BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 11 May 09 - 08:19 AM

African tribe populated rest of the world
The entire human race outside Africa owes its existence to the survival of a single tribe of around 200 people who crossed the Red Sea 70,000 years ago, scientists have discovered.


By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Last Updated: 9:10AM BST 09 May 2009

Research by geneticists and archaeologists has allowed them to trace the origins of modern homo sapiens back to a single group of people who managed to cross from the Horn of Africa and into Arabia. From there they went on to colonise the rest of the world.

Genetic analysis of modern day human populations in Europe, Asia, Australia, North America and South America have revealed that they are all descended from these common ancestors.

It is thought that changes in the climate between 90,000 and 70,000 years ago caused sea levels to drop dramatically and allowed the crossing of the Red Sea to take place.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5299351/African-tribe-populated-rest-of-the-world.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 11 May 09 - 09:43 AM

Sage, ahem you just wanted to snag 800, so to speak ;^/

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 11 May 09 - 09:52 AM

The Hobbit's foot is more Chimpanzee like than human. Fair jumpers and good climbers but poor runners. They lacked the locking bone underneath for efficient walking and were decidedly more flat footed.

The tribal legends rearding "Hobbits" among the current indiginous people speak of the tiny people stealing everything from food to young children.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 May 09 - 06:56 PM

Push-ups, crunches, gyms, personal trainers -- people have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain?
Meditate.

That's the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate. In a study published in the journal NeuroImage and currently available online (by subscription), the researchers report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group.

Specifically, meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions.

"We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior," said Eileen Luders, lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. "The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities."

Research has confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, many people who meditate regularly have reduced levels of stress and bolstered immune systems. But less is known about the link between meditation and brain structure.

In the study, Luders and her colleagues examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years.

More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day.
The researchers used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure. One approach automatically divides the brain into several regions of interest, allowing researchers to compare the size of certain brain structures. The other segments the brain into different tissue types, allowing researchers to compare the amount of gray matter within specific regions of the brain.   (PhysOrg)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Desert Dancer
Date: 13 May 09 - 08:03 PM

No Laughing Matter
(from Science magazine 8 May 2009, Vol 324, Issue 5928, "Random Samples" section)

In Central Europe, homeland of psychoanalysis, psychologists have been exploring a hitherto uncodified facet of the human personality: gelotophobia, the fear of being laughed at.

In the latest of a spate of papers on the condition, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Ilona Papousek of the University of Graz, Austria, and colleagues report that people with gelotophobia (from gelos, Greek for laughter) have weak control over their emotions and are hypersensitive to others' negative moods.

Co-author Willibald Ruch of the University of Zurich in Switzerland says researchers have developed a 15-item scale that can distinguish the problem from social phobias or "shame-based" neuroticism. For example, he says, gelotophobes "distrust smiling faces" and "are not able to discriminate between friendly and hostile laughter" or between teasing and ridicule. That can lead to serious consequences, says Ruch, citing two recent school shootings in Germany in which the perpetrators reportedly had a horror of being mocked. About 10% of the population has some degree of gelotophobia, he says.

In tests of the scale in 74 countries, Scandinavians ranked among the least gelotophobia-prone groups, whereas people in Muslim countries and in Africa tended to score high. The highest scores in Europe were from the United Kingdom—suggesting, Ruch says, that "maybe a well-developed sense of humor does not help [where] mock[ery] and ridicule are cultivated too."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 May 09 - 08:43 PM

Researchers in condensed matter physics at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago have created an experimental and computer model to study how jamming, the physical process in which collections of particles are crammed together to behave as solids, might affect the behavior of systems in which thermal motion is important, such as molecules in a glass.

The study presents the first experimental evidence of a vestige of the zero temperature jamming transition — the density at which large, loose objects such as gas bubbles in liquid, grains of sand or cars become rigid solids such as foam, sand dunes or traffic jams — in a system of small particles where thermal energy is important. This demonstrates that despite the fact that the size of constituent particles differ by many orders of magnitude, molecules in a glass retain an echo of the phenomenon of how boulders coming to rest to form a solid rock pile.

"We have been testing the speculation that jamming has a common origin in these different systems," Andrea Liu, an author of the study and professor in the Department of Physics at Penn, said.

The paper appears in the current issue of the journal Nature.

The idea of jamming is that slow relaxations in many different systems, ranging from glass-forming liquids to suspensions of particles such as bits of ice in a milkshake to foams and granular materials, can be viewed in a common framework. For example, one can define jamming to occur when a system develops a yield stress or extremely long stress relaxation time in a disordered state. Foams and granular materials flow when a large shear stress is applied but jam when the shear stress is lowered below the yield stress. But systems of large particles such as foams and granular materials can be considered zero-temperature systems because the energy associated with a typical temperature, such as room temperature, is negligible compared to the energy required to shift the particles.

As a result, it is not known whether the jamming of such systems is related to the jamming of systems of small particles, such as molecular liquids, which jam as temperature is lowered through the glass transition.

From PhysOrg

http://www.physorg.com/news161439954.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 May 09 - 11:30 PM

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders's family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders's stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful emetic. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders' arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance - a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. "Look what has come out of you Vance," he cried. "The voodoo curse is lifted."

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there's no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

Voodoo nouveau
You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

He didn't die from cancer but from believing he was dying of cancer
Cases such as Shoeman's may be extreme examples of a far more widespread phenomenon. Many patients who suffer harmful side effects, for instance, may do so only because they have been told to expect them. What's more, people who believe they have a high risk of certain diseases are more likely to get them than people with the same risk factors who believe they have a low risk. It seems modern witch doctors wear white coats and carry stethoscopes.

The idea that believing you are ill can make you ill may seem far-fetched, yet rigorous trials have established beyond doubt that the converse is true - that the power of suggestion can improve health. This is the well-known placebo effect. Placebos cannot produce miracles, but they do produce measurable physical effects.

The placebo effect has an evil twin: the nocebo effect, in which dummy pills and negative expectations can produce harmful effects. The term "nocebo", which means "I will harm", was not coined until the 1960s, and the phenomenon has been far less studied than the placebo effect. It's not easy, after all, to get ethical approval for studies designed to make people feel worse.

