Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF): Zeroing in on MACD – Nelson Research

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The trend-following momentum indicator that illustrates the relationship between two moving averages is called the Moving Average Convergence Divergence. MACD can be found by subtracting the 26-day exponential moving average, or EMA, from the 12-day EMA. A signal line, which is the 9-day EMA of the MACD, can then be plotted over the MACD, triggering both buy and/or sell signals. Three methods are used to interpret the MACD. The first is the Crossovers method. When the MACD falls underneath the signal line, it is bearish, indicating that it is time to sell. When the MACD shoots above the signal line, a bullish indicator, the price of the commodity is most likely going to experience upward momentum. The second method is called Divergence, when the price of the security diverges from the MACD, it usually means the current trend has ended. Finally, there is the Dramatic Rise method. Whenever the MACD experiences a dramatic rise, the commodity is overbought will most likely soon return to normal levels.

The Open is the start of trading on a securities exchange. The open indicates the start of an official business day for an exchange, meaning that transactions may begin for the day. The different exchanges have different opening times. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF) opened at $0.96. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF)s high, highest trade price for the day, was $1. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF)s lowest trade price for the day was $0.96. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF)s last trade price was $1. The 9-day difference between a short-term and long-term moving average. A value above 0 indicates a bullish signal while a value below 0 interprets as a bearish signal. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF)s 9-Day MACD is0.0118 and its 14-Day MACD is 0.0205. Its 20-Day MACD is 0.0311, 50-Day MACD is0.0402 and, finally, its 100-Day MACD is 0.0044.

Volume is the number of shares traded specific period of time. Every buyer has a seller, and each transaction adds to the total count of the volume. When a buyer and a seller agree on a transaction at a certain price, it is considered to be one transaction. For example, if only ten transactions occur in a trading day, the volume for the day is ten. Volume is used to measure the relative worth of a market move.

When the markets make a strong price movement, the strength of that movement depends on the volume over that period. The higher the volume means the more significant the move. Volume levels give clues about where to find the best entry and exit points. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF) experienced a volume of 7200.

Change is the difference between the current price and the previous days settlement price. Change is the basis for describing and measuring data over a specific period of time. A negative change indicates declining performance while a positive change indicates an improved performance.

Interpretation change can be left to the analyst. The formula for finding change is by subtracting the previous time period from the most recent time period. If a company trades at $20 at the end of the first quarter and $40 at the end of the second quarter, the change $40 minus $20, or $20. Here we find the change to be positive, but by how much? The price went up from $20 to $40, so it doubled. In this example, the companys stock price grew 100% in the first quarter. Investors like change. Change allows investors to make a profit. In volatile markets, there are many opportunities for investors to make up for losses. Prices are based on the change in price of assets.

Value is based on changing prices. Calls make a bet that the price of the asset will increase, while puts bet that the price of the asset will go decrease. More volatility means that there is more likely a chance for investors to make a profit. Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF)s share price changed $-0.0213, a percentage of -2.09%%.

Volume is an important measure of strength for traders and technical analysts because volume is the number of contracts traded. The market needs to produce a buyer and a seller for any trade to occur. The market price is when buyers and sellers meet. When buyers and sellers become very active at a certain price, this means that there is high volume. Bar charts are used to quickly determine the level of volume and identify trends in volume. Barchart Opinions show investors what a variety of popular trading systems are suggesting. These Opinions take up to 2 years worth of historical data and runs the prices through thirteen technical indicators. After each calculation, a buy, sell or hold value for each study is assigned, depending on where the price is in reference to the interpretation of the study. Todays opinion, the overall signal based on where the price lies in reference to the common interpretation of all 13 studies, for Nanotech Security Corp (NTSFF) is 48% Buy.

Disclaimer: Nothing contained in this publication is intended to constitute legal, tax, securities, or investment advice, nor an opinion regarding the appropriateness of any investment, nor a solicitation of any type. The general information contained in this publication should not be acted upon without obtaining specific legal, tax, and investment advice from a licensed professional.

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Is Australia sleepwalking into WW3? – News.com.au – NEWS.com.au

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Two U.S bombers flew over the disputed South China Sea, the U.S. Air Force says, asserting the right to treat the region as international territory despite China's claims in the waters. Ryan Brooks reports.

Some analysts predict China will peacefully increase their power in the region over time. Picture: Dale de la Rey

A FORMER chief of the Australian Defence Force has claimed it is only a matter of time before Australia will be invaded, and we should be worried about rising tension in the Asia-Pacific region.

Admiral (ret.) Chris Barrie, was quoted in an analysis by the ABC, declaring Australia is plunging headlong into catastrophe and we are utterly unprepared ... The time-bomb is ticking and it will explode in our lifetimes.

He argued there are many trip-wires or points of tension in the region.

Chinas construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea is one of them, as is Americas unrelenting naval patrols leading China to officially protest a US defence bill on Monday, which could see American warships visiting Taiwan.

North Koreas missile program is another, with Japan calling on this United Nations this week to increase pressure on leader Kim Jong-un and grind testing to a halt.

The article described the region as a tinderbox, poised to descend into war.

This week, a Japanese diplomat called for action to stop North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns missile program, saying This is not a time for dialogue. Its a time for pressure. Picture: Wong Maye-ESource:AP

A miscalculation or misunderstanding ... could tip us over the edge, countries would be backed into corners and we have no way right now of talking our way out.

Its a grim prospect, but Ashley Townshend a research fellow at the University of Sydneys United States Studies Centre told news.com.au there is another possibility.

It all depends on the fragile balance of power that maintains the regions stability.

He agreed with the Admirals comments that miscalculations and misunderstandings between the major powers could be disastrous, but noted significant steps have been taken in the past few years to manage some of the risks.

There is a clear and sustained strategic competition taking place between the US and China in our backyard. But it is not preordained how this rivalry will work itself out, he said.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are responsible for managing the delicate balance of power in the Asia Pacific region. Picture: Saul LoebSource:AP

The US and China in particular have agreed to a number of military-to-military confidence-building measures that are designed to reduce the risk of an accidental clash between fighter aircraft or warships in the open seas and open skies, he said.

An increasing number of close encounters have recently prompted the two countries to adopt a much more conservative approach to one another.

These near misses really brought home for Beijing the inherent risks of military recklessness by their seamen and pilots. The good news is a number of rules-based agreements are being followed, and at some level this reduces the risk of an accidental clash, he said.

Thats not to say there wont be a deliberate provocation or a deliberate outbreak of hostilities. The entrenched disagreements in the East and South China Seas, on the Korean Peninsula, and between the US and China more broadly will all continue to cause friction.

However, Chinese island-building and frequent US patrols are two other potential sources of conflict. Picture: Centre for Strategic and International Studies.Source:Supplied

While war is one possibility, he argued its also entirely plausible the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region will shift peacefully over time.

Mr Townshend said if both countries continue to be risk averse, there could be a gradual decrease in American strategic influence and a relative increase in Chinese geopolitical weight.

However, that may not be whats best for Australia.

A US-China confrontation I agree would be devastating, and that is certainly a potential future scenario. But another, and possibly more likely scenario is one where there is a slow erosion of US strategic power a slow changing of the guard without major conflict.

Its obviously in Australias interests to see peace prevail in the Asia Pacific, but we also have clear interests in an open, democratic and liberal regional order, and its unclear at this point whether our current trajectory will allow this order to prevail.

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Do You Take Drugs at Festivals? This Initiative is Working on Keeping You Safe – PoliticalCritique.org

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Despite its popularity, recreational drug use remains stigmatised. Thus, it can be difficult to find reliable information, and if you do end up on a bad trip, specialised help and emergency rooms at festivals are not only few and far between, but users might also feel discouraged from seeking help for fear of being reported to the authorities.

The Czech Psychedelic Society is working to change that. Their PsyCare initiative is a cozy and safe tent, where users can get information about drugs, as well as be helped through a bad experience. Qualified volunteers accompany the visitors for hours, making sure they feel comfortable PsyCare is thus an important program of on-site harm reduction. You can support the crowdfunding campaign here.

Anna Azarova: In your experience, is drug consumption common at the festivals you work at? Svatava Bardynov: Yes, definitely. The international experience is that roughly 1% of festivalgoers visit PsyCare tents. But at a festival where we worked last month, we had more than 20 out of 100-300 guests around 20%.

Festivals are required to have on-site paramedics at all time, and many people dont see the point of harm reduction or drug sitting tents. How is your work with PsyCare any different? The biggest difference, Id say, is that we dont judge people for taking drugs: we know that its very common to take them, especially recreationally. When people have a bad trip, they can have difficult psychedelic experiences, and the paramedics cant really help them properly, because, as we see it, their needs are more psychological, and they often see it differently. But we can approach it from this point of view as well.

So if someone is, lets say, on acid and isnt feeling very well, and goes to the ambulance, they really dont know what to do. Sometimes they give them diazepam or some other benzodiazepines. Thats often not very helpful: you can calm people down a bit, but at the same time, the psychological aspect of the trip is prevented from ending on its own terms.

Some people have stayed with us for 6 hours, and our volunteers are with them throughout the whole time.

The way we see it, is that in this state people need a safe environment and education. The volunteers working with us are all experienced with psychedelics; and we all work as psychiatrists or social workers with drug users, so we know both the counselling and the preventative sides of the work. We can really help them to go through the psychedelic experience in comfort and safety to do what they need, be it crying or screaming, or simply just lying down, or even closing their eyes if they want to but often talking, or being close to others is very helpful in itself. We can stay with them and support them for hours some people have stayed with us for 6 hours, and our volunteers are with them throughout the whole time. With psychedelics, it is very important to finish the trip so there is no unresolved residual issues. If you prevent the psychedelic high from resolving on its own, you risk having psychiatric issues, such as flashbacks, in the future. In a way, PsyCare is focusing on prevention to avoid those issues. Paramedics are not prepared to do this work.

What are you snorting tonight? Meow meow? Yeah, sure.

What is it about the festival environment that can trigger a bad trip? Does it happen often? Its difficult to say how often it happens, and there are many factors that can influence the experience, whether it be a bad trip or not. Some people are more sensitive to psychedelics, and of course it also depends on the dose. And, thirdly, your experience: most people who have a bad trip are first-time users.

Festivals can be a risky environment for taking psychedelics, especially if youre inexperienced.

Furthermore, festival settings can be quite overwhelming: you have to remember not to lose your wallet or phone, your friends are coming and going, its chaotic, and the music is often very loud. And of course, there are also other drugs, which visitors combine with the psychedelics the combination with alcohol is especially risky. After the psychedelic experience, you should also be able to take some time off to rest which can be difficult with everything around you being chaotic. I wouldnt say that its all crazy at festivals, but it can be risky, especially if youre inexperienced.

Apart from helping people through their bad trips, is there anything you are currently unable to do, but would want to? The biggest limit in PsyCare work is that the whole process is improvised. When people come to our tent, theyre already under the influence, and it can be hard to make agreements with them, for example that they dont take any other drugs.

Apart from that, it would be great to be able to provide drug testing, but at the moment we cant: it is very expensive, and we dont receive any funding.

Machon: Prohibiting a Little Weed? What Damage It Did!

The Czech Republic has the reputation of being one of the most liberal states in Europe concerning drugs. Is the legislation on psychedelics different from more widespread drugs, such as marijuana or MDMA? Psychedelics are considered to be hard drugs in the Czech Republic, and are illegal. Even though we have a lot of mushrooms growing in every forest, if you pick them and run into a police officer, you can get into a lot of trouble. On the other hand, drug use is very wide-spread in the Czech Republic: we are among the biggest consumers of cannabis, MDMA, and methamphetamine in Europe.

Under this legislation, to what extent is harm reduction work possible? What is also impossible, but should be possible? Its mostly alright we are allowed to do our work. But now it is mainly a question of money: it would be great if we could raise enough to pay at least the coordinators, if not all the volunteers.

It would be great if we could provide drug testing, but (since we work here on voluntary basis) it is a lot of work to write and apply for governmental grants; and the chances of receiving money for this kind of project is incredibly low. Ideally, we would be able raise enough money independently to use for both the testing and the PsyCare projects.

Currently, there are no organisations doing drug tests in the country. There used to be some a couple of years ago, until theNational Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction forbade independent organisations from doing it. Through this organisation, the government could exert pressure on the NGOs so that they could receive no funding at all if they engaged in drug testing so they stopped.

But if we would be able to stay completely independent from the state, we could start offering it again.

