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The halo of stars that envelops the outer Milky Way galaxy is like a "jumble of pasta" said one researcher, describing criss-crossed patterns of stellar streams revealed in new data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These stars appear to have been ripped away from the dwarf galaxies that are companions to our own galaxy, creating messy, spaghetti-like streams of stars in the outer edge of the Milky Way. The SEGUE (Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) of the Sloan Survey is mapping the structure and stellar makeup of the Milky Way Galaxy and has found numerous new small streams of stars mixed and tangled among larger streams that had been mapped out over the last decade. It appears the Milky Way's thievery is creating quite a mess.
/////////////////BURO MANUSH-ASUKH BISHUKH TO HOBEI
////////////////////DAHAM-1997-IMDB
//////////////////Elite" HIV wife may hold secret to AIDS vaccine
Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:02pm BST
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By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A woman who has never shown symptoms of infection with the AIDS virus may hold the secret to defeating the virus, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
Infected at least 10 years ago by her husband, the woman is able somehow to naturally control the deadly and incurable virus -- even though her husband must take cocktails of strong HIV drugs to control his.
She is a so-called "elite suppressor," and studies of her immune cells have begun to offer clues to how her body does it, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.
"This is the best evidence to date that elite suppressors can have fully pathogenic virus," said Dr. Joel Blankson, who led the study.
"The feeling was initially that they had defective virus," Blankson added in a telephone interview.
But the couple has been monogamous for at least 17 years, Blankson said, and tests show they are infected with the same strain of virus. What is different is the immune system of the wife, who cannot be named for privacy reasons.
"That's a good sign in terms of developing a therapeutic vaccine," Blankson said. Such a vaccine would not prevent infection but might be used to treat patients.
The AIDS virus infects at least 33 million people globally and more than a million in the United States. It has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the early 1980s.
'//////////////////Boys 'grow out of child asthma'
Boys are more likely than girls to grow out of childhood asthma when they hit their teenage years, research shows.
/////////////////////1977: Rock and roll 'king' Presley dies
Elvis Presley, whose singing and style revolutionized popular music in the 1950s, dies after collapsing at his home.
///////////////////////KIN AND COMMUNITY
////////////////////KIN TO COMMUNITY
//////////////////////IND-Inflation climbs to 12.44 per cent
NEW DELHI, Aug. 14: Showing no signs of abating, inflation shot to a 16-year high of 12.44 per cent during the week ended 2 August, on the back of higher food and fuel prices. As per the data released today, prices of most food articles went up, although some items like fruits showed downward trend. The inflation, as measured by the wholesale price index (WPI) stood at 12.01 per cent in the previous week and 4.70 per cent during the corresponding week last year. n SNS
/////////////////100 YEARS AGO TODAY
News Item
STONE-THROWING AT TRAINS
A Boy Sentenced To Be Whipped
Before Babu CD Ghose, Deputy Magistrate of Howrah, on Monday a Bengali lad, named Abinash Chunder Dhur, alias Akhoy Kumar Ghose, aged about 13 years, was charged with throwing a stone at a running train near the distant signal of Sonarpur. The stone, which was, it was alleged, intended for the European Traffic Inspector of the railway, who happened to be travelling in the train at the time, missed its mark and fell on the lines. The accused admitted having thrown a stone, but said that he had aimed the stone at a cow, which was grazing close by at the time. The pleader of the defence prayed that the Court would deal with the lad under the First Offenders Act and release him on his father’s security. It was pointed out by the prosecution that under the Railway Act the lad was above the age where an accused could be dealt with under the First Offenders Act; moreover it would be hardly fair to place a restraint on a father who may or may not have sufficient control over his son so as to serve as a check against such conduct. The Magistrate remarked that it was a serious matter and the nuisance was on the increase of late. This was not a fit case to be dealt with under the First Offenders Act. He accordingly sentenced the boy to a whipping of eight stripes by way of school discipline, and warned his father to be more careful of his son in the future.
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More than half the bones in your body are located in your hands and feet.
There is enough iron in the human body to make one small nail.
Women blink almost twice as much as men.
