategies for digital overload

Social Media Cutting Into Your Sanity? Try the Great Unplug

Video producer Adam Nieri looks at the pros and cons of a post-AI world and recommends structured timeouts to regain perspective
Video producer Adam Nieri looks at the pros and cons of a post-AI world and recommends structured timeouts to regain perspective. Read More ›
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The Threshold of Near-Death Experience, Between Two Worlds

Heart Attack Doctor: Science Shows That Death Is Not the End

Sam Parnia began by wondering how brain cells can give rise to thoughts. He came to see that the message “from science” was not what he had been led to expect
Parnia concludes that science suggests, at a minimum, that our consciousness and selfhood “are not annihilated when we cross over into death.” Read More ›
silhouette form of bull and bear on technical financial graph

How can someone who fails be faulted when everyone else is failing?

Market turbulence can cause endowment fund managers to travel with the herd — sacrifice returns in order to reduce annual volatility
The current, widely-favored 60/40 strategy has little or nothing to recommend it beyond the fact that it is what everyone else is doing. Read More ›
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Mad biracial woman frustrated by computer operational problems

What We Can Learn From the Crowdstrike Fiasco

A lot of things that we try to do to remove risk actually make the problem worse — but also less visible
Saving effort in the short term by running these risks is a decision that should be made with full knowledge of how near-term decisions affect long-term risks. Read More ›
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Anonymous crowd of people walking street wearing masks during covid 19 coronavirus pandemic

Let Him Who Would “Represent” Science Beware…

James B. Meigs looks at Anthony Fauci’s new book, On Call, asking what happened? What turned the highly esteemed doctor into a scheming authoritarian?
Fauci’s early career was brilliant; he gained the trust of angry opponents during the AIDS years. But the art of listening seemed to desert him later. Read More ›
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Mini pig and dog on the field with dandelions

When Dogs and Pet Pigs Both Heard Humans Cry, What Happened?

Have humans changed dogs’ behavior over thousands of years of domestication?
Sensitivity is a two-way street. Dogs study us but we also extensively study and catalogue our dogs’ facial and body expressions as well. Pigs not so much. Read More ›
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Feigning Opossum

Once Again: Near-Death Experiences as Possum Tales

In the recent Scientific American article, we learn once again that NDEs evolved as a human way of “playing dead”
Hypotheses based on evolution sometimes proceed without establishing basic evidence, for example, whether thanatosis is even common in humans. Read More ›
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alien planet landscape, beautiful forest the surface of an exoplanet

Sci-fi Film Explores Idea That Earth’s Life Was Seeded From Space

Prometheus 2012 offers an intriguing premise: ancient civilizations were told in mysterious ways of a habitable moon in a distant galaxy (Part 1 of 4)
The corporation funding the mission to investigate the moon in Prometheus (2012) may have a different agenda from what the crew supposes. Read More ›
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Censored book

View: Universities Should Not Speak Up Against Dissenting Profs!

Jay Bhattacharya and Wesley J. Smith respond to an article in a medical journal arguing that universities SHOULD censure dissenters on the faculty
How much good science would have seen the light in the last 600 years if “Institutional Voices” had been heard from even more often than they were? Read More ›
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Ultra macro ant portrait shot, detailed close-up image of ant's face and trunk.

Why Panpsychism (Everything Is Conscious) Is Gaining Ground

Many life forms do unexpectedly remarkable things. It is simpler to broaden the circle of consciousness than to keep on trying to prove that human consciousness is just an illusion
Panpsychism will face a setback, however, when it tries to show that human consciousness is merely on a continuum with animal consciousness. It isn’t. Read More ›
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Goldenrod plant

Evolutionary Biologist Defines Goldenrod Plant as “Intelligent”

The media release for the journal paper, sponsored by Cornell University, illustrates the growing comfort of science with panpsychist (everything is conscious) ideas
Andre Kessler is influenced by the idea that plant cells are like bees and the plant is like a colony, where the members think collectively. Read More ›
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Crashing Ocean Wave with view inside the wave

New Podcast Asks, Is the World Really Enchanted—or Disenchanted?

At Created Souls and The Banquet of Souls, I want to explore the fact that human consciousness is not about to be made obsolete by AI or explained away by neuroscience
The tide is turning. The idea that science will soon explain away human consciousness is ceasing to be a live discussion. Let’s hear the new discussions! Read More ›
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Bees in the meadow and apiary. Selective focus.

A Darwinian Biologist Winces at Bees That Have Feelings

The problem Jerry Coyne has with Lars Chittka’s evidence for emotions among bees points to a growing conflict between naturalism and panpsychism in science
For a naturalist, the problem with accepting consciousness as real is that it is also immaterial, even in an animal like a dog that has a minimal self. Read More ›
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The young man stands on the crowdy street

How My World Looked Inside Apple Vision Pro

I felt everything the script intended for me to feel. But I left with a lot of questions
What happens when people perceive reality differently? Will our painfully divided culture will be even more fractured? Read More ›
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3D rendering of a dark cell at night

New Pre-Crime Laws: Real-Life “Minority Report” Coming to Canada?

Americans should NOT assume that “It can’t happen here.” The First Amendment is a constitutional tool, not a magic talisman. It can be undermined
Canadian media that accept Trudeau’s handouts must please the regime more than inform the public. Indies are under heavy fire. Read More ›
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Two programers holding laptop with coding interface walking towards desk and sitting down talking about online cloud computing. Software developers team discussing algorithms on computer screen.

Will AI Replace Developers? A Tale for Our Times

There are calls, even about software, that you would definitely not want a digital assistant to take
Developers don’t just write software; they must understand the whole picture of how it will be used both now and down the road. Read More ›
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Woman news announcer in the studio

Attention: Mind Matters News Has Been Prebunked!

ChatGPT-4 produced attacks on Mind Matters News, aimed at people who had never heard of it (prebunking), based only on the About page and the Introduction
Journalists who advocate prebunking to discourage audiences from seeing alternative information are helping propagandists defeat the search for truth. Read More ›
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Female empowerment in science: Arabic woman scientist with a veil working with a microscope in a high-tech laboratory

Religious Scientists Balance Work and Faith — on a Knife Edge

A recent article in Nature both sums up — and typifies — the problems they face, weaving around the presumption of atheism
What benefits does the presumption of atheism provide? So many disciplines reel under peer review scandals while trust in science has diminished over the years. Read More ›
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large language models Concept illustration Ai

LLMs Can’t Be Trusted for Financial Advice

The LLM responses demonstrated that they do not have the common sense needed to recognize when their answers are obviously wrong
It takes an experienced financial planner to distinguish between good and bad advice, so clients may as well skip the LLMs and go to the knowledgeable human. Read More ›