BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 01:39 PM

Islamists in Pakistan Recruit Entire Families from Europe

By Yassin Musharbash and Holger Stark

The German government is trying to secure the release of a group of suspected German Islamists who were arrested by Pakistani authorities while making their way to a jihadist colony in the Waziristan region along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Entire families from Germany are moving to the region to join the jihad.

The young speaker, who calls himself "Abu Adam," praises the stay in the mountains -- almost as if he were shooting an ad for a family holiday camp. "Doesn't it appeal to you? We warmly invite you to join us!" Abu Adam says, raising his index finger. He lists all the things this earthly paradise has to offer: hospitals, doctors, pharmacies as well as a daycare center and school -- all, of course, "a long way from the front." After all, they don't want the children to be woken up by the roar of guns.

The latest recruitment video from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is a half-hour in length and is addressed to our "beloved" brothers and sisters back in Germany. The video is presented by, among others, Mounir Chouka, alias "Abu Adam," who grew up in the western German city of Bonn.

The video shows shacks erected against a backdrop of lush greenery and craggy rock formations. Women wearing blue burqas are seen surrounded by their children. One small girl is holding an artillery gun.

Welcome to the wild world of Waziristan, the region along the Afghan-Pakistani border controlled by Pashtun tribes, al-Qaida and other splinter groups which has become a regular target of US drones and their remote-controlled missiles.

Islamists Recruiting Entire Families

The ad for Waziristan appears to be finding fertile ground in Germany. Security officials here believe the IMU is currently the largest and most active Islamic group recruiting in the country. But there's an unusual development here, too -- militants don't normally recruit women and children as the IMU appears to be doing. The families move to mujahedeen villages in the rough terrain which are used as bases for supporting the battle against the US troops and the Afghan army.

The German government in Berlin is also examining the propaganda offensive. For several weeks, diplomats in the German Foreign Ministry have been negotiating with Islamabad over the fate of a group of suspected Islamists from Germany's Rhineland region who have been held in custody in Pakistan for several months now. The group includes a young Tunisian and six Germans, including Andreas M. of Bonn, a Muslim convert, and his Eritrean wife Kerya.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 06:37 PM

cientists find that individuals in vegetative states can learn
September 20th, 2009
Scientists have found that some individuals in the vegetative and minimally conscious states, despite lacking the means of reporting awareness themselves, can learn and thereby demonstrate at least a partial consciousness. Their findings are reported in today's (20 September) online edition of Nature Neuroscience.
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It is the first time that scientists have tested whether patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states can learn. By establishing that they can, it is believed that this simple test will enable practitioners to assess the patient's consciousness without the need of imaging.
This study was done as a collaborative effort between the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Institute of Cognitive Neurology (Argentina). By using classical Pavlonian conditioning, the researchers played a tone immediately prior to blowing air into a patient's eye. After some time training, the patients would start to blink when the tone played but before the air puff to the eye.
This learning requires conscious awareness of the relation between stimuli - the tone precedes and predicts the puff of air to the eye. This type of learning was not seen in the control subjects, volunteers who had been under anaesthesia.

The researchers believe that the fact that these patients can learn associations shows that they can form memories and that they may benefit from rehabilitation.
Lead author Dr Tristan Bekinschtein, from the University of Cambridge's Wolfson Brain Imaging Unit, said: "This test will hopefully become a useful, simple tool to test for consciousness without the need for imaging or instructions. Additionally, this research suggests that if the patient shows learning, then they are likely to recover to some degree."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Sep 09 - 06:43 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- Whether gazing into lava lamps or watching balsamic vinegar mix with olive oil, people have long been transfixed by the seemingly mystical way that droplets of one liquid find each other within another liquid and join together. Conventional scientific wisdom has held that this merging of liquid droplets, a process called coalescence, is enhanced by applying an electrical field, but a new study, which will be published in the Sept. 17 issue of the journal Nature, shows that an increased electrical field actually can prevent droplets from merging.


"These surprising results could lead to improved applications in diverse fields including petroleum purification, food-oil processing and even biodiesel production," said Andrew Belmonte, an associate professor of mathematics at Penn State and one of the leaders of the project. "The results also could increase our understanding of atmospheric high-voltages that are generated in thunderstorms."

According to William Ristenpart, an assistant professor at the University of California at Davis and another of the project's leaders, "It has long been assumed that oppositely charged droplets experience an attractive force that encourages them to coalesce. This study, however, demonstrates that while droplets move toward each other when a low-strength electrical field is applied, those same droplets actually are repelled from one another after they make contact under higher-strength electrical fields."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 23 Sep 09 - 02:24 PM

Scientist Ray Kurzweil claims humans could become immortal in as little as 20 years' time.

The 61 year old American said that this new immortality will be thanks to nanotechnology and an increased understanding of how the body works.

Kurzweil said that humanity is starting to understand genes and computer technology at an accelerating rate. He said that nanotechnologies capable of replacing many of our vital organs could be in the shops in 20 years' time. He points out that artificial pancreases and neural implants are starting to become available.

You want to live here forever?

According to the Daily Telegraph, Kurzweil says that in 20 years we will have the means to reprogram our bodies' stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever. Nanobots will replace blood cells and do their work thousands of times more effectively.

He said that within 25 years we will be able to do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or go scuba-diving for four hours without oxygen. This will be handy because with global warming you will not be able to breathe the air.

Apparently nanotechnology will improve our brains to such an extent we will be able to write books within minutes. Of course there is no guarantee that anyone will want to read them.

In virtual-reality mode, nanobots will shut down brain signals and take us wherever we want to go. Virtual sex will become commonplace. Hologram-like figures will pop in our brain to explain what is happening so we can make the right decisions.

Humans will effectively become cyborgs. Resistance is futile.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 Sep 09 - 09:13 AM

Analysis of the lunar surface by three different spacecraft has provided "unambiguous evidence" of water on the Moon, Space.com reports.

India's Chandrayaan-1, NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and the agency's Deep Impact probe have all detected the presence of either water or hydroxyl - one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom linked by a single bond.

The NASA-built Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) aboard Chandrayaan-1 "detected wavelengths of light reflected off the surface that indicated the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen".

The M3 suggested water/hydroxyl in the top few millimetres of the lunar surface - the limit of its penetrative capability - and detected a water signal which "got stronger toward the polar regions".

Cassini passed by the Moon in 1999, en route to Saturn, and also noted a globally-distributed water/hydroxyl signal, once again stronger towards the poles.

Deep Impact, meanwhile, detected the same signal at all latitudes above 10 degrees N, and confirmed the poles showed the strongest signals. The probe made multiple passes of the Moon on its way to a planned rendezvous flyby of comet 103P/Hartley 2 in November 2010.

Commenting on the trio of studies, Paul Lacey of the University of Hawaii said the findings "provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of hydroxyl or water" - data which "prompts a critical re-examination of the notion that the moon is dry".

There are two possible sources for lunar water - from water-bearing comets hitting the surface, or an "endogenic" process. Space.com explains that since the material which makes up the lunar surface is roughly 45 per cent oxygen, "combined with other elements as mostly silicate minerals", it could interact with the solar wind to produce water.

According to the M3 team, if the solar wind's positively-charged hydrogen atoms impact against the Moon's surface with sufficient force they can "break apart oxygen bonds in soil materials", and "where free oxygen and hydrogen exist, there is a high chance that trace amounts of water will form".

Regarding just why there appears to be more water/hydroxyl at the poles, Deep Impact was able to "observe the same regions at different times of the lunar day", and found that "when the sun's rays were strongest, the water feature was lowest, while in the morning, the feature was stronger".