A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
Beards are the fastest growing hair. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it could grow to 30 feet over the course of his lifetime.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Fingernails grow faster than toenails and your middle fingernail is the quickest one to grow. It takes about 150 days to grow out a full length fingernail.
Your brain continues to send out electrical wave signals approximately 37 hours after death.
The nervous system transmits messages to the brain at speeds of 180 miles per hour.
The human nose can remember 50,000 different smells.
The human eye can detect more than 10,000,000 different colors!
Your jawbone is the hardest bone in your body.
When you were born, you had 350 bones in your body, and after childhood 144 of these bones fused together.
Your brain stops growing when you are about 15 years old.
Laughing and coughing put more pressure on the spine than walking or standing.
Your stomach produces a new lining every 3 days in order to avoid digesting itself in its own production of acid.
About every seven years, your body replaces the equivalent of an entirely new skeleton.
The spinal cord is less then two feet in length and is the same diameter as your index finger, yet it contains over 10 billion nerve cells.
Blood type A can receive blood types A & O safely. Blood type B can receive types B & O. Blood type O can receive only O blood but are "universal donors" because O is acceptable to all other blood types. Blood type O is the most common blood type worldwide.
The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle of the whole body. It contracts in less than 1/100th of a second.
It takes approximately 200,000 frowns to create one permanent brow line.
Your eyesight is the sharpest in the middle of the day.
/////////////////Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber
last modified 01-04-2008 16:22
Paleontologists from the University of Rennes (France) and the ESRF have found the presence of 356 animal inclusions in completely opaque amber from mid-Cretaceous sites of Charentes (France). The team used the X-rays of the European light source to image two kilogrammes of the fossil tree resin with a technique that allows rapid survey of large amounts of opaque amber. At present this is the only way to discover inclusions in fully opaque amber.
Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber
Opaque amber has always been a challenge for paleontologists. Researchers cannot study it because the naked eye cannot visualize the presence of any fossil inclusion inside. In the Cretaceous sites like those in Charentes, there is up to 80% of opaque amber. It is like trying to find, in complete blindness, something that may or may not be there.
However, the paleontologists Malvina Lak, her colleagues from the University of Rennes and the ESRF paleontologist Paul Tafforeau, together with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, have applied to opaque amber a synchrotron X-ray imaging technique known as propagation phase contrast microradiography. It sheds light on the interior of this dark amber, which resembles a stone to the human eye. “Researchers have tried to study this kind of amber for many years with little or no success. This is the first time that we can actually discover and study the fossils it contains”, says Paul Tafforeau.
///////////////////PRBLM OF EV TSING/PHYSCL ASSLT/RP
/////////////////// Fifty years later, the Noise just stops.
Everyone on Earth instantly goes insane.
Society crumbles. Crazed and senseless, mankind stops reproducing. One by one, everyone dies. The human race becomes extinct.
It is now very, very quiet.
/////////////Selathirupavar (Tamil): a word used to define a certain type of absence without official leave in face of duty
///////////////......SU=express my anger and denounce things I don't like (religious fanaticism, power hungry politicians, lying leaders, people who don't give a shit about anything) and share the love for environment, activism of all sort, humanity, poetry, respect and my geeky addiction to new technology.
/////////////////SICK SOCIETYS JUST LOOK OWN INTEREST
/////////////////SCIAM=High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius
Researchers are finding clues to the basis of brilliance in the brain
By Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic
Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect.
Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. (The statistical average is 100. See the box on the opposite page.) A high IQ increases the probability of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading, writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks [see “Solving the IQ Puzzle,” by James R. Flynn; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2007].
Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations. Part of Einstein’s parietal lobe (at the top of the head, behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a structure called the anterior cingulate.
But the functional consequences of such enlargement are controversial. In 1883 English anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton dubbed intelligence an inherited feature of an efficiently functioning central nervous system. Since then, neuroscientists have garnered support for this efficiency hypothesis using modern neuroimaging techniques. They found that the brains of brighter people use less energy to solve certain problems than those of people with lower aptitudes do.
