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Afghanistan wants ban on reporting attacks - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - Aug. 19 (News) - "All domestic and international media agencies are requested to refrain from broadcasting any incident of violence during the election process from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm on 20 August," the foreign ministry said in a statement. The country's national security council made the request "in view of the need to ensure the wide participation of the Afghan people ... and prevent any election-related terroristic violence," it said. But despite fears of insurgent attacks, the move earned criticism from Human Rights Watch, which accused the government of an attempt at censorship.

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Mumbai killing spree through gunmen's eyes - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - Aug. 03 (Investigative Report) - Kill as many people as you can and whatever happens, you must not be taken alive. That was the chilling message relayed by phone from Pakistan to gunmen by their Lashkar-e-Taiba superiors during the Mumbai terror attacks last November. Terror in Mumbai goes to air on Four Corners on ABC1 tonight at 8:30pm AEST. It will be repeated on August 4 at 11.35pm. The documentary is from an independent filmmaker.

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Call for Iran 'rioters' to be executed

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - Jun. 26 (News Report) - A hardline Iranian cleric has called for the execution of "rioters", in a sign of the authorities' determination to stamp out opposition to the June 12 presidential election result. Iran's top legislative body, the Guardian Council, said it had found no major violations in the election, which it called the "healthiest" vote since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

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Time to go: ABC thrown out of Iran

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Ben Knight - Jun. 17 (Special Report) - Middle East correspondent Ben Knight is leaving Iran after journalists were ordered out of the country and told not to report on unauthorised gatherings. Here he describes how it is getting harder to get information out of Iran about the protests.

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Jellyfish threaten to 'dominate' oceans

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Anna Salleh - Jun. 08 (Special Report) - Jellyfish are normally kept in check by fish, which eat small jellyfish and compete for jellyfish food such as zooplankton, he says. But, with overfishing, jellyfish numbers are increasing. Jellyfish feed on fish eggs and larvae, further impacting on fish numbers. To add insult to injury, nitrogen and phosphorous in run-off cause red phytoplankton blooms, which create low-oxygen dead zones where jellyfish survive, but fish can't. "You can think of them like a protected area for jellyfish," says Richardson. Richardson and colleagues say climate change may also encourage more jellyfish. They have postulated for the first time that these conditions can lead to what they call a "jellyfish stable state", in which jellyfish rule the oceans.

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Rhetoric or reality? - neuroscience's take on teenage brains

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Mar. 29 (Review) - Well it's all about our teenage years this week. On All in the Mind Dr Robert Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen is arguing adolescence is little more than a cultural construction. A falsehood. Fraudulent even. You might have read his Scientific American article in 2007 where he makes his case.

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ABC Radio Australia:Connect Asia:Stories:Journalism students show little interst in newspapers

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Reporter: Sen Lam; Interview with Alan Knight, Journalism Professor - Mar. 13 (Interview) - With the global economic downturn the newspaper industry around the world is in turmoil. Profits are down and journalists are being layed off. But more than that the habits of younger news consumers are changing. Even those who aspire to be journalists. A new suvey of journalism students has found that more than 60 per cent read a printed newspaper only once a week or less. Presenter: Sen Lam Speaker: Alan Knight is Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at the Queensland University of Technology

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Getting philosophical, experimentally.

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Feb. 22 (Interview) - My guests this week are part of an emerging movement of (youngish) experimental philosophers. The vignettes they use in their experiments are deceptively perplexing, great for dinner party existentials, and have provoked robust debate amongst philosophers. Audio and more details here. Have a go yourself. First, meet an obfuscatory CEO. One of Joshua Knobe's intentionality experiments goes like this:

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Historic cases in psychology

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Nov. 16 (Review) - Over the next month, I'm running a series on All in the Mind excavating a handful of historic cases in behavioural research. (The broadcast but not the podcast editions. See below.) There's the wild boy who sparked the curiosity of the French scientific establishment; the man whose hole in the head revealed that many parts make a whole in the brain stakes; there's a gruesome New York murder witnessed by many but not prevented by any; and... a little lad whose fear of horses meant something considerably more to Dr. Sigmund Freud.

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Computers and your head

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Oct. 31 (Review) - Are our ubiquitous interactions with computers radically changing our brains? The way we think? The way we see the world? Do digital natives think significantly differently to digital immigrants? Are we heading towards a Nobody, a Someone, or an Anyone scenario? What do these mean, and why should we be worried about the prospect? Tune in to this weekend's edition of All in the Mind to hear a warning beacon from acclaimed neuroscientist and science communicator, Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution of Britain. We're coming to you from the stage of the gorgeous art deco Capri Theatre in Adelaide.

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The secret life of bacteria - small, smart and thoughtful!

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Oct. 25 (Special Report) - We can't survive without them -- and we've long underestimated their prowess. Controversially, bacteria could even have cognitive talents that rival our own. Predatory behaviour, cooperation, memory. Jules Verne eat your heart out! -- take a strange adventure into the secret world of microbial mentality.

