BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 13 Jan 10 - 08:13 PM

Random traces is becoming nothing but sex sex sex lately.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jan 10 - 02:24 PM

* General Physics
    * Condensed Matter
    * Optics & Photonics
    * Superconductivity
    * Plasma Physics
    * Soft Matter
    * Quantum Physics

Radio pulses from pulsar appear to move faster than light
January 14, 2010 by Lin Edwards


Superluminal, or faster than light, speeds are associated with anomalous dispersion, which is a process in which the refractive index of a medium increases with the wavelength of light passing through it. If a light pulse (consisting of a group of light waves at different wavelengths) passes through such a medium, the group velocity of the pulse can increase to a velocity greater than any of the waves within the pulse, but the energy of the pulse still travels at the speed of light, which means information is transmitted in accordance with Einstein's theory.

Astrophysicists, led by Frederick Jenet of the University of Texas at Brownsville, have been monitoring a pulsar, PSR B1937+21, which is about 10,000 light years from Earth. They used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to obtain radio data over three days at 1420.4 MHz with a bandwidth of 1.5 MHz. They found that pulses closer to the center arrived earlier than the normal timing, which suggests they had travelled faster than the speed of light.

A pulsar is a neutron star that is spinning rapidly and emitting a rotating beam of radio radiation as it spins, which is observed on Earth at regular intervals rather like light from a lighthouse. The pulses of radiation can be affected by several factors as they travel through the interstellar medium (ISM). Their polarization can be rotated if they pass through a magnetic field, for example, and they can be scattered if they encounter free electrons, and can be absorbed by neutral hydrogen in the ISM. Jenet and his colleagues think anomalous dispersion also affects the pulses.

According to Jenet and colleagues, the pulses from the pulsar traveled through a cloud of neutral hydrogen, which has a resonance of 1420.4 MHz -- the exact center of the bandwidth studied. Passing through the cloud caused anomalous dispersion that resulted in a superluminal group velocity, and pulses with frequencies closest to the resonance frequency arrived earlier than other pulses.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Jan 10 - 08:20 PM

For Sale:

2 previously owned vehicles. Both one owners and garaged.

The Endeavor and another Space Shuttle of your choice is for sale to the next owner who can pick up the merchandise themselves.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jan 10 - 01:04 AM

"A group of international scientists this morning announced that they are moving the hands of the symbolic "Doomsday Clock" away from midnight -- or the figurative apocalypse -- but only by one minute.

The clock, which is maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was designed to reflect how close civilization is to "catastrophic destruction." First set at seven minutes to midnight, the clock has been moved only 18 times since its creation in 1947.

The group, which includes more than a dozen Nobel laureates, last moved the hands of the clock in 2007, from seven to five minutes before midnight to reflect the threat of a "second nuclear age" and the challenges presented by global warming.

Today, at a press conference in New York, the Bulletin announced that despite the looming threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, it would move the hands of the clock from five to six minutes before midnight."

Linked from Slashdot

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jan 10 - 01:30 AM

ZEUS' ALTAR OF ASHES
News from the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif. By Bruce Bower January 30th, 2010; Vol.177 #3 (p. 14)    Text Size
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Excavations at the Sanctuary of Zeus atop Greece's Mount Lykaion have revealed that ritual activities occurred there for roughly 1,500 years, from the height of classic Greek civilization around 3,400 years ago until just before Roman conquest in 146.

"We may have the first documented mountaintop shrine from the ancient Greek world," says project director David Romano of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Ritual ceremonies were conducted in a part of the open-air sanctuary called the ash altar of Zeus. It now consists of a mound of ash, stone and various inscribed dedications to Zeus, the head god of Greek mythology. Romano's team has found no evidence of a temple or structures of any kind on Mount Lykaion.

Work conducted over the past two years at the ash altar of Zeus has unearthed material from many phases of Greek civilization. Finds include pottery of various types, terra cotta figurines of people and animals, and burned bones of sheep and goats.

Chemical analyses have revealed traces of red wine on the inside surfaces of some pottery fragments, Romano says. His team reported initial evidence of ritual activity at the ash altar of Zeus in 2007. The new discoveries indicate that ancient Greeks kept returning to the sacred site for a remarkably long time.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jan 10 - 12:35 PM

The manuscript, from 1752, is a biography of Newton entitled Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life written by William Stukeley, an archaeologist and one of Newton's first biographers. Newton told the apple story to Stukeley, who relayed it as such:


"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees...he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself..."


The Royal Society has made the manuscript available today for the first time in a fully interactive digital form on their website at royalsociety.org/turning-the-pages.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jan 10 - 06:59 PM

Nanoscale: Robot Arm Places Atoms and Molecules With 100% Accuracy

Written By: Michael Anissimov
Date Published: January 12, 2010


Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman.

In a 2009 article in Nature Nanotechnology, Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy. Earlier trials had yielded only 60-80% accuracy.

The nanorobotic arm is built out of DNA origami: large strands of DNA gently encouraged to fold in precise ways by interaction with a few hundred short DNA strands. The products, around 100 nanometers in diameter, are eight times larger and three times more complex than what could be built with a simple crystalline DNA array, vastly expanding the space of possible structures. Other nanoscale structures or machines built by Dr. Seeman and his collaborators including a nanoscale walking biped, truncated DNA octahedrons, and sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays. Dr. Seeman has exploited structural features of DNA thought to be used in genetic recombination to operate his nanoscale devices, tapping into the very processes underlying all life.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jan 10 - 08:54 AM

Washington (CNN) – Digital history was made Monday when President Obama became the first commander-in-chief to "tweet" a message on the social networking site, though he had a little bit of help.

When Obama stopped at the headquarters of the American Red Cross' to promote aid to Haiti, a member of the agency's new media team wrote a message on Twitter.com telling people he had arrived.

"President Obama and the first lady are here visiting our disaster operation center right now," the Red Cross staffer wrote.

The new media staffer then asked the president to hit "Update" on the screen and Obama posted the item himself under the @RedCross handle at Twitter.com.

A moment later the Red Cross staffer posted a follow-up tweet: "President Obama pushed the button on the last tweet. It was his first ever tweet!"

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jan 10 - 09:31 AM

As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop's appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to "alien abductors" in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

"There's just one thing we haven't quite dared to mention. It's this, and you won't believe it. It's all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child's face."

Boskops, then, were much talked and written about, by many of the most prominent figures in the fields of paleontology and anthropology.

Yet today, although Neanderthals and Homo erectus are widely known, Boskops are almost entirely forgotten. Some of our ancestors are clearly inferior to us, with smaller brains and apelike countenances. They're easy to make fun of and easy to accept as our precursors. In contrast, the very fact of an ancient ancestor like Boskop, who appears un-apelike and in fact in most ways seems to have had characteristics superior to ours, was destined never to be popular.

