Author: Feds to admit UFOs soon

Mannix Porterfield, Register-Herald Reporter

 

Expect the government to remove the lid soon on a secret it has held religiously more than half a century: Unidentified Flying Objects are real and come from outer space, says a West Virginia author on the verge of releasing his second book on the subject.

 

Kyle Lovern figures United States authorities have covered up the existence of UFOs since the celebrated 1947 incident in Roswell, N.M., out of fear they couldn’t control global unrest and fear.

 

“They thought the public would panic,” says Lovern, whose latest book is a sequel to his first effort, “Appalachian Case Study: UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters.”

 

“We went through World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War. They knew there was nothing we could do if these people were coming here from another planet. People would have panicked 40, 50 years ago. Look at the impact the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast by Orson Welles had on the public.”

 

Given the plethora of attention given UFOs since the late 1940s, however, in movies, books, and documentaries, public attitudes have changed, and fear now seems to have been replaced by curiosity, and a strong desire to know the truth, Lovern said Monday in an interview.

 

“I do think things have changed now,” the former West Virginia newsman said.

 

“I think we’re very close to disclosure. I do believe there has been a cover-up. My good friend, Stanton Friedman (the world’s premier authority and researcher) has called it a ‘cosmic Watergate,’ which I thought was a good quote.”

 

Lovern points to the credibility of astronauts Edgar Mitchell, who walked longer on the moon than anyone else in the Apollo 14 mission, and Gordon Cooper, who have insisted they saw evidence of UFOs in space exploration.

 

“These are well-educated, military guys, and they have come forth now,” the author said.

 

“They just don’t want to take it with them. People want to know the truth. There have been just too many educated, honest and respected people who have seen a UFO or know someone close to them who have witnessed a sighting. And there have been at least two presidents who saw them — Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.”

 

The late Sen. Barry Goldwater, a retired Air Force brigadier general and pilot, once was quoted as saying, “I certainly believe in aliens in space and that they are indeed visiting our planet. They may not look like us, but I have very strong feelings that they have advanced beyond our mental capabilities.”

 

One source who has spent years researching the subject — Frank Feschino — has suggested West Virginia has been the favorite target of UFO visits.

 

“My theory is because we’re a remote area, very mountainous,” Lovern said.

 

“They would be less likely to be detected than in a heavy populated area. There also have been a lot of sightings in the Southwest, desert areas, places that are not as populated. So, if you didn’t want to be seen, that would be the place to go.”

 

Lovern says it only makes sense that aliens would come to earth and snoop around as explorers.

 

“We’re explorers,” he said.

 

“We’ve been to the moon and want to go to Mars. We’ve got a space station lab. What’s the difference if another race of some kind from another planet would want to come here and explore, too? That’s why they venture to earth, to check us out and study our natural resources and do scientific study.”

 

Are they also snatching up humans for some medical studies?

 

Lovern covers this aspect of the UFO phenomenon in his sequel, which bears nearly the same title, except the phrase “alien encounters” is replaced with “alien abductions.”

 

A few stories on the subject are included in his second book, among them the account of three women who claim aliens abducted them while returning from a baby shower in 1976 in Stanford, Ky.

 

Their car went out of control and afterward the three women couldn’t account for a lapse in time, the author said.

 

“They definitely feel like they were abducted, and so did the investigators from MUFON (Mutual UFO Network),” the author said.

 

Lovern’s latest work is scheduled for an Oct. 11 release by the publisher, Woodland Press in West Virginia, and coincides with the West Virginia Book Festival that weekend at the Charleston Civic Center.

 

“A few people this time didn’t mind giving me their names and allowing me to use their pictures,” Lovern said of the subjects covered in the 19-chapter effort.

 

“It also gives some credibility when folks allow you to use their names.”

