Archive for the 'news' Category

Interview with Rak Razam

Published June 3, 2009 Rak Razam , consciousness , entheogenics , news Leave a Comment

Interview with Rak Razam.

Australia’s experiential journalist speaks out on entheogens, ayahuasca, salvia, and global psychedelic culture.
Interview by James Kent

Self-described “experiential journalist” Rak Razam is a busy man: Two wives, two kids, and two new entheogenic books to promote. Editor of “The Journeybook: Travels on the Frontiers of Consciousness” and author of “Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey”, Razam has his finger on the pulse of the Australian entheo scene and the global awakening. He graciously took the time to answer our questions for this exclusive DoseNation interview.

FOXNews.com – Flowing Blood Could Power iPods, Cell Phones – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

Published April 2, 2009 news , paradigm shift , technology Leave a Comment

FOXNews.com – Flowing Blood Could Power iPods, Cell Phones – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News.

Power generated from flowing blood, simple body movements or a gentle breeze could one day be converted to electricity to charge iPods, cell phones and other personal electronic devices.

Researchers reported today they can harvest energy by converting low-frequency vibrations, like simple body movements, the beating of the heart or movement of the wind, into electricity by using zinc oxide nanowires that conduct the electricity.

The nanowires are piezoelectric — they generate an electric current when subjected to mechanical stress.

Other schemes have been devised to generate power in a backpack as you hike or from a device attached to the knee. Those are comparatively bulky, however.

full story here.

How to stop the drug wars | The Economist

Published March 18, 2009 consciousness , news , paradigm shift Leave a Comment

drugsfinal1

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

via How to stop the drug wars | The Economist.

Edgecentral: Monday Too Far Away: Rainbow Serpent Fest 09

Published February 18, 2009 news , trance , ultraculture Leave a Comment

Edgecentral: Monday Too Far Away: Rainbow Serpent Fest 09 by Graham St John.

You have to travel a long way up river to find him.

So far above the headwaters there’s barely a trickle. Under the withering south-eastern Australian sun in January, under the direct pressure of quality sound, in that primal real estate between the speaker stacks on Monday afternoon, on the Market Floor, Rainbow Serpent Festival. It doesn’t get much better than this. And somewhere, amid all that optimising, under all that tweaking of sophisticated hardware, in a vibrant undergrowth of bronzed bodies and baked wet ware, the Colonel is getting his freak on. This is not the bird-frying Colonel of take-out restaurant fame. He’s not your rank and file denizen of the trance floor. Somewhere in this theatre of the absurd, this paddock of pizzazz, this cavalcade of crank, the highest, rankest and most de-commissioned officer in the PLA (the Psychedelic League of Australasia), Colonel Kurtz, is at large.

for the full story click here

Psychoactive Compound Activates Mysterious Receptor

Published February 17, 2009 entheogenics , news Leave a Comment

Psychoactive Compound Activates Mysterious Receptor.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 13, 2009) —  A hallucinogenic compound found in a plant indigenous to South America and used in shamanic rituals regulates a mysterious protein that is abundant throughout the body, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have discovered.

The finding, reported in the Feb. 13 issue of Science, may ultimately have implications for treating drug abuse and/or depression. Many more experiments will be needed, the researchers say.

Scientists have been searching for years for naturally occurring compounds that trigger activity in the protein, the sigma-1 receptor. In addition, a unique receptor for the hallucinogen, called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), has never been identified.

Read the full story

Experts urge wider use of brain-boosting drugs

Published February 11, 2009 news Leave a Comment
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Experts urge wider use of brain-boosting drugs.

Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, December 8, 2008

(12-07) 19:25 PST — Three job candidates sit in a quiet room, straining over a tough exam. But one of them has taken a memory-enhancing drug the other two couldn’t afford. Is the test fair?

Henry Greely, a Stanford law professor, rejects compariso…Henry Greely, a Stanford law professor, says society shou… View Larger Images
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In another futuristic scenario, a drug can help airline pilots keep focused during a long flight, though it causes some side effects. May an airline require pilots to take the drug?

