When you look at a face, you look nose first
Eyes land on nose first when checking out a face, UC San Diego computer scientists say
http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/When_you_look_at_a_face_you_look_nose_first.asp
////////////////////////////In game of tennis, seeing isn't always believing
A universal bias in the way people perceive moving objects means that tennis referees are more likely to make mistakes when they call balls "out" than when they call them "in,"
http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/In_game_of_tennis_seeing_isnt_always_believing.asp
////////////////////2 billion words of written English.
//////////////////the
be
to
of
and
a
in
that
have
I
it
for
not
on
with
he
as
you
do
at
this
but
his
by
from
they
we
say
her
she
or
an
will
my
one
all
would
there
their
what
so
up
out
if
about
who
get
which
go
me
when
make
can
like
time
no
just
him
know
take
person
into
year
your
good
some
could
them
see
other
than
then
now
look
only
come
its
over
think
also
back
after
use
two
how
our
work
first
well
way
even
new
want
because
any
these
give
day
most
us
50 C ENG WORDS USED
/////////////////
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
CDS-291008-EEBBIE QURDY CASE-MCLWP
HW-SNOW-MKK-TRCKR DD IN M40
///////////////BDY PRISN
////////////////JUDGES ONLY INTERPRETE EXISTING LAW
/////////////////T. Rex Was a True Killer
By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
posted: 28 October 2008 08:29 pm ET
Buzz up!
Add to delicious del.icio.us
Digg It! Digg It!
Save to Newsvine Newsvine
Add to reddit reddit
1 Comments | 2 Recommend
T. rex could throw around more than its vicious teeth and incredible size in the battle of survival. Its super-sized olfactory bulbs mean the carnivore could sniff out prey night or day. Credit: Courtesy of Royal Tyrrell Museum.
Full Size
Previous Image Next Image
1 of 2
T. rex could throw around more than its vicious teeth and incredible size in the battle of survival. Its super-sized olfactory bulbs mean the carnivore could sniff out prey night or day. Credit: Courtesy of Royal Tyrrell Museum.
This CT scan of the skull of an ornithomimid dinosaur shows the olfactory bulbs (red) and the forebrain (blue). Credit: Courtesy of Yoshitsugu Kobayashi.
Tyrannosaurus rex relied on its elite nose to sniff out victims and take down live prey at night, a new study shows.
Some scientists previously had considered T. rex a scavenger of carrion, rather than a hunter, due to various features including its sense of smell. The new study, which analyzed data for a range of meat-eating dinosaurs as well as living carnivores (alligators), suggests T. rex likely was a true hunter and took down live prey such as other dinosaurs.
/////////////////
Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor both had a very keen sense of smell according to a study published today. These frightening predators are believed to have used this keen sense of smell to hunt out prey, navigate and carry out activities in low-light conditions.
/////////////////RUNNING HAS NEVER BEEN SO POINTLESS
///////////////I HAVENT HEARD OF U EITHER
////////////THE BOREAL FORESTS
//////////////////ncreasing Number Of People Vaccinated Against Influenza Can Decrease Burden Of Disease (October 29, 2008) -- Two new studies published in the journal PLoS Medicine show that increasing the number of people vaccinated against influenza can decrease the burden of the disease, and not just in the individuals receiving the vaccine. ... > full story
//////////////////Statin Use Associated with Drops in PSA Levels
Prostate-specific antigen levels appear to drop after men begin using statins, according to an observational study published online by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The study included some 1200 men with healthy prostates who had their PSA levels measured within 2 years before filling prescriptions for a statin and again within 1 year afterward. Overall, the median PSA concentration fell by roughly 4% after statin initiation.
Despite the drop, editorialists point out that these findings do not clarify whether statins may be "preventive, therapeutic, or simply affect PSA level itself." They conclude that "only a randomized trial with histological endpoints can determine whether statins affect a man's risk of prostate cancer."
////////////////////Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. -- Bryce Courtenay
////////////////////Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss
////////////////Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt
////////////////////I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams
////////////////////
///////////////BDY PRISN
////////////////JUDGES ONLY INTERPRETE EXISTING LAW
/////////////////T. Rex Was a True Killer
By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer
posted: 28 October 2008 08:29 pm ET
Buzz up!
Add to delicious del.icio.us
Digg It! Digg It!
Save to Newsvine Newsvine
Add to reddit reddit
1 Comments | 2 Recommend
T. rex could throw around more than its vicious teeth and incredible size in the battle of survival. Its super-sized olfactory bulbs mean the carnivore could sniff out prey night or day. Credit: Courtesy of Royal Tyrrell Museum.
Full Size
Previous Image Next Image
1 of 2
T. rex could throw around more than its vicious teeth and incredible size in the battle of survival. Its super-sized olfactory bulbs mean the carnivore could sniff out prey night or day. Credit: Courtesy of Royal Tyrrell Museum.
This CT scan of the skull of an ornithomimid dinosaur shows the olfactory bulbs (red) and the forebrain (blue). Credit: Courtesy of Yoshitsugu Kobayashi.
Tyrannosaurus rex relied on its elite nose to sniff out victims and take down live prey at night, a new study shows.
Some scientists previously had considered T. rex a scavenger of carrion, rather than a hunter, due to various features including its sense of smell. The new study, which analyzed data for a range of meat-eating dinosaurs as well as living carnivores (alligators), suggests T. rex likely was a true hunter and took down live prey such as other dinosaurs.
/////////////////
Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor both had a very keen sense of smell according to a study published today. These frightening predators are believed to have used this keen sense of smell to hunt out prey, navigate and carry out activities in low-light conditions.
/////////////////RUNNING HAS NEVER BEEN SO POINTLESS
///////////////I HAVENT HEARD OF U EITHER
////////////THE BOREAL FORESTS
//////////////////ncreasing Number Of People Vaccinated Against Influenza Can Decrease Burden Of Disease (October 29, 2008) -- Two new studies published in the journal PLoS Medicine show that increasing the number of people vaccinated against influenza can decrease the burden of the disease, and not just in the individuals receiving the vaccine. ... > full story
//////////////////Statin Use Associated with Drops in PSA Levels
Prostate-specific antigen levels appear to drop after men begin using statins, according to an observational study published online by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The study included some 1200 men with healthy prostates who had their PSA levels measured within 2 years before filling prescriptions for a statin and again within 1 year afterward. Overall, the median PSA concentration fell by roughly 4% after statin initiation.
Despite the drop, editorialists point out that these findings do not clarify whether statins may be "preventive, therapeutic, or simply affect PSA level itself." They conclude that "only a randomized trial with histological endpoints can determine whether statins affect a man's risk of prostate cancer."
////////////////////Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky. -- Bryce Courtenay
////////////////////Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss
////////////////Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt
////////////////////I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams
////////////////////
Sunday, 26 October 2008
FYON-FND UR OWN NICHE
ECO-NICHE FITTEST
/////////////////////
“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.”-o wilde
/////////////////////99% OF ALL SPECIES WHO HAVE LIVED HAVE GONE EXTINCT
//////////////////WE ARE A SUBSET OF AFRICAN APES-DAWKINS
//////////////////Most Icelanders do not have a family name (such as Johnson, Smith, etc). So children have a given name and then father’s-name-son or father’s-name-daughter. Thus:
1. Jon has a son named Thor Jonsson and a daughter named Hafdis Jonsdottir.
2. Thor Jonsson has a son named Bjarni Thorsson and a daughter named Frida Thorsdottir.
3. And so forth.
///////////////////CHILDHOOD INDOCTRINATION PREVENTS RATIONALISM
///////////////DWKINS QUOTES BLAIR-EDUCN,EDUCN,EDUCN
/////////////////
/////////////////////
“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.”-o wilde
/////////////////////99% OF ALL SPECIES WHO HAVE LIVED HAVE GONE EXTINCT
//////////////////WE ARE A SUBSET OF AFRICAN APES-DAWKINS
//////////////////Most Icelanders do not have a family name (such as Johnson, Smith, etc). So children have a given name and then father’s-name-son or father’s-name-daughter. Thus:
1. Jon has a son named Thor Jonsson and a daughter named Hafdis Jonsdottir.
2. Thor Jonsson has a son named Bjarni Thorsson and a daughter named Frida Thorsdottir.
3. And so forth.
///////////////////CHILDHOOD INDOCTRINATION PREVENTS RATIONALISM
///////////////DWKINS QUOTES BLAIR-EDUCN,EDUCN,EDUCN
/////////////////
Thursday, 23 October 2008
CDS 231008-CARBOREXIA
//////////////////Carborexia is a cute play in the neologism game. It refers to a condition in which a person strives ardently to reduce his or her carbon footprint, much as a person with anorexia strives to reduce her or his body mass.
/////////////////The Mysterium Tremendum... and You
by Alexander Green
Dear Reader,
Last night I listened to a lecture by physicist Lawrence Krauss and was dismayed to hear his comments on scientific literacy in this country.
For example, when asked a straightforward true/false question about whether the earth revolves around the sun and takes one year to do so, half of respondents polled consistently get it wrong.
As an amateur astronomer (10-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain, for kindred spirits), I find this distressing. Too many of us know next to nothing about the universe we live in.
If your neighbor doesn't know the earth revolves around the sun, he probably isn't aware that our planet is spinning on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour and traveling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, covering over a million and a half miles a day.
He's even less likely to know that the sun itself - and its retinue of planets - is orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a hair-raising 558,000 miles per hour.
We're just hitchhikers on for a brief ride. Even at this speed, the sun takes approximately 225 million years to complete a single revolution.
Why so long? Because the Milky Way is bigger than our brains can imagine. Light, traveling 186,000 miles per second, takes 100,000 years to cross our galaxy.
Moreover, the Milky Way itself is traveling at roughly 660,000 miles per hour (and you wonder why you always feel rushed), gravitationally attracted to the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The Virgo Supercluster, in turn, is attracted to an even larger assembly of galaxies, the Great Attractor.
(Just so we're on the same page, the Great Attractor is a gravitation anomaly in intergalactic space, not Angelina Jolie.)
Like most galaxies, the Milky Way is mostly empty space. But it is home to over 200 billion stars. These stars, of course, are simply other suns. Every galaxy has billions of suns. And a recent Hubble Space Telescope image indicates there are over 240 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
The next time you go outside and look up at the twinkling lights - assuming you don't live near Broadway and 52nd - consider that there are more stars in the known universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. (Billions and billions, indeed.)
Earth itself is orbiting a fairly ordinary star, a medium-size yellow dwarf. Beginning in October 1995, however, astronomers began discovering planets outside our solar system orbiting other stars. So far 313 of these "extrasolar" planets have been discovered, leading scientists to conclude that there are probably hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of planets out there.
Do any of them contain life? No one knows. But if extraterrestrial life exists, it is almost certainly weirder than anything having a drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars.
(As the English Astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington famously said, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.")
Cosmologists estimate the universe is 156 billion light-years wide and 13.7 billion years old. How do they know these things? Through reason, evidence, and experimentation. Or, more specifically, by observing and measuring the redshifts of galaxies, the abundance of light elements, and the cosmic background radiation in the heavens.
Much about the universe remains beyond human comprehension, however. As H.L. Mencken said, "Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."
When asked what happened before the Big Bang, for example, physicist Stephen Hawking replies that the question is tantamount to asking "what lies north of the north pole?"
Some things we just don't know - and likely never will.
Yet it's worth remembering that everyone who lived and died before the 20th century never had good answers to these big questions about the universe. They looked up at night and wondered. They speculated. They told each other myths. But they didn't know.
Yet now that science has finally got it right, millions haven't bothered to learn.
Richard Dawkins, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, writes that, "After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?"
The men and women who have visited space certainly have strong opinions on the subject. Many describe it as a near-mystical experience.
Astronaut James Irwin said, "The earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man..."
After returning from the moon, Neil Armstrong said, "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine."
Space exploration has much to offer us, the earthbound majority. It inspires us. It teaches us brotherhood and humility. It reveals the connection between us and everything else that exists, reminding us of our place in the tapestry of creation. It provides us with a sense of wonder, a feeling of awe.
In fact, much of what we understand about the cosmos dovetails with Rudolph Otto's characteristics of religious experience: the holy; the sacred; gratitude and oblation; thanksgiving; awe before the mysterium tremendum; the sense of the divine; the ineffable; the quality of exaltedness and sublimity; powerlessness; the impulse to surrender and to kneel; a sense of the eternal; fusion with the universe as a whole.
These experiences are open to anyone who looks up at night, believers and non-believers alike.
In "Pale Blue Dot," astronomer Carl Sagan writes:
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and, I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Carpe
////////////////SPIRITUAL WEALTH
//////////////////// Focus on Your Food, Not the Tube
According to research in the UK, women who watching TV while having a meal desired more food once they'd finished eating.
///////////////////Racist/casteist imbeciles exist everywhere!
//////////////////////
/////////////////The Mysterium Tremendum... and You
by Alexander Green
Dear Reader,
Last night I listened to a lecture by physicist Lawrence Krauss and was dismayed to hear his comments on scientific literacy in this country.
For example, when asked a straightforward true/false question about whether the earth revolves around the sun and takes one year to do so, half of respondents polled consistently get it wrong.
As an amateur astronomer (10-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain, for kindred spirits), I find this distressing. Too many of us know next to nothing about the universe we live in.
If your neighbor doesn't know the earth revolves around the sun, he probably isn't aware that our planet is spinning on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour and traveling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, covering over a million and a half miles a day.
He's even less likely to know that the sun itself - and its retinue of planets - is orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a hair-raising 558,000 miles per hour.
We're just hitchhikers on for a brief ride. Even at this speed, the sun takes approximately 225 million years to complete a single revolution.
Why so long? Because the Milky Way is bigger than our brains can imagine. Light, traveling 186,000 miles per second, takes 100,000 years to cross our galaxy.
Moreover, the Milky Way itself is traveling at roughly 660,000 miles per hour (and you wonder why you always feel rushed), gravitationally attracted to the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The Virgo Supercluster, in turn, is attracted to an even larger assembly of galaxies, the Great Attractor.
(Just so we're on the same page, the Great Attractor is a gravitation anomaly in intergalactic space, not Angelina Jolie.)
Like most galaxies, the Milky Way is mostly empty space. But it is home to over 200 billion stars. These stars, of course, are simply other suns. Every galaxy has billions of suns. And a recent Hubble Space Telescope image indicates there are over 240 billion galaxies in the visible universe.
The next time you go outside and look up at the twinkling lights - assuming you don't live near Broadway and 52nd - consider that there are more stars in the known universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. (Billions and billions, indeed.)
Earth itself is orbiting a fairly ordinary star, a medium-size yellow dwarf. Beginning in October 1995, however, astronomers began discovering planets outside our solar system orbiting other stars. So far 313 of these "extrasolar" planets have been discovered, leading scientists to conclude that there are probably hundreds of billions - if not trillions - of planets out there.
Do any of them contain life? No one knows. But if extraterrestrial life exists, it is almost certainly weirder than anything having a drink at the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars.
(As the English Astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington famously said, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.")
Cosmologists estimate the universe is 156 billion light-years wide and 13.7 billion years old. How do they know these things? Through reason, evidence, and experimentation. Or, more specifically, by observing and measuring the redshifts of galaxies, the abundance of light elements, and the cosmic background radiation in the heavens.
Much about the universe remains beyond human comprehension, however. As H.L. Mencken said, "Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."
When asked what happened before the Big Bang, for example, physicist Stephen Hawking replies that the question is tantamount to asking "what lies north of the north pole?"
Some things we just don't know - and likely never will.
Yet it's worth remembering that everyone who lived and died before the 20th century never had good answers to these big questions about the universe. They looked up at night and wondered. They speculated. They told each other myths. But they didn't know.
Yet now that science has finally got it right, millions haven't bothered to learn.
Richard Dawkins, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, writes that, "After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it?"
The men and women who have visited space certainly have strong opinions on the subject. Many describe it as a near-mystical experience.
Astronaut James Irwin said, "The earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man..."
After returning from the moon, Neil Armstrong said, "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine."
Space exploration has much to offer us, the earthbound majority. It inspires us. It teaches us brotherhood and humility. It reveals the connection between us and everything else that exists, reminding us of our place in the tapestry of creation. It provides us with a sense of wonder, a feeling of awe.
In fact, much of what we understand about the cosmos dovetails with Rudolph Otto's characteristics of religious experience: the holy; the sacred; gratitude and oblation; thanksgiving; awe before the mysterium tremendum; the sense of the divine; the ineffable; the quality of exaltedness and sublimity; powerlessness; the impulse to surrender and to kneel; a sense of the eternal; fusion with the universe as a whole.
These experiences are open to anyone who looks up at night, believers and non-believers alike.
In "Pale Blue Dot," astronomer Carl Sagan writes:
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and, I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Carpe
////////////////SPIRITUAL WEALTH
//////////////////// Focus on Your Food, Not the Tube
According to research in the UK, women who watching TV while having a meal desired more food once they'd finished eating.
///////////////////Racist/casteist imbeciles exist everywhere!
//////////////////////
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
CDS 221008-LE MAIN
///////////////Wealth gap between UK rich and poor narrows
22/10/2008
The gap between rich and poor has narrowed faster in the UK than in any other developed nation since 2000, researchers said yesterday.
But the 20 per cent earnings gap is still wider than in most first world countries.
A study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development blamed unemployment, single parenthood and lack of social mobility.
It said: "What your parents earned affects your earnings much more than elsewhere."
The OECD's Mark Pearson, warned: "Now we are entering recession, inequality and poverty may increase again."
////////////////////The advent of photosynthesis: postponing the event
The oldest widely accepted evidence for oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth comes from hydro-carbon biomarkers extracted from 2.7-billion-year-old shales in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, thought to be evidence of eukaryotes and photosynthetic cyanobacteria. This early date has caused controversy because of the long delay between this earliest appearance of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria and the 'great oxidation event' that caused the rise of atmospheric oxygen some 300 million years later. New work by Rasmussen et al. shows that the organic biomarkers are not of Archaean age and must have entered the rocks later, some time after about 2.2 billion years ago. The earliest unambiguous fossil evidence for eukaryotes and cyanobacteria thus reverts to 1.78–1.68 and 2.15 billion years, respectively.
////////////////////Pectin Power: Why Fruits And Vegetables May Protect Against Cancer's Spread (10/18/2008)
Tags:
cancer, pectin
Scientists have found a new possible explanation for why people who eat more fruit and vegetables may gain protection against the spread of cancers.
They have shown that a fragment released from pectin, found in all fruits and vegetables, binds to and is believed to inhibit galectin 3 (Gal3), a protein that plays a role in all stages of cancer progression.
"Most claims for the anticancer effects of foods are based on population studies," says Professor Vic Morris from the Institute of Food Research. "For this research we tested a molecular mechanism and showed that it is viable."
