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Comment How to know if a loved one has aphantasia (Score 3, Interesting) 243

I ran across a YouTube video about aphantasia a few years ago and during lunch with my wife afterward I told her about it. Her reaction was not what I expected. She asked if I could visual things, and I told her I could. I discovered that she thought when people talked about visualizing or imagining or picturing something in their minds was (not to be ironic) a figure of speech. Turns out, she has aphantasia and we found out during that lunch. She called her mother and her sister and some other family members, and she's the only one who cannot form mental images.

And then I realized aphantasia was the reason why she could never understand why certain furniture arrangements would not work in the rooms in our house, that I would have to move the couch and the chairs and disconnect the TV and shift everything else so that we could confirm that this new configuration was much worse than leaving everything were it was. (And no, this was not a one-time thing.)

Crime

Submission + - John McAfee accused of murder, wanted by Belize police (thehackernews.com) 1

thn writes: "John McAfee, who started the antivirus software giant named after him, has been accused of murder in Belize and wanted. McAfee had taken to "posting on a drug-focused Russian message board...about his attempts to purify the psychoactive compounds colloquially known as 'bath salts,'" Gizmodo wrote. The scariest aspect of this story may be the fact that an entire lab was constructed for John McAfee’s research purposes. Because of his efforts to extract chemicals from natural chemical plans McAfee was able to justify his experiments in a country that is largely unregulated."
Science

Submission + - Supersymmetry theory dealt a blow (bbc.co.uk)

Dupple writes: Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have detected one of the rarest particle decays seen in Nature.

The finding deals a significant blow to the theory of physics known as supersymmetry.

Many researchers had hoped the LHC would have confirmed this by now.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY, has gained popularity as a way to explain some of the inconsistencies in the traditional theory of subatomic physics known as the Standard Model.

The new observation, reported at the Hadron Collider Physics conference in Kyoto, is not consistent with many of the most likely models of SUSY.

Prof Chris Parke, who is the spokesperson for the UK Participation in the LHCb experiment, told BBC News: "Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital."

Submission + - Milky Way is Surrounded by Halo of Hot Gas (nasa.gov)

kelk1 writes: If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it also could be an explanation for what is known as the "missing baryon" problem for the galaxy [...] a census of the baryons present in stars and gas in our galaxy and nearby galaxies shows at least half the baryons are unaccounted for [...] Although there are uncertainties, the work by Gupta and colleagues provides the best evidence yet that the galaxy's missing baryons have been hiding in a halo of million-kelvin gas that envelopes the galaxy.

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