 

— E-mail:

 

mannix@register-herald.com

Malmstrom AFB UFO Incident

Source : Gregan Wortmann , http://www.examiner.com/x-10832-Billings-Sightseeing-Examiner~y2009m6d30-Malstrom-AFB-UFO-Incident

 

 

Thursday morning March 16, 1967 Captain Eric Carlson and First Lieutenant Walt Figel were below ground in the Launch Control Center (LCC) or capsule of the missile silo called Echo Flight located between Winfred and Hilger, Montana about fifteen miles north of Lewistown.

 

Missile maintenance crews and security personnel were camped out at two of the Launch Facilities (LFs), having worked there during the previous day and were staying overnight to be there to do more work in the morning.  During the early morning hours, more than one report came in from the security patrols and maintenance crews about seeing UFOs.  One UFO was reported directly above one of the Echo Flight LF or silos.

 

Around 8:30 a.m., Figel, the Deputy Crew Commander (DMCCC), was briefing Carlson, the Crew Commander (MCCC), on the flight status when the alarm horn sounded.  One of the Minuteman missiles they supervised had become inoperable.  It was one of the two sites where maintenance crews had camped out on site.  Thinking that the missile had gone “off alert” because of work done by the maintenance crew, Figel immediately called the missile site.

 

Figel spoke with one of the on-site security guards who reported that they had not yet performed any maintenance that morning.  The guard also told Figel about a UFO seen hovering over the site.  Figel thought the guard must have been drinking.  Suddenly, other missiles started to go “off alert” in rapid succession!  Within seconds, the entire flight of ten ICBMs was down!  All missiles reported a “No-Go” condition.  One by one, across the board, each missile had became inoperable. When the checklist procedure had been completed for each missile site, it was discovered that each of the missiles was down due to a Guidance and Control (G&C) System fault.  Power was still on and available to the sites; the missiles simply were not operational because, for some unexplainable reason, each of their guidance and control systems had malfunctioned.

 

Captain Don Crawford’s crew relieved the Echo Flight crew later that morning.  Crawford recalled that both Carlson and Figel were still visibly shaken by what had occurred. Crawford also recalled that the maintenance crews worked on the missiles the entire day and late into the night during his shift to bring them all back on alert.  Not only had missiles been knocked out of service but had remained out of service for an entire day!

 

The Oscar Flight LCC was located a mile or two south of the town of Roy, about 20 miles southeast of the Echo Flight LCC.  Robert Salas was the DMCCC in Oscar Flight during the morning hours of 16 March 1967.

 

Outside, above the underground LCC capsule, it was a typically clear, cold Montana night sky and there were a few inches of snow on the ground.  There were no city lights to distract from seeing anything like stars in the sky.  Airmen on duty topside probably spent some of their time outside looking up at the stars.  It was one of those airmen who first saw what at first appeared to be a star begin to zig-zag across the sky.  Then he saw another light do the same thing, and this time it was larger and closer.  He asked his Flight Security Controller, an NCO, to come and take a look.  They both watched the lights streak directly above them, stop, change directions at high speed and return overhead.  The NCO ran into the building and phoned Salas at his station underground.  The NCO reported that they had been seeing lights making strange maneuvers over the facility, and that they weren’t aircraft.  Salas replied: “Great. You just keep watching them and let me know if they get any closer.”

 

A few minutes later, the security NCO called again.  This time he was clearly frightened and was shouting his words.  Here is the conversation that took place:

 

“Sir, there’s one hovering outside the front gate!”

 

“One what?”

 

“A UFO!  It’s just sitting there.  We’re all just looking at it.  What do you want us to do?”

 

“What?  What does it look like?”

 

“I can’t really describe it. It’s glowing red.  What are we supposed to do?”

 

“Make sure the site is secure and I’ll phone the Command Post.”

 

“Sir, I have to go now, one of the guys just got injured.”

 

Salas woke his commander and began to brief him about the phone calls and what was going on topside.  In the middle of this conversation, they both heard the first alarm sound and both immediately looked over at the panel lights at the Commander’s station.  A ‘No-Go’ light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of the missile sites.  Another alarm went off at another site, then another and another.  Within seconds, six to eight missiles went to a ‘No-Go’ (inoperable) condition.

