BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Jun 10 - 12:22 PM

"You wouldn't think a sunken ship from 2000 years ago could hold the key to the success of a neutrino detection experiment, except perhaps in a Hollywood movie, or a NOVA special on Jacques Cousteau. But sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. Scientists with the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), a neutrino observatory buried under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, hit the motherlode when archaeologists discovered a Spanish ship off the coast of Sardinia, filled with lead that dates back two millennia.

Yes, lead. Really, really old lead. That might not seem very exciting to you, but for CUORE scientists, it's a godsend. They use lead (also copper) as a shielding material for their neutrino detection materials. See, neutrinos -- dubbed "ghost particles" because they so rarely interact with everything (billions course through you every second) -- are extremely difficult to detect, in part because their signals can be obscured by things like cosmic rays, and the natural radioactivity in rocks, for example.

WATCH VIDEO: Another ship, the Odyssey Marine Exploration, is the best at finding deep-sea treasure. Kasey-Dee Gardner meets the crew and learns how they do it.CUORE is looking for an even rarer event, known as neutrinoless double-beta decay. Among other things, such an observation would provide a handy means of directly calculating the mass of a neutrino (which is very, very small -- so small that for decades physicists believed neutrinos had no mass).

Alas, there are also trace amounts of radioactivity in the very materials that are supposed to shield the experiments from interference -- the radioactive isotope lead-210, in the case of contemporary lead ingots. But if you have lead that is 2000 years old, that radioactive isotope has pretty much disappeared. Unfortunately, lead that old is quite a rare find. US scientists working on the IGEX experiment lucked out a few years ago when they snagged from 450-year-old lead from a sunken Spanish galleon.

That's why the discovery of this new sunken ship is so exciting to nuclear physicist Ettore Fiorini, who finessed some key financing from the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics so that archaeologists could salvage the vessel -- in return for for a bunch of that ancient lead. And there's rather a lot of it, apparently. While most such ships were merely lined with lead, this particular vessel was actually carrying lead as its cargo, so the find "multiplies by many times the quantity of ancient lead available in the world," according to Fiorini."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jun 10 - 03:41 PM

YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) -- Yakima fire officials say a rat that chewed through the electrical wiring of a jukebox is responsible for a $1 million fire that gutted the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 379. Investigators believe the rodent caught fire Wednesday morning and fled to its nest inside an old piano, where it ignited combustible material in the nest. The rat was found dead near the fire's point of origin.

Deputy Fire Marshal Ron Melcher says it's uncommon for rodents to cause fires. He says investigators had to study the building carefully to decide what happened because there was so much damage.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jun 10 - 11:08 AM

"I fired [Douglas MacArthur] because he wouldn't respect the authority of the president. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals," Truman said, reflecting on his decision to relieve the U.S. commander in Korea.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Jun 10 - 06:20 PM

There were already many anecdotal accounts of large crocodiles sighted far out at sea, but nothing confirmed. Now, for the first time, using sonar transmitters and satellite tracking, scientists now find that saltwater crocodiles actually do ride surface ocean currents for long-distance travel, enabling them to voyage from one oceanic island to another.

"Because these crocodiles are poor swimmers, it is unlikely that they swim across vast tracts of ocean," said researcher Hamish Campbell, a behavioral ecologist from University of Queensland in Australia. "But they can survive for long periods in saltwater without eating or drinking, so by only traveling when surface currents are favorable, they would be able to move long distances by sea."

Crocodile river travel

Working at the remote Kennedy River in northeastern Australia, the team of scientists Ñ which included the late Steve Irwin, "The Crocodile Hunter" Ñ tagged 27 adult seawater crocodiles with sonar transmitters, employing 20 underwater receivers deployed along a 39-mile-long stretch of the river (63 km) to track the reptiles' every move for more than 12 months. They found both male and female adult crocodiles undertook long-distance journeys, regularly traveling more than 30 miles (48 km) from their home area to the river mouth and beyond into open sea.

The scientists also discovered the "salties" always began long-distance travel within an hour of the tide changing, allowing them to go with the flow. They halted their journeys by hauling out onto the river bank or diving to the river bottom when the currents turned against them.

(LiveScience website)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Jun 10 - 11:15 PM

Petrichor

A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.

Used in a sentence by the Listener in 1971:

No matter what kind of rock or earth was used, the oily essence always possessed the aroma of petrichorÑthe smell of rain falling on dry ground. (NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 01 Jun 10 - 12:09 PM

Cloning Entangled Qubits to Scales One Can See
Authors: Pavel Sekatski, Bruno Sanguinetti, Enrico Pomarico, Nicolas Gisin, Christoph Simon
(Submitted on 27 May 2010)
Abstract: By amplifying photonic qubits it is possible to produce states that contain enough photons to be seen with a human eye, potentially bringing quantum effects to macroscopic scales [1]. In this paper we theoretically study quantum states obtained by amplifying one side of an entangled photon pair with different types of optical cloning machines for photonic qubits. We propose a detection scheme that involves lossy threshold detectors (such as human eye) on the amplified side and conventional photon detectors on the other side. We show that correlations obtained with such coarse-grained measurements prove the entanglement of the initial photon pair and do not prove the entanglement of the amplified state. We emphasize the importance of the detection loophole in Bell violation experiments by giving a simple preparation technique for separable states that violate a Bell inequality without closing this loophole. Finally we analyze the genuine entanglement of the amplified states and its robustness to losses before, during and after amplification.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 31 May 10 - 10:36 PM

Scientists from CERN and INFN of the OPERA Collaboration have announced the first direct observation of a muon neutrino turning into a tau neutrino. 'The OPERA result follows seven years of preparation and over three years of beam provided by CERN. During that time, billions of billions of muon-neutrinos have been sent from CERN to Gran Sasso, taking just 2.4 milliseconds to make the trip. T

he rarity of neutrino oscillation, coupled with the fact that neutrinos interact very weakly with matter, makes this kind of experiment extremely subtle to conduct. ... While closing a chapter on understanding the nature of neutrinos, the observation of neutrino oscillations is strong evidence for new physics. The Standard Model of fundamental particles posits no mass for the neutrino. For them to be able to oscillate, however, they must have mass.'"

(From Slashdot)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 29 May 10 - 09:39 AM

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. É I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected, barely concealing his anger.



Frustrated by psychology's focus on what he considered to be peripheral beliefs, like political opinions and social attitudes, Rokeach wanted to probe the limits of identity. He had been intrigued by stories of Secret Service agents who felt they had lost contact with their original identities, and wondered if a man's sense of self might be challenged in a controlled setting. Unusually for a psychologist, he found his answer in the Bible. There is only one Son of God, says the good book, so anyone who believed himself to be Jesus would suffer a psychological affront by the very existence of another like him. This was the revelation that led Rokeach to orchestrate his meeting of the Messiahs and document their encounter in the extraordinary (and out-of-print) book from 1964, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Although by no means common, Christ conventions have an unexpectedly long history. In his commentary to Cesare Beccaria's essay "Crimes and Punishments," Voltaire recounted the tale of the "unfortunate madman" Simon Morin who was burnt at the stake in 1663 for claiming to be Jesus. Unfortunate it seems, because Morin was originally committed to a madhouse where he met another who claimed to be God the Father, and "was so struck with the folly of his companion that he acknowledged his own, and appeared, for a time, to have recovered his senses." The lucid period did not last, however, and it seems the authorities lost patience with his blasphemy. Another account of a meeting of the Messiahs comes from Sidney Rosen's book My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H. Erickson. The renowned psychiatrist apparently set two delusional Christs in his ward arguing only for one to gain insight into his madness, miraculously, after seeing something of himself in his companion. ("I'm saying the same things as that crazy fool is saying," said one of the patients. "That must mean I'm crazy too.")

(Full article here

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 May 10 - 06:13 PM

nternet, networks of connections between Hollywood actors, etc, are examples of complex networks, whose properties have been intensively studied in recent times. The small-world property (that everyone has a few-step connection to celebrities), for instance, is a prominent result derived in this field. A group of scientists around Professor Cirac, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Germany), has now introduced complex networks in the microscopic, so called, quantum regime (Nature Physics, Advanced Online Publication).