Population studies such as EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer, identified a strong link between eating lots of fibre and a lower risk of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. But exactly how fibre exerts a protective effect is unknown.
Pectin is better known for its jam-setting qualities and as being a component of dietary fibre. The present study supports a more exciting and subtle role.
///////////////////ALL NEED DOWNTIME
////////////////ANXIETY-PAIN -EVOLN SPEAKING MOTIVATES BEARER TO TAKE AXN
//////////////An idle mind is..........................The best way to relax
/////////////////Superstition
Belief in the Age of Science
Robert L. Park
To read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8720.html
From uttering a prayer before boarding a plane, to exploring past lives through hypnosis, has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture? Robert Park, the best-selling author of Voodoo Science, argues that it has. In Superstition, Park asks why people persist in superstitious convictions long after science has shown them to be ill-founded. He takes on supernatural beliefs from religion and the afterlife to New Age spiritualism and faith-based medical claims. He examines recent controversies and concludes that science is the only way we have of understanding the world.
"If a tree falls on a scientist in a forest with no one else around does it mean he won't make a sound? Not if that scientist is the indomitable Bob Park, the skeptic's skeptic, the Ralph Nader of nonsense, the man who rose from the (nearly) dead to pen this uncompromising critique of superstition and the beliefs that follow once you abandon science and reason. Read this book. Now."--Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic and author of
////////////////
22/10/2008
The gap between rich and poor has narrowed faster in the UK than in any other developed nation since 2000, researchers said yesterday.
But the 20 per cent earnings gap is still wider than in most first world countries.
A study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development blamed unemployment, single parenthood and lack of social mobility.
It said: "What your parents earned affects your earnings much more than elsewhere."
The OECD's Mark Pearson, warned: "Now we are entering recession, inequality and poverty may increase again."
////////////////////The advent of photosynthesis: postponing the event
The oldest widely accepted evidence for oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth comes from hydro-carbon biomarkers extracted from 2.7-billion-year-old shales in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, thought to be evidence of eukaryotes and photosynthetic cyanobacteria. This early date has caused controversy because of the long delay between this earliest appearance of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria and the 'great oxidation event' that caused the rise of atmospheric oxygen some 300 million years later. New work by Rasmussen et al. shows that the organic biomarkers are not of Archaean age and must have entered the rocks later, some time after about 2.2 billion years ago. The earliest unambiguous fossil evidence for eukaryotes and cyanobacteria thus reverts to 1.78–1.68 and 2.15 billion years, respectively.
////////////////////Pectin Power: Why Fruits And Vegetables May Protect Against Cancer's Spread (10/18/2008)
Tags:
cancer, pectin
Scientists have found a new possible explanation for why people who eat more fruit and vegetables may gain protection against the spread of cancers.
They have shown that a fragment released from pectin, found in all fruits and vegetables, binds to and is believed to inhibit galectin 3 (Gal3), a protein that plays a role in all stages of cancer progression.
"Most claims for the anticancer effects of foods are based on population studies," says Professor Vic Morris from the Institute of Food Research. "For this research we tested a molecular mechanism and showed that it is viable."
Population studies such as EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer, identified a strong link between eating lots of fibre and a lower risk of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. But exactly how fibre exerts a protective effect is unknown.
Pectin is better known for its jam-setting qualities and as being a component of dietary fibre. The present study supports a more exciting and subtle role.
///////////////////ALL NEED DOWNTIME
////////////////ANXIETY-PAIN -EVOLN SPEAKING MOTIVATES BEARER TO TAKE AXN
//////////////An idle mind is..........................The best way to relax
/////////////////Superstition
Belief in the Age of Science
Robert L. Park
To read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8720.html
From uttering a prayer before boarding a plane, to exploring past lives through hypnosis, has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture? Robert Park, the best-selling author of Voodoo Science, argues that it has. In Superstition, Park asks why people persist in superstitious convictions long after science has shown them to be ill-founded. He takes on supernatural beliefs from religion and the afterlife to New Age spiritualism and faith-based medical claims. He examines recent controversies and concludes that science is the only way we have of understanding the world.
"If a tree falls on a scientist in a forest with no one else around does it mean he won't make a sound? Not if that scientist is the indomitable Bob Park, the skeptic's skeptic, the Ralph Nader of nonsense, the man who rose from the (nearly) dead to pen this uncompromising critique of superstition and the beliefs that follow once you abandon science and reason. Read this book. Now."--Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic and author of
////////////////
Monday, 20 October 2008
MCLWP
acking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?
How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?
By Gary Stix
The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves.
The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime.
In the past 10 years, however, more realistic approximations of technologies originally evoked in the cyberpunk literature have made their appearance. A person with electrodes implanted inside his brain has used neural signals alone to control a prosthetic arm, a prelude to allowing a human to bypass limbs immobilized by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or stroke. Researchers are also investigating how to send electrical messages in the other direction as well, providing feedback that enables a primate to actually sense what a robotic arm is touching.
But how far can we go in fashioning replacement parts for the brain and the rest of the nervous system? Besides controlling a computer cursor or robot arm, will the technology somehow actually enable the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons to function as a clandestine repository for pilfered industrial espionage data or another plot element borrowed from Gibson?
Will Human Become Machine?
Today’s Hollywood scriptwriters and futurists, less skilled heirs of the original cyberpunk tradition, have embraced these neurotechnologies. The Singularity Is Near, scheduled for release next year, is a film based on the ideas of computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who has posited that humans will eventually achieve a form of immortality by transferring a digital blueprint of their brain into a computer or robot.
Yet the dream of eternity as a Max Headroom–like avatar trapped inside a television set (or as a copy-and-paste job into the latest humanoid bot) remains only slightly less distant than when René Descartes ruminated on mind-body dualism in the 17th century. The wholesale transfer of self—a machine-based facsimile of the perception of the ruddy hues of a sunrise, the constantly shifting internal emotional palette and the rest of the mix that combines to evoke the uniquely subjective sense of the world that constitutes the essence of conscious life—is still nothing more than a prop for fiction writers.
Hoopla over thought-controlled prostheses, moreover, obscures the lack of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of neural functioning needed to feed information into the brain to re-create a real-life cyberpunk experience. “We know very little about brain circuits for higher cognition,” says Richard A. Andersen, a neuroscientist at Caltech.
What, then, might realistically be achieved by interactions between brains and machines? Do the advances from the first EEG experiment to brain-controlled arms and cursors suggest an inevitable, deterministic progression, if not toward a Kurzweilian singularity, then perhaps toward the possibility of inputting at least some high-level cognitive information into the brain? Could we perhaps download War and Peace or, with a nod to The Matrix, a manual of how to fly a
helicopter? How about inscribing the sentence “See Spot run” into the memory of someone who is unconscious of the transfer? How about just the word “see”?
These questions are not entirely academic, although some wags might muse that it would be easier just to buy a pair of reading glasses and do things the old-fashioned way. Even if a pipeline to the cortex remains forever a figment of science fiction, an understanding of how photons, sound waves, scent molecules and pressure on the skin get translated into lasting memories will be more than mere cyberpunk entertainment. A neural prosthesis built from knowledge of these underlying processes could help stroke victims or Alz heimer’s patients form new memories.
Primitive means of jacking in already reside inside the skulls of thousands of people. Deaf or profoundly hearing-impaired individuals carry cochlear implants that stimulate the auditory nerve with sounds picked up by a microphone—a device that neuroscientist Michael S. Gaz zaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has characterized as the first successful neuroprosthesis in humans. Arrays of electrodes that serve as artificial retinas are in the laboratory. If they work, they might be tweaked to give humans night vision.
The more ambitious goal of linking Amazon.com directly to the hippocampus, a neural structure involved with forming memories, requires technology that has yet to be invented. The bill of particulars would include ways of establishing reliable connections between neurons and the extracranial world—and a means to translate a digital version of War and Peace into the language that neurons use to communicate with one another. An inkling of how this might be done can be sought by examining leading work on brain-machine interfaces.
Your Brain on Text
Jacking text into the brain requires consideration of whether to insert electrodes directly into tissue, an impediment that might make neural implants impractical for anyone but the disabled. As has been known for nearly a century, the brain’s electrical activity can be detected without cracking bone. What looks like a swimming cap studded with electrodes can transmit signals from a paralyzed patient, thereby enabling typing of letters on a screen or actual surfing of the Web. Niels Birbaumer of the University of Tübingen in Germany, a leading developer of the technology, asserts that trial-and-error stimulation of the cortex using a magnetic signal from outside the skull, along with the electrode cap to record which neurons are activated, might be able to locate the words “see” or “run.” Once mapped, these areas could be fired up again to evoke those memories—at least in theory.
Some neurotechnologists think that if particular words reside in specific spots in the brain (which is debatable), finding those spots would probably require greater precision than is afforded by a wired swim cap. One of the ongoing experiments with invasive implants could possibly lead to the needed fine-level targeting. Philip R. Kennedy of Neural Signals and his colleagues designed a device that records the output of neurons. The hookup lets a stroke victim send a signal, through thought alone, to a computer that interprets it as, say, a vowel, which can then be vocalized by a speech synthesizer, a step toward forming whole words. This type of brain-machine interface might also eventually be used for activating individual neurons.
Still more precise hookups might be furnished by nanoscale fibers, measuring 100 nanometers or less in diameter, which could easily tap into single neurons because of their dimensions and their electrical and mechanical properties. Jun Li of Kansas State University and his colleagues have crafted a brushlike structure in which nano fiber bristles serve as electrodes for stimulating or receiving neural signals. Li foresees it as a way to stimulate neurons to allay Parkinson’s disease or depression, to control a prosthetic arm or even to flex astronauts’ muscles during long spaceflights to prevent the inevitable muscle wasting that occurs in zero gravity.
Learning the Language
Fulfilling the fantasy of inputting a calculus text—or even plugging in Traveler’s French before going on vacation—would require far deeper insight into the brain signals that encode language and other neural representations.
Unraveling the neural code is one of the most imposing challenges in neuroscience—and, to misappropriate Freud, would likely pave a royal road to an understanding of consciousness. Theorists have advanced many differing ideas to explain how the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that connect them can ping meaningful messages to one another. The oldest is that the code corresponds to the rate of firing of the voltage spikes generated by a neuron.
Whereas the rate code may suffice for some stimuli, it might not be enough for booting a Marcel Proust or a Richard Feynman, supplying a mental screen capture of a madeleine cake or the conceptual abstraction of a textbook of differential equations. More recent work has focused on the precise timing of the intervals between each spike (temporal codes) and the constantly changing patterns of how neurons fire together (population codes).
Some help toward downloading to the brain might come from a decadelong endeavor to build an artificial hippocampus to help people with memory deficits, which may have the corollary benefit of helping researchers gain insights into the coding process. A collaboration between the University of Southern California and Wake Forest University has worked to fashion a replacement body part for this memory-forming brain structure. The hippocampus, seated deep within the brain’s temporal lobe, sustains damage in stroke or Alzheimer’s. An electronic bypass of a damaged hippocampus could restore the ability to create new memories. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, might eventually go further, enhancing normal memory or helping to deduce the particular codes needed for high- level cognition.
The two groups—led by Theodore W. Berger at U.S.C. and Samuel Deadwyler at Wake Forest—are preparing a technical paper showing that an artificial hippocampus took over from the biological organ the task of consolidating a rat’s memory of pressing a lever to receive a drop of water. Normally the hippocampus emits signals that are relayed to cortical areas responsible for storing the long-term memory of an experience. For the experiment, a chemical temporarily incapacitated the hippocampus. When the rat pressed the correct bar, electrical input from sensory and other areas of the cortex were channeled through a microchip, which, the scientists say, dispatched the same signals the hippocampus would have sent. A demonstration that an artificial device mimicked hippocampal output would mark a step toward deducing the underlying code that could be used to create a memory in the motor cortex—and perhaps one day to unravel ciphers for even higher-level behaviors.
If the codes for the sentence “See Spot run”—or perhaps an entire technical manual—could be ascertained, it might, in theory, be possible to input them directly to an electrode array in the hippocampus (or cortical areas), evoking the scene in The Matrix in which instructions for flying a helicopter are downloaded by cell phone. Artificial hippocampus research postulates a scenario only slightly more prosaic. “The kinds of examples [the U.S. Department of Defense] likes to typically use are coded information for flying an F-15,” says Berger.
The seeming simplicity of the model of neural input envisaged by artificial hippocampus-related studies may raise more questions than it answers. Would such an implant overwrite existing memories? Would the code for the sentence “See Spot run” be the same for me as it is for you or, for that matter, a native Kurdish speaker? Would the hippocampal codes merge cleanly with other circuitry that provides the appropriate context, a semantic framework, for the sentence? Would “See Spot run” be misinterpreted as a laundry mishap instead of a trotting dog?
Some neuroscientists think the language of the brain may not be deciphered until understanding moves beyond the reading of mere voltage spikes. “Just getting a lot of signals and trying to understand what these signals mean and correlating them with particular behavior is not going to solve it,” notes Henry Markram, director of neuroscience and technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. A given input into a neuron or groups of neurons can produce a particular output—conversion of sensory inputs to long-term memory by the hippocampus, for instance—through many different pathways. “As long as there are lots of different ways to do it, you’re not even close,” he says.
The Blue Brain Project, which Markram heads, is an attempt that began in 2005 to use supercomputer-based simulations to reverse-engineer the brain at the molecular and cellular levels—modeling first the simpler rat organ and then the human version to unravel the underlying function of neural processes. The latter task awaits a computer that boasts a more than 1,000-fold improvement over the processing power of current supercomputers. The actual code, when it does emerge, may be structured very differently from what appears in today’s textbooks. “I think there will be a conceptual breakthrough that will have significant implications for how we think of reality,” Markram says. “It will be quite a profound thing. That’s probably why it’s such an intractable problem.”
The challenge involved in figuring out how to move information into the brain suggests a practical foreseeable limit for how far neurotechnology might be advanced. The task of forming the multitude of connections that make a memory is vastly different from magnetizing a set of bits on a hard disk. “Complex information like the contents of a book would require the interactions of a very large number of brain cells over a very large area of the nervous system,” observes neuroscientist John P. Donoghue of Brown University. “Therefore, you couldn’t address all of them, getting them to store in their connections the correct kind of information. So I would say based on current knowledge, it’s not possible.”
Writing to the brain may remain a dream lost in cyberspace. But the seeming impossibility does not make Donoghue less sanguine about ultimate expectations for feeding information the other way and developing brain-controlled prostheses for the severely disabled. He has been a leader in studies to implant an array of multiple electrodes into the brain that can furnish a direct line from the cortex to a prosthetic arm or even a wheelchair.
Donoghue predicts that in the next five years brain-machine interfaces will let a paralyzed person pick up a cup and take a drink of water and that, in some distant future, these systems might be further refined so that a person with an upper spinal cord injury might accomplish the unthinkable, perhaps even playing a game of basketball with prosthetics that would make a reality of The Six Million Dollar Man, the 1970s television series. Even without an information pipeline into the brain, disabled patients and basic researchers might still reap the benefits of lesser substitutes. Gert Pfurtscheller of the Graz University of Technology in Austria and his colleagues reported last year on a patient with a spinal cord injury who was able, merely by thinking, to traverse a virtual environment, moving from one end to the other of a simulated street. Duke University’s Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, another pioneer in brain-machine interfaces, has begun to explore how monkeys connected to brain-controlled prosthetic devices begin to develop a kinesthetic awareness, a sense of movement and touch, that is completely separate from sensory inputs into their biological bodies. “There’s some physiological evidence that during the experiment they feel more connected to the robots than to their own bodies,” he says.
The most important consequences of these investigations may be something other than neural implants and robotic arms. An understanding of central nervous system development acquired by the Blue Brain Project or another simulation may let educators understand the best ways to teach children and determine at what point a given pedagogical technique should be applied. “You can build an educational development program that is engineered to, in the shortest possible time, allow you to acquire certain capabilities,” Markram says. If he is right, research on neural implants and brain simulations will produce more meaningful practical benefits than dreams of the brain as a flash drive drawn from 20th-century science-fiction literature.
Note: This article was originally published with the title, "Jacking Into the Brain".
///////////////////////Mesonoxian
Pertaining to midnight
//////////////////////////
How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?
By Gary Stix
The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves.
The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s own lifetime.
In the past 10 years, however, more realistic approximations of technologies originally evoked in the cyberpunk literature have made their appearance. A person with electrodes implanted inside his brain has used neural signals alone to control a prosthetic arm, a prelude to allowing a human to bypass limbs immobilized by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or stroke. Researchers are also investigating how to send electrical messages in the other direction as well, providing feedback that enables a primate to actually sense what a robotic arm is touching.
But how far can we go in fashioning replacement parts for the brain and the rest of the nervous system? Besides controlling a computer cursor or robot arm, will the technology somehow actually enable the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons to function as a clandestine repository for pilfered industrial espionage data or another plot element borrowed from Gibson?
Will Human Become Machine?
Today’s Hollywood scriptwriters and futurists, less skilled heirs of the original cyberpunk tradition, have embraced these neurotechnologies. The Singularity Is Near, scheduled for release next year, is a film based on the ideas of computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who has posited that humans will eventually achieve a form of immortality by transferring a digital blueprint of their brain into a computer or robot.
Yet the dream of eternity as a Max Headroom–like avatar trapped inside a television set (or as a copy-and-paste job into the latest humanoid bot) remains only slightly less distant than when René Descartes ruminated on mind-body dualism in the 17th century. The wholesale transfer of self—a machine-based facsimile of the perception of the ruddy hues of a sunrise, the constantly shifting internal emotional palette and the rest of the mix that combines to evoke the uniquely subjective sense of the world that constitutes the essence of conscious life—is still nothing more than a prop for fiction writers.
Hoopla over thought-controlled prostheses, moreover, obscures the lack of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of neural functioning needed to feed information into the brain to re-create a real-life cyberpunk experience. “We know very little about brain circuits for higher cognition,” says Richard A. Andersen, a neuroscientist at Caltech.
What, then, might realistically be achieved by interactions between brains and machines? Do the advances from the first EEG experiment to brain-controlled arms and cursors suggest an inevitable, deterministic progression, if not toward a Kurzweilian singularity, then perhaps toward the possibility of inputting at least some high-level cognitive information into the brain? Could we perhaps download War and Peace or, with a nod to The Matrix, a manual of how to fly a
helicopter? How about inscribing the sentence “See Spot run” into the memory of someone who is unconscious of the transfer? How about just the word “see”?
These questions are not entirely academic, although some wags might muse that it would be easier just to buy a pair of reading glasses and do things the old-fashioned way. Even if a pipeline to the cortex remains forever a figment of science fiction, an understanding of how photons, sound waves, scent molecules and pressure on the skin get translated into lasting memories will be more than mere cyberpunk entertainment. A neural prosthesis built from knowledge of these underlying processes could help stroke victims or Alz heimer’s patients form new memories.