 

After reporting this incident to the Command Post, Salas phoned the security guard who said that the man who had approached the UFO had not been injured seriously but had been evacuated by helicopter to the base.  The security guard said that the UFO had a red glow and appeared to be saucer shaped and that it had been immediately outside the front gate and had hovered silently.

 

Salas sent a security patrol to check our the LFs after the shutdown, and they reported sighting another UFO during that patrol.  They also lost radio contact immediately after reporting the UFO.

 

After the silo crews were relieved by the replacement crews later that morning the missiles had still not been brought on line by on-site maintenance teams http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1017.htm (readers interested in this story should definitely watch the video at this link).

 

An investigation of the incident was conducted at the Boeing Company’s Seattle plant.  Boeing engineers confirm that no cause for the missile shutdowns was ever found.  Robert Kaminski was the Boeing Company engineering team leader for this investigation.  Kaminski stated: “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert and there was no technical explanation that could explain the event.”  Another Boeing Company engineer, Robert Rigert, reproduced the effects by introducing a 10 volt pulse on a data line that repeated the shutdown effects 80% of the time, but only when directly injected at the logic coupler.  No explanation could be found for a source of such a pulse occurring in the field and getting inside the shielded missile system equipment.

 

According to articles from the February 8, 1967 Great Falls Tribune newspaper Louis DeLeon saw two strange objects in the sky which did not look like airplanes and they glowed an orange and red color while driving east of Chester, Montana and later, ten miles east of Chester, Jake Walkman was in his back yard when he sighted a “flying saucer.”  The next evening, George Kawanishi, a foreman for the Great Northern Railroad, saw a bright ball of light in the sky directly above the Chester train depot. These sightings all preceded the missile shutdown incidents later in March.                 http://www.coasttocoastam.com/photo/ufos-aerial-phenomena/48

 

Also in March a two person security team, assigned to Echo Flight, was performing a routine check of the missile launch facilities a few miles north of Lewistown, Montana.  As they approached one of the launch facilities, an amazing sight caused the driver to slam on his brakes.  They watched stunned as, about 300 feet ahead, a very large glowing object hovered silently directly over the launch facility.  One of them picked up his VHF hand microphone and called Captain Don Crawford who was the DMCCC on duty that evening.

 

“Sir, you wouldn’t believe what I’m looking at,” he said.

 

He described what they were seeing.  Crawford didn’t believe him at first but the young airman insisted he was telling the truth, his voice revealing his emotional state.  Eventually Crawford took him seriously enough to call the Command Post to report it.  The officer on duty at the Command Post refused to accept the report and simply stated, “We no longer record those kinds of reports,” indicating he didn’t want to hear about the UFO.  Crawford unsure of what to tell his shaken security guard, decided to give the guard his permission to fire his weapon at the object if it seemed hostile.

 

“Thanks, sir, but I really don’t think it would do any good,”

 

 A few seconds later the object silently flew away.  http://www.nuforc.org/  http://www.nuforc.org/webreports.html http://www.ufocasebook.com/

 

Malmstrom AFB is near Great Falls, Montana.  From Billings take 27th Street North to Montana Route 3 and drive to Harlowton then take U.S. Highway 191 to Moore and then take U.S. Highway 87 to Great Falls.  It is about 219 miles. http://www.malmstrom.af.mil/

 

For readers interested in this subject here are some places to check out.  4th Annual International UFO Symposium August 6th to the 7th in Denver, Colorado.  http://www.mufon.com/symposia.htm  Great Lakes Paranormal Convention July 24th in Eveleth, Minnesota http://www.darkplainsradio.com/event.html  Roswell UFO Festival July 2nd to the 5th in Roswell, New Mexico http://www.ufofestivalroswell.com  Ancient of Days 2009 Roswell UFO Conference July 4th to the 5th and the Shag Harbour UFO Festival August 14th to the 15th in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia http://www.shagharbour.com

 

Gregan Wortmann

 

kruzndog@imt.net

Alabama : Church Says Image of Jesus appeared

Source : Catherine DuBose,  http://www.fox10tv.com/dpp/news/local_news/baldwin_county/AlachurchsaidimageofJesusappeared

 

A church in Silverhill Alabama said the image of Jesus has appeared in their church. The church is calling it a sign form above.

