There are certainly physical phenomena we do not yet understand, but peer-reviewed study, is the only way to go about it IMO. Anything else is either bad science, or on occasion, outright quackery/bullshitting. Sometimes (cough cough 'doctor' wakefield..cough) both.

I would think though, that although there are indeed electromagnetic fields generated in-vivo, thanks to the nervous system being essentially electrical in nature, the strength of the currents are not going to be anywhere near significant enough to move metal, even using a superconducting magnet of moderate/small size, there needs to be significant energy dumped in  (indirectly, I.e to produce the liquid nitrogen/liquid helium in the first place) to cool the thing down enough to make it superconduct, other forms of electromagnetic levitation exist, but generally require both much higher power levels than the couple of milliamps seen in your average action potential (current flow defining the opening of ion channels in neurons and depolarisation of the ion gradient of the cell axon/dendrites), in addition to the presence of resistance to magnetic permeability that the surrounding atmosphere presents, and the inherent lack of stability/feedback control in a simple mag-lev system without some form of control mechanism.

Chances are, even if the human body were able to produce enough of an EM field, and direct it consciously, I would guess that the most that would be possible is to chuck something across the room in a fairly uncontrolled, unstable way. Magnetic fields provide very little inertial damping without some sort of spatial confinement.

Then again, I'm a bio guy, rather than having any head for physics, math does not agree with me much.

Some people "want to believe" in independent verification. For some of us... it is more functional than personal anecdotes, constantly substituting fact with opinion instead, focusing only on the facts we think are important, and promoting only the ideals we wish to instill onto others. None of these are compatible with the most effective and accurate acquisition of knowledge.

I suppose it is merely a question of logic than a question of desire. Logic in terms of the geeky and highly mathematical, repetitive behavior used in science isn't always neat and clean, and isn't 100% solid at debunking myths but it does allow for refinement. "Smoke and mirrors" don't allow for refinement... they allow for misdirection. David Blaine, Steve Valentine, or Ricky Jay (not necessarily listed in order of significance) are masters of misdirection. Ricky Jay runs a company called "Deceptive Practices". These guys don't pull the rabbit out of the hat. They make the rabbit appear out of thin air without a table or box underneath. They are the Houdinis of our time.

They can not read my mind or lift objects with theirs, however. Not many people can read my mind or decipher my behavior in live interaction. I'm not very transparent at most times.

So i guess some people think it's just people wanting to believe things, even the ones who claim to have abilities ? (thatd mean they're lying. I mean according to the statement. Not me).

I just see people talking normally together about things and don't think that it makes sense to assume they're all just a mixture of crazy / saw hallucination or lying people. it makes more sense when people say people coming out and saying they have an ability are lying, but not people lying -together- talking on a forum or channel. I just don't see it. (them being all either liars or crazy / mistaken

Would be scary if they were all lying together also because of the fact they spend time sitting there lying to each other for a long time ... I'd get bored. ( vs  its easier to see someone spending hours going out with their claim tho trying to prove abilities to someone tho

**also although I barely have abilities, things come up every once in a while, and even when not thinking about that these things seem possible to me

This post was last modified: 11-15-2011 08:03 PM by mels8780.

I am, in fact, a biology guy. An amateur biology hobbyist, but a biology guy nonetheless.


You, on the other hand, are a biochem guy. Biochem is what we yanks call "an AP credit" while one is still in boarding/public school. Biochem is a workload pain, mang.

The public education system of the US seems vastly different from the UK. Here we have what are called 'GCSE' exams, taken when leaving school at 16. Pretty basic really, and never really gets anywhere close to interesting. Basics of photosynthesis in plants etc.

What I really need is space to put things. Everywhere in the house is so crowded with stuff in general. Got some rather interesting stuff involving parasitic fungi (of grain, not humans) I want to be experimenting on, but nowhere suitable to plonk a decent-sized set of bubble column fermentors and a few hundred petri dishes laced with mutagens (I.e nasty carcinogenic stuff other people in the house do not need to be poking around/moving and/or buggering up), as a whole load of mutagenesis runs have to be done on your average wild-type ergot samples before one isolates a decent alkaloid-productive strain.