What we do know suggests the impact of nocebo is far-reaching. "Voodoo death, if it exists, may represent an extreme form of the nocebo phenomenon," says anthropologist Robert Hahn of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, who has studied the nocebo effect...


(New Scientist)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227081.100-the-science-of-voodoo-when-mind-attacks-body.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg20227081.100

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 May 09 - 10:23 AM

The decision on which names to accept and which to reject is generally left to the local registrar, but that decision can be contested in court. And sometimes the court's ruling can seem rather arbitrary. While the names Stompie, Woodstock and Grammophon have been rejected by German courts in the past, the similarly creative parents of Speedy, Lafayette and Jazz were granted their name of choice.

In Sweden, a couple fighting to name their son Q – not, it seems, in homage to James Bond's exasperated gadget purveyor – recently appealed to the country's supreme court to approve their choice. According to The Telegraph:

Q's parents are hoping that they can benefit from a reform to the legislation last year, allowing parents to use previously banned names.

The reforms followed a political row over arbitrary decisions by the authorities.

In one 2007 case parents were forbidden to name their daughter Metallica after the heavy metal rock band while another couple were allowed to name their son Google, after the internet search engine.

In a 1996 protest at the law a couple tried and failed to call their son "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116" – pronounced Albin.

(In 2008, a judge in New Zealand ordered that a nine-year-old girl be made a ward of court so that the name bestowed upon her by her parents – Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii – could be changed.)

NYT

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 May 09 - 02:56 PM

A British Scientist has apparently broken the code on how pre-life could have migrated into the key biological molecules of RNA. Here's a graphic of his breakthrough which supports the notion of pre-biotic life forming into the key ingredients of life.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 May 09 - 03:45 PM

Boy air-freights himself home in a box from New Jersey to Dallas, and lives to be busted for it...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 May 09 - 12:19 PM

A robot has shown it can find its way across town by asking people for directions. It interprets armwaving, semantics, etc. to build a map. It had to ask 35 times, though, so men are still safe... :D



A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 May 09 - 02:16 PM

"A discovery of a 47 million-year-old fossil primate that is said to be a human ancestor was announced Tuesday at a press conference in New York City.

Known as "Ida," the nearly complete transitional fossil is 20 times older than most fossils that provide evidence for human evolution.

It shows characteristics from the very primitive non-human evolutionary line (prosimians, such as lemurs), but is more related to the human evolutionary line (anthropoids, such as monkeys, apes and humans), said Norwegian paleontologist Jørn Hurum of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum.
Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here

The fossil, called Darwinius masillae and said to be a female, provides the most complete understanding of the paleobiology of any Eocene primate so far discovered, Hurum said. An analysis of the fossil mammal is detailed Tuesday in the journal PLoS ONE.

"This is the first link to all humans ... truly a fossil that links world heritage," Hurum said. "

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 19 May 09 - 03:37 PM

A 35,000 year old ivory statuette of a rotund female human was found in six pieces. It looks like a typical Pre Columbian fertility symbol.

Steven Colbert called it ancient porn.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 May 09 - 08:17 PM

PhysOrg reports:


This image shows the design of a new type of invisibility cloak that is simpler than previous designs and works for all colors of the visible spectrum, making it possible to cloak larger objects than before and possibly leading to practical applications in "transformation optics." (Purdue University)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers have created a new type of invisibility cloak that is simpler than previous designs and works for all colors of the visible spectrum, making it possible to cloak larger objects than before and possibly leading to practical applications in "transformation optics."


Whereas previous cloaking designs have used exotic "metamaterials," which require complex nanofabrication, the new design is a far simpler device based on a "tapered optical waveguide," said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue University's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Waveguides represent established technology - including fiber optics - used in communications and other commercial applications.

The research team used their specially tapered waveguide to cloak an area 100 times larger than the wavelengths of light shined by a laser into the device, an unprecedented achievement. Previous experiments with metamaterials have been limited to cloaking regions only a few times larger than the wavelengths of visible light.

Because the new method enabled the researchers to dramatically increase the cloaked area, the technology offers hope of cloaking larger objects, Shalaev said.

Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing May 29 in the journal Physical Review Letters. The paper was written by Igor I. Smolyaninov, a principal electronic engineer at BAE Systems in Washington, D.C.; Vera N. Smolyaninova, an assistant professor of physics at Towson University in Maryland; Alexander Kildishev, a principal research scientist at Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center; and Shalaev.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 22 May 09 - 03:41 PM

Sequim woman first known assisted-suicide patient in state

By VANESSA HO
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

A 66-year-old Sequim woman diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer became the first known person to use the state's assisted-suicide law Thursday night, after ingesting a lethal dose of medication with her family, dog, and physician by her bedside, a patient-advocacy group said Friday.

"The pain became unbearable, and it was only going to get worse," said the woman, Linda Fleming, before she died, according to a statement from the group, Compassion & Choices of Washington.

"I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death."

Fleming, who had worked with homeless and mentally ill people, was diagnosed with the advanced cancer roughly a month ago. Soon after, she made her first of three required requests to receive medication under the Death with Dignity Act, said her friend, Virginia Peterhansen.

Fleming made her final request -- a written one witnessed by two people -- on May 15, six days before she died, Peterhansen said. "I know she was not scared about making this choice, but scared about what other people might do," said Peterhansen, explaining that her friend had been worried about people criticizing her.

Passed last November by nearly 60 percent of voters, the law allows doctors to give lethal medication to terminally ill patients they can ingest themselves. Patients receiving the medication must be terminally ill with six months to live or less; mentally competent; at least 18 years old; and a resident of the state. They must make two oral requests 15 days apart, and a written request witnessed by two people.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 22 May 09 - 03:44 PM

* News
    * World news
    * Race issues

Mississippi town breaks with its past to elect first black mayor

James Young's victory stands in stark contrast to climate which bred racism and segregation in the 1960s

    * Buzz up!
    * Digg it

    * Chris McGreal in Washington
    * guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 May 2009 18.40 BST
    * Article history

Mayoral candidate James Young, left, and supporters celebrate as his campaign claimed the win on election night

James Young, left, and supporters celebrate as his campaign claimed the win in Philadelphia, Mississippi's mayoral election. Photograph: Jim Prince/AP

James Young is just old enough to remember the era that seared his small Mississippi town of Philadelphia on to the national consciousness.