(Discover Mag)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jan 10 - 10:06 AM

Barbara Herrnstein Smith's "Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion." gets an analytical review from Stanley Fish, resident philosopher-head of the NYT, entitled "Must There Be a Bottom Line?" WOrth a read as an interesting stepping stone in the evolution of the religion/materialism dichotomy.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jan 10 - 10:51 AM

Bohr finally proven more right than Einstein as regards entanglements and uncertainties according to Phys.Org.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jan 10 - 05:42 PM

New Scientist:

"Although gravity has been successfully described with laws devised by Isaac Newton and later Albert Einstein, we still don't know how the fundamental properties of the universe combine to create the phenomenon.

Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a prominent and internationally respected string theorist, argues that gravitational attraction could be the result of the way information about material objects is organised in space. If true, it could provide the fundamental explanation we have been seeking for decades.

Verlinde posted his paper to the pre-print physics archive earlier this month, and since then many physicists have greeted the proposal as promising (arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785). Nobel laureate and theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands stresses the ideas need development, but is impressed by Verlinde's approach. "[Unlike] many string theorists Erik is stressing real physical concepts like mass and force, not just fancy abstract mathematics," he says. "That's encouraging from my perspective as a physicist."

Newton first showed how gravity works on large scales by treating it as a force between objects (see "Apple for your eyes"). Einstein refined Newton's ideas with his theory of general relativity. He showed that gravity was better described by the way an object warps the fabric of the universe. We are all pulled towards the Earth because the planet's mass is curving the surrounding space-time.

Yet that is not the end of the story. Though Newton and Einstein provided profound insights, their laws are only mathematical descriptions. "They explain how gravity works, but not where it comes from," says Verlinde. Theoretical physics has had a tough time connecting gravity with the other known fundamental forces in the universe. The standard model, which has long been our best framework for describing the subatomic world, includes electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces - but not gravity.

Many physicists doubt it ever will. Gravity may turn out to be delivered via the action of hypothetical particles called gravitons, but so far there is no proof of their existence. Gravity's awkwardness has been one of the main reasons why theories like string theory and quantum loop gravity have been proposed in recent decades.

Verlinde's work offers an alternative way of looking at the problem. "I am convinced now, gravity is a phenomenon emerging from the fundamental properties of space and time," he says.

To understand what Verlinde is proposing, consider the concept of fluidity in water. Individual molecules have no fluidity, but collectively they do. Similarly, the force of gravity is not something ingrained in matter itself. It is an extra physical effect, emerging from the interplay of mass, time and space, says Verlinde. His idea of gravity as an "entropic force" is based on these first principles of thermodynamics - but works within an exotic description of space-time called holography...."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 20 Jan 10 - 05:48 PM

kick

Sci Fi writers rejoice.
Its the Amosmatic screeplayorama

Just take 6 science posts from this thread and combine them in a action drama of your choice.




----------------



Further suppositions of the donuel multi-verse model;
With a basic knowledge of singularities, virtual particles, branes and string theory the romance of the universe can unflod before your eyes.


In the multi verse model, new births of new universes can come from colliding branes as well as "on the other side" of existing super massive black holes or wherever sufficiently/impossibly dense pressure and energy resides.


Taking just the example of branes colliding and giving birth to one or many universes, first we must know where and what they are.
These parents who by bumping together give birth to a universe, are vast regions that fly through the 11th dimension, the highest dimension realized. The 11th dimension has the advantage of being able to contact every point in all the dimensions "beneath" it.

*If 11th dimensional branes are full of elementary hydrogen it might explain the mystery of where virtual particles come from.*

An 11th dimension has the unique ability to be in all places at all times.

I can only imagine an 11th dimension as being the most extreme example of quantum strangeness.


One would think that branes would pass through each other if they crossed vectors in 11 dimensions, but in the event that all 11 dimensions being at all places at all times match up and collide the resulting collision would be A HUGE impact within a small tiny wrapped up space within itself but simultaneously being every where and when at once,,,,,,,,,,, then Kaboom a big bang occurs creating its own space time as it goes which would appear like expansion over time. That expansion would be a growing space time which would continue as it began, in an acceleration of new space time containing matter born of energy amid a sea of energy.

This kind of speculation is based only upon certain elements of M and string theory and has no affirming math behind it, but what struck me regarding this flight of imagination is the possibility that virtual particles come from the 11th dimension.

If this is somehow impossibly true, it would give a coherence and similarity to all the universes born of colliding branes. In other words the atomic forces within new baby universes would be inherited from the parental branes of elemental hydrogen.

This would greatly enhance life giving ablities to all new universes.
In fact this mega process is one of a living system giving birth to living systems.




The fuzzy uncertain quantum properties of cosmological physics is in a way exteremly sexy. Think of the grinding and bumping hot membranes that rub and rub until BANG,,,,, and then sometimes a baby universe spews forth.

Yep pretty darn sexy if not similar to the opening credits to Monty Python's MEaning of Life.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Jan 10 - 08:21 PM

U.S. filmmaker Dan Woolley was shooting a documentary about the impact of poverty in Haiti when the earthquake struck. He could have died, but he ultimately survived with the help of an iPhone first-aid app that taught him to treat his wounds.

After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.


Join Reddit's Haiti relief fundraising drive with Direct Relief International.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone's alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.

"I just saw the walls rippling and just explosive sounds all around me," said Woolley, recounting the earthquake to MSNBC. "It all happened incredibly fast. David yelled out, 'It's an earthquake,' and we both lunged and everything turned dark."

Woolley's incident highlights a large social implication of the iPhone and other similar smartphones. A constant internet connection, coupled with a device supporting a wealth of apps, can potentially transform a person into an all-knowing, always-on being. In Woolley's case, an iPhone app turned him into an amateur medic to help him survive natural disaster.

Say what you will about the iPhone. This story is incredible.



Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/haiti-survivor-iphone/#ixzz0dCoAl4LE

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Jan 10 - 03:48 PM

PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in the U.S. have calculated that 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably only around 18,500 individuals capable of breeding (and no more than 26,000). This made them an endangered species with a smaller population than today's species such as gorillas (approximately 25,000 breeding individuals) and chimpanzees (an estimated 21,000). They remained an endangered species for around one million years.



Modern humans are known to have less genetic variation than other living primates, even though our current population is many orders of magnitude greater. Researchers studying specific genetic lineages have proposed a number of explanations for this, such as recent "bottlenecks", which are events in which a significant proportion of the population is killed or prevented from reproducing. One such event was the Toba super-volcano in Indonesia that erupted around 70,000 years ago, triggering a nuclear winter.

