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Lack of sleep is a lot like mental illness
26 October 2007
From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
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Feeling cranky after a bad night's sleep? Now there could be an explanation. Brain activity associated with psychiatric illness has been observed in healthy people who missed a single night's sleep. As well as shedding light on why sleep deprivation makes us feel so bad, the study could change our thinking about mental illness.
Volunteers were asked to miss a night's sleep and stay up until 5 pm the following day. Next came a session in which their brains were scanned as they viewed gory images, such as mutilated bodies or children with tumours. Compared with controls, the sleep-deprived group showed increased activity in the amygdala, an area of the brain involved in processing fear and other emotions (Current Biology, vol 17, p R877).
The heightened activity is no surprise, since tiredness and emotion are known to be linked. But the reason the amygdala was more active appeared to be because connections with the prefrontal cortex - an area of the brain that normally damps the amygdala down - were disrupted. Similar disruption is seen in patients with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the study.
"It is thought that psychiatric conditions create sleep problems," he says. "We should entertain the possibility that it is a sleep disorder that is creating the condition."
Mental Health - Discover the latest research in our continuously
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//////////////////////Don’t allow yourself to be chained by consumerism.
The world is filled with stuff. Don’t let stuff get in the way of what is important. When you become chained to your stuff, you are no longer leading your life. Ask yourself: if you had to give up 90% of your net worth tomorrow to pursue your dream, could you do it effortlessly? If you hesitated, perhaps your ability to lead your own life has been weakened by your attachment to stuff.
//////////////////Rule money. Don’t let money rule you.
Money is a resource that can be applied when leading your life. You can use it to reduce discomforts, focus on meaningful work and apply it to help you learn and improve. But if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, the money is in control.
Here are some goals to put yourself in a position to rule the money in your life:
Maintain one year of emergency funds in the bank.
Your lifestyle should expand at a slower rate than your income grows.
Be able to drastically reduce your expenditures if needed.
Financial freedom doesn’t mean the ability to buy everything you could desire or live in luxury. It means that money becomes a tool and not a distraction in leading your life.
//////////////////// Anything you lack can be trained.
Never accept a fatalistic view of life. So you’ve been told you lack the intelligence, willpower, strength or charisma to do something? Ignore them. So you’ve told yourself that you lack the talent? Ignore yourself.
Begin with the assumption that anything can be trained and you’ll find few exceptions. I used to be a shy, introverted kid. Recently some friends described me as an extreme extrovert, being unafraid to meet new people and having honed my abilities to speak in front of crowds. Begin with the belief that you have no idea where your talents are until you train them.
//////////////////////Newness
No matter how old you are, try to look for newness in life. Avoid repeating the same routine, try learning new skills or visiting different places. If we are constantly expanding our horizons, life will offer new challenges whatever our physical age. Take inspiration from The Zimmers — a band of old age pensioners who hit the big time, despite an average age in the 80s.
///////////////////////Keep Active
Getting old does not mean we have to vegetate in front of the TV, with the highlight of the week a trip to the Bingo hall. It is important to keep our mind and, where possible, our body active. If we don’t exercise our mental faculties, it will not be a surprise if we lose our concentration and ability to engage in critical thought. We should try to be a life long learner; if we keep our mind permanently busy we will retain our mental faculties for longer. We shall also gain a feeling of continuing self improvement right into old age.
///////////////////CREDIT-DAILY GALAXY=Michio Kaku's Civilizations of the Cosmos
"What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque."
Carl Sagan
Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York, in the current issue of Cosmos writes that Sagan's question is no longer just a matter of idle speculation.
Soon, humanity may face an existential shock as we discover Earth-sized twins of our planet orbiting nearby solar systems. This may usher in a new era in our relationship with the universe, so that we will never see the night sky in the same way. Realizing that scientists may eventually compile an encyclopedia identifying the precise coordinates of perhaps hundreds of Earth-like planets, gazing at the night sky, we will forever after wonder if someone is gazing back at us.
Kaku takes up where some/one of the world's pioneer astronomers left off with a definition of civilizations in the universe that mimics the work of Russian astrophysicist Kardashev. Inspired at the age of five by a Moscow Planetariumshow about Giordano Bruno, Kardashev definined three levels of advanced civilizations based on how they harness energy to fuel their societies. All three categories of civilizations, even the most advanced Type 111, would still be bound by the laws of physics thatallow us to predict the behavior of the universe from the subatomic world to the large-scale structure of the universe, through a staggering 43 orders of magnitude (a factor of 10 million billion billion billion billion).
Type 1 civilizations would have a technological level similar to ours at present, as measured by total energy consumption. Carl Sagan estimated that Earth qualifies as a Type 0.7 civilisation.Type 11 civilizations would be capable of harnessing the energy of their own star -constructing, for example, a Dyson Sphere. And Type 111 civilizations would be able to utilize energy on the scale of their own galaxies. Kardeschev and Kaku believe there is an extremely low probability of detecting Type 1 civilizations and suggests that type 11 or 111 civilizations would make better targets.Kardeschev calculated that the energy consumption of these three types of civilizations would be separated by a factor of about 10 billion.
