To many of us, being the masters of our own dreams is of great interest, and numerous techniques have been devised to enable individual dreamers to induce a state of lucid dreaming, wherein the dreamer realizes that they’re in a dream-state, and can thus take control. But, as it is with many other phenomena, different lucid dreaming techniques will deliver varying levels of effectiveness, so what technique will produce the most consistent results? A new study on the subject pitted a number of these different methods against one another in an attempt to answer that question.
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The second-largest tropical cyclone on record, Typhoon Lan, made landfall early on Monday, leaving 7 people dead and 100 injured as it passed near Tokyo. The storm was fueled by warm sea surface temperatures (86ºF/30ºC), and caused extensive flooding and mudslides, dumping nearly 32 inches of rain over 48 hours on Wakayama Prefecture alone.
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A new study of 90 different species of whales and dolphins has found a striking similarity in the evolution of the brains of cetaceans and primates, including humans. The study looked at the social complexity of each species, and used that factor to determine if brain size could be used to predict the richness of the culture of each type of marine mammal.
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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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