Only an estimated 15,000 humans are thought to have survived. Another explanation is that the numbers of humans and our ancestors were chronically low throughout the last two million years, sometimes with only 10,000 breeding individuals surviving....(PhysOrg)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 25 Jan 10 - 02:01 PM

January 25, 2010    Maximum height of extreme waves up dramatically in Pacific Northwest

Wave heights are increasing off the Pacific Northwest, according to a new study at Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. (Photo by Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

A major increase in maximum ocean wave heights off the Pacific Northwest in recent decades has forced scientists to re-evaluate how high a "100-year event" might be, and the new findings raise special concerns for flooding, coastal erosion and structural damage.


The new assessment concludes that the highest waves may be as much as 46 feet, up from estimates of only 33 feet that were made as recently as 1996, and a 40 percent increase. December and January are the months such waves are most likely to occur, although summer waves are also significantly higher.

In a study just published online in the journal Coastal Engineering, scientists from Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries report that the cause of these dramatically higher waves is not completely certain, but "likely due to Earth's changing climate."

Using more sophisticated techniques that account for the "non-stationarity" in the wave height record, researchers say the 100-year wave height could actually exceed 55 feet, with impacts that would dwarf those expected from sea level rise in coming decades. Increased coastal erosion, flooding, damage to ocean or coastal structures and changing shorelines are all possible, scientists say.

---

Dear gawd...can you actually imagine a wave fifty-five feet high measured from sea level to crest?   One that just keeps going up and up and up....a solid wall of water?   The very concept makes me nervous.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 25 Jan 10 - 04:34 PM

November 11, 1959, Vol. V, No. 3 of the Village Voice.

Village Dope Raid

Last week-end Greenwich Village was treated to one of the most spectacular off-Broadway theatricals it has seen in years. The producer was the Police Department, which supplied a cast of detectives decked out as beatniks. The final act was played on Saturday night when the sleuths rang down the curtain on 13 of their erstwhile marijuana-smoking buddies.

Between Harlem and the Village, the enterprise had absorbed the energies of the entire narcotics squad for one month.

Inspector Edward F. Carey, narcotics-squad commander, who must be the envy of the whole publicity-hungry off-Broadway movement for having his production front-paged in every metropolitan paper, declared himself delighted with the results. "Carey's crusaders will strike again," he told reporters.

The men booked at Charles Street station apparently took their arrests in the prevailing spirit of good fun, and put on an impromptu bongo party. None of the Village contingent was picked up for heroin; they were all charged with possession of marijuana.

Among those arrested were Stanley Gould, 32, of First Avenue, who was held in $1,000 bail; George McKee, 30, and Michael J. Scott, 35, both musicians; and Joseph Gaffney, 22, who said he had no home and is known as "The Mad Mongolian of Bleecker Street."

The Bleecker Street "leather jackets" were generally unimpressed by the turn-of-events, but one admitted to The Voice on Monday that "the cops put on a real cool show - I didn't know it was in them."

A middle-aged artist who had been making the Bleecker Street scene since the end of the war was a little more sardonic about the whole business: "A few more raids like that and the big operators won't have a thing to worry about. Everybody will figure the dope problem's been cracked."

"There wasn't an honest-to-God racketeer in that whole Village mob of characters they picked up - not even a minor one," he told the Voice.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Jan 10 - 10:32 AM

Glasgow scientists predict mass of new particle
January 26, 2010

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists from the University of Glasgow has predicted the mass of a new particle which would help explain one of the fundamental forces of the universe.

The scientists say the Bc* meson will have been produced fleetingly in collisions in the Tevatron accelerator in Illinois, USA and at CERN in Switzerland, but has not yet been spotted by experimentalists searching through the debris.

However, a team led by Professor Christine Davies, head of the University's Particle Physics Theory Group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and an expert in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) theory, used supercomputers to predict the mass of the meson, which might help scientists understand the strong force that dictates the behaviour of particles at the sub-atomic level.

The strong force is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe and is what holds quarks together - the smallest units of matter found to date. It is this force that QCD theory seeks to understand.

The other fundamental forces are:

* Gravitation - the phenomenon where bodies of mass are attracted to each other,
* Electromagnetic - the attraction that exists between electrically charged particles such as electrons and protons,
* Weak - which is involved in some forms of particle decay, most notably nuclear beta decay

Prof Davies said: "Although this meson has not yet been shown to exist, our calculations have allowed us to predict not only its existence but also its mass. Two previous predictions we've made have been shown to be true so we are confident with this one. We predict the mass of the particle to be 6.330 GeV/c2 with an error of 9 MeV/c2. This is 6.75 times the mass of the proton with an error of 1% of the proton's mass. We predict that this particle is heavier than its cousin the Bc (whose mass we predicted five years ago) by 53(7) MeV/c2."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Jan 10 - 11:59 AM

Scientists have created baby monkeys with a father and two mothers. Their goal was to eliminate birth defects, but increasing the number of biological parents beyond two could add a futuristic twist to an area where the law already is a mess: the question of who, in this age of artificial insemination and surrogacy, should be considered the legal parents of a baby.


Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center were looking for ways to eliminate diseases that can be inherited through maternal DNA. They developed, as the magazine Nature reported last summer, a kind of swap in which defective DNA from the egg is removed and replaced with genetic material from another female's egg. The researchers say the procedure is also likely to work on humans.

The result would be a baby with three biological parents — or "fractional parents," as Adam Kolber, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, calls them.

He mentioned the idea over lunch at The Times, and it provided plenty of grist for debate among law junkies: Could a baby one day have 100 parents? Could anyone who contributes DNA claim visitation rights? How much DNA is enough? Can a child born outside the United States to foreigners who have DNA from an American citizen claim U.S. citizenship?

Further Discussion at The NY Times

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Jan 10 - 12:20 PM

US babies mysteriously shrinking

   
Birthweights in the US are falling but no one knows why, according to a study of 36.8 million infants born between 1990 and 2005.

A 52-gram drop in the weight of full-term singletons – from an average of 3.441 to 3.389 kilograms – has left Emily Oken's team at Harvard Medical School scratching their heads. It can't be accounted for by an increase in caesarean sections or induced labours, which shorten gestation. What's more, women in the US now smoke less and gain more weight during pregnancy, which should make babies heavier. Oken suggests that unmeasured factors, such as diet or exercise, could explain why babies are being born lighter.

"For your average baby, 50 grams probably makes no difference at all," she stresses. But those born substantially lighter could be at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes later in life.

(New Scientist)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Jan 10 - 06:33 PM

New Scientist:

"Horizontal and vertical: The evolution of evolution

26 January 2010 by Mark Buchanan
Magazine issue 2744. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
For similar stories, visit the Genetics and Evolution Topic Guides

Another kind of evolution (Image: Richard Borge)
1 more image
JUST suppose that Darwin's ideas were only a part of the story of evolution. Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history. It may sound preposterous, but this is exactly what microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believe. Darwin's explanation of evolution, they argue, even in its sophisticated modern form, applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed - billions of years, in fact - the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn't Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.