The infamous murders of three civil rights activists in 1964 laid bare the bitter racism and official complicity in the lawlessness underpinning segregation in the south, and years later prompted the film Mississippi Burning.

But the racists soon lost the struggle to prevent Philadelphia's black residents from voting and this week it resulted in exactly what old Mississippi had tried to prevent – the election of Young as the town's first African-American mayor with white votes helping deliver him victory.

"Philadelphia has some of the worst history and now some of the best. This is a reversal of some of the views that have been dominant in the community," Young said today. "There was a time when this could not have happened. Now it is accepted by everyone. There's not a major riot in the streets because I'm black."

The 53 year-old Pentecostal minister's victory was perhaps more evolution than revolution in the town of 7,300 people, about 40% of them black. African Americans have been filling elected positions in Philadelphia and the state for years with white support, including Young who served on the local legislature. The old racists who controlled the council and police, and won popular support by opposing civil rights, are dying off and their successors are marginalised.

Still, Young's election has an important symbolism in a town that came to represent all that was wrong with the old south.

"It will erase the thought that we're just a southern racist town," Dorothy Webb, 72, a white retired school principal told the local newspaper.

The 1964 murders of the three civil rights workers – an African-American man from Mississippi and two white New Yorkers, all in their twenties - shocked the country not only because of the crime but because of the complicity of local officials in the killing and cover up.

As the FBI hunted for the missing activists, the local sheriff, Lawrence Rainey, said they had gone into hiding to embarrass Mississippi. The state governor, Paul Johnson, suggested they were in Cuba.

During the search, the FBI discovered the bodies of seven other black people who had been murdered in and around Philadelphia without inquiry by the local police. Even after the civil rights workers corpses were found six weeks after they were shot, justice was slow in coming. Mississippi officials declined to prosecute. Seven people, including a police deputy and a Ku Klux Klan leader eventually convicted on federal civil rights charges, served only light sentences.

Mississippi took action for the first time only in 2005 when Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, a KKK organiser who is now 84, was convicted of the three murders and sentenced to 60 years in prison.

For years Philadelphia lived with the legacy of the killings. Ronald Reagan chose the town to launch his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech about states' rights, taken as a stand with southern whites opposed to federal civil rights laws.

But however Philadelphia was still seen, it was also changing as Young's own progress showed. He trained as a paramedic and rose to head the county ambulance service for 20 years. He was also elected to the local legislature four times and served on the planning board for 12 years.

That helped make him a safe choice in the election....

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 May 09 - 10:58 AM

"Once defined as everything that exists, the term "universe" now often refers to just one of an infinite number of space-time bubbles.

"What we've all along been calling the universe," says Arizona State University cosmologist Paul Davies, may be "just an infinitesimal fragment in a much larger, more elaborate system for which want of a better word we call the multiverse."

A generation ago, such multiple universes existed only in science fiction, not science textbooks. Nowadays, the multi-verse is a hot topic at real-world scientific conferences, including a recent symposium on "Origins" at Arizona State, in Tempe. There Davies and other experts explored the anthropic implications of a multiplicity of universes, which owe their newfound importance to a popular astrophysical theory called inflation.

Among the Origins symposium's speakers was Alan Guth of MIT, who invented the inflation idea in 1980. It explained several mysteries about the Big Bang, the cosmic explosion 13.7 billion years ago marking the birth of today's one known universe.

For a tiny fraction of a second, Guth proposed, the universe expanded exponentially, explaining why the visible cosmos is now so uniform in temperature and structure. That exponential inflation would have stretched spacetime enough to eliminate all but the tiniest lumps in the original amalgamation of matter and energy, resulting in smooth skies today. Inflation would also have provided the impetus for the universe to grow to its current size from its minute origin.

"Inflation explains how the universe got to be so big, which is something we might take for granted, but there isn't really any other theory I know of which comes close to actually explaining it," Guth said at the Arizona conference.

Inflation is driven, Guth explains, by a repulsive form of gravity, generated by an energy field residing in space. As spacetime inflates, some of that field loses its strength — so a local region can expand more gradually, allowing stars and galaxies to develop and stick together. But at the same time, other regions of the inflating field continue to grow exponentially. There is always more inflating material available to spawn new spacetime bubbles — Guth calls them "pocket universes" — and no way for that process to ever stop.

"So once started, inflation goes on literally forever, with pieces of the inflating region breaking off and producing these pocket universes," Guth says. "And if this is right, we would be living in one of these infinity of pocket universes."

Goldilocks bubbles

Most experts today believe that inflation is the best explanation available for the visible universe's appearance and contents. And if it's the right explanation for the one known universe, there must be an infinite number of others.

"The question arises as to whether all these other universes are going to be like ours," says Davies, "or whether they may have different laws and the laws in our universe are in some sense special."

Arguments based on string theory, a favorite candidate (although unsubstantiated by experiment) for explaining all of physical law, suggest that the multiverse encompasses bubbles hosting various sorts of physics. Andrei Linde of Stanford University, another pioneer of inflation theory, noted at the Arizona symposium that string theory predicts the existence of an enormous number of different "vacuum states," or spacetime bubbles with different properties, such as physical constants or particle masses. Of an infinite number of bubbles, Linde says, there could be 10500 different varieties. And though any underlying basic law of physics would remain the same, the bubbles could nonetheless exhibit vast physical diversity. "It is the same fundamental law of physics, but different realizations," Linde says.

Some of those bubbles would not have lasted long enough for life, inflating but then shrinking before any interesting chemistry commenced. Others would expand forever, as seems the case with the bubble that humans occupy. In some, the local laws of physics would have welcomed living things; others would have permitted none of the particles and forces that conspire to build atoms, molecules and metabolic mechanisms. It seems that universes come in all sizes and flavors, with the human bubble being the Goldilocks version, just right for life.

It's not possible, or at least it's very unlikely (SN: 6/7/08, p. 22), for any of those other universes to make its presence physically known. So at first glance there is no obvious way to prove that they exist apart from inflation's equations. But in fact, Guth and others argue, applying anthropic reasoning to the multiverse allows calculations of some observable properties of the known universe, otherwise inexplicable. Success in such calculations would validate the assumption that the multiverse is real.

"Whether you like it or not, we may be living in a multiverse —the question is whether or not it will be possible to tell one way or the other," says Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "Some people complain that this theory is completely untestable. I think it can be tested."..."