Primitive means of jacking in already reside inside the skulls of thousands of people. Deaf or profoundly hearing-impaired individuals carry cochlear implants that stimulate the auditory nerve with sounds picked up by a microphone—a device that neuroscientist Michael S. Gaz zaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has characterized as the first successful neuroprosthesis in humans. Arrays of electrodes that serve as artificial retinas are in the laboratory. If they work, they might be tweaked to give humans night vision.
The more ambitious goal of linking Amazon.com directly to the hippocampus, a neural structure involved with forming memories, requires technology that has yet to be invented. The bill of particulars would include ways of establishing reliable connections between neurons and the extracranial world—and a means to translate a digital version of War and Peace into the language that neurons use to communicate with one another. An inkling of how this might be done can be sought by examining leading work on brain-machine interfaces.
Your Brain on Text
Jacking text into the brain requires consideration of whether to insert electrodes directly into tissue, an impediment that might make neural implants impractical for anyone but the disabled. As has been known for nearly a century, the brain’s electrical activity can be detected without cracking bone. What looks like a swimming cap studded with electrodes can transmit signals from a paralyzed patient, thereby enabling typing of letters on a screen or actual surfing of the Web. Niels Birbaumer of the University of Tübingen in Germany, a leading developer of the technology, asserts that trial-and-error stimulation of the cortex using a magnetic signal from outside the skull, along with the electrode cap to record which neurons are activated, might be able to locate the words “see” or “run.” Once mapped, these areas could be fired up again to evoke those memories—at least in theory.
Some neurotechnologists think that if particular words reside in specific spots in the brain (which is debatable), finding those spots would probably require greater precision than is afforded by a wired swim cap. One of the ongoing experiments with invasive implants could possibly lead to the needed fine-level targeting. Philip R. Kennedy of Neural Signals and his colleagues designed a device that records the output of neurons. The hookup lets a stroke victim send a signal, through thought alone, to a computer that interprets it as, say, a vowel, which can then be vocalized by a speech synthesizer, a step toward forming whole words. This type of brain-machine interface might also eventually be used for activating individual neurons.
Still more precise hookups might be furnished by nanoscale fibers, measuring 100 nanometers or less in diameter, which could easily tap into single neurons because of their dimensions and their electrical and mechanical properties. Jun Li of Kansas State University and his colleagues have crafted a brushlike structure in which nano fiber bristles serve as electrodes for stimulating or receiving neural signals. Li foresees it as a way to stimulate neurons to allay Parkinson’s disease or depression, to control a prosthetic arm or even to flex astronauts’ muscles during long spaceflights to prevent the inevitable muscle wasting that occurs in zero gravity.
Learning the Language
Fulfilling the fantasy of inputting a calculus text—or even plugging in Traveler’s French before going on vacation—would require far deeper insight into the brain signals that encode language and other neural representations.
Unraveling the neural code is one of the most imposing challenges in neuroscience—and, to misappropriate Freud, would likely pave a royal road to an understanding of consciousness. Theorists have advanced many differing ideas to explain how the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses that connect them can ping meaningful messages to one another. The oldest is that the code corresponds to the rate of firing of the voltage spikes generated by a neuron.
Whereas the rate code may suffice for some stimuli, it might not be enough for booting a Marcel Proust or a Richard Feynman, supplying a mental screen capture of a madeleine cake or the conceptual abstraction of a textbook of differential equations. More recent work has focused on the precise timing of the intervals between each spike (temporal codes) and the constantly changing patterns of how neurons fire together (population codes).
Some help toward downloading to the brain might come from a decadelong endeavor to build an artificial hippocampus to help people with memory deficits, which may have the corollary benefit of helping researchers gain insights into the coding process. A collaboration between the University of Southern California and Wake Forest University has worked to fashion a replacement body part for this memory-forming brain structure. The hippocampus, seated deep within the brain’s temporal lobe, sustains damage in stroke or Alzheimer’s. An electronic bypass of a damaged hippocampus could restore the ability to create new memories. The project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, might eventually go further, enhancing normal memory or helping to deduce the particular codes needed for high- level cognition.
The two groups—led by Theodore W. Berger at U.S.C. and Samuel Deadwyler at Wake Forest—are preparing a technical paper showing that an artificial hippocampus took over from the biological organ the task of consolidating a rat’s memory of pressing a lever to receive a drop of water. Normally the hippocampus emits signals that are relayed to cortical areas responsible for storing the long-term memory of an experience. For the experiment, a chemical temporarily incapacitated the hippocampus. When the rat pressed the correct bar, electrical input from sensory and other areas of the cortex were channeled through a microchip, which, the scientists say, dispatched the same signals the hippocampus would have sent. A demonstration that an artificial device mimicked hippocampal output would mark a step toward deducing the underlying code that could be used to create a memory in the motor cortex—and perhaps one day to unravel ciphers for even higher-level behaviors.
If the codes for the sentence “See Spot run”—or perhaps an entire technical manual—could be ascertained, it might, in theory, be possible to input them directly to an electrode array in the hippocampus (or cortical areas), evoking the scene in The Matrix in which instructions for flying a helicopter are downloaded by cell phone. Artificial hippocampus research postulates a scenario only slightly more prosaic. “The kinds of examples [the U.S. Department of Defense] likes to typically use are coded information for flying an F-15,” says Berger.
The seeming simplicity of the model of neural input envisaged by artificial hippocampus-related studies may raise more questions than it answers. Would such an implant overwrite existing memories? Would the code for the sentence “See Spot run” be the same for me as it is for you or, for that matter, a native Kurdish speaker? Would the hippocampal codes merge cleanly with other circuitry that provides the appropriate context, a semantic framework, for the sentence? Would “See Spot run” be misinterpreted as a laundry mishap instead of a trotting dog?
Some neuroscientists think the language of the brain may not be deciphered until understanding moves beyond the reading of mere voltage spikes. “Just getting a lot of signals and trying to understand what these signals mean and correlating them with particular behavior is not going to solve it,” notes Henry Markram, director of neuroscience and technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. A given input into a neuron or groups of neurons can produce a particular output—conversion of sensory inputs to long-term memory by the hippocampus, for instance—through many different pathways. “As long as there are lots of different ways to do it, you’re not even close,” he says.
The Blue Brain Project, which Markram heads, is an attempt that began in 2005 to use supercomputer-based simulations to reverse-engineer the brain at the molecular and cellular levels—modeling first the simpler rat organ and then the human version to unravel the underlying function of neural processes. The latter task awaits a computer that boasts a more than 1,000-fold improvement over the processing power of current supercomputers. The actual code, when it does emerge, may be structured very differently from what appears in today’s textbooks. “I think there will be a conceptual breakthrough that will have significant implications for how we think of reality,” Markram says. “It will be quite a profound thing. That’s probably why it’s such an intractable problem.”
The challenge involved in figuring out how to move information into the brain suggests a practical foreseeable limit for how far neurotechnology might be advanced. The task of forming the multitude of connections that make a memory is vastly different from magnetizing a set of bits on a hard disk. “Complex information like the contents of a book would require the interactions of a very large number of brain cells over a very large area of the nervous system,” observes neuroscientist John P. Donoghue of Brown University. “Therefore, you couldn’t address all of them, getting them to store in their connections the correct kind of information. So I would say based on current knowledge, it’s not possible.”
Writing to the brain may remain a dream lost in cyberspace. But the seeming impossibility does not make Donoghue less sanguine about ultimate expectations for feeding information the other way and developing brain-controlled prostheses for the severely disabled. He has been a leader in studies to implant an array of multiple electrodes into the brain that can furnish a direct line from the cortex to a prosthetic arm or even a wheelchair.
Donoghue predicts that in the next five years brain-machine interfaces will let a paralyzed person pick up a cup and take a drink of water and that, in some distant future, these systems might be further refined so that a person with an upper spinal cord injury might accomplish the unthinkable, perhaps even playing a game of basketball with prosthetics that would make a reality of The Six Million Dollar Man, the 1970s television series. Even without an information pipeline into the brain, disabled patients and basic researchers might still reap the benefits of lesser substitutes. Gert Pfurtscheller of the Graz University of Technology in Austria and his colleagues reported last year on a patient with a spinal cord injury who was able, merely by thinking, to traverse a virtual environment, moving from one end to the other of a simulated street. Duke University’s Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, another pioneer in brain-machine interfaces, has begun to explore how monkeys connected to brain-controlled prosthetic devices begin to develop a kinesthetic awareness, a sense of movement and touch, that is completely separate from sensory inputs into their biological bodies. “There’s some physiological evidence that during the experiment they feel more connected to the robots than to their own bodies,” he says.
The most important consequences of these investigations may be something other than neural implants and robotic arms. An understanding of central nervous system development acquired by the Blue Brain Project or another simulation may let educators understand the best ways to teach children and determine at what point a given pedagogical technique should be applied. “You can build an educational development program that is engineered to, in the shortest possible time, allow you to acquire certain capabilities,” Markram says. If he is right, research on neural implants and brain simulations will produce more meaningful practical benefits than dreams of the brain as a flash drive drawn from 20th-century science-fiction literature.
Note: This article was originally published with the title, "Jacking Into the Brain".
///////////////////////Mesonoxian
Pertaining to midnight
//////////////////////////
AUTUMN-CAROTENE AND XANTHOCYANIN
//////////////////CHARMING BUT BEST LEFT TO THE EXPERTS
/////////////////FRY-AMERICA-SOUTH STRTS BELOW PENNSYLVANIA
///////////////////Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
//////////////////////CAUTION AND MYSELF TO THE WINDS,ON A BALLOON
/////////////////////Grief and Mourning
By Angela Morrow, RN, About.comUpdated: September 9, 2008
About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by the Medical Review Board
See More About:griefmourningbereavementdeathdying
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Bereavement Grief
Grief Process
Grief Parent
Sibling Grief
Unresolved Grief
Grief and mourning are natural responses to loss. In relation to palliative care and hospice, the process of grieving and mourning begins with the delivery of bad news. Thus, it is beneficial that bereavement care begin as soon as a patient begins palliative care or hospice.
Studies have proven that early intervention with palliative care or hospice is not only beneficial to the patient in achieving the type of death that is most desirable to them, but also for caregivers and loved ones in identifying symptoms of grief early on and providing much needed bereavement support.1
It is also important to note that under hospice care, bereavement support continues for up to one year after a loved ones death. A survivor is often faced not only with grieving the loss of their loved one, but also with the loss of the variety of roles the deceased assumed during their relationship. This can be a difficult time of adjustment that affects multiple aspects of the survivors life, not the least of which is increasing financial pressures. Ongoing bereavement counceling can help survivors adjust to the multitude of changes that occur in their lives after their loss.
Grief
Grief is a bereaved person’s internal emotional response to the loss event. It has several components: physical, behavioral, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual. It is often described by those that have gone through it as a heaviness that isn’t easily lifted. It can sometimes be so pronounced that it affects a person’s physical self and can even mimic illnesses. There is a normal response to grief and an abnormal response.
Normal Grief
Normal grief is found in the majority of survivors. It describes grief that is eventually lessened as a person readjusts to their loss. This is done with support as one moves through the four phases and the four tasks of the grief process. Grief is usually not something one “recovers” from because the loss is never regained or replaced. A grieving individual doesn’t return to the person they were before the loss; rather they usually describe their lives after loss as “different”. For some, it changes their entire identity and they will divide their lives into “before” the loss and “after” the loss.
Abnormal Grief
Abnormal, often referred to as complicated grief, is found in only 3 to 25 percent of loss survivors. There are different types of abnormal grief:
Chronic grief – the grieving person has trouble finding closure and returning to normal activities over an extended amount of time.
Delayed grief – the intentional postponement of grief. Sometime this is related to other life events or losses that drain ones ability to work through the grief process.
Disenfranchised grief – often occurs when a grieving person’s loss can’t be openly acknowledged or is one that society does not accept as a real. Examples include losses related to AIDS, miscarriage, or loss of a homosexual partner.
Exaggerated grief – intense reactions of grief that may include nightmares, delinquent behaviors, phobias (abnormal fears), and thoughts of suicide.
Sudden grief – when death takes place very suddenly without warning. Sudden grief can lead to exaggerated reactions and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Mourning
Mourning is the outward expression of grief. It is usually based on cultural, religious, or personal belief systems. Examples of mourning include visiting the gravesite of a loved one on special dates, keeping a journal or making a photo album of the deceased, and even more dramatic expressions like tearing at hair and clothes. All of these expressions are normal and it’s important to remember that mourning is a very personal expression of grief. There is no right or wrong way to do it.
////////////////////Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox
By J. Miguel Rubí
Science has given humanity more than its share of letdowns. It has set limits to our technology, such as the impossibility of reaching the speed of light; failed to overcome our vulnerabilities to cancer and other diseases; and confronted us with inconvenient truths, as with global climate change. But of all the comedowns, the second law of thermodynamics might well be the biggest. It says we live in a universe that is becoming ever more disordered and that there is nothing we can do about it. The mere act of living contributes to the inexorable degeneration of the world. No matter how advanced our machines become, they can never completely avoid wasting some energy and running down. Not only does the second law squash the dream of a perpetual-motion machine, it suggests that the cosmos will eventually exhaust its available energy and nod off into an eternal stasis known as heat death.
Ironically, the science of thermodynamics, of which the second law is only one part, dates to an era of technological optimism, the mid-19th century, when steam engines were transforming the world and physicists such as Rudolf Clausius, Nicolas Sadi Carnot, James Joule and Lord Kelvin developed a theory of energy and heat to understand how they work and what limited their efficiency. From these nitty-gritty beginnings, thermodynamics has become one of the most important branches of physics and engineering. It is a general theory of the collective properties of complex systems, not just steam engines but also bacterial colonies, computer memory, even black holes in the cosmos. In deep ways, all these systems behave the same. All are running down, in accordance with the second law.
But despite its empirical success, the second law often seems paradoxical. The proposition that systems steadily run down seems at odds with the many instances in nature not only of disorganization and decay but also of self-organization and growth. In addition, the original derivation of the second law has serious theoretical shortcomings. By all rights, the law should not apply as widely as it does.
Many of the scientists who founded thermodynamics were conscious of these failings and sought to formulate a more complete theory, a task taken up in the 20th century by Lars Onsager, Ilya Prigogine, Sybren de Groot, Peter Mazur and others. Yet even their more sophisticated approach had limited applicability. My colleagues and I have recently made progress in solidifying the foundations of thermodynamics and extending it into new realms. We have confirmed that the second law is universal but also found that it is not nearly as gloomy as its reputation suggests.
Out of Balance
Thermodynamics is one of the most widely misunderstood branches of physics. Laypeople and scientists alike regularly use concepts such as temperature, pressure and energy without knowing their rigorous meaning and subtleties. But those of us who plumb the theory’s depths are acutely aware of the need to take care. The Achilles’ heel of thermodynamics is that, strictly speaking, it applies only when the system under study is in a quiescent state called equilibrium. In this state the system’s parameters, such as mass, energy and shape, have ceased to change. Putting two objects together at different temperatures makes heat flow from the hotter object to the colder. This process stops when both reach the same temperature—that is, when the two are in thermal equilibrium. From that point on, nothing changes.
A common example is when you put ice in a glass of water. The ice melts, and the water in the glass reaches a uniformly lower temperature. If you zoom in to the molecular level, you find an intense activity of molecules frantically moving about and endlessly bumping into one another. In equilibrium, the molecular activity organizes itself so that, statistically, the system is at rest; if some molecules speed up, others slow down, maintaining the overall distribution of velocities. Temperature describes this distribution; in fact, the very concept of temperature is meaningful only when the system is in equilibrium or sufficiently near it.
Thermodynamics therefore deals only with situations of stillness. Time plays no role in it. In reality, of course, nature never stands still, and time does matter. Everything is in a constant state of flux. The fact that classical thermodynamics is limited to equilibrium situations may come as a surprise. In introductory physics classes, students apply thermodynamics to dynamic systems such as car engines to calculate quantities such as efficiency. But these applications make an implicit assumption: that we can approximate a dynamic process as an idealized succession of equilibrium states. That is, we imagine that the system is always in equilibrium, even if the equilibrium shifts from moment to moment. Consequently, the efficiency we calculate is only an upper limit. The value that engines reach in practice is somewhat lower because they operate under nonequilibrium conditions.
The second law describes how a succession of equilibrium states can be irreversible, so that the system cannot return to its original state without exacting a price from its surroundings. A melted ice cube does not spontaneously re-form; you need to put it in the freezer, at a cost in energy. To quantify this irreversibility, the second law introduces a key quantity: entropy. Entropy is popularly described as the degree of disorder in the system, but as I will discuss later, this description can be misleading. Quantitatively, entropy is the amount of heat exchanged in a process divided by the temperature. In an isolated system, entropy always stays the same or increases.
For instance, a typical engine works by exploiting the flow of heat from a hot to a cold reservoir, which are two large masses exterior to the engine mechanism. If the reservoirs maintain a constant temperature and the engine parts are frictionless, the engine goes through its cycle in a completely reversible way; the total entropy remains constant. In a real engine, these idealizations do not apply, so the cycle is irreversible and the total entropy increases. Eventually the engine runs out of available energy, heat ceases to flow and entropy reaches a maximum value. At that point, the reservoirs and engine are in equilibrium with one another and will remain that way, unchanged, from then on.
The fact that classical thermodynamics presumes equilibrium situations limits the applicability of the second law. Entropy and temperature cannot even be defined unless the system is in equilibrium. Moreover, many systems cannot be modeled as a heat engine. The cosmos is one: if space is expanding, entropy can increase without limit, so that the universe approaches but never reaches equilibrium [see “The Cosmic Origins of Time’s Arrow,” by Sean M. Carroll; Scientific American, June]. What these systems have in common is that they are not in equilibrium or even close to it.
Order from Chaos
Nonequilibrium systems behave in some fascinating ways that the classical theory of thermodynamics does not capture and that belie the idea that nature tends to become steadily more disordered. For instance, consider a familiar appliance, the electric toaster. The wire inside it heats up because the wire material offers resistance to the flow of electric current. The second law stipulates that this process is irreversible: you cannot use a toaster to untoast a piece of bread and thereby generate electricity.
You can, however, do something similar. You can impose a temperature difference between the tips of the toaster wire, thereby ensuring the system remains out of equilibrium. Then it will indeed generate electricity. This reversal is the basis of the thermocouple, a device used to measure temperature or produce power.
A related phenomenon is reverse os mosis for seawater desalination. In standard osmosis, the difference in salt concentration across a membrane creates a difference in pressure, ensuring that water flows to the saltier side and dilutes it. The system thereby approaches equilibrium. In reverse osmosis, an external pressure keeps the system out of equilibrium, forcing water to flow over to the less salty side and become potable.