In 1963 Kardeschev searched for traces of the more advanced type 11 and 111 at the 920 MHz wavelength creating an uproar of excitement thinking he had discover signals from a Type 11 civilization that later proved to be an ordinary quasar with a large redshift. A similar uproar occurred in 1967 when regular signals were detected by radio telescopes at Cambridge, England, which turned out to be the first discovery of neutron stars.
Over the next few years, according to Kaku, "New spaceborne telescopes will finally become powerful enough to identify twins of Earth. The Kepler telescope, to be launched in 2008, will probably be able to identify terrestrial planets – rocky worlds rather than gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Until 2012 it will scan as many as 100,000 Sun-like stars up to 2,000 light years away, and perhaps identify hundreds of Earth-like worlds by detecting the slight loss of light they cause as they pass in front of their mother star. Kepler will hopefully identify 185 such planets with less than 1.3 times the radius of Earth, and as many as 640 terrestrial planets less than 2.2 times."
The Terrestrial Planet Finder, expected to be launched in about 2014, will scan the brightest 1,000 stars within 50 light years of Earth, and focus on the 50 to 100 brightest planetary systems, analyzing the faint light reflected from these planets to determine if they can support the organic chemistry that make life possible.
All this, Kaku predicts "will stimulate an active effort to discover if any of them harbor life, perhaps some with civilizations more advanced than ours. According to the laws of planetary evolution, any advanced civilization must grow in energy consumption faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes, such as meteor impacts, ice ages, or supernova explosions. If their growth rate stays any slower, they are doomed to extinction. Thus, this places mathematical lower limits on the growth rates of these civilizations.
Kaku believes along Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, that although human civilization has only recently begun to master planetary energies -fossil fuels, passive solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear fission, and may one day soon crack nuclear fusion-hat, within a century or two, we should attain Type I status. In fact, growing at a modest rate of 1 per cent per year, Kardashev estimated that it would take only 3,200 years to reach Type II status, and 5,800 years to reach Type III status.
By definition, Kaku proposes that an advanced civilization must grow faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes. Since large meteor and comet impacts take place once every few thousand to million years, a Type I civilization must master space travel to deflect space debris within that time, which should not be much of a problem. Ice ages may take place on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, and so a Type I civilization must learn to modify the weather within that period.
Artificial and internal catastrophes must also be negotiated. Global pollution is a mortal threat for a Type 0 civilization, but not a Type I civilization, which has lived for several millennia as a global force and necessarily achieved ecological balance with its home planet. Internal problems such as wars do present a serious recurring threat, but emerging civilizations have thousands of years in which to solve their racial, national, and sectarian conflicts. Since it would take centuries or even millennia for a Type I civilization to terraform nearby planets, its peoples will have plenty of time to work out their internal differences on the same planet before they finally leave the mother planet in any significant numbers.
The only serious threat to a Type II civilization would be a nearby supernova explosion, whose sudden eruption could scorch their planet in a withering blast of life-destroying gamma-rays. The most potentially interesting civilization is a Type III civilization, "for it is truly immortal. It has exhausted the power of a single star, and has reached out to other star systems. No natural catastrophe known to science has the capacity to destroy a Type III civilization."
Faced with an exploding supernova, a Type 111 would have several alternatives, for example altering the evolution of a dying red giant star which is about to explode, or leaving this particular star system and terraforming a nearby planetary system. Kaka continues:
However, there are roadblocks to an emerging Type III civilization. Eventually, it bumps into Einstein's theory of relativity. Nothing can travel faster than light, which is about 300,000km a second (for a possible loophole, see the end of this article). Since the universe is so vast and space is so empty, this absolute speed limit tends to hold back a civilization's successful expansion. Dyson estimates that this roadblock may delay the transition from a Type II to a Type III civilization by perhaps a million years or more.
So what is the most efficient way of exploring the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy?
Kaku writes that the solution is to to send fleets of 'von Neumann probes' throughout the galaxy (named after John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician who defined the mathematical laws of self-replicating systems).
A von Neumann probe is a robot designed to reach distant star systems and create factories that will reproduce copies of themselves by the thousands. For von Neumann probes, a planet is a less ideal destination than a dead moon; these have no atmosphere and no erosion, which means the probes can easily land and take off and can 'live off the land', using naturally occurring deposits of iron, nickel and other minerals to build replicants for dispersal in search for other star systems.
Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies, has even raised the possibility that a von Neumann probe could be resting on our own Moon, left over from a previous visitation in our system aeons ago -the plot foundation of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Originally, apparently, Stanley Kubrick began the film with a series of scientists explaining how von Neumann-like probes would be the most efficient method of exploring space. Unfortunately, at the last minute, Kubrick cut the opening segment from his film, and the famous monoliths – von Neumann probes – became mystical entities that triggered human evolution.
