I would gladly pay 2 dollars more per year in taxes if it went to the space program

Surely one of them......

New Australian Telescope Set to Find 700,000 Galaxies
ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2012)

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Australia's newest radio telescope is predicted to find an unprecedented 700,000 new galaxies, say scientists planning for CSIRO's next-generation Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP).

In a paper to be published Sunday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Australian researchers have combined computer simulations with ASKAP's specifications to predict the new telescope's extraordinary capabilities.

"ASKAP is a highly capable telescope. Its surveys will find more galaxies, further away and be able to study them in more detail than any other radio telescope in the world until the SKA Is built," said Dr Alan Duffy from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.

"Our simulation is similar to testing a Formula 1 car in a wind tunnel before using it on the track."

ASKAP will start scanning southern skies in 2013 as a forerunner to the massive Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be shared between Australia-New Zealand and Southern Africa.

Dr Duffy said two ASKAP surveys, WALLABY and DINGO, would examine galaxies to study hydrogen gas -- the fuel that forms stars -- and how those galaxies had changed in the last 4 billion years, allowing us to better understand how our own galaxy, the Milky Way, grew.

"We predict that WALLABY will find an amazing 600,000 new galaxies and DINGO 100,000, spread over trillions of cubic light years of space."
Dr Duffy said the new ASKAP galaxy surveys would also allow astronomers to probe the nature of one of astronomy's greatest mysteries -- Dark Energy.

Combining a large simulation of the Universe with new theories of galaxy formation − including the effects of supermassive black holes − had led scientists to accurately predict where as-yet undiscovered galaxies should be located, Dr Duffy said.

"We calculated how much of the model Universe ASKAP could observe using details of the telescope's capabilities," said co-author Dr Baerbel Koribalski, who has recently been appointed as an Office of the Chief Executive Science Leader at the CSIRO.

Co-author Associate Professor Darren Croton from Swinburne University of Technology also said the predictions would be used to help scientists refine how to handle the large quantity of data ASKAP will produce and test theories of galaxy formation.

"If we don't see this many galaxies, then the Universe is strangely different to our simulations," Associate Professor Croton said.

ASKAP will become part of the world's largest telescope -- the SKA.
ICRAR is a joint venture between Curtin University and The University of Western Australia providing research excellence in the field of radio astronomy.

Thought this was really cool..

The beautiful nano details of our world

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Please consider... http://www.penny4nasa.org/

You are on a roll. Good work!

It's all about the teachers. I had a good chemistry/physics teacher and learned a ****load. It isn't a standards problem. Nothing happens if you don't meet the standards. Getting rid of shit teachers is what isn't happening. The standards, in theory are a good idea, but the system is so broken, fixing the standards will do nothing.

Thank you for that sir

FoxO Gene and Immortality. It's coming...

Solving the Mystery of Aging: Longevity Gene Makes Hydra Immortal and Humans Grow Older

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2012) — Why do we get older? When do we die and why? Is there a life without aging? For centuries, science has been fascinated by these questions. Now researchers from Kiel (Germany) have examined why the polyp Hydra is immortal -- and unexpectedly discovered a link to aging in humans.

The study carried out by Kiel University together with the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH) will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Hydra -- mysteriously immortal

The tiny freshwater polyp Hydra does not show any signs of aging and is potentially immortal. There is a rather simple biological explanation for this: these animals exclusively reproduce by budding rather than by mating. A prerequisite for such vegetative-only reproduction is that each polyp contains stem cells capable of continuous proliferation. Without these stem cells, the animals could not reproduce any more. Due to its immortality, Hydra has been the subject of many studies regarding aging processes for several years.

Aging in humans

When people get older, more and more of their stem cells lose the ability to proliferate and thus to form new cells. aging tissue cannot regenerate any more, which is why for example muscles decline. Elderly people tend to feel weaker because their heart muscles are affected by this aging process as well. If it were possible to influence these aging processes, humans could feel physically better for much longer. Studying animal tissue such as those of Hydra -- an animal full of active stem cells during all its life -- may deliver valuable insight into stem cell aging as such.

Human longevity gene discovered in Hydra

"Surprisingly, our search for the gene that causes Hydra to be immortal led us to the so-called FoxO gene," says Anna-Marei Böhm, PhD student and first author of the study. The FoxO gene exists in all animals and humans and has been known for years. However, until now it was not known why human stem cells become fewer and inactive with increasing age, which biochemical mechanisms are involved and if FoxO played a role in aging. In order to find the gene, the research group isolated Hydra's stem cells and then screened all of their genes.

Immortality mechanism of Hydra revealed

The Kiel research team examined FoxO in several genetically modified polyps: Hydra with normal FoxO, with inactive FoxO and with enhanced FoxO. The scientists were able to show that animals without FoxO possess significantly fewer stem cells. Interestingly, the immune system in animals with inactive FoxO also changes drastically. "Drastic changes of the immune system similar to those observed in Hydra are also known from elderly humans," explains Philip Rosenstiel of the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at UKSH, whose research group contributed to the study.

FoxO makes human life longer, too

"Our research group demonstrated for the first time that there is a direct link between the FoxO gene and aging," says Thomas Bosch from the Zoological Institute of Kiel University, who led the Hydra study. Bosch continues: "FoxO has been found to be particularly active in centenarians -- people older than one hundred years -- which is why we believe that FoxO plays a key role in aging -- not only in Hydra but also in humans." However, the hypothesis cannot be verified on humans, as this would require a genetic manipulation of humans. Bosch stresses however that the current results are still a big step forward in explaining how humans age. Therefore the next step must be to study how the longevity gene FoxO works in Hydra, and how environmental factors influence FoxO activity.

Without stem cells we all die

Scientifically, the study has two major conclusions: On the one hand it confirms that the FoxO gene plays a decisive role in the maintenance of stem cells. It thus determines the life span of animals -- from cnidarians to humans. On the other hand, the study shows that aging and longevity of organisms really depend on two factors: the maintenance of stem cells and the maintenance of a functioning immune system.

This work was funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.

Zombie Ants... Awesome..

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Zombie Ants Controlled by Fungus

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, also known as cordyceps, is a type of fungus that infects insects and takes over their nervous systems. The method with which they take control of nervous systems is still a mystery to science. However, the repercussions of such an infection are all too clear.