This leads the researchers to suggest "the daily dehydration and rehydration of the trace water across the surface could lead to the migration of hydroxyl and hydrogen towards the poles where it can accumulate in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 Sep 09 - 05:42 PM

And from the Dark Side:

I is investigating worker's death in Kentucky. Is crime-scene reference to 'fed' a clue or a feint?

By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the September 24, 2009 edition
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Bill Sparkman knew his seemingly innocuous job – Census Bureau worker – had its risks.

In fact, a retired state trooper had warned Mr. Sparkman that not everybody may look kindly upon a government proxy walking the rural routes near Manchester, Ky.

The discovery of Sparkman's body Sept. 12 in the deep woods of eastern Kentucky – hanging from a tree with the word "fed" scrawled on his chest – not only is a grim reminder of the everyday risks that door-to-door workers face on the job. It also has the government again worried that disaffection and anger with Washington may be morphing into extremism, even domestic terrorism, and may be directed at government representatives. Sparkman's death has been called "an apparent homicide."

Judging from reports so far, the apparent murder "may [have] political motivation," says James Alan Fox, a veteran criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. "But although a lot of Americans are disenchanted with the economy the way it is, and there's lots of anger, we shouldn't be quick to jump to conclusions to somehow say that this is now open season on government workers. It absolutely isn't."

The FBI and Washington promise to investigate aggressively. Sparkman, a middle-age Scout leader, was found near a cemetery in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

"If this is an attack on a federal employee, I can assure you that no resources will be spared to find the perpetrators," John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, said Thursday morning, according to the Washington Post. "We cannot tolerate essentially domestic terrorism, if that is what it is."
...(Christian Science Monitor)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 25 Sep 09 - 02:18 PM

Scientist Ray Kurzweil claims humans could become immortal in as little as 20 years' time


Hey, I actually posted this one first.

Amos 690
Don 1

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Sep 09 - 01:10 PM

Wow, and I forgot!! Take 5 points!! :D


(PhysOrg.com) -- At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Wednesday, the company announced a new optical cable that will be able to transfer data, between electrical devices, starting at speeds of 10 gigabits per second.
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Vice president, Dadi Perlmutter, of Intel's Mobility Group, hopes to ship an optical cable, called Light Peak, by 2010. Light Peak will first be introduced into the market as being able to transfer data at 10 gigabits per second. Future versions will be able to transfer data at 40 and 100 gigabits per second as the manufacturing process becomes cheaper.
A single Light Peak cable will be capable of transporting multiple types of data simultaneously such as transferring data to a hard drive, connecting to the internet and transferring video.

Each end of the Light Peak cable will be connected to chips that contain light producing devices, encode data, and transmit data. The chips will also amplify data and convert the light to electrical signals.

Researchers are hopeful that silicon photonics will eventually replace copper wires on motherboards and microprocessors by making high-bandwidth connectors cheaper.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Sep 09 - 01:15 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- Computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., have for the first time successfully demonstrated the ability to run more than a million Linux kernels as virtual machines.

The achievement will allow cyber security researchers to more effectively observe behavior found in malicious botnets, or networks of infected machines that can operate on the scale of a million nodes. Botnets, said Sandia's Ron Minnich, are often difficult to analyze since they are geographically spread all over the world.

Sandia scientists used virtual machine (VM) technology and the power of its Thunderbird supercomputing cluster for the demonstration.

Running a high volume of VMs on one supercomputer — at a similar scale as a botnet — would allow cyber researchers to watch how botnets work and explore ways to stop them in their tracks. "We can get control at a level we never had before," said Minnich.
Previously, Minnich said, researchers had only been able to run up to 20,000 kernels concurrently (a "kernel" is the central component of most computer operating systems). The more kernels that can be run at once, he said, the more effective cyber security professionals can be in combating the global botnet problem. "Eventually, we would like to be able to emulate the computer network of a small nation, or even one as large as the United States, in order to 'virtualize' and monitor a cyber attack," he said.
A related use for millions to tens of millions of operating systems, Sandia's researchers suggest, is to construct high-fidelity models of parts of the Internet.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Sep 09 - 01:18 PM

ALso from PhysOrg:

(PhysOrg.com) -- Chinese scientists today reveal the discovery of five remarkable new feathered dinosaur fossils which are significantly older than any previously reported. The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, at last providing hard evidence that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

Talking from the conference in Bristol, Dr Xu Xing, lead scientist on the report published online in Nature today, said: "These exceptional fossils provide us with evidence that has been missing until now. Now it all fits neatly into place and we have tied up some of the loose ends".


Professor Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol and one of the world's leading experts on dinosaurs, commented: "This is one of the most exciting fossil discoveries in recent years. It's like finding a missing piece of the jigsaw - suddenly the picture looks much more complete".

Previous discoveries of dinosaur fossils with exquisitely preserved remains of feathers were undoubtedly some of the most important fossil finds ever made. At the time, many paleontologists considered this to be the Holy Grail that demonstrated once and for all that birds are highly derived dinosaurs.

However, the oldest undisputed bird, Archaeopteryx, is older than the feathered dinosaurs previously found. Therefore, critics claimed, feathered dinosaurs could not have been ancestral to birds.

The new fossils are from two separate areas, named the Tiaojishan and Daohugou formations. Comparison of the Tiaojishan and Daohugou fossils suggests that they probably all belong to the same fauna. The isotopic dates range from 168 to 151 million years old for the Tiaojishan and 164 to 158 million years for the Daohugou Formation. Archaeopteryx lived 150-145 million years ago, so was significantly younger than these new dinosaurs.

One of the dinosaurs, named Anchiornis huxleyi has extensive plumage and profusely feathered feet. It provides important new information on the origins of birds and the evolution of feathers.

"This fossil provides confirmation that the bird-dinosaur hypothesis is correct and supports the idea that birds descended from theropod dinosaurs, the group of predatory dinosaurs that include Allosaurus and Velociraptor", said Xu.
Provided by University of Bristol

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Sep 09 - 02:07 PM

For nearly a century, his problem has remained a quixotic quest for physicists. Particle physics has always held that matter can only exist at one state in one time. That is why particles are classified as moving with an up or down spin but nothing in between. In recent years that rule has been bent with the superposition of atoms and other nonliving things. Superposition is the term for an object that is not being observed that exists as both possibilities: up and down, dead and alive. This allows physicists to observe the matter in two different states at the same time. However, thus far it has only been done with non-living things. A life-form has never been superimposed. Now, one physicist says he may have an answer.

Oriol Romero-Isart is at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Physics in Garching in Germany. Along with his team he is proposing a "Schrodinger's virus" experiment that would follow the same general principles of Schrodinger's Cat. Using an electromagnetic field created by a laser, the virus would be trapped in a vacuum. Then, using another laser, the virus will be slowed down until it lies motionless in its lowest possible energy state.

Now that the virus is fixed, a single photon is used to put the virus into a superposition of two states, moving and non-moving. Up until the point is measured it is in both states. Only after a measurement is it found to be in one state and one alone. The team has suggested that the tobacco mosaic virus be used. The virus is rod-shaped and measures 50 nanometers wide and approximately 1 micrometer long. There is debate however, whether the virus can truly be classified as "alive." However the scientists are confident that the treatment could be extended to tiny micro-organisms such as tardigrades who can survive in vacuum for days, making them suitable for the "Schrodinger treatment."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 26 Sep 09 - 10:27 PM

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

Photos of cloth and spiders

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 06:01 PM

'Time telescope' could boost fibre-optic communication

17:48 28 September 2009 by Colin Barras
A "telescope" that can magnify time could dramatically increase the amount of data that can be sent through fibre optic cables, speeding up broadband internet and other long-distance communications.