Strong claims, but others are taking them seriously. "Their arguments make sense and their conclusion is very important," says biologist Jan Sapp of York University in Toronto, Canada. "The process of evolution just isn't what most evolutionary biologists think it is."..."

Full story here

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Jan 10 - 10:10 AM

"If you really want something done, just do it. Do it hard, do it well. Don't pussyfoot. Don't pander. And don't say bad words in public."

Philippines President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
State of the Nation Address
July 27, 2009

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 27 Jan 10 - 10:41 AM

The horizontal theory of evolution has been proposed for decades and is not that controversial.

Just as biological scientists use hosts to introduce new genes or DNA into cells, there may have been RNA super virus or bacteria that did this in the distant past.

Many unrelated species share identical genes. Modern humans were found to have some feline genes that are hard to explain how they got there.

I imagine a bacterial "flu" that picked up some of Dna and went on to infect another type of animal. If the infection spread to the reproductive organs and in turn the gamete cells the next generation might have some "alien" dna from the bacteria's prior host.

In a way this is the idea behind the monster movie "Alien" and"The Thing".



Socialogicly we often classify people as being like other animals.
I'm not saying we detect actual gene similarities but it is something we do.
Actually I prefer cat people to lizard people. Walrus people are nice but not my favorite.

The human genome project may still hold some surprises regarding humans having genes of animals other than just primates and tiny fragments of feline genes.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 Jan 10 - 01:03 PM

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, can speed up photons (particles of light) to seemingly faster-than-light speeds through a stack of materials by adding a single, strategically placed layer. This experimental demonstration confirms intriguing quantum-physics predictions that light's transit time through complex multilayered materials need not depend on thickness, as it does for simple materials such as glass, but rather on the order in which the layers are stacked. This is the first published study of this dependence with single photons.

http://www.physorg.com/news183752006.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 31 Jan 10 - 10:57 AM

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123116417
SCIENCE FAIR WINNER invents life saving technolgy

In the book Last train from Hiroshima (now unavailable on Amazon due to dispute between Amazon and Apple pad readers resulting in Amazon not selling random House Books )

The bomb we dropped was a dud. A runaway neutron incident two days earlier on Tianamon Island weaked the bomb so much that only a 1/3 of the golf ball sized mass actually turned directly into energy.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 01 Feb 10 - 06:46 PM

From Slashdot:

North Carolina State University researcher has discovered what appears to be the strongest metal foam yet, capable of compressing up to 80% of it's original size under load and still retain the original shape. The hope is that this amazing material could be used in cars, body armor, or even buildings to absorb the shock from earthquakes.
"Metal foam is exactly what you might think – a cellular structure made from metal with tiny pockets of space inside. What makes Rabiei's metal foam better than others is that she's been able to make the tiny pockets of space more uniform. And that apparently is what gives it the strength as well as elasticity it needs in order to compress as much as it does without deformation. Many tests are being performed in the laboratory to determine its strength, but so far Rabiei says that the spongy material has 'a much higher strength-to-density ratio than any metal foam that has ever been reported.' Calculations also predict that in car accidents, when two pieces of her composite metal foam are inserted "behind the bumper of a car traveling at 28 mph, the impact would feel the same to passengers as an impact traveling at only 5 mph."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 01:30 PM

From Engadget:

"Spare a thought for the noble LORAN network. It helped bombers and ships across the Atlantic in WWII and, since then, has served as a reliable system for helping sailors, domestic and otherwise, to find their position. Of course, now that everybody and their kid cousin has a GPS receiver in their back pocket the need for limited, complex, radio-based geolocation is somewhat reduced. So, the US government is killing it off, shutting down most of the towers on February 8, with those that stay online over the summer going decidedly offline this fall. The savings? $190 million over five years. The cost? No backup for our GPS system, meaning we'll be totally blind when the first wave of EMPs hit -- and don't try to act like they're not comin', man."


THis is indeed the end of an era; I trained on Loran C receivers in my 20's. I doubt EMPs would leave Loran operational any more than it would Sat Nav. But the old fashioned reduction tables and a sextant might be good backups!!


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 01:44 PM

Asian in Italy 2,000 years ago, Canadian team discovers
Canwest News ServiceFebruary 2, 2010

A team of Canadian archeologists working in Italy has unearthed a 2,000-year-old set of bones that shouldn't be there. The male skeleton with DNA from East Asia -- buried at a time when the Roman Empire had no direct contact with civilizations in the Far East -- is forcing scholars to re-examine what they thought they knew about the first century following the birth of Jesus Christ. The Asian man's grave was found in a cemetery at Vagnari, which experts have determined was the site of an imperial estate. Seventy-five skeletons from the first, second and third centuries AD have been excavated at the estate in a project led by McMaster University archeologist Tracy Prowse. A tooth recovered from the man's grave was used to trace his roots. "The work being done at the site is showing us that there was considerable economic activity going on in the area, and this activity had connections beyond Italy's borders. It is changing our understanding of the economic and political history of the region," Prowse said.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 02 Feb 10 - 02:50 PM

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.


"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent - one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."

The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth. However critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react; and without an energy source, life as we know it can't exist.

"Despite bioenergetic and thermodynamic failings the 80-year-old concept of primordial soup remains central to mainstream thinking on the origin of life," said senior author, William Martin, an evolutionary biologist from the Insitute of Botany III in Düsseldorf. "But soup has no capacity for producing the energy vital for life."

In rejecting the soup theory the team turned to the Earth's chemistry to identify the energy source which could power the first primitive predecessors of living organisms: geochemical gradients across a honeycomb of microscopic natural caverns at hydrothermal vents. These catalytic cells generated lipids, proteins and nucleotides giving rise to the first true cells.

The team focused on ideas pioneered by geochemist Michael J. Russell, on alkaline deep sea vents, which produce chemical gradients very similar to those used by almost all living organisms today - a gradient of protons over a membrane. Early organisms likely exploited these gradients through a process called chemiosmosis, in which the proton gradient is used to drive synthesis of the universal energy currency, ATP, or simpler equivalents. Later on cells evolved to generate their own proton gradient by way of electron transfer from a donor to an acceptor. The team argue that the first donor was hydrogen and the first acceptor was CO2.


"Modern living cells have inherited the same size of proton gradient, and, crucially, the same orientation - positive outside and negative inside - as the inorganic vesicles from which they arose" said co-author John Allen, a biochemist at Queen Mary, University of London.

(Phys.org)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Feb 10 - 12:34 PM

"More like a slug-trail than footsteps, the tracks smear through the 565-million-year-old rock overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. They were left by what may have been the first mobile organism to live on Earth.

Alex Liu of the University of Oxford, UK and his colleagues discovered them etched in the rock at Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, Canada.

The site is famous among palaeontologists for harbouring the remains of the first large complex life forms to evolve, known as Ediacarans.