Carpenter Ants, for example, live in the canopy of the tropical rainforest. They frequently forage for food on the forest floor. Unfortunately, this is where the cordyceps fungus proliferates. A new study shows that the fungus prefers to grow on “the undersides of leaves sprouting from the northwest side of plants that grow on the forest floor” This places it in an ideal position to grow and release its spores to infect ants. Here's how the fungus gets there in the first place.

When an ant is infected by cordyceps, it undergoes a series of behavioural changes. The fungus forces the ant to climb down from the canopy to the low leaves where the cordyceps prefers to grow. Just before dying, the ant will use its mandibles to bite down on the leaf to secure itself.

After the zombie ant dies, the fungus digests the insides of the ant to get nutrition for growth. It’s interesting to note that the cordyceps avoids digesting the muscles controlling the ant’s mandibles. These muscles are the ones that keep the ant attached to the surface. The outer husk of the ant is also left unharmed. The cordyceps uses this as a physical armor to protect against microbes and other fungi.

The fruiting body of the cordyceps will then erupt from the ants head, slowly growing longer until it matures, after which it will release the spores, which seek new hosts. Any ant in the vicinity of this event risks infection.

A single ant infection is a threat to the whole colony. As such, ant colonies go out of their way to avoid an epidemic. Worker ants will often carry an infected ant far away from where the colony forages to prevent the spread of the fungus. The fact that Carpenter Ants live in the canopy of the rainforest may be a strategy to escape the infection.

Cordyceps does not exclusively target Carpenter Ants. There are many different types of Cordyceps fungi that can infect many different insects, including moths, grasshoppers and many more.

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Hey.... what happened little buddy? Whatcha got on your mind?

I happened to be watching the 10:00 news on NBC out of Wichita. I normally try not to watch that crap, but there was a news report that said 1 in 5 teachers don't even record grades for Science.

WHAT. THE. ****.

That is crap!

Of and if you didn't see this in the lounge try this... Amazing

http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/

incredible. Almost incomprehensible how small our little world is in relation to everything else...

The US Navy has unveiled plans to make jet fuel out of seawater, with the help of electrochemistry and gas-to-liquid fuels technology.


Researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, have demonstrated that it is possible to obtain CO2 and hydrogen from seawater, then convert these to hydrocarbons suitable for fuelling aircraft.

Keeping ships and aircraft fuelled is a major operation for any navy. The US Navy has 15 refuelling ships — known as oilers — and last year these delivered 600 million gallons of fuel to ships under way. Generating their own fuel would free up the ships from these logistics and make the navy less dependent on imported oil, said Nancy Willauer, a research chemist who worked on the project.




Refuelling at sea is an expensive process that often relies on imported oil

The technology uses electrochemistry to recover CO2 from seawater, where it is present at a concentration 140 times greater than in air, mostly as bicarbonate with traces of carbonate and dissolved CO2 gas (carbonic acid). The navy team developed a device called an electrochemical acidification cell, which uses ion-permeable polymer membranes and an electric current to lower the pH of the seawater. The three forms of carbon in the water exist in a state of equilibrium, and making the water more acidic alters the balance between them, making gaseous CO2 the most stable form. The cell produces hydrogen gas at its cathode as a by-product.

After demonstrating this at a small scale, the NRL team scaled it up to a skid process — a freestanding unit on a scale similar to that which might be used in the field — which can reportedly recover up to 92 per cent of the CO2 from seawater taken from the Gulf of Mexico.


The skid unit at NRL, which can recover up to 92 per cent of the CO2 from seawater

Converting these two gases into hydrocarbons uses a technology similar to the Fischer-Tropsch process, which has been used for many years to make fuel from ‘synthesis gas’, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. ‘By modifying the surface compositions of iron catalysts in fixed-bed reactors, NRL has successfully improved CO2 conversion efficiencies by up to 60 per cent,’ Willauer said.

The iron-catalysed process produces short-chain unsaturated hydrocarbons, which can then be combined to make compounds containing nine to 16 carbon atoms; treating these with a catalyst supported on porous nickel converts them into a liquid suitable as jet fuel, the researchers said.

NRL is now looking into improving the efficiency of the process and scaling it up and believes that the final process should be able to produce fuel at a price of between $3 and $6 per gallon (between fifty pence and £1 per litre). The process could be powered using nuclear electricity or by a method known as solar OTEC, which uses the natural temperature gradient between different levels of the ocean to power electricity generation, the team suggested. The research can be read in this paper.


Read more: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/sectors...#ixzz2CRICukih

(CBS News) Two men who've had HIV for years may now be free of the disease following bone marrow transplants, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston announced Thursday.


The new research has some attendees at the XIX International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. hopeful for a cure.

Timothy Ray Brown, man thought to be first "cured" of AIDS, says he's still cured
Man "cured" of AIDS: Timothy Ray Brown

Both patients were being treated for cases of cancer. One of the patients underwent a bone marrow transplant two years ago at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center in Boston, the other had the procedure done four years ago at the same hospital. NBCNews.com reports that one of the patients is in his 50s and has been infected since the early 1980s towards the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and the other man, in his 20s, was infected at birth.

Both stayed on their antiretroviral medication regimens, the standard treatment of HIV, following the transplants.

The researchers discovered that overtime as the patients' cells were replaced by cells from the donor, evidence of HIV in the patients' blood tests disappeared. The researchers also said both patients have no signs of HIV in their DNA or RNA and levels of their disease-fighting antibodies have also decreased. The researchers think the medications helped allow these cells to be replaced.

"This gives us some important information," one of the researchers Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, an infectious disease specialist at the hospital and Harvard Medical school said in a press release. "It suggests that under the cover of antiretroviral therapy, the cells that repopulated the patient's immune system appear to be protected from becoming re-infected with HIV."

The researchers themselves won't call it a cure yet, saying they still need to check more tissues for traces of the disease. But they were surprised to see no signs of HIV beyond what's seen in a blood test.

"We expected HIV to vanish from the patients' plasma, but it is surprising that we can't find any traces of HIV in their cells," said co-resarcher Dr. Timothy Henrich, also of BWH and Harvard. "The next step is to determine if there are any traces of HIV in their tissue."

The researchers' announcement comes days after Timothy Ray Brown, the man known as the "Berlin Patient," held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to say he's still cured of AIDS five years after undergoing a bone marrow blood transplant.

