By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
NASA researchers wondered what would happen to spiders if treated to a variety of mind altering substances. The drugs chosen were LSD, Speed, Marijuana, and Caffeine. To test their faculties the researchers administered the drugs then let spiders be spiders and build their webs. Here are the results:
There was some overlap in arachnid versus human performance. “According to the researchers, the spider that was high on marijuana did a fair job weaving, but then got bored or distracted and didn’t finish. The one on speed went really fast, but without much awareness of the overall picture: It left large gaps. The acid-tripping spider wove a psychedelic, symmetrical web that was very pretty but not great at catching bugs.”
Makes you wonder about that second cup of coffee this morning.
Source: NASA via Life’s Little Mysteries
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
aside from the entertainment value, i really wonder if it was all the same type of spider. or was it the exact SAME spider that used all of these substances… hmmm… .
This is sort of ironic in its timing… Yesterday, I was the spider.
I, akin to the spider weaving his web, was redoing the baseboard and adding crown molding to my new house yesterday.
I won’t incriminate myself here, BUT I started off doing a very nice job of cutting, painting, and installing…unfortunately after about 3 hours I got bored and distracted and spent sometime surveying my yard for the first time sans snow.
Then I had a Red Bull and got back to work, but I was agitated right away with some tough corners and did some sloppy work…so I went back outside to enjoy the sun and a little more of what got my morning going.
When I got back at it, redid my crappy caffinated work and for another 3 hours or so I did some quality work and got a lot done, until I got bored and distracted again.
At that point, I had a beer and took a nap.
I did not do any work on LSD (uh, no thanks) or Speed (though I do have a ‘scrip for dextroamphetamine due to ‘idiopathic hypersomnia’, so I could try that)
My conclusion…the spider didn’t get bored and distracted, he needed another dose. Caffeine is no friend to me or arachnid. And I assume that If they gave beer to the spider, he’d be just be napping by Ms. Muffet
TD, I’m very familiar with the location. I recall something from my early years, about 11 or 12 yo, that I associate with the hospital but can’t verify. I have looked for information about scandals in the treatment of the patients there but haven’t had much luck in in that regard. Also, my age would have placed the memory prior to the larger scandals of Willowbrook (NY) or Bridgwater.
I recall being at a neighborhood restaurant/tavern type place in the evening with my parents having a late dinner on a Friday or Saturday night. We ate there every few weeks. They had a TV in the restaurant, in a corner, and the late, local news, 9:00pm or so, came on and the newsreader said they had a special report on the the state mental hospital and it would be disturbing. The state asylum on Arsenal was a place people scared their kids with so I assumed it was our hospital. It was a horrific report with pictures that had been taken ‘undercover’. The general response of the patrons was disgust and outrage, as well it should have been.
I have thought about that report more than once over the years and while I have searched, have never found a record of such a story/history for the St. Louis State Mental Hospital. It would have been right at 1960. It could have been another mental hospital but the consensus of the patrons was that OUR hospital shouldn’t be run that way. So everybody seeing it misunderstood which hospital was being talked about (as did I) or it was indeed our St. Louis hospital.
It was disturbing enough, pictures and all, that it became the focus of attention for anyone in view of the TV, turned the conversation dark and subdued, and is a disturbing memory for me even today. It gave me nightmares then. It’s one of those strange childhood events that with time, can no longer be confirmed as real as one remembers it. Periodically, when I have occasion to think of that hospital, I am haunted by that memory and I’d like to be able to pin it down. It was downright traumatic.
I remember seeing this in school… Wikipedia dates the NASA study 1995.. It’s not news, and hardly shocking at that.. Maybe it’s time to redo the study with a broader range of ‘drugs’ like GHB, DMT, Anti-depressants, BPA, steroids, ritalin, mephedrone…
Lottakatz and Idealist-
Among the many shameful acts of the U.S.Military/War Profiteer Cabal after WWII was using German and Japanese war criminals, a.k.a. “scientists”, in Pentagon research instead of hanging them. In my opinion the “arms race” was no excuse for allowing these vermin to escape the justice they deserved. Worst among them were the Japanese “scientists” who used chemical and biological agents to experiment on American, British, Dutch, Aussie, New Zealander, and other Prisoners of War. These experiments were little more than sadistic torture of the worst kind and resulted in mutilation and painful death for hundreds of P.O.W.’s. Instead of being tried for obvious war crimes, these sadists were brought to the U.S. to work in clandestine programs to develop American chemical and biological weapons.