"This is the earliest evidence for controlled locomotion by animals in the fossil record," says Liu." New Scientist

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Feb 10 - 12:35 PM

There's been a lot of excitement and speculation that nature may be using quantum mechanical practices," says chemistry professor Greg Scholes, lead author of a new study published this week in Nature. "Our latest experiments show that normally functioning biological systems have the capacity to use quantum mechanics in order to optimize a process as essential to their survival as photosynthesis."

Special proteins called light-harvesting complexes are used in photosynthesis to capture sunlight and funnel its energy to nature's solar cells - other proteins known as reaction centres. Scholes and his colleagues isolated light-harvesting complexes from two different species of marine algae and studied their function under natural temperature conditions using a sophisticated laser experiment known as two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy.

"We stimulated the proteins with femtosecond laser pulses to mimic the absorption of sunlight," explains Scholes. "This enabled us to monitor the subsequent processes, including the movement of energy between special molecules bound in the protein, against a stop-clock. We were astonished to find clear evidence of long-lived quantum mechanical states involved in moving the energy. Our result suggests that the energy of absorbed light resides in two places at once - a quantum superposition state, or coherence - and such a state lies at the heart of quantum mechanical theory."

"This and other recent discoveries have captured the attention of researchers for several reasons," says Scholes. "First, it means that quantum mechanical probability laws can prevail over the classical laws of kinetics in this complex biological system, even at normal temperatures. The energy can thereby flow efficiently by—counter intuitively—traversing several alternative paths through the antenna proteins simultaneously. It also raises some other potentially fascinating questions, such as, have these organisms developed quantum-mechanical strategies for light-harvesting to gain an evolutionary advantage? It suggests that algae knew about quantum mechanics nearly two billion years before humans," says Scholes.

Phys. Org

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Feb 10 - 10:42 AM

New Delhi, India (CNN) -- The last member of an ancient tribe that has inhabited an Indian island chain for around 65,000 years has died, a group that campaigns for the protection of indigenous peoples has said.

Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India's eastern coast, Survival International said in a statement.

The London-based group, which works to protect indigenous peoples, said she was the last member of one of ten distinct Great Andamanese tribes, the Bo.

"The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman islands for as long as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on earth," it noted.

With her passing at a hospital, India also lost one of its most endangered languages, also called Bo, linguists say.

"She was the last speaker of (the) Bo language. It pains to see how one by one we are losing speakers of Great Andamanese and (their) language is getting extinct. (It is) A very fast erosion of (the) indigenous knowledge base, that we all are helplessly witnessing," read an obituary in Boa Sr's honor posted on the Web site of the Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA) project.

"Boa Sr was the only speaker of Bo and had no one to converse with in that language.

Project director Anvita Abbi, a professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University, met with Boa as recently as last year. "She was the only member who remembered the old songs," Abbi recounted in her obituary.

"Boa Sr was the only speaker of Bo and had no one to converse with in that language," Abbi told CNN. Her husband and children had already died, the linguist said.

Other than Bo, she also knew local Andaman languages, which she would use to converse, according to Abbi.

Boa Sr was believed to be the oldest of the Great Andamanese, members of ten distinct tribes. Survival International estimates there are now just 52 Great Andamanese left.

There were believed to be 5,000 of them when the British colonized the archipelago in 1858. Most of those tribal communities were subsequently killed or died of diseases, says Survival International.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Feb 10 - 10:44 AM

The water content of leaves, their thickness, their density and other properties can now be determined without even having to touch them. A team of researchers from the CSIC Institute of Acoustics and the Agri-Food Research and Technology Centre (CITA) of Aragón has just presented an innovative technique that enables plant leaves to be studied using ultrasound in a quick, simple and non-invasive fashion.


Tomas E. Gómez, one of the authors of the study and researcher at the CSIC Institute of Acoustics, where a technique has been developed to analyse these parts of plants without touching them, explains to SINC that "The method involves establishing a silent dialogue with plant leaves, questioning them and listening to what they say".

The research, recently published in the journal, Applied Physics Letters, demonstrates that some properties of leaves such as thickness, density or compressibility can be determined with this method.

"The voice of the leaves itself is what gives us information about their status and their properties, all in an innocuous and silent way since communication is established by ultrasound, with above-audible frequencies", the scientist indicates.

The technique involves radiating the leaves with broadband ultrasonic pulses (between 0.2 and 2 megahertz), which are emitted through the air from portable devices. In doing so, the leaves start to vibrate and an ultrasonic sensor very similar to the transmitter detects the waves. The signal is then digitalised and the researchers analyse the resonance range, which enables the characteristics of the leaves to be assessed.

The entire process is done in a way that is non-intrusive to the plant. Until now, coupling fluids have been used between the ultrasound transmitter and the material being studied, as is in the case in medicine, for example, when gels or oils are applied to perform an ultrasound.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Feb 10 - 02:07 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the same quantum principles that enable the teleportation of information, a new proposal shows how it may be possible to teleport energy. By exploiting the quantum energy fluctuations in entangled particles, physicists may be able to inject energy in one particle, and extract it in another particle located light-years away. The proposal could lead to new developments in energy distribution, as well as a better understanding of the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy.

Japanese physicist Masahiro Hotta of Tohoku University has explained the energy teleportation scheme in a recent study posted at arxiv.org, called "Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation."

Previously, physicists have demonstrated how to teleport the quantum states of several different entities, including photons, atoms, and ions. Researchers predict that the principles of teleportation could also extend to molecules, viruses, and other more complex objects. Over the past year, physicists have also been exploring quantum energy teleportation, and Hotta's latest paper builds on these studies.

In quantum energy teleportation, a physicist first makes a measurement on each of two entangled particles. The measurement on the first particle injects quantum energy into the two-particle system, which is possible because there are always quantum fluctuations in the energy of any particle. This energy can then be immediately extracted at the second particle by making a second carefully chosen measurement on that particle. Throughout the process, the energy of the overall system remains the same.

As in previous examples of teleportation, the actual particles aren't teleported since they're basically identical at the quantum level. Rather, the information they carry is the important part. For this reason, physicists can simply send the information within a particle and not the particle itself. A receiving particle accepts the information from a sending particle, taking on the identity of the sending particle.

Hotta's paper marks the first example of the energy-entanglement relation for the smallest kind of quantum energy teleportation model. As he explains, the findings could enable scientists to explore the foundations of physics: specifically, the relationship between quantum information and quantum energy.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 06 Feb 10 - 12:49 PM

GOOD news surfers: waves in the north-east Pacific are getting taller, and the height of the most extreme "100-year" waves is increasing fastest.

Previous data had shown wave height to be increasing in the north-east Pacific and north Atlantic since the late 1980s. Now measurements from a deep-water buoy moored off the Oregon coast since the mid-1970s indicate that the "100-year" waves - the monster waves with a 1 per cent chance of occurring in any given year - could be 40 per cent larger than previous estimates, at 14 metres high.