However, the researchers noted differences in their two patients' treatment compared to that of Brown.

In Brown's case, his donor was specifically chosen because he possessed a genetic mutation that's found in one person of Caucasian people that makes them resistant to developing HIV. But the donors for the two Boston patient were selected at random. Additionally, Brown had stopped taking his antiretroviral medications following his transplant, while the Boston patients have stayed on the drugs.

Traces of HIV have been found in Brown's tissues, causing some to say the virus had returned, but he denied that at his press conference, saying those are merely dead remnants of the virus still in his body.

"We can't say we've replicated the Berlin patient's cure at this point because our patients remain on antiretroviral therapy," Kuritzkes told NPR. He did add to the station that it's "entirely possible" the two patients will remain disease-free.

Dr. Steven Deeks, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Washington Post, "Today might be considered a day when the research agenda moves from basic science and the lab into the clinic," adding that "it is an absolutely critical advancement."

Not all experts were impressed. Dr. Jay Levy, another HIV researcher at UC San Francisco, told The Boston Globe, "The real news would be if they could stop the drugs and not have the virus come back."

Potential magic bullet vs caner?

PHILADELPHIA — A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.
Multimedia
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Gene Therapy

Attacking a Tumor

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University of Pennsylvania

Tiny magnetic beads force the larger T-cells to divide before they are infused into the patient.
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Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

FULL OF LIFE William Ludwig, 66, in his RV parked at his home in New Jersey.
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Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

MAJOR ADVANCE Dr. Bruce Levine lifted cells from a freezer in his lab in Philadelphia last week. Special cell-culturing techniques may have contributed to the lab’s success.
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Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells — a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors — and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig’s veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

There was no trace of it anywhere — no leukemic cells in his blood or bone marrow, no more bulging lymph nodes on his CT scan. His doctors calculated that the treatment had killed off two pounds of cancer cells.

A year later, Mr. Ludwig is still in complete remission. Before, there were days when he could barely get out of bed; now, he plays golf and does yard work.

“I have my life back,” he said.

Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients. The research, they say, has far to go; the treatment is still experimental, not available outside of studies.

But scientists say the treatment that helped Mr. Ludwig, described recently in The New England Journal of Medicine and Science Translational Medicine, may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer. And not just for leukemia patients: other cancers may also be vulnerable to this novel approach — which employs a disabled form of H.I.V.-1, the virus that causes AIDS, to carry cancer-fighting genes into the patients’ T-cells. In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.

Two other patients have undergone the experimental treatment. One had a partial remission: his disease lessened but did not go away completely. Another had a complete remission. All three had had advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia and had run out of chemotherapy options. Usually, the only hope for a remission in such cases is a bone-marrow transplant, but these patients were not candidates for it.

Dr. Carl June, who led the research and directs translational medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the results stunned even him and his colleagues, Dr. David L. Porter, Bruce Levine and Michael Kalos. They had hoped to see some benefit but had not dared dream of complete, prolonged remissions. Indeed, when Mr. Ludwig began running fevers, the doctors did not realize at first that it was a sign that his T-cells were engaged in a furious battle with his cancer.

Other experts in the field said the results were a major advance.

“It’s great work,” said Dr. Walter J. Urba of the Providence Cancer Center and Earle A. Chiles Research Institute in Portland, Ore. He called the patients’ recoveries remarkable, exciting and significant. “I feel very positive about this new technology. Conceptually, it’s very, very big.”

Dr. Urba said he thought the approach would ultimately be used against other types of cancer as well as leukemia and lymphoma. But he cautioned, “For patients today, we’re not there yet.” And he added the usual scientific caveat: To be considered valid, the results must be repeated in more patients, and by other research teams.

Dr. June called the techniques “a harvest of the information from the molecular biology revolution over the past two decades.”

Hitting a Genetic Jackpot

To make T-cells search out and destroy cancer, researchers must equip them to do several tasks: recognize the cancer, attack it, multiply, and live on inside the patient. A number of research groups have been trying to do this, but the T-cells they engineered could not accomplish all the tasks. As a result, the cells’ ability to fight tumors has generally been temporary.

The University of Pennsylvania team seems to have hit all the targets at once. Inside the patients, the T-cells modified by the researchers multiplied to 1,000 to 10,000 times the number infused, wiped out the cancer and then gradually diminished, leaving a population of “memory” cells that can quickly proliferate again if needed.

The researchers said they were not sure which parts of their strategy made it work — special cell-culturing techniques, the use of H.I.V.-1 to carry new genes into the T-cells, or the particular pieces of DNA that they selected to reprogram the T-cells.

The concept of doctoring T-cells genetically was first developed in the 1980s by Dr. Zelig Eshhar at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. It involves adding gene sequences from different sources to enable the T-cells to produce what researchers call chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs — protein complexes that transform the cells into, in Dr. June’s words, “serial killers.”

Mr. Ludwig’s disease, chronic lymphocytic leukemia is a cancer of B-cells, the part of the immune system that normally produces antibodies to fight infection. All B-cells, whether healthy or leukemic, have on their surfaces a protein called CD19. To treat patients with the disease, the researchers hoped to reprogram their T-cells to find CD19 and attack B-cells carrying it.

But which gene sequences should be used to reprogram the T-cells, from which sources? And how do you insert them?

Various research groups have used different methods. Viruses are often used as carriers (or vectors) to insert DNA into other cells because that kind of genetic sabotage is exactly what viruses normally specialize in doing. To modify their patients’ T-cells, Dr. June and his colleagues tried a daring approach: they used a disabled form of H.I.V.-1. They are the first ever to use H.I.V.-1 as the vector in gene therapy for cancer patients (the virus has been used in other diseases).

The AIDS virus is a natural for this kind of treatment, Dr. June said, because it evolved to invade T-cells. The idea of putting any form of the AIDS virus into people sounds a bit frightening, he acknowledged, but the virus used by his team was “gutted” and was no longer harmful. Other researchers had altered and disabled the virus by adding DNA from humans, mice and cows, and from a virus that infects woodchucks and another that infects cows. Each bit was chosen for a particular trait, all pieced together into a vector that Dr. June called a “Rube Goldberg-like solution” and “truly a zoo.”

