The Answers to Itching and the End of Scratching

Found a story this morning that seems to be a perfect Pluto in Capricorn square Saturn-Uranus opposition manifestation. Pluto wants to change (or destroy) whatever it touches. It does this by weeding mostly, hence the destruct and destroy element. Sometimes its methods for figuring how to weed are a little bit interesting in psychological circumstances as it creates a great Hunger for Power in whomever it touches. If the person is not quite on the up and up it will create Hubris and the person's actions will bring him down or Pluto can bring devastating feelings of Powerlessness. If the person is ready for an experience or simply "selected" in life he can achieve greatness. The idea is that he/she will just become either more powerful or more purified.

On the physical side it can work in the same ways. So, as Pluto has moved into Capricorn, sign that rules skin and bones and knees, I've been waiting for these stories to crop up having to do with advances in understanding these areas of the body and have found one today.

A neuroscientist in Minnesota, Dr. Glenn Giesler, Jr., has tortured some Macaque Monkeys in the lab and has found a possible area in the part of the spine located at the bottom of the rib cage that triggers itching sensations in the skin.

The spine is co-ruled by Saturn and Uranus. The nerves are ruled by Uranus and Mercury. I wonder if there will end up being a statistically significant number of revelations in Health as Saturn opposes Uranus in the signs of Virgo-Pisces. Pisces, of course, rules the part of the story where lab animals are tortured. I suppose this can help animals as well who have chronic itches so in the end they may benefit as well. I wonder if plants have itches. I bet they do. I can tell you that just writing this has caused me to rub about 3 parts of my body practically raw. Actually, my left eye has just developed a twitch. This is stuff that Chiropractors and Acupuncturists probably already know about.

Story is called: "Relief from itch seen in nerves; may aid treatment" by Malcolm Ritter.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5htxYGByY8h81dDsyGnIW8DZ30f8QD97D0DN00

Mother Science Predicts Whether You Will Rich

Interesting article more related to Palmistry than to Astrology. Researchers have found that Financial Traders who are successful risk takers and quick decision makers have ring fingers that are longer than pointer fingers. This has to do with testosterone levels and is thought to be determined while the baby is still in the womb.

The Forefinger is ruled by Jupiter and the Ring Finger is ruled by the Sun (Apollo) according to this website on Palmistry:

http://www.geocities.com/mystically_mf/palmistry.html

So, it's definitely a Confidence thing, but it's more about Creativity than about Luck. And the biggee here is that the Sun rules Leo and the 5th House which show a person's ability to take Risks and to Gamble.

Since both are determined by Testosterone pre-natally so Pluto is working behind the scenes in there somewhere.

Interesting that the Middle Finger, which I use to communicate when someone cuts me off while driving, is ruled by Saturn and not by a Mercury/Mars conjunction. I have a very long Saturn finger.

Link to the Yahoo article:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090113/ap_on_sc/sci_financial_finger

The Sixth Taste

Maybe the Sixth Taste has been Discovered. And it's not Woo-Woo like the Sixth Sense. The Sixth Taste might be Calcium. Mmmm, Chalk. Lovin it. Anyway, according to the Yahoo link to the LiveScience article (link at bottom) "Sixth 'Taste' Discovered - Calcium" by Charles Q. Choi a researcher has discovered that Mice can distinguish the taste of Calcium. This could be a pretty cool connection to Pluto's movement into Capricorn which rules the bones.

I would give the sense of Taste to Pluto any old day. Don't know what Rex Bills says; he's out in the car.

I already wrote about the Fifth Taste called Umami or Savoury which was identified by a Japanese Libra back in 1908. Pluto was at around 24 Gemini at that point so maybe new taste identities come along when Pluto hits the end of Gemini/Sagittarius.

mmmm, gifts from the Galactic Center.

But, really, can't we do better than identify what Chalk tastes like?

Interesting article. Apparently the Calcium taste in dairy foods binds to other things and we can't taste it. Because we don't want to. Ah man, remember Kaopectate? Bleck. Is that stuff still around? I've talked about my childhood bout with The Salmonella ad nauseum here but, really, all I remember is the moment that my Mother didn't force me to take any more of that Kaopectate for the runs. I was throwing up already anyway.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080820/sc_livescience/sixthtastediscoveredcalcium

Large Hadron Collider

ADDITION/CORRECTION TO ORIGINAL:

Start time for the Collider is 10:28 am Local Time (Geneva, Switzerland). This is a much nicer chart than the ones I looked at. 25 Libra is Rising. Ruler of the Chart, Venus is in her own sign of Libra (H12). She is conjunct Mercury and Mars. They trine the North Node-Neptune conjunction in Aquarius (H4) and square the Moon-Jupiter conjunction in Capricorn (H3). With Neptune being the only outer planet placed on an angle and the Chart ruler in the 12th House, the Mysteries of the Universe might really be solved. The Big Bang Aspect of Sun opposing Uranus is placed off the Angles. Pluto is still unaspected to any planets down in the 3d House but is in aspect to both ASC and MC. Both Jupiter and Pluto stationed Direct yesterday so they are assured of a long life without suffering any Retrogrades by Progression.

