The Raw Story

A non-profit news blog, focused on providing independent journalism.

Saturday, 13 June 2015

Impact of testosterone on amygdala depends on motivation rather than on the emotion itself

The activity of the emotion centres in the brain -- the amygdalae -- is influenced by motivation rather than by the emotions themselves. This can be concluded from research carried out at Radboud University into the hormone testosterone. Testosterone increases amygdala activity in a person who is approaching a socially threatening situation and decreases the activity when such a situation is avoided. It was already known that the amygdala response...

Freight train derails on bridge in Houston, TX causing several cars to fall off overpass

© Air 11 / KHOU 11 There were no injuries reported when several cars derailed on the bridge over Old Katy Road in Houston on Thursday. After a day of clean up after a train derailed along Old Katy Road, officials said the road should be reopened by Friday morning. The incident happened around 8:30 a.m. near Washington Avenue, just north of the Katy Freeway. According to a spokesman Jeff Degraff with Union Pacific, which runs the tracks, the Kansas...

Ya think?! A Machiavellian plan against Russia?

© Unknown Just 'cause yer machiavellian don't mean yer smarter than yer opponents, Barry. MOSCOW - To the Kremlin, recent events in its backyard have proved once and for all that the amorphous body known as 'the West' - its politicians, institutions, media, diplomats, armies, financial architecture and governance bodies - are not to be trusted. The charge sheet is long and contested: it starts with NATO's 'out of theater' bombing campaign in Yugoslavia...

Giant fire rainbow colors the sky over Bangkok and baffles residents

A giant fire rainbow appeared in the sky over Bangkok on June 9, 2015. Many users of social networks say this iridescent cloud could presage an anomalous natural event, like an earthquake. Well hopefully not! [embedded content] Such clouds have been witnessed and filmed just before apocalyptic earthquakes in China. ...

Canada gone crazy: Teenaged "ISIS supporter" guilty of no crime in custody in Winnipeg

Warning: supporting U.S.-backed terrorist groups can get you arrested. RCMP in Winnipeg have raided the rental home of an ISIS supporter known by the alias Harun Abdurahman and seized what's believed to be computer equipment. Neighbours say undercover officers have been watching the home in the city's southwestern neighbourhood of Charleswood for months. RCMP took out garbage bags containing what appeared to be computer towers. It's unknown if...

Unusual numbers of purple sea hares wash ashore near San Francisco

© Morgan Dill Giant sea slugs called sea hares have been washing up in some East Bay beaches in unusual numbers this summer. Giant sea slugs have been washing up on some Bay Area beaches in unusual numbers this summer, and some folks who aren't sure what the creatures are actually calling police thinking they've made a grisly discovery. The big purple blobs, called "sea hares," are invading East Bay beaches and waterways to the wonder and curiosity...

Russian Foreign Ministry to U.S.: Kiev National Guard just as bad as Azov Nazis

Moscow wants to remind Washington that other formations of the National guard of Ukraine are no better than the "Azov" battalion. This was stated by the official representative of Russian Foreign Ministry, Alexander Lukashevich, in connection with the ban on allocation of funds for training of "Azov", which was supported by the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress. "It took more then a year for the US Congress to realize that this unit...

Giant hail falls in Minooka, Illinois

As storms passed over the region, one of them found its way over Minooka and dumped giant balls of hail over the village, according to a public information statement from the National Weather Service and several photos that popped up on Facebook showing the hail. "There were multiple reports of hail up to 4.25 inches in diameter," the statement said. "Some of this hail caused severe damage to vehicle windshields." National Weather Service Meteorologist...

Trail-blazing ants show hints of metacognition when seeking food

© FLPA/Rex I think, therefore I ant sure. Do they know they don't know? Ants seem to examine their knowledge, a little like humans do when unsure of which route to take. Tomer Czaczkes and Jürgen Heinze from the University of Regensburg in Germany let black garden ants find food on a T-shaped maze, with the food always in one arm. Then they switched the food to the other arm, creating uncertainty for the ants. Ants that headed in the wrong direction...

Sinabung volcano unleashes hot ash a mile into the air on Indonesian island

Eruption: A farmer continues to tend to his field on the Indonesian island of Sumatra as Mount Sinabung erupts violently in the background A volcanic eruption in western Indonesia has unleashed hot ash over a mile into the air and threatens the lives of thousands in nearby villages. Mount Sinabung, which is located on the island of Sumatra, had been dormant for over 400 years before erupting in August 2010 when it killed at least two and made...

Elephant escapes from circus and kills 65-year-old man in Buchen, Germany

Elephant attack: The 65-year-old man was killed when the African elephant (not the elephant pictured) escaped from a nearby circus in the town of Buchen and attacked him in the early hours of this morning A 65-year-old man has been killed by an escaped circus elephant in Germany. The man was taking his regular early morning stroll in some woods near the southwest town of Buchen. The African elephant is believed to have attacked him shortly after...

Dallas police confirm shooter who attacked headquarters is dead

The man who opened fire on Dallas police headquarters early Saturday, riddling the building and a squad car with bullets from an armoured van, is dead, police confirmed.   They did not say whether he died from being shot by a police sniper during a standoff hours earlier or when police set off controlled explosions of his van at around noon CT.  #Breaking We can now confirm that the susp in the van is deceased but unable to confirm...

Dallas police HQ attack: Suspect believed killed during standoff

Suspect Mug Shot from Dallas County Sheriff’s Office that matches name given to police – James Boulware. A man unleashed a barrage of gunfire on Dallas' police headquarters and planted explosives outside the building early Saturday -- narrowly failing to wound anyone -- leading to a chase to a suburb that ended with officers shooting him in his parked van at a restaurant parking lot. Police believe they killed the suspect, though they haven't...