We have SATs and ACTs done once a year in may.

That's fascinating. Why are you producing ergot again?

Again? Hey, first time for everything. Up until now everything has been concentrated on obtaining sufficient wild-type samples to give a decent population base in terms of genetic material to start mutating the crap out of (with Claviceps purpurea, the ergot species I'm going to be experimenting on, at least, initially, the published mutagenesis studies I've read so far, mainly using nitrosamines, EMS, it tends to kill most of the cells its exposed to, although perhaps the likes of hydroxylamine, or benzene might prove a little less toxic), and many, many plates need to be cultured, and tested with van urk reagent to determine the rough alkaloid production.

That is, at least, until I can afford a cheap, secondhand UV or IR spectrophotometer for finer analytical resolution. As for the why...well many of the alkaloids ergots produce are quite valuable, to say the least. And besides, its something interesting to do, at least when one has an autie behind the lab bench rather than a pharm tech employee bored of his skull counting the hours until his shift is over and he can go and get pissed as a fart

Have a few things I want to try out that as far as I can tell have never been tried, in terms of procedures and additions to culture media to increase ergopeptide/lysergic acid yield, such as for instance, treatment with colchicine, a metabolic poison found in the bulbs of the autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale, also used as a treatment for gout, and in botanical/microbiology stuff to double the number of chromosomes in a plant. Acts to inhibit mitosis, and in animals, its a nasty poison, we don't tolerate extra, or missing chromosomes very well at all on the whole, with the exclusion of the sex chromosomes, especially the X chromosome which can have several duplicates without in many cases ever being noticeable in a female, delete a region or entire autosome, or add an extra, and the crap, in general, hits the fan.

With plants its a different story, treat a plant with colchicine, and one is likely to get increased growth, vigour, productivity of sought-after plant metabolites. And A single study, pretty sparse in detail, noted that in ergot fungi, increased physical vigor was the result of treatment with mitotic poisons, although no detail on alkaloid function was given, it was just a feeding study with radiolabelled nutrients, but hey, its inspiration also.

I think, it SHOULD increase alkaloid yield, given that for production of more than a few milligrams/liter of culture medium in submerged culture, a heterokaryotic state of the fungal hyphae seems to be absolutely essential. Usually done by crossbreeding, but why not try to do the same chemically, both with a single parent strain, creating in essence, an inbred strain (works for rednecks) and with already high-yielding isolates.

And for that matter, go the other way, and expose a few plates to a mitogen, and see what happens. Don't think thats ever been done. Not to my knowledge, and I've got, suffice as to say, quite a big bloody stack of papers studied and books read on the subject.

They are. But most of them is propably not even concious lie. they can get super emotional while doing it too since they really believe this crazy ***.

Take this dude.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHxkGN721Yo

There are a lot of people who believe it too. They are all lying to themself. The brain is capable of great trick on us. Even when you show them evidence to the contrary, they believe so hard in them lies they wont see the evidence.

Religious people all do the same thing.

If you mean people who have abilities (which is what I as talking about), that they're all lying or just believing so hard they're mistaken (some things people say are really hard to just hallucinate they happened, which leaves lying, but I also can't see people lying all *together* on a channel.

They are a bunch of lying idiots.

I have a question for you now. Should I be worried about that group of vampires and werewolves hanging out at the mall, or are they just lying/pretending?

My best friend's girlfriend has been a professional and very successful psychic for most of her life. Used to write for a national magazine, do stuff on the radio, do readings for very famous people, and so on.

There are at least 3 possibilities:
(1) She is lying.
(2) Her abilities are supernatural.
(3) She thinks that her abilities are supernatural, but they are not.

I am certain that my best friend's girlfriend is not a frauds or a liar. At the same time I am certain that any abilities she may have are not supernatural.