The toaster and thermocouple, and forward and reverse osmosis, are mirror-image processes. They are connected by the so-called reciprocity relation, the formulation of which won Onsager the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The symmetry between these processes reflects the reversibility of the laws governing the motion of the particles of the system. Those laws work equally well backward or forward in time. The irreversibility we observe at a macroscopic level arises only when we consider particles en masse.
The discovery of the reciprocity relation changed how physicists think of equilibrium. They used to think of it as the most highly ordered state. Although the molecules may be maximally disordered, the system overall is placid, symmetrical and orderly. Yet the reciprocity relation exemplifies how a nonequilibrium system, too, can be highly ordered. Regularities, symmetries and islands of tranquility may come up in situations far from equilibrium.
Another classic example is a thin fluid layer heated from below. Heat flows from the bottom to the top, and a temperature gradient develops across the layer. By increasing the gradient, one can increase the departure from equilibrium. For modest gradients, the fluid remains at rest. For larger gradients, however, it begins to move. Its convective motion, far from being chaotic, is orderly. Small hexagonal cells form as if the fluid were a crystal. For even larger gradients, the motion becomes turbulent. This phenomenon, known as the Bénard problem, demonstrates that order can shade into chaos and back to order as a system deviates from equilibrium.
In yet another example, an experimenter begins with a fluid at rest. The fluid is isotropic: it looks the same in every direction. The experimenter then forces the fluid to pass through a metal grid at a certain speed. Although the fluid becomes turbulent on the downstream side, its motion still takes place in one direction. Thus, the fluid is no longer isotropic. As the experimenter increases the speed of the fluid, the turbulence increases and eventually becomes so great that the fluid no longer flows one way. At this point, the fluid is again isotropic. The fluid has gone from isotropic to anisotropic and back to isotropic—a type of progression from order to disorder to order.
Standard thermodynamics does not capture such phenomena, a limitation that has become all the more pressing in recent years. Researchers in molecular biology and the nascent field of nanotechnology have discovered a great diversity of organized but ever changing structures in physical, chemical and biological systems. To explain them requires a theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
Breaking It Down
Earlier efforts to develop such a theory started from the concept of local equilibrium states. Although a system may not be in equilibrium, individual pieces of it can be. For instance, imagine stirring a cocktail with a swizzle stick. The equilibrium is disturbed by the motion of the stick but can still be found if you look closely at small pockets of fluid, which retain their internal coherence. These small regions are able to reach equilibrium if the forces acting on the system are not too large and if its properties do not change by large amounts over small distances. Concepts such as temperature and entropy apply to these islands of equilibrium, although the numerical values of these quantities may vary from island to island.
For instance, when one heats up one of the ends of a metal bar, heat flows through the bar toward the other end. The temperature difference between the ends of the bar acts as a force driving the heat flow, or flux, along the bar. A similar phenomenon occurs with a drop of ink in water. The difference in ink concentration is the driving force that makes the ink invade the host liquid until it becomes uniformly colored. These forces are linear: the heat flux is proportional to the temperature difference and the particle flux to the concentration difference, a proportionality that holds even when the forces acting on the system are strong. Even in many turbulent flows, the internal stresses in the fluid are proportional to the velocity gradients. For these cases, Onsager and others formulated a theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and showed that the second law continues to hold.
But when those conditions are not met, this theory breaks down. When a chemical reaction takes place, one substance suddenly changes into another—an abrupt change described by a nonlinear equation. Another type of failure occurs when the system is so small that the chaotic jumble of molecular motions dictates its behavior and causes the system’s properties to vary wildly over short distances. Processes taking place in small systems, such as the condensation of water vapor and the transport of ions through a protein channel in a cell membrane, are dominated by such fluctuations. In them, temperature and entropy cease to be well-defined quantities. Does the failure of the theory in these instances imply the failure of the second law, too?
In the past several years David Reguera of the University of Barcelona, José M. G. Vilar of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and I have extended thermodynamics into these realms. We have shown that many of the problems go away with a change of perspective. Our perception of abruptness depends on the timescale we use to observe these processes. If we analyzed one of the seemingly instantaneous chemical processes in slow motion, we would see a gradual transformation as if we were watching a pat of butter melting in the sun. When the process is viewed frame by frame, the changes are not abrupt.
The trick is to track the intermediate stages of the reaction using a new set of variables beyond those of classical thermodynamics. Within this expanded framework, the system remains in local thermodynamic equilibrium throughout the process. These additional variables enrich the behavior of the system. They define a landscape of energy that the system rambles through like a backpacker in the mountains. Valleys correspond to a dip in energy, sometimes involving molecular chaos, other times molecular order. The system can settle into one valley and then be kicked into another by external forces. If it is in the grasp of chaos, it can break away from disorder and find order, or vice versa.
Next, consider the problem of fluctuations. Does thermodynamics fail when systems are excessively small? A simple example shows that the answer is no. If we toss a coin only a few times, it could happen, by chance, that we would get a series of heads. But if we flip the coin many times, the result reliably approaches an average. Nature flips coins quite often. A few particles moving around in a container collide only occasionally and can maintain large velocity differences among themselves.
But even in a seemingly “small” system, the number of particles is much larger, so collisions are much more frequent and the speed of the particles is brought down to an average (if slightly fluctuating) value. Although a few isolated events may show completely unpredictable behavior, a multitude of events shows a certain regularity. Therefore, quantities such as density can fluctuate but remain predictable overall. For this reason, the second law continues to rule over the world of the small.
From Steam Engines to Molecular Motors
The original development of thermodynamics found its inspiration in the steam engine. Nowadays the field is driven by the tiny molecular engines within living cells. Though of vastly differing scales, these engines share a common function: they transform energy into motion. For instance, ATP molecules provide the fuel for myosin molecules in muscle tissue to move along actin filaments, pulling the muscle fibers to which they are attached. Other motors are powered by light, by differences in proton concentrations or by differences in temperature [see “Making Molecules into Motors,” by R. Dean Astumian; Scientific American, July 2001]. Chemical energy can drive ions through channels in a cell membrane from a region of low concentration to one of high concentration—precisely the opposite direction that they would move in the absence of an active transport mechanism.
The analogy between large and small machines is very deep. Fluctuations of the chemical energy affect a molecular motor in the same way that a random and variable amount of fuel affects the piston of a car motor. Therefore, the long tradition of applying thermodynamics to large motors can be extended to small ones. Although physicists have other mathematical tools for analyzing such systems, those tools can be tricky to apply. The equations of fluid flow, for example, require researchers to specify the conditions at the boundary of a system precisely—a Herculean task when the boundary is extremely irregular. Thermodynamics provides a computational shortcut, and it has already yielded fresh insights. Signe Kjelstrup and Dick Bedeaux, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and I have found that heat plays an underappreciated role in the function of ion channels.
In short, my colleagues and I have shown that the development of order from chaos, far from contradicting the second law, fits nicely into a broader framework of thermodynamics. We are just at the threshold of using this new understanding for practical applications. Perpetual-motion machines remain impossible, and we will still ultimately lose the battle against degeneration. But the second law does not mandate a steady degeneration. It quite happily coexists with the spontaneous development of order and complexity.
Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "The Long Arm of the Second Law".
////////////////////PRISON CONVERSION
//////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////FRY-AMERICA-SOUTH STRTS BELOW PENNSYLVANIA
///////////////////Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
//////////////////////CAUTION AND MYSELF TO THE WINDS,ON A BALLOON
/////////////////////Grief and Mourning
By Angela Morrow, RN, About.comUpdated: September 9, 2008
About.com Health's Disease and Condition content is reviewed by the Medical Review Board
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Bereavement Grief
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Unresolved Grief
Grief and mourning are natural responses to loss. In relation to palliative care and hospice, the process of grieving and mourning begins with the delivery of bad news. Thus, it is beneficial that bereavement care begin as soon as a patient begins palliative care or hospice.
Studies have proven that early intervention with palliative care or hospice is not only beneficial to the patient in achieving the type of death that is most desirable to them, but also for caregivers and loved ones in identifying symptoms of grief early on and providing much needed bereavement support.1
It is also important to note that under hospice care, bereavement support continues for up to one year after a loved ones death. A survivor is often faced not only with grieving the loss of their loved one, but also with the loss of the variety of roles the deceased assumed during their relationship. This can be a difficult time of adjustment that affects multiple aspects of the survivors life, not the least of which is increasing financial pressures. Ongoing bereavement counceling can help survivors adjust to the multitude of changes that occur in their lives after their loss.
Grief
Grief is a bereaved person’s internal emotional response to the loss event. It has several components: physical, behavioral, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual. It is often described by those that have gone through it as a heaviness that isn’t easily lifted. It can sometimes be so pronounced that it affects a person’s physical self and can even mimic illnesses. There is a normal response to grief and an abnormal response.
Normal Grief
Normal grief is found in the majority of survivors. It describes grief that is eventually lessened as a person readjusts to their loss. This is done with support as one moves through the four phases and the four tasks of the grief process. Grief is usually not something one “recovers” from because the loss is never regained or replaced. A grieving individual doesn’t return to the person they were before the loss; rather they usually describe their lives after loss as “different”. For some, it changes their entire identity and they will divide their lives into “before” the loss and “after” the loss.
Abnormal Grief
Abnormal, often referred to as complicated grief, is found in only 3 to 25 percent of loss survivors. There are different types of abnormal grief:
Chronic grief – the grieving person has trouble finding closure and returning to normal activities over an extended amount of time.
Delayed grief – the intentional postponement of grief. Sometime this is related to other life events or losses that drain ones ability to work through the grief process.
Disenfranchised grief – often occurs when a grieving person’s loss can’t be openly acknowledged or is one that society does not accept as a real. Examples include losses related to AIDS, miscarriage, or loss of a homosexual partner.
Exaggerated grief – intense reactions of grief that may include nightmares, delinquent behaviors, phobias (abnormal fears), and thoughts of suicide.
Sudden grief – when death takes place very suddenly without warning. Sudden grief can lead to exaggerated reactions and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Mourning
Mourning is the outward expression of grief. It is usually based on cultural, religious, or personal belief systems. Examples of mourning include visiting the gravesite of a loved one on special dates, keeping a journal or making a photo album of the deceased, and even more dramatic expressions like tearing at hair and clothes. All of these expressions are normal and it’s important to remember that mourning is a very personal expression of grief. There is no right or wrong way to do it.
////////////////////Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
In seeming defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, nature is filled with examples of order emerging from chaos. A new theoretical framework resolves the apparent paradox
By J. Miguel Rubí
Science has given humanity more than its share of letdowns. It has set limits to our technology, such as the impossibility of reaching the speed of light; failed to overcome our vulnerabilities to cancer and other diseases; and confronted us with inconvenient truths, as with global climate change. But of all the comedowns, the second law of thermodynamics might well be the biggest. It says we live in a universe that is becoming ever more disordered and that there is nothing we can do about it. The mere act of living contributes to the inexorable degeneration of the world. No matter how advanced our machines become, they can never completely avoid wasting some energy and running down. Not only does the second law squash the dream of a perpetual-motion machine, it suggests that the cosmos will eventually exhaust its available energy and nod off into an eternal stasis known as heat death.
Ironically, the science of thermodynamics, of which the second law is only one part, dates to an era of technological optimism, the mid-19th century, when steam engines were transforming the world and physicists such as Rudolf Clausius, Nicolas Sadi Carnot, James Joule and Lord Kelvin developed a theory of energy and heat to understand how they work and what limited their efficiency. From these nitty-gritty beginnings, thermodynamics has become one of the most important branches of physics and engineering. It is a general theory of the collective properties of complex systems, not just steam engines but also bacterial colonies, computer memory, even black holes in the cosmos. In deep ways, all these systems behave the same. All are running down, in accordance with the second law.
But despite its empirical success, the second law often seems paradoxical. The proposition that systems steadily run down seems at odds with the many instances in nature not only of disorganization and decay but also of self-organization and growth. In addition, the original derivation of the second law has serious theoretical shortcomings. By all rights, the law should not apply as widely as it does.
Many of the scientists who founded thermodynamics were conscious of these failings and sought to formulate a more complete theory, a task taken up in the 20th century by Lars Onsager, Ilya Prigogine, Sybren de Groot, Peter Mazur and others. Yet even their more sophisticated approach had limited applicability. My colleagues and I have recently made progress in solidifying the foundations of thermodynamics and extending it into new realms. We have confirmed that the second law is universal but also found that it is not nearly as gloomy as its reputation suggests.
Out of Balance
Thermodynamics is one of the most widely misunderstood branches of physics. Laypeople and scientists alike regularly use concepts such as temperature, pressure and energy without knowing their rigorous meaning and subtleties. But those of us who plumb the theory’s depths are acutely aware of the need to take care. The Achilles’ heel of thermodynamics is that, strictly speaking, it applies only when the system under study is in a quiescent state called equilibrium. In this state the system’s parameters, such as mass, energy and shape, have ceased to change. Putting two objects together at different temperatures makes heat flow from the hotter object to the colder. This process stops when both reach the same temperature—that is, when the two are in thermal equilibrium. From that point on, nothing changes.
A common example is when you put ice in a glass of water. The ice melts, and the water in the glass reaches a uniformly lower temperature. If you zoom in to the molecular level, you find an intense activity of molecules frantically moving about and endlessly bumping into one another. In equilibrium, the molecular activity organizes itself so that, statistically, the system is at rest; if some molecules speed up, others slow down, maintaining the overall distribution of velocities. Temperature describes this distribution; in fact, the very concept of temperature is meaningful only when the system is in equilibrium or sufficiently near it.
Thermodynamics therefore deals only with situations of stillness. Time plays no role in it. In reality, of course, nature never stands still, and time does matter. Everything is in a constant state of flux. The fact that classical thermodynamics is limited to equilibrium situations may come as a surprise. In introductory physics classes, students apply thermodynamics to dynamic systems such as car engines to calculate quantities such as efficiency. But these applications make an implicit assumption: that we can approximate a dynamic process as an idealized succession of equilibrium states. That is, we imagine that the system is always in equilibrium, even if the equilibrium shifts from moment to moment. Consequently, the efficiency we calculate is only an upper limit. The value that engines reach in practice is somewhat lower because they operate under nonequilibrium conditions.
The second law describes how a succession of equilibrium states can be irreversible, so that the system cannot return to its original state without exacting a price from its surroundings. A melted ice cube does not spontaneously re-form; you need to put it in the freezer, at a cost in energy. To quantify this irreversibility, the second law introduces a key quantity: entropy. Entropy is popularly described as the degree of disorder in the system, but as I will discuss later, this description can be misleading. Quantitatively, entropy is the amount of heat exchanged in a process divided by the temperature. In an isolated system, entropy always stays the same or increases.
For instance, a typical engine works by exploiting the flow of heat from a hot to a cold reservoir, which are two large masses exterior to the engine mechanism. If the reservoirs maintain a constant temperature and the engine parts are frictionless, the engine goes through its cycle in a completely reversible way; the total entropy remains constant. In a real engine, these idealizations do not apply, so the cycle is irreversible and the total entropy increases. Eventually the engine runs out of available energy, heat ceases to flow and entropy reaches a maximum value. At that point, the reservoirs and engine are in equilibrium with one another and will remain that way, unchanged, from then on.
The fact that classical thermodynamics presumes equilibrium situations limits the applicability of the second law. Entropy and temperature cannot even be defined unless the system is in equilibrium. Moreover, many systems cannot be modeled as a heat engine. The cosmos is one: if space is expanding, entropy can increase without limit, so that the universe approaches but never reaches equilibrium [see “The Cosmic Origins of Time’s Arrow,” by Sean M. Carroll; Scientific American, June]. What these systems have in common is that they are not in equilibrium or even close to it.
Order from Chaos
Nonequilibrium systems behave in some fascinating ways that the classical theory of thermodynamics does not capture and that belie the idea that nature tends to become steadily more disordered. For instance, consider a familiar appliance, the electric toaster. The wire inside it heats up because the wire material offers resistance to the flow of electric current. The second law stipulates that this process is irreversible: you cannot use a toaster to untoast a piece of bread and thereby generate electricity.
You can, however, do something similar. You can impose a temperature difference between the tips of the toaster wire, thereby ensuring the system remains out of equilibrium. Then it will indeed generate electricity. This reversal is the basis of the thermocouple, a device used to measure temperature or produce power.
A related phenomenon is reverse os mosis for seawater desalination. In standard osmosis, the difference in salt concentration across a membrane creates a difference in pressure, ensuring that water flows to the saltier side and dilutes it. The system thereby approaches equilibrium. In reverse osmosis, an external pressure keeps the system out of equilibrium, forcing water to flow over to the less salty side and become potable.
The toaster and thermocouple, and forward and reverse osmosis, are mirror-image processes. They are connected by the so-called reciprocity relation, the formulation of which won Onsager the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The symmetry between these processes reflects the reversibility of the laws governing the motion of the particles of the system. Those laws work equally well backward or forward in time. The irreversibility we observe at a macroscopic level arises only when we consider particles en masse.
The discovery of the reciprocity relation changed how physicists think of equilibrium. They used to think of it as the most highly ordered state. Although the molecules may be maximally disordered, the system overall is placid, symmetrical and orderly. Yet the reciprocity relation exemplifies how a nonequilibrium system, too, can be highly ordered. Regularities, symmetries and islands of tranquility may come up in situations far from equilibrium.
Another classic example is a thin fluid layer heated from below. Heat flows from the bottom to the top, and a temperature gradient develops across the layer. By increasing the gradient, one can increase the departure from equilibrium. For modest gradients, the fluid remains at rest. For larger gradients, however, it begins to move. Its convective motion, far from being chaotic, is orderly. Small hexagonal cells form as if the fluid were a crystal. For even larger gradients, the motion becomes turbulent. This phenomenon, known as the Bénard problem, demonstrates that order can shade into chaos and back to order as a system deviates from equilibrium.
In yet another example, an experimenter begins with a fluid at rest. The fluid is isotropic: it looks the same in every direction. The experimenter then forces the fluid to pass through a metal grid at a certain speed. Although the fluid becomes turbulent on the downstream side, its motion still takes place in one direction. Thus, the fluid is no longer isotropic. As the experimenter increases the speed of the fluid, the turbulence increases and eventually becomes so great that the fluid no longer flows one way. At this point, the fluid is again isotropic. The fluid has gone from isotropic to anisotropic and back to isotropic—a type of progression from order to disorder to order.
Standard thermodynamics does not capture such phenomena, a limitation that has become all the more pressing in recent years. Researchers in molecular biology and the nascent field of nanotechnology have discovered a great diversity of organized but ever changing structures in physical, chemical and biological systems. To explain them requires a theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics.