The scientists have proven that these quantum complex networks have surprising properties: even in a very weakly connected quantum network, performing some measurements and other simple quantum operations allows to generate arbitrary graphs of connections that are otherwise impossible in their classical counterparts.

The behaviour of networks has been widely explored in the context of classical statistical mechanics. Periodic networks, by definition, have a regular structure, in which each node is connected to a constant number of ÔgeometricalÕ neighbours. If one tries to enlarge these systems, their topology is not altered since the unit cell is just repeated ad aeternum. The construction of a random network is completely different: each node has a small probability of being connected to any other node. Depending on the connection probability and in the limit of infinite size, such networks exhibit some typical effects. For instance, if this probability is high enough, nearly all nodes will be part of one giant cluster; if it is too small only sparse groups of connected nodes will be present.
In a quantum network one link between neighbouring nodes is given by one pair of entangled qubits, for example atoms; in other words, one link in a quantum network represents the entanglement between two qubits.

Therefore, a node possesses exactly one qubit for each neighbour, and since it can act on these qubits it is called a ÔstationÕ. This holds for any kind of quantum networks. However, there are different ways of defining the entanglement between neighbouring qubits. Until now, quantum networks have been mostly modelled as periodically structured graphs, that is, lattices. In the work described here the scientists set the amount of entanglement between two nodes to be equal to the connection probability of the classical random graphs.

In the classical case, some specific subgraphs appear suddenly if one lets the connection probability scale with the size of the network: for very low probabilities only trivial connections (simple links) are present in the network, whereas for higher probabilities the subgraphs become more and more complex (e.g., triangles, squares, or stars). In quantum networks, on the other hand, a qualitatively different behaviour emerges: even for the lowest non-trivial connection probability, i.e., if the entanglement between the nodes is, at first sight, just sufficient to get simple connections, it is in fact possible to generate communication subgraphs of any complexity. This result mainly relies on the superposition principle and on the ability to coherently manipulate the qubits at the stations.   (PhysOrg)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 May 10 - 07:25 PM

"The shape of the cost curves that show up as we build and run
communications networks have properties that seem counterintuitive to
many people, but that have been surprisingly consistent across lots of
different technologies since at least the days of the telegraph, and
probably further back than that.

Herewith, the Iron Laws of Network Cost Scaling:

1. Upgrade cost per increment of capacity decreases as capacity rises.

2. Network costs scale primarily with the number of troubleshooters
required to run them, not with capacity.

3. Under market pressure, network pricing evolves from metered to
flat-rate.

When you learn to apply all three of these together, you can make useful
qualitative predictions across a surprisingly broad set of real-world cases.

The easiest way to see why upgrade cost per increment of capacity
decreases as capacity rises is to think about the high capital cost
associated with laying the first cable from A to B. YouÕre going to have
to pay to dig a trench and lay conduit, or put the functional equivalent
of telephone poles in a right-of-way. If weÕre talking wireless, you
need two antenna towers Ð OK, maybe one if the start end is on your net
already. Trenches are expensive; rights-of-way and poles are expensive;
towers are expensive.

But once youÕve got that physical conduit or poles or towers in place,
pulling replacement wire or upgrading your radio repeaters is much less
expensive. As your tech level rises, you stop having to do that, even;
you find cleverer ways to squeeze bandwidth out of fiber, copper, or air
by using denser encodings, better noise cancellation Ð better
algorithms. The action moves from hardware to software and upgrade costs
drop.

As a very recent example of how the shift from hardware to software
affects developing communications networks, the differences between the
two major fourth-generation wireless data technologies, WiMAX and LTE,
are so slight that the same hardware, running different software, can
support either. This means that on any timescale longer than that
required to push firmware upgrades to your repeaters, the differences
between the two arenÕt of consequence for planning."...

Eric Raymond on The Iron Laws of Network Cost Scaling

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 May 10 - 12:53 PM

"With the first baby boomers turning 65 next year, the Census Bureau projects a sharp increase in the share of people in the age group compared with those between 20 and 64. Depending on the influx of younger immigrants, the number of people 65 and older per 100 in the younger group would rise to 35 (in 20 years) from 22 now, the bureau said Thursday, raising potential political conflicts over everything from Social Security to school board budgets. By 2030, a quarter of non-Hispanic whites would be 65 and over. By 2050, the black, Hispanic and Asian elderly, now 20 percent of the older population, would make up 42 percent. "

Ibid

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 May 10 - 10:18 AM

"We proceed gingerly when interpreting the results of high-energy physics experiments. The way it has been explained is that it all comes down to a very slight bias, an asymmetry, in the behavior of a subatomic particle, the neutral B-meson. As it oscillates between its matter and antimatter states, it shows a slight predilection for matter, a result predicted by Andrei Sakharov.

That preference for one state over another — becoming matter more readily than it becomes antimatter — is small, about 1 percent. But that may be enough to explain the preponderance of matter. We expect more news on this front from the Tevatron and its larger European cousin, the Large Hadron Collider.

What these physicists are searching for is a model of the universe and its origins. We are, as we know, made of stardust, of elements formed in the Big Bang and in the subsequent creation and destruction of stars. The very existence of this universal stuff called matter may depend on a slight bias in the frenetic variation of a particle we can only momentarily detect, in the hottest kilns humanity has so far created. "

NYT

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 May 10 - 02:40 PM

From this NYT Book review discussing "The Rational Optimist," by Matt Ridley:

"As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.

The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they've both got it backward: traders' wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.

"Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment," Dr. Ridley writes. "This is history's greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the 'creation' of time."

You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second. That technological progress, though, was sporadic. Innovation would flourish in one trading hub for a while but then stagnate, sometimes because of external predators — roving pirates, invading barbarians — but more often because of internal parasites, as Dr. Ridley writes:

"Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers."
..."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 May 10 - 11:03 AM

"There are two travellers, an English woman and a French man, both in their late twenties. They are eloquently self-aware and profoundly unhappy. They are hoping to find a new purpose to their lives. They arrive in Egypt in November 1849, within days of each other. They stay in adjacent hotels. They travel along the same river, and they visit the same places at the same season of the year. They confide their secrets to their journals. They write vivid letters home. For two days they are to be found on the upper and the lower decks of the same steamship, plodding along the lower Nile from Alexandria to Cairo.

These two young travellers, so nicely oblivious of each other, are Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Within seven years of their journey along the Nile both will be famous, she as the saviour of the wounded soldiers of the Crimean War, he as the author of Madame Bovary. His novel will be the classic description of the subjection of women. Her mission to the Crimea will foreshadow their emancipation. At this point in their lives, though, their primary creative energies are paralysed. Egypt may transform them.

..."

(From the UK Literary Review coverage of BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS -- A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt By Anthony Sattin)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 May 10 - 08:06 AM

A Japanese couple was married by a robot serving as minister last week. What does this say about the chest-beating "sanctity of marriage" yodelers? :D

The robot minister was a 1.5m tall I-Fairy manufactured by Kokoro Co. The robot features plastic pigtails, flashing eyes which are used to depict expression and, for the occasion, it donned a wreath of flowers. Its arms are capable of movements like waving a hand or reaching behind it and, while it is capable of speech, it requires a programmer to input the desired words.That programmer can also program in a variety of movements, like dance moves, which the robot can perform.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 18 May 10 - 07:50 AM

Orderliness, openness defining political traits: Study

Being a "bleeding-heart liberal" is an insult in some circles, but new Canadian research suggests it's an accurate label, while "compassionate conservative" might be a mythical creature.

A study examining the link between politics and personality traits finds that liberals are more compassionate, preoccupied with fairness and equality, while conservatives are more polite, modest and respectful of social norms.

"What we found is that conservatives tend to be higher in a trait called orderliness and lower in openness. What that means is they're more concerned about a sense of order and tradition, so they have this motive to preserve the current social order. On the other hand, liberalism tended to be more associated with compassion and empathy," says Jacob Hirsh, a post-doctoral psychology researcher at the University of Toronto and lead author on the paper.