From this much longer and more thorough article on infinity, in Science News.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 May 09 - 12:24 PM

"At or around the ninth century, Western civilization began to greatly expand its range of externalization of symbolization of thought through the practice of silent reading, greatly aided by the invention of the Carolingian miniscule, with ascender, standard, and descender letters graphically separated into easily distinguishable words, obviating the need to analyze each letter into its phonetic segments. This silent-reading-made-easy technique increased exponentially the value of reading, becoming a human faculty (Fischer 2003: 161).

Combine that innovation with an earlier bureaucratic invention of the library cataloguing system by Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 305-340 BCE) a little over a thousand years before at Alexandria, and a people can start collecting and organizing enough texts to create entire domains of knowledge. Drama, oratory, lyric poetry, legislation, medicine, history, and philosophy were just a few knowledge domains reflected in the original bureaucracy of the library at Alexandria (Fischer 2003: 59). Such innovations in the production and consumption of the external symbol systems made it possible to organize later generations into even larger groups, such as constitutional monarchies, republics, nations and states, all held together by the "magical powers" of the written word..."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 27 May 09 - 10:34 AM

"Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time

Look at what Rousseau writes above: floating in a boat in fine weather, lying down with one's eyes open to the clouds and birds or closed in reverie, one feels neither the pull of the past nor does one reach into the future. Time is nothing, or rather time is nothing but the experience of the present through which one passes without hurry, but without regret. As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the "Tractatus," "the eternal life is given to those who live in the present." Or ,as Whitman writes in "Leaves of Grass": "Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour."

Rousseau asks, "What is the source of our happiness in such a state?" He answers that it is nothing external to us and nothing apart from our own existence. However frenetic our environment, such a feeling of existence can be achieved. He then goes on, amazingly, to conclude, "as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God."..." (NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 May 09 - 10:43 AM

1959 Millionaire-Murderer

VRIDSLOESELILLE, Denmark Denmark's newest prospective millionaire today [May 28] had nothing to do but spend his life in prison. Convicted murderer Anders Jorgensen stood only a slim chance of ever spending a penny of the royalties from his new invention. He is serving a life sentence for two murders. Jorgensen invented a device for alerting fishing trawlers when their nets are full of fish. Commercial fishing firms said the gadget will save them a fortune in nets, which often burst because of snagging too many fish. The inventor has applied for a patent on his new device. Fishing circles said royalties on it could get him millions. But Vridsloeselille Prison Warden Borgschmidt Hansen said a million dollars will do convict Jorgensen no good. Danish law insures that crime does not pay. (NYT Flashback)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:40 PM

A robotic submarine named Nereus has become the third craft in history to reach the deepest part of the world's oceans, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.

The dive to Challenger Deep, an abyss within the Mariana Trench that reaches 11,000 metres beneath the waves, was completed on 31 May by a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Massachussetts, US.

For the expedition, the team had to build a new breed of remotely-operated submarine, called Nereus, which is capable of going deeper than any other while still filming and collecting samples. Sunday's dive makes it the world's deepest-diving vehicle, and the first vehicle to explore the Mariana Trench since 1998.

So far only a single picture taken by Nereus at the bottom of the trench has been released,

Vast explorations

"Nereus is like no other deep submergence vehicle," says oceanographer Tim Shank of WHOI.

"It allows vast areas to be explored with great effectiveness. Our true achievement is not just getting to the deepest point in our ocean, but unleashing a capability that enables deep exploration, unencumbered by a heavy tether and surface ship, to investigate some of the richest systems on Earth."

"With a robot like Nereus, we can now explore virtually anywhere in the ocean," adds project manager Andy Bowen.

Third in line

Only two other vehicles have ever reached the bottom of Challenger Deep: US bathyscaphe Trieste, which carried Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960, and the Japanese robot Kaiko, which made three unmanned expeditions to the trench between 1995 and 1998. Trieste was retired in 1966, and Kaiko was lost at sea in 2003.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:56 PM

(PhysOrg.com) -- MIT engineers have built a fast, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip, modeled on the human inner ear, that could enable wireless devices capable of receiving cell phone, Internet, radio and television signals.

Rahul Sarpeshkar, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and his graduate student, Soumyajit Mandal, designed the chip to mimic the inner ear, or cochlea. The chip is faster than any human-designed radio-frequency spectrum analyzer and also operates at much lower power.

"The cochlea quickly gets the big picture of what's going on in the sound spectrum," said Sarpeshkar. "The more I started to look at the ear, the more I realized it's like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels."

Sarpeshkar and his students describe their new chip, which they have dubbed the "radio frequency (RF) cochlea," in a paper in the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. They have also filed for a patent to incorporate the RF cochlea in a universal or software radio architecture that is designed to efficiently process a broad spectrum of signals including cellular phone, wireless Internet, FM, and other signals.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Jun 09 - 07:59 PM

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated entanglement--a phenomenon peculiar to the atomic-scale quantum world--in a mechanical system similar to those in the macroscopic everyday world. The work extends the boundaries of the arena where quantum behavior can be observed and shows how laboratory technology might be scaled up to build a functional quantum computer.


The research, described in the June 4 issue of Nature, involves a bizarre intertwining between two pairs of vibrating ions (charged atoms) such that the pairs vibrate in unison, even when separated in space. Each pair of ions behaves like two balls connected by a spring (see figure), vibrating back and forth in opposite directions. Familiar objects that vibrate this way include pendulums and violin strings.

The NIST achievement provides insights into where and how "classical" objects may exhibit unusual quantum behavior. The demonstration also showcased techniques that will help scale up trapped-ion technology to potentially build ultra-powerful computers relying on the rules of quantum physics. If they can be built, quantum computers may be able to solve certain problems, such as code breaking, exponentially faster than today's computers.

