According to NASA scientists, space smells a lot like my uncle’s workshop. One can detect hints of fried steak, hot metal, and the welding of a motorbike. They have hired Steven Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients, to recreate the smell in a laboratory. NASA will use his research to help train potential astronauts. Steven stated, “I did some work for an art exhibition in July, which was based entirely on smell, and one of the things I created was the smell of the inside of the Mir space station. NASA heard about it and contacted me to see if I could help them recreate the smell of space to help their astronauts.”
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Posted by: in Housing
Filed under: Housing, Financial Crisis
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I’ve always imagined that one of the great joys of belonging to a Socialist group would be not worrying about the well-nigh incomprehensible fluctuations of the stock market. While other people may lose sleep over the screaming highs and soul-crushing lows of the capitalist economies, hard-core socialists just have to worry about plebian things like political purity, the potato harvest, and whether or not the shops currently have razor blades in stock.
With that in mind, I feel somewhat sorry for the Provisional Irish Republican Army. While they rejected the Communist tendencies of the “Official” IRA in the 1960’s, they still self-identified as a “non-Marxist Democratic Socialist” organization. However, when they signed a ceasefire in 1997, they rebelled against this identity and invested their funds in the property market and, subsequently, in high-high-dividend deposit accounts in the U.S. According to some reports, Wall Street’s current meltdown may have cost the former terrorist group as much as $274 million.
Needless to state, IRA financial advisors are currently “in a say of panic,” as they’re watching their funding (and potential political power) evaporate. There’s no word yet on whether or not Baader-Meinhof, Shining Path, or Black September were invested in the market!
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Posted by: admin in Today News
Helping people trying to dig their way out of debt - Asahi Shimbun
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ddelmonte writes “This Washington Post article examines a test conducted at UCLA. The test had two groups, young people who used the World wide web, and older people who had never been on the internet. Both groups were asked to do World wide web searches and book reading tasks while their brain activity was monitored. ‘We found that in reading the book task, the visual cortex — the part of the brain that controls reading and language — was activated,’ Small said. ‘In doing the World wide web search task, there was much greater activity, but only in the Internet-savvy group.’ He stated it appears that people who are familiar with the World wide web can engage in a much deeper level of brain activity. ‘There is something about World wide web searching where we have the ability to gauge it to a level that we find challenging,’ Small said. In the aging brain, atrophy and reduced cell activity can take a toll on cognitive function. Activities that keep the brain engaged can preserve brain health and thinking capability. Small thinks learning to do Internet searches may be one of those activities.”
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According to a study to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, you can tell someone’s political affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess. Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia. Their conservative contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials. Their bedrooms and offices are well lit and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags — especially American ones. Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, states these room cues are “behavioral residue.” The findings are just the latest in a series of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. I, for one, support a woman’s right to clean.
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Posted by: admin in Today News
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