 

In November The Little Welcome Baptist Church made renovations on the church but then decided to build another one.

 

Members said after adding varnish to doors inside the church, an image appeared in the wood.

 

Church Member, Essie Edwards said the image is the lord’s way of welcoming the congregation home. “The lord has been in this place for 40 years, the image just appeared for us to know that we are back home again” Edwards said.

The Human Brain Is On The Edge Of Chaos

Source :ScienceDaily

 

 — Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

 

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

 

“Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions,” says co-author Manfred Kitzbichler.

 

The researchers used state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to measure dynamic changes in the synchronization of activity between different regions of the functional network in the human brain. Their results suggest that the brain operates in a self-organized critical state. To support this conclusion, they also investigated the synchronization of activity in computational models, and demonstrated that the dynamic profile they had found in the brain was exactly reflected in the models. Collectively, these results amount to strong evidence in favour of the idea that human brain dynamics exist at a critical point on the edge of chaos.

 

According to Kitzbichler, this new evidence is only a starting point. “A natural next question we plan to address in future research will be: How do measures of critical dynamics relate to cognitive performance or neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatments?”

 

 

——————————————————————————–

 

Journal reference:

 

1.Kitzbichler et al. Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization. PLoS Computational Biology, March 20, 2009; 5 (3): e1000314 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000314

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Psychics given £4,500 government grant to help relatives contact the dead

By Luke Salkeld , http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1165017/Psychics-given-4-500-government-grant-help-relatives-contact-dead.html

 

 

Two clairvoyants have been awarded a £4,500 government grant to set up a school for psychics.

Paul and Deborah Rees had their palms crossed with taxpayers’ silver after applying for funding through a Department for Work and Pensions job creation scheme.

The couple’s Accolade Academy of Psychic and Mediumistic Studies aims to train people to contact ‘the other side’.

 

 Psychics Deborah and Paul Rees have been awarded a £4,500 government grant to teach people how to contact the dead

Yesterday critics branded the award a ‘disgrace’ and said public money should not be spent on ‘hocus pocus’ business ideas at a time when thousands are losing their jobs.

But Mr Rees, 40, and his wife, 37, defended the public funding.

 Secretary of State for Work and Pensions James Purnell: His department approved the grant

Mr Rees said: ‘People who feel their tax money has been wasted should remember that if they’d lost a child they would go to a medium to get peace that their loved one has passed safely and is in a better place.

‘Our job is to provide substantial evidence to bring ease to people’s grieving.’

The couple, who have been working as mediums for five years, admitted they were surprised to get the Want2Work grant aimed at setting up new businesses.

Mr Rees, a father-of-two who worked as an upholsterer for 17 years, said: ‘They hadn’t invested in psychics before so we really had to prove ourselves.’

The couple run the £65 workshops from their home in Bridgend, South Wales, and say the cash will be spent on printing, advertising and website costs.

But Conservative Welsh Assembly member Jonathan Morgan said: ‘It is an utter disgrace.

The people administering the scheme should be disciplined for allowing this project to get public funding  -  and the money should be recouped.’

Mark Wallace, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘The last thing our money should be spent on is this kind of hocus pocus.

‘At a time when people who are alive are losing their jobs, it’s absurd that money is being spent trying to contact the other side.’

Welsh Assembly chiefs have now launched an internal investigation into the funding of the psychic school.

A DWP spokesman said of the £21million Want2Work scheme, aimed at getting 200,000 people back into work: ‘We give real help to anyone who loses their job to get back into work as quickly as possible.’

Meditation increases brain gray matter

Source : http://www.physorg.com/news161355537.html

Push-ups, crunches, gyms, personal trainers — people have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain? Meditate.