"It fits in with stereotypes of these different groups as well. The term 'bleeding-heart liberal' is often thrown around, but there's some truth to that."

Conversely, the study shows that right-leaning individuals tend to score high in order and low in compassion, leading Hirsh to conclude in the paper that "compassionate conservative" is "something of an oxymoron." The results don't suggest the "moral superiority" of either viewpoint, the authors write, but Hirsh says they do help explain why liberals and conservatives clash.

The study included more than 600 subjects from Canada and the U.S., who categorized their politics as small-L liberal or small-C conservative rather than adherence to any particular political party.

Psychologists profile personalities according to the so-called "Big Five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and agreeableness. (Compassion and politeness, the characteristics Hirsh studied, are specific aspects of agreeableness.)

Some of these traits sound more flattering than others, but Hirsh says too much of any of them is not a good thing.

Openness, for instance, means interest in aesthetic experiences, cultural sophistication and abstract ideas; it's a trait that's more common in liberals than conservatives, he says, but it's a double-edged sword.

"A very low-open person is very down to earth, someone who thinks in concrete terms and is very grounded — and when you phrase it that way, it sounds much more positive," he says of the conservative personality profile. "At the extreme high-open end, that's where you get people (whose) thinking is sort of scattered, they jump from idea to idea and they're less focused."

The study reflects a shift in psychology and political science toward recognizing that many "non-rational" factors shape people's politics and there's a "massive genetic component" to both political orientation and personality, Hirsh says.

Researchers have been drawing links between politics and personality since the Second World War, he says, but his work is part of a recent resurgence that views people's political orientation as driven by underlying psychological needs.

"It means you have to take a deeper view of political values and morality in terms of where these things are coming from, rather than just a straight rational consideration of the issues," he says. "People's values are deeply embedded in their biology and their genetic heritage."

And while their political opponents might think otherwise, the fact that a conservative concern with order and a liberal urge toward empathy have persisted as human personality traits for millennia means both are useful, he says.

"The fact that the variation still exists, from an evolutionary perspective, it means that neither one is right on its own, you really need both to balance out an effective society," Hirsh says.

"Most political ideologues think that if you can just get rid of the other side, everything would be perfect, but from an evolutionary perspective, that doesn't quite make sense. If there really was one optimal solution that was better than the other, then that would have survived and everything else would have perished."
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 May 10 - 02:00 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of Clarkson University scientists led by Prof. Igor Sokolov are using atomic force microscopy (AFM) to record sounds emanating from inside living insects like flies, mosquitoes and ladybugs.

AFM is one of major scientific tools responsible for the emergence of modern nanotechnology.

The unprecedented sensitivity of AFM allowed the Clarkson team to record sub-nano oscillations of very faint amplitude (less than the size of one atom) at high frequencies (up to 1,000 hertz or cycles per second). Previous work in the study of insects was only done at up to 5 hertz. The sounds are recorded by touching the surface of the bugs with an AFM probe.

The study of these sounds may allow researchers to discover unknown features and physiology of insects. Sokolov hopes these discoveries may help in finding solutions to the problems caused by insect pests.

"Insects are of general interest not only as the most numerous and diverse group of animals on the planet, but also as highly efficient bio-machines varying greatly in size," says Sokolov. "Some are major agricultural pests and competitors of humans for crops. Mosquitoes and other insects are important vectors of plant, animal, and human diseases. Also, vast lands of the earth are still underdeveloped because they are occupied by blood-sucking insects."...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 May 10 - 12:39 PM

cracker :

mid-15c., "hard wafer," but the specific application to a thin, crisp biscuit is 1739. Cracker-barrel (adj.) "emblematic of down-home ways and views" is from 1877. Cracker, Southern U.S. derogatory term for "poor, white trash" (1766), is from mid-15c. crack "to boast" (e.g. not what it's cracked up to be), originally a Scottish word. Especially of Georgians by 1808, though often extended to residents of northern Florida.

I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. [1766, G. Cochrane]

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 May 10 - 12:17 PM

The classic study of witchcraft in Africa occurred among the Azande, who inhabit the eastern edge of the Central African Republic. The anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard found that the Azande attributed a staggering range of misfortunes—infected toes, collapsed granary roofs, even bad weather—to meddling by witches. Nothing happened by chance, only as an effect of spell-casting by a wicked interloper. That sentiment remains widespread among Central Africans, who demand that the law reflect the influence of witchcraft as they understand it. The standard legal concept of force majeure, under which a defendant cannot be held liable for an "act of God," is thus rendered meaningless.


Foreign human-rights groups have noticed that many of the targets of prosecution are vulnerable types (like Pygmies, or even children), and nongovernmental organizations that exist to encourage the rule of law are embarrassed that the "law" in this case resembles the penal code of 17th-century Salem.

In response, the Central African parliament is considering striking the clause outlawing witchcraft from its books. The parliament is in Bangui, the capital, which sees far fewer witchcraft cases per capita. Even so, most lawyers I consulted there favored keeping the law intact, although they admitted that it fits uneasily in a modern legal system. "The problem is that in a witchcraft case, there is usually no evidence," said Bartolomé Goroth, a lawyer in Bangui, who recently defended (unsuccessfully) a coven of Pygmies who had been accused of murder-by-witchcraft in Mbaiki. Goroth said the trials generally ended with an admission of guilt by an accused witch in exchange for a modest sentence. I asked how one determined guilt in cases where the alleged witches denied the charges. "The judge will look at them and see if they act like witches," Goroth said, specifying that "acting like a witch" entailed behaving "strangely" or "nervously" in court. His principal advice to clients, he said, was to act normally and refrain from casting any spells in the courtroom.


(From an article in Atlantic

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 May 10 - 08:15 PM

Silicon chips are on the way out, at least if Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer has his way. The professor of electrical and computer engineering says a single grad student using the unique properties of DNA to coax circuits into assembling themselves could produce more logic circuits in a single day than the entire global silicon chip industry could produce in a month.

Indeed, DNA is perfectly suited to such pre-programming and self-assembly. Dwyer's recent research has shown that by creating and mixing customized snippets of DNA and other molecules, he can create billions of identical, waffle-like structures that can be turned into logic circuits using light rather than electricity as a signaling medium.

The process works by adding light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to the structures. These chromophores absorb light, exciting the electrons within. That energy is passed to a different nearby chromophore, which uses the energy to emit light of a different wavelength. The difference in wavelength is easily differentiated from the original light; in computing terms, it's the difference between a one or a zero. Presto: a logic gate.
Rather than running computers and electrical circuits on electricity, light-sensitive DNA switches could be used to move signals through a device at much higher speeds. Furthermore, the waffle structures are cheap and can be made quickly in virtually limitless quantities, driving down the cost of computing power. Once you figure out how you wish to code the DNA snippets, you can synthesize them easily and repeatedly; from there you can create everything from a single logic gate to larger, more complex circuits....(PopSci)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 May 10 - 01:52 PM

By Chr. Science Monitor Space.com staff / May 11, 2010

A vast hole in space has been unexpectedly discovered in a part of the universe thought to be packed with a cloud of dense gas and dust – the latest in a string of cosmic finds by the European Herschel infrared space telescope.

The surprising hole in space has provided astronomers with a new glimpse at the end of the star-forming process.

"No one has ever seen a hole like this," said study team member Tom Megeath of the University of Toledo in Ohio. "It's as surprising as knowing you have worms tunneling under your lawn, but finding one morning that they have created a huge, yawning pit."


Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas, and while jets of gas have been spotted coming from young stars, the process of how a star uses this gas to disperse surrounding debris and emerge from its birth cloud has not been understood.

This latest discovery byHerschel, an infrared space telescope built by the European Space Agency, may be an unexpected step in the star-forming process.

A cloud of bright, reflective gas, known to astronomers as NGC 1999, is located next to a black patch of sky. For most of the 20th century, these black patches were understood to be dense clouds of dust and gas that block light that would normally pass through.

As Herschel's infrared eye looked in the direction of NGC 1999 to study nearby young stars, the cloud continued to look black, even though the telescope's infrared technology is designed to penetrate through such dense cloud material. This meant that either the cloud was immensely dense, or Herschel had happened upon a previously unexplained phenomenon.

