Vice
oracknows | July 12, 2017I had a bit of a rough day yesterday. By the time I was done with work, I was just too tired to write my usual length Insolence. I was, however, fortunate enough to see something that reinforces something I wrote last week. Last friday I discussed the politicization of vaccine policy that has been occurring over the last few years and that has accelerated since the battle over SB 277, the law in California that eliminated nonmedical (i.e., personal belief) exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Specifically, antivaxers, particularly at the state level, have co-opted the rhetoric of…
omnibrain | December 1, 2010I love creative design. Here begins a new theme on Omni Brain.
Do you only have a small cabinet and need to fit in as many drinking tools as possible? Do you want to get sticky booze all over your house? This is for you!
-via gizmodo-
sb admin | November 16, 2007
Anti-drug ad parody that's also an anti-drug ad itself. This is Your Brain on Heroin: Any Questions?.
omnibrain | September 28, 2007Mind Hacks has alerted us to some amazing engineering from Harvard University:
A team from Harvard Medical School are interested in how smoked marijuana affects the brain, but have come to the inevitable conclusion that it's actually quite hard smoking a joint when you're lying on your back being brain scanned.
So the research team put their heads together (!), and realised they needed to design a bong - a water pipe for smoking marijuana - safe to use in an MRI scanner.
This isn't a trivial task. Apart from being free of metal parts that could be affected by the MRI scanner's strong magnet,…
omnibrain | July 27, 2007Since we're talking about panicking about drugs today, complements of Robot Chicken:
omnibrain | July 27, 2007Stop smoking pot immediately! You WILL go CRAZY!!! Panic!
The study by Zammit and colleagues, published in the medical journal the Lancet, reanalyzed data from seven long-term studies on psychotic illnesses and marijuana involving 61,000 participants.
The researchers filtered out about 60 factors, such as preexisting mental illness and the use of other illicit drugs, and considered IQ and social class, to try to isolate the effect of marijuana, Zammit said.
Most of the studies that were analyzed indicated a range of increased risk for frequent users from 50% to 200%, with the average being…
omnibrain | February 19, 2007A study from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Center in Australia has shown that nearly a third of people under the age of 30 think marijuana is totally uncool. Drug abuse is clearly a problem that has to be dealt with through education and treatment programs (don't get me started on the war on drugs though). The only problem with this statistic is that people might think marijuana is uncool for totally inaccurate reasons that they pick up either through a lack of education (or even more bothersome - mis-education).
It seems that a possible reason that people believe pot is so…
omnibrain | February 15, 2007In the ongoing battle between the DEA, farmers, patients, and scientists there has been nothing but contradictory information. It looks like with a couple new pieces of news that the pro-marijuana (the medical kind) people might be coming out ahead.
For researchers studying marijuana, it's been a very good week. In one of the most careful studies to date, marijuana was found to relieve pain. And a judge ruled in favor of an agronomist who has has been trying for six years to overcome one of the problems of marijuana research: the lack of an adequate supply of the drug for experiments.
The…
omnibrain | February 13, 2007
A couple months ago we posted a number of very disturbing cigarette warning labels from around the world and wondered whether perhaps a picture of a rotting, stinking, bleeding tumor on a guys throat would perhaps help lower the incidence of smoking. In the March issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine researchers have taken a step toward showing big obnoxious warnings are the best.
The abstract does a good job describing the study so I'll let them do it:
Text and Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packages: Findings from the International Tobacco Control Four Country Study…
omnibrain | January 31, 2007Here's the basic story...
New work by a team of researchers has shed light on why hallucinogenic compounds cause altered states in creatures. It has long been known that hallucinogenic compounds have a high affinity for a certain receptor in the central nervous system (5-HT2A, or 2AR), and that when these receptors are blocked, the hallucinogenic side effects are mitigated. What has remained a mystery is why other non-hallucinogenic compounds with a similar affinity for these 2ARs do not produce similar side effects.
How do you know a mouse is tripping balls? It's not like you can show them…
omnibrain | January 28, 2007 Check out the brains of mice on drugs. This site is a very strange one to say the least- it starts with a bunch of high mice in a club of sorts just struggling to stand up. Then the interactive flash demo starts in which you have to drag a mouse into a comfy chair which transports it into a weird device that shows what's happening to the mouse's brain depending on what it snorted, smoked, or injected earlier.
Freakin' weird - a wee bit trippy ;). Especially from an academic institution.Check out the Mouse Party.
omnibrain | January 26, 2007SMOKERS who suffer damage to a particular part of their brains appear to be able to quit their nicotine habit easily - a discovery that might open new avenues of addiction research.
A study of smokers who had suffered brain damage of various kinds after a stroke showed that those with injuries to a part of the brain called the insula were in many cases able to quit smoking quickly and easily - saying they had lost the urge to smoke altogether.
The insula receives information from the body and translates it into subjective feelings such as hunger, pain and craving, including craving for drugs…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007It seems that alcoholics just can't seem to get a joke. In this study from Germany, participants underwent a series of tests including, mood, intelligence, memory, psychomotor skills, and their ability to enjoy a joke.
For example, one of the jokes tested on the subjects began as follows: It was Mother's Day. Anna and her brother had told their mother to stay in bed that morning. She read her book and looked forward to breakfast. After a long wait she finally went downstairs. Anna and her brother were both eating at the table.
The subjects were given a choice of five punchlines:
a) Anna said…
omnibrain | December 18, 2006
In no particular order...1) Being a south paw promotes survival from attacks (well at least in crabs). It seems thatThe left-handed advantage is realized when snails interact with predators of opposite handedness. Some predatory crabs are "righties" -- and have a specialized tooth on their right claw that acts like a can opener to crack and peel the snail shells. "The 'sinistral advantage,' or advantage to being left-handed, is that it would be like using a can opener backwards for the crab to crack and peel the snail shell,"
Does something like this apply to humans? We're still waiting…
omnibrain | December 17, 2006An interesting History channel segment about Aldous Huxley and his mescaline use.
If you haven't read The Doors of Perception - or really most of his other works - you should!