The irony of a search for a Type III civilization is that they probably wouldn't resemble anything we'd be able to recognise immediately.
Kaku concludes that that "one day, many of us could gaze at the encyclopadia that contains the coordinates of perhaps hundreds of Earth-like planets in our sector of the galaxy. Then we will ponder with wonder, as Sagan did, what an intelligent civilization a millions years ahead of ours will look like."
Read Kaku's brilliant essay in its entirety at Cosmos Magazine.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
///////////////////RAMÓN SAMPEDRO'S WILL
Complete text of Ramón Sampedro's Will:Your Honors, Political and Religious Authorities: After watching the images you have just seen, of a person taking care of an atrophied and deformed body -mine- I ask you: what does dignity means to you? Whatever your consciences' answer is, for me, this is not dignity. This is not living with dignity! I, along with some judges, and the majority of people who love life and freedom, think that living is a right, not an obligation. Nevertheless, I have been obligated to tolerate this pitiful situation for 29 years, 4 months, and several days. I refuse to continue doing it any longer
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Map of the Missing Cosmos
07 November 2007, 15:40:48 Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
The universe is a very complex place; there’s no doubting that. It continually throws up new questions that scientists have to answer, or answers that we just don’t know the question for. One of these questions is where is all the mass?
To better understand what it is that is going on in this article let’s start off with University of Alabama in Huntsville’s own analogy;
Imagine “if billions of lights thought to come from billions of aircraft carriers were found instead to come from billions of extremely bright fireflies.”
This is the analogy that is framing the problem researchers from the University of Alabama Huntsville are facing. The same group of researchers that, back in 2002, announced to the world that they had found a large fraction of the “missing mass” of our universe has, essentially, retracted that statement.
Let’s explain.
The universe must be a certain mass to fit in to one of the three expansion models proposed in the early 20th century. And, with all the research that has been done, scientists have begun to get an idea of just how heavy the universe is (and by heavy, I mean its mass). But there is a difference between what we measure the universe to be, and what we can observably weigh.
In other words, all of what we can see – the gas, dust, planets and stars – don’t add up to the right mass to provide the answer “stable universe.
So “where is all the missing matter?” is question that has been asked for a very long time.
Dark matter is one of those substances that, while unobservable, is believed to add up to fit the “stable universe” equation. But the UAH researchers, in 2002, found what they believed to be another cohabitating answer; heavy x-rays.
Those x-rays allowed scientists to be a little safer in their answers. But all of a sudden the same researchers have announced that, instead of hefty atoms being expelled, the x-ray emitting clouds are emitting tiny electrons.
"This means the mass of these x-ray emitting clouds is much less than we initially thought it was," said Dr. Max Bonamente, an assistant professor in UAH's Physics Department. "A significant portion of what we thought was missing mass turns out to be these 'relativistic' (travelling at the speed of light) electrons."
And though tiny electrons don’t seem to be all that heavy, the sheer amount of them added up to 10% of the mass that is thought to hold the universe together; keeping it from spinning out of control.
The most logical explanation seems to be that a large amount of the energy comes from electrons that are smashing into other photons instead of from warm atoms and ions, which would have recognizable spectral emission lines. "We have never been able to detect spectral emission lines associated with those detections," Bonamente explained. "If this 'bump' in the data were due to cooler gas, it would have emission lines."
But this latest discovery also exposes the problem that, the lighter x-rays they have discovered, may have been “puffing up” the mass of galaxy clusters in the past. Energy used from galaxy clusters – the universes largest object – helped scientists calculate the mass. Now that such energy is connected to light-weight electrons, those measurements drop as well.
Results of this research by Bonamente, Jukka Nevalainen of Finland'sHelsinki Observatory and UAH's Dr. Richard Lieu were published Oct. 20 in the "Astrophysical Journal. So if you manage to get your hands on it, make sure you contact me! I want to know more.
Posted by Josh Hill
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Extinction of the Dinosaurs -New Research May Have Solved One of the World’s Biggest Mysteries
07 November 2007, 02:12:30 Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff
Apparently, even killing dinosaurs was a job outsourced to India. New research suggests that a series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Previously it was believed that the likely suspect was a meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico. However, the volcanic eruptions in India, which created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds, are now the prime suspect in the most famous and persistent paleontological murder mystery. Scientists have recently conducted several new investigations and were able to hone in on the eruptions timing.
"It's the first time we can directly link the main phase of the Deccan Traps to the mass extinction," said Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller. The main phase of the Deccan eruptions spewed 80 percent of the lava and covered hundreds of miles. It is calculated to have released ten times more climate altering gases into the atmosphere than the nearly concurrent Chicxulub meteor impact, according to volcanologist Vincent Courtillot from the Physique du Globe de Paris. In other words, Chicxulub was a space whimp that didn’t have anything on chaos wrecked by the Deccan volcanoes.
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