Help Timothy Leary Live In Cyberspace!

Before 1960's counter-cultural icon Timothy Leary died in 1996, he knew that one of the tools that could keep him immortal to future generations was computer technology, or more specifically, the internet. It's a little over a decade later and it looks like his dream may come to fruition in a way that could make him even more influential than he ever was in life.

The Timothy Leary estate is currently seeking donations to have his archives completely digitized and uploaded to the world wide web. With over 500,000 typed documents, including hundreds of letters from luminaries such as Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley and Abbie Hoffman, as well as documents from his Harvard research and hundreds of hours worth of audio and video footage, the project is proving to be a huge undertaking, and probably the first of its kind. Not only will it please Leary fans who wish to know every possible known facet of his life, it would provide the history of the entire psychedelic movement.

According to the estate, the newly planned site would be completely searchable and indexed, and that "Dr. Leary had this dream before most people even knew what the internet was, or how important it would become."

Despite being known as a distinctly 60's figure, Leary was a leading proponent in moving people towards the future with technology. In a 1995 interview posted on EcoMall.com, Leary said, "In the 1980's, of course, an incredible event happened which changed American culture--a new media developed. Radio developed as a new media in the twenties and created the jazz age and a changed America and of course television changed America by bringing the world into our living room. But it was all passive. The problem with the sixties, the problem with television watching, is it's passive consumption... But in the 1980's an incredible technological advance happened in media--computers--YOU could change what's on your screen."

As the internet developed and became more mainstream in 90's, Leary took to it immediately, and may have even been one of the first bloggers as he documented his declining health nearly daily.

The amount of bandwidth needed for a massive Timothy Leary archive isn't cheap; however, and donations can be made here to actualize the groundbreaking project.

NASA To Seek Life On Other Planets

NASA recently announced that the biggest camera to ever be launched into outer space will soon scour the Milky Way galaxy for warm, rocky, "Earth-like" planets that may host life. The Kepler spacecraft is scheduled to spend 3 1/2 years looking at more than 100,000 stars similar to our sun, with the rest of us hoping that some Star Wars-like universes actually exist.

"Kepler will push back the boundaries of the unknown in our patch of the Milky Way galaxy. And its discoveries may fundamentally alter humanity's view of itself," Jon Morse, director of NASA's astrophysics division, told reporters.

The spaceship will cruise around the "habitable" zones of stars--areas where a planet wouldn't be so close as to be burnt to a crisp, and not so far away as to be frozen. But to give some perspective on this issue, 300 some planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than our sun since 1995, but most are large gas planets unlikely able to host life. William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California remains optimistic; however, with Reuters reporting that he estimated Kepler could find as much as 50 rocky and water-containing planets.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and scientists could spend the next 3 1/2 years looking at grainy video images of barren planets instead. The mission starts March 5, and NASA says it will cost $591 million--let's hope it finds some needy extraterrestrials because there's plenty of life forms here on earth that could use such funds right now.

Dogs Help Fight Cancer and Other Deadly Diseases

According to an article found at Health.com, the future of cancer prevention may be in the nasal passages of canines.

The Pine Street Foundation, a cancer education and research center in San Anselmo, Calif., is training dogs to literally sniff out early stage ovarian cancer. The Foundation now holds success in training dogs to identify patients with lung and breast cancer, but only in the late stages of the diseases.

Nicholas Broffman, executive director of the foundation, gave the following quote:

“Is there something about the breath of people with cancer that is different in people who do not have cancer?” Broffman wants to know. “Our goal is to identify what collection of molecules in the breath are unique to ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, and lung cancer, and develop a test to find those.”

The use of animals in disease detection is not new, and other animals have been used to detect disease.

Scientists are likely years from identifying exactly what the dogs detect in the difference between the breath of those with cancer and those without. Eventually, scientists hope to discover the type of cancer a patient suffers from and even use a mechanical device to do so.

“It would be great to have a Breathalyzer-type machine that could do this,” Broffman says. “Our goal is to identify what collection of molecules are unique to ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, or lung cancer, and can we develop a test to find those. Scientifically, this is very difficult.”

Dogs are able to detect nuances in scents that scientific devices cannot, allowing them to be the at the forefront of cancer prevention.

To read more about dogs and other animals used to fight disease, read the original article at Health.com.

Name A Cow, Get More Milk

An article found on Discovery News describes a new study, published in January in the journal Anthrozoos that has found that cows with names produce more milk.

Call a cow by any name and it will be more productive according to cattle behaviorist Catherine Douglas, of Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Cows like to feel good and not like they are just any cow.

Cows with names have more relaxed behavior, and previous studies have shown that elevated stress hormones like cortisol reduce milk production by interfering with the milk-boosting hormone oxytocin. Anxiety also makes cows more difficult to milk because they stomp and kick.

"If you call a cow by name, it indicates that perhaps you talk to her more, perhaps you consider her more of an individual, perhaps you have more of a one-to-one relationship," said Douglas, who has seen firsthand the consequences of stress in a cow. "Personally, I have had a black eye and broken ribs from milking."

For the study, Douglas and colleague Peter Rowlinson surveyed 500 farmers around the UK about their feelings on cows--both their own and others.

Of those surveyed, almost half of the farms named their cow. Of the named cows, they were reported to produce an average of 258 more liters of milk over the 10-month milking season, or about an extra liter a day than cows without names.

Although dairy cows don’t produce milk until their second year, the study also found that cows that were treated well between the ages of six months and 15 months produced more milk later on.

The study reflects findings of how other animals respond to stress and fear and also has implications about how farmers treat their animals, even as farming becomes increasingly industrialized.