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Should We Reclassify Marijuana as a Hallucinogen? – Big Think

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Marijuana has been hard to classify, historically. It doesnt fall neatly into any of the other categories, be they stimulants, depressants, opioids, or what-have-you. As a result, its be dropped into a slot all its own. At a recent psychedelics conference in London, New York psychologist Julie Holland suggested a recategorization for cannabis, as a hallucinogen.

Her reasoning, it can cause "dehabituation," or the ability to see an issue from a completely new perspective. According to Holland, "The thing that I'm interested in with cannabis is how it does this thing where everything old is new again." Such an experience is very therapeutic. Consider being able to suddenly see a traumatic memory differently, and to frame it in a healthier way.

Currently, not much is known about marijuanas effect on the brain. Some research shows that chronic use can increase the risk of psychosis. Psychosis however, is defined in a very specific way. Its considered either becoming overly paranoid or experiencing hallucinations.

Marijuanas inducement of dehabituation may be useful for clinical purposes. Getty Images.

Some research suggests that chronic marijuana use doesnt cause psychotic disorders, but may be a catalyst to an episode thats already developing. In other words, its those who suffer from mental illness who gravitate toward chronic marijuana use, perhaps to self-soothe. But theyre also barreling toward an episode.

So how would dehabituation work therapeutically? In this case, a therapist would have a patient use marijuana and then take them on a guided trance, in such a way as to install a healthier viewpoint in them. Could such a thing be done?

Some fear marijuana use alongside psychological treatment could trigger a mood disorder such as anxiety or depression. But a well-regarded study recently upended such claims. It may cause problems in the developing brain however, particularly in those between adolescence and age 25. There are conflicting views. If it were cleared, cannabis therapy would have to be performed only on those over a certain age.

Marijuanas psychoactive ingredient, delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), can cause neural noise. This is experiencing a stream of random, unrelated thoughts, or even a hallucination. The person feels the effect of neurons becoming overactive inside their brain. These electrical disturbances, in marijuanas case, calm down quickly. Over the course of some minutes, the patient enters an altered state, losing touch with reality and then returns. Most psychedelics meanwhile, last for hours.

Chronic marijuana use may be detrimental to those under age 25. Getty Images.

According to Dr. Holland, "In psychiatry it seems that cannabis is grossly underused and understudied." Most marijuana studies have looked at it as a way of alleviating the side effects of say cancer treatment or severe epileptic disorders, offering pain relief, dampening Parkinsons, and mitigating the symptoms of other serious illnesses. Few have looked at it for mental health treatment. Some of those studies do show that it may be helpful for treating PTSD, anxiety, or depression.

Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence shows that psychedelics can be useful in overcoming psychological disorders. Research has found that LSD can help addicts and alcoholics overcome addiction. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was shown to helpcancer patients overcome depression and anxiety.Meanwhile, MDMA has successfully treated PTSD.

As a result of these and other findings, medical research on psychedelics has increased in the last 15 years or so. Even so in the US, marijuana and most hallucinogens are considered schedule 1 narcotics under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Therefore, research on such drugs has been limited. Gaining approval from multiple federal agencies is required, to study either one, which can take years. Even so, interest in using both marijuana and hallucinogens for therapeutic purposes is growing.

Marijuana and psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, may interact differently within the brain, discouraging reclassification. Studies using the brain scans of patients on psychedelics show that their brains make new connections with disparate parts. Different regions may interact with the visual cortex for example, allowing those on acid to smell colors or visualize music. No such equivalent has been witnessed in marijuana users.

Chronic use of marijuana effects the orbitofrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala. The first has to do with decision-making and information processing, while the second and third are both part of the brains reward circuit. The amygdala is also the center for our emotions.

Psilocybin mushrooms. Getty Images.

Could neural noise and the experience of dehabituation, no matter how brief, lead to marijuanas reclassification? Probably not. It would be of little value, since theyre both are at the same classification level. Would there be any other advantages in seeing marijuana reclassified?

Not really. What a growing number of researchers, policy makers, and journalists are saying, is that there needs to be a change in the classification of both marijuana and hallucinogens in the US, on the federal level. These drugs arent deadly, have no long-lasting side effects, and arent physically addictive.

A rescheduling would allow for more research, so we can better understand how they affect human health, and if these drugs can be leveraged effectively for clinical purposes, with minimal side effects. Despite obstacles, Holland and colleagues are working on a study which will assess whether or not marijuana helps reduce PTSD symptoms. Veterans have been claiming it does since the Vietnam War era.

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Countdown To (Legalized) Ecstasy! Rick Doblin, MAPS, & the Psychedelic Renaissance [Podcast] – Reason (blog)

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Reason.com"The experiences I've had with psychedelic drugs, namely psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD, but particularly MDMA, have been personally transformative for me," says Mike Riggs, a reporter for Reason and the author of a blockbuster new story about how medical and psychiatric researchers are using psychedelics to help their patients. "Not frequent use, but kind of taking these drugs and then having really intense, in-depth, long conversations with intelligent people about how to get better, just how to get better as a person, as a human being, how to be a better neighbor, how to be a better friend."

It was that experience that led Riggs to study groups such as The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and its founder, Rick Doblin. "Doblin is a totally fascinating guy," Riggs tells me in the newest Reason Podcast. "He started MAPS in 1986. His journey of studying and advocating for the use of psychedelic drugs in therapeutic settings began in the late 1960s or early '70s. He was kind of a guy who, for a long time starting when he was in college all the way to the mid-'80s, he was a guy who's like, 'We can get this to where it needs to be in terms of legitimacy simply by talking about it and simply by doing it.' And so in the 1960s and 1970s, there's some underground psychedelic therapy work in which psychiatrists who either participated in the research in the 1950s with LSD continued secretly. And then going into the 1970s when MDMA was kind of rediscovered by this chemist named Sasha Shulgin. MDMA wasn't illegal. It hadn't been banned. So psychiatrists were able to use it as kind of a research chemical."

The tale Riggs tells isn't one of wanton hedonism or Dr. Strange-level trips. Rather, it's one in which doctors and patients are working together against the backdrop of a decades-long war on drugs to figure out new and effective ways to treat PTSD, depression, and other maladies with currently illegal substances. And more amazing, how Doblin and crew are on the verge of changing the way that the government regulates drugs.

Produced by Ian Keyser.

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This is a rush transcriptcheck all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Nick Gillespie: Hi. I'm Nick Gillespie and this is the Reason podcast. Please subscribe to us at iTunes, and rate and review us while you're there.

Today, we are talking with Mike Riggs. He's a reporter for Reason. He writes for the magazine, the print magazine. He writes for the website. And he occasionally appears in videos at Reason TV. Mike, thanks so much for talking to us.

Mike Riggs: Yeah. It's my pleasure.

Gillespie: All right. So, you've got a kind of blockbuster story coming out, or out at Reason.com, which is about how after 30, 40 years, 50 years, almost 60 years, psychedelic drugs are being taken seriously by all kinds of medical researchers, psychological researchers, et cetera. Explain, briefly, what the thesis of your story is.

Riggs: The thesis of the story, I would say, is basically that while most people who follow drug policy reform kind of broadly or generally think of it as using ballot initiatives for drugs like marijuana to basically kind of legalize through mobilizing the citizenry that there's an entire alternative path that's being pursued by psychedelic researchers. People who are studying the medical applications for LSD, psilocybine, MDMA, and some other drugs like that. Their path, they have never tried the referendum approach. They've never tried getting legislatures to pass laws to decriminalize or legalize these drugs. The trajectory they chose was instead to go through the FDA. Let's jumped through all the hoops. Let's dot all the I's, cross all the T's, and that's all the trials necessary to have the FDA approve these substances as pharmaceutical drugs. The benefit of this is that it basically removes democratic politics from the drug approval process-

Gillespie: And democratic, small d there, right? I mean, you don't have to-

Riggs: Yeah, yeah.

Gillespie: You don't have to get 50% plus one or two thirds or anything like that. What you are doing is you're going to the gate keeper institution that says, "Here are good drugs that pharmaceutical companies and doctors will create, and doctors will prescribe. You'll pay a co-pay, et cetera." As opposed to basically the model for medical marijuana and recreational marijuana, increasingly.

Riggs: Yeah. And so, the plus side is you don't have to worry about a legislature sabotaging this or having some kind of campaign finance war where it's who can spend the most on advertising. The downside is that it happens much more slowly. California passed it's first medical marijuana law in 1996. We're just shy of 20 years later and marijuana, is across the country, revolutionized. Meanwhile, the process that psychedelic researchers have gone through, started in about 1986. It's now 2017. None of these drugs are yet legal.

Gillespie: What is the status? I mean, the drugs in America are put, since the Nixon years, they're put on different schedules including a schedule one drug, which it's got a high potential for abuse and no known medical use, right?

Riggs: Yeah, that's true.

Gillespie: Where is LSD, psilocybin, Ecstasy or MDMA, and the like? Because what's interesting about these and LSD is obviously, or not obviously, but probably the most famous, but that drug was legal until 1966. Ecstasy was legal until 1986. Are any of these drugs, are they in something other than schedule one?

Riggs: No, they're all in schedule one. But the one exception is ketamine, which I think is on schedule two or schedule three. And that's only because it was used for a very long time as a surgical anesthetic before anybody realized that it had dissociative properties, which dissociation kind of fits under the umbrella or psychedelic side effects, though it's not really a psychedelic drug. But everything else is in schedule one.

Gillespie: Walk us through. What is LSD good for besides just tripping your balls out?

Riggs: The argument, and this argument was made a long time ago, Aldous Huxley in "Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell," wrote about LSD. Albert Hoffman, who was the chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals who studied LSD. Basically, going back to the '40s and '50s and '60s, the argument has been that psychedelic drugs, and the first one that anybody really tried was the LSD, kind of stops you from being who you are for long enough for you to change who you are. As an adjunct to psychotherapy, if you're working with someone who's seeing a lot of people taking LSD and worked with a lot of people who've taken LSD, this is not actually as scary as it sounds. If you're somebody who has a substance use disorder or you're a binge eater or you're depressed or you're anxious or you're-

Gillespie: And an alcoholic, right?

Riggs: Whatever you want to say.

Gillespie: Yeah.

Riggs: Yeah. That was the first one, that was the big one was alcoholics, was the idea that there was something underneath the alcoholism, that there was some sort of psychological issue that if you could just sort of pause a person and say, "Let's start from scratch." Again, there's really no other drug or really any other medical therapy or modality that says, "Let's just make you somebody else."

Gillespie: Right.

Riggs: That's kind of what the psychedelic model is.

Gillespie: And then, what about psilocybin and ecstasy? Why are medical researchers or and what's interesting, you went to the MAPS conference. Rick Doblin, the kind of grand poobah of MAPS. These are not people who are, they're not silly people, they're not superficial people. They're talking about how do individuals use drugs like we all use other training regimens or diet or whatever, meditation, courses in education to better ourselves or to understand ourselves better. That's what these people are about. What about psilocybin and ecstasy? What do those do for people in a therapeutic setting?Riggs: If we can just leave the chemistry aside a little bit because it's kind of complicated for both drugs, but at a basic level, psilocybin and MDMA are both being used in patient populations that are experiencing anxiety related to a traumatic experience. For a lot of the studies with psilocybin, they've been used in patient populations that either have a terminal illness or a life threatening illness. In a lot of cases, that's cancer of some sort.

And then for MDMA, it's a lot of the clinical trials involve people who have PTSD as a result of military service or sexual abuse. The basic idea's that while on these substances the patient is just able to confront difficult concepts, difficult memories, without re-experiencing the panic and anxiety and lockdown that they feel when they re-visit those memories when their sober. This is one of the idea of triggering for people with PTSD is that whenever they're confronted by something that resembles this really traumatic experience, you hear about people coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq who hear a car backfire, a door slammed really loudly, and suddenly they're back in Fallujah.

MDMA allows them to sort of re-visit these really hard memories and talk about them and think about them and create a demarcation, maybe a wall, a compartment, where that memory, they're able to disconnect it from this sort of unintentional feedback loop of emotions where every time that memory is evoked, they then have to experience panic or anxiety or fear. And so they can consider the memory, they can be reminded of that experience without feeling all this other stuff.

Gillespie: Well, talk a little bit about MAPS and Rick Doblin.