It isn't possible to speed up the flashes of light that stream through the global network of optical fibres at around 200 million metres per second. But more information can be squeezed into each burst of light, says Mark Foster at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, using what he and his colleague Alexander Gaeta call a "time telescope" fitted with "time lenses".

Time lenses
"A time lens is essentially like an optical lens," says Foster. An optical lens can deflect a light beam into a much smaller area of space; a time lens deflects a section of a light beam into a smaller chunk of time.

The Cornell team made their time lenses using a silicon waveguide that can channel light. An information-carrying pulse made from a series of small laser bursts signalling digital 1s and 0s travels through an optical fibre and into the waveguide. As it enters, it is combined with another laser pulse from an infrared laser. The infrared pulse vibrates the atoms of the waveguide, which in turn shifts the frequencies of the data-carrying pulse before it exits the waveguide and passes into an optical fibre beyond.

"The front of the [data-carrying] pulse is shifted down in frequency and the end is shifted up in frequency within the silicon waveguide," says Foster. Because the speed of light passing through a medium depends on its frequency, the front of the pulse is slowed down while its rear speeds up. At the time lens's focal point the rear of the pulse catches up with the front, producing a fleeting image with a spectrum encoding the entire light pulse. ... (New Scientist)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 08:05 PM

Image from Phys.Org illustrating boundaries of the Earth system

These are estimates of how the different control variables for seven planetary boundaries have changed from 1950 to present. The green shaded polygon represents the safe operating space. Human activities have already pushed the Earth system beyond three of the planet's biophysical thresholds, with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world; six others may well be crossed in the next decades, conclude 29 European, Australian and US scientists in an article in the September 24 issue of the scientific journal Nature. Credit: Image courtesy of Courtesy of Stockholm Resilience Centre

Human activities have already pushed the Earth system beyond three of the planet's biophysical thresholds, with consequences that are detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world; six others may well be crossed in the next decades, conclude 29 European, Australian and U.S. scientists in an article in the Sept. 24 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

Scientists have been warning for decades that the explosion of human activity since the industrial revolution is pushing the Earth's resources and natural systems to their limits. The data confirm that 6 billion people are capable of generating a global geophysical force the equivalent to some of the great forces of nature - just by going about their daily lives.

This force has given rise to a new era - Anthropocene - in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change.

"On a finite planet, at some point, we will tip the vital resources we rely upon into irreversible decline if our consumption is not balanced with regenerative and sustainable activity," says co-author Sander van der Leeuw who directs the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Van der Leeuw is an archaeologist and anthropologist specializing in the long term impacts of human activity on the landscape. He also co-directs ASU's Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative that focuses ASU's interdisciplinary strength on large-scale problems where an integrated effort is essential to finding solutions.

Defining planetary boundaries

It started with a fairly simple question: How much pressure can the Earth system take before it begins to crash?

"Until now, the scientific community has not attempted to determine the limits of the Earth system's stability in so many dimensions and make a proposal such as this. We are sending these ideas out through the Nature article to be vetted by the scientific community at large," explains van der Leeuw, whose experience includes leading interdisciplinary initiatives in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"We expect the debate on global warming to shift as a result, because it is not only greenhouse gas emissions that threaten our planet's equilibrium. There are many other systems and they all interact, so that crossing one boundary may make others even more destabilized," he warns.

Nine boundaries were identified, including climate change, stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, biological diversity, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans, aerosol loading and chemical pollution. The study suggests that three of these boundaries -climate change, biological diversity and nitrogen input to the biosphere - may already have been transgressed.

"We must make these complicated ideas clear in such a way that they can be widely applied. The threats are so enormous that it is too late to be a pessimist," says van der Leeuw.

"A safe operating space for humanity"

Using an interdisciplinary approach, the researchers looked at the data for each of the nine vital processes in the Earth system and identified a critical control variable. Take biodiversity loss, for example, the control variable is the species extinction rate, which is expressed in extinctions per million species per year.

They then explored how the boundaries interact. Here, loss of biodiversity impacts carbon storage (climate change), freshwater, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and land systems. (click link above for complete article)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 29 Sep 09 - 10:58 AM

How ASchools Fail Democracy (Excerpt)

"...More than 40 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that it was unsound to assume that the individual development of every child must coincide, through a kind of established harmony, with the development of a good society. The anti-set-curriculum idea and the equally unsound how-to conception of learning are two of the guiding ideas in American colleges and schools of education. Together they form an ideological double whammy against a coherent, knowledge-based curriculum in elementary schools—against, that is, the thing most needed to enhance language ability and overcome the language-comprehension gap.

Mastery of the knowledge assumed within the American speech community is not just a technical prerequisite for proficiency in the standard language. It is also a prerequisite to something equally profound in a democracy—a sense of community and solidarity within the nation. Such a sense of unity was one of the chief educational ambitions of the founders. "A popular Government," said Madison, "without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy." The cohesion of the nation and the willingness of citizens to temper their private and local interests with allegiance to the common good could be obtained only through commonality in the school curriculum. Such commonality was the explicit subject of an important early essay on schooling, "Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic," written in 1786 by Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Our most important and influential early schoolmaster, Noah Webster, was our chief maker of both dictionaries and schoolbooks. He correctly connected the two projects, believing that a common public language plus a common school curriculum were needed to sustain a loyalty to the common good.

The tempering of factionalism through a common education is thus the emotional parallel to the technical need for shared background knowledge within a speech community. Among early schoolbook writers there was a benign conspiracy to celebrate both patriotism and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and, as one wrote, to "exhibit in a strong light the principles of political and religious freedom which our forefathers professed … and to record the numerous examples of fortitude, courage and patriotism which have rendered them illustrious."

Already by the early 19th century, as de Tocqueville noted, the American educational experiment was highly successful in creating loyal, patriotic citizens ready to participate in the public sphere. Horace Mann, a great proponent of the "common school" in the 19th century, explained how this creation of an emotional bond could overcome resentments of class and tribe: "The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society."..

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 09 - 01:46 PM

MURDER MOST ROYAL
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
By Alison Weir (Jonathan Cape 416pp £20)

(Literary Review)

"It was Jimmy Goldsmith who said that when you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy, but it could just as easily have been Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn's great folly lay in her inability to adapt to the role of consort when, after a six-year-long struggle and the fracturing of Christendom, she finally married her man. She refused to temper her feisty, flirty spirit, she neglected to look the other way when Henry's eye wandered and, fatally, she failed to produce a male heir. Had she behaved more like a wife and less like a mistress, Anne Boleyn might not have ended her days as 'the lady in the Tower'.

Alison Weir's title is taken from a letter, almost certainly forged, purportedly from Anne to Henry VIII. It is also shared with a Jean Plaidy novel, but unlike the fiction, which covered the rise as well as the fall of Anne Boleyn, Weir's work of non-fiction concentrates on the first five months of 1536, which began with Anne miscarrying a fifteen-week-old foetus and ended with her head in the straw. She was accused of adultery with five men, including her own brother George, and the low-born musician Mark Smeaton (in an age of strict hierarchy, this was almost as heinous). She was also charged with plotting regicide, which was, Weir writes, 'the ultimate treason'. Despite the fact that on the dates of more than half of the twenty-one offences cited in the indictment, it can be proved that Anne or her alleged accomplice was not at the stated location, the catch-all phrase 'and divers days before and after' was inserted to generalise the specifics. She was found guilty by her peers on 15 May and executed four days later.

