Trees and Qi

As I mentioned in a recent article, scientists have uncovered that plants emit inaudible acoustic signals that can help to encourage the growth of other plants. This is significant to energy work practice in light of ongoing Chinese research on Qigong, which has found that Qigong masters emit infrasonic waves that seem to encourage healing in the cells of their patients. I recently came across this article discussing a new book called Blinded by Science by Matthew Silverstone. In the book, Silverstone compiles studies that seem to indicate vibrations produced by trees are also beneficial to human health.

The author points to a number of studies that have shown that children show significant psychological and physiological improvement in terms of their health and well being when they interact with plants and trees. Specifically, the research indicates that children function better cognitively and emotionally in green environments and have more creative play in green areas. Also, he quotes a major public health report that investigated the association between green spaces and mental health concluded that "access to nature can significantly contribute to our mental capital and wellbeing".

So what is it about nature that can have these significant effects? Up until now it has been thought to be the open green spaces that cause this effect. However, Matthew Silverstone, shows that it is nothing to do with this by proving scientifically that it is the vibrational properties of trees and plants that give us the health benefits and not the open green spaces.

Truck Thief Pursued by Zombies

The walking dead are on the loose in Temecula, California. At least, that's the claim made by Jerimiah Hartline, who stole a truck in an attempt to flee from the undead monstrosities. Hartline led police on a wild chase during which he crashed the truck several times and injured seven people as he tried to escape both the law and the shambling zombie menace.

The California Highway Patrol says Hartline stowed away in the truck in Tennessee and stole it when the driver got out at roadside scales near Temecula, Calif.

The CHP says after Hartline caused several crashes, the big-rig overturned on Interstate 15 and spilled its load of strawberries. Seven people were injured.

CHP investigators say Hartline told them he had to speed and swerve because he was fleeing from the walking dead.

There you have it, folks - clear evidence of the coming zombie apocalypse. The creatures who pursued Hartline were not stopped by police, nor were they witnessed by anyone else on the scene. Clearly these monsters have developed the power of invisibility that only Hartline can see through, which means that they could be seeking fresh brains just about anywhere and in the process spreading their foul plague far and wide. Today Temecula, tomorrow the world - and in the ensuing chaos there won't be nearly enough trucks out there for everyone seeking refuge to steal.

Swaziland Regulates Flying Witches

The regulation of magical practices is not uncommon in parts of Africa and Asia. Recently a Civil Aviation Authority official in Swaziland confirmed that witches riding broomsticks are prohibited by law from flying any higher than 150 meters. The law was put into place to protect the country's airspace and is not unlike laws in the United States that limit ultralight flights to 500 feet, only slightly higher than the Swaziland law specifies.

Witches’ broomsticks are considered similar to any heavier-than-air transportation device that is airborne, reports The Star. “A witch on a broomstick should not fly above the [150-metre] limit,” Civil Aviation Authority marketing and corporate affairs director Sabelo Dlamini told the newspaper. No penalties exist for witches flying below 150 metres.

The report said it was hard to say how serious he was, but witchcraft isn’t a joking matter in Swaziland, where the people believe in it. The statute also forbids toy helicopters and children’s kites from ascending too high into the country’s airspace.

Like all witches that are currently believed to exist in the real world (as opposed to those found in Hollywood movies and Halloween-based tourist attractions), Swaziland's witches are not reputed to fly through the air on broomsticks. So it may be that Dlamini was kidding around or using an outrageous example to illustrate the law. However, this strikes me as a rather dangerous statement to make in country where people are still killed by angry mobs for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

Immortal Consciousness

I recently came across this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing an idea familiar to magical practitioners and which I have been considering since working on my experimental psychology degree back in the early 1990's. The concept of building a body of light or field of consciousness that is self-sustaining and therefore immortal has been part of the Western Esoteric Tradition for a very long time, and when you combine that notion with the rapid advancement still going on in computing technology this is what you get - the possibility of preserving the mind as essentially a mathematical object that can be simulated in a digital environment.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson played around with this idea in his novel Neuromancer, both in the form of a sentient artificial intelligence and a "ROM construct" that represented the uploaded and stored mind of an individual preserved at the moment of death. Researcher Ken Hayworth believes that our technology will soon reach the point where this is no longer fiction, and may be possible to achieve by constructing complete maps of individual brains called "connectomes."

Connectomics is a new way of looking at an old idea. Since the mid-19th century, scientists have known that the brain comprises a dense web of neurons. Only recently, however, have they been able to get a detailed glimpse. The view is daunting. A piece of human brain tissue the size of a thimble contains around 50 million neurons and close to a trillion synapses. Scientists compare the task of tracing each connection to untangling a heaping plate of microscopically thin spaghetti.

In 1986, researchers did manage to map the nervous system of a millimeter-long soil worm known as C. elegans. Though the creature has only 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses, the project took a dozen years. (The lead scientist, Sydney Brenner, who won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002, is also at Janelia Farm.) C. elegans's remains the only connectome ever completed. According to one projection, if the same techniques were used to map just one cubic millimeter of human cortex, it could take a million person-years.