Riggs: Yeah, so Doblin is a totally fascinating guy. He started MAPS in 1986. His journey of studying and advocating for the use of psychedelic drugs in therapeutic settings began in the late 1960s or early '70s. He was kind of a guy who, for a long time starting when he was in college all the way to the mid-'80s, he was a guy who's like, "We can get this to where it needs to be in terms of legitimacy simply by talking about it and simply by doing it." And so in the 1960s and 1970s, there's some underground psychedelic therapy work in which psychiatrists who either participated in the research in the 1950s with LSD continued secretly. And then going into the 1970s when MDMA was kind of re-discovered by this chemist named Sasha Shulgin. MDMA wasn't illegal. It hadn't been banned. So psychiatrists were able to use it as kind of a research chemical.

Doblin had met all these people. He'd heard great stories about therapists working with these drugs. He said, "This should be enough. We've got all these M.D.s, a lot of them affiliated with academic institutions. A lot of them have been in practice for a long time. They have great medical records. They haven't been sued out of existence. They haven't had their licenses revoked. This should be enough to get the government to recognize these as therapeutic drugs."

As we know, most every therapeutic drug that also happens to make people feel good, MDMA worked it's way into the recreational community the same way that LSD had and other drugs like that. And so, when the DEA decided to crack down on MDMA in the 1980s, the evidence that all these psychiatrists put forward and that Doblin helped organize and deliver to Washington D.C. really didn't move the needle. The DEA engaged in years long battle with all these therapists throughout the 1980s and by the late 1980s had won the battle. And so, these drugs were added to schedule one.

Gillespie: One of the things that is fascinating about ecstasy or MDMA, excuse me, is and I say this as somebody, I was in college from '81 to '85, ecstasy was free and legal, or it wasn't free, but it was very cheap and it was legal. But it was seen as an anti-social drug because you would have such intense feelings and emotions. You would just stay in a room with yourself and your girlfriend or boyfriend and touch fingerprints. You wouldn't even go outside because you didn't want to. You were exploring yourself. It was a very introspective drug. Once it was banned, it became the ultimate party drug and the rave drug and then everybody ... One of the reasons it was banned is because it turned people dangerously anti-social. After it was banned, it became the rave drug of choice. Kind of fascinating.

How do the phrases set and setting fit into the broader kind of psychedelic research that you've been covering?

Riggs: Yeah. Set and setting is probably the most significant contribution from Timothy Leary to the contemporary movement. Leary, in the 1960s, was a big advocate of LSD. He worked at Harvard and lost his job because he was giving drugs to undergrads. He coined this idea of set and setting, which is set is mindset. So how you're thinking about a drug or what you're going to do on the drug before you do it. And then setting is the physical setting that you're in. Psychedelic therapists still use this language today. Mindset, you want to prepare a patient for the experience that they're going to have when they're on one of these drugs. And then setting is you want to make sure that they feel safe and comfortable and that there's nothing in their immediate physical environment that's going to upset them.

It's also terminology that's used by recreational users. I mean, there are all kinds of forums on the internet from Bluelight to Reddit where users will say to other users, "Hey. I was thinking about using this psychedelic drug at event X, Y, or Z." And then there will be a conversation about whether or not that's a good set or setting based on how the drug affects the mind. It's very interesting. There's a sort of an element of planning and preparation for psychedelic drugs you generally don't see with things like marijuana or cocaine just because the potential for a really bad experience if you're not thinking ahead and you're not being prepared is so much more real for LSD or psilocybin than it is for marijuana.

Gillespie: Well, then, it's also the trip lasts longer. It's like planning a golf outing or a long horseback ride or something where with cocaine you're not talking about minutes. You're talking about, an LSD trip could last anywhere from 4 to 12 to 24 hours.

Riggs: Yeah. LSD lasts an incredibly long time. MDMA is on the shorter side. It's maybe two hours, two and a half hours. Psilocybin's somewhere between. But yeah, these drugs all last much longer than marijuana and certainly much longer than cocaine, which peaks really quickly and then you hit the trough pretty quickly after that.

Gillespie: What did these guys do to win the FDA over to at least considering rescheduling things or to take seriously the idea that these drugs that have been associated for decades now with hippies and youth and out of control kinds, all of that kind of stuff? How did they get the FDAs attention to say, "Okay. You know what? We want to start thinking about this more seriously."

Riggs: Part of it was sheer, dumb luck. In the late 1980s, the FDA created a new unit within itself that was tasked with expediting the investigational new drug application process, which is where a researcher says, "Hey. I have chemical X or Y. I think it could be useful in this setting. I'd like to move my research from animals to humans." Prior to the late 1980s, there were a lot of those applications would come into the FDA and a lot of them have just been put on hold. This group called the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff started in the late 1980s to bring some sort of entrepreneurial elements into the FDA, started going through all these old applications and realized that overwhelming amount of applications that had been put on hold were for psychedelic drugs.

Around the time that this division was created, Rick Doblin, again the founder and president of MAPS, met a psychiatrist named Charles Grobe, who still practices today and is a medical school professor in California. Together, they said, "Hey. Let's submit a proposal for FDA to kind of get this process started." So that's what they did. Grobe put together an investigational new drug application with a limited trial for cancer patients suffering anxiety. He and Doblin and some other psychedelic researchers, mostly chemists, flew to Washington D.C. for meetings with all the alphabet agencies, DEA, the drugs [czar's 00:16:09] office, the FDA, Health and Human Services, and basically made their case.

They said, "There's a lot of data out there that wasn't necessarily conducted or gathered through the clinical trial process, but that was gathered by responsible investigators who documented what they were doing showing that we can use this safely in humans. We think we should be allowed to proceed especially if this ends up being a kind of revolutionary new drug for psychiatric disorders." The FDA, after all these meetings with DEA and drug czar's office, the feeling was, "Hey. If this is as tightly controlled, if this process is as by the book as we would request of any pharmaceutical giant, you can go ahead and do it."

So Grobe and Doblin got permission to do so. They raised the money from philanthropists to conduct these studies. That's something else worth noting, that almost none of the psychedelic research is tied to the pharmaceutical industry in any way because all these drugs are off patent. They're all-

Gillespie: Even though all of them, I mean, came out of the, for lack of better term, the legitimate pharmaceutical industry. Right?

Riggs: Yeah, no, that's true. MDMA, LSD were both developed by pharmaceutical companies in the 20th century. Merck developed MDMA right at the turn of the 20th century as a sort of intermediate drug for something else. They never used it in humans. It was never of interest to their clinical team. LSD was kind of the same. But, yeah. The only one that's really got any pharmaceutical company involvement is ketamine, again, because it's not a schedule one, because it was a surgical anesthesia. But, so they just said, "Hey. Let's raise the money. Let's put together these trials."

They kind of bootstrapped it for a little while. I got to talk to a woman at MAPS who defected, for lack of a better word, from Novartis, which is a pharmaceutical giant to go work at MAPS. She talks about how for over a decade, nearly two decades, MAPS did all of their paperwork like an Excel spreadsheet and by hand. They were sort of documented all this way using photocopies and stuff like that. She kind of upgraded them to the more modern pharmaceutical style electronic and digital databases and that kind of thing. But they just tried to do what any other drug researcher working with a budget 100 times larger than their own would do.

Gillespie: Is there interest in pharmaceutical companies to start purveying newer versions, newer and better versions, time release versions? All of that kind of stuff of these drugs.

Riggs: For ketamine, there is right now, again because they know it's legal right now. If you're able to come up with a newer or better version of ketamine, you're time window for getting that approved is much shorter than for any of these other drugs.

I think that once one of these psychedelic drugs is moved from schedule one to schedule two or schedule three, something like MDMA, either you will see some pharmaceutical interest particularly when you get what's called post-market data in. A drug is moved to prescription status. And then for years afterward, you're able to collect a totally different type of data because you've gone from your clinical trial sample size, which will be a couple hundred people, to five years after it gets the pharmaceutical status you could have had 10 thousand people use the drugs, you could have had 50 thousand.

And so once we know what is most desirable about MDMA in this clinical setting, in this psychiatric setting, and what effects are least desirable, what effects kind of occasionally complicate or sabotage improvement, I suspect that's when you see the pharmaceutical companies saying they would look at that data and say, "Okay. Psychiatrists say that this is the best part of using this drug. This is not a great part. Well, let's make a drug that only has these ideal qualities and none of the bad ones."

Gillespie: Timothy Leary gave out psilocybin in his Good Friday experiments, along with Richard Alpert later, Ram Dass, at Harvard. That was the proximate cause for them getting bounced from Harvard. Leary obviously popularized LSD. He was a big promoter of pot use and stuff. He's kind of the villain, isn't he, in people who do psychedelic research? Talk a little bit about Timothy Leary's kind of ambivalent role or ambiguous role in all of this.

Riggs: He's sort of the guy without whom I'm not sure any of this would be possible, but because of him it hasn't already happened, if that makes sense. If you just look at his credentials, he got his PhD in psychology at UCLA and then he went to Harvard. Had he done everything by the book, had he not fallen in love with LSD, which LSD changed Timothy Leary's life. I mean, it transformed him as a human being and as a thinker. Had it not done all that. Had it remained purely academic for him, I suspect that this research would have never stopped and that maybe some of these drugs would be legal already for medical uses. But at the same time, I don't know if you ever get the national awareness that LSD developed without him.

He's a cautionary tale for contemporary researchers. They recognize that the credentials were necessary, that Leary being at Harvard, for a while, was very helpful, which is why so many of the researchers today, they are at Stanford. They're at UCLA. They're at Imperial College London. They're at Johns Hopkins University. They're at NYU. They're at Brown. I mean, they're just, they're all over the place. Being in those positions of authority and power and respect are really important.

The tricky thing is sort of always maintaining this wall, this firewall between the personal affection that most of these researchers, I won't say all of them because I haven't spoken to all of them, but many of the researchers recognize on a personal level that these drugs are very beneficial for most of the people who use them, even people who use them outside of a psychiatric setting. But in terms of what they say publicly, what they say in their research, they are very consistent and disciplined about saying, "Regardless of what we know anecdotally about these drugs, what we know is wise to recommend is that they only be used under supervision after they've been approved by the FDA." That's because of Leary.

Gillespie: One of the many of the fascinating aspects of your story, you discuss your own use, particularly with ecstasy, I guess. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How does that factor into this broader story of psychedelics kind of on the march for psychological well being and kind of realization of human potential for you?

Riggs: Yeah. It's funny. I kind of waffled a little bit on whether or not to include the personal stuff in my story just because as I was researching this one I was reading Albert Hoffman's memoir, "LSD: My Problem Child." One of the things he talks about this explosion of awareness of LSD in the 1960s and then an increase in recreational use. He blames, I don't know if blame's the right word, but he says that this coincides with a lot of writing about LSD in the popular press. There were a couple of memoirs that came out. Word leaked that Cary Grant, the actor, had used LSD and that it transformed him and made him a better actor.

I felt kind of self conscious about that, as well, because the experiences I've had with psychedelic drugs, namely psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD, but particularly MDMA, have been personally transformative for me. I think most of the people who have known me for many years would say that I'm a different person now than I was four or five years ago. Part of that is because I wasn't leading a particularly sustainable life five or six years ago. But part of it for me was that the transition to a more healthful way of being taking better care of my body, trying to be more diligent about building good habits was kind of aided by the use of psychedelic drugs. Not frequent use, but kind of taking these drugs and then having really intense, in depth, long conversations with intelligent people about how to get better, just how to get better as a person, as a human being, how to be a better neighbor, how to be a better friend. That kind of stuff.

The reason that I was ambivalent to include it in the story is that I only know my own story best, I know it's a good one. And I know lots of people who also have positive stories. But there are people who have bad ones. There are people who have problem use with MDMA. It does have an amphetamine component, which activated dopamine receptors and that makes it a drug that you kind of want to take a lot. So there's addiction issues with MDMA. I've met people who used mushrooms and felt really terrible throughout the entire experience and don't ever want to use them again. LSD is kind of, I mean, that is a real commitment to self exploration. The trip lasts a long time. It distorts your perception of reality in a way that nothing else does.

For me, they've been really important and really amazing and really life-affirming. That's just not true for everyone. I tried to, this is also why I find this whole story interesting is this idea of a lot of these psychedelic researchers, they either had this experience themselves or they know someone who has had this experience. And so, what they want to do is kind of Sherpa these drugs from where they are now to a place where if somebody has a bad reaction on them, they're having it in the presence of a trained clinician who can make sure that they don't hurt themselves. As much as I believe in my body, my choice, and not incarcerating people for what they do to their own bodies, I do see a lot to commend in the movement to make sure that these drugs are used in safe settings.