And I haven’t forgotten another war criminal who not only escaped hanging, but was honored by Presidents of the United States- Werner von Braun. In spite of von Braun’s claims of ignorance about the Jews who were being used as slave labor at Penemunde and other rocket building facilities, he had to know that that they were not only being worked to death, but systematically starved at the same time. His “ignorance” was both deliberate and self-serving.
Our own government, of course, is not excused from the list of those who have criminally misused science in tests secretly done without the knowledge or consent of the people used as “human guinea pigs”. LSD and other chemicals secretly administered to soldiers and civilians, and African-American men deliberately infected with syphilis without their knowledge or consent are two well known crimes of American government scientists.
We have paid a heavy price in our moral values and national self-respect in the name of “national defense”.
Lottakatz:
If you grew up in the Central Corridor of Saint Louis then you were not far from the Saint Louis State Hospital which was the site where the out patient retrieved all of the CIA MKULTRA records from the dumpster in about 1976 or thereabouts.
the LSD spider never finished his web because halfway through he realized I”M A FREAKIN SPIDER
Two excellent books on the history of LSD:
“Acid Dreams”
and
“Storming Heaven”
Excerpts from “Acid Dreams” here:
http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/tripguide.html
ID: “As for abduction of mixed race couple. Sound like racial murder to me.”
They weren’t murdered, they went on after their abduction and probing to be the subject of a book. One of the first I read purporting to be an account of an actual alien abduction. That was a more naive time.
**
“Betty and Barney Hill were an American couple who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials in a rural portion of New Hampshire on September 19–20, 1961.
The couple’s story, called the Hill Abduction, and occasionally the Zeta Reticuli Incident, was that they had been kidnapped for a short time by a UFO. Theirs was the first widely-publicized claim of alien abduction, adapted into the best-selling 1966 book The Interrupted Journey and the 1975 television movie The UFO Incident.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction
They were using UV markers, we were tested under UV light is an office that had the lights dimmed. The chemical was sprayed above several cities to check the dispersal pattern.
Toxicologic Assessment of the Army’s Zinc Cadmium Sulfide Dispersion Tests (1997)
Commission on Life Sciences
Pg 1
“SUMMARY
BECAUSE OF CONCERN over the possible use of biologic warfare (BW) by a foreign power against the United States and its allies, President Roosevelt in 1942 established the U.S. Biological Warfare Program. During the 1950s and 1960s, Stanford University and other contractors for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted dispersion tests using fluorescent particles of zinc cadmium sulfide (ZnCdS) as part of the BW program in Minneapolis, MN; Corpus Christi, TX; Fort Wayne, IN; St. Louis, MO; and 29 other urban and rural locations in the United States and Canada. The ZnCdS tests were conducted to determine how BW agents disperse in various environments and to determine the munitions requirement (the quantity of a material required to achieve a particular military objective) for the strategic use of BW agents against selected cities and other areas. The ZnCdS particles were not themselves BW agents, but rather were nonbiologic simulants of bacterial particles. The compound was considered to be desirable as a nonbiologic simulant for the following reasons: it fluoresces under ultraviolet (UV) light and therefore can be easily detected; its particle diameter (2-3 µm) and mass, and thus its behavior in air, are similar to those of BW agents; it is economically feasible to use; it was thought to be nontoxic to humans, animals, and plants; and it is relatively stable in the atmosphere ….”
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5739&page=1
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
“Unethical human experimentation in the United States” Lotta’ govt ‘speriment’n going on.
You were posting while I was writing.