Protesters slam Bilderberg big boss elitist summit for lack of transparency

The Bilderberg conference, which bills itself as a forum for informal discussions held by the world's top brass, has drawn fire from protesters gathered near the Interalpen-Hotel Tyrol in Austria, accusing the attendees of corruption and elitism. After a rally on Friday, anti-Bilderberg activists re-emerged on Saturday afternoon to protest what many of them refer to as a gathering of criminals. Thousands of protesters are expected to assemble outside...

Dead fin whale seen off New Jersey coast

© Courtesy of Bill Lovgren A dead Finwhale seen here floating on Wednesday about 18 miles from the Manasquan Inlet. A pair of Point Pleasant Beach commercial fishermen working about 18 miles east of the Manasquan Inlet spotted a dead 40-foot whale floating on the surface. "I saw it on the horizon. We were making a tow at the time for flounders," said Capt. Dennis Lovgren of the 78-foot dragger Kailey Ann. "It was very white in color but there wasn't...

Dead humpback whale found on shore of Mount Desert Island, Maine

© Allied Whale A dead humpback whale identified by researchers as Spinnaker floats off Great Head on Mount Desert Island on Thursday. Spinnaker, a humpback whale who cheated death a few times by becoming entangled in and then freed from ropes floating in the ocean, has run out of luck. The body of the 40-foot-long female whale washed up Thursday on the shore of Mount Desert Island, a researcher with Allied Whale said Friday. Spinnaker was 11 years...

Great white shark bites boat in New Zealand waters

© nzuploader03/YouTube Shark attack A great white shark took a bite at a fishing boat's engine in an encounter that left three fishermen in awe. Three boat mates Jack Lucas, Chris Pom and Adam Ellington were jigging for kingfish in Auckland's Hauraki Gulf when a small great white approached their boat. The shark began circling their boat and then attempted to take a bite out of their boat engine. "You could feel it was going to take the motor off...

Are we in a post-antibiotic world?

Antibiotics are one of modern day's greatest discoveries, but it's failing us. By our own hand, we have abused this medical achievement by using it as a "fix-all", and it has caused antibiotic resistance issues that spans across the globe. In fact, antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest health threats of the 21st century. Superbugs, Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), drug resistant Typhoid, and multidrug-resistant...

Wildfire in drought-parched California threatens small remote town

© U.S. Forest Service A lightning-sparked wildfire has grown to nearly 1,000 acres An out-of-control wildfire raging through a Northern California forest as the state battles a devastating drought has forced authorities to warn about 250 people to evacuate or prepare to leave their homes in a remote town, officials said on Friday. The fire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest follows an outbreak of lightning-sparked blazes in neighboring Oregon...

Untold stories: First-ever US Nakba Museum opens in Washington DC

© Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope Facebook page When Bshara Nassar arrived in Washington, DC, he strolled along the National Mall and passed myriad museums dedicated to exposing the painful history of oppressed peoples: the National Museum of the American Indian, the Holocaust Museum, Laogai Museum, the list goes on. He quickly recognized there was no "place for the Palestinian story to be told," which inspired him to launch the first-ever...

Saudi Arabia, another one of Washington's military proxies

© Reuters/Faisal Al Nasser A Saudi artillery unit fires shells towards Houthi positions from the Saudi border with Yemen April 13, 2015. Several posts on this site about Britain's 'special friend' have referred to the United States of America. Today seeing a barrage of news accumulating about another special friend, Saudi Arabia, aka Britain's biggest arms market last year, an overview of the last quarter follows. At the closing session of a two-day...

Lugansk delivers ultimatum to Poroshenko

© AFP 2015 / Pool/Grigory Dukor If Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko intends to tighten the Donbass economic blockade, he should make such decisions in the presence of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande, who brokered the Minsk-II deal together with Russian President Vladimir Putin, head of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic said. On Friday, the Ukrainian parliament introduced a bill to ban trade...

Thousands of tuna crabs invade San Diego beaches

© KGTV Thousands of tuna crabs washed up on a California beach. Thousands of tuna crabs have invaded the beaches of San Diego Bay. The thumb-sized crustaceans started washing ashore further up the California coast earlier this year, but turned up this week in San Diego in unusually larger numbers, officials said. They've washed ashore periodically over the years because of any number of natural effects, but research scientist Michael Shane of...

At near absolute zero, molecules may start to exhibit 'exotic states of matter'

© Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT MIT researchers have successfully cooled a gas of sodium potassium (NaK) molecules to a temperature of 500 nanokelvin. In this artist's illustration, the NaK molecule is represented with frozen spheres of ice merged together: the smaller sphere on the left represents a sodium atom, and the larger sphere on the right is a potassium atom. The air around us is a chaotic superhighway of molecules whizzing through space and...

Two injured by floods and dozens of cars swept away in Ankara, Turkey

© AA Flooding in Ankara Two people were injured and dozens of cars were damaged in flooding after heavy rain on the evening of June 11 in Turkey's capital Ankara. Boğaziçi Neşet Ertaş Street, one of the main thoroughfares in Ankara's Mamak district, was flooded and daily life in the capital was paralyzed by the heavy rain. Two people were reportedly injured, while around 100 cars were swept away and damaged. Municipal workers and locals tried to...

Two brothers die after inhaling sewer fumes in Dublin tragedy

Stephen and Alan Harris were working at a housing estate Another man has died in a double tragedy after being overcome by fumes while working in a sewer. Stephen Harris, 34, of Monasterboice Road in Crumlin, Dublin, lost his fight for life in Beaumont Hospital at 9am today. He was caught up in the same suspected methane gas incident which claimed the life of his brother, Alan Harris, a father of two, on Wednesday. The pair had been inspecting...
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