"Where the boundary is between the quantum and classical worlds, no one really knows," says NIST guest researcher John Jost, a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder and first author of the paper. "Maybe we can help answer the question by finding out what types of things can—and cannot be—entangled. We've entangled something that has never been entangled before, and it's the kind of physical, oscillating system you see in the classical world, just much smaller."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 10:14 AM

1934 Editor Sued for Hitler's Book

PARIS A suit, alleged to have been instigated by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, came up in the Paris commercial court yesterday [June 4], when the action of a Munich publishing house against the Paris editor of "Mein Kampf" (My Battle) was heard. The Munich firm is seeking to prevent the sale of the French translation of the book and demands 1,000 francs indemnity for each copy of the book already published. After arguments yesterday the court postponed judgment for eight days. Hitler's book, written ten years ago, mostly while he was in prison on a political charge, and expressing the chancellor's opinions on European problems with extreme frankness, has, since his rise to power, had an almost equal success, millions of copies having been sold in Germany, while translations into English and Italian also have had large sales. In consequence of the interest in the book, a Paris editor requested the right to publish a French translation. This demand was refused but the Paris publisher decided to go ahead. The German publisher then brought suit. The French publisher's attorney insisted that Hitler's book could not be considered an ordinary work and that it was the program of a public figure. Hitler had declared that he has abandoned his rights as an author and the argument of material prejudice could not therefore be defended.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 02:59 PM

Jane Goodall's Animal Planet is an extensive interview with the groundbreaker primatologist who learned the ways of chimpanzees in the wild. Well worth a read!



A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Jun 09 - 10:22 PM

PhysOrg.com) -- Millions of people today carry around pocket-sized music players capable of holding thousands of songs, thanks to the discovery 20 years ago of a phenomenon known as the "giant magnetoresistance effect," which made it possible to pack more data onto smaller and smaller hard drives. Now scientists are on the trail of another phenomenon, called the "colossal magnetoresistance effect" (CMR) which is up to a thousand times more powerful and could trigger another revolution in computing technology.

Understanding, and ultimately controlling, this effect and the intricate coupling between electrical conductivity and magnetism in these materials remains a challenge, however, because of competing interactions in manganites, the materials in which CMR was discovered. In the June 12, 2009, issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers report new progress in using high pressure techniques to unravel the subtleties of this coupling.

To study the magnetic properties of manganites, a form of manganese oxide, the research team, led by Yang Ding of the Carnegie Institution's High Pressure Synergetic Center (HPSync), applied techniques called x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) and angular-dispersive diffraction at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. High pressure XMCD is a newly developed technique that uses high-brilliance circularly polarized x-rays to probe the magnetic state of a material under pressures of many hundreds of thousands of atmospheres inside a diamond anvil cell.

The discovery of CMR in manganite compounds has already made manganites invaluable components in technological applications. An example is magnetic tunneling junctions in soon-to-be marketed magnetic random access memory (MRAM), where the tunneling of electrical current between two thin layers of manganite material separated by an electrical insulator depends on the relative orientation of magnetization in the manganite layers. Unlike conventional RAM, MRAM could yield instant-on computers. However, no current theories can fully explain the rich physics, including CMR effects, seen in manganites.

"The challenge is that there are competing interactions in manganites among the electrons that determine magnetic properties," said Ding. "And the properties are also affected by external stimuli, such as, temperature, pressure, magnetic field, and chemical doping."

"Pressure has a unique ability to tune the electron interactions in a clean and theoretically transparent manner," he added. "It is a direct and effective means for manipulating the behavior of electrons and could provide valuable information on the magnetic and electronic properties of manganite systems. But of all the effects, pressure effects have been the least explored."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Jun 09 - 11:34 PM

"Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians."

Russ Rymer

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 09 Jun 09 - 12:14 PM

What Do You Say to an ET?

How about "Hi. We're new. Is there a FAQ?": Most of the SETI Institute's attention is focused on listening, scanning the skies for a signal from a distant civilization. In its latest efforts, using the Allen Telescope Array, the institute plans to scan one million stars over 10 billion communications channels for a transmission that indicates the presence of intelligent life. But SETI researchers are also concerned with what happens if we actually receive such a message. Do we reply at all, and if so, knowing the importance of first impressions, what do we say? In the past, SETI has asked academics to toss these questions around, but considering that a reply really ought to speak for everyone on the planet, it has decided to broaden the discussion.

On a new site called Earth Speaks, SETI is crowdsourcing the issue, asking people around the world to submit the text, sounds or pictures that they think should be transmitted to an alien race. The intent isn't to pick a winning entry for transmission, but to gain a better sense of the broad themes and common content that emerge from the submissions and any differences that show up among various demographic groups. That information would then be given consideration in any international discussions of a suitable response, said project lead Douglas Vakoch.

If, that is, a response is deemed wise at all, given that we'd likely be talking to a civilization far older and more advanced than ours. "We're in an asymmetric position," said Jill Tarter, director of SETI research and the inspiration for Jodi Foster's character in the movie "Contact." "We don't know if there are other civilizations out there, but if there are, we can be pretty sure we are the youngest. ... As the new kids on the block, we should listen first."

Fu8ll story in LA Times, excerpt from newsletter.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 10 Jun 09 - 08:32 PM

Sanjay Gupta reported on CNN:
Measuring 1 mm wide and 6 mm long Isreali researchers are developing a remote controlled robot to disperse medicine inside blood vessels or broncia. Magnified it looks lke a classic Greek galley ship with six oars on each side. To the naked eye it looks like a bug.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 11 Jun 09 - 08:57 AM

Periodic table gets a new element
By Victoria Gill
Science reporter, BBC News

The ubiquitous periodic table will soon have a new addition - the "super-heavy" element 112.

More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of the element, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery.

The team, led by Sigurd Hofmann at the Centre for Heavy Ion Research, must propose a name for their find, before it can be formally added to the table.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8093374.stm

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jun 09 - 11:08 AM

Web 2.0 beats Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English Word

English passed the Million Word mark earlier today, June 10 at 10:22 am GMT

Word Number 1,000,001: Financial Tsunami

Austin, Texas June 10, 2009 â€" The Global Language Monitor today announced that Web 2.0 has bested Jai Ho, N00b and Slumdog as the 1,000,000th English word or phrase. added to the codex of the fourteen hundred-year-old language. Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months. Two terms from India, Jai Ho! and slumdog finished No. 2 and 4. Jai Ho! Is a Hindi exclamation signifying victory or accomplishment; Slumdog is an impolite term for children living in the slums. Just missing the top spot was n00b, a mixture of letters and numbers that is a derisive term for newcomer. It is also the only mainstream English word that contains within itself two numerals. Rounding out the final five were another technical term, cloud computing, meaning services that are delivered via the cloud (or Internet), and a term from the Climate Change debate, carbon neutral. At its current rate, English generates about 14.7 words a day or one every 98 minutes.