Lotta,
lots of stuff there.
UV markers, not geigers. Why could they detect UV markers in an ambient light environment? The dispersal if not from a source at the school would be so thin. Not disagreeing, just wondering how they were detecting it.
Could perhaps be the result of infection in skin rashs etc instead.
As for abduction of mixed race couple. Sound like racial murder to me.
That we are guinea pigs, of course we are, And not just of the CIA, mil. etc.
Even the drug industry in spite of FDA. They let the drugs people do the work, instead of letting drugs pay for their own testing.
TalkinDog1, March 25, 2012 at 12:35 pm
——————————————————-
Things developed by the Military and other Gov agencys bleed out into practice in the private sectors….and vice versa….I suppose it is easier to blame the government (if you are part of the corporate climate) and knowledge of the damage your company causes gets out….and vice versa.
I don’t think any one sector has cornered the market on damaging the public….theres enough bullshit and blame to go around.
Talking Dog: “It is not odd that not one commenter knew of this besides Anon Nurse above. The media is snuffed on the subject.”
———-
I suspect that most on this Blawg are familiar with MKUltra as well as the clandestine Army testing.
As a child living in St. Louis’ central corridor (as was the better half) we were (along with the rest of the students in our respective grade schools) pulled into the school’s medical office several times and examined under ultraviolet light. Sometimes they told our parents it was for “ringworm” or head lice, even when cases of those things weren’t happening in our schools or neighboring schools, and sometimes the reason was ‘just routine’. Those were follow-ups to the tests the Army was conducting on the dispersal of radiation or chemical weapons.
One can only guess what other tests were being done in other states and small towns. The government has never been shy about using its citizens as guinea pigs. That fact is one of the greatest factors to undermine the ET connection to various accounts of abduction. Betty and Barnie Hill, abducted in ’61? Mixed race couple on a deserted road late at night. Sure. By ET’s? Maybe, but maybe it was the Army or some other govt. agency. I don’t know about the 60’s but there are currently 4 military bases within 50 miles of their abduction, one an air station with landing strip. Makes ya’ wonder.
Naw, just playing with your head, never mind 🙂
Good point Blouise about DIA.
Just goes to show, that what Cheney’s buddy at Defense said he was worried about is now covered; ie not knowing what we don’t know we should know.
OT
An anecdote by a aspergistic scientist who got all the tough ones to answer at the nuke lab in New Mexico.
“Tell us in five days if it is possible to send a missile faster than ballistic missiles” He was a rocket/space expert. He answered NO. They were satisfied with that.
He guesses that somebody had heard a rumor that the soviets could attack so fast that our counterstrikes could not be launched.
As he had been elected as President of a NM scientist federation, I guess we can trust his word. Name? Zeppero. His memoirs are fetchable gratis.
Intriging reading.
Space enthusiasts heads up. Zuppero has bad news for you.
Our bodies can’t handle space travel. Nor can our energy sources.
He spent 35 years studying it for the government.
BIG TIME OT
Guess what Google ad came up when I was watching Elaine’s video on spider strands as violin strings?
And ad for a Swedish coffee: Thread text search=caffeine + Swedish IP = Gevalia—-or is it a brand over there?
BTW, do you get these little test banners across in front of the video. Declickable thank goodness.
Fortunately Google did not check my kitchen cabinet and say buy some more Nestlé expresso powder. That and a reminder that the store has a sale on eggs, which I’m also low on, it could remind me.
The wonders of science—-or should we say “the stuff they know about you”.
… or cocoa tree plantations
I have a serious question for those more “scientific” than I. If they ran this experiment using spiders from Central and South American coffee plantations, would the reaction be the same?
Yep, they call themselves the DIA (The Defense Intelligence Agency is first in all-source defense intelligence to prevent strategic surprise and deliver a decision advantage to warfighters, defense planners, and policymakers. DIA deploys globally alongside warfighters and interagency partners to defend America’s national security interests.)
If the CIA didn’t the Army did. -lottakatz
Another “truth”, to parrot Blouise.