PARADIGM SHIFT: WOO IN THE NEWS FROM DRUDGE

Reading today’s Drudge Report, we’re treated to a plethora of bizarre news stories, including one about an upcoming Amy Winehouse “hologram” tour, and Newt Gingrich’s plan to save the world from North Korean nukes AND giant solar flares. But perhaps the most intriguing stories involve a breakthrough in mind-reading technology as reported on by FOX News (which turns out to be not quite so groundbreaking as the headline suggests). From the article:

"There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said. For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information. “This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.

The images in question:

Now, we do have to keep in mind that the images in this article were created a full two years ago – the paper based on the findings being published just now – so who knows what advances have been made in the interim?

Another intriguing report in today’s Drudge involves this report from Extreme Tech, which describes upcoming trials in human suspended animation. From the article:

At a hospital in Pittsburgh, surgeons are now allowed to place patients into a state of suspended animation. If a patient arrives with a traumatic injury, and attempts to restart their heart have failed — if they’re on the doorstep of death — they will have their blood replaced with a cold saline solution, which stops almost all cellular activity. At this point, the patient is clinically dead — but if the doctors can fix the injury within a few hours, they can be returned to life from suspended animation by replacing the saline with blood. Or at least, that’s the theory.

I, for one, would be very happy if Drudge stuck to bringing us woo-based news, because his politics are annoying as it gets, and frankly suck donkey balls through a straw.