Blog – Page 3 – Éiriú Eolas

Jun 13 2019

Monsanto paid American Council on Science and Health front group to hide evidence

Monsanto's new owner, Bayer, has been slammed with judgments in the first three Roundup lawsuits to go to trial. The verdicts, which have sided with plaintiffs in all cases so far, have found not only that Roundup herbicide caused the plaintiffs' cancers but also that Monsanto engaged in malice, oppression or fraud in their attempts to cover up Roundup's toxicity.1 Some of the evidence brought to light during the trials has been particularly eye-opening, including internal emails showing that Monsanto paid an industry front group for the favor of publishing pro-glyphosate media, right around the time the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) determined it to be a probable carcinogen.2 ...

Jun 12 2019

Free will is real

Éiriú Eolas

Psychology

Philosopher Christian List argues against reductionism and determinism in accounts of the mind I can live without God, but I need free will. Without free will life makes no sense, it lacks meaning. So I'm always on the lookout for strong, clear arguments for free will. Christian List, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, provides such arguments in his succinct new book Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard 2019). I met List in 2015 when I decided to attend, after much deliberation, a workshop on consciousness at NYU. I recently freely chose to send him some questions, which he freely chose to answer. -John Horgan Horgan: Why philosophy? Was your choice pre-determined? List: I don't think it was. As a teenager, I wanted to become a computer scientist or mathematician. It was only during my last couple of...

Jun 12 2019

Women exposed to light during sleep at higher risk for weight gain

Éiriú Eolas

Health & Wellness

Sleeping with a cellphone, bright alarm clock on or a television next to your bed puts women at risk for weight gain, a new study found. Women who slept with a light or even the TV on were 17% more likely to have gained 11 pounds over the course of five years, according to the study, the results of which were published Monday in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine. Light coming in from outside the room was associated with more modest weight gain, researchers found. The study is the first to find an association between exposure to artificial light at night while sleeping and weight gain in women, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funded the study. ...

Jun 11 2019

Imagination can change perception of reality on a neural level

Éiriú Eolas

Psychology

Imagining something into reality is probably a desire as old as imagination itself, but there might just be a slight bit more to it than mere wishful thinking. A new study reveals how imagining a scenario that takes place in an emotionally neutral place can change our attitude to that place in reality. To puzzle out how we learn from imagined events, researchers from Harvard University and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive Brain Sciences conducted an experiment, first in the US and then they replicated it in Germany. Participants were asked to provide a list of people they really liked, people they disliked and a list of places they had neutral feelings towards. Then, while lying in an fMRI scanner, they were asked to imagine meeting someone from their liked-list at one of their neutral places. ...

Jun 11 2019

Super-soldier diet? Pentagon eyes controversial keto diet in bid to build more lethal warriors

Éiriú Eolas

Health & Wellness

Ditching carbs may be the key to military success in America's future wars. Top Pentagon officials say research has shown that human bodies in ketosis - the goal of the popular and controversial ketogenic diet - can stay underwater for longer periods, making the fat- and protein-heavy eating plan a potential benefit to military divers. It is one example of a rapidly growing trend as military researchers zero in on how nutrition and certain drugs can enhance how fighting men and women perform in battle. But U.S. defense officials say they lack the legal authorities to dictate to soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines what they can and cannot eat. Critics of the entire concept warn that the military is entering a danger-filled world if it begins ordering diets and drug protocols solely to build more lethal warriors. ...