It is a familiar tale and raises the question: do we really need to read about it again? Absolutely, argues Weir, who points out that it is precisely because it is such a popular story, so beloved of novelists and filmmakers, that common misconceptions and myths abound. She has a point: I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked if Anne really miscarried her brother's baby. Weir sets the record straight in her captivating, intelligent, no-nonsense prose. No, Anne wasn't accused of being a witch (though it may have been implicit in one article in the indictment); no, there is no evidence to suggest that the foetus she miscarried in January was deformed; nor is it likely that Anne would have wanted to seduce five men when she was either pregnant or recovering from childbirth on the dates cited.

This book is not just about dispelling myths. Weir allows the possibility that George was homosexual and reminds us that another of Anne's alleged lovers, Henry Norris, initially confessed to something before retracting it. She also counsels against the default position of assuming that Anne was so obviously innocent that to believe otherwise, then and now, is absurd. The case against Anne had to be 'credible and convincing', Weir writes, and the letter of the law, if not the spirit, was followed. Overall, though, she largely agrees with Eric Ives, whose magisterial biography of Anne contended that she was the victim of a Cromwellian coup. 'In the absence of any real proof of Anne's guilt,' Weir concludes, 'and with her having been convicted only on suspicious evidence, there must be a very strong presumption that she went to her death an innocent woman.'/p>

What of Henry VIII in all this? Did he set in motion the events that led to his wife's execution, at the very least hinting that he would appreciate her removal so he could get on with marrying Jane Seymour and siring an heir? Or did he believe the charges when they were presented to him and react with genuine outrage? Weir thinks the latter and argues that Henry's seemingly callous behaviour - dallying with ladies while his wife languished in the Tower and marrying Seymour only ten days after Anne's execution - was a face-saving exercise after such a monumental humiliation.

Not only had Henry been exposed as a cuckold, but he had also had his sexual prowess questioned in open court. Little wonder that the famous Whitehall Mural of 1537, the iconic image of Henry that is familiar to every schoolchild, displayed such an emphatic codpiece: virility restored...."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Oct 09 - 07:57 PM

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report's authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair's brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down (Sleep Medicine, vol 10, p 247).

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive," he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either...."

New Scientist

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Oct 09 - 01:56 PM

(CBS) Cryonics is a controversial science involving freezing human remains.

Its believers hope that, one day, those remains can be bought back to life.

Now, a former employee of the nation's largest cryonics center is speaking up, claiming he witnessed bizarre and unbelievable acts while he was working there.

The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the worldwide leader in cryonics. Its lab is said to house corpses, including the remains of baseball great Ted Williams -- frozen to minus 321 degrees, all at a cost of about $120,000 each.

Larry Johnson, a former chief operating officer at Alcor, says in a new book that Williams' corpse was mistakenly decapitated and gruesomely mistreated.

Through internal documents, photos and secretly recorded conversations obtained by Johnson, he also alleges the company participated in the premature deaths of two Alcor clients, who were close to dying.

In one recorded conversation, Johnson is head asking, "So, what did he do? Did he just..."

And the response Alcor Vice President Joe Hovey is heard giving is, "He killed her."

Alcor denies any wrongdoing and released a statement about the claims made in Johnson's book. In part, it says, "Alcor is a non-profit organization, a pioneer in the field of cryonics and categorically denies the false allegations contained in Mr. Johnson's book."

On "The Early Show" Thursday, Johnson explained to co-anchor Harry Smith that, "Typically, what would happen is they would have a member, a member of Alcor, would pass away, would die. They would bring that individual to the facility and begin the cool-down process. Depending on what option you would take depends on what they'd do to you. If you take the whole-body option, they freeze your whole body. If you want just the head-only option, they just freeze the head."

So it was quite common for them to decapitate the corpses?

"Yes, that's correct," Johnson confirmed.

Saying, "I saw his (Williams') head," Johnson asserted that, "What happens is they had had his head in one -- looked like a freezer chest ... and it was malfunctioning, there were some issues. So they wanted to move his head into another vessel to lower the temperature of his head down it minus 321 Fahrenheit, so they went to put his head in that vessel. Obviously, the head's round, it's not gonna sit upright.

"So, they got a tuna fish can, and they put it in the bottom of that vessel. They set the head on top of the can and then filled the vessel with liquid nitrogen. Well, obviously, after two or three days of being in that state, when they pull you out, that can is stuck to the top of the head and in Williams' case, that's exactly what happened.

"They pulled him out, the tuna can was stuck on the top of his head, a technician grabbed a monkey wrench, took a swing at the can, missed it, missed the can, hit the head, drew back again, (took) a second swing, hit the can, sent it flying across the room."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Oct 09 - 08:49 PM

A study earlier this year found that saints and sinners both tend to find a moral balance, the former by breaking rules and the latter by following the rules.

Carry that theme to the extreme, and you might think, at least, that a sociopath and an extreme altruistic do-gooder are opposites personality-wise.

Increasingly, however, research suggests you'd be wrong.

"After all, the chances of a serial killer running into a burning building to save a child are pretty slim, right?" writes Andrea Kuszewski at ScientificBlogging. "And wouldn't a hero-type be one of the last people likely to break rules?"

Not so, according to a new study Kuszewski cites.

"Personality has consistently shown to be extremely heritable," she writes. "However, the same genetic material arranged and weighted in a slightly different way, may at times express as vastly different phenotypes: the 'extremely good' and the 'extremely bad' individual."

In fact, scientists say natural selection leaves us all at least a little bit crazy — a byproduct, perhaps, of our oversized brains. One might wonder to what extent nurturing determines whether a person ends up on this or that side of the line. (New Scientist)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 09 Oct 09 - 06:10 PM

I strangely winced at the image of hitting a dead frozen head with a wrench. I thought it would have spintered at minus 351

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Oct 09 - 02:25 PM

To send a quantum message, it helps to have a photon six-pack.

When bound together by a process called quantum entanglement, a set of six photons can withstand the hard knocks that ordinarily would erase quantum information, researchers have shown.

Papers describing the new experiment appear in the Oct. 9 Physical Review Letters and the October Physical Review A.

"This is an exciting landmark in experimental capabilities," comments physicist Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the work. Creating the six-photon entanglement is an impressive technical achievement, he says. "This is the first demonstration of such large entangled states" with high quality.

Quantum communication offers an absolutely secure way to send secret messages, such as encoded military secrets or financial transactions. But quantum information is fragile, quickly destroyed by even slight interactions with the environment.

While a conventional bit of information can have only one value, 0 or 1, a quantum bit, or qubit, exists as a combination of 0 and 1 simultaneously. A qubit stays in this undecided state until something, whether a stray atom or a scientist trying to measure its properties, interacts with it, forcing it into a single state. This collapse of possibilities, known as quantum decoherence, can be detected farther down the line to catch eavesdroppers. But it can also keep qubits from reaching their destination intact.

Fortunately, theorists have shown that some quantum-mechanical systems are immune to certain interactions. One of these resilient systems is a set of four or more photons that are intimately bound, or entangled, a property of quantum systems that links particles' fates even when they are separated by large distances. (Science News)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 11 Oct 09 - 07:19 PM

This month's Oct 09 Scientific American Magazine features Quantum Internet advances.



WHAT IS NEW IN MUSIC?
How about a little hand held music composer that makes really cool modern music tracks at your command for under $40 or the full computer version for $300?

