Recently, scientists may have found a plausible biological explanation for the collection of phenomena known popularly as "Near Death Experiences (NDE)." According to the study, people who have died and experienced the common elements associated with near death experiences like white light, a tunnel, floating above their body are actually dreaming.

"I see it as an activation of certain brain regions that are also active during the dream state," explains Dr. Kevin R. Nelson of the University of Kentucky in Louisville, in a prepared statement for a study just published in Neurology.

A peculiar relationship It's no secret that Science and Buddhism have been having an affair. During last month's Mind & Reality Symposium at Columbia University, scientists and Buddhists co-mingled, explored, and sought definition for their curious enounters. How can the two systems of knowledge forge a working, mutually benefitial relationship? For years now Buddhism has been popping up in science.

A fifteen year old Nepalese boy, Ram Bahadur Banjan, who many believe to be the reincarnation of Lord Buddha, has been attracting worldwide attention. For the past six months he has been sitting under a banyan tree meditating, allegedly without taking food or drink. Thousands of pilgrims flock to him to receive his darshan, while critics are looking to test the truthfulness of his claims.

Nature magazine has posted an entertaining little comic about the mechanics of microbiology. The colorful pint-sized primer serves as an introduction for how DNA is currently being programmed, especially as these are chained together using basic electronics as the organizing principle via inverters, devices and signal carriers.

Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation? The Catholic News Service reports.

Recent advances in adaptive optics, a technique borrowed from astronomy, has revealed new insights into the arrangement of retinas in living people, which show surprising variation from one person to the next. Nonetheless, our perceptions don’t vary as might be expected.

As researchers took pictures of the thousands of cells responsible for detecting color in the deepest layer of the eye, they found that our eyes are physically wired differently. Yet we all — with the exception of the colorblind — identify colors similarly. The results suggest that the brain plays an even more significant role than previously thought in deciding what we see. The findings were detailed in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. Read the full story.

The visionary father of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage, once created a legendary film called Mothlight (watch it on the By Brakhage – Anthology DVD), composed entirely by gluing the wings of moths to film. Recent studies indicate that perhaps his extraordinary intuition has now seeped from celluloid into science, according to BBC News: “The way light is extracted from the butterfly’s system is more than an analogy – it’s all but identical in design to the LED,” explains University of Exeter researcher Pete Vukusic. Fluorescent patches on the wings of African swallowtail butterflies work in a very similar way to to the innovative designs of cutting edge high emission light emitting diodes (LEDs).

Reports about scientific studies that provide clues to links between the brain, the mind, and meditation are surfacing around the web, spawned in particular by the Dalai Lama’s appearance this past weekend at Investigating the Mind, a round of talks on the science and clinical application of meditation. Here’s a survey of the top stories on the subject:

Do you ever have a gut feeling about something? Oftentimes our gut is the cornerstone of a truth that eludes our rational mind. It’s funny when you think about it, a location within our mindbody geography that can override our ordinary sensory input and cut to a deeper level.

It may be perennial folk wisdom, but cutting edge science is now listening carefully as well. The traditional lie detector, the polygraph, may be losing favor to a newer test which listens to one’s belly, a.k.a., the electrogastrogram:

There’s a great little article in last week’s New York Times, Down For The Count which overviews recent scientific research on sleep.

“Sleep has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in science, but we really don’t know what sleep is.”