********

They're calling it the Big Bang Machine. The Swiss have built a 17 mile wide tunnel under the ground somewhere outside of Geneva and hope to answer the great mysteries of the Universe with it. I hope they don't knock the Clocks out of whack, or worst yet, harm Our Astrodienst Folks and Free Online Computer Software in any way.

Other than this I don't have a clue what the thing does. It's called a Large Hadron Collider and this is what it's proposing to do:

"LHC experiments will address questions such as what gives matter its mass, what the invisible 96 percent of the Universe is made of, why nature prefers matter to antimatter and how matter evolved from the first instants of the Universe's existence."

That's from the CERN website that gives how many seconds till tee off but in Swiss time:

http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/Welcome.html

I probably don't have the time right for when they're flipping the switch but the website says that a live Webcast will play at 8:30pm. I initially tried to count the time out by myself and got hopelessly lost in time zones but came up with a really cool chart fro 3:30pm that has a Galactic Center-Pluto Sagittarius Ascendant. Still exceptional, though, with this chart is that the 3 Outermost planets will be Singletons: Uranus in Water, Neptune in Fixed, Pluto in Fire.

With this 8:30 am chart Pluto is conjunct a 4 Capricorn Midheaven from the 9th House so still connected with an angle. There's a tight conjunction of Mercury-Venus-Mars at 14-15 Libra that's conjunct the Descendant. While the Outer Planets aren't working in cohoots with anybody the Inner Planets are colluding in a huddle on an Angle (and disposing to Venus as they ought to). That's got to say something about Scale. I think they're going to try to study Infinity through Minutae. The Outer Planets through the Inner Planets.

Mars rules this 8:30 pm chart (assuming the time is correct). That's pretty impressive for something called a Big Bang Machine.

Although this is the first run of the Collider, it won't be officially open until Oct. 21. Between that time Mercury will go retrograde so will hold close to this spot for a very long time. Astrologers aren't real fond of Mercury Rx. I believe that I read that this "machine" is its own prototype so there's a chance that there might be a couple of snags along the way in learning how to use it.

The Virgo Sun (H6) will be opposing Uranus (12) and conjunct Saturn (h6) (Saturn & Uranus not in aspect). That sounds like a great set-up for a Particle Blaster. Saturn in Virgo is a great one for the Sciences and Uranus always likes a new whirligig. 17 miles, wow, that's huge. I keep getting it confused with 17 Mile Drive down in the Monterey area, one of the most beautiful drives on earth.

Large Hadron Collider
Sept. 10, 2008 8:30 pm Geneva, Switzerland

Sun 19 Virgo; 23 8 Aries Rising; Moon 24 Capricorn; MC 4 Capricorn; NN Aquarius

Scientists "Blowing Roses"

An article from The Guardian tells how Scientists are learning to read people's minds through the use of brain scans. 77 percent accuracy rate. They can't do it, though, without their big fat magnets and by making you sit very very still. Astrologers can just bring a Scorpio Rising along and ask them what's on your mind. Could this be some amazing symptom of all the outer planets in the outermost signs? Once Uranus moves into Aries are we going to enter a Flowers for Algernon phase?

Here's link to the article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/30/mindread?gusrc=rss&feed=technologyfull

and part of the article (found at kottke.org):

"The paper establishes for the first time that one can predict the pattern of neural activity associated with thinking about many different nouns, from the verbs that co-occur with that noun," said Mitchell. "It can't yet decode arbitrary thoughts, but it does well on a multiple-choice test with two choices."

The team scanned the brains of 9 volunteers using functional MRI as they viewed 58 nouns such as body parts, vehicles and vegetables. The scanning technique detects increases in blood flow in the brain when different regions are activated.

The team then categorised the nouns using an electronic database of texts that contained more than a trillion words. They were looking for how often each of the nouns appeared together with simple verbs such as push, run, fear and open.

Next they matched this pattern of co-occurrence with the brain scan patterns and found that the brain does something similar. "The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it," said Prof Marcel Just, who led the study.

To test the model, the researchers showed the volunteers two new nouns which were also subjected to the same textual analysis. The model then predicted what it expected the brain scans for those nouns to look like.

By comparing these with the real scans it guessed which of the nouns the person was really looking at. The model was correct 77% of the time, significantly better than chance.

"Philosophers, psychologists, linguists and others have debated for centuries how the brain organises and represents meaning. But they were hampered in debating these issues because they lacked experimental data," said Mitchell.
"[We have] established for the first time a direct connection between how a word is used in a large collection of typical language, and the neural activity the brain uses to represent the word's meaning."