Also view the Eigen Basson which is really out of this world...


http://createdigitalmusic.com/?option=com_content&task=view&id=136&Itemid=44


The hand held electronic composer was discussed on npr but after 2 hours I still do not have a successful search on the interview and demonstration of this device.



Prof. Cope from Santa Cruz has a new composing software called Emily Howell. His earlier version EMI could simulate any famous composer with gorgeous results. The new version makes more contempory music which is often impossible to play by a mere mortal pianist.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Oct 09 - 02:51 AM

Museum to show Mary Rose sailors' remains
Human bones and Tudor artefacts are to go on display for the first time

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent
Monday, 12 October 2009S



More than 450 years after they drowned in a battle with a French invasion force, the remains of 90 crew members of the Mary Rose warship are to be put on public display.

Alexandra Hildred, a curator at the the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, said discussions are underway to mount a major exhibition in which objects found on the ship will be showcased next to their original owners.

On 19 July 1545, the Mary Rose, the flagship of Vice-Admiral Sir George Carew, set out from Portsmouth, along with some 80 other English vessels, to confront a fleet of 225 ships, carrying 30,000 soldiers, sent by King Francis I of France to attempt an invasion.

She sank with the loss of more than 400 lives, in circumstances which remain unclear to this day. A dismayed King Henry VIII watched the battle from onshore, in Southsea Castle.

The underwater wreck was discovered in 1836 by a fisherman in the Solent. It became an officially protected site in 1974, and was excavated in 1982. Only 1,000 objects have so far been seen by the public, from a stock of 19,000 underwater finds. This is about to change, at the renovated museum in Portmouth's Historic Dockyard zone.

The project is due to be completed by 2010, depending on a further £4m of funding being secured. "We are discussing the possibility of displaying human remains next to the objects," Ms Hildred said. Another option is to have the human remains in a separate area, to be viewed by appointment only.

None of the remains have been seen before, except for two skulls shown earlier this year. "Displaying bones is something that causes huge controversy," Ms Hildred acknowledged. "We have not yet decided how we will do it."

The previously unseen relics include Europe's oldest fiddle and bow, a beautifully preserved leather "man bag" (the height of Tudor fashion), a giant wooden spoon used to stir the crew's porridge pot, arrows, longbows and backgammon boards.

Rear Admiral John Lippiett, chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust, said: "The importance of these Tudor artefacts, many of which we have never had the space to put on public display, cannot be over-estimated. Nowhere else is a single moment in Tudor life captured as it is with the Mary Rose."

(UK Independent)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Oct 09 - 10:47 AM

"In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton's Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to "musical taste" itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.
menace_mech_music.png

"From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful," he wrote. "And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters."

In fact, things were so bad that amateur music-making was threatened, something that could lead indirectly to the rampant sissification of the entire country. "Under such conditions," Sousa believed, "the tide of amateurism cannot but recede until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises so important a factor in the curriculum of physical culture will be out of vogue. Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"

This sounds ridiculous, and in many ways it was. (Sousa opened the piece by admitting he might well be "reckoned an alarmist" on this topic.) But it wasn't completely crazy—recorded music did have an effect on the Victorian middle-class practice of singing songs around the piano for evening entertainment, and many Americans today don't sing regularly in groups at all unless they attend church or join a school choir.

Sousa's interest went beyond the "national throat and chest," though. What he really cared about was the rampant copying of his compositions for use of player pianos and other playback devices without any payment for the use of his work. "When I add to this that I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights in our own work I but offer a second reason why the facts and conditions should be made clear to everyone alike in the interest of musical art and of fair play," he wrote.


His piece concluded, "Do they not realize that if the accredited composers who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor are refused a just reward for their efforts a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking and compositions will no longer flow from their pens or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?"

Sousa was making the argument at the heart of copyright: that it promotes innovation, and that without any protection for works, many will never be created. Though player pianos didn't put an end to composition and gramophones certainly didn't put an end to music—indeed, we're lost in our own personal libraries today—Sousa's "alarmist" rhetoric about the effects of new technology continued throughout the twentieth century and into our own. Indeed, the rhetoric increased both in volume and apocalyptic fervor, even as copyright law granted ever more rights to creators."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Oct 09 - 03:42 PM

A new genetic analysis has confirmed that the "royal disease" suffered by the male descendants of Queen Victoria was in fact a rare type of hemophilia, the genetic disease marked by a deficiency in blood clotting. Queen Victoria had several sons that died from blood loss after seemingly minor injuries. The disease spread as her descendants married into other royal families across Europe, altering Western history.

Based on the sons' reported symptoms, modern researchers had already hypothesized that the royals had hemophilia, but there was never any concrete evidence. Now, new DNA analysis on the bones of the last Russian royal family, the Romanovs, indicates the Royal disease was indeed hemophilia, a rare subtype known as hemophilia B [ScienceNOW Daily News]. The genotyping study was published in the journal Science.

To pinpoint the exact form of the disorder, the scientists extracted DNA from the skeletal remains of Queen Victoria's great grandson Crown Prince Alexei of Russia's Romanov family and decoded the genetic information. (The bones were found in 2007, and it was only earlier this year that they were confirmed to have belonged to the murdered prince, who was killed during the Russian revolution.) The new analysis discovered a mutation in a gene on the X chromosome that codes for the production of Factor IX, a substance that causes blood to clot [BBC News]. Since the mutation is on the X chromosome, the disease is carried by females but usually shows up only in male descendants, because they don't have a second X chromosome with a working copy of the gene. Researchers say the finding of hemophilia B in the Romanov's closes the case on the cause of "royal disease."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Oct 09 - 08:09 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny microscopic creatures commonly known as water bears (also called Tardigrades), along with a few other life forms, will be sent to the Martian moon Phobos to test whether organisms can survive for long periods of time in deep space. The mission, called the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE), was originally going to be launched earlier this month, but it has been delayed due to safety and technical issues. Currently, the scientists hope to launch the specimens on the Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft in 2011, the next time that the orbits of Earth and Mars offer a launch window.

The LIFE experiment is being developed by The Planetary Society, a publicly supported organization founded in part by Carl Sagan that now has 125 member countries. The researchers will send 10 individual organisms (three of each, for a total of 30 samples) from all three domains of life - bacteria, eukaryota, and archaea - along with some native soil samples to Mars' largest moon on the three-year mission. According to the scientists, the experiment will test part of the theory of transpermia, specifically investigating life's ability to move between planets. In an earlier experiment in 2007, water bears flew on a spacecraft and survived the major hardships of radiation and the vacuum.

In 2011, the life forms will be packed up inside a puck-like container called a BioModule with a total mass of 100 grams, which is designed to resemble a meteorite that may have carried earlier life forms between planets. After the 10-month journey to Phobos, the specimens will undergo a 4,000-g impact on the moon's surface, spend a few weeks there in their sealed containers, and then return to Earth on board a robotic interplanetary lander that would crash-land in Kazakhstan. Scientists would then open the containers and see what was still alive.

"If no microbes survive, this does not necessarily rule out the possibility of transpermia, but it certainly calls it into question more," according to The Planetary Society's website. "But if some of the organisms do make it alive to Phobos and back, then at least we would know that some life could indeed survive an interplanetary journey over a three-year period inside a rock."

The experiment would mark the longest time that biological samples have spent in deep space; the Biostack 1 and 2 experiments, flown during the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the moon, traveled outside the Earth's magnetosphere for about two weeks.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Oct 09 - 03:06 PM

FORT COLLINS. Colo. - Authorities were trying to determine Thursday how to safely bring down a 6-year-old boy who reportedly clambered into his family's experimental balloon-powered aircraft and floated away from home, sheriff's officials said.

