Professor wins $5 million grant to study life after death

Pop quiz: Does life exist after death?

A University of California, Riverside philosophy professor, John Martin Fischer, has been awarded a three-year, $5 million grant by the John Templeton Foundation to study just this topic—and yes, students can take his class.

Fischer noted in an email to Yahoo News, "Both I and my post-doc, Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, will teach related classes over the next three years. I have frequently taught classes on death, immortality, and the meaning of life both at Yale University and UC Riverside."

So what's the meaning of life? More on that in a moment.

Fischer noted, "We'll be open both to studying religious and non-religious views about immortality. One thing that we'll study is whether human beings would want to live forever: would it be boring? Would it lose its meaning and beauty and urgency? Does death give meaning to life?"

According to the university's website announcing the grant award, many anecdotal reports of the afterlife abound, but there has been "no comprehensive and rigorous, scientific study of global reports about near-death and other experiences, or of how belief in immortality influences human behavior." The research will look at a range of phenomena, including heaven, hell, purgatory, and karma.  The grant is the largest ever awarded to a humanities professor at UC Riverside, and one of the largest given to an individual at the university.

Fischer said in a statement, "We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions," Fischer said. "Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous. We're not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports."

The grant will also fund two conferences to discuss the findings. Said UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy P. White, Fischer's research "takes a universal concern and subjects it to rigorous examination to sift fact from fiction."

The Immortality Project, as it is called, will solicit research proposals from eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work "will be reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and popular journals."

The research will also delve into cultural aspects of the afterlife. For example, there are reports of millions of Americans seeing a tunnel with a bright light at the end. In Japan, reports often find the individual tending a garden.

The professor added that the academic research could include a range of issues, like "heaven and hell: If we are material beings, how can we exist in heaven, where we would not have physical bodies (or not of the sort we have here)?

"There is a lot of interest in near-death experiences. We can carefully catalog them and look into whether there are patterns. There has already been a lot of work on this. Perhaps some cross-cultural studies would be helpful.

"We'll also be open to studying the relationship between beliefs in afterlife and behavior--moral behavior and crime rates."

Sounds like the kind of research topics that many college students have already spent hours pondering. As for the meaning of life? The professor says check back in three years.

'Plain Jane Bandit' believed caught after eight heists

The "Plain Jane Bandit," who is believed to be responsible for eight bank heists or attempted bank robberies in Southern California, has been arrested, officials said.

Sylvia Helen Garcia, 38, was captured near her home in Downey, Calif., late Thursday, according to ABC News' Los Angeles affiliate KABC.

Here are some other memorable nicknames given to thieves in recent years.

The FBI reportedly received multiple tips about Garcia.

The Plain Jane Bandit has been linked to six bank robberies and two attempted bank robberies in three counties around Southern California since July 12. The most recent attempt by the Plain Jane Bandit was on Tuesday, but she left before getting any money.

In all eight instances, she used both written and verbal demands and told the bank teller that an accomplice was waiting outside, the FBI said.

Authorities did not say how much money was stolen, but witnesses described the robber as a Hispanic woman in her mid-30s, between 5-foot-3 and 5-foot-5 and weighing 150 to 170 pounds. She did not wear a disguise.

The nickname came from a witness' description of the robber as a "plain Jane."

The robber was linked to a silver four-door vehicle, though the alleged accomplice had not been seen. Authorities said an officer responded to one tip that described the robber's silver car. That officer went to the location of the car and took a woman fitting the robber's description into custody.

U.S. Bank, which had five branches robbed, had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the robber's arrest and conviction.

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Nevada teen missing after Southwest flooding

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A teen was swept away in a drainage wash in the Las Vegas area and remained missing, and two people were rescued from a van stranded in high water in suburban Phoenix after heavy rains in the Southwest flooded ditches and roads.

Family and friends gathered Thursday in Henderson, southeast of the Las Vegas Strip, to look for a 17-year-old boy who disappeared after falling into a flood channel the day before. The wash had filled quickly after a Wednesday morning downpour.

William Mootz was hanging out with friends when he somehow fell into the Pittman Wash, which meanders past a shopping mall and his high school, police said. The teen apparently didn't intend to get in.

