Get ready for the sexapocalypse – some say it’s already here We are living through the golden years of apocalyptic storytelling, and nothing is immune from dystopia fever – even sex. In fact, the sexapocalypse has been with us since at least the days of Hieronymous Bosch, a 15th century Dutch painter famous for depicting the end of days in vast canvasses packed with tiny figures enjoying bizarre sexual scenarios. More recently, novels like The Handmaids Tale and comic Y the Last Man suggest that horrific gender scenarios will play a major role in our dark future.
But is the sexapocalypse really something to fear? Or could it actually usher in a new era without the old sexual hangups and oppression that many of us struggle with today? We asked a group of brave scientists and science fiction writers what they think the coming sexapocalypse will bring.
A sexapocalypse can be many things, from a scenario where one gender is wiped out or humans can no longer reproduce, to stories about dystopian sexual hedonism (think Logan’s Run or Brave New World). No matter what, the sexapocalypse is sure to usher in a strange new world where sex is changed forever.
Get ready for the sexapocalypse – some say it’s already here In the early 1980s, cyberpunk author Rudy Rucker published a bizarre novel about math and alien invasion called The Sex Sphere. In it, humanity is nearly destroyed when the planet is invaded by aliens who are made of nothing but sex organs, and seemingly exist entirely to latch onto humans and have constant sex with us. Eventually there’s a showdown with a giant vagina dentata, and everything returns to normal. So naturally, I turned to Rucker for a sense of what a sexapocalypse might look like. Inspired by Bosch’s work, which he said “didn’t look like much fun,” he wrote this hallucinatory description:
A simple idea is that any part of your body can sprout a penis or open up into a vagina. “We just shook hands.” Telepathy could be a kind of sexual thing, too—-after all, a big part of sex is getting into a deep feeling of synch with your partner. The synch aspect is one reason why music can seem so sexual. So on sexapocalypse day the Big Beat starts up and everyone’s rocking it. We melt into gouts of sperm and roly-poly eggs. We wriggle into the ground. Ma Earth swells up like a milkweed pod. She splits open and our star-children drift to the stars. Here we come!
So this sexapocalypse, which doesn’t sound too bad, offers us Earth and the stars instead of spirituality and Heaven.
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Inside the Brain: An Interactive Tour “What happens in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease? This tour explains how the brain works and how Alzheimer’s affects it. Taking the tour: There are 16 interactive slides. Move forward or back one slide at a time by clicking on the arrows. You can also jump to any slide by clicking on its number at the top of each page. As you view each slide, roll your mouse over any colored text that appears on each page to highlight special features of each image.”
U.S. colleges with the most transfer students are University of Phoenix online campus (35,515); Excelsior College in Albany, NY (16,541); Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ (5,446); University of South Florida in Tampa, FL (4,623); and University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL (4,455). – Provided by RandomHistory.com
Generation of children are becoming zombies because of late-night gaming sessions, claims charity.
Volcanic origin for Little Ice Age.
Life of crime is in the genes, study claims – .
Ultrasound zap to stop sperm production .
Skin transformed into brain cells.
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10 Foreign Remakes of American TV Shows Very Different Than the Original
The U.S. is known (and probably not in a good way) for taking other countries’ popular shows and turning them into something much less palatable for American audiences. There have been several successes, including some that you probably don’t realize weren’t ours to begin with, but a large percentage of the foreign shows are ruined when we import them. Have you ever wondered which U.S. TV shows have been botched in a similar way — or at the very least, turned into a weird, localized version of the program we knew? Many of our shows are just dubbed for foreign viewers, but some lucky series got recreated or edited beyond recognition.
Happy Together
When you think of your favorite U.S. sitcoms in the last few decades, Married … With Children probably isn’t at the top of your list. But this show has been remade all around the world: Argentina to Armenia, Germany to the UK. The Russian version, called Happy Together, was an incredible success, probably even more liked than the original was in its home country.
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Martha’s Vineyard’s signature apparel retailer Vineyard Vines pokes fun at the Occupy Movement with a $35 White Cap ribbed-collar imported cotton tee that features a typical Vineyard “beach baron” protesting in favor of “more time on the water.”