Breaking It Down
Earlier efforts to develop such a theory started from the concept of local equilibrium states. Although a system may not be in equilibrium, individual pieces of it can be. For instance, imagine stirring a cocktail with a swizzle stick. The equilibrium is disturbed by the motion of the stick but can still be found if you look closely at small pockets of fluid, which retain their internal coherence. These small regions are able to reach equilibrium if the forces acting on the system are not too large and if its properties do not change by large amounts over small distances. Concepts such as temperature and entropy apply to these islands of equilibrium, although the numerical values of these quantities may vary from island to island.
For instance, when one heats up one of the ends of a metal bar, heat flows through the bar toward the other end. The temperature difference between the ends of the bar acts as a force driving the heat flow, or flux, along the bar. A similar phenomenon occurs with a drop of ink in water. The difference in ink concentration is the driving force that makes the ink invade the host liquid until it becomes uniformly colored. These forces are linear: the heat flux is proportional to the temperature difference and the particle flux to the concentration difference, a proportionality that holds even when the forces acting on the system are strong. Even in many turbulent flows, the internal stresses in the fluid are proportional to the velocity gradients. For these cases, Onsager and others formulated a theory of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and showed that the second law continues to hold.
But when those conditions are not met, this theory breaks down. When a chemical reaction takes place, one substance suddenly changes into another—an abrupt change described by a nonlinear equation. Another type of failure occurs when the system is so small that the chaotic jumble of molecular motions dictates its behavior and causes the system’s properties to vary wildly over short distances. Processes taking place in small systems, such as the condensation of water vapor and the transport of ions through a protein channel in a cell membrane, are dominated by such fluctuations. In them, temperature and entropy cease to be well-defined quantities. Does the failure of the theory in these instances imply the failure of the second law, too?
In the past several years David Reguera of the University of Barcelona, José M. G. Vilar of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and I have extended thermodynamics into these realms. We have shown that many of the problems go away with a change of perspective. Our perception of abruptness depends on the timescale we use to observe these processes. If we analyzed one of the seemingly instantaneous chemical processes in slow motion, we would see a gradual transformation as if we were watching a pat of butter melting in the sun. When the process is viewed frame by frame, the changes are not abrupt.
The trick is to track the intermediate stages of the reaction using a new set of variables beyond those of classical thermodynamics. Within this expanded framework, the system remains in local thermodynamic equilibrium throughout the process. These additional variables enrich the behavior of the system. They define a landscape of energy that the system rambles through like a backpacker in the mountains. Valleys correspond to a dip in energy, sometimes involving molecular chaos, other times molecular order. The system can settle into one valley and then be kicked into another by external forces. If it is in the grasp of chaos, it can break away from disorder and find order, or vice versa.
Next, consider the problem of fluctuations. Does thermodynamics fail when systems are excessively small? A simple example shows that the answer is no. If we toss a coin only a few times, it could happen, by chance, that we would get a series of heads. But if we flip the coin many times, the result reliably approaches an average. Nature flips coins quite often. A few particles moving around in a container collide only occasionally and can maintain large velocity differences among themselves.
But even in a seemingly “small” system, the number of particles is much larger, so collisions are much more frequent and the speed of the particles is brought down to an average (if slightly fluctuating) value. Although a few isolated events may show completely unpredictable behavior, a multitude of events shows a certain regularity. Therefore, quantities such as density can fluctuate but remain predictable overall. For this reason, the second law continues to rule over the world of the small.
From Steam Engines to Molecular Motors
The original development of thermodynamics found its inspiration in the steam engine. Nowadays the field is driven by the tiny molecular engines within living cells. Though of vastly differing scales, these engines share a common function: they transform energy into motion. For instance, ATP molecules provide the fuel for myosin molecules in muscle tissue to move along actin filaments, pulling the muscle fibers to which they are attached. Other motors are powered by light, by differences in proton concentrations or by differences in temperature [see “Making Molecules into Motors,” by R. Dean Astumian; Scientific American, July 2001]. Chemical energy can drive ions through channels in a cell membrane from a region of low concentration to one of high concentration—precisely the opposite direction that they would move in the absence of an active transport mechanism.
The analogy between large and small machines is very deep. Fluctuations of the chemical energy affect a molecular motor in the same way that a random and variable amount of fuel affects the piston of a car motor. Therefore, the long tradition of applying thermodynamics to large motors can be extended to small ones. Although physicists have other mathematical tools for analyzing such systems, those tools can be tricky to apply. The equations of fluid flow, for example, require researchers to specify the conditions at the boundary of a system precisely—a Herculean task when the boundary is extremely irregular. Thermodynamics provides a computational shortcut, and it has already yielded fresh insights. Signe Kjelstrup and Dick Bedeaux, both at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and I have found that heat plays an underappreciated role in the function of ion channels.
In short, my colleagues and I have shown that the development of order from chaos, far from contradicting the second law, fits nicely into a broader framework of thermodynamics. We are just at the threshold of using this new understanding for practical applications. Perpetual-motion machines remain impossible, and we will still ultimately lose the battle against degeneration. But the second law does not mandate a steady degeneration. It quite happily coexists with the spontaneous development of order and complexity.
Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "The Long Arm of the Second Law".
////////////////////PRISON CONVERSION
//////////////////////////////////////////////
DOPAMINE-PLEASURE-FOOD FIX
//////////////////Pleasure, Brain Pain, and Food Desire
Monday, October 20, 2008
Byron Richards, CCN
EMAIL PRINT RSS SHARE
Dopamine is an important nerve transmitter involved with reward. It is released when you eat, so that you know eating is good and thus you will survive. Some individuals don’t release a normal amount, thus they eat more to get the same feeling of satisfaction that someone else gets eating less food. A new study with advanced brain imaging while milkshakes were being consumed has proved this point.
I should point out that stress creates “brain pain” to a greater or lesser degree. Of course, a quick fix is a pleasure burst of dopamine. Just about everyone knows you can get such a pleasure burst from eating almost anything. Stress eating is rooted too much brain pain and the consequent addiction to get a food fix to solve the feelings. This problem would be far worse if a person has a genetic issue and is not able to make dopamine at the proper rate in the first place.
The nutrient tyrosine, which is in Thyroid Helper, helps to make dopamine in the first place. Nutrients in Stress Helper assist your nerves to better manage stress, helping to reduce the urge in the first place.
//////////////////JOY IS THE BEST MAKE UP
/////////////////
CDS 201008-WRLD IN RCSSN
///////////////////WATER SEEN IN GHSH HS YDAY
//////////////////JANAMBHOOMI-KARAMBHOOMI
//////////////////REDUCING ENTIRE LF INTO FEW PACKING BOXES
////////////////////In Chinese the word "crisis" contains two symbols, danger & opportunity... How do you choose to deal with "crisis"? -- Jim Maclaren
CRSS=DO
///////////////////////WHERE DOES TIME GO
////////////////////
Where Does the Time Go? Forward, Physics Shows
By Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times
December 22, 1998
In Lewis Carroll's mirror world of "Through the Looking Glass," it seems perfectly logical that the White Queen, who lives backward, first bandages her finger, then begins to bleed, then screams, and finally pricks her finger. On paper, if not in real life, the physics governing many natural phenomena permit time to run either forward, like a swimmer jumping from a diving board, or backward, like a reversed movie in which the swimmer leaps from the water and lands on the board.
But since a landmark experiment in 1964 by Dr. James W. Cronin and Dr. Val L. Fitch, both at Princeton University at the time, physicists have known that time reversal is not so neat in the microscopic world of particles. They found indirect but convincing evidence that sometimes a particle going backward in time fails to land on the metaphorical diving board; in other words, time, they found, could not be perfectly symmetrical.
Experimenters have now achieved direct confirmation of this unsettling inference.
To no one's surprise, physicists at two big particle accelerators, one in Switzerland and the other in Illinois, proved that when certain particles go backward in time, their behavior is somewhat different from what it is when they go forward.
If this sounds baffling to non-scientists, they are not alone; a member of the Nobel committee who sat on the panel that awarded Dr. Cronin and Dr. Fitch the 1980 prize in physics remarked, "It would take a new Einstein to say what it means."
But one important implication stands out Time's slippery nature may explain why there was anything left after the Big Bang to build the universe as we know it. Theorists have concluded that there was a slight imbalance in the amounts of matter and antimatter created at the birth of the universe. The matter and antimatter believed to have been created by the Big Bang presumably annihilated each other quickly, leaving only a slight excess of matter - just enough to create today's matter universe.
Time, which had a role in this, is probably the deepest of all enigmas in physics.
At the everyday level, physicists believe that the "arrow" of time points always in the direction of increasing disorder (or "entropy").
Natural processes run down, order yields to disorder, information disappears, and people grow old, die and decay. These processes mark the forward passage of time.
But a particle is not like a human being, and when physicists speak of a particle going backward in time, they do not mean that the particle is a tiny time machine capable of exploring the past.
A leading particle theorist, Dr. Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. explained: "It's not that antiparticles in my laboratory are actually moving backward in time. What's really meant by that is that if I think of a particle moving from one place to another forward in time, the physical process is the same as it would be if we image running the film backward and also changing the particle into an antiparticle."
Three fundamental transformations of particles are involved in all this: the reversal of electrical charge (C), which changes particles into antiparticles and vice versa; parity reversal (P), the mirror reversal of every dimension in a particle (turning it inside out, so to speak), and time reversal (T).
Physicists feel comfortable when things can be explained by balance sheets that show everything accounted for. They once believed that the symmetry of parity - the original form versus its inside-out version- was inviolate, meaning that physics in a mirrow world would be identical to our own. But the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics honored Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee and Dr. Chen N. Ning Yang for discovering that the assumed symmetry of parity in particles did not exist; that when short-lived particles called K mesons (or kaons) decay, their transformations violate parity symmetry.
Many theorists expected that this asymmetry would be balanced out by another of the transformations, that of charge. Dr. Fitch and Dr. Cronin proved, however, that charge symmetry was also violated. That meant that to keep things in balance, the symmetry of time had to be violated to make up for the symmetry violations of charge and parity. In this way the total package of charge, parity and time, or C.P.T. as physicists call this combination of interlocking components, would be "conserved," preserving the ideal of a universe that fits neatly together.
"If you believe that charge, parity and time taken together must balance out," Dr Quigg said, "then if charge and parity are a little funny, and you divide them into the charge-parity-time package, then time must be a little funny, to compensate. That was predicted by theory. But the two new experiments by Fermilab and Cern, the European accelerator group, show directly that time-reversed symmetry is violated in just the direction and amount predicted by theory. Now the C.P.T. ledger book is in balance."
Both the Cern and the Fermilab experiments measured decay processes of rare particles called neutral kaons and neutral antikaons, which consist of two quarks. (Protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the nuclei of ordinary atoms, contain three quarks.)
In the Cern experiment, detectors measured the oscillations of kaons into antikaons, and vice versa, as these fleeting particles sped away from their point of origin. If time were perfectly symmetrical, the rates at which kaons and antikaons are transformed inot each other should be precisely equal. The experiment showed, however, that the rate at which antikaons (which are a form of antimatter) turn into kaons(which are normal matter) is higher than the time-reversed process in whcih kaons become antikaons.
Some similar asymmetry could help to explain the presumed excess of matter over antimatter when the universe was created
But what, if anything, does a particle moving backward in time have to do with conventional time at larger scales?
Mathematical equations governing the laws of motion, electromagnetism and many other phenomena present no difficulty with time reversal. Nor is time reversal inconsistent with particle physics, which is governed by ordinary quantum mechanics, which for all its celebrated weirdness operates within a mathematical framework of classical three-dimensional space and time. Quantum mechanics requires no special direction of time, either forward or backward.
But cosmic relationships are governed by the laws of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, and these have yet to be brought into consonance with quantum mechanics - the rules for the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. In each of these domains, time has a somewhat different meaning.
Relativity decrees that time is not an absolute quantity. Among the surprising effects of relativity are that a moving clock runs slower than a clock at rest, and that time on a mountain top runs faster than time at sea level, because gravity is stronger at sea level and gravity slows time down.
In theory, some scientist have suggest, it might be possible to travel in time using black holes, worm holes, cosmic strings or other distortions of space-time, but one of the problems with time machines is the "grandmother paradox"; if someone could go back to the past and kill his own grandmother, a paradoxical violation of the principle of causality would result. The possibility of this happening is one of the main objections to the idea of time travel, although some physicists have devised ingenious schemes for getting around the paradox.
But does a particle going backward in time pose the same kind of paradox?
Physicists think not.
Noting that the physics of ordinary experience prevents time reversal and violations of causality, Dr. Fitch said in an interview that "things in the everyday world are statistical in nature, and disorder always increases, fixing the direction of the arrow of time. But time asymmetry for particles applies to just a handful of individual particles, not to statistical aggregates."
Dr. J. Richard Gott 3d, a Princeton University cosmologist, envisions a possible universe that would be the opposite of ours in every sense.
"I can image living in a universe like ours, except that charge, parity and time are all reversed," Dr. Gott said in an interview. "Instead of expanding from the Big Bang, such a universe would be contracting toward a big crunch, with everything growing hotter."
In a recent paper in the journal Physical Review D, Dr. Gott and his colleague, Li-Xin Li, suggested that the laws of physics "may allow the universe to be its own mother."
In an antimatter, time-reversed universe, Dr. Gott said, people would remember what we call the future, (but not what we thing of as the past), and for them, the backward flow of time would seem as natural as does our sense of forward-flowing time.
But to come to terms with such things physicists need to deal with quanta - the discrete packets of energy that define the microscopic world: electrons, photons, quarks and so forth. Even empty space is believed to be quantized - subdivided into infinitesimal cells.
But so far, despite the best efforts of Albert Einstein and many other theorists, no one has been able to dissect gravity or time into their component quantum packets, if such exist.
"We're still children as far as quantum gravity is concerned," said Dr. Daniel E. Holz, a relativity theorist at the Max Planck Institute, Potsdam, Germany.
"We don't know how to quantize time," Dr. Holz said. "You can't make heads or tails of it. When you try to quantize gravity, time is what sinks you. When we understand what to do with time in quantum gravity we'll have it done. Or turn it around: When we get quantum gravity, the big revelation will be, aha! So that's the way time works!"
Dr. John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, the cosmologist and astrophysicist who coined the term "black hole" to describe ultradense objects from which light cannot escape, believes that despite the puzzles and paradoxes posed by time, a fundamental simplicity underlies it.
"It's not so much that there's something strange about time," Dr. Wheeler said in an interview. "The thing that's strange is what's going on inside time."
"We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is."
///////////////////Does Time Really Exist?
Combining relativity theories with quantum physics would eliminate time
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
31st of July 2007, 17:56 GMT
Adjust text size:
The more advanced the science, the more difficult puzzles emerge. Now, the shortest time intervals ever have been observed.
Ferenc Krausz in his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has managed to do this by using ultraviolet laser pulses to detect the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms, an event lasting roughly 100 attoseconds (100 quintillionths of a second). Like a second in 300 million years.
But even so, on the Planck scale, attoseconds would be like eons. The scale would define a region where distances and intervals are so short that the concepts of time and space start to disappear.
Planck time, the smallest time unit with any physical meaning, would be 10-43 from a second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. And furthermore? Tempus incognito at the limits of the current physics. But this run touches the very basics of the problem: time may not exist in physical reality. Then, what is time and why are we its slaves?
"The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics. The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic." said Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford.
One hundred years ago, Einstein's theories of relativity eliminated the concept of time as a universal constant. The past, present and future would not be absolute. But these theories, aiming for gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos, do not match quantum physics, the realm of the tiny.
40 ago, John Wheeler, at Princeton and Bryce DeWitt, at the University of North Carolina, tried to combine them through an equation that turned the concept of time into a more confusing one.
"One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time-that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless," said Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.
Many physicists believe that Wheeler-DeWitt equation rather describes a timeless universe. Another strange law of physics is that time always points to the future. All the physics laws could be applied as well if time ran backward. But for the moment, time is a one-way process; it never goes in reverse, even if no laws impede it.
"The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition." said Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT.
"The mother of all initial conditions was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don't provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder-physicists call it an increase in entropy-is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time." said Loyd.
But as Einstein showed, time is a component of the universe. Our clocks don't measure something independent of the universe.
"In fact, clocks don't really measure time at all. I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) I said something like, 'Your clocks measure time very accurately.' They told me, 'Our clocks do not measure time.' I thought, Wow, that's very humble of these guys. But they said, 'No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.' Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks." said Loyd.
"We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time," said Rovelli.
"Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it's only a macroscopic effect. It's something that emerges only for big things."
"Big things" would be anything above the mysterious Planck scale.
Even if physicists ever make it to join quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be assessed by some changed quantum mechanics, in which space and time would be clearly separated and no longer smooth and continuous.
They would be made of tiny building blocks, quanta, just like light is made of photons, individual bundles of energy.
"In quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves." said Rovelli.
A peculiar trait of the waves is that they can exist in an infinite number in the same location. Quanta could be piled together in just one dimensionless point.
"Space and time in some sense melt in this picture. There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space," said Rovelli.
////////////////QUIETEN MIND-CANDLE IN THE DARK-WATCH
////////////////Volcanoes May Have Provided Sparks Of First Life (October 16, 2008) -- New research suggests that lightening and volcanoes may have sparked early life on Earth. Researchers have reanalyzed Stanley Miller's classic origin of life experiment, offering a new analysis on how the essential building blocks of life may have arisen from volcanic eruptions. ... > full story
/////////////////////MTHR GOING FR EYE SX SOON
/////////////////////The greatest oaks have been little acorns.
~Proverb, (Polish)~
////////////////////The problem of evil points out a logical contradiction in the traditional conceptions of the nature of God and the world.
Suppose we have the following four premises:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omnibenevolent.
3. God is omniscient.
4. Evil exists.
We get the following contradiction. If God is omnibenevolent, then he does not want evil to exist. If God is omniscient, then he must know about all evil in the world. If God is omnipotent, then he must be capable of doing something about it. Therefore, evil should not exist. Dropping any one of those four premises would resolve the contradiction, but dropping #4 would require us to fundamentally redefine evil in some way, and dropping the other three would undermine the Christian concept of God.
As David Hume wrote, (paraphrasing Epicurus):
"Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
— Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
/////////////////
//////////////////JANAMBHOOMI-KARAMBHOOMI
//////////////////REDUCING ENTIRE LF INTO FEW PACKING BOXES
////////////////////In Chinese the word "crisis" contains two symbols, danger & opportunity... How do you choose to deal with "crisis"? -- Jim Maclaren
CRSS=DO
///////////////////////WHERE DOES TIME GO
////////////////////
Where Does the Time Go? Forward, Physics Shows
By Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times
December 22, 1998
In Lewis Carroll's mirror world of "Through the Looking Glass," it seems perfectly logical that the White Queen, who lives backward, first bandages her finger, then begins to bleed, then screams, and finally pricks her finger. On paper, if not in real life, the physics governing many natural phenomena permit time to run either forward, like a swimmer jumping from a diving board, or backward, like a reversed movie in which the swimmer leaps from the water and lands on the board.