“It incorporates the ability of H.I.V. to infect cells but not to reproduce itself,” he said.

To administer the treatment, the researchers collected as many of the patients’ T-cells as they could by passing their blood through a machine that removed the cells and returned the other blood components back into the patients’ veins. The T-cells were exposed to the vector, which transformed them genetically, and then were frozen. Meanwhile, the patients were given chemotherapy to deplete any remaining T-cells, because the native T-cells might impede the growth of the altered ones. Finally, the T-cells were infused back into the patients.

Then, Dr. June said, “The patient becomes a bioreactor” as the T-cells proliferate, pouring out chemicals called cytokines that cause fever, chills, fatigue and other flulike symptoms.

The treatment wiped out all of the patients’ B-cells, both healthy ones and leukemic ones, and will continue to do for as long as the new T-cells persist in the body, which could be forever (and ideally should be, to keep the leukemia at bay). The lack of B-cells means that the patients may be left vulnerable to infection, and they will need periodic infusions of a substance called intravenous immune globulin to protect them.

So far, the lack of B-cells has not caused problems for Mr. Ludwig. He receives the infusions every few months. He had been receiving them even before the experimental treatment because the leukemia had already knocked out his healthy B-cells.

One thing that is not clear is why Patient 1 and Patient 3 had complete remissions, and Patient 2 did not. The researchers said that when Patient 2 developed chills and fever, he was treated with steroids at another hospital, and the drugs may have halted the T-cells’ activity. But they cannot be sure. It may also be that his disease was too severe.

The researchers wrote an entire scientific article about Patient 3, which was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Like the other patients, he also ran fevers and felt ill, but the reaction took longer to set in, and he also developed kidney and liver trouble — a sign of tumor lysis syndrome, a condition that occurs when large numbers of cancer cells die off and dump their contents, which can clog the kidneys. He was given drugs to prevent kidney damage. He had a complete remission.

What the journal article did not mention was that Patient 3 was almost not treated.

Because of his illness and some production problems, the researchers said, they could not produce anywhere near as many altered T-cells for him as they had for the other two patients — only 14 million (“a mouse dose,” Dr. Porter said), versus 1 billion for Mr. Ludwig and 580 million for Patient 2. After debate, they decided to treat him anyway.

Patient 3 declined to be interviewed, but he wrote anonymously about his experience for the University of Pennsylvania Web site. When he developed chills and a fever, he said, “I was sure the war was on — I was sure C.L.L. cells were dying.”

He wrote that he was a scientist, and that when he was young had dreamed of someday making a discovery that would benefit mankind. But, he concluded, “I never imagined I would be part of the experiment.”

When he told Patient 3 that he was remission, Dr. Porter said, they both had tears in their eyes.

Not Without Danger to Patients

While promising, the new techniques developed by the University of Pennsylvania researchers are not without danger to patients. Engineered T-cells have attacked healthy tissue in patients at other centers. Such a reaction killed a 39-year-old woman with advanced colon cancer in a study at the National Cancer Institute, researchers there reported last year in the journal Molecular Therapy.

She developed severe breathing trouble 15 minutes after receiving the T-cells, had to be put on a ventilator and died a few days later. Apparently, a protein target on the cancer cells was also present in her lungs, and the T-cells homed in on it.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer in New York also reported a death last year in a T-cell trial for leukemia (also published in Molecular Therapy). An autopsy found that the patient had apparently died from sepsis, not from the T-cells, but because he died just four days after the infusion, the researchers said they considered the treatment a possible factor.

Dr. June said his team hopes to use T-cells against solid tumors, including some that are very hard to treat, like mesothelioma and ovarian and pancreatic cancer. But possible adverse reactions are a real concern, he said, noting that one of the protein targets on the tumor cells is also found on membranes that line the chest and abdomen. T-cell attacks could cause serious inflammation in those membranes and mimic lupus, a serious autoimmune disease.

Even if the T-cells do not hit innocent targets, there are still risks. Proteins they release could cause a “cytokine storm”— high fevers, swelling, inflammation and dangerously low blood pressure — which can be fatal. Or, if the treatment rapidly kills billions of cancer cells, the debris can damage the kidney and cause other problems.

Even if the new T-cell treatment proves to work, the drug industry will be needed to mass produce it. But Dr. June said the research is being done only at universities, not at drug companies. For the drug industry to take interest, he said, there will have to be overwhelming proof that the treatment is far better than existing ones.

“Then I think they’ll jump into it,” he said. “My challenge now is to do this in a larger set of patients with randomization, and to show that we have the same effects.”

Mr. Ludwig said that when entered the trial, he had no options left. Indeed, Dr. June said that Mr. Ludwig was “almost dead” from the leukemia, and the effort to treat him was a “Hail Mary.”

Mr. Ludwig said: “I don’t recall anybody saying there was going to be a remission. I don’t think they were dreaming to that extent.”

The trial was a Phase 1 study, meaning that its main goal was to find out whether the treatment was safe, and at what dose. Of course, doctors and patients always hope that there will be some benefit, but that was not an official endpoint.

Mr. Ludwig thought that if the trial could buy him six months or a year, it would be worth the gamble. But even if the study did not help him, he felt it would still be worthwhile if he could help the study.

When the fevers hit, he had no idea that might be a good sign. Instead, he assumed the treatment was not working. But a few weeks later, he said that his oncologist, Dr. Alison Loren, told him, “We can’t find any cancer in your bone marrow.”

Remembering the moment, Mr. Ludwig paused and said, “I got goose bumps just telling you those words.”

“I feel wonderful,” Mr. Ludwig said during a recent interview. “I walked 18 holes on the golf course this morning.”

Before the study, he was weak, suffered repeated bouts of pneumonia and was wasting away. Now, he is full of energy. He has gained 40 pounds. He and his wife bought an R.V., in which they travel with their grandson and nephew. “I feel normal, like I did 10 years before I was diagnosed,” Mr. Ludwig said. “This clinical trial saved my life.”

Dr. Loren said in an interview, “I hate to say it in that dramatic way, but I do think it saved his life.”

Mr. Ludwig said that Dr. Loren told him and his wife something he considered profound. “She said, ‘We don’t know how long it’s going to last. Enjoy every day,’ ” Mr. Ludwig recalled.

“That’s what we’ve done ever since.”