In other cases, scientists have observed higher neuronal power consumption in individuals with superior mental capacities. Musical prodigies may also sport an unusually energetic brain [see box on page 67]. That flurry of activity may occur when a task is unusually challenging, some researchers speculate, whereas a gifted mind might be more efficient only when it is pondering a relatively painless puzzle.
Despite the quest to unravel the roots of high IQ, researchers say that people often overestimate the significance of intellectual ability [see “Coaching the Gifted Child,” by Christian Fischer]. Studies show that practice and perseverance contribute more to accomplishment than being smart does.
Size Matters
In humans, brain size correlates, albeit somewhat weakly, with intelligence, at least when researchers control for a person’s sex (male brains are bigger) and age (older brains are smaller). Many modern studies have linked a larger brain, as measured by magnetic resonance imaging, to higher intellect, with total brain volume accounting for about 16 percent of the variance in IQ. But, as Einstein’s brain illustrates, the size of some brain areas may matter for intelligence much more than that of others does.
In 2004 psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues reported evidence to support the notion that discrete brain regions mediate scholarly aptitude. Studying the brains of 47 adults, Haier’s team found an association between the amount of gray matter (tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe just behind it. Other scientists have also seen more white matter, which is made up of nerve axons (or fibers), in these same regions among people with higher IQs. The results point to a widely distributed—but discrete—neural basis of intelligence.
The neural hubs of general intelligence may change with age. Among the younger adults in Haier’s study—his subjects ranged in age from 18 to 84—IQ correlated with the size of brain regions near a central structure called the cingulate, which participates in various cognitive and emotional tasks. That result jibed with the findings, published a year earlier, of pediatric neurologist Marko Wilke, then at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and his colleagues. In its survey of 146 children ages five to 18 with a range of IQs, the Cincinnati group discovered a strong connection between IQ and gray matter volume in the cingulate but not in any other brain structure the researchers examined.
Scientists have identified other shifting neural patterns that could signal high IQ. In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307 children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of their cerebral cortex, the brain’s exterior part. They discovered that academic prodigies younger than eight had an unusually thin cerebral cortex, which then thickened rapidly so that by late childhood it was chunkier than that of less clever kids. Consistent with other studies, that pattern was particularly pronounced in the frontal brain regions that govern rational thought processes.
The brain structures responsible for high IQ may vary by sex as well as by age. A recent study by Haier, for example, suggests that men and women achieve similar results on IQ tests with the aid of different brain regions. Thus, more than one type of brain architecture may underlie high aptitude.
Low Effort Required
Meanwhile researchers are debating the functional consequences of these structural findings. Over the years brain scientists have garnered evidence supporting the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information processing in the brain. Underlying such speed, some psychologists argue, is unusually efficient neural circuitry in the brains of gifted individuals.
Experimental psychologist Werner Krause, formerly at the University of Jena in Germany, for example, has proposed that the highly gifted solve puzzles more elegantly than other people do: they rapidly identify the key information in them and the best way to solve them. Such people thereby make optimal use of the brain’s limited working memory, the short-term buffer that holds items just long enough for the mind to process them.
Starting in the late 1980s, Haier and his colleagues have gathered data that buttress this so-called efficiency hypothesis. The researchers used positron-emission tomography, which measures glucose metabolism of cells, to scan the brains of eight young men while they performed a nonverbal abstract reasoning task for half an hour. They found that the better an individual’s performance on the task, the lower the metabolic rate in widespread areas of the brain, supporting the notion that efficient neural processing may underlie brilliance. And in the 1990s the same group observed the flip side of this phenomenon: higher glucose metabolism in the brains of a small group of subjects who had below-average IQs, suggesting that slower minds operate less economically.
More recently, in 2004 psychologist Aljoscha Neubauer of the University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues linked aptitude to diminished cortical activity after learning. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that detects electrical brain activity at precise time points using an array of electrodes affixed to the scalp, to monitor the brains of 27 individuals while they took two reasoning tests, one of them given before test-related training and the other after it. During the second test, frontal brain regions—many of which are involved in higher-order cognitive skills—were less active in the more intelligent individuals than in the less astute subjects. In fact, the higher a subject’s mental ability, the bigger the dip in cortical activation between the pretraining and posttraining tests, suggesting that the brains of brighter individuals streamline the processing of new information faster than those of their less intelligent counterparts do.