Astronomers continued their investigation using ground-based telescopes and found the same results when looking at the patch of gas. This led to the conclusion that the patch looks black not because it is an extremely dense pocket of gas, but because it is truly empty – something had blown a hole through the cloud.

The astronomers think the hole must have been opened when the narrow jets of gas from some of the young stars in the region punctured the sheet of dust and gas that forms NGC 1999. The powerful radiation from a nearby mature star may have also helped to create the hole, researchers said.

Whatever the exact cause of the hole may be, the discovery may be an important glimpse into the way newborn stars shake off their birth clouds that helps astronomers develop a better understanding of the entire star-forming process, researchers said. ...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 May 10 - 01:15 PM

When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the ideal renewable fuel, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Biofuels ultimately come from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass--corn or switchgrass or algae? "What we wanted to know," Afeyan says, "is could we engineer a system that could convert carbon dioxide directly into any fuel that we wanted?"

The answer seems to be yes, according to Joule Biotechnologies, the company that Afeyan founded (also in Cambridge) to design this new fuel. By manipulating and designing genes, Joule has created photosynthetic microörganisms that use sunlight to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethanol or diesel--the first time this has ever been done, the company says. Joule grows the microbes in photobioreactors that need no fresh water and occupy only a fraction of the land needed for biomass-based approaches. The creatures secrete fuel continuously, so it's easy to collect. Lab tests and small trials lead Afeyan to estimate that the process will yield 100 times as much fuel per hectare as fermenting corn to produce ethanol, and 10 times as much as making it from sources such as agricultural waste. He says costs could be competitive with those of fossil fuels.

If Afeyan is right, biofuels could become an alternative to petroleum on a much broader scale than has ever seemed possible. The supply of conventional biofuels, such as those made from corn, is constrained by the vast amount of water and agricultural land needed to grow the plants they're made from. And while advanced biofuels require less water and don't need high-quality land, their potential is limited by the expensive, multistep processes needed to make them. As a result, the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2050, biodiesel and ethanol will meet only 26 percent of world demand for transportation fuel. ...

From the MIT Technology Review

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 May 10 - 10:35 AM

"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"
"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed voices.
"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
"And what do ye next, men?"
"Lower away, and after him!"
"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"
"A dead whale or a stove boat!"



The call-and-response of Ahab's maniacal pep rally—a string of, as Ishmael puts it, "seemingly purposeless questions" with which the Pequod's captain stirs his crew into a bloodthirsty furor for whale-killing—culminates in what one scholar of American folklore has called the "universal motto" of nineteenth-century whalemen: "A dead whale or a stove boat!" Like a seagoing version of the Depression-era bumper slogan "California or bust," the phrase pithily evokes both the mariners' desperate dedication to the pursuit and destruction of their prey and the extreme risks they incurred in the process. "A dead whale" was, of course, the desired outcome of the chase, but "a stove boat"—a wrecked mess of splintered timber, fouled tackle, and flailing bodies—was just as likely. For the fictional crew of the Pequod, as for the real whalemen of the day, whaling was more mortal combat than straightforward hunt: Six sailors in a flimsy, open whaleboat, armed with only handheld harpoons and lances, pitting themselves at every opportunity against the singular terror of a true sea monster, the sperm whale, an animal that, when fully grown, could measure sixty-two feet in length, weigh eighty tons, and wield, to deadly purpose, an eighteen-foot jaw studded with seven-inch teeth.



Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, a new American Experience documentary by Ric Burns, is alive with the all-or-nothing ethos of the nineteenth-century whaleman. Drawing its central narrative arc from two of the most famous man-versus-whale tales of the era—the true, though at the time unthinkable, story of the Essex, a whaleship sunk in the middle of the Pacific by an enraged sperm whale, and the dark masterpiece it partially inspired, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick—the film follows the history of the American trade as it evolved from the colonial practice of "drift whaling" through the so-called Golden Age, which lasted from shortly after the War of 1812 until the commercialization of petroleum after it was successfully drilled in 1859. During that time, Nantucket, New Bedford, and other port towns sent hundreds of ships all over the globe in search of leviathans. This was before modern whaling technologies reduced the drama and heroics of the chase to mere assembly-line slaughter, when whaling still represented, in the words of several scholars interviewed in the film, a "primordial . . . epic hunt, . . . tap[ping] into something very basic about human existence and experience," "a spiritual endeavor," and a "peculiar combination of romance, . . . danger, and exoticism." Those brave enough to ship out on a Yankee whaler could expect to hunt the biggest game, explore new corners of the ocean and faraway lands, dally with foreign women, and hack to pieces and boil down behemoth carcasses.

Wait. Hack and boil carcasses?

For all the antiquarian nostalgia that risks tinting our view of the fishery's past, Into the Deep never loses sight of the simple fact that whaling was an industry—one of the largest, most profitable, and important businesses of its day, involving tens of thousands of workers at sea and on shore, and millions of dollars in annual investments and returns. It is a refreshingly clear perspective for those of us who may have thumbed quickly past the more technical chapters of Moby-Dick, or who imagine whaling through the narrow lens of those impressive painted and scrimshawed scenes of vicious whales smashing boats and tossing sailors in the air. Men went to sea for any number of reasons—to make a living, to escape the law, to find themselves—but once aboard a whaleship, their job was to supply the rapidly industrializing Western world with oil for its lamps, candles, and machinery, and baleen for its parasol ribs, horsewhips, and corsets. And as author Nathaniel Philbrick, one of the experts appearing in the film, said in a phone interview: "It's not as though the harpoon hit the whale and—poof—magically it was turned into a profitable commodity." To effect that transformation required some of the most difficult and disgusting labor of any industry of the time.

"We have to work like horses and live like pigs," wrote Robert Weir, a greenhand (or first-time sailor), in his diary. His experiences aboard the whaleship Clara Bell from 1855 to 1858 correspond to many scenes from Into the Deep. After only forty-eight hours at sea, his "eyes," he said, were already "beginning to open" to the harsh realities of his "rather dearly bought independence." He had shipped out to cut ties with those on land—his family and creditors—but to what end? The life of a whaleman was not, it turned out, all battling leviathans, exploring exotic isles, and cavorting with natives. In fact, for the most part, it was downright miserable. The quarters were cramped, the food was awful, and the work, when there was any to be done, positively backbreaking. After one especially long day, Weir jotted in his diary, it "rained pretty hard in the evening—and I got wet and tired tending the rigging and sails. Tumbled into my bunk with exhausted body and blistered hands." To this account he appended a one-word commentary, as bitterly sarcastic as it was short: "Romantic."

Although wooden whalers required, as Weir put it, "innumerable jobs" just to keep afloat and moving forward, the really hard work of whaling didn't begin until after the brief thrills of the chase were brought to a successful conclusion. If a whaleboat crew were skilled and lucky enough to kill a whale—to make it spout blood and roll "fin out," in the colorful language of the fishery—the men would then have to tow the carcass to the waiting mother ship, which could be anywhere from a few yards to several miles distant. As Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, a professor of maritime literature at Williams College–Mystic Seaport Program, points out in the film, dragging tens of tons of deadweight through the water under oar was anything but easy: Six men working themselves raw could only achieve a top speed of one mile per hour. Even a mariner seasoned by years in the merchant service described towing a dead whale as "one of the most tedious and straining undertakings I have ever assisted at."


And, as some of the archival photographs and footage Burns dredged up for Into the Deep graphically attest, things didn't get any easier after the whaleboat met the ship. Brought alongside, the corpse was secured to the starboard side of the vessel, whale's head to ship's stern, by a large chain about its flukes and sometimes a wooden beam run through a hole cut into its head. Soon, all hands—except, in American whalers, the captain—were given over to the bloody task of "cutting-in," by which the whale was literally peeled of its blubber—"as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it" is the simile Melville and other salts and scholars have used to illuminate the process. With a few deft slashes of a fifteen-foot cutting spade, an experienced mate would loosen a portion of flesh and blubber between the animal's eye and fin, while another man, braving the sharks that were by now swarming the grisly mass, boarded the body, and fixed a huge hook to the cut swath of whale. Drawn up into the rigging, this hook began ripping a long strip of blubber, called a "blanket-piece," from the carcass. Measuring some five feet wide, fifteen feet long, and ten to twenty inches thick, blanket-pieces were borne aloft and aboard, where they could be cut down to sizes suitable for "trying-out," the next step.
...From http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2010-03/Whaling.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 May 10 - 06:10 PM

Yeon-Kyun Shin, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at ISU, has shown that the protein called synaptotagmin1 (Syt1) is the sole trigger for the release of neurotransmitters in the brain.