Ammonites. Giant prehistoric squid/snail predators that could grow as large as a Smartcar....

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/2053/ammonites.jpg
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http://animals.nationalgeographic.co...ric/ammonites/

Ammonites are named after the Egyptian god Ammon, who is often depicted with rams' horns behind each ear.

Female ammonites grew up to 400 percent larger than males, presumably to make room to lay eggs.

Ammonites were predatory, squidlike creatures that lived inside coil-shaped shells. Like other cephalopods, ammonites had sharp, beaklike jaws inside a ring of tentacles that extended from their shells to snare prey such as small fish and crustaceans. Some ammonites grew more than three feet (one meter) across—possible snack food for the giant mosasaur Tylosaurus.

Ammonites constantly built new shell as they grew, but only lived in the outer chamber. They scooted through the warm, shallow seas by squirting jets of water from their bodies. A thin, tubelike structure called a siphuncle reached into the interior chambers to pump and siphon air and helped them move through the water.

Ammonites first appeared about 240 million years ago, though they descended from straight-shelled cephalopods called bacrites that date back to the Devonian, about 415 million years ago. Ammonites were prolific breeders, lived in schools, and are among the most abundant fossils found today. They went extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Scientists use the various shapes and sizes of ammonite shells that appeared and disappeared through the ages to date other fossils.

Fibonacci Sequence

[EDIT: And what's really interesting to me about this 240 million year old snail/squid monster, is that it's another awesome natural occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence. To me, another glimpse of the fascinating math at the root of all life. Another amazing repeatable mathematical pattern evident throughout the chaos of random evolving life. Natural beauty, definable by math and science.]

The shape of the ammonite shell (and the shell of all nautiloids) are aesthetically pleasing because they are one of the natural expressions of the Fibonacci spiral, or golden spiral (also observed in galaxies, the unfurling of fern fiddleheads, the arrangement of leaves around a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, and the arrangement of a pinecone, just to name a few...). A "golden spiral" is easy to construct: 1**2 + 1**2 + . . . + F(n)**2 = F(n) x F(n+1)

The golden spiral is a symbol of beauty and proportional perfection/fit with unlimited room for expansion. The logarithmic proportions of the spiral are consistent throughout, no matter how large the spiral becomes, and the unique spiral can be found throughout the human body and in nature.

The spiral follows a specific mathematical formula: Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2. Each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. If you construct a series of squares with lengths equal to the Fibonacci numbers (1,1,2,3,5, etc) and trace a line through the diagonals of each square, it forms a Fibonacci spiral.

http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/8440/fibonacci.jpg

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/2709/euhopc2.gif

That Fibonacci stuff in nature is profoundly interesting. I've looked at it a little bit while studying markets.

Nocturnal Penile Tumescence.... The Science of Morning Wood....

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Nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) is the spontaneous occurrence of an erection of the penis during sleep or when waking up. All men without physiological erectile dysfunction experience this phenomenon, usually three to five times during the night. It typically happens during REM sleep.

The existence and predictability of nocturnal tumescence is used by sexual health practitioners to ascertain whether a given case of erectile dysfunction (E.D.) is psychological or physiological in origin. A patient presenting with E.D. is fitted with an elastic device to wear around his penis during sleep; the device detects changes in girth and relays the information to a computer for later analysis. If nocturnal tumescence is detected, then the E.D. is presumed to be due to a psychosomatic illness such as sexual anxiety; if not, then it is presumed to be due to a physiological cause.

The cause of NPT is not known with certainty. Bancroft (2005) hypothesizes that the noradrenergic neurons of the locus ceruleus are inhibitory to penile erection, and that the cessation of their discharge that occurs during REM sleep may allow testosterone-related excitatory actions to manifest as NPT.

Evidence supporting the possibility that a full bladder can stimulate an erection has existed for some time and is characterized as a 'reflex erection'. The nerves that control a man’s ability to have a reflex erection are located in the sacral nerves (S2-S4) of the spinal cord. A full bladder is known to mildly stimulate nerves in the same region. This mild stimulus which during the day is normally suppressed in adult males by competing stimuli and other distractions; during sleep with the absence of such factors could instigate a reflex erection.

The possibility of a full bladder causing an erection, especially during sleep, is perhaps further supported by the beneficial physiological effect of an erection inhibiting urination, thereby helping to avoid nocturnal enuresis.

Ever seen a spider crab migration?

Stingray is boss...

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A Fibonacci spiral is not the same as a golden spiral. Close, but not the same. Not sure why the article equates the two.

True. Good point. That's not exactly correct.

A*Golden spiral is very similar to the Fibonacci spiral but is based on a series of identically proportioned golden rectangles, each having a golden ratio of 1.618 of the length of the long side to that of the short side of the rectangle:

http://imageshack.us/scaled/landing/...nrectangle.gif

The Fibonacci spiral gets closer and closer to a Golden Spiral as it increases in size because of the ratio of each number in the Fibonacci series to the one before it converges on Phi, 1.618, as the series progresses (e.g., 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 13 produce ratios of 1, 2, 1.5, 1.67, 1.6 and 1.625, respectively)

Fibonacci spirals and Golden spirals appear in nature, but not every spiral in nature is related to Fibonacci numbers or Phi. *Most spirals in nature are equiangular spirals, and Fibonacci and Golden spirals are special cases of the broader class of Equiangular spirals. *An Equiangular spiral itself is a special type of spiral with unique mathematical properties in which the*size of the spiral increases but its shape remains the same with each successive rotation of its curve. *The curve of an equiangular spiral has a constant angle between a line from origin to any point on the curve and the tangent at that point, hence its name. *In nature, equiangular spirals occur simply because they result in the forces that create the spiral are in equilibrium, and are often seen in non-living examples such as spiral arms of galaxies and the spirals of hurricanes. *Fibonacci spirals,*Golden spirals and golden ratio-based spirals generally appear in living organisms.

More info: http://www.goldennumber.net/spirals/

Water clouds on Mars:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0104...uds_viking.jpg

Did you know that bananas are radioactive? They're radioactive enough in fact, their radioactivity has spawned its own unit of measurement of radioactivity. The banana equivalent dose (BED). The source of radioactivity is the Potassium. Potassium is actually a radioactive element. An important and necessary radioactive element that humans need in their diet.

http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/9...0055698895.jpg


http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/716...tivefoods2.jpg

Interdasting....