Gillespie: You're writing at Reason is really a lot about human modification or kind of self-directed evolution almost. How do people, they have an idea of what they want to be like and then they pursue that. Talk a bit about, and you yourself over the past few years, you went on a particularly strict diet and workout regimen, you transformed the way that you look. You had always been what used to be called a husky person, now you're kind of-

Riggs: That's true. Yeah.

Gillespie: Rock hard and all that. What is your interest, and for libertarians in particular, what is the interest in this kind of motivational change of what you look like or what you think like?

Riggs: There are lots of sort of just these moments of awareness that happened as I was nearing the age of 30 in which I was kind of like, "Okay. This is a thing I cannot do forever." One of those was smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. I was like, "I cannot do this forever." My father had a double bypass when he was 52 and had been a lifelong smoker. And so I was just kind of all these things were happening. I was like, "Okay. I can't do this forever." And then the other thing that I realized and that has become a fundamental, philosophical belief for me is that the world has very little interest in how long I live or how well I live.

As someone who believes very much in the phenomenon of spontaneous order and that you don't need a central organizer or planner to make sure that life happens. There's nothing in the theory of spontaneous order that says, "The world will not continuously offer you stuff that will kill you." For me, that has been at various times cigarettes. It's been alcohol. It's been food. It's been inactivity. It's been mindless forms of entertainment. There's no drug I've tried, maybe with the exception of nicotine, that I find as addictive as an Xbox game console.

For me, this was kind of just a realization of things. One, that there was no one in the world who was going to keep me from living a unfortunately short life if I so choose and that some part of me, maybe it's genetic, maybe it's just ingrained through repetition, really preferred a lot of behaviors that were going to shorten my lifespan. I don't know how I feel about living forever or even exceeding what's considered a long, healthy natural life. But I don't like the idea of someone saying, "He died young." And so that was that constellation of sentiments is kind of what led me to change things.

Gillespie: Talk a bit about your kind of career arc because I believe, and if I'm not mistaken, you first came to Reason as an intern. What year would that have been?

Riggs: That was 2008.

Gillespie: Yeah. You were there and then you went on to various other journalism outfits. You worked for Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Give your interest in kind of self ownership in terms of better living through chemistry in many ways and a wakening sense of exercise and diet and things like that, your interests in policy. What's the grand narrative that Mike Riggs is building for himself?

Riggs: That's tricky. I mean, the initial grand narrative. I was an intern at Reason in 2008. I'd been a student journalist in college and turned at a daily newspaper before I left college. But the narrative for a long time was that good art comes from suffering and that the best way to suffer is to kind of self abuse. I was very much a fan of Hunter Thompson and in pretty much any other heavy drinking, big meal eating, writer from the 20th century. I just thought that that was the best way to get stories, was to do crazy stuff, to get ripped or hammered, to always write with a cigarette between my lips. A lot of stuff like that. That was kind of-

Gillespie: This is, if I can say this is William Blake by way of Jim Morrison what the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Something along those lines.

Riggs: Yeah. I mean, basically, I found that way of seeing art and writing and creation very compelling. I struggled for a very long time with the idea of how can you have a happy, healthy, normal life? How can you be someone who gets eight hours of sleep a day, and is a good family man, and doesn't wake up hungover with bloodshot eyes? How can you be all those things and also someone who makes compelling writing? It wasn't so much that I came to believe that this was not true, as it was that I just found it utterly exhausting.

I went from Reason as an intern to the Washington City paper where my personal brand was kind of the insufferable libertine. I also wrote as a libertarian, but it was mostly [illiteracy 00:33:15]. I was mostly like, "Hey, isn't it fun to be reckless all the time?" And then I went to the Daily Caller, which had not yet launched, but I helped Tucker Carlson launch that and kind of developed a reputation while working there. It's very conservative today, but at the time it was so new that I was able to be someone who was also kind of reckless and wild. That was my "personal brand."

I think eventually I just found it exhausting and also it kind of got on my employers nerves after a while. That kind of eventually led to a revisiting and this desire to tell good stories, tell interesting stories, tell true stories, tell hopeful stories, while also leading a life that was not slowly killing me.

Gillespie: You also worked at Families Against Mandatory Minimums, FAMM. How did that play into your interests or your commitments?

Riggs: Yeah. I joined FAMM from the Atlantic. I felt just one step too far removed from what I have basically, the thing I've written about consistently at every journalism job I've ever had is drug policy. I was feeling kind of mildly frustrated. As a young blogger, I was in the habit of saying things like, "Well, if we just did this, we will fix these problems. If we just did this." After a while I kind of wanted to get a little closer and just get a sense of, "Well, what's keeping us from just doing this? What are the obstacles to just doing that?"

So I went to work for Families Against Mandatory Minimums as the director of communications there and got a front row seat to why it is so difficult to change, probably any law, but definitely the laws around drug sentencing for federal drug offenders. That was just an incredible wake up call. I mean, for one thing, this idea that kind of permeates most drug policy writing is we tend to look at somebody who's been incarcerated due to a drug offense and we say, "Hey, they've got kids. Hey, they've never been convicted of a violent crime before. Hey, they're neighbors don't seem to have a problem with them. Why are we putting them in prison for a long time? This doesn't make sense. They're not really bad people that you want to put in prison for a long time."

Working at FAMM, I came to learn pretty deeply and intimately just how little a defendant character or personality or beliefs or circumstances has to do with how long they're sentenced to prison. I mean, which is one of the biggest objections to mandatory minimums is that when you go, one size fits all. When you say, "X quantity of drugs gets you X sentence regardless of whatever mitigating circumstances you may be able to present to the court." That's why one of the reasons why they're so heinous. I mean, you treat the kingpin who's ordered the deaths of dozens of people and the dad who owns a pizza shop and grows a bunch of weed in his backyard to supplement his income, you look at both of them and say, "Your sentence is based on the quantity of drugs you have."

Gillespie: Are you optimistic about drug policy reform in America?

Riggs: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, at the end of the Obama administration, I would have said yes. I would have said that he did not do enough and that the justice department did not do enough and that I was very frustrated by the opportunities that a seemingly reformed, friendly Congress missed because of partisan bickering. But that I was, for the most part, optimistic that things could only get better. With Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, I don't want to say that all hope is lost, but it is a reminder that whatever policy changes are implemented by way of executive order as opposed to signed, or passed and signed legislation, they are transitory. They don't have to be. Sometimes they aren't. But, for the most part, they're transitory.

I am wondering, I do wonder, what has to change? What has to happen? What does Congress have to look like? Who has to sit in the White House? For those two branches of government to re-visit the cascade of terrible drug laws that they've passed since, well going back to the beginning of the 20th century. But what are the ideal circumstances for that because a republican majority in Congress that seemed to be pro criminal justice reform with a democratic president who was pro criminal justice reform, whatever the allure of some great, bi-partisan bargain is to pundits was not there for them. Now that you have a unified Congress, and a republican President, a republican Congress, whatever allure there is to being able to take full responsibility for implementing some brilliant criminal justice reform. That also doesn't seem to be very compelling.

I do wonder. My optimism is blunted by my curiosity, I guess you could say, about what has to happen for any of this to actually become real.

Gillespie: What is the next story you're working on, Mike?

Riggs: I've got a couple of different ones that I'm thinking about. I will be meeting with my excellent editor, Peter Seederman, to go over them. But I'm looking at a piece about reciprocity, which is the idea that any drug that the European Union approves we should just automatically allow Americans to use as well because it's Europe not Rwanda and so they've got a pretty good drug approval process.

I'm also doing some exploration of the ultimate drug gray market, which is the research chemical market. Most familiar to Americans because of the K2/spice/bath salts epidemic. All of those things were created by academic chemists at universities here in the United States who then published their formulas. And then those things kind of took on a life of their own that became a global phenomenon. That is a piece I'm looking into now is kind of tracing how is that phenomenon born? How does K2 or spice or bath salts, how does that come into existence? Why did it come into existence? And what is the best solution for having people use safer drugs?

Gillespie: I can remember a couple of years ago when K2 or spice was a big thing. There was a great, I forget the newspaper that ran it, but it was a headline that said, "Fake pot as bad as the real thing." It just seemed to kind of sum up a lot of the thinking that goes into the drug war.

Mike Riggs, reporter for Reason. Thank you so much for talking to the Reason podcast. Any last, any message to your fans?

Riggs: Yeah. Be safe.

Gillespie: All right. All right.

Riggs: Be safe. That's always by words of wisdom.

Gillespie: Those are true words of wisdom. Thank you so much, Mike Riggs.

This is the Reason podcast. I am Nick Gillespie for Reason. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to us at iTunes and rate and review us while you're there.

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Countdown To (Legalized) Ecstasy! Rick Doblin, MAPS, & the Psychedelic Renaissance [Podcast] - Reason (blog)

Nootropics | Our Favorite Nootropics Supplements

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NooCube is TSR.orgs #1 ranked Nootropic brain supplement. It contains the highest quality, most clinically studied and most potent ingredients among all the supplements in this category.READ THE REVIEW

Brain Pill is a new supplement on the nootropic scene that has made some waves.We believe it certainly deserves the attention it has been getting and we ranked it high on our list. Check out this Brain Pill review to learn whyit earned its spot anda few of its shortcomings that prevented it from being #1. READ THE REVIEW

Addy Focus is a unique supplement that should have been invented a long time ago. It is exactly what it sounds like: an alternative to the drug Adderall. Can you really experience the benefits of Adderall without needing a prescription or having to suffer from the side effects? Check out this review to learn how Addy Focus makes it possible.READ THE REVIEW

Lumonol is without a doubt one of the best brain supplements on the market. It uses a combination of very potent and proven ingredients that makes for a super powerful formula. Based on the high overall potency, positive user experiences, and high quality formula, this is definitely a solid bet when it comes to brain supplements. It may not be #1, but it certainly earned its spot on the top 10 list.READ THE REVIEW

Geniux is a brain supplement that has been getting a lot of attention lately because of its apparent ability to improve brain function and cognitive performance. But just because of its widespread popularity, it is at the bottom of our top-1o list for a reason. Checkout this Geniux review to learn why.READ THE REVIEW

OptiMind is by far one of the most popular brain supplements on the market. We certainly consider it to be one of the ten best brain supplementsbut it failed to crack the top 5. Read this OptiMind review todiscover the positives and the negatives. READ THE REVIEW

Alpha Brain is one of the top 10 brain supplements on the market because of the high quality ingredients, diverse formula, and wide array of benefits. Its certainly a good supplement, but is it the best? Read this Alpha Brain review to find out why it made the top 10 but didnt crack the top 5. READ THE REVIEW

Adderin is another supplement designed to mimic the effects of the A.D.D. drug, Adderall. Is it possible for a natural supplement to work as well as Adderall? Read this Adderin review to find out just how effective it is and why it rankedwhere it did in our list. READ THE REVIEW

Smart Pill, by Only Natural, is one of the many brain supplements out there that claims to be able to boost overall function and cognitive performance, but does it live up to the claims?Though it deserves a top-ten ranking, it is far removed from the best of the best.READ THE REVIEW

Smart X is ranked #2 in our top 10 list because it is loaded with proven ingredients, and in high potencies. This popular brain supplement won the Best Brain Supplement of 2015. Find out why it didnt rank #1.READ THE REVIEW

Brain Pill is a new supplement on the nootropic scene that has made some waves.We believe it certainly deserves the attention it has been getting and we ranked it high on our list. Check out this Brain Pill review to learn whyit earned its spot anda few of its shortcomings that prevented it from being #1. READ THE REVIEW

CogniMaxxXL is a brain supplement formula that according to the manufacturer claim, gives the best brain of your life especially if your age is above 40.The manufacturerdeclares that their proprietary cognitive enhancer improves memory, the ability to focus and improves overall concentration. And for the most part, we agree.READ THE REVIEW

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Nootropics | Our Favorite Nootropics Supplements

NETCENTS Integrates Top Tier Merchants Within the Nutraceutical Sector – Canada NewsWire (press release)

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VANCOUVER, July 19, 2017 /CNW/ -NetCents Technology Inc. ("NetCents" or the "Company") (CSE: NC) is pleased to announce the rapid expansion of its merchant portfolio, further validating the company's robust suite of eCommerce-based plugins; such as WooCommerce and Magento (See news May 23, 2017 and July 5, 2017).