“As expected, English crossed the 1,000,000 word threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. However, some 400 years after the death of the Bard, the words and phrases were coined far from Stratford-Upon-Avon, emerging instead from Silicon Valley, India, China, and Poland, as well as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK,â€쳌 said Paul JJ Payack, president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “English has become a universal means of communication; never before have so many people been able to communicate so easily with so many others.â€쳌

The English language is now being studies by hundreds of millions around the globe for entertainment, commercial or scientific purposes.â€쳌 In 1960 there were some 250 million English speakers, mostly in former colonies and the Commonwealth countries. The future of English as a major language was very much in doubt. Today, some 1.53 billion people now speak English as a primary, auxiliary, or business language, with some 250 million acquiring the language in China alone.

These are the fifteen finalists for the one millionth English word, all of which have met the criteria of a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution, and depth of citations.

1,000,000: Web 2.0 â€" The next generation of web products and services, coming soon to a browser near you.

999,999: Jai Ho! â€" The Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as “It is accomplishedâ€쳌. Achieved English-language popularity through the multiple Academy Award Winning film, “Slumdog Millionaireâ€쳌.

999,998: N00b â€" From the Gamer Community, a neophyte in playing a particular game; used as a disparaging term.

999,997: Slumdog â€" a formerly disparaging, now often endearing, comment upon those residing in the slums of India.

999,996: Cloud Computing â€" The ‘cloud’ has been technical jargon for the Internet for many years. It is now passing into more general usage.

999,995: Carbon Neutral â€" One of the many phrases relating to the effort to stem Climate Change.

999,994: Slow Food â€" Food other than the fast-food variety hopefully produced locally (locavores).

999,993: Octomom â€" The media phenomenon relating to the travails of the mother of the octuplets.

999,992: Greenwashing â€" Re-branding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly.

999,991: Sexting â€" Sending email (or text messages) with sexual content.

999,990: Shovel Ready â€" Projects are ready to begin immediately upon the release of federal stimulus funds.

999,989: Defriend â€" Social networking terminology for cutting the connection with a formal friend.

999,988: Chengguan â€" Urban management officers, a cross between mayors, sheriff, and city managers.

999,987: Recessionista â€" Fashion conscious who use the global economic restructuring to their financial benefit.

999,986: Zombie Banks â€" Banks that would be dead if not for government intervention and cash infusion.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 11 Jun 09 - 02:47 PM

he moment of the universe's birth created both matter and an expanding space-time in which this matter could exist. While gravity pulled the matter together, the expansion of space drew particles of matter apart - and the further apart they drifted, the weaker their mutual attraction became.

It turns out that the struggle between these two was balanced on a knife-edge. If the expansion of space had overwhelmed the pull of gravity in the newborn universe, stars, galaxies and humans would never have been able to form. If, on the other hand, gravity had been much stronger, stars and galaxies might have formed, but they would have quickly collapsed in on themselves and each other. What's more, the gravitational distortion of space-time would have folded up the universe in a big crunch. Our cosmic history could have been over by now.

Only the middle ground, where the expansion and the gravitational strength balance to within 1 part in 1015 at 1 second after the big bang, allows life to form. That is down to the size of the gravitational constant G, also known as Big G.

G is the least well-defined of all the constants of nature. It has been pinned down to only 1 part in 10,000, which makes it look pretty rough and ready next to the fundamental number called the Planck constant, which is accurate to 2.5 parts in 100 million. It's gravity's weakness that makes G difficult to measure more accurately - but that's just a laboratory issue. The important question is, where does this value come from? Why does G have the value that allowed life to form in the cosmos?

The simple but unsatisfying answer is that we could not be here to observe it if it were any different. As to the deeper answer - no one knows. "We can make measurements that determine its size, but we have no idea where this value comes from," says John Barrow of the University of Cambridge. "We have never explained any basic constant of nature."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 10:33 AM

Medical Marvels

Russian surgeons said what they first believed was a tumor in a man's lungs turned out to be a living, growing fir tree, according to reports in the Russian media. The doctors said they found a tree measuring nearly 2 inches long inside the lung tissues of 28-year-old Artyom Sidorkin. Horticulturalists remain skeptical, however. Tricia Diggins of the Wellesley College Botanical Gardens in Boston told ABCNews.com that while it may be possible for such trees to grow without light, she doubted whether such an environment could yield an apparently normal, green plant.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 10:38 AM

More Medical Marvels

For nearly four decades, Sanju Bhagat carried the body of his own twin inside him. Doctors discovered Bhagat had one of the world's most bizarre medical conditions — fetus in fetu, an extremely rare abnormality that occurs when a fetus gets trapped inside its twin.
(ABC)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 11:07 AM

Ain't nature wonderful.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 02:56 PM

"The traffic here is shocking: Or at least like a shock wave. Researchers have used the equations that describe the behavior of post-explosion pressure waves to model the flow of congestion when it forms on roads that aren't suffering from a specific, traffic-causing incident, such as construction or an accident. Apparently, these waves act as self-reinforcing attractors, which the authors term "jamitons." No word yet on whether these are the fundamental units of traffic, or if researchers will be waiting to see whether any jamitinos appear at the LHC. "   From http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/06/weird-science-ponders-angry-flies-and-guilty-dogs.ars

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Jun 09 - 06:24 PM

The first of the new features lets anyone, anywhere, recommend places on Mars to photograph with ASU's THEMIS camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. The second new feature shows the most recent infrared images of Mars sent back to Earth from the THEMIS camera.
THEMIS is the Thermal Emission Imaging System, a multiband infrared and visual camera designed at ASU by Dr. Philip Christensen. A Regents' Professor of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, Christensen is THEMIS' principal investigator and also director of the Mars Space Flight Facility on the Tempe campus.
"These two features, developed by our staff in cooperation with programmers at Google, will help everyone have a lot more fun exploring the Red Planet," says Christensen. "It's public engagement at its best."
Hey Mars, say cheese!
"We wanted to give the general public a way to suggest places on Mars for THEMIS to photograph," says Christensen. "Using the new feature, people can recommend sites, and these recommendations go to mission scientists who will decide what areas THEMIS images. If a public suggestion matches what the researchers choose, we'll notify the person who suggested the site and let them see the image as soon as we do."
To suggest a place for THEMIS to photograph, viewers need two things: Google Earth 5.0 and a file that is updated each week giving the spacecraft's Mars orbital groundtrack. Google Earth 5.0 is available at http://earth.google.com.
To get the orbital track, users should go to http://suggest.mars.asu.edu and follow the simple steps to register. Registering takes users to a page to download each week's orbital track file and it also lets them make image suggestions without having to enter an e-mail address with each image suggestion.
Registering also creates a customized page where users can see their past image suggestions and find links to their successful ones.
With the orbital track file downloaded, viewers start Google Earth and switch the globe to Mars (via the Planets toolbar button, which resembles the planet Saturn). Then viewers open the orbital track file from within Google Earth. Viewers can also just double-click on the orbital file once Google Earth has been set to Mars as its planet.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Jun 09 - 12:39 PM