That leaves (3).

Remember that Uri Geller was feted as a psychic with the powers of psychokinesis and telepathy. He had enormous numbers of people convinced that he was the real deal, including some scientists. He was the guy that popularised "spoon bending". His tricks can be replicated by any competent magician, and he now prefers to refer to himself as a "mystifier and entertainer".

My aunt is a minister in the Spiritualist Church. She contacts the dead and stuff like that. I have no doubt that my aunt believes everything she preaches.

The reality is that the people who claim to have these abilities are a mixture of frauds/liars and space cadets who think they really can do this stuff.

This post was last modified: 11-16-2011 09:51 AM by 142857.

Whats more..I wouldn't call 'supernatural' phenomena, which in actual fact, do occur in one form or another, paranormal or supernatural at all. Merely things we do not yet understand.

If one were able to go back in time, with something as simple to us today, as a mobile phone, or flashlight, a few centuries, to the people living then, the ability to speak in real time to a person hundreds of miles, or entire continents away would be indistinguishable from 'magic' (or more likely, in those times, the work of the devil)

I've got a (fairly old) book on supernatural phenomena, called 'beyond supernature' by lyall watson, and IIRC, it details experiments where plants were burned in the presence of others of the same species which were themselves not subjected to injury, these second plants appeared to react in 'sympathy' with the ones that were damaged. This could easily be explained as a supernatural event, but modern research shows that plants actually do talk to each other, in some circumstances, notably certain species mimosa (or is it Acacia, I often confuse the two genera, might well be both) when trees are grazed by herbivores, release ethylene gas which acts as a plant hormone, causing other plants nearby to fold in their leaves in order to present as little target as possible when the animals find their dinner just vanished and decide to move on.


Or just read up a bit on quantum physics, for a modern day case of the same. Some of the stuff being discovered is pretty spooky, quantum entanglement, quantum tunelling, the Casimir effect, There is a hell of a lot we don't understand, scientifically, but it doesn't make it supernatural, the work of jesus/satan/both.

Whats more..I wouldn't call 'supernatural' phenomena, which in actual fact, do occur in one form or another, paranormal or supernatural at all. Merely things we do not yet understand.

If one were able to go back in time, with something as simple to us today, as a mobile phone, or flashlight, a few centuries, to the people living then, the ability to speak in real time to a person hundreds of miles, or entire continents away would be indistinguishable from 'magic' (or more likely, in those times, the work of the devil)

I've got a (fairly old) book on supernatural phenomena, called 'beyond supernature' by lyall watson, and IIRC, it details experiments where plants were burned in the presence of others of the same species which were themselves not subjected to injury, these second plants appeared to react in 'sympathy' with the ones that were damaged. This could easily be explained as a supernatural event, but modern research shows that plants actually do talk to each other, in some circumstances, notably certain species mimosa (or is it Acacia, I often confuse the two genera, might well be both) when trees are grazed by herbivores, release ethylene gas which acts as a plant hormone, causing other plants nearby to fold in their leaves in order to present as little target as possible when the animals find their dinner just vanished and decide to move on.


Or just read up a bit on quantum physics, for a modern day case of the same. Some of the stuff being discovered is pretty spooky, quantum entanglement, quantum tunelling, the Casimir effect, There is a hell of a lot we don't understand, scientifically, but it doesn't make it supernatural, (or) the work of jesus/satan/both.

Arthur C Clarke win.

Thats the thing, there is no people with abilities. So yes they are lying, conscienciously or not. There are a lot of fraud, but people want to believe so hard, despite the evidence of the contrary, just encourage them. Take Popof. Even though he was outed has a fraud, he is now back and people keep flocking to his gathering.

If anyone had any kind of power, they would have gone and done the Randy challenge. And all of them saying my power are not for show, or are not for my personnal gain can suck my cock: They will charge people, but would not do it for 1 million... That's a huge pile of *** right htere.