The Larimer County Sheriff's Department said the boy's family had been building an experimental aircraft that had a large helium balloon attached to it at their home, KUSA-TV reported. The aircraft was approximately 20 feet by 5 feet and covered in tin foil, the station said.

On Thursday morning, according to the family and officials, the boy got onto the aircraft and detached the rope holding it in place. Sheriff's spokeswoman Eloise Campanella said the boy climbed into the access door and the airborne device took off.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

Several people in the neighborhood said they saw the aircraft floating over their homes and some snapped pictures.

Television news helicopters were tracking the craft, which was last seen floating south of Milliken, about 40 miles north of Denver.

Officials were scrambling to figure out how to rescue the boy.

The craft, which is shaped like a flying saucer, has the potential to rise to 10,000 feet, Campanella said.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Oct 09 - 03:57 PM

In 2007, Canadian researchers amazed us with the discovery that plants can distinguish whether nearby plants are their siblings —in other words, if they've grown from seeds from the same source.

Now, University of Delaware professor Harsh Bais has identified just how plants do this: by secreting chemical signals to other plants.

Plants grow more horizontal roots when they're in the presence of "strangers," better enabling them to compete for necessary nutrients. However, when plants are near their "siblings," they grew fewer roots—leaving researchers to think that plants don't need to grow as many roots to survive when they know they're among "kin."

In a series of experiments, the researchers exposed young seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana to the root secretions from their "siblings" as well as to those of "strangers." When exposed to unfamiliar root secretions, the test plants grew more roots. However, when the plants were around kin, they "knew" that they would be competing for nutrients, so their roots didn't grow as much. Additionally, when the researchers treated the first group of plants (the ones next to strangers) with sodium orthovanadate—a chemical that stops secretion but doesn't stop roots from growing—the plants seemed to loose their sense of "strangers."

Physorg reports:

    "Plants have no visible sensory markers, and they can't run away from where they are planted," Bais says. "It then becomes a search for more complex patterns of recognition…"

    Bais says he and his colleagues also have noticed that as sibling plants grow next to each other, their leaves often will touch and intertwine compared to strangers that grow rigidly upright and avoid touching.

    The study leaves a lot of unanswered questions that Bais hopes to explore further. How might sibling plants grown in large "monocultures," such as corn or other major crop plants, be affected?

In a related study, when plants were planted next to "strangers," their growth was stunted—because all their energy was spent growing more roots, the rest of the plant suffered. Siblings, on the other hand, fared better overall. So like humans, plants often do best when they're among family.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Oct 09 - 06:44 PM

"In this week's issue of Nature, scientists from Princeton University trained mice to navigate around a virtual environment using a setup that resembles a combination of a giant trackball and a mini-iMax theater displaying a virtual world rendered using a modified version of the Quake 2 open source game engine. (Here's the academic paper, subscription required.) They hold the mouse's head still atop a giant trackball, which the mouse turns by running. The scientists use the rotations to move the mouse around in the virtual environment, and when he reaches certain places, he gets a reward. Because they are able to hold the head still, they can stick microscopic glass electrodes into individual neurons in the hippocampus of this mouse as it 'navigates.' They find the neural activity that resembles activity during real life navigation, and learned new things about the inputs and computations that are going on inside these neurons, which weren't known before. No word as of yet whether the scientists plan on giving the mice control of the gun. Wonder whether John Carmack ever envisioned this when he opened up the Quake code?" (Slashdot)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Oct 09 - 01:09 PM

You will be happy to learn that the sperm whales of the Southern Ocean have been adjudicated to be net carbon neutral or even carbon-negative despite their massive exhalations of CO2. This is because they bring up large amounts of iron from the sea depths when they do their deep feeding, which iron re-mingles with the waters higher in the column and feeds plankton, who absorb CO2.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Oct 09 - 01:12 PM

A long and interesting exposition of the Holographic Paradigm of reality, well worth reading for those who need a bit of a spiritual jolt from time to time. (Plus it is Scientific!!)


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Oct 09 - 12:56 PM

A curious experiment has given scientists an unprecedented look into the human brain as it goes about a vital and everyday task: processing and speaking words. The study, published in Science, found that the brain carries out three steps of the task in about half a second, and that all the activity happens sequentially in the same small brain region, known as Broca's area.

The researchers took advantage of a rare procedure in which epilepsy patients allow doctors to implant dozens of electrodes directly into their brains. While they are awake, the patients answer questions so that doctors can determine which parts of the brain are necessary to maintain language and which parts can be safely removed to treat epileptic seizures [Los Angeles Times]. Three such patients agreed to take part in the language experiment, were given long lists of verbs, and were asked to change some of them to the past or present tense before saying them out loud.

The electrodes picked up regular pulses of activity in the brain region called Broca's area, which lies beneath the left temple. The area of the brain is named after a 19th century physician named Pierre Paul Broca, who became famous for his study of two patients who couldn't speak [NPR News]. While neuroscientists have long believed Broca's area plays an important role in speech, they've previously had little luck in determining exactly what goes on inside the brain region, since standard brain scans like fMRIs don't have enough resolution.

Electrical activity spiked 200 milliseconds, 320 milliseconds and 450 milliseconds after being presented with a new word. The researchers concluded that those peaks corresponded to the times when the brain decided on the appropriate word to use, picked the proper grammatical form, and figured out how to pronounce it [Los Angeles Times]. The findings negate a previous theory that Broca's area is involved only in speaking, and another region, Wernicke's area, handles reading and hearing.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Oct 09 - 02:01 PM

A University of Michigan professor is developing an electric rocket thruster (NanoFET) that uses nanoparticle electric propulsion and enables spacecraft to travel faster and with less propellant than previous technology allowed. Credit: Michael Rayle, Electrodynamic Applications, Inc.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research is funding Professor Alec D. Gallimore's research because particle electric propulsion, with its half-inch thruster, increases velocity by several hundred or thousand miles an hour and is expected to have a dramatic impact on nanosatellites and larger spacecraft. These electric fields help to create thrust when the particles are charged, accelerated and propelled into space.

"Particles used in this technology are initially 10 to 50 nanometers in size (approximately a thousand times smaller than a human hair in diameter), and we scale them up to between one and ten microns (1/20th to about half the size of a human hair) because at that size, we can see and use them for advanced propulsion research," said Gallimore.

Even with the modifications there are still challenges in doing NanoFET research.

"There are material science aspects of designing the right materials that can withstand high voltages and close proximity to each other," Gallimore said. "There's also a challenge of making certain that all materials are in a form that fits on a satellite that's not much larger than a baseball." Currently the materials are more functional than form-fitting.

"We're hoping that we can actually resolve a lot of these issues in the next three to four years," said Gallimore.

In the meantime, the researchers have tested the nanoparticle, electric-based propulsion in air and in a vacuum chamber on an aircraft that replicates conditions of limited gravity.

"It has the potential to be a revolutionary propulsion concept, especially regarding nanosatellites and larger satellites, but there's also a possibility of applying the technology to non-space vehicle applications as well," he said.

AFOSR Program Manager, Dr. Mitat Birkan who oversees the research, agrees. "Electrostatic acceleration of charged nanoparticles has many potential applications besides space propulsion, including manufacturing and biomedical technologies."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Oct 09 - 08:42 PM

Time in a Bottle--Watching Evolution Happen


Charles Darwin's seminal Origin of Species first laid out the case for evolution exactly 150 years ago. Now, MSU professor Richard Lenski and colleagues document the process in their analysis of 40,000 generations of bacteria, published this week in the international science journal Nature.