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Magic Mushrooms Could be Key to Treating Depression
Studies of the effects of psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, show that rather than increase brain activity, as was previously believed, the drug actually suppresses activity in areas of the brain associated with depression. Some antidepressants also target activity in these brain regions, leading researchers to wonder whether psilocybin could someday be used therapeutically to treat depression. The studies also show that psilocybin may relieve cluster headache symptoms by reducing blood flow in the hypothalamus. More …
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The U.S. military already has a kennel-load of bomb-sniffing dogs. But getting those four-legged weapons-hunters ready for war requires a ton of time and patience from a human trainer. No more, the Army hopes. They want an automated system that can prep dogs and rodents to spot bombs. Good call, Pentagon! As they surely learned on the internets, dogs love computers.In the military’s latest round of small business research awards, the Army doled out three contracts to create computerized animal coaches. Their plan is to come up with “a rugged automated trainer system” that would prep “large quantities of animals” to seek out explosives and landmines.The initiative, Rugged Automated Training System, or, yes, RATS, is the latest in a series of Pentagon-backed ventures to turn furry mammals into mine hunters. Dogs remain the military’s best explosives detector – boasting an 80 percent success rate – much to the chagrin of top brass who’ve doled out more than $19 billion for high-tech bomb-detection research since 2004. Rodents, including giant African pouched rats, have sniffed out land mines across Africa and are undergoing military-funded study for their potential to track down mines in warzones.
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As the Sabbath evening approached on Jan. 13, Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country’s history and one of its most experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of the general staff for the Israel Defense Forces, interior minister, foreign minister and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Israel’s inner security cabinet, the most important decision of his life — whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation — the first of several over the next week — lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall. “This is not about some abstract concept,” Barak said as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, “but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.”
When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi — that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible “in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.” As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”
Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as “Israel’s ability to act,” “international legitimacy” and “necessity,” all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:
1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?
2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?
3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran’s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?
For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel’s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.
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One of the most enduring epithets for Hamas, right up there with “terrorist,” is “proxy.” If you Google “Hamas Iran proxy,” you get 1,750,000 hits. The idea that the relationship between Sunni Hamas, the Gaza affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Shia Iran was merely a marriage of convenience and not a true love match is rejected by those who forget that most enduring maxim of Middle East politics: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” And implicit in that maxim are two more words: “for now.”
This conventional wisdom is due for a makeover. On January 17, a Ha’aretz headline announced “Hamas brutally assaults Shi’a worshippers in Gaza.” The article reported that Hamas fears “growing Iranian influence in Gaza.” But for years, we have been told that it is Hamas itself that represents Iranian influence in Gaza. What gives?
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United States Launches Explorer I (This Day in 1958)
Explorer I was the first American satellite. It was launched four months after the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, was put into orbit by the Soviet Union, beginning the so-called space race. Although it carried a number of instruments, Explorer I was relatively small, weighing just 30 lbs (13 kg). It stopped transmission of data later in 1958, when its batteries died, but remained in orbit for more than 12 years. Where did it make its fiery reentry? More…
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In a recent essay in The Times, Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, wrote about preparing American students for the future. In the essay, he said that international experience was essential, arguing that English’s emergence as the global language makes the investment in other languages less essential.
Does he have a point? Even though Americans aren’t as monolingual as you might think, is learning a language other than English a worthwhile investment?
I frequently get asked in America why India’s caste system, a pre-feudalistic division of labor that assigns one’s line of work at birth, has persisted into the 21st century. I typically answer: the need of the privileged upper castes for cheap labor. But there is an even more tragic explanation, as I discovered during a recent visit to New Delhi while talking to Maya, the dalit or untouchable — the lowest of the four castes — who has serviced my family for 35 years. Maya herself clings to her caste because it still offers her the best possible life in India.
What’s puzzling about the caste system is that it endures without legal force. Unlike slavery, where whites actively relied on authorities to maintain their slave holdings, the caste system is an informal, self-perpetuating institution.
How? Consider Maya’s story.
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FEMEN Protests at World Economic Forum
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ISAF, Afghan forces capture al Qaeda ‘facilitator’ in east
Afghan and Coalition special operations forces captured an al Qaeda facilitator during a raid in the eastern province of Paktia today.
The al Qaeda facilitator “coordinated insurgent activity throughout the area and provided reports to senior al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan,” the International Security Assistance Force stated in a press release. The name and country of origin of the al Qaeda facilitator was not disclosed by ISAF.
This the first ISAF press release noting the capture or death of an al Qaeda operative since Nov. 29, 2011, when another facilitator was detained during a raid in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Similarly, there has been a gap in recent ISAF reporting on operations against the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which has a strong presence in the Afghan east; no such operations were reported between Dec. 8, 2011, and Jan. 29. Just yesterday, however, ISAF reported on the killing of an IMU leader who directed suicide attacks in Takhar province.
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