The latest fully integrated, additions to NetCents' diverse merchant base include four, top tier market leaders within the burgeoning Nutraceutical vertical. Since the successful integration of these four merchant-partners, NetCents has realized a significant boost in both active users and transactional volumes.

Automated, onboarding processes have facilitated the accelerated growth of NetCents' merchant portfolio. These processes allow prospective merchants to realize a practically instantaneous integration into the NetCents Gateway. One of the preeminent features of the NetCents' platform is its ability to immediately onboard merchants through its low-touch online gateway.

"NetCents has created revolutionary, low touch, high growth merchant integration procedures. This is because of our fully automated merchant application and on-boarding process. We have completely streamlined the merchant integration process by removing non-value added activities," said Clayton Moore CEO & Founder, NetCents Technology Inc.

Another prominent feature of the NetCents' platform is the company's AI 2.0 proprietary processing algorithm, pre-validation of transactions before the final transaction is processed with the merchant. "This process eliminates 99.9% of all chargeback related events, which is a multi billion-dollar problem," said Clayton Moore CEO & Founder, NetCents Technology Inc. "The NetCents solution opens up a huge market opportunity, particularly in industries where merchants are labelled as high risk. The Nutraceutical industry in the most part has been deemed high risk where payment processing has not been available to these merchants. NetCents' cryptocurrency processing allows these online merchants the ability to conduct business and allowing NetCents the opportunity to corner lucrative markets such as Nutraceuticals for payment processing."

NetCents will be providing updates on these events in the coming weeks with more detailed information.

The cognitive enhancement supplement industry also called Nootropics or smart supplements are drugs, supplements, or other substances that improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals.

"Global Nootropics Market To Reach Over USD 6 Billion By 2024" according to the latest report published by Credence Research, Inc. "Nootropics Market - Growth, Future Prospects and Competitive Analysis, 2016-2024," the global Nootropics market was valued at USD 1.3 Billion in 2015, and is expected to reach over USD 6 Billion by 2024.

If your company or organization wishes to integrate the NetCents platform into your website, visit http://www.netcents.biz and click on our "Payment Gateway" tab to complete the online form to get the digital integration process started. A NetCents payment icon will be placed on your website at no cost.

About NetCents

NetCents is a next generation online payments processing platform, offering consumers and merchants online services for managing electronic payments. The Company is focused on capturing the migration from cash to digital currency by utilizing innovative Blockchain Technology to provide payment solutions that are simple to use, secure and worry free. NetCents works with its financial partners, mobile operators, exchanges, etc., to streamline the user experience of transacting online. NetCents Technology is integrated into the Automated Clearing House ("ACH") and is registered as a Money Services Business (MSB) with FINTRAC, which ensures our consumer's security and privacy. NetCents is available for deposits from 194 Countries around the World, providing you with the freedom to choose to Pay. Your Way.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors NetCents Technology Inc.

"Clayton Moore"Clayton Moore, CEO, Founder and Director

NetCents Technology Inc. Suite 880, 505 Burrard St (Bentall 1), Vancouver, BC, V7X 1M4

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Information

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

SOURCE NetCents Technology Inc.

For further information: please visit the corporate website at http://www.netcents.biz or contact Robert Meister, Capital Markets at Ph: 604.676.5248 or email: Robert.meister@net-cents.com.

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NETCENTS Integrates Top Tier Merchants Within the Nutraceutical Sector - Canada NewsWire (press release)

Every Entrepreneur Needs Flow. Nootropics Can Get You There. – Entrepreneur

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Weve all savored being in the zone: creative thoughts flow from brain to fingertips, timelessness, perhaps even an experience of euphoria. This elevated state of consciousness is the secret behind many outstanding athletes, daredevils, artists and entrepreneurs. It has a name -- flow -- given to it by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

You can harness thepower of flow.

Entrepreneurs trying to break the status quo need to be better than average. Innovations and breakthroughs arent exclusivelythe result of hard work and hustle, especially as machines and computers take over monotonous tasks. Entrepreneurs need creativity to excel and develop new technologies.

Sixty percent of CEOspolled by IBM ranked creativity as the most important leadership quality. Entrepreneurs seeking flow must have the right environment and lifestyle habits but there are nootropics (aka cognitive enhancers) that can change the biochemistry of our brain to achieve flow more easily.

Related:The Happiest People Know Their 'Flow State.' What's Yours?

Since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi labeled and analyzed flow states, it has become a hot topic for performance enhancement.

As Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheals book, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work shows, high performance individuals are using flow enhancing techniques across the board.These mental states are the objective of high performers from Sergey Brin and Google executives to elite special forces.

The benefits of achieving flow states are manifold. Military researchers found that flow states can increase learning ability up to 230 percentin novice snipers. McKinsey researchers studied top executives for 10 years and found they were five times more productive in flow states.

Imagine working on a business venture with fivetimes the productivity and the ability to learn new materials 230 percentquicker than your competition. That alone would make flow states advantageous, but the true benefit is for creativity.

In 2013, phase one of the Red Bull Hacking Creativity Project started as a joint effort between MIT Media Lab, a group of TED fellowsand other flow experts to better understand creativity and flow states.

In late 2016, after reviewing more than 30,000research papers and interviewing hundreds of subject-matter experts, the project reached two conclusions. First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems. Second, creativity is less of a skill and more of a state of mind: i.e: a flow state.

Oliver Braithwaite, founder of the private tuition company Stars & Catz Teacher Network, said: Many of our students are executives who wish to take up a musical instrument to take their minds off work, de-stress and be creative. In part, what theyre seeking is actually a state of flow, where all other thoughts are suspended, stress drops away and creativity kicks in. Personally, as both an entrepreneur and a musician, Im aware that my most creative and effective work comes when enjoyment, creativity and focus coexist. Thats how Id define being in flow.

Related:How to Achieve aStateof Total Concentration

If flow states were easy to achieve, wed all be using them nonstop. There are environmental, psychologicaland emotional factors that affect to our ability to achieve flow regularly.

As new evidence and technologies come online, we better understand the neurochemistry of flow states and how to achieve it, including through supplements.Steven Kotler, author and flow researcher, recounted a simple flow hack using many commonly found techniques.

20 - 25 minute jog to release endorphins.

A cup of coffee -- caffeine for brain chemicals called dopamine and norepinephrine.

Marijuana -- THC provides a chemical called anandamide used for lateral thinking.

According to Kotler, this essentially mimics the neurochemistry of a flow states. It isnt sustainable, but it is a quick hack into this mental space (assuming you live in a part of the world where THC is legal).

Related:Mexico Joins Canada In Making Cannabis Legal, Leaving the US Far Behind in Marijuana Policy.

Aside from this clearly defined formula, there are a host of other substances utilized for creativity and achieving flow.

The term entheogen refers to psychoactive compounds, including LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, among others. Literally meaning generating the divine within, these compounds have been used in traditional cultures for thousands of years.

Even though many are illegal in the western world, entheogens like LSD and psilocybin are experiencing a resurgence of interest and research. Before these substances were made illegal, researcher James Fadiman conducted experiments using entheogens to enhance problem solving.

Within the experiment, 27 individuals (including engineers, mathematicians, architects, and engineer-physicists) were told to bring a problem they had been struggling with for months. Using small doses of mescaline, 44 percentof the cohort found breakthrough solutions (including patents and tangible technologies).

Entheogenic compounds have gone unstudied for decades, but the newfound interest is already bearing fruit. A brain imaging study conducted at Imperial College London by Dr. Carhart-Harris suggests regions of the brain associated with creativity are affected under the influence of entheogenic compounds.

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, top executives are microdosing psychedelics to produce flow states, hack creativity, and produce breakthrough innovations. While these compounds are still illegal, there is some hope that will change over time.

Related:Tim Ferriss: If You're Not Happy With What You Have, You Might Never Be Happy

The drawback to nootropics and cognitive enhancers isthe lack of scientific evidence and minefield of snake oil salesman. Many of the purported smart drugs are no more useful than the placebo effect while others come with unnecessary side effects.

Self experimentation becomes key for entrepreneurs trying to enhance flow states and creativity. When I visited the Peak Brain Institute in Los Angeles to perform a QEEG brain map, we found a synthetic nootropic called phenylpiracetam enhanced brain waves associated with flow states. Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Hill confirmed the cognitive boost providing empirical evidence this smart drug works for me.

Finding nootropic concoctions to achieve flow states need not be scary, riskyor challenging. For risk averse beginners, simply taking L-theanine (an amino acid found in green tea) with your morning cup of coffee can increase alpha brain waves, which are associated with flow states.

Related:3 Surprising Ways to Unlock Your Creativity

Entrepreneurs servethe world by creatinguseful innovations and technology. To solve global problems, entrepreneurs must be able to achieve more creative flow states and do so more consistently.

Through nootropic supplementation and innovative technologies, we can now achieve flow more readily to create more value and wealth in our businesses.

Mansal Denton is an entrepreneur and self explorer currently developing Nootropedia, which offers unbiased and accessible information to improve mental performance. He enjoys active hobbies, including hiking and jiu-jitsu, as well as quiet...

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Every Entrepreneur Needs Flow. Nootropics Can Get You There. - Entrepreneur

Take part in the show with ‘Dr. Amnesia Trance’s Hypnotic Show’ – The Register-Guard

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Dr. Amnesia Trances Hypnotic Show

Friday, July 21 through Sunday

Cottage Theatre

Theaters fourth wall will break during an interactive performance featuring young actors from the Cottage Theatres summer Melodrama Camp. Dr. Amnesia Trances Hypnotic Show invites audiences of all ages to engage in the performance with callbacks and an opening sing-along.

The show plays at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday with a matinee at 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $7 (cottage theatre.org/tickets or 541-942-8001). The Cottage Grove Theatre is at 700 Village Drive in Cottage Grove.

Love Letters

Friday, July 21 through July 30

Class Act Theatre

A tale of distant love and the power of the written word comes to the Class Act Theatre in Florence.

Love Letters, a play by A.R. Gurney, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The production is in honor of Gurney, who died June 13. David Lauria plays Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Rosemary Lauria plays Melissa Gardner, childhood friends who begin a lifelong correspondence with birthday party thank-you notes and summer camp postcards. As their life journeys take them on divergent paths, they remain close through written letters, which come to encompass the love that they share.

Paula Lindekugel-Willis directed the show.

It runs Friday through July 30, with 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday shows and 2 p.m. Sunday matinees. Tickets are $18 (catproductions.org or 541-991-3773).

The Class Act Theatre is at 509 Kingwood St. in Florence.

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Take part in the show with 'Dr. Amnesia Trance's Hypnotic Show' - The Register-Guard

Wacha puts the Mets into trance – Journal Times

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Michael Wacha threw a three-hitter for his first career shutout, Matt Carpenter had four hits, and the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Mets at New York.

Wacha (7-3) has won his last four starts. He struck out eight and walked one in his 99th career start.

The 26-year-old right-hander, who was ineffective last season, had not won four straight starts since the 2013 playoffs when he helped lead St. Louis to the World Series.

Wacha and the Cardinals capitalized on a shoddy Mets defense that let down starter Rafael Montero (1-6) with three errors. Montero allowed four runs, two earned, in six innings. New York has lost three straight and eight of 11.

DIAMONDBACKS 11, REDS 2: Chris Herrmann capped a six-run fifth inning with a two-run homer, and Arizona slugged its way past the Cincinnati Reds shortly after trading for slugger J.D. Martinez.

Rey Fuentes added a pinch-hit, three-run shot in the seventh, All-Star outfielder Jake Lamb had a two-run triple and Arizona ended a five-game skid by tying a season high with nine extra-base hits one from each spot in the order. The Diamondbacks had four doubles in the fifth, helping overcome Zack Cozarts 10th homer of the season.

PHILLIES 5, MARLINS 2: Maikel Franco had three hits, including a tie-breaking home run in the eighth inning, to help lead Philadelphia past the Marlins at Miami.

National League home run leader Giancarlo Stanton hit his 29th for the Marlins, who have lost four of five.

Francos homer to left field off Dustin McGowan (5-1) was his 14th of the season and it broke a 2-all tie.

ORIOLES 12, RANGERS 1: Chris Davis homered in a six-run first inning, added a grand slam in the fourth and finished with a career-high six RBIs to help the Orioles breeze past Texas at Baltimore.