Lenski, Hannah Professor of Microbial Ecology at MSU, started growing cultures of fast-reproducing, single-celled E. coli bacteria in 1988. If a genetic mutation gives a cell an advantage in competition for food, he reasoned, it should dominate the entire culture. While Darwin's theory of natural selection is supported by other studies, it has never before been studied for so many cycles and in such detail.

"It's extra nice now to be able to show precisely how selection has changed the genomes of these bacteria, step by step over tens of thousands of generations," Lenski said.
Lenski's team periodically froze bacteria for later study, and technology has since developed to allow complete genetic sequencing. By the 20,000-generation midpoint, researchers discovered 45 mutations among surviving cells. Those mutations, according to Darwin's theory, should have conferred some advantage, and that's exactly what the researchers found.

The results "beautifully emphasize the succession of mutational events that allowed these organisms to climb toward higher and higher efficiency in their environment," noted Dominique Schneider, a molecular geneticist at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France.

Lenski's long-running experiment itself is uniquely suited to answer some critical questions -- such as whether rates of change in a bacteria's genome move in tandem with its fitness to survive.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Oct 09 - 01:27 PM

By manipulating a single protein found in the brains of mice, researchers can wipe out a mouse's specific, traumatic memory without damaging brain cells, a new study reports. While the process is nowhere near ready for testing in humans, researchers say it does raise the possibility of novel treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions. "While memories are great teachers and obviously crucial for survival and adaptation, selectively removing incapacitating memories, such as traumatic war memories or an unwanted fear, could help many people live better lives," said [lead researcher] Joe Tsien [Telegraph].

Humans have the same so-called "memory molecule" in our brains, and the announcement is certain to prompt speculation that sci-fi scenarios of memory erasure are almost upon us. The concept was the premise of the popular 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which two former lovers pay a "memory-erasure" service to expunge the unhappy affair from their minds [HealthDay News].

In the study, published in the journal Neuron [subscription required], researchers created genetically engineered mice that had elevated levels of a brain protein called CaMKII, and also fashioned a chemical inhibitor that allowed them to turn the protein "off" and "on" at will. They then traumatized the mice by placing them in a chamber where they shocked their paws, causing the mice to associate the chamber with pain. Mice that had the CaMKII protein turned on before they were brought to the chamber the next time showed no fear, but they retained their memories of other habitats and objects.

A month later, the effect still held: Whereas the month-old memories of foot-shock … caused normal mice to freeze with fear when placed in original testing environment, mice with overexpressed αCaMKII appeared comparatively blasé in the same environment. Many researchers believe CaMKII to be "the key molecule underlying learning and memory," commented neuroscientist Mark Mayford [The Scientist], and the new study elegantly reaffirms that belief.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Oct 09 - 11:11 PM

Microsoft, Dell, Spectrum Bridge launch first public white spaces network
First ever public white spaces broadband network is alive in Virginia -- like WiFi on steroids.
By Microsoft Subnet on Wed, 10/21/09 - 4:23pm.

The first public white spaces network officially launched on Wednesday in Claudville, Virginia. It is uses sensing technology from Spectrum Bridge with software and Web cams supplied by Microsoft and PCs supplied by Dell. The project was funded the TDF Foundation.

White spaces are services that run in the unused portion of television spectrum, and have been called "WiFi on steroids" by Google founder Larry Page. The battle for white spaces has been going on for years. IT companies like Microsoft, Dell and Google lobbied in favor of opening up the spectrum for data services, particularly broadband Internet access, while those in the broadcasting industry vehemently opposed the idea, even going so far as to create a FUD advertising campaign to make consumers believe that white spaces would hurt television quality.

Almost a year ago, in November, 2008, the FCC actually did the right thing and voted to allow carriers and other vendors to deploy devices in the unlicensed white spaces spectrum at up to 100 milliwats, and up to 40 milliwats on white space spectrum adjacent to TV channels. Unlike WiFi, white spaces will support a bigger bandwidth for faster downloads over longer distances. It also is less prone to interference from walls and other obstacles.

One condition the FCC placed on would-be white spaces providers at the time is that the devices would need sensing capabilities that would automatically shut them down should they interfere with television. Devices were also to have access to a geo-location database to track them by their IP address or media-access-control address or a radio-frequency identification tag. Once the database had a fix on the device's location, it was to be able to select the optimal white-space spectrum for the device and switch the spectrum as the device moves.

Spectrum Bridge provided the database that ensures the white spaces devices in Claudville do not cause interference with local TV signals. "The database assigns non-interfering frequencies to white spaces devices, and can adapt in real time to new TV broadcasts, as well as to other protected TV band users operating in the area," the company explains.

Dell was surprisingly quiet about its specific contribution to this white spaces network. Microsoft had original developed a prototype device that was trounced on at the time by the enemies of the idea, the National Association of Broadcasters. Tests of those early devices by the FCC were said to show that they did indeed cause the feared interference with television signals, though Microsoft said that the device tested must have been defective. A second roun

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 22 Oct 09 - 12:06 PM

The edge of the solar system is tied up with a ribbon, astronomers have discovered. The first global map of the solar system reveals that its edge is nothing like what had been predicted. Neutral atoms, which are the only way to image the fringes of the solar system, are densely packed into a narrow ribbon rather than evenly distributed.

"Our maps show structure and energy spectra that are completely different from what any model has predicted," says study coauthor Herbert Funsten of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer satellite, or IBEX, discovered the narrow ribbon, which completes nearly a full circle across the sky. The density of neutral atoms in the band is two to three times that in adjacent regions.

These and related findings, reported in six papers posted online October 15 in Science, will not only send theorists back to the drawing board, researchers say, but may ultimately provide new insight on the interaction between the heliosphere — the vast bubble in which the solar system resides — and surrounding space.

The bubble is inflated by solar wind, the high-speed stream of charged particles blowing out from the sun to the solar system's very edge. For 48 years, researchers have assumed that the solar wind sculpted the structure at the heliosphere's boundary with interstellar space, says Tom Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.. But the newly found ribbon's orientation suggests that the galaxy's magnetic field, just outside the heliosphere, seems to be the chief organizer of structure in this region, says theorist Nathan Schwadron of Boston University, a lead author of one of the studies.

It's not known whether the ribbon lasts for just a few years or is a permanent feature.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48456/title/Solar_systems_edge_surprises_astronomers

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 22 Oct 09 - 02:03 PM

Heil Heidegger!

Martin Heidegger in 1961: Twenty-eight years earlier, the German philosopher told his students of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness," declaring that Hitler alone "is the present and future of German reality, and its law."

By Carlin Romano

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

To be sure, every philosophy reference book credits Heidegger with one or another headscratcher achievement. One lauds him for his "revival of ontology." (Would we not think about things that exist without this ponderous, existentialist Teuton?) Another cites his helpful boost to phenomenology by directing our focus to that well-known entity, Dasein, or "Human Being." (For a reified phenomenon, "Human Being," like the Yeti, has managed to elude all on-camera confirmation.) A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It's the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness," declaring that "the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law."

Faye, whose book stirred France's red and blue Heidegger départements into direct battle a few years back, follows in the investigative footsteps of Chilean-Jewish philosopher Victor Farias (Heidegger et le Nazisme, 1987), historian Hugo Ott (Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu Zeiner Biographie, 1988) and others. Aim? To expose the oafish metaphysician's vulgar, often vicious 1930s attempt to become Hitler's chief academic tribune, and his post-World War II contortions to escape proper judgment for his sins. "We now know," reports Faye, "that [Heidegger's] attempt at self-justification of 1945 is nothing but a string of falsehoods."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 23 Oct 09 - 12:22 PM

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- A bear on ice skates attacked two people during rehearsals at a circus in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, killing one of them, Kyrgyz officials said Friday.