Prior to this research, Syt1 was thought to be a part of the protein structure (not the sole protein) that triggered the release of neurotransmitters at 10 parts per million of calcium.
Shin's research is published in the current issue of the journal Science.
"Syt1 was a suspect previously, but people were not able to pinpoint that it's the real one, even though there were lots and lots of different trials," said Shin.
"In this case, we are trying to show in the laboratory that it's the real one. So we excluded everything else, and included SNARE proteins -- that's the machinery of the release, and the Syt1 is a calcium-sensing timer."

Syt1 senses, at 10 ppm of calcium, and tells the SNARE complex to open the pore to allow the movement of the neurotransmitters.

Brain activity occurs when neurotransmitters move into a fusion pore.
"We are showing that this Syt1 senses the calcium at 10 ppm, and sends the signal to the SNARE complex to open the fusion pore. That is the process that we are showing right now," Shin said....(PhysOrg)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 May 10 - 02:15 PM

Gravity-Induced Vacuum Dominance
William C. C. Lima and Daniel A. T. Vanzella
Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 161102 (Published April 20, 2010)



Quantum field theory describes all fundamental interactions between matter except for the most familiar interaction, that of gravity, since a full theory of quantum gravity has yet to be formulated. In an approximation to such a theory, the behavior of the quantum fields describing matter and its nongravitational interactions can be investigated by assuming that they propagate in a classical background spacetime. These fields will in turn affect the background metric, but such Òback-reactionÓ effects are thought to be small as long as one is not dealing with an extreme situation, such as near a singularity.
However, in an article appearing in Physical Review Letters, authors William Lima and Daniel Vanzella, both of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, show that even in some ÒnonextremeÓ situations the quantum fluctuations of these fields can have large effects on the background metric.

They consider a free scalar field that is coupled to the scalar curvature R and propagating in a metric that is conformally flat in the asymptotic past and conformally static in the asymptotic future. They find, under some specific but reasonable conditions, that the background metric forces the vacuum fluctuations to increase without bound as the field propagates into the future. As a result, the fieldÕs vacuum energy density will eventually dominate its classical energy density.

The authors speculate that this Òvacuum-dominanceÓ effect might have unexpected implications in astrophysical settings (such as neutron stars) and in cosmology. In a cosmological setting, they estimate that the Òasymptotic futureÓ where this effect cuts in is of the order of ten billion years, but for a neutron star it may be as short as 100 microseconds. Ð Jerome Malenfant

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 May 10 - 01:37 PM

Excerpt from Cosmos Magazine:
"
Two tiny meteorites recently recovered from Antarctic snow contain material dating back to the birth of our Solar System, and may provide clues about the delivery of organic matter to Earth. Researchers believe that these micrometeorites likely came from the cold, comet-forming outer regions of the gas and dust cloud that comprised the early Solar System, and sample its composition. Discovered in 2006, the particles measure less than 0.25 mm across and survived their journey through Earth's atmosphere relatively unscathed.

More importantly, scientists found that they contain unusually high amounts of organic matter." (Emphasis added).

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 09 May 10 - 05:12 AM

Lebanon fires latest salvo in hummus battle with Israel

Lebanon has claimed the latest victory in the continuing battle with Israel over which country can make the largest serving of hummus.

Some 300 chefs set the new record, creating a huge 10-tonne vat of the chickpea-based dip in Fanar.

That more than doubles the previous record of about four tonnes, set in January by cooks in the Israeli-Arab town of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem.

Both Lebanese and Israelis claim hummus as a national dish.

A Guinness World Records adjudicator confirmed that Lebanon now held the record.

Hummus is a dip made of chickpeas, olive oil, sesame paste, lemon juice and garlic. The chefs mixed the ingredients together in a giant plate which itself claimed a record for the largest earthenware dish.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 May 10 - 01:11 AM

A demo of a quantum calculation carried out by Japanese researchers has yielded some pretty mind-blowing results: a single molecule can perform a complex calculation thousands of times faster than a conventional computer. A proof-of-principle test run of a discrete Fourier transform Ñ a common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression, among other things Ñ performed with a single iodine molecule transpired very well, putting all the molecules in your PC to shame." (SlashDot)

From PopSci:

A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC
By Clay DillowPosted 05.05.2010 at 4:50 pm5 Comments

Computing with Iodine

A demo of a quantum calculation carried out by Japanese researchers has yielded some pretty mind-blowing results: a single molecule can perform a complex calculation thousands of times faster than a conventional computer.
A proof-of-principle test run of a discrete Fourier transform -- a common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression, among other things -- performed with a single iodine molecule transpired very well, putting all the molecules in your PC to shame.

Using quantum interference Ð the vibrations of the atoms themselves Ð the team was able to run the complete discrete Fourier transform extremely quickly by encoding the inputs into an optically tailored vibrational wave packet which is then run through an excited iodine molecule whose atomic elements are oscillating at known intervals and picked up by a receiver on the other side. The entire process takes just a few tens of femtoseconds (thatÕs a quadrillionth of a second). So weÕre not just talking faster data flow or processing here; these are speeds that are physically impossible on any kind of conventional electronic device.

But donÕt trade in your conventional computing power just yet. Like other quantum information platforms, molecular computing is in its infancy; we understand some of its mechanisms, but itÕs difficult to execute and there are still a lot of unknowns. Further, researchers arenÕt quite sure how they could integrate such technology into something that works the way weÕre used to our computers working....

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 May 10 - 09:46 PM

"Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, theyÕll read each otherÕs minds.

At least, thatÕs the hope of researchers at the PentagonÕs mad-science division Darpa. The agencyÕs budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to Òallow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.Ó ThatÕs on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of Òpre-speech,Ó analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. ItÕs a technique theyÕre also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.


The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a personÕs EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable Ñ if everyone has similar patterns. Last, Òconstruct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.Ó

The military has been funding a handful of mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to Òmake the enemy obey our commands.Ó The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officerÕs remotely-transmitted thoughts.
"

(Wired Mag)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 May 10 - 01:53 PM

In 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.


That's an unsettling and counterintuitive discovery. Why aren't numbers evenly distributed in such lists? One answer is that if numbers have this type of distribution then it must be scale invariant. So switching a data set measured in inches to one measured in centimetres should not change the distribution. If that's the case, then the only form such a distribution can take is logarithmic.


But while this is a powerful argument, it does nothing to explan the existence of the distribution in the first place.


Then there is the fact that Benford Law seems to apply only to certain types of data. Physicists have found that it crops up in an amazing variety of data sets. Here are just a few: the areas of lakes, the lengths of rivers, the physical constants, stock market indices, file sizes in a personal computer and so on.

However, there are many data sets that do not follow Benford's law, such as lottery and telephone numbers.

What's the difference between these data sets that makes Benford's law apply or not? It's hard to escape the feeling that something deeper must be going on.


Today, Lijing Shao and Bo-Qiang Ma at Peking University in China provide a new insight into the nature of Benford's law. They examine how Benford's law applies to three kinds of statistical distributions widely used in physics.


These are: the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution which is a probability measure used to describe the distribution of the states of a system; the Fermi-Dirac distribution which is a measure of the energies of single particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle (ie fermions); and finally the Bose-Einstein distribution, a measure of the energies of single particles that do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle (ie bosons).


Lijing and Bo-Qiang say that the Boltzmann-Gibbs and Fermi-Dirac distributions distributions both fluctuate in a periodic manner around the Benford distribution with respect to the temperature of the system. The Bose Einstein distribution, on the other hand, conforms to benford's Law exactly whatever the temperature is.