Scripps scientists have solved the mystery of fish disappearing from long-lines after they were caught but while still at depth. They used video cams attached to the long lines and discovered the cause was Bandit Sperm Whales!! Pictures and story from Fox News.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 10:57 AM

Fusion falters under soaring costs

By Matt McGrath
Science reporter, BBC World Service

An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges.

Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled.

Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away.

At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8103557.stm

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 12:26 PM

* Warp drive enabling faster-than-light travel is a sci-fi staple and an offense against the laws of nature as we now know them, but physicist Richard Obousy says there's some theoretical science behind the concept — it's just a matter of harnessing "dark energy" and taking advantage of additional dimensions predicted by string theory in a way that would allow a vessel to envelope itself in a bubble of spacetime, which, if the Big Bang is any indication, should be capable of moving far faster than light. Or something like that. He's even mocked up a concept of how such a vessel might look — less like the Enterprise and more like a couple of bicycle tires.

http://dsc.discovery.com/space/im/warp-drive.html

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: bobad
Date: 17 Jun 09 - 09:07 PM

Associated Press
$2.5 billion spent, no alternative cures found
Big, government-funded studies show most work no better than placebos
        
BETHESDA, Md. - Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

As for therapies, acupuncture has been shown to help certain conditions, and yoga, massage, meditation and other relaxation methods may relieve symptoms like pain, anxiety and fatigue.

However, the government also is funding studies of purported energy fields, distance healing and other approaches that have little if any biological plausibility or scientific evidence.

Taxpayers are bankrolling studies of whether pressing various spots on your head can help with weight loss, whether brain waves emitted from a special "master" can help break cocaine addiction, and whether wearing magnets can help the painful wrist problem, carpal tunnel syndrome.

The acupressure weight-loss technique won a $2 million grant even though a small trial of it on 60 people found no statistically significant benefit — only an encouraging trend that could have occurred by chance. The researcher says the pilot study was just to see if the technique was feasible.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jun 09 - 07:26 PM

ASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of very fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.


During spacecraft commissioning, the IBEX team turned on the IBEX-Hi instrument, built primarily by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which measures atoms with speeds from about half a million to 2.5 million miles per hour. Its companion sensor, IBEX-Lo, built by Lockheed Martin, the University of New Hampshire, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, measures atoms with speeds from about one hundred thousand to 1.5 million mph.
"Just after we got IBEX-Hi turned on, the moon happened to pass right through its field of view, and there they were," says Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division. "The instrument lit up with a clear signal of the neutral atoms being detected as they backscattered from the moon."

The solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles that flows out from the sun, moves out into space in every direction at speeds of about a million mph. The Earth's strong magnetic field shields our planet from the solar wind. The moon, with its relatively weak magnetic field, has no such protection, causing the solar wind to slam onto the moon's sunward side.

From its vantage point in space, IBEX sees about half of the moon -- one quarter of it is dark and faces the nightside (away from the sun), while the other quarter faces the dayside (toward the sun). Solar wind particles impact only the dayside, where most of them are embedded in the lunar surface, while some scatter off in different directions. The scattered ones mostly become neutral atoms in this reflection process by picking up electrons from the lunar surface.

The IBEX team estimates that only about 10 percent of the solar wind ions reflect off the sunward side of the moon as neutral atoms, while the remaining 90 percent are embedded in the lunar surface. Characteristics of the lunar surface, such as dust, craters and rocks, play a role in determining the percentage of particles that become embedded and the percentage of neutral particles, as well as their direction of travel, that scatter.
(From PhysOrg.org)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 19 Jun 09 - 09:51 PM

Scientists in Canada and India are proposing a surprising new solution to the global energy crisis —"milking" oil from the tiny, single-cell algae known as diatoms, renowned for their intricate, beautifully sculpted shells that resemble fine lacework. Their report appears online in the current issue of the ACS' bi-monthly journal Industrial Engineering & Chemical Research.

Richard Gordon, T. V. Ramachandra, Durga Madhab Mahapatra, and Karthick Band note that some geologists believe that much of the world's crude oil originated in diatoms, which produce an oily substance in their bodies. Barely one-third of a strand of hair in diameter, diatoms flourish in enormous numbers in oceans and other water sources. They die, drift to the seafloor, and deposit their shells and oil into the sediments. Estimates suggest that live diatoms could make 10−200 times as much oil per acre of cultivated area compared to oil seeds, Gordon says.

"We propose ways of harvesting oil from diatoms, using biochemical engineering and also a new solar panel approach that utilizes genetically modifiable aspects of diatom biology, offering the prospect of "milking" diatoms for sustainable energy by altering them to actively secrete oil products," the scientists say. "Secretion by and milking of diatoms may provide a way around the puzzle of how to make algae that both grow quickly and have a very high oil content."