 

 

 

 

That’s the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate. In a study published in the journal NeuroImage and currently available online (by subscription), the researchers report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group.

 

Specifically, meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions.

 

“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior,” said Eileen Luders, lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. “The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities.”

 

Research has confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, many people who meditate regularly have reduced levels of stress and bolstered immune systems. But less is known about the link between meditation and brain structure.

 

In the study, Luders and her colleagues examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years.

 

More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day.

 

The researchers used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure. One approach automatically divides the brain into several regions of interest, allowing researchers to compare the size of certain brain structures. The other segments the brain into different tissue types, allowing researchers to compare the amount of gray matter within specific regions of the brain.

 

 

The researchers found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, including larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators.

 

Because these areas of the brain are closely linked to emotion, Luders said, “these might be the neuronal underpinnings that give meditators’ the outstanding ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way.”

 

What’s not known, she said, and will require further study, are what the specific correlates are on a microscopic level — that is, whether it’s an increased number of neurons, the larger size of the neurons or a particular “wiring” pattern meditators may develop that other people don’t.

 

Because this was not a longitudinal study — which would have tracked meditators from the time they began meditating onward — it’s possible that the meditators already had more regional gray matter and volume in specific areas; that may have attracted them to meditation in the first place, Luders said.

 

However, she also noted that numerous previous studies have pointed to the brain’s remarkable plasticity and how environmental enrichment has been shown to change brain structure.

 

Source: University of California – Los Angeles

Doctors confirm woman’s imaginary third arm

Source :  www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Doctors_confirm_woman_s_imaginary_third_arm.html?siteSect=105&sid=10522330&rss=true&ty=st&ref=ti_spa

 

The brain of the 64-year-old patient reacts as if she had a third arm

 

The arm appeared to the woman a few days after suffering a stroke, doctors said.

 

But this case of what is known as a supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a genuine head-scratcher.

 

The upshot is that the woman can use the apparitional extremity to relieve very real itches on the cheek. It cannot penetrate solid objects.

 

She does not always perceive the arm but “retrieves” it when needed, doctors told the Swiss news agency.

 

It is nevertheless the first case known to doctors of a person being able to feel, see and deliberately move a limb that doesn’t exist. The findings are published in the Annals of Neurology.

 

Pinpointing

Khateb and his colleagues examined the patient’s brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool that allows doctors to see whether the brain is truly stimulated, and to pinpoint where. In this case, the investigations revealed that the woman actually experienced what she described.

 

Researchers instructed the woman to move her right hand. As expected, the motor cortex and visual processing areas in the left side of her brain became mobilised.

 

The same effects were observed to a lesser extent when the woman simply imagined moving her right hand. Imaginary movements of the woman’s paralysed left hand prompted the same activity in the brain, but on the right side.

 

But when doctors asked her to move her phantom arm, her brain reacted as though the arm really existed and could be moved. In addition, the patient’s visual cortex was also activated, indicating the she actually saw the imaginary limb.

 

And when she was instructed to scratch her cheek, regions of the brain relating to touch were activated.

 

Mystery

Khateb said the exact cause of the imaginary arm remains a mystery. Supernumerary limbs are rare. There are only nine known cases of a patient both feeling and seeing an arm.

 

“Existing evidence from stroke-elicited SPLs convincingly implicates the mismatch between the subject’s well-established sensorimotor representations and a suddenly aberrant pattern of communication between the brain and the paralysed limb,” the authors wrote.

 

They said it could represent a missing link between classical phantom limbs and phenomena such as out-of-body experiences.

 

Phantom limbs are more commonly associated with people who have had an amputation – between 50 and 80 per cent of people who have had body parts removed suffer from it. In most cases it is painful, according to a 1984 article published in a scientific journal called the Clinical Journal of Pain.

 

“Ultimately however these conditions might offer a unique way to understand how the brain constructs a normal experience of bodily awareness and the self,” they concluded.