What to make of this discovery? Lijing and Bo-Qiang say that logarithmic distributions are a general feature of statistical physics and so "might be a more fundamental principle behind the complexity of the nature".


That's an intriguing idea. Could it be that Benford's law hints at some kind underlying theory that governs the nature of many physical systems? Perhaps.


But what then of data sets that do not conform to Benford's law? Any decent explanation will need to explain why some data sets follow the law and others don't and it seems that Lijing and Bo-Qiang are as far as ever from this.


(From MIT's Technology Review)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 06 May 10 - 10:04 PM

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
May 7, 2010


The first modern humans to leave Africa about 80,000 years ago encountered Neanderthal settlements in the Middle East and, on at least some occasions, chose to make love instead of war, according to an international team of scientists who have pieced together the genetic code of humanity's closest relatives.

Traces of that ancient DNA live on in most human beings today, the researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The finding, which was made by analyzing DNA from Neanderthal bones and comparing it with that of five living humans, appears to resolve a long-standing mystery about the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, who coexisted in Europe and Western Asia for more than 10,000 years until Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago.

"We can now say with absolute certainty that we've got these Neanderthal genes," said John Hawks, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in the study. "They're not 'them' anymore; they're 'us.'"


Svante Paabo, the geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who spearheaded the study, said he now sees his ancestors in a new light. His initial research on a different type of DNA that contains far less information had concluded Ñ incorrectly, it turns out Ñ that Neanderthals have no genetic connection to people today.

Now, Paabo said, "I would more see them as a form of humans that were a bit more different than people are from each other today."

Most important, scientists said, knowing the precise structure of the Neanderthal genome will help answer the fundamental biological question: What makes us human?

Neanderthal DNA is 99.7% identical to that of people, according to the analysis, which involved dozens of researchers. Something in the remaining 0.3% must make us unique.

"It's not about understanding Neanderthals," said genome biologist Ed Green, who led the study as a research fellow in Paabo's lab and is now at UC Santa Cruz. "It's understanding us."

By lining up the Neanderthal genome with DNA from humans and chimpanzees, Green and colleagues identified small changes that are unique to humans. Some were in genes involved in energy metabolism, skeletal structure and brain development, including four that are thought to contribute to conditions such as autism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia.


(LAT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 May 10 - 10:48 PM

Indeed. Among them, compassion, telepathy, and the ability to step outside the brain.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 04 May 10 - 08:25 PM

Amos, the original thinking regarding the first completed map of the human genome was that 95% of the genes were junk DNA. Now we feel that most of the junk is for the most complex protein formations.
The other unidentifiable DNA is for traits that are unexpressed in our current enviorment but when stressed, such as by an extremly cold climate, the gene that layed dormant would engage and produce hemoglobin that would transport Oxygen even in near zero temperatures. Of course that is a hypothetical example but the point is that we may have abilities that we may not even be able to imagine until they are needed by our children

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 May 10 - 11:13 PM

cientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that by applying chemicals to manipulate genes in a developing embryo, they've been able to change the brain of one type of cichlid fish to resemble that of another. The researchers also discovered differences in the general patterning of the brain very early in development before functional neurons form in a process known as neurogenesis. This finding is at odds with a well-held theory known as "late equals large." The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition beginning May 3, 2010.



In the mid 1990s, the hypothesis called "late equals large" was put forth to explain the way brains evolve across species. The brain begins as a blank slate. In early development, the anterior, or front, part of the brain is specified from the posterior, or back, part. After that, neurogenesis occurs as precursor cells mature to become neurons. These precursors can replicate endlessly, but once they become functional neurons, replication ends. The later the switch from precursors to mature neurons, the larger the brain, or brain region, becomes. The "late equals large" model holds that the brains of different species, for example humans vs. mice, are similar early in development and differ because of the later process of neurogenesis.

"We found differences in the general patterning of the brain as early as 48 hours after fertilization, before neurogenesis begins," said J. Todd Streelman, associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biology.

Streelman, Ph.D. student Jonathan Sylvester, and their colleagues studied brain development in six species of cichlid from Lake Malawi stock, three species from the rock-dwelling lineage and three species of their sand-dwelling cousins.
"We repeated our tests from two to four days after fertilization and found that sand-dwelling cichlids exhibited a larger expression domain of the gene wnt1, known to be an important factor in the development of the posterior brain. This correlates with a larger thalamus, a posterior forebrain structure used in the processing of vision," said Sylvester."

PhysOrg

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 02 May 10 - 11:02 AM

Reminder:

One joule in everyday life is approximately:
the energy required to lift a small apple one meter straight up.
the energy released when that same apple falls one meter to the ground.
the energy released as heat by a person at rest, every hundredth of a second.
one hundredth of the energy a person can receive by drinking a drop of beer.
the kinetic energy of an adult human moving at a speed of about a handspan every second.
the kinetic energy of a tennis ball moving at 23 km/h (14 mph).[2]

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 29 Apr 10 - 02:04 PM

Darwin's Radio: Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV

Darwinsradio_full 'The next great war will start inside us. 'In the next stage of evolution, mankind is history'.

Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio

About 95% of the human genome has once been designated as "junk" DNA. While much of this sequence may be an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some junk DNA may function in ways that are not currently understood. The conservation of some junk DNA over many millions of years of evolution may imply an essential function that has been "turned off." Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on.


What these scientists have done could give us the first bulletproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures, and hey've published their ground-breaking research in PLoS Biology.

A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV - one that worked with the body's own immune system. They knew Old World monkeys had a built-in immunity to HIV: a protein called retrocyclin, which can prevent HIV from entering cell walls and starting an infection. So they began poring over the human genome, looking to see if humans had a latent gene that could manufacture retrocyclin too. It turned out that we did, but a "nonsense mutation" in the gene had turned it off at some point in our evolutionary history.

Nonsense mutations are caused when random DNA code shows up in the middle of a gene, preventing it from beginning the process of manufacturing proteins in the cell. Venkataraman and her team decided to investigate this gene further, doing a series of tests to see if the retrocyclin it produced would keep HIV out of human cells. It did.

At last, they knew that if they could just figure out a way to reawaken the "junk" gene that creates retrocyclin in humans, they might be able to stop HIV infections. The researchers just needed to figure out a way to remove that nonsense mutation and get the target gene to start manufacturing retrocyclin again.

Here's where things really get interesting. The team found a way to use a compound called aminoglycosides, which itself can cause errors when RNA transcribes information from DNA to make proteins. But this time, the aminoglycoside error would work in their favor: It would cause that RNA to ignore the nonsense mutation in the junk gene, and therefore start making retrocyclin again. In preliminary tests, their scheme worked. The human cells made retrocyclin, fended off HIV, and effectively became AIDS-resistant. And it was done entirely using the latent potential in the so-called junk DNA of the human genome.

After more research is done, the researchers believe this might become a viable way to make humans immune to HIV infection.

What's especially intriguing, beyond the amazing idea of an AIDS vaccine, is that aminoglycosides have the potential to unlock the uses for other pieces of junk DNA. In Darwin's Radio, certain portions of these "non-sense" sequences, remnants of prehistoric retroviruses, have been activated by aminoglycosides
In the novel, humans start rapidly evolving after their junk DNA re-awakens in response to stress. Could we induce instant mutations, or gain other new immunities by using aminoglycosides on our junk DNA?

via PLoS Biology

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Apr 10 - 02:03 PM

Overview of the calculation

The Kalman filter uses a system's dynamics model (i.e., physical laws of motion), known control inputs to that system, and measurements (such as from sensors) to form an estimate of the system's varying quantities (its state) that is better than the estimate obtained by using any one measurement alone. As such, it is a common sensor fusion algorithm.