Curiosity's Mars discovery called 'one for history books'

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently made a discovery "for the history books," but we'll have to wait a few weeks to find out what the new Red Planet find may be, media reports suggest.

The discovery was made by Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, NPR reported Tuesday. SAM is the rover's onboard chemistry lab, and it's capable of identifying organic compounds — the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.

SAM apparently spotted something interesting in a soil sample Curiosity's huge robotic arm delivered to the instrument recently.

"This data is gonna be one for the history books," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told NPR. "It's looking really good."

Grotzinger said the rover team won't be ready to announce just what SAM found for several weeks yet, NPR reported. The scientists want to check and double-check the results, to make sure they're for real.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover landed inside Mars' huge Gale Crater on Aug. 5, kicking off a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

The car-size robot carries 10 different instruments to aid in its quest, but SAM is the rover's heart, taking up more than half of its science payload by weight.

In addition to analyzing soil samples, SAM also takes the measure of Red Planet air. Many scientists are keen to see if Curiosity detects any methane, which is produced by many lifeforms here on Earth.

A SAM analysis of Curiosity's first few sniffs found no definitive trace of the gas in the Martian atmosphere, but the rover will keep looking.
Space news from NBCNews.com

Curiosity began driving again Friday after spending six weeks testing its soil-scooping gear at a site called "Rocknest." The rover will soon try out its rock-boring drill for the first time on the Red Planet, scientists have said.

Progress on warp drive tech.

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will...rst-warp-drive

Sweet holy Moses.


"A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive.

His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work."

The Alcubierre drive has always fascinated me. I can remember being at Emporia State University, and we had some physicist come in and speak to our Engineering club. He explained the idea behind the Alcubierre drive, and its effect on time and space, and it completely blew my mind. At the time, it seemed so completely unfathomable and I never ever thought that humans would be capable of such a thing for another 1000 years. My, did I have a lot to learn...

Yeah, I had heard of this idea before, but of course the amount of energy required to make it work was a seemingly insurmountable barrier to ever building one.

And now, this scientist may have had a breakthrough making it feasible.

Is there anything mankind cannot achieve?

I'm gonna go with no, if we can all stop killing each other for like 5 minutes.

Scat-Firing Caterpillars Elude Predators

Several species of caterpillars have developed an interesting system for waste disposal; they fire their fecal pellets a distance of up to 40 times their body length away from their homes, at a speed of 4.2 feet (1.3 meters) per second. The equivalent distance for a 6-foot-tall (1.8 meter) human would be around 240 feet (73 meters).

Scientists have long speculated on the evolutionary factors that would favor the development of this extraordinary behavior.

"While studies of foraging have been a cornerstone of ecological research, analogous issues related to defecation have received much less attention," said Martha Weiss, an ecologist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

A lot of animals distance themselves from their waste, usually for reasons of hygiene. Some nestling birds, for example, package waste into mucilage-coated sacs ready for convenient disposal by the adults in the nest. Other animals are known to use scat for surprising purposes; larval tortoise beetles pile fecal shields on their backs to protect them from predators. Some caterpillar species climb onto silk strings decorated with fecal pellets, which are known as frass. The frass helps protect them from ants.

In Weiss's research of scat-launching caterpillars, she found the first experimental evidence that the adaptation serves to protect the caterpillar larvae from wasps and other predators.

Scat-Throwing Launch Pad

Skipper butterfly caterpillars are able to fire frass pellets by pumping up blood pressure directly under an anal "launching pad" on which extruded fecal pellets rest.

"It's the equivalent of the mechanism involved in flicking a pea," said Stanley Caveney, a biologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.

Caveney discovered the "scatapulting" mechanism, leaving scientists with questions about its purpose.

One explanation favored by scientists was that the caterpillars are just good housekeepers and keep their silk-stitched leaf shelters spotless for hygienic purposes.

Weiss's research provides the first experimental evidence for the predator avoidance idea.

"Until now, there has been no direct evidence to suggest the idea that fecal firing behavior in caterpillars helps them to avoid being caught by [predators]," Caveney said.

To test the link between wasp attack and frass accumulation, Weiss introduced the leaf shelters of the silver-spotted skipper caterpillar (Epargyreus clarus) into captive paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus) colonies. The roomy leaf pockets contained either hidden frass pellets or similar-looking black glass beads.

She found that the wasps that visited leaf shelters spent more than 70 percent of their time on those containing frass.

When caterpillar larvae were added to the leaf shelters, the evidence was equally as dramatic. During 5-minute trials, 14 of the larvae housed with frass were devoured by wasps. In contrast, only three were eaten in the shelters containing the black beads.

Related experiments showed that accumulation of frass in their leaf shelters did not affect the caterpillars in terms of crowding or disease. Skipper caterpillars in close contact with 30-day accumulations of frass were no less likely to make it to a healthy adulthood than those in frass-free homes.

The findings are reported in the April issue of the journal Ecology Letters.

Sniff Test

Predatory wasps appear to be attracted to the odor of caterpillar frass, said Weiss. "Evolutionarily, it seems that frass ejection helps to protect larvae from predation by natural enemies," she said. "If they retained frass in their shelters they would be more likely to be killed by wasps or other enemies."

The findings are "novel, interesting, and significant," said Caveney. "[The study] shows convincingly that frass may be used as a homing signal to locate prey."

Predator avoidance is a significant factor driving the evolutionary development of silver-spotted skipper caterpillars. Earlier experiments conducted by Weiss have shown that up to 30 percent of caterpillars in some wild populations can be killed by predators over just a few days.

In fact the risk of being found by predators is so great that many distantly related caterpillar lineages have independently developed the ability to fire frass, said Weiss.

That leaves just one question: Why are pellets ejected so far, so fast?

"A shot distance of a few centimeters or so would generally be sufficient to propel the pellet off the leaflet surface," said Weiss. "Perhaps it's just a by-product of caterpillar physiology."

Life... will find a way....

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Lake life survives in total isolation for 3000 years
20:00 26 November 2012 by Andy Coghlan

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It is seven times as salty as the sea, pitch dark and 13 degrees below freezing. Lake Vida in East Antarctica has been buried for 2800 years under 20 metres of ice, but teems with life.