Peter Ruggiero of Oregon State University, who carried out the analysis, found that average wave heights increased at the rate of 1.5 centimetres per year, while each year's biggest wave increased by an average of 10 centimetres per year. He says climate change is a likely culprit, but more measurements are needed to confirm this.

New Scientist

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Feb 10 - 01:25 PM

New Scientist reports:

"DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves - ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. "It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time," says Hogan.

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram."

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Susskind and 't Hooft's remarkable idea was motivated by ground-breaking work on black holes by Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge. In the mid-1970s, Hawking showed that black holes are in fact not entirely "black" but instead slowly emit radiation, which causes them to evaporate and eventually disappear. This poses a puzzle, because Hawking radiation does not convey any information about the interior of a black hole. When the black hole has gone, all the information about the star that collapsed to form the black hole has vanished, which contradicts the widely affirmed principle that information cannot be destroyed. This is known as the black hole information paradox."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Feb 10 - 08:54 PM

The nicest explanation ever as to why you should wear your seat belt.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 09 Feb 10 - 02:55 AM

A Holographic universe has been proposed for a long time.
How else could the entanglement paradox occur?
Entangled pairs of particles that can share information instantly (not at the speed of light no matter what the distaance) is trying to tell us something. Like split beam holography, entangled particles is like a cosmic hologram. At least it seems that way to me, and I have a verified IQ of 101.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 Feb 10 - 12:39 PM

Five crates of Scotch whisky and two of brandy have been recovered by a team restoring an Antarctic hut used more than 100 years ago by famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.

Ice cracked some of the bottles that had been left there in 1909, but the restorers said Friday they are confident the five crates contain intact bottles "given liquid can be heard when the crates are moved."

New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust team leader Al Fastier said the team thought there were two crates and were amazed to find five.

Current distillery owner, drinks group Whyte & Mackay, launched the bid to recover the Scotch whisky for samples to test and decide whether to relaunch the defunct spirit made by distiller McKinlay and Co.

Fastier said restoration workers found the crates under the hut's floorboards in 2006, but they were too deeply embedded in ice to be dislodged.

The New Zealanders agreed to drill the ice to try to retrieve some bottles, although the rest must stay under conservation guidelines agreed to by 12 Antarctic Treaty nations.

"The unexpected find of the brandy crates, one labeled Chas. Mackinlay & Co and the other labeled The Hunter Valley Distillery Limited Allandale (Australia) are a real bonus," said Fastier.

Ice has cracked some of the crates and formed inside them. Fastier said in a statement that would make extracting the contents delicate, but the trust would decide how to do so in coming weeks.

Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte and Mackay, whose company supplied the Mackinlay's whisky for Shackleton, described the find as "a gift from the heavens for whisky lovers."

"If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated. Given the original recipe no longer exists, this may open a door into history," he said in a statement.

Shackleton's expedition ran short of supplies on its long ski trek to the South Pole from the northern Antarctic coast in 1907-1909 and turned back about 100 miles (160 kilometers) short of its goal.

The expedition sailed away in 1909 as winter ice formed, leaving behind supplies, including the whisky and brandy.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 09 Feb 10 - 04:58 PM

Can the power of thought stop you ageing?

By Abigail Williams

In 1979 psychologist Ellen Langer carried out an experiment to find if changing thought patterns could slow ageing. But the full story of the extraordinary experiment has been hidden until now.

How much control do you have over how you will age?

Many people would laugh at the idea that people could influence the state of their health in old age by positive thinking. A way of mitigating ageing is a holy grail for the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry, but an experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer three decades ago could hold significant clues.

CONTINUED

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 Feb 10 - 08:00 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- Eventually, the day will come when life on Earth ends. Whether thatÕs tomorrow or five billion years from now, whether by nuclear war, climate change, or the Sun burning up its fuel, the last living cell on Earth will one day wither and die. But that doesnÕt mean that all is lost. What if we had the chance to sow the seeds of terrestrial life throughout the universe, to settle young planets within developing solar systems many light-years away, and thus give our long evolutionary line the chance to continue indefinitely?

According to Michael Mautner, Research Professor of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University, seeding the universe with life is not just an option, itÕs our moral obligation. As members of this planetÕs menagerie, and a consequence of nearly 4 billion years of evolution, humans have a purpose to propagate life. After all, whatever else life is, it necessarily possesses an incessant drive for self-perpetuation. And the idea isnÕt just fantasy: Mautner says that Òdirected panspermiaÓ missions can be accomplished with present technology.

ÒWe have a moral obligation to plan for the propagation of life, and even the transfer of human life to other solar systems which can be transformed via microbial activity, thereby preparing these worlds to develop and sustain complex life,Ó Mautner explained to PhysOrg.com. ÒSecuring that future for life can give our human existence a cosmic purpose.Ó

As Mautner explains in his study published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Cosmology, the strategy is to deposit an array of primitive organisms on potentially fertile planets and protoplanets throughout the universe. Like the earliest life on Earth, organisms such as cyanobacteria could seed other planets, digest toxic gases (such as ammonia and carbon dioxide on early Earth) and release products such as oxygen which promote the evolution of more complex species. To increase their chances of success, the microbial payloads should contain a variety of organisms with various environmental tolerances, and hardy multicellular organisms such as rotifer eggs to jumpstart higher evolution. These organisms may be captured into asteroids and comets in the newly forming solar systems and transported from there by impacts to planets as their host environments develop

Mautner has identified potential breeding grounds, which include extrasolar planets, accretion disks surrounding young stars that hold the gas and dust of future planets, and - at an even earlier stage - interstellar clouds that hold the materials to create stars. He explains that the Kepler mission may identify hundreds of biocompatible extrasolar planets, and astronomers are already aware of several accretion disks and interstellar clouds that could serve as targets. These potential habitats range in distance from a few light-years to 500 or more light-years away.


To transport the microorganisms, Mautner proposes using sail-ships. These ships offer a low-cost transportation method with solar sails, which can achieve high velocities using the radiation pressure from light. The microorganisms could be bundled in tiny capsules, each containing about 100,000 microorganisms and weighing 0.1 micrograms. Mautner predicts that the most challenging part of the process would be the precise aiming required in order for a mission to arrive at its target destination after hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years of travel.

Accounting for the difficulties of each of the steps involved, Mautner has calculated how many microbial capsules would be needed to ensure a reasonable probability of success. He concludes that a few hundred tons of microbial biomass Òcan seed dozens of new solar systems in an interstellar cloud with life for eons.Ó With launch costs of $10,000/kg, this amount of biomass would cost about $1 billion to launch. If we can aim precisely at planets in nearby solar systems, the mission would require significantly fewer capsules, smaller biomass, and lower costs. Mautner predicts that, while the technology is currently available, such an initiative will be easier to implement as space infrastructure develops and launch costs decrease.