All measurements and calculations based on models are estimates to some degree. Noisy sensor data, approximations in the equations that describe how a system changes, and external factors that are not accounted for introduce some uncertainty about the inferred values for a system's state. The Kalman filter averages a prediction of a system's state with a new measurement using a weighted average. The purpose of the weights is that values with better estimated uncertainty are "trusted" more. The weights are calculated from the covariance, a measure of the estimated uncertainty of the prediction of the system's state. The result of the weighted average is a new state estimate that lies in between the predicted and measured state, and has a better estimated uncertainty than either alone. This process is repeated every time step, with the new estimate and its covariance informing the prediction used in the following iteration. This means that the Kalman filter works recursively and requires only the last "best guess" - not the entire history - of a system's state to calculate a new state.

When performing the actual calculations for the filter (as discussed below), the state estimate and covariances are coded into matrices to handle the multiple dimensions involved in a single set of calculations. This allows for representation of linear relationships between different state variables (such as position, velocity, and acceleration) in any of the transition models or covariances.
[edit] Example application

As an example application, consider the problem of determining the precise location of a truck. The truck can be equipped with a GPS unit that provides an estimate of the position within a few meters. The GPS estimate is likely to be very noisy and jump around at a high frequency, though always remaining relatively close to the real position. The truck's position can also be estimated by integrating its velocity and direction over time, determined by keeping track of the amount the accelerator is depressed and how much the steering wheel is turned. This is a technique known as dead reckoning. Typically, dead reckoning will provide a very smooth estimate of the truck's position, but it will drift over time as small errors accumulate. Additionally, the truck is expected to follow the laws of physics, so its position should be expected to change proportionally to its velocity.

In this example, the Kalman filter can be thought of as operating in two distinct phases: predict and update. In the prediction phase, the truck's old position will be modified according to the physical laws of motion (the dynamic or "state transition" model) plus any changes produced by the accelerator pedal and steering wheel. Not only will a new position estimate be calculated, but a new covariance will be calculated as well. Perhaps the covariance is proportional to the speed of the truck because we are more uncertain about the accuracy of the dead reckoning estimate at high speeds but very certain about the position when moving slowly. Next, in the update phase, a measurement of the truck's position is taken from the GPS unit. Along with this measurement comes some amount of uncertainty, and its covariance relative to that of the prediction from the previous phase determines how much the new measurement will affect the updated prediction. Ideally, if the dead reckoning estimates tend to drift away from the real position, the GPS measurement should pull the position estimate back towards the real position but not disturb it to the point of becoming rapidly changing and noisy.
[edit] Technical description and context

The Kalman filter is an efficient recursive filter that estimates the internal state of a linear dynamic system from a series of noisy measurements. It is used in a wide range of engineering and econometric applications from radar and computer vision to estimation of structural macroeconomic models,[5][6] and is an important topic in control theory and control systems engineering. Together with the linear-quadratic regulator (LQR), the Kalman filter solves the linear-quadratic-Gaussian control problem (LQG). The Kalman filter, the linear-quadratic regulator and the linear-quadratic-Gaussian controller are solutions to what probably are the most fundamental problems in control theory.

In most applications, the internal state is much larger (more degrees of freedom) than the few "observable" parameters which are measured. However, by combining a series of measurements, the Kalman filter can estimate the entire internal state.

In control theory, the Kalman filter is most commonly referred to as linear quadratic estimation (LQE).

In Dempster-Shafer theory, each state equation or observation is considered a special case of a Linear belief function and the Kalman filter is a special case of combing linear belief functions on a join-tree or Markov tree.

A wide variety of Kalman filters have now been developed, from Kalman's original formulation, now called the simple Kalman filter, the Kalman-Bucy filter, Schmidt's extended filter, the information filter, and a variety of square-root filters that were developed by Bierman, Thornton and many others. Perhaps the most commonly used type of very simple Kalman filter is the phase-locked loop, which is now ubiquitous in radios, especially frequency modulation (FM) radios, television sets, satellite communications receivers, outer space communications systems, and nearly any other electronic communications equipment.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Apr 10 - 01:36 PM

Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Solar Fuel Company Gets $30 Million Investment
Joule Biotechnologies has completed its second round of funding.
By Kevin Bullis

A company that we featured this year as part of our list of top 10 emerging technologies (the TR10), Joule Biotechnologies, today announced that it had pulled in a second round of funding. It will use the money--$30 million--to push forward on a pilot plant it's building in Leander, TX, near Austin. The company says its on track to start "high-capacity" production of diesel in 2012.

The company has developed a system that using genetically engineering photosynthetic organisms to convert carbon dioxide and water--with energy from sunlight--into diesel fuel (another similar system makes ethanol). Read more here.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Apr 10 - 03:29 PM

A Robot Called WANDA (
April 26, 2010 by Aditi Risbud

(PhysOrg.com) -- Berkeley Lab scientists have established a revolutionary nanocrystal-making robot, capable of producing nanocrystals with staggering precision. This one-of-a-kind robot, named WANDA, provides colloidal nanocrystals with custom-made properties for electronics, biological labeling and luminescent devices. Since this robot is controlled by software protocols, novice users can direct WANDA to perform complex workflows that traditionally require extensive chemistry experience.


No longer attributable to human error—Berkeley Lab scientists have established a revolutionary nanocrystal-making robot, capable of producing nanocrystals with staggering precision. This one-of-a-kind robot provides colloidal nanocrystals with custom-made properties for electronics, biological labeling and luminescent devices.

This robotic engineer is named WANDA (Workstation for Automated Nanomaterial Discovery and Analysis) and was developed in collaboration with Symyx Technologies at the Molecular Foundry, a U.S. Department of Energy User Facility located at Berkeley Lab. By automating the synthesis of these nanocrystals, WANDA circumvents the issues facing traditional techniques, which can be laborious and are difficult to reproduce from one laboratory to the next. What's more, WANDA's synthetic prowess can help researchers sift through a large, diverse pool of materials for specific applications. Such a combinatorial approach has been used for decades in the pharmaceutical industry and now is being applied to nanomaterials at the Foundry..." (Phys.org)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Apr 10 - 01:23 PM

When astronomers study distant galaxies, they see only a small fraction of the mass needed to hold these clumps of stars together. Without some kind of extra hidden mass, galaxies ought to fly apart.

Astronomers call this hidden mass 'dark matter' and physicists around the world are engaged in an increasingly desperate race to find evidence of it here on Earth. That's why there are more than 30 experiments in various parts of the planet looking for the stuff.

The consensus is that, despite this global effort, dark matter remains well hidden. Nobody has had a whiff of the stuff.

That is nobody except an Italian group which has spent the last ten years or so watching a giant lump of sodium iodide. Their thinking is that any dark matter hitting the sodium iodide should generate a photon. And that as Earth moves around the Sun, they should see more photons when heading into the background sea of dark matter than when moving away from it.

Sure enough, this seasonal signal is exactly what this team says it sees. They claim that it's experiment called DAMA/LIBRA is the first direct evidence of dark matter.

The trouble is that nobody else believes them, mainly because so many other experiments have seen nothing. The critics says something else must be responsible for these seasonal signals, perhaps some kind of environmental change like a variation in temperature.

Then, about a month ago, everything changed when an experiment called CoGent based in the US reported that it too had found a hint of dark matter. CoGent looks for evidence that dark matter particles have bumped into a crystal of germanium and sure enough, the CoGent team say that the experiment is producing abundant evidence of these kinds of collisions.

Curiously, while most experiments are looking for relatively heavy dark matter particles which should produce higher energy collisions, CoGent looks for much lighter particles.

(From Technology Review

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 10 - 01:34 PM

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. ... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

— Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, persuaded by the big numbers that life likely exists elsewhere in the universe, also thinks that rather than reaching out to any intelligent extraterrestrials, we might want to lie low.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Apr 10 - 01:30 PM

remember my excitement one morning in the winter of 2006 when I peered through a microscope in my laboratory and saw a colony of cells that looked just like embryonic stem cells. They were clustered in a little heap, after dividing in a petri dish for almost three weeks. And they were glowing with the same colorful fluorescent markers scientists take as one sign of an embryonic cell's "pluripotency"—its ability to give rise to any type of tissue in an organism's body. But the cells I was looking at did not come from any embryo: they were regular adult mouse cells that had seemingly been rejuvenated by the addition of a simple cocktail of genes.