It was the 19th career multihomer game for Davis, making his fifth start since coming off the disabled list with an oblique strain. Baltimores cleanup hitter hadnt gone deep since June 10 and has 16 home runs after hitting 38 last season.

TIGERS 9, ROYALS 3: Nicholas Castellanos homered twice and drove in five runs, Detroit scored five times in the second inning and the Tigers cruised from there at Kansas City.

After trading slugger J.D. Martinez to Arizona for a package of prospects before the game, the Tigers proved they didnt need him in the lineup at least for one night to win their fourth straight game.

ASTROS 6, MARINERS 2: Evan Gattis homered twice to back up a solid start by Brad Peacock and help the Astros defeat Seattle at Houston.

Gattis hit solo shots in the second and sixth innings off Sam Gaviglio (3-5) for the eighth multihomer game of his career.

Peacock (8-1) allowed three hits and one run while fanning nine in seven innings to tie the longest start of his career and earn his fifth straight win. Luke Gregerson got the last four outs for his first save.

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Wacha puts the Mets into trance - Journal Times

Competition: Watch The Jetwalls In Cyberpunk Motorcycle Game Qbike – VRFocus

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When people are first introduced to the concept of virtual reality (VR) many tend to think of something theyve seen in TV or in a movie, or those that have had experience of it in previous generations of the technology might think it is purely that. For tha majority though its the memory of the fiction that stays with them more and is called to compare with VR of today. It can be both a help and a hiderance, something weve discussed onVRFocus on a couple of occasions.

When it comes to those visions of what VR is like one of the biggest is, of course, TRON, Disneys film about a computer programmer being zapped into a computer and being forced to play games for his very life. A franchise that has inspired many of todays videogame developers. So, it would be safe to say that Qbike:Cyberpunk Motorcycles is rather TRON influenced, baring in mind that the game is a VR representation of the classic lightcycles game, more specifically a more fully realised version in terms of design and play of that seen in TRON Legacy. With multiple levels of play and the bikesjetwalls even being effective in the air.

Weve teamed up with developers, GexagonVR, to offer you the chance to win one of four codes for the videogame which is currently in Early Access on Steam. Qbike will be offering support of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive

You haveapproximately a week in order to enter as youve until the turn of Thursday, 27th July2017 in the UK. The competition is open to everyone, though please note youll need to have an Steam account in order to claim the code. To enter all you have to do to is use the app below and be either a follower of VRFocus on Twitter, be a subscriber to ourYouTube channel or visit our Facebook or Google+ pages. Thats it. You get an entry for any of those so make sure you check everything out.

Win Qbike on Vive/Rift (Steam Early Access)

Well let winners know as soon as possible after the competition ends. Good luck!

Long time Social & Community Manager and occasional writer of words, looks pretty dashing with technology strapped to his head. As well as keeping the team's social media channels ticking over, Kevin's also a feature writer for VRFocus best known for the Tuesday afternoon "VR vs." opinion piece. Among many other roles Kevin E is also our (unofficial) Deputy Editor.

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Competition: Watch The Jetwalls In Cyberpunk Motorcycle Game Qbike - VRFocus

Racers Prepare For Solar Car Competition At TMS CBS Dallas … – CBS DFW

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Racers Prepare For Solar Car Competition At TMS

One of the largest solar car races on the planet is happening this week in North Texas. Check out some of the racers who will be competing. They come from 36 high schools across nearly a dozen states.

Effort Underway To Change Name Of Busy Road In DallasA new proposal within the City of Dallas could change the name of Plano Road to North Lake Highlands Drive.

John Wayne Gacy Victim Identified Four Decades LaterThe Cook County Sheriffs office in Illinois announced on Wednesday the DNA match is that of 16-year old James Jimmie Haakenson.

Top Cop Driven By Personal Tragedy To Fight CrimeChief Renee Hall's father was murdered when she was 6 months old.

Senator John McCain Diagnosed With Brain CancerThe discovery came after he had a blood clot removed above his left eye.

North Texas Neighborhood Is A Speeding 'No Man's Land'Alleged speeding in a Godley neighborhood is so severe, some parents won't let the kids play outside.

Frisco ISD In Urgent Need Of Bus DriversThe school district is looking to add 30 bus drivers as soon as possible.

Fire And Explosions At Lake Texoma MarinaEmergency crews are at Lake Texoma responding to a fire and several explosions at Highport Marina in Pottsboro.

Oak Cliff Drive-By Shooting Turns Into Gun BattleA man and a woman were wounded after rounds of gunfirewere exchanged outside a convenience store in east Oak Cliff.

North Texas Traffic Stop Ends With Dispatcher ProposalThe site of flashing red and blue lights in the rearview mirror can startle just about anyone.But there was a big surprise waiting for one North Texas woman who was literally in tears after she was pulled over for speeding and then informed there were warrants involved.

New Details In Death Of Dallas 4-Year-Old, Mother's Boyfriend ChargedHorrific new details are emerging in the death of a 4-year-old Dallas boy and the subsequent arrest of a 27-year-old man.

Dallas ISD Push Back Against Charter Schools13 percent of DISD's expected enrollment attends area public charter schools

DPD Suspends Elliott Investigation Over Lack Of Witness CooperationDallas Police have suspended into an incident that allegedly involved Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott

Racers Prepare For Solar Car Competition At TMSOne of the largest solar car races on the planet is happening this week in North Texas. Check out some of the racers who will be competing. They come from 36 high schools across nearly a dozen states.

Heavy Rain, Fast-Moving Water Brings Garbage To White Rock Lake ShoresThe lake is surrounded by creeks that feed into the water that bring runoff from as far away as Frisco during a big downpour.

'Seed Library' Giving North Texans Healthy Eating Nudge: Check It Out!Some Dallas Main Library staffers decided to give patrons a little push, by providing free seeds along with information and resources.

Transgender Woman Trolls Abbott With PhotographA transgender woman took her 'bathroom bill' protest directly to Gov. Greg Abbott, and he may not have even noticed.

Racers Prepare For Solar Car Competition At TMSOne of the largest solar car races on the planet is happening this week in North Texas. Check out some of the racers who will be competing. They come from 36 high schools across nearly a dozen states.

Behind The Scenes: Fort Worth Battling Cyber AttacksA behind the scenes look at how the city of Fort Worth fights off cyber attacks.

Transgender Woman Trolls Abbott With PhotographA transgender woman took her 'bathroom bill' protest directly to Gov. Greg Abbott, and he may not have even noticed.

Racers Prepare For Solar Car Competition At TMSOne of the largest solar car races on the planet is happening this week in North Texas. Check out some of the racers who will be competing. They come from 36 high schools across nearly a dozen states.

Soundwave Tattoos Turn Skin Art Into AudioA tattoo innovation is bringing a new way to preserve memories. Soundwave tattoos combine ink and technology, turning skin art into audio that can be played with an app.

Triple-Digit Heat On The WayA typical stifling North Texas summer is here!

Effort Underway To Change Name Of Busy Road In DallasA new proposal within the City of Dallas could change the name of Plano Road to North Lake Highlands Drive.

John Wayne Gacy Victim Identified Four Decades LaterThe Cook County Sheriffs office in Illinois announced on Wednesday the DNA match is that of 16-year old James Jimmie Haakenson.

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SimpliShip ties up with TMS provider Kuebix – American Shipper (subscription)

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The Taiwanese ocean carrier will offer the shares to existing shareholders, Yang Ming employees and the general public as part of the company's ongoing recapitalization plan.

The digital truckload brokerage's latest capital infusion indicates logistics investment won't be slowing any time soon, as venture capital firms continue to back advanced online freight marketplace models.

Alpenglow Rail LLC, which is backed by private equity firm Stonecourt Capital, completed its acquisition of VIP Rail LLC, a short-line railroad located in Sarnia, Ontarios chemical valley.

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The cloud-based transportation management software provider Kuebix has created a direct integration with the international freight marketplace SimpliShip, the companies said Tuesday. The integration allows Kuebix users to pull air and ocean freight rates from SimpliShip directly into Kuebixs planning and execution platform. Kuebix will utilize SimpliShips international freight rate application programming interface (API). The integration allows Kuebix to provide procurement capability in international modes to complement its existing capability in domestic modes, and gives SimpliShip access to Kuebix customers that require international rates. SimpliShip Chief Executive Officer Cory Margand called the integration the first step in unlocking the true potential for APIs in international logistics. The days of having to access multiple platforms to manage domestic and international shipments are over. Margand is a former logistics executive with Adidas, and founded SimpliShip to provide a platform to make the procurement of freight forwarding services easier for shippers. The use of APIs to connect logistics and freight transportation systems is steadily growing, especially among the newer breeds of systems providers. APIs are essentially a way for two systems to communicate with one another in a more flexible, real-time, two-way manner, relative to electronic data interchange (EDI). EDI is a more standardized method of conveying information like rates, transit times and invoice information, but that standardization can be perceived as rigidity for some uses. EDI messages are also sent in batches, creating data latency, and EDI integrations can be costly and time-consuming. Kuebix President Dan Clark called the SimpliShip integration a great addition to the Kuebix ecosystem as we continue to expand our global network of providers to maximize visibility and efficiency for domestic and international shippers. Kuebix is a fast-growing TMS provider primarily focused on the small- and medium-sized enterprise segment, but with growing revenue from larger enterprises. The [Kuebix] TMS was built on the Salesforce platform and allows clients to implement the solution very quickly with the core TMS, then seamlessly add premier apps and integrations as needed, Gartner analyst Bart de Munyck wrote about the company in a TMS market study in March. Kuebix focuses on both the SMB and the enterprise market and has over 1,500 customers. Although 90 percent of Kuebix's customers are small (less than $25 million in freight under management), the company is growing on the large enterprise client side. Kuebix offers managed service programs to businesses looking to partially or fully outsource transportation management.

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The worlds largest container line is one of many companies and organizations that have reported being hit by a cyber attack this week.

Under the terms of the deal, Chinese conglomerate COSCO Shipping will own 90.1 percent of Orient Overseas International Ltd., parent of Hong Kong-based container carrier OOCL, while Shanghai International Port Group will hold the remaining 9.9 percent.

The world's largest liner carrier and its associated businesses are gradually recovering from Tuesday's massive cyber attack, but some systems remain shuttered.

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SimpliShip ties up with TMS provider Kuebix - American Shipper (subscription)

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BRAIN center gathers to ponder future, direction – Arizona State University

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July 19, 2017

For all its resiliency and creativity, the human brain is equally fragile and prone to disease. Millions around the world are affected by neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, a World Health Organization study found eight out of 10 disorders in the three highest disability classes are linked to neurological problems, a figure likely to increase, as the global elderly population is expected to double by 2050.

In response to this growing need, a new collaboration between Arizona State University, the University of Houston and industry members formed to develop and test new neurotechnologies. Above: From left to right, Professors Jose L. Contreras-Vidal and Marco Santello pose for a photo with Deans Joseph W. Tedesco and Kyle Squires, of the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering and ASU's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, respectively, at Old Main on the Tempe campus, June 29. Santello and Contreras-Vidal lead the ASU and UH sites for the new National Science Foundation-funded Building Reliable Advancements in Neurotechnology, or BRAIN, an IndustryUniversity Cooperative Research Center. Photo by Jessica Hochreiter/ASU Download Full Image

Building Reliable Advancements in Neurotechnology, or BRAIN, is an IndustryUniversity Cooperative Research Center dedicated to bringing new neurotechnologies and treatments to market. The center was officially funded earlier this year with a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, and has already attracted nine industry partners.

BRAIN held its first industry advisory board meeting June 2930 on ASUs Tempe campus, bringing together stakeholders to begin charting the course of the collaboration.

Neurodegenerative diseases are one of the biggest challenges society faces today, said Professor Marco Santello at the outset of the meeting. An aim of the center is to not only develop new devices and strategies in the realm of neurotechnology, but validate existing ones as well.

Santello and Professor Jose L. Contreras-Vidal, directors of the respective ASU and UH BRAIN sites, will lead the center, which includes more than 40 faculty members from ASUs Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering and UHs Cullen College of Engineering.

The pair defined the centers five main research areas as neurological clinical research, mobility assessment and clinical intervention, invasive neurotechnology, noninvasive neurotechnology and neurorehabilitation technology.

Santello, who also serves as the director of the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, said BRAINs areas of interest are intentionally broad as to fully investigate all potential solutions, approaches, and outcomes related to neurotechnology.