Yorkshire man wakes up Irish after brain surgery

By Joe Fay , http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/28/irish_yorkshire/

 

A Yorkshire man woke up from brain surgery to find he’d turned from a flat vowelled, thrifty dalesman into a blarney kissing, ‘Danny Boy’ singing, happy-go-lucky Dubliner.

 

The Daily Mail reports that 30 year old Chris Gregory spent three days on life support, after a blood vessel in his brain ruptured. While the staff were relieved to see him come round, they were non-plussed when he opened his mouth and began speaking in a broad Irish accent.

 

He then spent 30 minutes lilting away and bursting into a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’.

 

His wife-to-be walked into the ward, and heard a commotion including “someone singing ‘Danny Boy’ really loud. It sounded like a drunken Irishman, and all the racket seemed to coming from the direction of Chris’s bed.”

 

Mrs Gregory then realised the Ronan Keating-a-like was her future husband who had apparently been reset from tyke to jackeen. On spotting his wife, he apparently declared “It’s da broid.”

 

She added, “It’s not as if Chris has any Irish relatives. He’s no connection with the country and he’s never been there – that’s what makes it all so strange.”

 

There’s no indication whether Gregory was a Boyzone or Westlife fan or if he’d ever seen an episode of Father Ted or Ballykissangel.

 

The frightening possession apparently wore off after half an hour, leaving Gregory with no memory of the incident.

 

It seems that Gregory is just the latest victim of “foreign accent syndrome”, where a smack to the head or other trauma leaves the sufferer speaking in a foreign accent, or even a foreign language.

 

Back in 2007, a Czech speedway racer discovered his inner British toff after another rider ran over his head. Matej Kus, 18, a non-English speaker woke up having lost his memory, but having gained a BBC accent.

 

In 2004 a Bristol woman woke up speaking French and thinking she was living in Paris. She was subsequently diagnosed with Susac’s syndrome. But as she explained to the Daily Mail last year, “It might sound funny to others, but suddenly thinking you are French is terrifying.”

Physicists Prove That Vampires Could Not Exist

By Mark Strauss, http://io9.com/5241252/physicists-prove-that-vampires-could-not-exist

 

If you’ve ever read Salem’s Lot (or seen the lame Starsky and Hutch-era miniseries adaptation starring David Soul), then you know that after a vampire decides to settle in your town, the undead begin to multiply at an alarming rate (he bites two friends, who bite two friends, and so on, and so on…).

 

Putting aside for a moment the issue of how that would impact neighborhood property values, this phenomenon raises an even more pressing question: If vampires are indeed living (unliving?) among us, then shouldn’t we have seen an undead population explosion by now?

 

Fortunately, our best minds are on the case. Physicists Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi’s paper “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality” offers a full explanation.

 

Efthimiou and Gandhi conduct a thought experiment: Assume that the first vampire appeared on January 1, 1600. At that time, according to data available at the U.S. Census website, the global population was 536,870,911. Efthimiou and Gandhi calculate that, once the Nosferatu feeding frenzy began, the entire human race would have been wiped out by June 1602 (thus forever changing the course of history by preventing the invention of the slide rule eighteen years later).

 

The physicists note:

 

 

Another philosophical principal related to our argument is the truism given the elaborate title, the anthropic principle. This states that if something is necessary for human existence, then it must be true since we do exist. In the present case, the nonexistence of vampires is necessary for human existence. Apparently, whomever devised the vampire legend had failed his college algebra and philosophy courses.

 

Oooh, snap! But, this gauntlet had been barely thrown down before it invited a rebuttal from mathematician Dino Sejdinovic. In his article, “Mathematics of the Human Vampire Conflict” (Math Horizons, November 2008) Sejdinovic faults Efthimiou and Gandhi’s logic, since they have not “accounted for the birth-rate of non-vampires and death-rate of vampires (actually the death-death-rate since they are already dead, but when they die again they should stay dead but stop being living) due to close encounters with stakes, garlic and holy water.” Moreover, “vampires are presented exclusively as greedy consumers: a rational strategy of managing their human resources is not considered.”

