On October 10, 2009, a Cyclone of Slack will slam into Portland bringing true SubGenius mutation back to Stumptown for the first time in a decade!
Cast aside your false profiteers and your hipster biscuits, and bask in the Yetisyn glow of true Dobbsian mutation! Experience the gene-twisting joy of a SubGenius Devival in all of its mutated glory!
* See the psychedelic sights not meant for mere Normals!
* Hear the hindbrain-boggling ranting of SubGenius Doktors directly channeling the Elder Gods!
* Smell the third-nostril opening aromas of full-bore Yetis in heat!
* Feel the tidal wave of the TRUE SLACK that we were all meant to experience
when the CYCLONE OF SLACK hits Portland!
Featuring:
REV. IVAN STANG!
DR. HOWLAND OWL!
PRINCESS WEI R. DOE!
REV. DR. ONAN CANOBITE!
THE DUKE OF UKE!
REV. CRAWFORD!
With the Musical Stylings of:
POWER CIRCUS!
NEQUAQUAM VACUUM!
CULT OF ZIR!
And:
an utter lack of NENSLO!
Heavy metal blues: Japan’s new first lady rode a UFO to venus
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s next prime minister might be nicknamed “the alien,” but it’s his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another world.
“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.
“It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.”
Yukio Hatoyama is due to be voted in as premier on September 16 following his party’s crushing election victory over the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Sunday.
Miyuki, 66, described the extraterrestrial experience, which she said took place some 20 years ago, in a book entitled “Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered.”
When she awoke, Japan’s next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she had just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream.
“My current husband has a different way of thinking,” she wrote. “He would surely say ‘Oh, that’s great’.”
Yukio Hatoyama, 62, the rich grandson of a former prime minister, was once nicknamed “the alien” for his prominent eyes.
Miyuki, also known for her culinary skills, spent six years acting in the Takarazuka Revue, an all-female musical theater group. She met the U.S.-educated Yukio while living in America.
(Reporting by Colin Parott; Editing by Linda Sieg)
via: Reuters
The next 200 years: are Modern Humans Evolving Faster?
“We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals.”
John Hawks -University of Wisconsin anthropologist
In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.
The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival.
A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimates that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone -dating back to the Stone Age – has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution. Many of the new genetic adjustments are occurring around changes in the human diet brought on by the advent of agriculture, and resistance to epidemic diseases that became major killers after the growth of human civilizations.
“In evolutionary terms, cultures that grow slowly are at a disadvantage, but the massive growth of human populations has led to far more genetic mutations,” says Hawks. “And every mutation that is advantageous to people has a chance of being selected and driven toward fixation. What we are catching is an exceptional time.”
While the correlation between population size and natural selection is nothing new – it was a core premise of Charles Darwin, Hawks says – the ability to bring quantifiable evidence to the table is a new and exciting outgrowth of the Human Genome Project.
(the Rest: Daily Galaxy)
Open Source DNA
In the chilling science fiction movie Gattaca, Ethan Hawke stars as a man with “inferior genes” who assumes another’s genetic identity to escape a dead-end future. The 1997 film illustrates the very real fear swirling around today’s genome research — fear that private genetic information could be used negatively against us.
Last year, after a published paper found serious security holes in the way DNA data is made publicly available, health institutes in the United States and across the world removed all genetic data from public access.
“Unfortunately, that knee-jerk response stymied potential breakthrough genetic research,” says Dr. Eran Halperin of Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik School of Computer Sciences and Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology. He wants to put this valuable DNA information back in circulation, and has developed the tool to do it — safely.