Contreras-Vidal, who also leads UHs Laboratory for Non-invasive Brain-Machine Interface Systems, noted the unique faculty resources that UH and ASU bring together, whose research expertise encompasses neuroscience, invasive and noninvasive interfaces and neuromodulation, neuroimaging, rehabilitation technologies, big data and bioinformatics as well as regulatory science and law and neuroethics.

Though a stable of researchers firmly rooted in neurology, data, device development and clinical trials are essential to BRAINs success, equally important is the inclusion of regulatory law experts. To this end, Contreras-Vidal is leading a Research Collaborative Agreement between UH and the Food and Drug Administration.

Brain activity measurements, such as scalp electroencephalography, have both diagnostic value in and of themselves, and also value as objective endpoints for measuring the efficacy of other medical devices. However, despite their growing importance, very little is known about the constancy and variability of these measurements in real complex settings in healthy individuals and in the patient population. Nevertheless, the efficacy and safety of EEG-based diagnostics and therapeutics depend on such scientific understanding, Contreras-Vidal said. Thus, understanding of the population distribution of EEG-based biometrics is regulatory science that contributes to personalized medicine and to the development of better biomedical devices.

Professor Barbara Evans of UH, whose background includes engineering, earth science and law, will serve as a resource for regulatory processes, issues and strategy, noting its sometimes necessary to think five or 10 years ahead.

This type of work is going to take careful thought about how to address the FDA, and work out regulatory solutions, said Evans, who is also the director of the Center on Biotechnology and Law at UH. The burden of neurocognitive diseases is a pressing problem. While there are pharmaceutical solutions which have promise, there is even greater promise in terms of the research at BRAIN and I believe we have to attack these diseases on every front. The main thing I hope to do is help translate wonderful technology to market and help people.

The nine industry partners include companies such as Medtronic, the CORE Institute, Indus Instruments and Brain Vision LLC, as well as medical institutions such as the Phoenix Childrens Hospital and The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research Memorial Hermann Hospital.

Eric Maas, a Medtronic representative, said his company was drawn to the immense talent pool contained within BRAIN.

This partnership not only benefits Medtronic, but the world, Maas said. Big companies like ours like to go after big problems, but a center like this opens up paths to solve smaller, sometimes overlooked illnesses that deserve attention.

For Dr. David Adelson, director of the Barrow Neurological Institute and chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Phoenix Childrens Hospital, BRAIN has been a long time coming. Adelson has long since been an advocate for bringing cutting-edge research to clinical care, pushing for a center like BRAIN for some time.

So much of medicine is focused on adults and not children, and so much of is applicable to pediatric care, said Adelson, noting that traumatic brain injury is the leading cause of disability and death in children and adolescents in the U.S.

United with invested industry partners, the multifaceted, transdisciplinary research approach of ASU and UH caught the interest of the National Science Foundation as a way to address the big picture challenges of brain research.

The technical expertise of both ASU and UH goes without saying, but both universities did well in bringing together industry members to get this center off the ground, said Dmitri Perkins, director of the NSFs IUCRC program. Brain research is in general an area of great national interest. The NSF looks for centers with potential to deliver great impact in their areas of study as well as the possibility to work with other IUCRCs, universities and industries, and we see that here.

VisitBRAIN onlinefor more information about the center, or contactSantelloandContreras-Vidalto discuss partnership opportunities.

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BRAIN center gathers to ponder future, direction - Arizona State University

Bad Advice: The Exquisite Political Correctness of Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’ – National Review

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Conservatives cataloging the unhappy results of Americas permanent sexual revolution could do worse than to make Slates Dear Prudence column appointment reading. Just prepare for some bleeding from the eyeballs.

Dear Prudence, which runs several times a week and is written, in its current iteration, by author Mallory Ortberg (Texts from Jane Eyre), is consistently one of Slates most-visited pages. Though Ortberg herself is the spiritual descendant of such traditionalagony aunts as Amy Dickinson (Ask Amy) and Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), her Prudence has found its niche by dispensing advice that is at once clickbait-friendly (the most outrageous question is always the lede) and perfectly calibrated, in its unbending sexual permissiveness, to win the Lefts approval. As one wag in the comments section recently put it (in slightly amended fashion), if Dear Abby is where one goes to read about thank-you notes and families fighting over beach houses, Dear Prudence is where one struggles to keep up with the ever-evolving politics surrounding polyamory and trans.

Now, about those scare quotes.

One of the delights of reading Dear Prudence the experience is by no means without its pleasures is witnessing the pushback from some of the columns less enlightened fans. For every three readers applauding Ortbergs refusal to be appalled by, e.g., brothersister incest (except, predictably, to the extent that it harms a third party), there are one or two who still bless their deplorable hearts put trans in quotation marks. The effect, though decidedly dissonant, is on balance reassuring: Ortbergs Prudence dispenses increasingly ridiculous progressive orthodoxies, and a not insignificant portion of her audience, well, laughs at them.

Consider, for example, last Mondays column, in which a bisexual graduate student (the Platonic ideal of a Dear Prudence advice-seeker) wrote in to ask if she should abandon her long-term mnage trois now that Dave and Sue, the husband and wife with whom she resided, were expecting a child together and had begun to ostracize her. Ortberg was as helpful as one can be while thinking and speaking exclusively in amoral, activist-culture clichs (This is not a safe situation for you), but a number of her readers took a sterner tack. It doesnt surprise me, wrote Naturefist in the comments section, that the married couple doesnt want to bring their bisexual f*** buddy to a church baby shower. Another reader, Timberhitch, agreed: Theres a reason why extramarital relations are frowned upon in every society Ive heard of. Timberhitch overstates the case, perhaps (has he or she met the French?), but the point remains a good one: Regular people the great unwashed, in Edmund Burkes oft-repeated phrase know both instinctively and by hard experience that to live as the sexual Left preaches is to enter a world of confusion, heartbreak, and deep, abiding dissatisfaction.

Not that one would guess any of that by reading Ortbergs responses.

Like its parent, Slate, Dear Prudence exists seemingly to reassure progressives that their path is the only true and right one. In service of this project, Ortberg presides over a fiefdom in which all official correspondence every conclusion reached in the column proper is unfailingly, sometimes dizzyingly, correct.

Examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to count, but three recent exchanges provide a flavor: the young transgender woman who ought, in Ortbergs view, to estrange himself from his family should the latter choose not to refer to [him] by [his] actual name and cease to intentionally misgender [him]; the letter-writer who wondered if she was bisexual enough to inform her live-in boyfriend (Ortbergs answer: Theres no bisexual critical mass [that] someone has to achieve in order to justify coming out); and the mother who made the mistake of asserting that she still love[s] her [daughter] even if she is gay. When you tell someone, I still love you even if you are gay, Ortberg replied, what you are really saying is this: Obviously being gay is worse than being straight. It would be an obstacle in the way of my love for you, but I am willing to overlook it.

The problem with these cubes of p.c. baloney aside from the fact that, if heeded, theyre likely to leave Ortbergs readers in worse shape is that their cumulative effect is to move acceptable discourse (indeed, acceptable thought) ever leftward. Because Ortberg makes pronouncements rather than arguments when discussing the latest trends in gender and sexuality, the casual reader could be forgiven for believing that the argument has already happened somewhere, that the Left won, and that the only remaining thing is to climb on board. In other words, Dear Prudence is dangerous because it does precisely what advice columns have always done: It shapes its readers sense of what is proper, what is expected, and what is owed. That, in doing so, it sneaks just ahead of popular opinion while implicitly presenting itself as mainstream is, of course, exactly the point.

Which is why those comments sections are so important.

Tucked alongside the relativism with which some readers responded to the aforementioned sibling-incest query (If they were both adults its icky but not wrong) was a good deal of feedback that, while perhaps exaggerated (Brother/sister unions are the sort of ick that should be put down with ironfisted force and severe public humiliation), was at least sane. Yes, Internet debates can be crass, counter-productive, and unkind. Yes, they can bring out the worst in people. But its a big, unruly, heterogeneous country out there, still, despite the efforts of Prudence et al.

Sometimes its helpful to be reminded of that fact.

READ MORE: Cleaning Sidewalks Might be Offensive, Apparently Bikini Wax Exam Question Gets Professor Accused of Sexual Harassment Evergreen State Asks Profs to Take Students Feelings into Account When Grading

Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.

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Bad Advice: The Exquisite Political Correctness of Slate's 'Dear Prudence' - National Review

Forget political correctness, we can handle the truth – New Vision

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How I wish the label Bobi were acceptable under parliamentary decorum, it would spice things up in the august House, surely.

Jim Mugunga is the spokesperson and Senior Public Relations Officer at the Ministry of Finance

By Jim Mugunga

As you read this, the self-styled ghetto president, Bobi Wine, is the new Member of Parliament for Kyaddondo East constituency. He is now Hon. Robert Kyagulanyi Sentamu, maximum respect!

How I wish the label Bobi were acceptable under parliamentary decorum, it would spice things up in the august House, surely. Kyagulanyi secured a landslide victory by ticking all the right boxes in as far as his electorate are concerned. During the campaigns, he ate, dressed and cried with the down trodden of the ghetto community just as he opted to sing, dance and give them hope as well as he agitated for their rights.

The simplicity of his message made him the darling of the majority. It was not about his dress code, his hair style or speech but about the issues he addressed and related to.

We are now able to see how Bobi Wine did this:

He stayed true to his beliefs. He is a grounded champion whose rise to popularity and celebrity lifestyle never changed him. He associated with his ghetto constituents and fully adopted their lingua. He rarely drunk or dined away from them. He did not embrace political correctness, in other words, he did not sugar coat his message but called a spade a spade. He opted for simplicity, fact and truthfulness. When his people tasked him to reach out to KCCA over excesses in evictions, he delivered a hit song, Tugambire ku Jennifer, a direct appeal to the KCCA executive director.

While the seasoned politicians opted for the politically acceptable lingua and persona as they rallied for votes, he did the reverse. They were rudely awakened to the reality that the electorate is tired of the existing party structures and the not-so-believable campaign stories. Their desperate attempts to stick to the same old lies and maintain the status quo left a sour taste in the mouths of voters.

So, Bobi Wine, realist and mercilessly truthful, emerged the winner. He defied the status quo and realised that it is now time for the straight talkers, the non-conformists and non-pretenders to move mountains. Individuals frowned upon in yester years, are now attracting the protest vote, from Trump in the US to Macron in France!

The conformists are of course rattled by the straight talkers. They are stuck in the old ways of believing that niceties, political correctness and talk of respect are the measure or epitome of civility. It is this standard by which they choose to operate and demand that all other politicians and public servants do the same. This is living in denial of the giant wave of change that the public is clamouring for.

Another victim of this outdated belief is Keith Muhakanizi, a no-nonsense straight talking rapid speaker whose forthright nature many mistake for arrogance.

Muhakanizi has diligently worked his way up from a junior job in the Ministry of Finance to now Permanent Secretary and Secretary to the Treasury. Since being mentored by the likes of Tumusiime Mutebile, Mayanja-Nkangi, and Gerald Sendaula, among others, Muhakanizi has been a key player in the Ugandan economy for over 30 years. It is during this period that the country has recorded phenomenal economic recovery, tilting real GDP growth towards the 10% mark at one time.

He is part of the core team responsible for ensuring a functional banking sector, restructuring state enterprises, to taming leakages and stopping subsidies. In the same period, they set up the modern securities exchange, reformed and resuscitated production, manufacturing, hospitality and corporate governance. He engineered and promoted re-tooling of old school public service with major reforms that emphasised re-skilling and training for a thriving workforce for the public and private sector in the region and beyond. He recently took the bull by the horns and reformed civil servants salary pay structures; as well pushed for adherence to the governments single account project.

Yes, he is evidently not your so courteous fellow as he goes about his business, especially as he delivers a message that the majority do not want to hear. The same style is reminiscent of a younger Kahinda Otafiire and the former Ministry of Works Permanent Secretary, Muganzi.

They all have one thing in common: brutal truth delivered in conviction. They study issues and with conviction attempt to outgun their opponents through interface. They do not use superiority to force them into submission but instead their opponents fail to engage intellectually and baptise the truth bearers as arrogant; a sign of the characteristic bad loser.

If one cannot find a suitable response to a position as advanced and instead becomes diversionary; that merely endorses the superiority credentials of the other party.