As Mautner notes, several scientists have previously proposed ways to seed planets (notably, Venus and Mars) in our own solar system with microorganisms in order to alter the atmosphere and possibly make them habitable for humans. Also, some theories suggest that, on Earth, life-supporting nutrients and materials - or even life itself - may have come from somewhere else in the universe, arriving here on meteors, asteroids, and comets. In a sense, MautnerÕs proposal would simply be helping lifeÕs planet-hopping journey continue.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 10 Feb 10 - 12:06 PM

Carbon-22 is now the heaviest observed Borromean nucleus. Borromean nuclei are named after the rings from the 15th century crest of the Borromeo family from Northern Italy. The rings are connected in such a way that the cutting of one ring results in the separation of all three.

An exotic form of carbon has been found to have an extra large nucleus, dwarfing even the nuclei of much heavier elements like copper and zinc, in experiments performed in a particle accelerator in Japan. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Physical Review Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint by Kirby Kemper and Paul Cottle of Florida State University in the February 8 issue of Physics.

Carbon-22, which has a nucleus comprised of 16 neutrons and 6 protons, is the heaviest atom yet discovered to exhibit a "halo nucleus." In such atoms, some of the particles that normally reside inside the nucleus move into orbits outside the nucleus, forming a halo of subatomic particles.

Because atoms like carbon-22 are packed with an excessive number of neutrons, they're unstable and rapidly break apart to form lighter atoms, but they are more stable than scientists had previously expected. The extra stability is a surprise because the three particles-- two neutrons and a nucleus-- that form a halo nucleus interact in a way that is difficult for physicists to model due to the complicated mathematics necessary to describe so-called "three body" problems.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Feb 10 - 06:14 PM

What's on your Mind?
Remarkably, scientists can predict with near-perfect accuracy the last thing you saw just by analyzing your brain activity. The technique is called neural decoding. To do it, scientists must first scan your brain while you look at thousands of pictures. A computer then analyzes how your brain responds to each image, matching brain activity to various details like shape and color. Over time, the computer establishes a sort of master decoding key that it can later use to identify and reconstruct almost any object you see without the need to analyze the image beforehand.

http://www.popsci.com/node/42740/?cmpid=enews021110

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Feb 10 - 06:58 PM

The U.S. shot down a ballistic missile with a high-powered airborne laser weapon, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency announced late last night. It is "the first successful test of a futuristic directed energy weapon," Reuters reported. The system is being developed by a team composed of Boeing Co., the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin and consists of a high-powered laser mounted to a modified 747 jumbo jet. "The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Testbed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile," the agency said, according to Reuters. The test took place at Point Mugu's Air Warfare Center-Weapons Division Sea Range in central California. With the laser-based system, the U.S. will be able to destroy all classes of missiles at the speed of light. "The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometers, and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies," the agency said.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Feb 10 - 12:18 PM

"...He was born the son of a policeman from Kreuznach in Germany, but joined the nobility in 1980, at the age of 37, when Princess Marie-Auguste von Anhalt, the ex-wife of Prince Joachim of Prussia, the Kaiser's son, adopted him, following the death of her own son (a friend of Frederic's) on the polo circuit.

In 1984, on holiday in Los Angeles, he gatecrashed a celebrity party and bumped into Hungarian-born Gabor. Sparks flew. Two years later, he became her ninth husband (he also had a track record: she was his seventh wife). They have lived together, as members of Hollywood's affluent old guard, ever since.

As marriages go, it has had ups and downs. A few years back, Prince Frederic was found by LA police in his Rolls-Royce, completely naked. He claimed to have been robbed at gunpoint by three attractive women, who had stolen his clothes and wallet and left him handcuffed to the steering wheel. Police never established the exact circumstances in which Frederic had picked up the three mysterious strangers. No arrests were ever made. But not long after the incident he was appointed an official celebrity spokesman for Viagra, a supply of which was found in the car.

In 2007, after the death of the wealthy former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, Frederic claimed he had pursued a decade-long affair with her. He could even be the father of the daughter who was in line to inherit her fortune, he said. But that was disproved by a DNA test.

Asked about these and other scandals, together with his reputation as one of old Hollywood's most legendary lotharios, Frederic tells me that his lifelong marital infidelity has always been condoned by his wife, whom he describes, with an admirable degree of understatement, as "not the jealous type."..."


From an article on Prince Frederick who has recently opened his campaign to be elected Governor of California on a platform, inter alia, to legalize prostitution, Cuban cigars, and marijuana to boost tax revenues.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 15 Feb 10 - 12:41 PM

Joe the Plumber goes off on McCain, says he 'screwed up my life'
By Eric Zimmermann - 02/14/10 11:12 AM ET

Joe the Plumber is no longer a fan of either Sarah Palin or John McCain, it seems.

Joe, also known as Sam Wurzelbacher, told an audience in Pennsylvania this week that McCain "is no public servant."

"McCain was trying to use me," Wurzelbacher said, according to public radio correspondent Scott Detrow. "I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy."

"I don't owe him s—," Wurzelbacher continued. "He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it."

In fact, Wurzelbacher's dislike for McCain is so strong that he no longer supports Sarah Palin simply because Palin will campaign for McCain's re-election.

As for Obama: "I think his ideology is un-American, but he's one of the more honest politicians. At least he told us what he wanted to do."

The Hill

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 15 Feb 10 - 12:55 PM

Child elopers' Africa plan foiled


Two German children - aged five and six - have been stopped by police from eloping to Africa to tie the knot in the sun, reports say.

The budding lovebirds, identified as Mika and Anna-Lena, packed bathing costumes, sunglasses and a lilo and headed for the airport.

They even had the presence of mind to invite along an official witness - Anna-Lena's seven-year-old sister.

The three got as far as Hanover railway station before police intervened.

The young couple were "very much in love" and had decided to get married in Africa "where it is warm", police spokesman Holger Jureczko told the AFP news agency.

The idea for the getaway wedding was born as the children's families celebrated New Year's eve together and Mika regaled the two girls with stories of a recent holiday to Italy.
        
The following morning, as their parents slept, the intrepid trio walked 1km (0.6 miles) to the local tram station at Langenhagen, where they hopped aboard a tram for Hanover central station.

But the group aroused the suspicion of a guard as they waited for a train to the airport, and police were called in.

Officers persuaded the children they would not get far without tickets and money, but consoled them with a free tour of the police station, where they were shortly picked up by relieved parents.

Although any marriage plans have been put on hold for now, police did not altogether rule out the possibility of an African wedding.

"They can still put their plan into action at a later date," AFP quoted the spokesman as saying.