 

Here, Sejdinovic cites the pioneering research conducted by Austrian mathematicians Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann, who published the landmark 1982 paper, “The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources,” later followed up by “Cycles of Fear: Periodic Bloodsucking Rates for Vampires” (Journal of Optimization Theory and Application, December 1992). Hartl and Mehlmann argue that vampires would never be stupid enough to deplete their entire food supply, and by applying the Hopf-Bifurcation Theorem (don’t ask), they demonstrate how vampires can adopt an optimal “cyclical bloodsucking strategy.”

 

However, there is a serious flaw in the Hartl and Mehlmann model: The assumption that human beings would be docile prey. Their research provoked an outraged response from economist Dennis Snower, who in his article “Macroeconomic Policy and the Optimal Destruction of Vampires” (The Journal of Political Economy, June 1982), declared:

 

 

One wonders what conceivable interest the authors could have had in helping vampires solve their intertemporal consumption problem. The implicit assumption of the Invisible Hand (or Fang)-whereby vampires, in pursuing their own interests, pursue those of human beings as well-is of questionable validity. The study by Hartl and Mehlmann is not concerned with the macroeconomic implications of blood-sucking behavior modes. Nor does it consider the policy instruments whereby human beings can protect themselves from vampires. Instead, humans are modeled as passive receptacles of blood whose cultivation and harvest are left to vampire discretion.

 

Hooyah! Snower argues that the mortal world can manage its resources in a manner that keeps the undead population in check, while simultaneously promoting long-term economic growth:

 

 

A transfer of labor services from the widget sector to the stake sector reduces human welfare at present but may raise welfare in the future (since an increase in stake production reduces the vampire population and thereby increases the future labor force whereby future widgets may be produced).

 

Still, I’m not entirely confident in Snower’s conclusions-not least because his complex mathematical proof indicates that the complete destruction of vampires would not be “socially optimal.” (And you wonder why economics is known as the dismal science?)

 

In fact, all of these models rest upon the assumption that vampires are at the top of the undead food chain. Who says that the blood-sucking population is not kept in check by something that preys on vampires? Time to consult the zoology journals.

 

Mark Strauss is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.

Let me sleep on it: Creative problem solving enhanced by REM sleep

The study by Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and first author Denise Cai, graduate student in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology, shows that REM directly enhances creative processing more than any other sleep or wake state. Their findings will be published in the June 8th online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

 

“We found that – for creative problems that you’ve already been working on – the passage of time is enough to find solutions,” said Mednick. “However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.”

 

Mednick added that it appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks, allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas. Importantly, the study showed that these improvements are not due to selective memory enhancements.

 

A critical issue in sleep and cognition is whether improvements in behavioral performance are the result of sleep-specific enhancement or simply reduction of interference – since experiences while awake have been shown to interfere with memory consolidation. The researchers controlled for such interference effects by comparing sleep periods to quiet rest periods without any verbal input.

 

While evidence for the role of sleep in creative problem-solving has been looked at by prior research, underlying mechanisms such as different stages of sleep had not been explored. Using a creativity task called a Remote Associates Test (RAT), study participants were shown multiple groups of three words (for example: cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to find a fourth word that can be associated to all three words (sweet, in this instance). Participants were tested in the morning, and again in the afternoon, after either a nap with REM sleep, one without REM or a quiet rest period. The researchers manipulated various conditions of prior exposure to elements of the creative problem, and controlled for memory.

 

“Participants grouped by REM sleep, non-REM sleep and quiet rest were indistinguishable on measures of memory,” said Cai. “Although the quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups received the same prior exposure to the task, they displayed no improvement on the RAT test. Strikingly, however, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances.”

 

The authors hypothesize that the formation of associative networks from previously unassociated information in the brain, leading to creative problem-solving, is facilitated by changes to neurotransmitter systems during REM sleep.

 

Source: University of California – San Diego