The biggest colossal squid ever caught weighs over 1000 pounds and measures almost 30 feet long.

In February, 2007, a Sanford seafood company fishing vessel, the San Aspiring, caught a toothfish on a long line while fishing in the freezing Ross Sea of the Antarctic. When the crew brought the toothfish to the surface, they realized they’d also caught a colossal squid. The squid wouldn’t let go of the toothfish, so they decided to catch the squid, too.

After hauling the squid aboard, the crew froze it in a cubic meter of water and brought it to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Currently, Marine biologists at the museum are in the process of thawing the creature in order to learn more about the species.

Besides measuring the largest eyeballs ever seen (about the size of a beach ball), the team has measured the colossal squid’s lower beak at 40 centimeters across.

Since a 49 centimeter squid’s beak was previously found in the stomach of a sperm whale — and since the total squid size to beak size ratio is incremental, not linear — scientists believe there are still colossal squid in the ocean that are a great deal bigger.

The colossal squid may hold another record, too: first colossal squid to have its own blog. To keep up with the thawing process and read the latest findings, visit: Colossal Squid Te Papa’s Blog.

Read more Amazing, Orgasmic, and Fantastic Facts: Amasnic Fact Off Archive.

Read More: giant squid, New Zealand

As mentioned in the previous post, brain experts are beginning to realize the right side of most normal people’s brains harbors genius, savant-like abilities. But, you were born with two very impressive brain hemispheres, and your left side is important too.

Let’s use George W. Bush as an example. To the right we see Bush, with both sides of his brain intact.

In this picture, Bush’s left side brain is controlling the right side of his face, and his right side brain controls the left side of his face. Your brain hemispheres control the opposite side of your face and body, too.

So, what would Bush be like if he only had a wonderful savant-like super talented right side brain, and vice versa?

The Godlike Right Brain

Meet Bush with two right side brains (actually, the right-brain controlled left side of his face and its mirror image.)

The right side brain is like God. When freed from the left hemisphere, it has almost miraculous savant-like abilities. It’s exceptional at imagining and creating (In the beginning…), processing spatial information (separating light from dark, water from land…), and seeing the big picture when faced with many shapes and sizes and complex interrelationships (all the little children of the world…)

And like God (I AM), the right side brain is always living in the present.

The down side is that Mr. Right Side Brain is pretty scatterbrained ( it might show up as a burning bush one day, a cloud the next, or just disappear and leave a crowd wandering in the desert for 40 years…) It stinks at organization, and it’s horrible at explaining itself verbally (Abraham, kill your son Isaac…but wait! No, not really…)

Frankly, the right side brain would rather keep dreaming big dreams and leave the details up to others (I gave you ten big ones on tablets; somebody else can write the New Testament…)

The Egocentric Left Brain

Now, meet Bush with two left side brains (the right side of his face, doubled.)

I’m not the first to suggest the left side brain is home of the ego. It’s even jealous of the right side brain, and proud of its own talent for language and verbal expression. If the right side brain paints a picture, the left side brain immediately slaps a name on it.

The left side brain is orderly, literal, articulate, and to the point. It tends to see everything in a linear way, past or future, black and white, good and evil, with no gray areas in between.

The down side? The egocentric left side brain doesn’t understand emotions. Emotions don’t make sense. Your puppy died? So, get another one. Problem solved. Now, back to balancing the checkbook…

The Perfect Human Brain

A lot of people say the dissident teacher Jesus was as close to a perfect human as anybody has ever come. Jesus supposedly attained Christ Consciousness. Jesus said he was the son of God, and the son of man. Maybe he was trying to tell us that he used both the godlike right and the egocentric left sides of his brain. Equally.

Perhaps to thrive in the world, we need to strike a balance between our godlike and egocentric brain halves.

Balancing Your Left and Right Side Brain

Most everybody has a dominant side of the brain. (Take this quiz to find out which side of your brain is dominant.)

Over 90% of Americans have the same dominant side of the brain. Care to guess which side it is? Here’s a clue: The left side of the brain is used for reading, writing, and basic arithmetic.

Add to this the fact that programs like No Child Left Behind require schools to spend even more time teaching Reading and Math — at the expense of already little-taught right-brain subjects like Art and Music — and the future culture of this country is looking even more egocentric brain imbalanced. If you think everybody is either with us or against us now, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

But there is something you can do about it; you can help restore balance, and you can start with your own brain.

Your left and right brain hemispheres are connected by a bridge called the corpus callosum. Like a muscle, it can be exercised and strengthened until it is physically larger, which will allow better communication and cooperation between your egocentric left brain and your godlike right brain. (If it’s any encouragement, Albert Einstein’s brain had a huge corpus callosum.)

