Look at this amazing interior designed by product design firm Nendo for a Tokyo mental health clinic. What appear to be doors are actually just wall paintings; doctors and patients enter and exit the rooms through sliding bookshelves and hidden openings in the wall.

Rather than getting patients back to a ‘zero’, a neutral starting place, the traditional model for mental health care, the clinic aims to provide patients with something extra: a further richness in their daily lives that they did not have before starting treatment. The interior design is an attempt to express this philosophy in space.

SOURCE: Boing Boing

BUCHAREST, Romania – In the latest bizarre claim to come out of Romania’s presidential race last year, the loser and his wife have claimed he was subject to attacks of negative energy by aides of President Traian Basescu during a crucial debate.

Former Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana who lost the Dec. 6 runoff, claimed Basescu ordered the attacks against him, Mediafax news agency reported Monday.

“During the Dec. 3 debate … people who were working for Basescu in this domain were present to the right of the camera. … I saw them and I know who they are,” Geoana told Antena 3 television. Geoana fared badly in parts of the debate.

His wife Mihaela Geoana said Saturday her husband “was very badly attacked, he couldn’t concentrate.”

Former President Ion Iliescu dismissed the allegations as “discussions for naive people, for uneducated people,” according to Monday’s edition of the daily Gandul.

Geoana aide Viorel Hrebenciuc has previously alleged there was a “violet flame” conspiracy during the campaign. He said Basescu dressed in purple on Thursdays to increase his chance of victory.

Asked about the violet connection, Basescu joked earlier this month that “it was the color of the year” in 2009.

Basescu narrowly won the election. Geoana’s Social Democracy Party claimed the ballot was marred by fraud.

SOURCE: Yahoo! News

Of all the sinister things that Internet viruses do, this might be the worst: They can make you an unsuspecting collector of child pornography.

Heinous pictures and videos can be deposited on computers by viruses — the malicious programs better known for swiping your credit card numbers. In this twist, it’s your reputation that’s stolen.

Pedophiles can exploit virus-infected PCs to remotely store and view their stash without fear they’ll get caught. Pranksters or someone trying to frame you can tap viruses to make it appear that you surf illegal Web sites.

Whatever the motivation, you get child porn on your computer — and might not realize it until police knock at your door.

An Associated Press investigation found cases in which innocent people have been branded as pedophiles after their co-workers or loved ones stumbled upon child porn placed on a PC through a virus. It can cost victims hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove their innocence.

Their situations are complicated by the fact that actual pedophiles often blame viruses — a defense rightfully viewed with skepticism by law enforcement.

“It’s an example of the old `dog ate my homework’ excuse,” says Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The problem is, sometimes the dog does eat your homework.”

SOURCE: Yahoo! News

LONDON – The Wellcome Collection a museum in London has acquired a beautiful, yet unusual new sculpture which will be on display September 25 until October 18.

The work depicts the virus which causes swine flu, it said Friday, and it offers “a point of departure to explore the impact such viruses have had on populations and to find out more about the global research to tackle them,” said Clare Matterson, the Wellcome Collection’s director of medicine, society and history.

Britain has been the worst-hit country in Europe by the A(H1N1) virus.

Sculptor Jerram’s previous work has included leaving pianos on streets around London for passers-by to play.

SOURCE: YAHOO! News

Bombus franklini, a North American bumblebee, was last seen on August 9, 2006. Professor Emeritus Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at UC Davis, was doing survey work on Mt. Ashland in Oregon when he saw a single worker on a flower near the Pacific Crest Trail. He had last seen the bee in 2003, roughly in the same area, where it had once been very common. “August ninth,” Thorp says. “I’ve got that indelibly emblazoned in my mind.”

Thorp had been keeping tabs on the species since the late 1960s. In 1998, the US Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management supported an intensive monitoring project to determine whether the bee should be listed as an endangered species, in part because of its narrow endemism. The total range of the bumble bee is only 190 miles north to south, from southern Oregon to northern California, and 70 miles east to west between the Coast and Sierra-Cascade Ranges.

When Thorp began to monitor the bee, populations were robust, and he even estimated their range to be slightly further to the north and southwest than previously believed. The study was, in part, an attempt to find out why the range is so restricted and other western bumblebees, such as its close relative Bombus occidentalis, are not. Thorp was investigating that question when something else occurred: Populations of both bees began to decline precipitously. “All of a sudden the bees disappeared out from under me,” he says.

Bees, and particularly the European honeybee, have come to symbolize a deepening ecological crisis in North America. Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in 2006, has been described as “an insect version of AIDS,” ravaging honeybee colonies throughout North America. It has become a cause célèbre of sorts, embraced by Häagen-Dazs, which features the bee on some of its pints of ice cream and asks consumers to imagine a world without pears, raspberries, and strawberries. In fact, the US has become so dependent on honeybees for agricultural purposes that in 2005, for the first time in 85 years, the US allowed for the importation of honeybees to meet pollination demands.

The decline of bumblebees has received far less attention, though in the public imagination their plight has often been conflated with that of the honeybee. Not only do bumblebees pollinate about 15 percent of our food crops (valued at $3 billion), they also occupy a critical role as native pollinators. Plant pollinator interactions can be so specific and thus the loss of even one species carries with it potentially severe ecological consequences. As E. O. Wilson writes, “If the last pollinator species adapted to a plant is erased … the plant will soon follow.” There are close to 50 bumblebee species in the United States and Canada that have evolved with various plants and flowers over the course of millions of years; our knowledge of those species, however, is incredibly weak.

SOURCE: AlterNet

New evidence suggests that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. It seems that the “time” part of the space-time continuum is literally running out.

Scientists have previously measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force “dark energy”.

However, no one really knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from.
Professor Jose Senovilla and colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain have proposed a mind-bending alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla suggests that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down.

At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, it could easily be measured.

The team’s proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

The theory bases its idea on a variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the “bulk”. In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.

“Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Senovilla told New Scientist magazine.

SOURCE: Daily Galaxy