BBC News

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Feb 10 - 02:35 PM

Bilingual babies: The roots of bilingualism in newborns
February 16, 2010

It may not be obvious, but hearing two languages regularly during pregnancy puts infants on the road to bilingualism by birth. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, infants born to bilingual mothers (who spoke both languages regularly during pregnancy) exhibit different language preferences than infants born to mothers speaking only one language.

Psychological scientists Krista Byers-Heinlein and Janet F. Werker from the University of British Columbia along with Tracey Burns of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in France wanted to investigate language preference and discrimination in newborns. Two groups of newborns were tested in these experiments: English monolinguals (whose mothers spoke only English during pregnancy) and Tagalog-English bilinguals (whose mothers spoke both Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, and English regularly during pregnancy). The researchers employed a method known as "high-amplitude sucking-preference procedure" to study the infants' language preferences. This method capitalizes on the newborns' sucking reflex — increased sucking indicates interest in a stimulus. In the first experiment, infants heard 10 minutes of speech, with every minute alternating between English and Tagalog.

Results showed that English monolingual infants were more interested in English than Tagalog — they exhibited increased sucking behavior when they heard English than when they heard Tagalog being spoken. However, bilingual infants had an equal preference for both English and Tagalog. These results suggest that prenatal bilingual exposure may affect infants' language preferences, preparing bilingual infants to listen to and learn about both of their native languages.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:37 AM

February 17, 2010 by Jean-Louis Santini

Scientists from around the world will gather this week in California for an annual conference to discuss everything from the secret pathologies of dolphins to a count of the creatures in the seas and the 50th birthday of the laser.

Up to 8,000 participants from 50 countries are expected to attend 176th annual conference of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which begins Thursday in San Diego and this year centers around the theme "bridging science and society."

The aim is to get "every scientist and engineer to make their work both beneficial and understandable, and on society to discover again the excitement and hope that research and its findings offer," Nobel chemistry laureate Peter Agre, who is president of the AAAS, said in a statement.

At the conference, participants -- be they scientist or engineer, student or mere enthusiast -- will have a wide choice of events to attend, with symposia covering a bevy of scientific branches, from astronomy to zoology.

Doubters and defenders of climate change could lock horns at discussions about global warming, including the release of a study on geo-engineering and whether we can cool down the planet that we have heated up.

The lessons on health and well-being that dolphins can give to humans will be the topic of another symposium, while yet another will offer a sneak peek at the final report of the 10-year census of marine life, which has discovered "unusual creatures" in the ocean, including a tubeworm that drills for oil and a crab with hairy legs.

Some of the symposia will cover eclectic subjects -- such as how dust in the atmosphere could counteract climate change -- while others touch on topics that are hot conversation, such as what role science and technology will play as the United States and Russia downsize their nuclear arsenals.

Medicine will be center-stage at many of the symposia, including the one on chemicals that affect the risk of contracting breast cancer or another on the staggering projected benefits of testing everyone for HIV/AIDS and immediately treating those found to be infected with the virus.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 17 Feb 10 - 10:56 AM

Tut's ills won't kill fascination, historians say

By LINDSEY TANNER (AP) – 2 hours ago

CHICAGO — It turns out Egypt's beloved boy-king wasn't so golden after all — or much of a wild and crazy guy, for that matter.

But will research showing King Tut was actually a hobbled, weak teen with a cleft palate and club foot kill enthusiasm for a mummy that has fascinated the world for nearly a century?

Not likely, historians say, even though the revelations hardly fit the popular culture depiction of a robust, exotically handsome young pharaoh, or a dancing "how'd-you-get-so-funky" phenom a la Steve Martin. The comedian parodied Tut on "Saturday Night Live" during a blockbuster King Tut traveling exhibit in the late 1970s, which packed U.S. museums and spawned a mini-industry in Tut tchotchkes.

"This is one sick kid," Egyptologist Emily Teeter, assistant curator at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said after learning of the research. It shows that, based on DNA tests and CT scans, Tut had a genetic bone disease and malaria, which combined with a severe broken leg could have been what killed him about 3,300 years ago at age 19.

The results appear in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. They further dispel the more romantic and popular theories about what did him in, like being murdered by a sneaky palace foe.

The findings stem from the most rigorous research yet on a mummy that has fascinated the world ever since his largely intact, treasure-filled tomb was found nearly 90 years ago.

But historians say the new evidence will likely only intensify public interest in King Tutankhamun because it brings the boy ruler down to Earth.

"It makes him all the more human and all the more fascinating," said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan.

The more realistic picture, fleshed out by testing Tut's mummy and those of his family, has its own mystique. Beneath the golden splendor in which they lived, ancient Egypt's royals were as vulnerable as the lowliest peasant: Three other mummies besides Tut's showed repeated malaria infections.

Moreover, their tradition of incestuous marriages only worsened their maladies.

The new research led by Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, bolstered previous theories that Tut's father was likely the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It also brought a new discovery: Tut's mother was Akhenaten's sister.

That would explain some of Tut's ailments, including the bone disease that runs in families and is more likely to be passed down if two first-degree relatives marry and have children.

In ancient Egypt, it wasn't really considered incest. Pharaohs were thought of as deities, so it makes sense that the only prospective mates who'd pass muster would be other deities, Markel said.

Now experts are trying to identify the mummy that DNA pinpointed as Tut's mother, as well as another confirmed as his wife, Hawass told reporters in Cairo on Wednesday. The DNA project is also seeking a more illustrious figure, Queen Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaten who was fabled for her beauty but whose mummy has never been identified.

"It will make more mystery about him, it will make more magic about him," Hawass said of the new discoveries.

Tut has long been big business. The 1970s Tut exhibit drew millions of visitors to U.S. museums, and a popular revival including artifacts from his tomb and others' has been traveling around the United States for the past several years and is currently at San Francisco's DeYoung Museum.

Egypt's economy depends a great deal on tourism, which brings in around $10 billion a year in revenues. The King Tut exhibit at Cairo's Egyptian Museum is one of the crown jewels of the country's ancient past and features a stunning array of treasures including Tut's most iconic relic — the golden funeral mask.

Another tourist destination is Tut's tomb tucked in the Valley of the Kings amid Luxor's desert hills. In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered it and the trove of fabulous gold and precious stones inside, propelling the once-forgotten pharaoh into global stardom. Hundreds of tourists come daily to the tomb to see Tut's mummy, which has been on display there since 2007.

Though historically Tut was a minor king, the grander image "is embedded in our psyche" and the new revelations won't change that, said James Phillips, a curator at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History.

"Reality is reality, but it's not going to change his place in the folk heroism of popular culture," Phillips said. "The way he was found, what was found in his grave — even though he was a minor king, it has excited the imagination of people since 1922."

Even if the research dents the myth, it won't change the most tangible part of Tut's image — all the intact relics that were found in his tomb.

"He's far more famous for what he owned and what he wore than what he actually did," Markel said.

Associated Press Writers Paul Schemm and Jason Keyser in Cairo contributed to this report.