It is time we stopped wasting time by seeking niceties and we demand for performance. There is political correctness fatigue among the people. The population is yearning for issues to be addressed and services delivered. That Muhakanizi can face MPs and tell them about lack of funds for their next fleet of motor vehicles may not endear him to them, but it is the truth. That he can dictate terms to help pensioners gain their rights against a system that had stripped them of the same makes him a hero to the pensioners. They see performance and not arrogance.

The country is now ready for a Parliament full of truth tellers, ready to fight for others rights and not just seeking political correctness.

The writer is the spokesperson and Senior Public Relations Officer at the Ministry of Finance

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Forget political correctness, we can handle the truth - New Vision

Turkey’s new school curriculum drops evolution and will teach concept of jihad – The Independent

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Turkey's new school curriculum drops Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and adds the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

The move has fuelled fears President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is subverting the republic's secular foundations.

The chairman of a teachers' union has described the changes as a huge step in the wrong direction for Turkey's schools and an attempt to avoid raising "generations who ask questions".

Turkey's president RecepTayyip Erdogan wins referendum to greatly expand powers

Ismet Yilmaz, the country's education minister, said the controversial decision to exclude the theory of evolution was "because it is above the students' level and not directly relevant."

A member of the opposition Republican People's Party, Mustafa Balbay, said any suggestion the theory was beyond their understanding was an insult to high school students.

"You go and give an 18-year old student the right to elect and be elected, but don't give him the right to learn about the theory of evolution...This is being close minded and ignorant."

The theory of evolution is rejected by both Christian and Muslim creationists, who believe God created the world as described in the Bible and the Koran, making the universe and all living things in six days.

Mr Erdogan, accused by critics of crushing democratic freedoms with tens of thousands of arrests and a clampdown on media since a failed coup last July, has in the past spoken of raising a "pious generation".

The curriculum, effective from the start of the 2017-2018 school year, also obliges Turkey's growing number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools to teach the concept of jihad as patriotic in spirit.

"It is also our duty to fix what has been perceived as wrong. This is why the Islamic law class and basic fundamental religion lectures will include [lessons on] jihad," Mr Yilmaz told reporters. "The real meaning of jihad is loving your nation."

Jihad is often translated as "holy war" in the context of fighters waging war against enemies of Islam; but Muslim scholars stress that it also refers to a personal, spiritual struggle against sin.

A woman takes a selfienext to the statue of Omer Halisdemir in Istanbul, in front of a memorial with the names of people killed last year during the failed coup attempt(AFP/Getty Images)

Mehhmet Balik, chairman of the Union of Education and Science Workers (Egitim-Is), condemned the new curriculum.

"The new policies that ban the teaching of evolution and requiring all schools to have a prayer room, these actions destroy the principle of secularism and the scientific principles of education," he said.

Under the AKP, which came to power in 2002, the number of "Imam Hatip" religious schools has grown exponentially. Erdogan, who has roots in political Islam, attended one such school.

He has spent his career fighting to bring religion back into public life in constitutionally secular Turkey and has cast himself as the liberator of millions of pious Turks whose rights and welfare were neglected by a secular elite.

Liberal Turks see MrErdogan as attempting to roll back the work of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Western-facing founder of modern Turkey who believed education should be free of religious teachings.

A woman holds placard depicting Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan during 'National Unity March' to commemorate the one year anniversary of the July 2016 botched coup attempt (AP)

Some government critics have said the new curriculum - which was presented for public feedback earlier this year - increased the emphasis on Islamic values at the expense of Ataturk's role.

But MrYilmaz said nothing about Ataturk or his accomplishments had been removed. Changes only emphasised core values such as justice, friendship, honesty, love and patriotism.

He said discussion of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Isisand the network of the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara blames for last year's attempted coup, would also be added.

Mr Balik, the head of the union, said the changes were being made in an attempt to stamp out dissenting ideas.

"The bottom line is: generations who ask questions, that's what the government fears," he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters

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Turkey's new school curriculum drops evolution and will teach concept of jihad - The Independent

What City Ants Can Teach Us About Species Evolution And Climate Change – Undark Magazine

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Acorn ants are tiny. Theyre not the ants youd notice marching across your kitchen or swarming around sidewalk cracks, but the species is common across eastern North America. In particular, acorn ants live anywhere you find oak or hickory trees: both in forests and in the hearts of cities.

Cities are a microcosm of the changes that are occurring at a planetary scale on an urbanized Earth.

Thats why theyre so interesting to Sarah Diamond, a biology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Were comparing this little forest island within a city to traditional forest habitats, she says. Specifically, she and her colleagues are looking at how well city ants can tolerate higher temperatures compared to their rural cousins. The experiment is made possible by whats known as the urban heat island effect, which describes the tendency of the built-up infrastructure of cities think heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, for example to create a hotter environment than less developed areas.

The urban island effect is several degrees Celsius warming as you go from rural habitats to urban habitats, Diamond says. A few degrees may not seem like a huge difference intuitively, but its on par with the amount global temperatures are expected to increase over the next decades.

The impact of climate change is something we cant simulate easily in natural ecosystems, but the artificial environment of cities may provide needed clues. We can take advantage of this unnatural experiment to see how organisms are responding to altered climatic regimes, Diamond says.

She and her team collected ant colonies from various sites in the city of Cleveland and in the surrounding countryside of Ohio. They then compared how colonies from each site adapted to the temperature conditions for both urban and rural environments. No matter how they mixed and matched temperatures, Diamond says, the urban ants always have higher heat tolerance, and they always lose their cold tolerance compared to the rural ants.

And because ants born in the lab only grow up in that environment, researchers have found that they seem to experience real genetic change, not just a shift in behavior, says Ryan Martin, one of Diamonds collaborators at Case Western. You can separate out those acclimatory effects, compared to those effects that are divergent between urban and rural ants [due to] genetic change. In other words, ants born from urban parents have higher tolerance to heat than ants born in rural environments, even when those newborn ant babies have never experienced the same conditions as their parents.

Diamond and her colleagues see the same effect in ants from places with measurably different climates, including Cincinnati, Ohio; Knoxville, Tennessee; and northern Florida. Theyre also expanding their research to include terrestrial isopods (the common critters known variously as pillbugs, sowbugs, and roly polies, among other names). The ultimate goal is to help answer a profound question: Can we predict how well some species will adapt to climate change based on how well they do in cities?

Cities do a lot more than generate heat, of course. They contaminate the soil and air, alter patterns of water drainage and sunlight exposure, radically increase noise pollution, and break up habitats. In the process, they routinely force plants, animals, and microbes to adapt or disappear. And studies have shown that the time scale for these environmental disruptions is astoundingly short compared with the usual rates of change in the natural world.

Cities are a microcosm of the changes that are occurring at a planetary scale on an urbanized Earth, says Marina Alberti, professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington. Humans in cities are changing the rules of natures game. Empirical evidence is showing that we selectively determine which species can live in cities and cause organisms to undergo rapid evolutionary change.

A number of researchers have become interested in urban ecology because of those relatively fast changes. Most North American cities are less than a century or two old, and the number of humans living in cities has jumped dramatically over the last 100 years. Even though thats a blink of an eye compared with the history of Earth, eco-evolutionists like Diamond are finding a wealth of measurable differences between urban organisms and members of the same species living in undeveloped ecosystems. Their experiments are beginning to reveal how quickly evolution can act under pressure.

Charles Darwin began On the Origin of Species by talking about artificial selection: how humans have bred animals and plants to bring out some features and suppress others. Any number of species have been domesticated, from dogs to pigeons to corn, changing from their wild form into something different. Artificial selection can be extremely rapid, simply by controlling how domesticated species reproduce.

Urban evolution, on the other hand, is still controlled by natural selection. What separates it from normal natural selection is that humans are the indirect source of the selection pressures. Our actions restrict nesting spaces by chopping down trees, paving over places for plants to sprout, and driving out some predators while bringing in new ones like cats and dogs. And of course, we raise temperatures by replacing vegetation with concrete, building with heat-absorbing roofs, and introducing greenhouse gases such as ozone from engines.

Our findings of rapid change of many plants and animals demonstrates the power of natural selection even in our cities, says Alberti. Many species will continue to go extinct, but we show that others are evolving the necessary strategies and physical characteristics to coexist with humanity. Understanding the role we play in planetary eco-evolution will provide us with the information to make better decisions and build more sustainable urban settlements.

But how large and rapid are these changes? And how can we separate fundamental changes in organisms makeup due to evolution from behavioral shifts? For instance, city ants havent evolved into a distinct species from country ants, even if they still exhibit measurable genetic shifts. Urban-dwelling birds, on the other hand, sing at higher pitches to be heard over the noises of the city. But its unclear if that behavior is a genetic change, or if their offspring would resume normal levels of singing if they were raised in the country.

In a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alberti and her colleagues found more than 1,600 cases from around the world in which urbanization has produced measurable evolutionary effects. Those effects include changes in the size of seeds or offspring, what kinds of food animals eat and where they nest, and how species interact with each other. The cases include plants, invertebrates (insects and so forth), and a range of vertebrates, from fish to birds.

Because of rapid urbanization, these changes occurred on the scale of centuries or less. By showing the genetic differences between urban and rural acorn ants, Diamonds experiments in Cleveland revealed that the shift must have occurred since the city began its modern period of growth. Thats roughly 100 years, or about 20 generations of acorn ant queens. And the shift might have been even faster, since were only seeing the end result, not the incremental changes since Cleveland began to change into a modern city.

Andrew Hendry of McGill University, one of Albertis coauthors on the recent study, says he suspected that the urban heat island effect is less significant than other problems city-dwelling organisms face, such as habitat loss or the breaking up of habitats into small discontinuous pieces. Even so, he added, that doesnt mean temperature isnt an important factor: When it comes to specific things the temperatures affecting, it can give us some guidelines about how fast can things evolve, what types of organisms can evolve faster or slower, or respond strongly or weakly in respect to temperature.

In other words, an organism that evolves rapidly in the city might do better in general when trying to adapt to a warming world. All the weedy, invasive species, like cabbage white butterflies, are doing fine, Diamond says. Thats little consolation, though. Just as cities contain a shadow of the biodiversity of the rural landscape they replace, climate change could result in a cascade of species loss.

Just as cities contain a shadow of the areas former biodiversity, climate change could result in a cascade of species loss.

What you find is urban populations have lower [genetic variation], says Martin. Presumably, that means theyve used up some of that variation in evolving, but it also might mean theyve lost some of their ability to respond [to environmental changes].

Diamonds ant lab is dominated by a row of environmental growth chambers. They resemble refrigerators, but their interiors can run the temperature gamut from hot summer days to cold winter nights. She opened one and presented a cup designed to hold urine samples, familiar to anyone who has undergone medical or drug tests. No ones peeing in these, she says. Were putting acorn ants in them.

Inside the cup was an entire living colony of ants crawling around their acorn nest. Each insect is smaller than one eighth of an inch long, with a body so light orange-brown in color it is almost invisible against the acorn. Acorn ant colonies usually have fewer than 100 tiny workers, which explains how they can all fit into a single nut resting in the cup.

Most species arent as easy to study as acorn ants. Theyre either too big, reproduce too slowly, or dont survive well under lab conditions. However, by focusing on these tiny creatures and how they survive in living urban laboratories, we may be starting to understand how vulnerable all species are in the uncontrolled experiment known as climate change.

Matthew R. Francis is a physicist, science writer, public speaker, educator, and frequent wearer of jaunty hats. He blogs at Galileos Pendulum.

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What City Ants Can Teach Us About Species Evolution And Climate Change - Undark Magazine

Evolution Mining: Gold Miner Delivers Strong 4Q – Barron’s

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Barron's
Evolution Mining: Gold Miner Delivers Strong 4Q
Barron's
Evolution Mining shares last traded up 1.4% at AUD2.18. The stock is up roughly 3% this year. The rise in the value of the Australian dollar to a two year high against the greenback has seen the Australian dollar price of gold fall from a high of AUD1 ...

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Evolution Mining: Gold Miner Delivers Strong 4Q - Barron's

MGM buys Evolution Media to expand Mark Burnett’s TV division – L.A. Biz

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MGM buys Evolution Media to expand Mark Burnett's TV division
L.A. Biz
MGM said Evolution will operate as Evolution Media, an MGM company, with founder and Chief Executive Douglas Ross as president of the acquired business and executive vice president of programming and development. Alex Baskin will become its ...

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MGM buys Evolution Media to expand Mark Burnett's TV division - L.A. Biz