But since a landmark experiment in 1964 by Dr. James W. Cronin and Dr. Val L. Fitch, both at Princeton University at the time, physicists have known that time reversal is not so neat in the microscopic world of particles. They found indirect but convincing evidence that sometimes a particle going backward in time fails to land on the metaphorical diving board; in other words, time, they found, could not be perfectly symmetrical.
Experimenters have now achieved direct confirmation of this unsettling inference.
To no one's surprise, physicists at two big particle accelerators, one in Switzerland and the other in Illinois, proved that when certain particles go backward in time, their behavior is somewhat different from what it is when they go forward.
If this sounds baffling to non-scientists, they are not alone; a member of the Nobel committee who sat on the panel that awarded Dr. Cronin and Dr. Fitch the 1980 prize in physics remarked, "It would take a new Einstein to say what it means."
But one important implication stands out Time's slippery nature may explain why there was anything left after the Big Bang to build the universe as we know it. Theorists have concluded that there was a slight imbalance in the amounts of matter and antimatter created at the birth of the universe. The matter and antimatter believed to have been created by the Big Bang presumably annihilated each other quickly, leaving only a slight excess of matter - just enough to create today's matter universe.
Time, which had a role in this, is probably the deepest of all enigmas in physics.
At the everyday level, physicists believe that the "arrow" of time points always in the direction of increasing disorder (or "entropy").
Natural processes run down, order yields to disorder, information disappears, and people grow old, die and decay. These processes mark the forward passage of time.
But a particle is not like a human being, and when physicists speak of a particle going backward in time, they do not mean that the particle is a tiny time machine capable of exploring the past.
A leading particle theorist, Dr. Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. explained: "It's not that antiparticles in my laboratory are actually moving backward in time. What's really meant by that is that if I think of a particle moving from one place to another forward in time, the physical process is the same as it would be if we image running the film backward and also changing the particle into an antiparticle."
Three fundamental transformations of particles are involved in all this: the reversal of electrical charge (C), which changes particles into antiparticles and vice versa; parity reversal (P), the mirror reversal of every dimension in a particle (turning it inside out, so to speak), and time reversal (T).
Physicists feel comfortable when things can be explained by balance sheets that show everything accounted for. They once believed that the symmetry of parity - the original form versus its inside-out version- was inviolate, meaning that physics in a mirrow world would be identical to our own. But the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics honored Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee and Dr. Chen N. Ning Yang for discovering that the assumed symmetry of parity in particles did not exist; that when short-lived particles called K mesons (or kaons) decay, their transformations violate parity symmetry.
Many theorists expected that this asymmetry would be balanced out by another of the transformations, that of charge. Dr. Fitch and Dr. Cronin proved, however, that charge symmetry was also violated. That meant that to keep things in balance, the symmetry of time had to be violated to make up for the symmetry violations of charge and parity. In this way the total package of charge, parity and time, or C.P.T. as physicists call this combination of interlocking components, would be "conserved," preserving the ideal of a universe that fits neatly together.
"If you believe that charge, parity and time taken together must balance out," Dr Quigg said, "then if charge and parity are a little funny, and you divide them into the charge-parity-time package, then time must be a little funny, to compensate. That was predicted by theory. But the two new experiments by Fermilab and Cern, the European accelerator group, show directly that time-reversed symmetry is violated in just the direction and amount predicted by theory. Now the C.P.T. ledger book is in balance."
Both the Cern and the Fermilab experiments measured decay processes of rare particles called neutral kaons and neutral antikaons, which consist of two quarks. (Protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the nuclei of ordinary atoms, contain three quarks.)
In the Cern experiment, detectors measured the oscillations of kaons into antikaons, and vice versa, as these fleeting particles sped away from their point of origin. If time were perfectly symmetrical, the rates at which kaons and antikaons are transformed inot each other should be precisely equal. The experiment showed, however, that the rate at which antikaons (which are a form of antimatter) turn into kaons(which are normal matter) is higher than the time-reversed process in whcih kaons become antikaons.
Some similar asymmetry could help to explain the presumed excess of matter over antimatter when the universe was created
But what, if anything, does a particle moving backward in time have to do with conventional time at larger scales?
Mathematical equations governing the laws of motion, electromagnetism and many other phenomena present no difficulty with time reversal. Nor is time reversal inconsistent with particle physics, which is governed by ordinary quantum mechanics, which for all its celebrated weirdness operates within a mathematical framework of classical three-dimensional space and time. Quantum mechanics requires no special direction of time, either forward or backward.
But cosmic relationships are governed by the laws of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, and these have yet to be brought into consonance with quantum mechanics - the rules for the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. In each of these domains, time has a somewhat different meaning.
Relativity decrees that time is not an absolute quantity. Among the surprising effects of relativity are that a moving clock runs slower than a clock at rest, and that time on a mountain top runs faster than time at sea level, because gravity is stronger at sea level and gravity slows time down.
In theory, some scientist have suggest, it might be possible to travel in time using black holes, worm holes, cosmic strings or other distortions of space-time, but one of the problems with time machines is the "grandmother paradox"; if someone could go back to the past and kill his own grandmother, a paradoxical violation of the principle of causality would result. The possibility of this happening is one of the main objections to the idea of time travel, although some physicists have devised ingenious schemes for getting around the paradox.
But does a particle going backward in time pose the same kind of paradox?
Physicists think not.
Noting that the physics of ordinary experience prevents time reversal and violations of causality, Dr. Fitch said in an interview that "things in the everyday world are statistical in nature, and disorder always increases, fixing the direction of the arrow of time. But time asymmetry for particles applies to just a handful of individual particles, not to statistical aggregates."
Dr. J. Richard Gott 3d, a Princeton University cosmologist, envisions a possible universe that would be the opposite of ours in every sense.
"I can image living in a universe like ours, except that charge, parity and time are all reversed," Dr. Gott said in an interview. "Instead of expanding from the Big Bang, such a universe would be contracting toward a big crunch, with everything growing hotter."
In a recent paper in the journal Physical Review D, Dr. Gott and his colleague, Li-Xin Li, suggested that the laws of physics "may allow the universe to be its own mother."
In an antimatter, time-reversed universe, Dr. Gott said, people would remember what we call the future, (but not what we thing of as the past), and for them, the backward flow of time would seem as natural as does our sense of forward-flowing time.
But to come to terms with such things physicists need to deal with quanta - the discrete packets of energy that define the microscopic world: electrons, photons, quarks and so forth. Even empty space is believed to be quantized - subdivided into infinitesimal cells.
But so far, despite the best efforts of Albert Einstein and many other theorists, no one has been able to dissect gravity or time into their component quantum packets, if such exist.
"We're still children as far as quantum gravity is concerned," said Dr. Daniel E. Holz, a relativity theorist at the Max Planck Institute, Potsdam, Germany.
"We don't know how to quantize time," Dr. Holz said. "You can't make heads or tails of it. When you try to quantize gravity, time is what sinks you. When we understand what to do with time in quantum gravity we'll have it done. Or turn it around: When we get quantum gravity, the big revelation will be, aha! So that's the way time works!"
Dr. John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, the cosmologist and astrophysicist who coined the term "black hole" to describe ultradense objects from which light cannot escape, believes that despite the puzzles and paradoxes posed by time, a fundamental simplicity underlies it.
"It's not so much that there's something strange about time," Dr. Wheeler said in an interview. "The thing that's strange is what's going on inside time."
"We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is."
///////////////////Does Time Really Exist?
Combining relativity theories with quantum physics would eliminate time
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
31st of July 2007, 17:56 GMT
Adjust text size:
The more advanced the science, the more difficult puzzles emerge. Now, the shortest time intervals ever have been observed.
Ferenc Krausz in his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has managed to do this by using ultraviolet laser pulses to detect the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms, an event lasting roughly 100 attoseconds (100 quintillionths of a second). Like a second in 300 million years.
But even so, on the Planck scale, attoseconds would be like eons. The scale would define a region where distances and intervals are so short that the concepts of time and space start to disappear.
Planck time, the smallest time unit with any physical meaning, would be 10-43 from a second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. And furthermore? Tempus incognito at the limits of the current physics. But this run touches the very basics of the problem: time may not exist in physical reality. Then, what is time and why are we its slaves?
"The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics. The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic." said Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford.
One hundred years ago, Einstein's theories of relativity eliminated the concept of time as a universal constant. The past, present and future would not be absolute. But these theories, aiming for gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos, do not match quantum physics, the realm of the tiny.
40 ago, John Wheeler, at Princeton and Bryce DeWitt, at the University of North Carolina, tried to combine them through an equation that turned the concept of time into a more confusing one.
"One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time-that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless," said Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.
Many physicists believe that Wheeler-DeWitt equation rather describes a timeless universe. Another strange law of physics is that time always points to the future. All the physics laws could be applied as well if time ran backward. But for the moment, time is a one-way process; it never goes in reverse, even if no laws impede it.
"The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition." said Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT.
"The mother of all initial conditions was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don't provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder-physicists call it an increase in entropy-is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time." said Loyd.
But as Einstein showed, time is a component of the universe. Our clocks don't measure something independent of the universe.
"In fact, clocks don't really measure time at all. I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) I said something like, 'Your clocks measure time very accurately.' They told me, 'Our clocks do not measure time.' I thought, Wow, that's very humble of these guys. But they said, 'No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.' Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks." said Loyd.
"We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time," said Rovelli.
"Is time a fundamental property of reality or just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it's only a macroscopic effect. It's something that emerges only for big things."
"Big things" would be anything above the mysterious Planck scale.
Even if physicists ever make it to join quantum theory and general relativity, space and time will be assessed by some changed quantum mechanics, in which space and time would be clearly separated and no longer smooth and continuous.
They would be made of tiny building blocks, quanta, just like light is made of photons, individual bundles of energy.
"In quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves." said Rovelli.
A peculiar trait of the waves is that they can exist in an infinite number in the same location. Quanta could be piled together in just one dimensionless point.
"Space and time in some sense melt in this picture. There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space," said Rovelli.
////////////////QUIETEN MIND-CANDLE IN THE DARK-WATCH
////////////////Volcanoes May Have Provided Sparks Of First Life (October 16, 2008) -- New research suggests that lightening and volcanoes may have sparked early life on Earth. Researchers have reanalyzed Stanley Miller's classic origin of life experiment, offering a new analysis on how the essential building blocks of life may have arisen from volcanic eruptions. ... > full story
/////////////////////MTHR GOING FR EYE SX SOON
/////////////////////The greatest oaks have been little acorns.
~Proverb, (Polish)~
////////////////////The problem of evil points out a logical contradiction in the traditional conceptions of the nature of God and the world.
Suppose we have the following four premises:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omnibenevolent.
3. God is omniscient.
4. Evil exists.
We get the following contradiction. If God is omnibenevolent, then he does not want evil to exist. If God is omniscient, then he must know about all evil in the world. If God is omnipotent, then he must be capable of doing something about it. Therefore, evil should not exist. Dropping any one of those four premises would resolve the contradiction, but dropping #4 would require us to fundamentally redefine evil in some way, and dropping the other three would undermine the Christian concept of God.
As David Hume wrote, (paraphrasing Epicurus):
"Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"
— Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
/////////////////
Friday, 17 October 2008
WARTENBERGS NEUROPATHY
////////////////LOTTO-PARA SPECTRUM
/////////////////HAIDT-BACK TO OWN CONTENTMENT THRESHOLD
/////////////////
/////////////////HAIDT-BACK TO OWN CONTENTMENT THRESHOLD
/////////////////
DOND-DEMO/REAL
//////////////Words to Remember
Whatever you give a woman, she's going to multiply. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So - if you give her any crap, you will receive a ton of shit.
////////////////////He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
Posted: 16 Oct 2008 09:00 AM CDT
~ Chinese Proverb
/////////////////////TENDULAKAR-12000 TEST RUNS-MAX IN WORLD
////////////////////////Why do women get more cavities than men?
Anthropologist reviews historical records, finds links to fertility, hormones and reproductive pressures
http://www.fossilscience.com/research/Why_do_women_get_more_cavities_than_men.asp
////////////////
Girls who start puberty early are less able to cope with stress
Girls who enter puberty early may be less able to cope with being bullied or rejected by other students than their female classmates who mature later
http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/Girls_who_start_puberty_early_are_less_able_to_cope_with_stress.asp
////////////////////Ancient Tibetan Practice Improves Health & Happiness
By Rebecca Sato/ Source: The Daily Galaxy
Data from a new Emory University study suggests that individuals who engage in “compassion meditation” based on a thousand-year-old Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice (called "lojong" in Tibetan), appears to effectively reduce the inflammatory and behavioral responses to stress that have been linked to depression and a number of physical illnesses. The practice revolves around fostering a sense of heightened compassion for others.
"Our findings suggest that meditation practices designed to foster compassion may impact physiological pathways that are modulated by stress and are relevant to disease," explains Charles L. Raison, MD, a lead author on the study.
Read the full story here...
////////////////////
Whatever you give a woman, she's going to multiply. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So - if you give her any crap, you will receive a ton of shit.
////////////////////He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
Posted: 16 Oct 2008 09:00 AM CDT
~ Chinese Proverb
/////////////////////TENDULAKAR-12000 TEST RUNS-MAX IN WORLD
////////////////////////Why do women get more cavities than men?
Anthropologist reviews historical records, finds links to fertility, hormones and reproductive pressures
http://www.fossilscience.com/research/Why_do_women_get_more_cavities_than_men.asp
////////////////
Girls who start puberty early are less able to cope with stress
Girls who enter puberty early may be less able to cope with being bullied or rejected by other students than their female classmates who mature later
http://www.brainmysteries.com/research/Girls_who_start_puberty_early_are_less_able_to_cope_with_stress.asp
////////////////////Ancient Tibetan Practice Improves Health & Happiness
By Rebecca Sato/ Source: The Daily Galaxy
Data from a new Emory University study suggests that individuals who engage in “compassion meditation” based on a thousand-year-old Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice (called "lojong" in Tibetan), appears to effectively reduce the inflammatory and behavioral responses to stress that have been linked to depression and a number of physical illnesses. The practice revolves around fostering a sense of heightened compassion for others.
"Our findings suggest that meditation practices designed to foster compassion may impact physiological pathways that are modulated by stress and are relevant to disease," explains Charles L. Raison, MD, a lead author on the study.
Read the full story here...
////////////////////
MOROCCO-TRAVEL
////////////////BOOM INTO BUST
/////////////If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be
speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the
world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months of
hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.
(Если вы сможете правильно произнести каждое слово в этом стихотворении,
значит вы говорите по английски лучше чем 90% тех для кого этот язык
родной. Один француз, попытавшись это прочесть, заявил что он предпочтет 6
месяцев каторги, нежели прочесть 6 строк.)
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
-- B. Shaw
////////////////////////////"Learning to Say No"
Everywhere we turn in our daily lives we are
offered food. This is one of the most difficult
things I have personally had to deal with over
the years.
It's a lot easier to lose weight when we stay home
away from temptations.
But, let's face it, this is very unrealistic.
We have to deal with "away from home" food
offers... usually every day. At work in the break
room... donuts... cakes... cookies etc.
The grocery store has people handing out samples.
Even at church, food is used to bring people
together. Not to mention clubs, parties,
weddings, birthdays...
Food everywhere you look. And my problem is that
I love food. Saying no is sometimes very difficult
to do. We don't want to hurt anyone's feelings.
But the only person's feelings we are really
hurting is our own when we fail to say NO. We are
the ONLY one really effected by eating what
is offered.
I once worked with a guy who said he was O.K. with
turning food down, if he never took the first bite.
If he did, he was a goner. He wanted it all. I know
exactly what he means. I have this problem
with sweets.
If you can't handle just a taste of something...
don't start. Yes, it's difficult to say NO... but
sometime it is the only way to head off a binge.
When I was a kid my Mother used to tell me that if
I didn't want to eat something like spinach, all
I had to do was say, "No thank you, I don't care
for any."
If I said, "I don't want any of that old stuff"...
guess what. I sat there until I ate the very last
bite of it. It didn't take many times for me to
learn from this.
I can, and I dare say we all can, say "NO" to the
things we don't like to eat. It takes practice to
say NO to those we do like. But boy do we feel
good when do pass up those tempting foods.
Practice saying, "No Thank You" this weekend.
It really doesn't hurt.
Have a "Souper" weekend and be good to YOU!
Lillie
/////////////////////////
From Chapter IV: The Yoga of the Division of Wisdom
IV.10. VEETARAAGABHAYAKRODHAA MANMAYAA MAAM UPAASHRITAAH;
BAHAVO JNAANA TAPASAA POOTAA MADBHAAVAM AAGATAAH.
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
'Freed from attachment, fear and anger, absorbed in Me, taking
refuge in Me, purified by the fire of knowledge, many have
attained to My Being.'
IV.11. YE YATHAA MAAM PRAPADYANTE TAAMSTATHAIVA BHAJAAMYAHAM;
MAMA VARTMAANUVARTANTE MANUSHYAAH PAARTHA SARVASHAH.
'In whatever way men approach Me, even so do I reward them;
My path do men tread in all ways, O Arjuna!'
///////////////////
UFTOE-GOS EFFORT
/////////////////TIPPI HEDRON-BIO -BIRD
///////////////////Net Surfing Sharpens Elderly Brain
HOUSTON: Oct. 16: Surfing Internet for long hours can help elderly and middle-aged people in sharpening their minds, says a study.
Searching the web triggers key centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning and may help stimulate and possibly improve brain functions, claims a team of researchers at the University of California Los Angeles. “Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function,” said Dr Gary Small, an ageing expert of UCLA.
“This suggests that just searching on the Internet may train the brain ~ that it may keep it active and healthy,” said Dr Small whose research was published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. Many studies have found that challenging mental activities such as puzzles can help preserve brain function, but few have looked at what role the Internet might play.
“This is the first time anyone has simulated an Internet search task while scanning the brain,” Dr Small said.
His team studied a group of 24 volunteers between the ages of 55 and 76. Half of them were experienced in searching Internet and the other half had no exposure of net searching. Both the groups were asked to do Internet searches and book reading tasks while their brain activity was monitored.
“We found that while reading books, the visual cortex ~ a part of the brain that controls reading and language ~ was activated,” Dr Small said. ~ PTI
///////////////////STRESS IN CAPITAL LETTERS
//////////////////BTHROOM WALL LONADHORA
////////////////////Doctors alerted to skin reaction to mobile phones
Glasgow Daily Record - 3 hours ago
The British Association of Dermatologists want GPs to look out for mobile phone dermatitis - a reaction to the nickel in the devices.
