M.J. Rose

This is a beautiful and heartbreaking story. Fascinating beyond imagination. A story that would make a most interesting and eye-catching film – Who wants to write the screenplay?

For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II

In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga

“Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air…”

Read more here.
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Have you ever wondered if we are someone else’s dream? And if so, whose dream are we? Ancient religions have posed these questions for thousands of years, and science may finally be catching up…

Physicists testing to see if universe is a computer simulation

By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News

“Could this be a computer simulation? (Space.com)

Will you take the red pill or the blue pill?

Some physicists and university researchers say it’s possible to test the theory that our entire universe exists inside a computer simulation, like in the 1999 film “The Matrix.”

In 2003, University of Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom published a paper, “The Simulation Argument,” which argued that, “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.” Now, a team at Cornell University says it has come up with a viable method for testing whether we’re all just a series of numbers in some ancient civilization’s computer game…”

For the complete post, click here.

Those of us who are creative types may, sadly, already be aware of this – and therefore it is not much of a mystery to us! The good news is that with increased scientific understanding may come better treatments, but let’s hope that whatever treatments are discovered treat the illness without damaging the genius that often comes along with it…

Creativity ‘closely entwined with mental illness’

By Michelle Roberts

Health editor, BBC News online

“Creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people.

Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found.

They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.

The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder…”

For the complete piece click here to go to the BBC.