The cerebrums of smart kids may also be more efficient at rest, according to a 2006 study by psychologist Joel Alexander of Western Oregon University and his colleagues. Using EEG, Alexander’s team found that resting eight- to 12-hertz alpha brain waves were significantly more powerful in 30 adolescents of average ability than they were in 30 gifted adolescents, whose alpha-wave signal resembled those of older, college-age students. The results suggest that gifted kids’ brains use relatively little energy while idle and in this respect resemble more developmentally advanced human brains.
Some researchers speculate that greater energy efficiency in the brains of gifted individuals could arise from increased gray matter, which might provide more resources for data processing, lessening the strain on the brain. But others, such as economist Edward Miller, formerly of the University of New Orleans, have proposed that the efficiency boost could also result from thicker myelin, the substance that insulates nerves and ensures rapid conduction of nerve signals. No one knows if the brains of the quick-witted generally contain more myelin, although Einstein’s might have. Scientists probing Einstein’s brain in the 1980s discovered an unusual number of glia, the cells that make up myelin, relative to neurons in one area of his parietal cortex.
Hardworking Minds
And yet gifted brains are not always in a state of relative calm. In some situations, they appear to be more energetic, not less, than those of people of more ordinary intellect. What is more, the energy-gobbling brain areas roughly correspond to those boasting more gray matter, suggesting that the gifted may simply be endowed with more brainpower in this intelligence network.
In a 2003 trial psychologist Jeremy Gray, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 48 individuals using functional MRI, which detects neural activity by tracking the flow of oxygenated blood in brain tissue, while the subjects completed hard tasks that taxed working memory. The researchers saw higher levels of activity in prefrontal and parietal brain regions in the participants who had received high scores on an intelligence test, as compared with low scorers.
In a 2005 study a team led by neuroscientist Michael O’Boyle of Texas Tech University found a similar brain activity pattern in young male math geniuses. The researchers used fMRI to map the brains of mathematically gifted adolescents while they mentally rotated objects to try to match them to a target item. Compared with adolescent boys of average math ability, the brains of the mathematically talented boys were more metabolically active—and that activity was concentrated in the parietal lobes, the frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate.
A year later biologist Kun Ho Lee of Seoul National University in Korea similarly linked elevated activity in a frontoparietal neural network to superior intellect. Lee and his co-workers measured brain activity in 18 gifted adolescents and 18 less intelligent young people while they performed difficult reasoning tasks. These tasks, once again, excited activity in areas of the frontal and parietal lobes, including the anterior cingulate, and this neural commotion was significantly more intense in the gifted individuals’ brains.
No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax. Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone who has a lower IQ.
Perfection from Practice
Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor. Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and a willingness to work hard.
University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures, the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline—a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain—were more likely than those lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.
A 2007 study by Neubauer’s team of 90 adult tournament chess players similarly shows that practice and experience are more important to expertise than general intelligence is, although the latter is related to chess-playing ability. Even Einstein’s spectacular success as a mathematician and a physicist cannot be attributed to intellectual prowess alone. His education, dedication to the problem of relativity, willingness to take risks, and support from family and friends probably helped to push him ahead of any contemporaries with comparable cognitive gifts.
Note: This article was originally published with the title, "High-Aptitude Minds".
//////////////////Facial Frontier
The human face can reveal much about a person-- whether they like it or not
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, August 12, 2008
(See hardcopy for Photo Description)Illustration By Kagan McLeod
Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes "the most sign-packed surface in the universe." Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner's experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious.
In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), Tallis sets out to make his readers into "astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror." He begins his examination with the face.
Faces, as Tallis sees them, are like texts, crammed with information. A friend of mine used to quote an old literary cliche, "Her face was a study." In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason.
Botox relaxes facial muscles and makes possible a smoothness where creases might otherwise appear, revealing the face's age. In return, Botox exacts a harsh payment. The user becomes relatively dull-looking, more like a copy than an original. Will we eventually speak of pre-Botox faces as artifacts in a once-loved but now abandoned style, like the Victorian novel?