///////////////////Aspirin offers no heart benefits in diabetes patients
Pulse - 1 hour ago
By Lilian Anekwe Prescribing aspirin or antioxidants to high risk patients with diabetes and asymptomatic arterial disease does not have a ‘clinically significant’ effect on the prevention of heart attacks or strokes, research published today has found ...
///////////////////Men in the north of England have dirtier hands
guardian.co.uk - 14 Oct 2008
It's true. The further north men live, the grubbier their hands. Not women; only men Men of the north, hang your heads in shame.
////////////////////CLASS OF THE TITANS
///////////////CIGARETTE SMOKE IS RESIDUE OF UR PLEASURE-LIKE BEER IS TO REEKY URINE ON YOUR HEAD
//////////////////
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
CDS 141008-OKTA VN BDLO-HMSDRSS+CLC DIS
UFTOE-DIS/TAPCHIDU6-LF CHNGED FREVER
////////////SONOMA=ARTRE SUMMARY
1. EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. "Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence." This means that what we do, how we act in our life, determines our apparent "qualities." It is not that someone tells the truth because she is honest, but rather she defines herself as honest by telling the truth again and again.
I am a professor in a way different than the way I am six feet tall, or the way a table is a table. The table simply is; I exist by defining myself in the world at each moment.
2. SUBJECT RATHER THAN OBJECT. Humans are not objects to be used by God or a government or corporation or society. Nor we to be "adjusted" or molded into roles --to be only a waiter or a conductor or a mother or worker. We must look deeper than our roles and find ourselves.
3. FREEDOM is the central and unique potentiality which constitutes us as human. Sartre rejects determinism, saying that it is our choice how we respond to determining tendencies.
4. CHOICE. I am my choices. I cannot not choose. If I do not choose, that is still a choice. If faced with inevitable circumstances, we still choose how we are in those circumstances.
5. RESPONSIBILITY. Each of us is responsible for everything we do. If we seek advice from others, we choose our advisor and have some idea of the course he or she will recommend. "I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities."
6. PAST DETERMINANTS SELDOM TELL US THE CRUCIAL INFORMATION. We transform past determining tendencies through our choices. Explanations in terms of family, socioeconomic status, etc., do not tell us why a person makes the crucial choices we are most interested in.
7. OUR ACTS DEFINE US. "In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait, and there is nothing but that portrait." Our illusions and imaginings about ourselves, about what we could have been, are nothing but self-deception.
8. WE CONTINUALLY MAKE OURSELVES AS WE ARE. A "brave" person is simply someone who usually acts bravely. Each act contributes to defining us as we are, and at any moment we can begin to act differently and draw a different portrate of ourselves. There is always a possibility to change, to start making a different kind of choice.
9. OUR POWER TO CREATE OURSELVES. We have the power of transforming ourself indefinitely.
10. OUR REALITY AND OUR ENDS. Human reality "identifies and defines itself by the ends which it pursues", rather than by alleged "causes" in the past.
11. SUBJECTIVISM means the freedom of the individual subject, and that we cannot pass beyond subjectivity.
12. THE HUMAN CONDTION. Despite different roles and historical situations, we all have to be in the world, to labor and die there. These circumstances "are everywhere recognisable; and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if we do not live them.
13. CONDEMNED TO BE FREE. We are condemned because we did not create ourselves. We must choose and act from within whatever situation we find ourselves.
14. ABANDONMENT. "I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help.
15. ANGUISH. "It is in anguish that we become conscious of our freedom. ...My being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation."
1) We must make some choices knowing that the consequences will have profound effects on others (like a commander sending his troops into battle.)
2) In choosing for ourselves we choose for all humankind.
16. DESPAIR.
We limit ourselves to a reliance on that which is within our power, our capability to influence. There are other things very important to us over which we have no control.
17. BAD FAITH means to be guilty of regarding oneself not as a free person but as an object. In bad faith I am hiding the truth from myself. "I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully. (There seems to be some overlap in Sartre's conception of bad faith and his conception of self-deception.)
A person can live in bad faith which ...implies a constant and particular style of life.
18. "THE UNCONSCIOUS" IS NOT TRULY UNCONSCIOUS. At some level I am aware of, and I choose, what I will allow fully into my consciousness and what I will not. Thus I cannot use "the unconscious" as an excuse for my behavior. Even though I may not admit it to myself, I am aware and I am choosing.
Even in self-deception, I know I am the one deceiving myself, and Freud's so-called censor must be conscious to know what to repress.
Those who use "the unconscious" as exoneration of actions believe that our instincts, drives, and complexes make up a reality that simply is; that is neither true nor false in itself but simply real.
19. PASSION IS NO EXCUSE. "I was overwhelmed by strong feelings; I couldn't help myself" is a falsehood. Despite my feelings, I choose how to express them in action.
20. ONTOLOGY: The study of being, of what constitutes a person as a person, is the necessary basis for psychoanalysis.
////////////////////Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
///////////////////KLUGE-
From Publishers Weekly
Why are we subject to irrational beliefs, inaccurate memories, even war? We can thank evolution, Marcus says, which can only tinker with structures that already exist, rather than create new ones: Natural selection... tends to favor genes that have immediate advantages rather than long-term value. Marcus (The Birth of the Mind), director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center, refers to this as kluge, a term engineers use to refer to a clumsily designed solution to a problem. Thus, memory developed in our prehominid ancestry to respond with immediacy, rather than accuracy; one result is erroneous eyewitness testimony in courtrooms. In describing the results of studies of human perception, cognition and beliefs, Marcus encapsulates how the mind is contaminated by emotions, moods, desires, goals, and simple self-interest.... The mind's fragility, he says, is demonstrated by mental illness, which seems to have no adaptive purpose. In a concluding chapter, Marcus offers a baker's dozen of suggestions for getting around the brain's flaws and achieving true wisdom. While some are self-evident, others could be helpful, such as Whenever possible, consider alternate hypotheses and Don't just set goals. Make contingency plans. Using evolutionary psychology, Marcus educates the reader about mental flaws in a succinct, often enjoyable way. (Apr. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
IMMEDIACY RATHER THAN ACCURACY
//////////////////Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.
Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience -- memory, belief, decision-making, language, and happiness -- Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us in knots even though it's only four words long.
Marcus also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge, for the betterment of ourselves and society. Throughout, he shows how only evolution -- haphazard and undirected -- could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.
///////////////////Unintelligent Design
4:02 AM PDT, July 1, 2008
Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.
When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.
Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),
Our troubles with memory in turn lead to an unending litany of problems that the psychologist Timothy Wilson collectively refers to as "mental contamination", in which irrelevant information frequently, ranging from the physical attractiveness of political candidates to random numbers on a roulette wheel, subconsciously cloud human judgments. If an ugly child throws an ice-filled snowballs, for instance, we judge that child to be delinquent, but when an especially attractive child does the same thing, we excuse him, saying he's just "having a bad day." A study published earlier this month showed that people's moral judgments are more severe when made in a disgusting, soiled pizza-box filled office than when in an office that is neat as a pin; another, which appeared just last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that voters are more likely to favor school policies if the balloting takes place in a school than if it takes place in an apartment building. We may aspire, as Aristotle thought, to be "the rational animal", but in reality the flotsam and jetsam of barely conscious memory frequently intercedes.
At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
Imperfections riddle the body as well; the human spine supports 70% of our body weight with a single column, where four might have distributed the load better (greatly reducing the incidence of debilitating back pain), and the human retina is effectively installed backwards, with its array of outgoing neural fibers coming out of the front rather than the back, saddling us with an entirely needless blindspot.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
A local maximum is like a moderately high peak in a rugged mountain range that is filled with other peaks, some of which are considerably higher; a peak at the top of the treeline, when there are plenty of snow-capped peaks that loom considerably higher. The process of natural selection is vulnerable to such limits for two reasons: it is blind, and it generally takes only small steps; as such, it can easily get stuck on low-lying peaks that are impressive but well short of the highest possible mountaintop, designs that are "good enough for government work" but far from perfect.
Darwin gives a natural explanation that indicates poorly-designed features should be common in biology. The theory of intelligent design, in contrast, has a serious problem explaining such phenomena: an intelligent designer that could perceive the whole landscape could just pick us up and move us to higher ground. That this has never happened is clear testament both to the wisdom of the theory of natural selection and the implausibility of intelligent design.
The problem with the Lousiana law is not just that it seeks to mix church and state, a situation that the Constitution's framers rightly sought to avoid, but that it is predicated on the assumption that creationists have a reasonable theory with which to counter evolution with - where in truth they simply don't.
-- Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology at New York University, is the author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.
////////////////his?)
We'd all like to believe that we're rational and clear-headed, and that our mind, will, and emotions are reliable (except, perhaps, when it comes to romance and chocolate). However, "Kluge" indicates that our Rube Goldberg brain often doesn't work quite as optimally as we believe it does. Thankfully, Gary Marcus' mind functioned well enough to bring us this fine book.
Reading about the brain is probably the ultimate act of navel-gazing, since it's the seat of who we are, and its function determines a large part of our destiny. I was glad to see a well-done and accessible analysis of our most important organ. I found the author's breakdown of the mind enlightening, like with the relationship between memory and context. Why can't I find my clipboard? Because I put it in an unfamiliar place - duh. He also compares our faulty context-dependent memory to the more accurate and systematic way a computer accesses information. Bottom line, we come up short in the total recall department.
Mr. Marcus is firmly in the evolutionary camp, so creationists may take issue with "Kluge." Mr. Marcus believes that a patchwork brain like ours couldn't be the product of a rational, superior creator. Instead, evolution fashioned our brain based on what worked for humanity's genetic propagation, not to imitate what is perfect or holy. "Good enough for survival" was evolution's mantra, as opposed to forming an "image of God," as most creationists advocate. But the author isn't demeaning towards believers, so persons of faith can at least take comfort in that.
As the whole the book was eye-opening, with chapters on concrete themes ("Memory") and more abstract topics ("True Wisdom" - yes, there's a little cognitive self-help advice). Some of the chapters were a bit more compelling than others, but that's mainly a personal preference thing. No matter the subject, each chapter contained one or more "a-ha" moments. For example, I identified with the blinding effect pleasure has on my higher cognitive functions. I've certainly made some dumb rationalizations in order to gain immediate gratification, only to look back after the fact and ask, "What was I thinking?" Of course, I wasn't firing on all cylinders - my "grab bag of crude mechanisms" devoted to pleasure was easily tricked.
My only real gripe with "Kluge" was with the tantalizing, yet too-small bits the author threw out about certain subjects. I wish he had spent more time on, say, sociopathy. He devotes all of one sentence and a footnote to this topic, but I wanted more analysis, since the idea that brain structure might be responsible for a Hannibal Lecter would be fascinating (and somewhat ironic) reading. Indeed, a deeper dip into the link between morality and brain formation/function would have been intriguing (or perhaps disconcerting to a person of faith who believes in the theology of sin and freedom of the will). In addition, Mr. Marcus' take on the idea of changing the brain, vs. simply "doing better," would also have been welcome, since that theory seems to be in vogue these days. I suppose these topics were beyond the book's scope, so I can't complain too much.
"Kluge" is a good read on its own, but I recommend going through it in conjunction with some complementary books: "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead," by David Shields, "Sperm Are From Men, Eggs Are From Women," by Joe Quirk, and "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin," by David Quammen.
////////////////////CASPIAN TIGER-EXTINCT-1937
///////////////////BARBARY LION OF N AFRICA-?BABBAR SHER
/////////////////TECHNO-OPTIMISM
/////////////////CLUTTER AND STRESS
////////////////
Researchers have uncovered a completely unexpected way that the brain repairs nerve damage, wherein cells known as astrocytes deliver a protective protein to nearby neurons.
Astrocytes are a type of support cell in the brain that serve many functions; one of their roles is to chew up damaged nerves during brain injury and then form scar tissue in the damaged area.
Roger Chung and colleagues have now found that astrocytes have another trick up their sleeve. During injury, astrocytes overproduce a protein called metallothionein (MT) and secrete it to surrounding nerves; MT is a scavenging protein that grabs free radicals and metal ions and prevents them from damaging a cell, and thus is a potent protecting agent.
While the ability of astrocytes to produce MT has been known for decades, the general view was that the MT stayed within astrocytes to protect them while they help repair damaged areas. However, Chung and colleagues demonstrated that MT was present in the external fluid of damaged rat brain. Furthermore, with the aid of a fluorescent MT protein, they observed that MT made in astrocytes could be transported outside the cell and then subsequently taken up by nearby nerves, and that the level of MT uptake correlated with how well the nerves repaired damage.
While the exact physiological role that MT plays in promoting better repair remains to be identified, this unexpected role for this protein should open up new avenues in treating brain injuries in the future.
///////////////////////// Beauty and the Brain
Neuroaesthetics promises to reinvigorate science's search for a theory of beauty.
by Moheb Costandi • Posted September 16, 2008 08:48 AM
Illustration by Gluekit.
Why is something beautiful? David Hume argued that beauty exists not in things but "in the mind that contemplates them." And everyone has at some point heard the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But Plato had a fanciful answer made to argue for a universal truth: In his world of forms, he claimed there existed a perfect Form of Beauty, which was imperfectly manifested in what we call beautiful. Despite the allure of Plato's metaphorical claim, students of aesthetics have struggled to substantiate it. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that there exist quantifiable, describable, universal aspects to the human capacity for appreciating beautiful forms, perhaps originating in our ancestors' experience on African savannas or in the need to find suitable mates. They have not solved the problem. However, recent work by several researchers at University College London — including the establishment of the first major grant-driven research program for the neurobiological investigation of aesthetics, or neuroaesthetics — has made the first steps toward a unified biocultural theory of art. An object's beauty may not be universal, but the neural basis for appreciating beauty probably is. The researchers' initial discoveries and the increasing formalization of the field promise to open the way for the first time to an understanding of beauty based on something other than speculation.
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Click here!
The first studies of aesthetics and the brain began with the sort of self-experimentation that science doesn't encourage anymore. In the 1920s neurologist Heinrich Klüver documented the hallucinations he experienced while under the influence of mescaline, using four categories: grids, zigzags, spirals, and curves. Noting their similarity to the hallucinations experienced in various conditions, such as migraine, sensory deprivation, and the hypnagogic state that occurs in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, he named them "form constants." These motifs do indeed seem to be constant — they recur throughout history and across cultures, and can be seen, for example, in prehistoric cave paintings, in the girih patterns of the tile mosaics decorating medieval mosques, and in the repeating tessellations of M.C. Escher's impossible figures or the rectangular forms of Mondrian's Compositions. Underlying those patterns, at least in part, are the intrinsic properties of the visual nervous system. Most neurons in the primary visual cortex occur in repeating structures called ocular dominance columns; these in turn are organized into hypercolumns, whose long-range interconnections are arranged geometrically. The spontaneous activity of these neural networks gives rise to the patterns Klüver studied.
The "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape.
Such investigations of the biology of aesthetics, however, had heretofore not been anyone's primary research focus; rather, the investigations have been subordinated to some other work, such as modelling the visual system. Semir Zeki of University College London is pioneering modern neuroaesthetics, and, thanks in part to a £1 million grant from the Wellcome Trust in the UK last autumn, is forging ahead with a research program that tries to establish the neurobiological underpinnings for creativity, beauty, and even love.
Zeki's work has been ongoing for several years. In 2004 he led a neuroimaging study designed to investigate the neural correlates of beauty. Ten participants were shown 300 paintings and asked to classify each of them as beautiful, ugly, or neutral. Paintings rated as beautiful by some of the participants were rated as ugly by others, and vice versa. The participants were then shown the paintings again while lying in a scanner. "Beautiful" paintings elicited increased activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, which is involved in emotion and reward. Interestingly, the "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape. More recently, Zeki has started to collaborate with scholars from the arts and humanities under the guidance of a multidisciplinary advisory board that includes author A.S. Byatt and Jonathan Miller, a physician and opera producer.
Richard Morris, head of neuroscience and mental health at the Wellcome Trust, says Zeki's work "gives insight into what it is to be human." And according to Wellcome senior scientist John Williams, could reveal some of the underpinnings of conditions, such as depression, that are marked by a reduced aesthetic sense.
Elsewhere at UCL, neuroscientist Hugo Spiers is investigating how the brain encodes direction, location, and the dimensions of space — the implications for architecture could be profound. Spiers recently collaborated with artist Antoni Malinowski and architect Bettina Vismann on a project that aimed to explore the relationship between art, architecture, and the brain. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project resulted in an installation called Neurotopographics, which tracked the relationship between movement though space and the activity of the brain. "When someone traverses a space, their brain produces an oscillating, rhythmic pattern," Spiers explains. "We tried to realize this abstract understanding into an everyday reality."
As for architecture, altering space can have a large impact on brain function. Changing the dimensions of an animal's enclosure causes grid cells to alter their scales accordingly, such that the periodicity of their firing, which is observed as the animal moves across a space, increases or decreases. Surprisingly, negotiating a corridor in opposite directions elicits completely different patterns of place-cell activity, so the same space is apparently encoded as two different places. A less surprising but still important finding is that the lack of easily recognizable landmarks causes disorientation. Spiers and his colleagues are now investigating how the brain encodes three-dimensional space. While recording neuronal activity as rats negotiated a spiral staircase, they found that place cells, but not grid cells, respond to changes in height. Thus, the brain seems to encode the vertical and horizontal dimensions in different ways.
Such knowledge of spatial cognition provides an understanding of the brain's response to the built environment and can inform architects as they consider the aesthetic elements and function of a space. "From an architectural point of view," says Vismann, "I find the correspondence between what occurs in the brain and the physical nature of space and spatial navigation fascinating." She expects that understanding the neural bases of spatial perception will inspire projects, inform the design process, and help formulate ways of organizing space.
Future work may elucidate the long-term effects of one's surroundings on brain function and the relationship between aesthetically pleasing spaces and their functionality. What one considers beautiful is, of course, influenced by culture, learning, and experience, and not everything we find beautiful will ultimately be traceable to the structure and function of our brain. The larger question "What is beauty?" still poses a major challenge, but answering it no longer seems so impossible.
//////////////////////////////
UPFRONT
Stun guns may cause brain injury
Print version: page 12
New research finds that stun guns—also known as Tasers and used by two-thirds of the nation's law enforcement agencies—may impair people's cognitive functioning.
In a study of 62 police officers, researchers at Rosalind Franklin University of Medical Science in Chicago and the University of Illinois found that police officers who had been "tased" during training drills fared worse than a control group in attention, processing speed and memory. The results, though preliminary, suggest that law enforcement agencies should reconsider their use of Tasers in training exercises and that researchers need to further investigate the potential long-term effects, says study co-author Neil Pliskin, PhD, a University of Illinois psychology professor.
