ModernDebauchery

The man, named as Sergey Karpentsov, is quoted as saying he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin’s carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital’s most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions.

“My main demand is the quick bulldozing of the mausoleum which contains the body of the anti-Christ,” he said. “I wanted to open fire on the tomb with an assault rifle but I was advised not to do that in case the tomb is armour-plated.”"I have drawn attention to this issue with my actions,” he added.

Lenin’s waxy presence at the heart of the Russian capital 86 years after his death continues to divide Russian society, with many older people believing he should be left where he is.

Others insist he should be re-buried near his mother in St Petersburg, arguing that it is incongruous for his corpse to remain on Red Square almost two decades after Soviet Communism was rejected.

Police say they spotted Karpentsov behaving strangely near the mausoleum and that he viciously beat a police officer who confronted him before shooting and wounding the man. (Read More)?

Humans like to portray themselves as a sophisticated life form driven by brain rather than brawn. So they may be surprised by a project to reconstitute a 28,000-year-old skull from remains found in France.

This has provided evidence to support a theory that our brains have begun to shrink.

The French team that claims to have produced one of the best replicas yet of an early modern human skull say that it is 15 to 20 per cent bigger than ours. No one suggests that we are 15 to 20 per cent more stupid than Cro Magnon 1, the best preserved of five skeletons discovered in 1868 in the Cro Magnon cave in the Dordogne, because there is only a minor link between brain size and intelligence.

It may be that, rather like computers, our brains are becoming more efficient even as they grow smaller. But the project could shed light on a human evolutionary question that has divided and bemused the specialists: if indeed our heads have started to shrivel, why is this happening?

Cro Magnon 1 has been kept in the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. He is believed to have been a well-built, elderly man about 6ft tall. Already known to scientists worldwide, Cro Magnon 1 will become even more famous next week when a mold of his skull will be shown at the American National Museum of Natural History in Washington. (Read More)?

This is an absolutely horrible story.

These haunting pictures show the extent to which a man with learning difficulties suffered 17 years of torment at the hands of youths, before he collapsed and died in his garden.

A film captured on a mobile phone shows how David Askew’s agitators would stand inches from his garden fence and hurl abuse at him.

On Wednesday the 64-year-old could take no more and, as he tried to protect his property, he suffered a suspected heart attack and died on the spot.

During the short film taken during a recent confrontation, a clearly agitated Mr Askew can be seen biting his hand out of frustration as he is abused.

He is then mocked and chased along the pavement outside his home in Hattersley, Greater Manchester.

As the pictures emerged a chief constable whose force was criticised for failing to stop the yobs for his death blamed the local council for the tragedy.

Peter Fahy, of Greater Manchester Police demanded to know why Mr Askew had not been re-housed, despite suffering 17 years of abuse from youngsters.

Mr Askew died in his garden after confronting a group who had broken down his gate and were interfering with his mother’s mobility scooter on Wednesday night.

While Mr Askew’s mother Rose, 89, has praised police for the steps they took to make them safer, neighbours have claimed officers and Tameside Council did little to solve the family’s problems and said the bullying killed him. (Read More)?

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A scan of brain activity can effectively read a person’s mind, researchers said Thursday.

British scientists from University College London found they could differentiate brain activity linked to different memories and thereby identify thought patterns by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The evidence suggests researchers can tell which memory of a past event a person is recalling from the pattern of their brain activity alone.

“We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces,” said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.

“We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time.”

The results, reported in the March 11 online edition of Current Biology, follow an earlier discovery by the same team that they could tell where a person was standing within a virtual reality room in the same way.

The researchers say the new results move this line of research along because episodic memories — recollections of everyday events — are expected to be more complex, and thus more difficult to crack than spatial memory.

In the study, Maguire and her colleagues Martin Chadwick, Demis Hassabis, and Nikolaus Weiskopf showed 10 people each three very short films before brain scanning. Each movie featured a different actress and a fairly similar everyday scenario. (Read More)?

The country’s highest court said that the woman — whom it didn’t identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse.

The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”

“The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court ruled.

CERN scientists are looking to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe.

Housed inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, the collider was started with great fanfare in September 2008, only to break down after nine days for the next 14 months.

It was shut down again in December, this time to ready it for collisions at unfathomed energy levels which began last month. (Read More)?

Marium Varinauskas, 28, tried to strike the officer on the head with his penis when she was called out to his flat, but she got out of the way.

Lithuanian Varinauskas admitted a charge of assault at Aberdeen Sheriff Court and was fined £600.

The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen.

Police were called to his home by his girlfriend, who had complained about him being drunk last November.

They arrived to find the self-employed engineer sitting on the sofa wearing a pair of underpants.

Fiscal depute Elaine Lynch said: “The accused got to his feet and was standing over the police officer exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck.”

Defence solicitor John Hardie said: “He was sitting on the couch drunk with his pants on.

“He can’t remember anything but accepts that if that’s what the police say then that’s what happened.  (Read More)?

Operators of the world’s largest atom smasher restarted their massive machine today in a run-up to experiments probing secrets of the universe. After a cautious trial period, Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) plans to ramp up the energy of the proton beams travelling around the 17-mile tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva to unprecedented levels – and start record-setting collisions of protons by late March. The restart follows a two and a half month winter shutdown during which scientists made improvements and checked out the smasher’s ability to collide protons at energies three times greater than has ever been achieved previously.

The new collisions are expected to shatter the subatomic particles and reveal still smaller fragments and forces than previously achieved on any collider, including the previous record-holder – the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago.

The Large Hadron Collider was built to examine suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as an explosion known as the Big Bang.

The restart follows successful trial runs late last year when Cern showed that it had made a big comeback from its initial 10 September, 2008, start-up with great fanfare. The machine was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated and set off a chain of damage to the magnets and other parts of the collider… Read More?

During the day visitors to the Secession contemporary art museum walk among the mattresses and erotic paraphernalia of the “Element6″ sex club to view masterpieces by Klimt, who once scandalised Edwardian Europe with his sexually explicit art.

By night, the “swingers” return to carry out orgies among the artwork.  “Group sex in the Secession – has our society completely lost it?” Austria’s far-Right Freedom Party has asked.

A spokesman for the sex club said it was participating in the exhibition “to give as many people as possible the opportunity to overcome their inhibitions”.

“In the framework of this exhibition at the Secession, each individual can test for himself or herself whether this opens up new dimensions for his or her own sexuality,” he said.

The sex club was invited into the museum as part of a project by Christoph Buechel, a Swiss artist.

While sex acts are not allowed during day, gallery visitors wander among the club’s king-size beds, erotic pictures, bar and whirlpool baths to view the art.

“It’s not my thing but why not?” said Ute Wegscheider, a young mother pushing her pram outside the museum. “Maybe I should go check it out with my husband.”

The museum is hoping to reignite the original controversy that surrounded Klimt’s 1902 “Beethoven Frieze”, the centre of the new exhibition.

Now considered one of the Austrian painter’s most important works, the frieze was once thought of as obscene and pornographic because of the way women’s bodies were depicted. (Read More?)