Creationist Science Quiz

This image has been circulating on the Internet for awhile, but I ignored it because I thought it had to be a hoax. The ease with which pictures can be faked is well known, and it's hard to believe any school would ever administer such a quiz. I've heard of the controversies over school boards packed by conservative Christians who want to give teachers the "freedom" to teach alternatives to evolution, but a quiz like this really takes the cake. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be real. That's right, there's an actual school that teaches this nonsense in science classes.

To start with, this photo is real, and was part of a quiz given at Blue Ridge Christian Academy, a private religious school. Since the school is private, and not public, this is not a violation of the First Amendment (unlike the flagrant stomping of the Constitution going on in Louisiana). In other words, this school can legally teach this. My complaint, therefore, is not a legal one. My complaint is one of simple reality. Young-Earth creationism is wrong, and it’s certainly not science. For that reason alone, ideally it shouldn't be taught as truth anywhere, let alone a science class.

And it’s not just wrong, it’s spectacularly wrong. It’s the wrongiest wrong that ever wronged. We know the Earth is old, we know the Universe is even older, and we know evolution is true. Any one of these things is enough to show creationism is wrong. In fact, all of science shows creationism is wrong, because creationism goes against pretty much every founding principle of and every basic fact uncovered by science. If creationism were true, then essentially no modern invention would work. Since you’re reading this on a computer, that right there is proof enough.

That this would come from a private religious school makes sense, as I can't imagine even a highly compromised public school being quite this blatant. Still, what's amazing to me is how this particular strand of creationist thought is presented as indisputable, when in fact Christian denominations can't even agree on how it should be interpreted. Mainstream Christian churches disavowed young-Earth creationism long ago. For that matter, even Pat Robertson, one of the most prominent conservative evangelicals, came out against it back in November. So it would seem that the folks running this school are determined to raise the most ignorant children possible when it comes to understanding not only the natural world, but also the theological discourse within their own religious tradition.

Plants and Qi

One of the research findings that I covered awhile back related Qigong practices to the generation of infrasonic waves. Any Qigong student will tell you that plants have a particular sort of Qi or energy, different from that of animals but present nonetheless. Researchers have now found that plants do in fact produce microscopic sound waves that can influence the growth of other plants. It may be that practitioners who work with Qi are able to sense these same vibrations, as well as issue sonic vibrations of their own.

It’s long been known that planting basil near other species can tend to encourage its neighbor’s growth, and it’s not new that plants communicate with each other through shade, chemical smells, root structures and other forms of touch. What scientists at the University of Western Australia were looking at specifically is if there’s any other ways that plants communicate, and what they found is astonishing. By planting chili pepper next to basil, then separating them from all known methods of plant interaction, the chili plant still grew as if it knew the basil was there.

“We have previously suggested that acoustic signals may offer such a mechanism for mediating plant-plant relationships,” they explained in their conclusion (PDF), “and proposed that such signals may be generated in plants by biochemical processes within the cell, where nanomechanical oscillations of various components in the cytoskeleton can produce a spectrum of vibrations.”

So maybe Qi really corresponds to "energy" after all - sonic vibrations have a measurable physical intensity. This might also explain why some people seem to have "green thumbs" even when they are very casual about caring for their plants. The plants themselves may just like the infrasonic vibrations produced by those individuals. It's also no big secret that sonic waves such as those corresponding to the vibration of names of power and so forth play an important role in magical operations. Closer investigation of the properties of these waves could prove very fruitful in terms of quantifying paranormal phenomena.

Unicorn Horns

Stories of the magical use of unicorn horns go back to the Middle Ages. The horns that still exist in museums come from the narwhal, a species of whale that like the mythological unicorn grows a single horn from the center of its forehead. As this article published in the Harvard Gazette back in 2005 explains, the horn of the narwhal is far more than a simple horn or tusk. According to researcher Martin Nweeia it is a complex organ for sensing the temperature, pressure, and composition of the water around it.

Ten million tiny nerve connections tunnel their way from the central nerve of the narwhal tusk to its outer surface. Though seemingly rigid and hard, the tusk is like a membrane with an extremely sensitive surface, capable of detecting changes in water temperature, pressure, and particle gradients. Because these whales can detect particle gradients in water, they are capable of discerning the salinity of the water, which could help them survive in their Arctic ice environment. It also allows the whales to detect water particles characteristic of the fish that constitute their diet. There is no comparison in nature in tooth form, expression, and functional adaptation.

"Why would a tusk break the rules of normal development by expressing millions of sensory pathways that connect its nervous system to the frigid arctic environment?" asks Nweeia. "Such a finding is startling and indeed surprised all of us who discovered it." Nweeia collaborated on this project with Frederick Eichmiller, director of the Paffenbarger Research Center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and James Mead, curator of Marine Mammals at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.

What's most interesting to me is that one of the principal uses of the unicorn horn in folklore is as a magical implement to detect poisons, and in fact when attached to a living narwhal it would be sensitive enough to chemicals in the water to do exactly that. So how did that particular bit of information make it into the stories? It seems like a remarkable coincidence that the narwhal would use its horn for the exact same purpose that magicians did, when the science of how the horn works was only recently discovered.