"It's a provocative finding because the kinds of difficulties that were observed ... are the same kinds of changes we see in people who have suffered electrical shocks from accidents involving domestic power sources," Pliskin says.
/////////////////
////////////SONOMA=ARTRE SUMMARY
1. EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. "Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence." This means that what we do, how we act in our life, determines our apparent "qualities." It is not that someone tells the truth because she is honest, but rather she defines herself as honest by telling the truth again and again.
I am a professor in a way different than the way I am six feet tall, or the way a table is a table. The table simply is; I exist by defining myself in the world at each moment.
2. SUBJECT RATHER THAN OBJECT. Humans are not objects to be used by God or a government or corporation or society. Nor we to be "adjusted" or molded into roles --to be only a waiter or a conductor or a mother or worker. We must look deeper than our roles and find ourselves.
3. FREEDOM is the central and unique potentiality which constitutes us as human. Sartre rejects determinism, saying that it is our choice how we respond to determining tendencies.
4. CHOICE. I am my choices. I cannot not choose. If I do not choose, that is still a choice. If faced with inevitable circumstances, we still choose how we are in those circumstances.
5. RESPONSIBILITY. Each of us is responsible for everything we do. If we seek advice from others, we choose our advisor and have some idea of the course he or she will recommend. "I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities."
6. PAST DETERMINANTS SELDOM TELL US THE CRUCIAL INFORMATION. We transform past determining tendencies through our choices. Explanations in terms of family, socioeconomic status, etc., do not tell us why a person makes the crucial choices we are most interested in.
7. OUR ACTS DEFINE US. "In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait, and there is nothing but that portrait." Our illusions and imaginings about ourselves, about what we could have been, are nothing but self-deception.
8. WE CONTINUALLY MAKE OURSELVES AS WE ARE. A "brave" person is simply someone who usually acts bravely. Each act contributes to defining us as we are, and at any moment we can begin to act differently and draw a different portrate of ourselves. There is always a possibility to change, to start making a different kind of choice.
9. OUR POWER TO CREATE OURSELVES. We have the power of transforming ourself indefinitely.
10. OUR REALITY AND OUR ENDS. Human reality "identifies and defines itself by the ends which it pursues", rather than by alleged "causes" in the past.
11. SUBJECTIVISM means the freedom of the individual subject, and that we cannot pass beyond subjectivity.
12. THE HUMAN CONDTION. Despite different roles and historical situations, we all have to be in the world, to labor and die there. These circumstances "are everywhere recognisable; and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if we do not live them.
13. CONDEMNED TO BE FREE. We are condemned because we did not create ourselves. We must choose and act from within whatever situation we find ourselves.
14. ABANDONMENT. "I am abandoned in the world... in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help.
15. ANGUISH. "It is in anguish that we become conscious of our freedom. ...My being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation."
1) We must make some choices knowing that the consequences will have profound effects on others (like a commander sending his troops into battle.)
2) In choosing for ourselves we choose for all humankind.
16. DESPAIR.
We limit ourselves to a reliance on that which is within our power, our capability to influence. There are other things very important to us over which we have no control.
17. BAD FAITH means to be guilty of regarding oneself not as a free person but as an object. In bad faith I am hiding the truth from myself. "I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully. (There seems to be some overlap in Sartre's conception of bad faith and his conception of self-deception.)
A person can live in bad faith which ...implies a constant and particular style of life.
18. "THE UNCONSCIOUS" IS NOT TRULY UNCONSCIOUS. At some level I am aware of, and I choose, what I will allow fully into my consciousness and what I will not. Thus I cannot use "the unconscious" as an excuse for my behavior. Even though I may not admit it to myself, I am aware and I am choosing.
Even in self-deception, I know I am the one deceiving myself, and Freud's so-called censor must be conscious to know what to repress.
Those who use "the unconscious" as exoneration of actions believe that our instincts, drives, and complexes make up a reality that simply is; that is neither true nor false in itself but simply real.
19. PASSION IS NO EXCUSE. "I was overwhelmed by strong feelings; I couldn't help myself" is a falsehood. Despite my feelings, I choose how to express them in action.
20. ONTOLOGY: The study of being, of what constitutes a person as a person, is the necessary basis for psychoanalysis.
////////////////////Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
///////////////////KLUGE-
From Publishers Weekly
Why are we subject to irrational beliefs, inaccurate memories, even war? We can thank evolution, Marcus says, which can only tinker with structures that already exist, rather than create new ones: Natural selection... tends to favor genes that have immediate advantages rather than long-term value. Marcus (The Birth of the Mind), director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center, refers to this as kluge, a term engineers use to refer to a clumsily designed solution to a problem. Thus, memory developed in our prehominid ancestry to respond with immediacy, rather than accuracy; one result is erroneous eyewitness testimony in courtrooms. In describing the results of studies of human perception, cognition and beliefs, Marcus encapsulates how the mind is contaminated by emotions, moods, desires, goals, and simple self-interest.... The mind's fragility, he says, is demonstrated by mental illness, which seems to have no adaptive purpose. In a concluding chapter, Marcus offers a baker's dozen of suggestions for getting around the brain's flaws and achieving true wisdom. While some are self-evident, others could be helpful, such as Whenever possible, consider alternate hypotheses and Don't just set goals. Make contingency plans. Using evolutionary psychology, Marcus educates the reader about mental flaws in a succinct, often enjoyable way. (Apr. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
IMMEDIACY RATHER THAN ACCURACY
//////////////////Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.
Taking us on a tour of the fundamental areas of human experience -- memory, belief, decision-making, language, and happiness -- Marcus reveals the myriad ways our minds fall short. He examines why people often vote against their own interests, why money can't buy happiness, why leaders often stick to bad decisions, and why a sentence like "people people left left" ties us in knots even though it's only four words long.
Marcus also offers surprisingly effective ways to outwit our inner kluge, for the betterment of ourselves and society. Throughout, he shows how only evolution -- haphazard and undirected -- could have produced the minds we humans have, while making a brilliant case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.
///////////////////Unintelligent Design
4:02 AM PDT, July 1, 2008
Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.
When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.
Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),
Our troubles with memory in turn lead to an unending litany of problems that the psychologist Timothy Wilson collectively refers to as "mental contamination", in which irrelevant information frequently, ranging from the physical attractiveness of political candidates to random numbers on a roulette wheel, subconsciously cloud human judgments. If an ugly child throws an ice-filled snowballs, for instance, we judge that child to be delinquent, but when an especially attractive child does the same thing, we excuse him, saying he's just "having a bad day." A study published earlier this month showed that people's moral judgments are more severe when made in a disgusting, soiled pizza-box filled office than when in an office that is neat as a pin; another, which appeared just last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that voters are more likely to favor school policies if the balloting takes place in a school than if it takes place in an apartment building. We may aspire, as Aristotle thought, to be "the rational animal", but in reality the flotsam and jetsam of barely conscious memory frequently intercedes.
At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
Imperfections riddle the body as well; the human spine supports 70% of our body weight with a single column, where four might have distributed the load better (greatly reducing the incidence of debilitating back pain), and the human retina is effectively installed backwards, with its array of outgoing neural fibers coming out of the front rather than the back, saddling us with an entirely needless blindspot.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
A local maximum is like a moderately high peak in a rugged mountain range that is filled with other peaks, some of which are considerably higher; a peak at the top of the treeline, when there are plenty of snow-capped peaks that loom considerably higher. The process of natural selection is vulnerable to such limits for two reasons: it is blind, and it generally takes only small steps; as such, it can easily get stuck on low-lying peaks that are impressive but well short of the highest possible mountaintop, designs that are "good enough for government work" but far from perfect.
Darwin gives a natural explanation that indicates poorly-designed features should be common in biology. The theory of intelligent design, in contrast, has a serious problem explaining such phenomena: an intelligent designer that could perceive the whole landscape could just pick us up and move us to higher ground. That this has never happened is clear testament both to the wisdom of the theory of natural selection and the implausibility of intelligent design.
The problem with the Lousiana law is not just that it seeks to mix church and state, a situation that the Constitution's framers rightly sought to avoid, but that it is predicated on the assumption that creationists have a reasonable theory with which to counter evolution with - where in truth they simply don't.
-- Gary Marcus, Professor of Psychology at New York University, is the author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.
////////////////his?)
We'd all like to believe that we're rational and clear-headed, and that our mind, will, and emotions are reliable (except, perhaps, when it comes to romance and chocolate). However, "Kluge" indicates that our Rube Goldberg brain often doesn't work quite as optimally as we believe it does. Thankfully, Gary Marcus' mind functioned well enough to bring us this fine book.
Reading about the brain is probably the ultimate act of navel-gazing, since it's the seat of who we are, and its function determines a large part of our destiny. I was glad to see a well-done and accessible analysis of our most important organ. I found the author's breakdown of the mind enlightening, like with the relationship between memory and context. Why can't I find my clipboard? Because I put it in an unfamiliar place - duh. He also compares our faulty context-dependent memory to the more accurate and systematic way a computer accesses information. Bottom line, we come up short in the total recall department.
Mr. Marcus is firmly in the evolutionary camp, so creationists may take issue with "Kluge." Mr. Marcus believes that a patchwork brain like ours couldn't be the product of a rational, superior creator. Instead, evolution fashioned our brain based on what worked for humanity's genetic propagation, not to imitate what is perfect or holy. "Good enough for survival" was evolution's mantra, as opposed to forming an "image of God," as most creationists advocate. But the author isn't demeaning towards believers, so persons of faith can at least take comfort in that.
As the whole the book was eye-opening, with chapters on concrete themes ("Memory") and more abstract topics ("True Wisdom" - yes, there's a little cognitive self-help advice). Some of the chapters were a bit more compelling than others, but that's mainly a personal preference thing. No matter the subject, each chapter contained one or more "a-ha" moments. For example, I identified with the blinding effect pleasure has on my higher cognitive functions. I've certainly made some dumb rationalizations in order to gain immediate gratification, only to look back after the fact and ask, "What was I thinking?" Of course, I wasn't firing on all cylinders - my "grab bag of crude mechanisms" devoted to pleasure was easily tricked.
My only real gripe with "Kluge" was with the tantalizing, yet too-small bits the author threw out about certain subjects. I wish he had spent more time on, say, sociopathy. He devotes all of one sentence and a footnote to this topic, but I wanted more analysis, since the idea that brain structure might be responsible for a Hannibal Lecter would be fascinating (and somewhat ironic) reading. Indeed, a deeper dip into the link between morality and brain formation/function would have been intriguing (or perhaps disconcerting to a person of faith who believes in the theology of sin and freedom of the will). In addition, Mr. Marcus' take on the idea of changing the brain, vs. simply "doing better," would also have been welcome, since that theory seems to be in vogue these days. I suppose these topics were beyond the book's scope, so I can't complain too much.
"Kluge" is a good read on its own, but I recommend going through it in conjunction with some complementary books: "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead," by David Shields, "Sperm Are From Men, Eggs Are From Women," by Joe Quirk, and "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin," by David Quammen.
////////////////////CASPIAN TIGER-EXTINCT-1937
///////////////////BARBARY LION OF N AFRICA-?BABBAR SHER
/////////////////TECHNO-OPTIMISM
/////////////////CLUTTER AND STRESS
////////////////
Researchers have uncovered a completely unexpected way that the brain repairs nerve damage, wherein cells known as astrocytes deliver a protective protein to nearby neurons.
Astrocytes are a type of support cell in the brain that serve many functions; one of their roles is to chew up damaged nerves during brain injury and then form scar tissue in the damaged area.
Roger Chung and colleagues have now found that astrocytes have another trick up their sleeve. During injury, astrocytes overproduce a protein called metallothionein (MT) and secrete it to surrounding nerves; MT is a scavenging protein that grabs free radicals and metal ions and prevents them from damaging a cell, and thus is a potent protecting agent.
While the ability of astrocytes to produce MT has been known for decades, the general view was that the MT stayed within astrocytes to protect them while they help repair damaged areas. However, Chung and colleagues demonstrated that MT was present in the external fluid of damaged rat brain. Furthermore, with the aid of a fluorescent MT protein, they observed that MT made in astrocytes could be transported outside the cell and then subsequently taken up by nearby nerves, and that the level of MT uptake correlated with how well the nerves repaired damage.
While the exact physiological role that MT plays in promoting better repair remains to be identified, this unexpected role for this protein should open up new avenues in treating brain injuries in the future.
///////////////////////// Beauty and the Brain
Neuroaesthetics promises to reinvigorate science's search for a theory of beauty.
by Moheb Costandi • Posted September 16, 2008 08:48 AM
Illustration by Gluekit.
Why is something beautiful? David Hume argued that beauty exists not in things but "in the mind that contemplates them." And everyone has at some point heard the old saw that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But Plato had a fanciful answer made to argue for a universal truth: In his world of forms, he claimed there existed a perfect Form of Beauty, which was imperfectly manifested in what we call beautiful. Despite the allure of Plato's metaphorical claim, students of aesthetics have struggled to substantiate it. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that there exist quantifiable, describable, universal aspects to the human capacity for appreciating beautiful forms, perhaps originating in our ancestors' experience on African savannas or in the need to find suitable mates. They have not solved the problem. However, recent work by several researchers at University College London — including the establishment of the first major grant-driven research program for the neurobiological investigation of aesthetics, or neuroaesthetics — has made the first steps toward a unified biocultural theory of art. An object's beauty may not be universal, but the neural basis for appreciating beauty probably is. The researchers' initial discoveries and the increasing formalization of the field promise to open the way for the first time to an understanding of beauty based on something other than speculation.
Advertisement
Click here!
The first studies of aesthetics and the brain began with the sort of self-experimentation that science doesn't encourage anymore. In the 1920s neurologist Heinrich Klüver documented the hallucinations he experienced while under the influence of mescaline, using four categories: grids, zigzags, spirals, and curves. Noting their similarity to the hallucinations experienced in various conditions, such as migraine, sensory deprivation, and the hypnagogic state that occurs in the transition from wakefulness to sleep, he named them "form constants." These motifs do indeed seem to be constant — they recur throughout history and across cultures, and can be seen, for example, in prehistoric cave paintings, in the girih patterns of the tile mosaics decorating medieval mosques, and in the repeating tessellations of M.C. Escher's impossible figures or the rectangular forms of Mondrian's Compositions. Underlying those patterns, at least in part, are the intrinsic properties of the visual nervous system. Most neurons in the primary visual cortex occur in repeating structures called ocular dominance columns; these in turn are organized into hypercolumns, whose long-range interconnections are arranged geometrically. The spontaneous activity of these neural networks gives rise to the patterns Klüver studied.
The "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape.
Such investigations of the biology of aesthetics, however, had heretofore not been anyone's primary research focus; rather, the investigations have been subordinated to some other work, such as modelling the visual system. Semir Zeki of University College London is pioneering modern neuroaesthetics, and, thanks in part to a £1 million grant from the Wellcome Trust in the UK last autumn, is forging ahead with a research program that tries to establish the neurobiological underpinnings for creativity, beauty, and even love.
Zeki's work has been ongoing for several years. In 2004 he led a neuroimaging study designed to investigate the neural correlates of beauty. Ten participants were shown 300 paintings and asked to classify each of them as beautiful, ugly, or neutral. Paintings rated as beautiful by some of the participants were rated as ugly by others, and vice versa. The participants were then shown the paintings again while lying in a scanner. "Beautiful" paintings elicited increased activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, which is involved in emotion and reward. Interestingly, the "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape. More recently, Zeki has started to collaborate with scholars from the arts and humanities under the guidance of a multidisciplinary advisory board that includes author A.S. Byatt and Jonathan Miller, a physician and opera producer.
Richard Morris, head of neuroscience and mental health at the Wellcome Trust, says Zeki's work "gives insight into what it is to be human." And according to Wellcome senior scientist John Williams, could reveal some of the underpinnings of conditions, such as depression, that are marked by a reduced aesthetic sense.
Elsewhere at UCL, neuroscientist Hugo Spiers is investigating how the brain encodes direction, location, and the dimensions of space — the implications for architecture could be profound. Spiers recently collaborated with artist Antoni Malinowski and architect Bettina Vismann on a project that aimed to explore the relationship between art, architecture, and the brain. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project resulted in an installation called Neurotopographics, which tracked the relationship between movement though space and the activity of the brain. "When someone traverses a space, their brain produces an oscillating, rhythmic pattern," Spiers explains. "We tried to realize this abstract understanding into an everyday reality."
As for architecture, altering space can have a large impact on brain function. Changing the dimensions of an animal's enclosure causes grid cells to alter their scales accordingly, such that the periodicity of their firing, which is observed as the animal moves across a space, increases or decreases. Surprisingly, negotiating a corridor in opposite directions elicits completely different patterns of place-cell activity, so the same space is apparently encoded as two different places. A less surprising but still important finding is that the lack of easily recognizable landmarks causes disorientation. Spiers and his colleagues are now investigating how the brain encodes three-dimensional space. While recording neuronal activity as rats negotiated a spiral staircase, they found that place cells, but not grid cells, respond to changes in height. Thus, the brain seems to encode the vertical and horizontal dimensions in different ways.
Such knowledge of spatial cognition provides an understanding of the brain's response to the built environment and can inform architects as they consider the aesthetic elements and function of a space. "From an architectural point of view," says Vismann, "I find the correspondence between what occurs in the brain and the physical nature of space and spatial navigation fascinating." She expects that understanding the neural bases of spatial perception will inspire projects, inform the design process, and help formulate ways of organizing space.
Future work may elucidate the long-term effects of one's surroundings on brain function and the relationship between aesthetically pleasing spaces and their functionality. What one considers beautiful is, of course, influenced by culture, learning, and experience, and not everything we find beautiful will ultimately be traceable to the structure and function of our brain. The larger question "What is beauty?" still poses a major challenge, but answering it no longer seems so impossible.
//////////////////////////////
UPFRONT
Stun guns may cause brain injury
Print version: page 12
New research finds that stun guns—also known as Tasers and used by two-thirds of the nation's law enforcement agencies—may impair people's cognitive functioning.
In a study of 62 police officers, researchers at Rosalind Franklin University of Medical Science in Chicago and the University of Illinois found that police officers who had been "tased" during training drills fared worse than a control group in attention, processing speed and memory. The results, though preliminary, suggest that law enforcement agencies should reconsider their use of Tasers in training exercises and that researchers need to further investigate the potential long-term effects, says study co-author Neil Pliskin, PhD, a University of Illinois psychology professor.
"It's a provocative finding because the kinds of difficulties that were observed ... are the same kinds of changes we see in people who have suffered electrical shocks from accidents involving domestic power sources," Pliskin says.
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