"I think they were just going out there to look at the raging water in the washes," Henderson police spokesman Keith Paul said.

Family members say the incoming high school senior is a strong swimmer and has emergency preparedness experience.

More than a dozen Henderson police officers walked up and down the wash with guidance from city public works employees who know how water typically flows down the channel. In all, about 100 volunteers were helping 40 police, firefighters and city employees look for Mootz.

They cleared an estimated 15 tons of dirt and debris from a more than mile-long, concrete-lined portion of the wash before turning their attention to a wider, muddy marsh farther downstream. Rainwater in the wash ultimately drains into Lake Mead.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was helping the effort with a helicopter. The chopper was being used to fly searchers into otherwise inaccessible parts of the mucky wetland.

"More than anything else, it's the use of the Metro Police helicopter that's very helpful in searching a large area quickly," Paul said.

In the Phoenix area, flooded roads led to a dramatic rescue Thursday morning. A driver and her disabled passenger had to be pulled from a medical transport van that was stranded after the driver tried to navigate a flooded Scottsdale wash.

Firefighters used a ladder truck, and news video showed the driver and passenger climbing out of a van stopped in the middle of a flooded area.

Heavy rains hit much of Arizona early Thursday, with more than an inch reported in an hour in parts of metropolitan Phoenix.

Normally dry washes were rushing like major rivers. Some neighborhoods were flooded, and parts of Interstate 10 on the city's western side were inundated, snarling traffic during the morning commute.

Some Southwest residents couldn't resist taking a plunge in the floodwaters despite the dangerous conditions.

On Wednesday, three young men were spotted riding an air mattress down floodwaters in Henderson.

The shirtless trio cheered and waved to a KTNV news helicopter crew as they rode the makeshift watercraft down the dirty waters of the canal. The station reports a police helicopter caught up with the riders and ordered them out of the water.

Almost a year after tragic plane crash, Lokomotiv returns to KHL

LokomotivIt's been almost 11 months since the tragic plane crash that took the lives of the entire Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team. On Wednesday, they returned to action in the KHL as Lokomotiv lost 4-1 to Alexander Radulov's CSKA Moscow club in a preseason game, but it was just the beginnings of a memorable upcoming season for the club.

From the KHL:

It was planned as a low-key affair, with little pre-publicity to lure sports fans away from the Olympic coverage on a sweltering evening, there was still an impressive crowd to welcome head coach Tom Rowe's new-look roster to "The Loko Family".

More than 100 Loko fans gathered outside the arena after the game to greet their new heroes prior to the team's training camp in Switzerland, and spirits were hardly dampened by CSKA's 4-1 win in a gentle pre-season warm-up.

...

The way a youthful Loko contested the first period backed up Rowe's claim that he found "14 or 15 youngsters who can play" when he came to the organization in the summer — and his willingness to give them game time highlights the importance that the club places on maintaining some continuity with the players who brought hockey back to the city in the aftermath of last September's tragedy.

Due to the tragedy, the team did not play in the KHL last season, instead fielding a team in the MHL, a minor league.

The re-building of Lokomotiv has been a process. In April, they hired Tom Rowe, formerly with the Carolina Hurricanes, to be their new head coach. They've also been able to sign former NHLers such as Niklas Hagman, Viktor Kozlov, Curtis Sanford, and Sami Lepisto, among others, to fill out their roster.

Alexei Kalyuzhni, who spent the last two seasons with Avangard Omsk, said about a "mystical fear" of joining the team, "I know what you're talking about. It was the main thing that made me think. But I lost a very close friend in that crash — Ruslan Salei. That's why I had personal reasons to be involved in the revival of Lokomotiv… It is impossible to replace someone who died. But you can try to do something on the team that, perhaps, he wanted to do himself."

As they prepared for the 2012-13 season, Lokomotiv was offered certain guarantees. "We were offered a guaranteed playoff spot," Yuri Lukin, the team GM told SovSport. "But Lokomotiv doesn't need any concessions. We put together a team that is capable of challenging for the Gagarin Cup."

Lokomotiv will begin regular season play Sept. 6 at Sibir, one day before the first anniversary of the plane crash.

Additional information provided by Dmitry Chesnokov

Follow Sean Leahy on Twitter at @Sean_Leahy