The discovery of strange, abundant bacteria in a completely sealed, icebound lake strengthens the possibility that extraterrestrial life might exist on planets such as Mars and moons such as Jupiter's Europa.

"Lake Vida is a model of what happens when you try to freeze a lake solid, and this is the same fate that any lakes on Mars would have gone through as the planet turned colder from a watery past," says Peter Doran of the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is co-leader of a team working in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica where Vida is situated. "Any Martian water bodies that did form would have gone through this Vida stage before freezing solid, entombing the evidence of the past ecosystem."

The Vida bacteria, brought to the surface in cores drilled 27 metres down, belong to previously unknown species. They probably survive by metabolising the abundant quantities of hydrogen and oxides of nitrogen that Vida's salty, oxygen-free water has been found to contain.

Co-research leader Alison Murray of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, is now investigating this further by growing some of the extracted cells in the lab. "We can use these cultivated organisms to better understand the physical or chemical extremes they can tolerate that might be relevant to other icy worlds such as Europa," she says.

Surprise composition

Murray and her colleagues were surprised to find so much hydrogen, nitrous oxide and carbon in the water. They speculate that these substances might originate from reactions between salt and nitrogen-containing minerals in the surrounding rock. Over the centuries, bacteria denied sunlight may have evolved to be completely reliant on these substances for energy. "I think the unusual conditions found in the lake have likely played a significant role in shaping the diversity and capabilities of life we found," she says.

But the existence of life in Lake Vida does not necessarily increase the likelihood that life exists in much older, deeper lakes under investigation in Antarctica, most notably Vostok and Ellsworth, which are 3 kilometres down and have been isolated for millions rather than thousands of years.

"It doesn't give us clues about whether there's life in Vostok or Ellsworth, but it says that under these super-salty conditions, life does OK," says Martin Siegert of the University of Bristol, UK, and leader of an expedition to Ellsworth which set off on 25 November. "We'll be drilling down 3 kilometres into the lake," he says.

Scientific Theories.

There's a bit more to them than you thought:

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NASA... making boob pics less blurry. It's just part of what they do....

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Welp, we're dead...

I found this while reading the linked article. This part could be a dealbreaker as far as actually GOING somewhere using this drive: http://www.universetoday.com/93882/w...ller-downside/

Vote for Curiosity as Time's person of the year.

my simplistic understanding was this will not be possible without damage when you stop.

They will have to figure out a way to repel those particles.

Yeah...not sure this really sounds impossible to overcome.

If I'm reading this correctly, this is only a problem for people at the destination, not people inside the ship, right?

And if so couldn't the problem be solved by choosing a stopping point far enough away from inhabitants so this blast of particles doesn't impact them?

Would you be able to plot that precise? Especially in its infancy?

While the particles would mainly be an issue in front and back, the article implies that they could radiate from the craft in ANY direction. You MAY have to slow down too far away from your destination to be practical.

One of the things that has made me wonder about the Alcubierre drive, is that you'd pretty much have to have your route laid out knowing exactly where every object is along your path. You couldn't steer. And hitting something at that speed would be bad. So you could probably travel quickly in the vast emptiness between galaxies, but there would still need to be a lot of mapping going on. For safe efficient space travel, we need a 3D live map of the universe to navigate.

Well, certainly doesn't sound like you can eliminate it as a possibility yet. Worth continuing the research on it, I'd say.

I would think you could avoid obstacles by making your flight path a series of small jumps rather than one long straight line path, working your way around cosmic "roadblocks".

As you say, though, it would require a lot of mapping first.

Come to think of it, could this also be a solution to the "particle" problem? Maybe by making multiple short jumps, you could allow the particles to dissipate at every jump so there was not nearly so much of a burst when you arrived at your final destination...

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Huge Saturn Vortex Swirls in Stunning NASA Photos

http://news.yahoo.com/huge-saturn-vo...190955874.html

They just announced on NASA TV that they found ice on Mercury's pole.

Listen live: http://blogs.discovery.com/inscider/...#mkcpgn=fbsci1

Press Conference on MESSENGER results from Mercury

NASA will host a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, November 29, to reveal new observations of Mercury's polar regions from the MESSENGER spacecraft. The briefing will be carried live on NASA TV.
The information below, although historically accurate, has not been substantially updated since circa 2005, we will be updating the page to include the new results from the MESSENGER mission.

Mercury would seem to be one of the least likely places in the solar system to find ice. The closest planet to the Sun has temperatures which can reach over 700 K. The local day on the surface of Mercury is 176 earth-days, so the surface is slowly rotating under a relentless assault from the Sun. Nonetheless, Earth-based radar imaging of Mercury has revealed areas of high radar reflectivity near the north and south poles, which could be indicative of the presence of ice in these regions (1-3). There appear to be dozens of these areas with generally circular shapes. Presumably, the ice is located within permanently shadowed craters near the poles, where it may be cold enough for ice to exist over long periods of time. The discovery of ice on the Earth's moon can only serve to strengthen the arguments for ice on Mercury.

How was the evidence for ice found?

Investigations of Mercury were done from Earth using the Arecibo radio telescope, the Goldstone antenna, and the Very Large Array (VLA). The Goldstone/VLA study (1) used the NASA Deep Space Network 70-m Goldstone dish antenna to transmit 8.51 GHz, 460 kW, right circularly polarized radar waves towards Mercury. The reflections were received by the National Radio Astronomy Observatories 26 VLA antennas. Calibration and processing of the radar returns showed radar-bright (high radar reflectivity) with depolarized signatures at the north pole. The Arecibo observations (2,3) were made by transmitting an S-band (2.4 GHz), 420-kW, circularly polarized coded radar wave at Mercury. The wave reflects off Mercury back to Earth. The wave is both transmitted and received by the Arecibo radio telescope. Filtering and processing the return signal gives a radar reflectivity map of Mercury's surface with a resolution of approximately 15 km. About 20 anomalously reflective and highly depolarized features were observed at the north and south poles.

So......... WTF has NASA done to make your life awesome?

Well, it's interesting that you asked...

http://www.wtfnasa.com/

Take a minute to click through some of the thousand ways that NASA has made life better.

Penny4NASA

I guess yesterday was a good day for Science...

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Pat Robertson has some kind of reverse senility going on....