Newsreader Standard is a considerably older face produced by our civilization. It's the universal mask, more or less the same from Tokyo to Brussels, through which we receive information on TV. By tradition, newsreaders show no emotion, so many of us every day spend time looking at faces that are by intention flat and generic, far from what we would regard (in private life) as human. Trying for an impassive manner, TV news people evoke an English term-- "po-faced," a shortening of poker-faced.
In ordinary life, what people want when they stare at the faces of others is acknowledgement. We want a sense that we exist. Tallis quotes Hegel's view that humans hunger above all for recognition by other humans. Connection is the key. Knowingly or not, we all yearn for it and may fall to pieces without it.
The Kingdom of Infinite Space celebrates routine biological processes that usually slip below the radar of consciousness. That's typical of Tallis. He habitually searches for reality that may be elusive until the right kind of imagination falls upon it.
He's a medical doctor by profession, a philosopher by inclination. In 2006, at the age of 60, he retired as a professor at the University of Manchester. He wanted more time to work on his books, but it's hard to imagine he will be more productive in his new life than in his old. Over three decades, getting up at 5 a. m. to write for two hours before going to the university, he turned out a longish shelf of books on everything from the inanities of postmodern literary criticism to artificial intelligence.
His subjects are life, death and consciousness, plus whatever else falls in his path. Four years ago, in Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents, he blamed the British government for the erosion of professionalism among doctors, along the way throwing well-aimed rocks at the unquestioning devotees of "alternative medicine," whose fatuous misunderstanding of medicine threatens to corrupt the whole profession. He's a published poet and one of the most incisive essayists in England.
So far as Tallis knows, there's nothing that's uninteresting about the head. After all, a head can sneeze, kiss, laugh, yawn, vomit and cry, sometimes with the owner's permission and sometimes not.
Blushing, for instance, enchants him. Sometimes, unbidden by our consciousness, blood flows to the face, turning it red. Why? Tallis doesn't forget to quote Mark Twain's curt summary, "Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to." As Tallis says, "We blush with embarrassment, with shyness, with uncertainty, with a sense of exposure." Blushing is common in children but peaks in adolescence when social anxiety and self-awareness also peak. It results from undesired social attention and heightened self-consciousness. But it is above all a question of self-betrayal. Here Tallis produces one of the metaphors that lighten his pages: "Blushing is a kind of glass-bottomed boat enabling us to look at the depths upon which our ordinary moments float."
That's one of many instances where a system of reflexes takes charge, as if to remind us that its power dwarfs the intentions of human beings who claim to be in control. A more spectacular case is vomiting.
"There can be few experiences so all-consuming as vomiting," Tallis points out. It begins without our consent and proceeds at its own rate, reminding us again that it has us in its grip. It's experienced as a kind of terror, "a shouted reminder that we are embodied in an organism that has its own agenda."
These are among the involuntary functions that are most awe-inspiring. On a lower level Tallis places yawning ("50% of people will yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else yawn").
He also examines willed behaviour, providing detailed data on kissing and possibly the first analysis ever of harrumphing.
Oxford defines a harrumph as an ostentatious clearing of the throat, expressing disapproval. Tallis says it's close to a suppressed bark, typically triggered by a newspaper item about a fashion or trend the harrumpher deplores. "Harrumphs are particularly associated with the idea of a member of the Establishment, whose overweight body provides the perfect instrument for manufacturing it," complete with jowls that shake while the sound emerges.
Few harrumphers practise this favourite tic in private. Like laughing, it's not often a solitary indulgence. (Tallis says we laugh 30 times more frequently when we are with others than when we are alone.)
The harrumph probably deserves more space than Tallis gives it. Is it dying out? Does it express social attitudes only of the old and cranky? I have heard people fail miserably when trying to produce a satisfactory harrumph. All they can manage is a pathetic snort. Harrumphing is no simple matter. There is a rumour they still teach it in the better private schools.
/////////////////When I speak of home, I speak of a place where-in default of a better-those I love are gathered together;and if that place were a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding." ~ Charles Dickens
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