Could it really be so easy to roll back the internal clock of any mammalian cell and return it to an embryonic state? I was not the only one wondering at the time. Shinya Yamanaka of the University of Kyoto and his colleagues had just published a groundbreaking study in August 2006 that revealed their formula for creating what they called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from the skin cells of mice. Researchers had been struggling for years to understand and control the enormous potential of embryonic stem cells to produce customized tissues for use in medicine and research—as well as contending with political and ethical controversies over the use of embryos, scientific setbacks and false hopes generated by previous "breakthroughs" that did not pan out. So stem cell scientists were surprised and a little bit skeptical of the Japanese group's results at first. But that morning in the lab, I could see firsthand the results of following Yamanaka's recipe...."

Scientific American

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Ed T
Date: 20 Apr 10 - 08:25 AM

A birds song...BS music content:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/science/20obsong.html?ref=science

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 19 Apr 10 - 04:36 PM

As described by radio lab:

The Eureka computer was programed to think for itself and organize its findings and discoveries that it made based on the data available in terms of an equation or proof.

After turning it on in less than 24 hours it came up with Newton's equation F=MA

After 2 months the Eureka computer announced that it had found the ideal equation that descibed all of its data.

The problem is
we do not yet know what the equation means. It has advanced beyond our ability to undertand its discoveries.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 19 Apr 10 - 04:21 AM

If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Apr 10 - 07:13 PM

Gargantuan whales and hefty cephalopods are typically thought of as the classic marine mammoths, but they might have to make way for the mighty microbes, which constitute 50 to 90 percent of the oceans' total biomass, according to newly released data.

These tiny creatures can join together to create some of the largest masses of life on the planet, and researchers working on the decade-long Census of Marine Life project found one such seafloor mat off the Pacific coast of South America that is roughly the size of Greece.

A single liter of seawater, once thought to contain about 100,000 microbes, can actually hold more than one billion microorganisms, the census scientists reported. But these small creatures don't just live in the water column or on the seafloor. Large communities of microscopic animals have even been discovered more than one thousand meters beneath the seafloor. Some of these deep burrowers, such as loriciferans, are only a quarter of a millimeter long.

"Far from being a lifeless desert, the deep sea rivals such highly diverse ecosystems as tropical rainforests and coral reefs," Pedro Martinez Arbizu, of the German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research and leader of the Census of the Diversity of Abyssal Marine Life, said in a prepared statement.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Apr 10 - 09:10 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics, at its laboratories in Gran Sasso, has received 120 lead bricks from an ancient Roman ship that sunk off of the coast of Sardinia 2,000 years ago. The ship's cargo was recovered 20 years ago, thanks to the contribution of the INFN, which at the time received 150 of these bricks. The INFN is now receiving additional bricks to complete the shield for the CUORE experiment, which is being conducted to study extremely rare events involving neutrinos. After 2,000 years under the sea, this lead will now be used to perform a task 1,400 metres under the Apennine mountain.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 13 Apr 10 - 09:07 AM

NIH rehearch revealed that mega doses of vitamin B 1 has halted and reversed Alhiemers in rats.

In the meantime it is advised you take B 1 for the beneficial good cholestoral that it promotes.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 12 Apr 10 - 09:01 AM

Hewlett Packard outlines computer memory of the future
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News

Memristors

The fundamental building blocks of all computing devices could be about to undergo a dramatic change that would allow faster, more efficient machines.

Researchers at computer firm Hewlett Packard (HP) have shown off working devices built using memristors - often described as electronics' missing link.

These tiny devices were proposed 40 years ago but only fabricated in 2008.

HP says it has now shown that they can be used to crunch data, meaning they could be used to build advanced chips.

That means they could begin to replace transistors - the tiny switches used to build today's chips.

And, crucially, the unique properties of memristors would allow future chips to both store and process data in the same device.

Today, these functions are done on separate devices, meaning data must be transferred between the two, slowing down the computation and wasting energy.

"The processor and memory could be exactly the same thing," Dr Stan Williams of HP told BBC News. "That allows us to think differently about how computation could be done."

Professor Leon Chua - the first person to propose memristors - said the work was "conceptually, just the tip of the iceberg".

He compared the devices to the human brain's synapses and axons.

"In the near future we can use memristors to make real brain-like computers, he told BBC News.

Researchers at the University of Michigan recently showed that the devices can mimic synaptic activity in the brain.

The HP work is published in the journal Nature.

Tower chips

Despite being proposed by Professor Chua in 1971, it took almost forty years for a working memristor to be built, by Dr Williams and his team.

Hewlett-Packard's Stan Williams helped develop 'memristors'

The tiny devices are the "fourth" basic building block of circuits, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.

"I'm delighted because I never thought this would happen in my lifetime," said Professor Chua.

The devices get their name from their ability to "remember" the amount of charge that has flowed through them after the power has been switched off.

This means they are suited for building computer memory and storage; an application that Dr Williams believes could be on the market within three years.

"Our immediate goal is to make a competitor to flash memory for cameras, iPods and devices like that," said Dr Williams.

"Our aspiration is for it to have twice as much available memory as an equivalent sized flash memory device."

The team has also shown that the memristors can be stacked on top of each other to form 3-D arrays.

"In theory we can connect thousands of layers in a very straightforward fashion," said Dr Williams.

"It could provide a way of getting a ridiculous amount of memory on a chip."

Future path

Further into the future, Dr Williams said that he hoped that they could be used to build a single device for storage and computation.

"That would allow a huge speed saving and energy saving," he said.

However, he said, that kind of device was more than a decade away.

Memristors could also help with a problem that continues to challenge the chip industry, continuing to pack more and more computational power into smaller and smaller spaces.

Currently, chip makers follow a path defined by Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years.

This is currently achieved by producing transistors with ever smaller feature sizes. Current cutting edge chips have transistors with feature sizes as small as 22 nanometres (22 billionths of a metre).

But this miniaturisation cannot continue forever, experts say.

Memristors offer an alternative path.

"We can continue to make them smaller even past the point where people think that transistors cannot shrink any further," said Dr Williams.

Crucially, said Dr Williams, they can be built using "materials commonly available in any fab [chip fabrication plant]".

Professor James Tour of Rice University in Houston said the memristor's ability to be compatible with existing transistor based technologies was a "critical parameter to permit rapid implementation into present chip manufacturing processes".

Dr Williams said he had already made "crude" prototypes with features as small as 3nm.

"The functional equivalent of Moore's Law could go on for decades after we hit the wall where we can no longer shrink transistors," he said.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 09 Apr 10 - 10:57 AM

Drug Discovered In The Soil Of Easter Island Could Cure Alzheimer's

A Drug Discovered In The Soil Of Easter Island Could Cure Alzheimer's Rapamycin is a bacterial byproduct discovered in the soil of Easter Island. It extends the lives of animals, and now two independent studies show that it can reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's. Is this the drug we've been waiting for?

A study published yesterday in the Journal of Biological Chemistry confirmed that mice with Altzheimers showed marked improvement in memory and cognition after being fed a rapamycin-enhanced diet. This study was released simultaneously with another, in PLoS One, which confirmed the results of the first in a different group of mice.

How does this wonder drug work? Physiologist Veronica Galvan, an author on the PLoS study, explained:

    Rapamycin treatment lowered levels of amyloid-beta-42, a major toxic species of molecules in Alzheimer's disease. These molecules, which stick to each other, are suspected to play a key role in the early memory failure of Alzheimer's . . . The fact that we are seeing identical results in two vastly different mouse models of Alzheimer's disease provides robust evidence that rapamycin treatment is effective and is acting by changing a basic pathogenic process of Alzheimer's that is common to both mouse models. This suggests that it may be an effective treatment for Alzheimer's in humans, who also have very diverse genetic makeup and life histories.

Rapamycin has already been approved by the FDA to treat organ rejection in transplant patients. That means doctors could start prescribing it for the "off label" use of treating Alzheimers tomorrow. The researchers are still not sure if the drug would reverse the effects of Alzheimers, or simply block them. But for millions of people suffering the effects of Alzheimers, that question may be moot.

Expect to be hearing more about this drug, and soon.