Try this exercise on for size: visual brain-balancing exercise.

Look at the circles above. Cross your eyes until you see the third circle between the blue and red one. When your left brain is dominant, you’ll see the blue circle/verticle line. When your right brain is dominant, you’ll see the red circle/horizontal line.

Try to focus your eyes so that you see a cross, which means you’re seeing both circles equally, which means you’re using both sides of your brain at the same time, which not only induces a very pleasant meditative state, but also grows your corpus callosum by leaps and bounds.

Alternating Left and Right Brain Dominance

Another interesting tidbit is that your left and right side brains switch dominance all the time, every 90 minutes or so on average, but at times as often as every few seconds.

Yogis say you can tell which side of your brain is currently dominant: if you’re breathing more through your left nostril, it’s the right side, and vice versa. Because they tend to feel more peaceful and connected with the world when their right side brain is dominant, yogis practice breathing through their left nostril to help turn on their right side brain.

Nose Peace. Who’d a thunk it? ;-)

Read More: left side brain, right side brain, hemispheric dominance, corpus callosum, George W. Bush

Savant syndrome occurs when a person with below normal intelligence displays an incredible ability in a specific area — like, for instance, if George W. Bush had extraordinary musical, mathematical, or artistic talent. ;-)

One thing to note about the super abilities of savants: they are gifts usually associated with the right side of the brain.

The Divine Right Side Brain

People with savant syndrome seem to have right-side brain abilities on steroids.

Savants may be able to mentally double 8,388,628 up to 24 times within a few seconds, paint amazingly accurate cityscapes from photographic memory, or sit down at a piano and play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 after only one listen.

Until recently, savant syndrome was thought to occur due to some sort of injury to the left side brain — occurring either inside the womb, or shortly after birth — which caused the right side brain to overcompensate.

But more recently, scientists have pondered whether we all have unconscious right side brain super abilities.

Allan Snyder, award-winning physicist and director of the Center for the Mind at the University of Sydney, says everybody has the innate capacity for savantlike skills:

Even something as simple as seeing requires phenomenally complex information processing.

When a person looks at an object, for example, the brain immediately estimates an object’s distance by calculating the subtle differences between the two images on each retina (computers programmed to do this require extreme memory and speed). During the process of face recognition, the brain analyzes countless details, such as the texture of skin and the shape of the eyes, jawbone, and lips. Most people are not aware of these calculations.

In savants the top layer of mental processing — conceptual thinking, making conclusions — is somehow stripped away. Without it, savants can access a startling capacity for recalling endless detail or for performing lightning-quick calculations.

This theory has been bolstered by a growing number of cases in which normal people suddenly acquire savant-like super talents after a head injury, after the onset of frontotemporal dementia in old age, and also, sometimes during deep hypnosis.

The Right Side Brain Experience of Jill Bolte Taylor

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor got the opportunity to experience the full power of the right side brain firsthand. One morning, when a stroke disabled her left side brain, she experienced the world according to her right side brain.

After years of rehabilitation, Taylor was able to tell the world about her experience:

TEDTalks Video: Jill Bolte Taylor describes what it’s like to lose your left side brain.

Daniel Tammet: The Rosetta Stone of Brain Research

Daniel Tammet is a savant gifted with super mathematical and natural language abilities. He’s most famous for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits, and for learning Icelandic in a week. He’s also fluent in English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Welsh and Esperanto.

There are fewer than 50 prodigious savants in the world, and unlike the rest of them, Tammet has no obvious mental disability. Because his language skills are functioning to a high degree, he can describe his own savant thought processes, which makes him a scientific Rosetta Stone for brain researchers.

Tammet explains that he “experiences” numbers, each with its own unique shape, color, and texture, and emotion. When solving math problems, he doesn’t consciously work out the answers, but sees the answers appear, emerging from mutating, multiple-sensory landscapes.

In 2005, Tammet was the subject of an engrossing UK documentary, well worth the watch:

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (1/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (2/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (3/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (4/5)

Daniel Tammet: The Boy With The Incredible Brain (5/5)

Update: Don’t miss the next post on Achieving Left and Right Brain Balance.

Read More: autistic, savant, savant syndrome, left side brain, right side brain, Jill Bolte Taylor, Daniel Tammet

A 3-day-old, 8-cell embryo created through in vitro fertilization.

There’s a fierce debate in America over the right of mothers to abort their unborn children.

Facts and figures and philosophical speculations are bandied about, but the brassiest argument knocking legal abortion is that it’s all too often used as a convenient form of birth control.

