Critical Exponent

Here’s an article on the Mahrer Arar investigation.

The New York Times reports on a study about brain activity in people in the thralls of new love.

…the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

Wired News: Volez ce MP3!

New Scientist reports on eleven steps to a better brain, including which Yoga poses are most brainificial:

Last year, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported results from a pilot study in which they considered the mood-altering ability of different yoga poses. Comparing back bends, forward bends and standing poses, they concluded that the best way to get a mental lift is to bend over backwards.

Ongoing work on the W3C Semantic Web

A Detroit high school was not looking forward to upgrading its hardware in order to upgrade their software. The solution, which saved them over $100,000? Switching to open source. They set up the aging PCs as Linux terminals (see the Linux Terminal Server Project) and gave all faculty and staff access to the OpenOffice.org suite, which in many cases works better than MS Office…

A view from the proper perspective. I got this from Slashdot.

Here’s an article on gay couples who employ surrogate moms. In many cases, the surrogates prefer working with gay families to working with straight families.

Read all about people who consider themselves asexual. Debate seems to center around distinguishing when such lack of interest in sex (I can’t imagine!) is innate and when it may be due to a disorder or a traumatic experience…. I guess that’s a valid discussion, as long as we allow people to identify themselves as asexual if they so choose. It bothers me that some are trying to pathologize asexuality, and yet I can see that it could be (possibly, maybe) an indicator of something “wrong” in some cases. Why do I feel that this is reminiscent of early debates over gay liberation? Maybe it’s one person quoted in the article:

“To me, to say that someone is ‘asexual’ is tantamount to saying that they’re not a human being,” says Barnaby Barratt, a sex therapist in Detroit and president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. “I would be profoundly critical of the idea that ‘asexuality’ is an ‘orientation’ or that it’s somehow the inevitable way that some people are born”

Here’s a NASA article on Voyager traversing the last reaches of the solar system.