More information: Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Journal Article: "Milking Diatoms for Sustainable Energy: Biochemical Engineering Versus Gasoline-Secreting Diatom Solar Panels"

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Jun 09 - 12:40 AM

"SCIENCE PAST FROM THE ISSUE OF JULY 4, 1959 of Science News:

Brides and grooms are younger than ever — Today's brides and grooms are younger than any others in the nation's history, the Population Reference Bureau reported. The average age for first marriages in the U.S. last year was 23 for men and 20 for women. More girls married at 18 than at any other age. In 1890, men averaged 26 at first marriage and women averaged 22. Since then, the average age has been declining slowly but steadily.… The Bureau offered no reason for the trend toward early marriages. Factors believed to contribute, however, are the nation's continued economic prosperity, teen-agers "going steady" at progressively younger ages, and a significant percentage of pre-marital pregnancies in young girls."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 23 Jun 09 - 02:52 PM

"...Last year, in an opening address at a conference in Rome, called "Science 400 Years After Galileo Galilei," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state of the Vatican, praised the church's old antagonist as "a man of faith who saw nature as a book written by God." In May, as part of the International Year of Astronomy, a Jesuit cultural center in Florence conducted "a historical, philosophical and theological re-examination" of the Galileo affair. But in the effort to rehabilitate the church's image, nothing speaks louder than a paper by a Vatican astronomer in, say, The Astrophysical Journal or The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

On a clear spring night in Arizona, the focus is not on theology but on the long list of mundane tasks that bring a telescope to life. As it tracks the sky, the massive instrument glides on a ring of pressurized oil. Pumps must be activated, gauges checked, computers rebooted. The telescope's electronic sensor, similar to the one in a digital camera, must be cooled with liquid nitrogen to keep the megapixels from fuzzing with quantum noise.

As Dr. Corbally rushes from station to station flicking switches and turning dials, he seems less like a priest or even an astronomer than a maintenance engineer. Finally when everything is ready, starlight scooped up by the six-foot mirror is chopped into electronic bits, which are reconstituted as light on his video screen.

"Much of observing these days is watching monitors and playing with computers," Dr. Corbally says. "People say, 'Oh, that must be so beautiful being out there looking at the sky.' I tell them it's great if you like watching TV."

Dressed in blue jeans and a work shirt, he is not a man who wears his religion on his sleeve. No grace is offered before a quick casserole dinner in the observatory kitchen. In fact, the only sign that the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope is fundamentally different from the others on Mount Graham, the home of an international astronomical complex operated by the University of Arizona, is a dedication plaque outside the door.

"This new tower for studying the stars has been erected on this peaceful site," it says in Latin. "May whoever searches here night and day the far reaches of space use it joyfully with the help of God." At that point, religion leaves off and science begins.

The Roman Catholic Church's interest in the stars began with purely practical concerns when in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII called on astronomy to correct for the fact that the Julian calendar had fallen out of sync with the sky. In 1789, the Vatican opened an observatory in the Tower of the Winds, which it later relocated to a hill behind St. Peter's Dome. In the 1930s, church astronomers moved to Castel Gandolfo, the pope's summer residence. As Rome's illumination, the electrical kind, spread to the countryside, the church began looking for a mountaintop in a dark corner of Arizona.

Building on Mount Graham was a struggle. Apaches said the observatory was an affront to the mountain spirits. Environmentalists said it was a menace to a subspecies of red squirrel. There were protests and threats of sabotage. It wasn't until 1995, three years after the edict of Inquisition was lifted against Galileo, that the Vatican's new telescope made its first scientific observations. ... (NYT Science)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 23 Jun 09 - 11:20 PM

Problems of Living with Robots (Phys Org)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 23 Jun 09 - 11:40 PM

We have our new lunar satillite in orbit and sending back pictures and water data.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Jun 09 - 03:32 PM

"The physics of the first kiss were off. I knew where I needed to be, but it was hard to reconcile the differences"

Noah Fulmor on getting married on board a parabolic flight – reported as the world's first wedding in zero gravity (Reuters, 20 June)

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

Friday Jan. 26, 1866

All hands turned to this morning at four o'clock to get the Ship ready to haul into the stream   at five a tug came and towed us into the stream where we lay until about one o'clock p.m. when two tugs came and towed us to sea   it has been cloudy all day. tonight the Officers chose their watches I being chosen in the Starboard watch.


Sunday Jan. 28th 1866

This day comes in pleasant this morning washed down decks the wind having died away we are becalmed.

About one o'clock a breeze sprung up which tonight has increased almost to a gale we are running under reefed topsails.

So ends this day with heavy winds.


Wednesday Jan. 31st 1866

The wind is not blowing very hard this morning and we are running with all sail set.

This afternoon it has been squally and we are now running under fore and main lower topsails and fore and upper topsail reefed.

So ends these twenty four hours

...

Sunday Mar 11th 1866

This day comes in clear with a head wind.

This AM. at four Oclock tacked ship crossed the Royal yard and set the sail. This P.M. saw a Brazilian fishing boat ahead the Mate motioned for them to come along side but they droped under our stern when we hove to when the Capt went aboard taking some bread and meat all of us boys sent letters here by them. they said they were going to Cape Frio in a day or two and would take the letters they gave the Capt quite a number of fish.

...Saturday Mar 31st 1866

This day comes in clear with a good breeze.

This A.M. the watch have been engaged in ship duty.

This P.M. the watch engaged the same as in the A.M. the wind has breezed up considerable since morning at six Oclock took in the Royals.

We keep in company with the Bark pretty well although she can whip us in fact most anything can that has a hull and a little piece of canvas.

The Ivanhoe was a big thing on little wheels in New York but at sea she is not what she was cracked up to be.

...Friday Apr 27th 1866



This day comes in cloudy with a head wind. Last night at six Oclock tacked ship   while were going around the wind shifted and a put us on our course again but it blew pretty fresh so of course we must put her under close reefs the way they do every fair wind   toward morning the wind hauled ahead and so we made sail. No wonder she never gets anywhere. This AM tacked again   This P.M. I have been Holystoning the Capt office   The men have been holystoning all day. This morning for breakfast we had hash and hard tack for dinner bean soup (dishwater) hard tack salt horse a fair specimen of our grub   when we get hash I could eat every bit of it myself but it is sent here for six   we have such poor grub that Ross is sick for the second time on account of it   I have seen the time that I have turned up my nose at bread and butter and mother told me that I might see the time when I would be glad to get it. I see that time now.



Excerpts from Mitchell Journal on board the Ivanhoe

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

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Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. A super-volcano at what's now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, erupted with a strength more than a thousand times that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Some 800 cubic kilometers of ash filled the skies of the Northern Hemisphere, lowering global temperatures and pushing a climate already on the verge of an ice age over the edge. Some scientists speculate that as the Earth went into a deep freeze, the population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to as low as a few thousand families.

The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. ..."

Excerpted from The Atlantic magazine.


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