Statistics show that the women who most use abortion as a convenience are poor single uneducated minority women:

Unintended pregnancy rates are substantially higher among women aged 18–24, unmarried (particularly cohabiting) women, low-income women, women who did not complete high school and minority women than among other groups.

Anti-abortion pundits sometimes use a sordid expression when alluding to this demographic: “welfare crack whores.” More about that later…

Life Begins at Conception

Another anti-abortion argument is that life begins at the moment of conception.

As far as science is concerned, life does indeed begin at conception, because at that moment, the conceived becomes an entity with all 46 chromosomes and a complete set of human DNA.

Danger, Will Robinson! Keep in mind…even blood samples, fingernail clippings, and skin cultures are genetically complete, but I dare say, do not constitute “personhood” or harbor human souls.

Crack Whores vs Soccer Moms

While some anti-abortion pundits are quick to point out the splinter in the eyes of welfare crack whores, they don’t talk much about the log in the eyes of another demographic.

On page 200 of Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, Jana Sawicki defines this demographic:

At present, in vitro fertilization is available primarily to married, white, upper middle-class women who perceive biological motherhood as very desirable.

As a level-playing-field wannabe-pundit, I’ll give this demographic its own sordid name: “barren soccer moms.”

Welfare crack whores may accidentally create unwanted embryos, but barren soccer moms use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to create unwanted embryos on purpose! Which is worse?

These in vitro fertilizations by barren soccer moms have left behind over 500,000 conceived human lives frozen in fertility clinics. Most of these human embryos will be abandoned, eventually thawed, and in the end — just like the aborted embryos of crack whores — they’ll end up in a medical incinerator or a landfill.

While barren soccer moms point their fingers at welfare crack whores using abortion for convenience, let us all keep in mind the upper middle-class white women who use in vitro fertilization for their own convenience, abusing a medical luxury which often, to save time and money, fertilizes many more eggs than needed — often leaving as many as two dozen unwanted embryos.

These barren soccer moms don’t implant all the conceived human lives they produce, and they use the same excuse as crack whores to justify their action: “What am I going to do with twenty kids? I can’t afford that!” Well, la-te-da! To cop a phrase from many anti-abortion rants, shouldn’t these barren soccer moms “stop and think before they spread their legs” at a fertility clinic?

In acts arguably more irresponsible than those of crack whores, barren soccer moms often leave it up to the staff at fertility clinics to decide how to trash the unwanted human lives they’ve created.

The Cheapness of Human Life

If crack whores should be forced to carry their embryos to term, then upper middle-class soccer moms who “irresponsibly” produce gluts of embryos should be forced to carry each of those human lives to term, too. And, if Americans make abortion a federal crime, then both demographics should face stiff prison sentences for first degree murder of each and every abandoned embryo.

But before our nation punishes mothers as criminals for conveniently killing human embryos in order to advance their own life agenda, I believe we as a nation would have to punish warmongers for conveniently killing innocent human adults out of convenience to advance our collective agenda, and collateral damage should no longer go unpunished. At the least, our laws should not value innocent embryonic life above innocent adult life.

Read More: abortion, pro choice, pro life, frozen embryos, crack whores, soccer moms

A laboratory in Texas has produced a light brighter than sunlight on the surface of the sun.

Prof Todd Ditmire, with help from colleagues at the Texas Center for High-Intensity Laser Science at The University of Texas at Austin, has flipped the switch on the $14 million Texas Petawatt laser. Thank God he had his shades on.

The Texas Petawatt laser is so named because it generates one thousand million million watts of laser power, making it the most powerful laser in the world. While the laser can’t yet destroy an entire planet, I do feel confident that VP Darth Cheney will be arriving to inspect it soon.

The Petawatt laser generates 2,000 times the power output of all the power plants in the United States — but only for a 10th of a trillionth of a second. Still, you can’t just suck that kind of juice out of a typical wall socket. Ditmire explains:

To fire up the Texas laser, electrical charge has to be pumped into twenty 20,000-volt capacitors. These capacitors energize the amplification tubes that pump up the energy of the laser light beam. Each tube contains an amplifying material, usually glass, that is “excited” by lamps powered by the capacitors. Every time the laser passes through one of these sheets of glass it gains more energy.

Ditmire and friends plan to use the laser to create and study matter at temperatures greater than those inside the sun — temperatures so high that gases break down into a soup of particles called a plasma. In the coming months, they will explore atronomical phenomena on a tiny scale, creating tabletop stars, min-supernovas, and studying advanced ideas for creating energy with controlled fusion.

Read more Amazing, Orgasmic, and Fantastic Facts: Amasnic Fact Off Archive.

Read More: Texas Petawatt Laser, Todd Ditmire, Center for High-Intensity Laser Science, University of Texas, Austin