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Head to head over money, markets and morality

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Aug. 24 (Interview) - The global credit crunch, rising interest rates and petrol prices...Are markets moral? Is our hunter-gatherer brain geared for modern capitalism, and do economies work like evolutionary organisms? That's this week's show - an event recorded for National Science Week here in Australia. We're talking 'the mind of the market', the rise of neuroeconomics, the extinction of Homo Economicus and more.

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Pinker on words, Lakoff on brains and politics

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Aug. 17 (Review) - All in the Mind this week features an encore broadcast of the Stephen Pinker's interview about The Stuff of Thought, his latest forensic excavation of language and its evolutionary delights. My original blog post about the interview (with some of your comments) is here. Feel free to add more thoughts.

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Let the patriot games begin

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Antony Loewenstein - Aug. 15 (Opinion) - It should never be forgotten that many studies find Chinese people overwhelmingly satisfied with their lives, though the rise of the internet and satellite television has certainly increased the knowledge of social rights. McCommunism, as Noami Klein calls it, appears to be a popular ideology.

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Whales mourn if a family member is taken

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - Aug. 10 (News Report) - Tasmanian scientists are examining the teeth of 100 whales and believe their research shows whaling impacts the mental health of other whales in the pod.

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Can science measure happiness?

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - May. 18 (Opinion) - This weekend's edition of All in the Mind probes the science of happiness with a 5 header panel of eminent thinkers and researchers: The pursuit of happiness is a global obsession. But can science investigate its slippery, subjective nature? What are the metrics-- self report, brain activity, or the good deeds we do? Five world leaders in the field join Natasha Mitchell in conversation--neuroscientist Richard Davidson, Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace, psychologist Daniel Gilbert and philosopher David Chalmers.

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Chicken or Egg: Consciousness strikes again

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - Which comes first - he asks - thought or brain (electro) activity? The conundrum of consciousness strikes again. ie. Do mental events correspond directly with neural events? And, if one dictates the other, are the mind and brain not the same thing? So...one rather intriguing brain phenomenon is often rolled out in this ever lively debate over consciousness and free will.

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Reptilian minds in modern skulls

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain. Darwinian models of the mind always provoke rich debate...I look forward to seeing some of that here (or via email, but be brave and blog it instead).

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US climate change plan branded 'Neanderthal'

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By No author listed - Apr. 18 (News Report) - A new plan from US President George Bush which aims to cap greenhouse gases by 2025 has been dismissed as "disastrous" and "Neanderthal" by a group of ministers at a climate change meeting in Paris.

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Big Brother meets neuroscience

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Apr. 14 (Opinion) - Nita Farahany, Assistant Professor of Law and Philosophy, from Vanderbilt University wrote to alert me to an article she's penned, published yesterday in the Washington Post newspaper. She's editor of a forthcoming title, Genes and Justice: The Impact of Behavioral Genetics and Neuroscience on Criminal Law. I've been following (and have written about) with interest the range of neuroscience-related projects being undertaken by the USA's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

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Meet the Ingersons....brains under seige.

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Apr. 11 (Review) - A while back I recorded and broadcast the brain surgery of a young Australian woman called Kia. It struck a real chord with listeners. The emails flooded in with all sorts of remarkable stories of brains under seige. Some of these programs have since inspired further projects, including last year's dramatised radio diary of a brain tumour, which similarly compelled people to write the most heartfelt emails about love, loss and vulnerable brains from their own lives. Quite something.

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Carteret Islanders likely first climate refugees

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By No author listed - Apr. 01 (News Report) - The United Nations says Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islanders in Bougainville are set to be among the world's first climate refugees.

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Tensions rise as global food crisis takes hold - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Reuters - Mar. 31 (News Report) - Food prices are soaring, a wealthier Asia is demanding better food, and farmers cannot keep up. In short, the world faces a food crisis, and in some places it is already boiling over. Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports - a new politics of scarcity in which ensuring food supplies is becoming a major challenge for the 21st century.

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Your irrational mind

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Mar. 28 (Opinion) - Like it or not, you're not the beast of reason you think you are. Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at MIT, argues that we're surprisingly and predictably irrational. Sex, freebies, expectations, placebos, price -- they all cloud our better judgment in rather sobering ways. Dan's unique research was partly inspired by a catastrophic accident which caused third degree burns to 70% of his body. He joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation.

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Got a head for numbers?

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Australian Broadcasting - By Natasha Mitchell - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - Check out Numbers Guy: Are our brain wired for math? -- And for other creative neuro-pursuits tune into my colleague Lyn Gallacher's interview on last Sunday's edition of Artworks with Professor Jack Onians. -- Here's a related interview on art and neuroscience I did with uber-neuroscientist V.S Ramanchandran.

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