Get ready to confront such questions in daily life, a group of scientists and policy experts urge in a thought-provoking commentary published online Sunday by the journal Nature.

Brain research is accelerating, and a new era of “cognitive enhancement” – the use of brain-stimulating drugs and devices by healthy people – is approaching, the authors said.

While thorny ethical and medical questions must be addressed, pharmaceutical enhancement of inborn mental gifts is a trend to be welcomed, the seven co-authors from Harvard, Stanford and other prestigious institutions said.

“We call for a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs,” said the writers, who include Stanford law Professor Henry Greely and neuropsychology Professor Barbara Sahakian at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “From assembly line workers to surgeons, many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it, yet they may also need protection from the pressure to enhance.”

Our world may be a giant hologram – space – 15 January 2009 – New Scientist

Published February 11, 2009 news Leave a Comment

Our world may be a giant hologram – space – 15 January 2009 – New Scientist.

DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

Stonehenge: One totally awesome rave location – Discovery.com- msnbc.com

Published February 11, 2009 news Leave a Comment
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Stonehenge: One totally awesome rave location
Stone circle’s acoustics are ideal for listening to repetitive trance rhythms. We may practice debauchery like we invented it, but ancient peoples knew how to party long before we were born.

By Rossella Lorenzi

updated 11:40 a.m. ET Jan. 7, 2009

Stonehenge was built as a dance arena for prehistoric “samba-style” raves, according to a study of the acoustics of the 5,000-year-old stone circle.

Using cutting-edge technology, Rupert Till, an expert in acoustics and music technology at Huddersfield University in northern England, discovered that Stonehenge’s megaliths reflect sound perfectly, making the stone circle an ideal setting for listening to repetitive trance rhythms.

Till and colleague Bruno Fazenda first carried out mathematical analysis of the archaeological site to make predictions of its acoustic effects. Their aim was to look at Stonehenge as it was thousands of years ago, rather than limit their work to the remaining acoustic properties of the semi-collapsed site.

Click here for full story.

Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber

Published February 11, 2009 entheogenics , news Leave a Comment

I strongly recommend reading this speech by Lawrenzo Hagerto which he gave to the psychedelic conference Mind States back in 2001:

The talk underscores what I believe is the key lesson to be learned in the 21st century: that we must birth a new kind of Mind, a collective intelligence, group mind, global brain, Gain Mind. The Internet will eventually become a new kind of sentient being uniting the planet and allowing us to bring this mess back in balance. That is really our only hope of avoiding a collapse of civilization, a massive die-off and a new Dark Age ruled by ignorance and fundamentalist survivalism.

Psychedelic Thinking and the Dawn of Homo Cyber.

Hello world!

Published July 15, 2008 news Leave a Comment
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blog1Aloha and welcome to Rak’s blog!

As the banner subtitle suggests, I’m going to be using this blog to keep y’all informed on my numerous publishing projects, as well as general news and memes of interest to the global community in this changing world as we quest for a sustainable future. And we don’t have long to do it, so expect lots of links and info here to connect the dots of the emerging Ultraculture…

My interests are technology, spirituality, consciousness and the nexus between them and how we can use the edge of chaos we currently find ourselves in for positive cultural and planetary transformation…

Somewhere else on the web I describe myself as an “Ontological Guerilla” and that’s pretty appropriate. But before this turns into a “first date” drama with me introducing myself, let me deluge you in some words:

Autopoetic lapis from the neo-cortex, focused diamond will that chisels reality for cultural meme-sculpting and some random word jamming to detourne the information warscapes during the decline of Western Civilisation and the birth of the Grand Unified Paradigm.

I blog. I.am.rak.

thanks! Let’s do this again…

About:

Autopoetic lapis from the neo-cortex, focused diamond will that chisels reality for cultural meme-sculpting and some random word jamming to detourne the information warscapes during the decline of Western Civilisation and the birth of the Grand Unified Paradigm. I blog. I.am.rak. All contents © 2009 Rak Razam, unless otherwise stated... rakrazam.com psy-banner art sample: © Tim Parish
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