In the incident, which happened Thursday, the 5-year-old animal killed the circus administrator, Dmitry Potapov, and mauled an animal trainer, who was attempting to rescue him.

"The incident occurred during a rehearsal by the Russian state circus company troupe which was performing in Bishkek with the program, Bears on Ice," Ministry of Culture and Information director Kurmangazy Isanayev told reporters.

It is unclear what caused the bear to attack Potapov, 25, nearly severing one of his legs while dragging him across the ice by his neck. Medical personnel were unable to save Potapov, who died at the scene.

The 29-year-old circus trainer Yevgeny Popov, who attempted to rescue Potapov, was also severely injured, according to doctors.

"The victim has sustained serious injuries - deep scalp lacerations, bruising of the brain, lacerations on his body. His condition is considered critical," Dr. Gulnara Tashibekova told reporters on Russian state television.

After the incident, the circus was cordoned off by police and emergency service workers. Experts have been brought in to examine the bear, which was shot and died at the scene.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 23 Oct 09 - 02:13 PM

Snooty wine pairing rules, such as the edict that one must only drink white wine with fish, now have a little data behind them, according to a new study. Researchers found a correlation between the high iron content of red wine and a nasty, fishy aftertaste when the reds are sipped with seafood. In the experiment, tasters ate a bit of scallop, tasted some wine and evaluated the aftertaste on a scale of 1 to 4. The diners found the unpleasant aftertaste was more intense with wines that had a higher iron content, the researchers say [Los Angeles Times]. The researchers were able to block the aftertaste by adding a compound that masks the iron.

The iron content of a wine depends on the composition of the soil in which the grapes were grown, the dust on the berry, contamination during harvesting, transportation, and crushing, and the conditions during fermentation [Telegraph]. The new research, published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, suggests that some low-iron red wines are OK to drink with fish. While red wines tend to have more iron than whites, it varies according to the type of grape, country of origin, and vintage.

But the iron is only half the story. The researchers report that they haven't yet isolated the compound in the scallops that reacts with the wine, but they suspect it's an unsaturated fatty acid, which could be breaking down rapidly and releasing the decaying fish smell when exposed to iron [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 24 Oct 09 - 08:01 AM

Revealed: The human genome in 3D

Scientists have worked out the 3D structure of the human genome.

Their findings, published in Science magazine, reveal how long strands of DNA code are folded and tightly packed into the nucleus of a human cell.

Unfolded, the cell's genome - those strands of DNA code - would be approximately 2m in length.

The team showed how this is organised into a tight ball to fit inside a nucleus, which is about one hundredth of a millimetre in diameter.

MORE

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 24 Oct 09 - 08:04 AM

Genome analysis changes diagnosis

A critically ill Turkish boy has had his life saved after scientists were able to read his genome quickly and work out that he had a wrong diagnosis.

The scientists writing in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say they completed the analysis of his blood in just 10 days.

They were able to see that he had a mutation on a gene that coded for a gut disease and tell his doctors.

Clinical tests proved that the boy had the disease and he is now recovering.

MORE

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 Oct 09 - 02:50 PM

PhysOrg.com) -- For more than 50 years, physicists have been intrigued by the concept of closed time-like curves (CTCs). Because a CTC returns to its starting point, it raises the possibility of traveling backward in time. More recently, physicists have theorized that CTC-assisted computers could enable ideal quantum state discrimination, and even make classical computers (with CTCs) equally as powerful as quantum computers. However, a new study argues that CTCs, if they exist, might actually provide much less computational benefit than previously thought.

A team of scientists consisting of Charles Bennett, Graeme Smith, and John Smolin from IBM, along with Debbie Leung from the University of Waterloo, argues that previous analyses of CTCs have fallen into the so-called "linearity trap," and have been based on physically irrelevant definitions that have led to incorrect conclusions about CTCs. The new study will be published in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.
As the physicists explain, CTCs are difficult to think about because they make quantum evolution nonlinear, whereas standard quantum mechanics systems evolve linearly. (In linear systems, the evolution of a mixture of states is equal to the mixture of the evolutions of individual states; this is not the case in nonlinear systems.) It seems that much of the apparent power of CTCs has come from analyzing the evolution of pure quantum states, and extending these results linearly to find the evolution of mixed states. The physicists call this situation the "linearity trap," which occurs when nonlinear theories are extended linearly. In the case of CTC computations, Bennett and coauthors found that this problem was causing the output to be uncorrelated with the input, which isn't a very useful computation.

"The trouble with the earlier work is that it didn't take into account the physical processes by which the inputs to a computation are selected," Smith told PhysOrg.com. "In a nonlinear theory, the output of a computation depends not only on the input, but also on how it was selected. This is the strange thing about nonlinear theories, and easy to miss."

To overcome these problems, the scientists proposed that the inputs to the system should be selected by an independent referee at the start of the computation, rather than being built deterministically into the structure of the computer. In order to ensure that the proper input is selected, the physicists proposed the "Principle of Universal Inclusion." The principle states that the evolution of a nonlinearly evolving system may depend on parts of the universe with which it does not interact, ensuring that scientists do not ignore the parts of the universe that need to be used to select the inputs. The physicists hope that these criteria will lead to choosing the correct input, and then to generating the correct corresponding output, rather than simply evolving the system linearly based on incorrect inputs.

As the scientists note, one of the motivating factors for their investigation is the previous finding that CTCs can distinguish between two nonorthogonal pure states, which is impossible in standard quantum mechanics. Further, the previous results seemed to imply that CTCs could be used to distinguish between two identical states, which should be impossible no matter how you look at it. To investigate this problem, the scientists considered what would happen if they prepared and evolved quantum states according to a specific physical process. They found that two output states can be distinguished even without using a CTC, eliminating any advantage the CTC may have offered.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 03:28 PM

PLoS ONE, October 21
Finally, on a lighter note: A new study has determined that the testosterone levels of male John McCain supporters dropped dramatically on Election Night 2008, when Barack Obama soundly beat their candidate. Men who supported Obama's candidacy showed no corresponding boost in testosterone levels, and women's hormone levels also stayed steady. The results were based on saliva samples taken at regular intervals on election night, and a surveys also revealed that the McCain supporters felt submissive, controlled, and unhappy. Researchers say the findings are proof that politics can affect men in the same way that physical contests for dominance do.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 09:14 PM

I was thinking yesterday. That should be momentous enough but I thought about the phrase manna from heaven. Our energy from the sun is like manna from heaven but so is gravity. The desert regions have plenty of sun but here in the east we have rain. Rain falling is manna from heaven if we harness it for our energy needs.

I have engineered a huge rain tank that is supported on four pillars but all the weight is supported by a central pillar that squeezes a hydrolic system that can power a turbine or flywheel for electricity.

Gravity fed electric power in your backyard without the hassel of hydro electric complications.

Charging the system with municipal water from time to time is required but at least the only pollution is water - if it ever springs a leak.

When it rains it pours kilowatts.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 09:15 PM

I think I will

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 09:15 PM

reserve #1000 for

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 09:16 PM

Amos

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 09:16 PM

helloo?

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Oct 09 - 10:21 PM

Huh? What? We're there already!!!! Sorry--I was dreaming about Kilowatts from heaven.....



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