Awesomeness:

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The amount of mass is just too large to comprehend...

Giant Black Hole Could Upset Galaxy Evolution Models

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2012) — A group of astronomers led by Remco van den Bosch from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) have discovered a black hole that could shake the foundations of current models of galaxy evolution. At 17 billion times the mass of the Sun, its mass is much greater than current models predict -- in particular since the surrounding galaxy is comparatively small. This could be the most massive black hole found to date.

To the best of our astronomical knowledge, almost every galaxy should contain in its central region what is called a supermassive black hole: a black hole with a mass between that of hundreds of thousands and billions of Suns. The best-studied super-massive black hole sits in the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, with a mass of about four million Suns.

For the masses of galaxies and their central black holes, an intriguing trend has emerged: a direct relationship between the mass of a galaxy's black hole and that of the galaxy's stars.

Typically, the black hole mass is a tiny fraction of the galaxy's total mass. But now a search led by Remco van den Bosch (MPIA) has discovered a massive black hole that could upset the accepted relationship between black hole mass and galaxy mass, which plays a key role in all current theories of galaxy evolution. The observations used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and existing images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

With a mass 17 billion times that of the Sun, the newly discovered black hole in the center of the disk galaxy NGC 1277 might even be the biggest known black hole of all: the mass of the current record holder is estimated to lie between 6 and 37 billion solar masses (McConnell et al. 2011); if the true value lies towards the lower end of that range, NGC 1277 breaks the record. At the least, NGC 1277 harbors the second-biggest known black hole.

The big surprise is that the black hole mass for NGC 1277 amounts to 14% of the total galaxy mass, instead of usual values around 0,1%. This beats the old record by more than a factor 10. Astronomers would have expected a black hole of this size inside blob-like ("elliptical") galaxies ten times larger. Instead, this black hole sits inside a fairly small disk galaxy.

Is this surprisingly massive black hole a freak accident? Preliminary analysis of additional data suggests otherwise -- so far, the search has uncovered five additional galaxies that are comparatively small, yet, going by first estimates, seemed to harbor unusually large black holes too. More definite conclusions have to await detailed images of these galaxies.

If the additional candidates are confirmed, and there are indeed more black holes like this, astronomers will need to rethink fundamentally their models of galaxy evolution. In particular, they will need to look at the early universe: The galaxy hosting the new black hole appears to have formed more than 8 billion years ago, and does not appear to have changed much since then. Whatever created this giant black hole must have happened a long time ago.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/...ion/52317624/1

Perhaps you've chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website.
Or, if you're in a hotel, maybe you've decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you'll wear today. You haven't. You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.
The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.
The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

What is free will?

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation. A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.
Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

'Meat computers'

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject "decides" to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. (These studies use crude imaging techniques based on blood flow, and I suspect that future understanding of the brain will allow us to predict many of our decisions far earlier than seven seconds in advance.) "Decisions" made like that aren't conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we've made them, then we don't have free will in any meaningful sense.
Psychologists and neuroscientists are also showing that the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us to connect our thoughts, which stem from unconscious processes, and our actions, which also stem from unconscious process. We think this because our sense of "willing" an act can be changed, created, or even eliminated through brain stimulation, mental illness, or psychological experiments. The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we're characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we're puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.
Most people find that idea intolerable, so powerful is our illusion that we really do make choices. But then where do these illusions of both will and "free" will come from? We're not sure. I suspect that they're the products of natural selection, perhaps because our ancestors wouldn't thrive in small, harmonious groups — the conditions under which we evolved — if they didn't feel responsible for their actions. Sociological studies show that if people's belief in free will is undermined, they perform fewer prosocial behaviors and more antisocial behaviors.
Many scientists and philosophers now accept that our actions and thoughts are indeed determined by physical laws, and in that sense we don't really choose freely, but philosophers have concocted ingenious rationalizations for why we nevertheless have free will of a sort. It's all based on redefining "free will" to mean something else. Some philosophers claim that if we can change our actions in response to reason, then we've shown free will. But of course the words and deeds of other people are simply environmental influences that can affect our brain molecules. That's how love begins.
Other philosophers argue that while we may not be able to choose our actions, we can choose to veto our actions — in other words, we don't have free will but do have "free won't." But from the standpoint of physics, instigating an action is no different from vetoing one, and in fact involves the same regions of the brain.
Finally, some argue that we have free will if our actions are consistent with our personalities and past behaviors. But that says nothing about whether we "choose' our actions; only that our genetic and environmental makeup affects our actions in a consistent way. As Sam Harris noted in his book Free Will, all the attempts to harmonize the determinism of physics with a freedom of choice down to the claim that "a puppet is free so long as he loves his strings."

If not, then what?

So if we don't have free will, what can we do? One possibility is to give in to a despairing nihilism and just stop doing anything. But that's impossible, for our feeling of personal agency is so overwhelming that we have no choice but to pretend that we do choose, and get on with our lives. After all, everyone deals with the unpalatable fact of our mortality, and usually do so by ignoring it rather than ruminating obsessively about it.
But there are two important ways that we must face the absence of free will. One is in religion. Many faiths make claims that depend on free choice: Evangelical Christians, for instance, believe that those who don't freely choose Jesus as their savior will go to hell. If we have no free choice, then such religious tenets — and the existence of a disembodied "soul" — are undermined, and any post-mortem fates of the faithful are determined, Calvinistically, by circumstances over which they have no control.
But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?
We should recognize that we already make some allowances for this problem by treating criminals differently if we think their crimes resulted from a reduction in their "choice" by factors like mental illness, diminished capacity, or brain tumors that cause aggression. But in truth those people don't differ in responsibility from the "regular" criminal who shoots someone in a drug war; it's just that the physical events behind their actions are less obvious.
But we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you'll behave badly in the future. Even without free will then, we can still use punishment to deter bad behavior, protect society from criminals, and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them. What is not justified is revenge or retribution — the idea of punishing criminals for making the "wrong choice." And we should continue to reward good behavior, for that changes brains in a way that promotes more good behavior.
There's not much downside to abandoning the notion of free will. It's impossible, anyway, to act as though we don't have it: you'll pretend to choose your New Year's resolutions, and the laws of physics will determine whether you keep them. And there are two upsides. The first is realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains, and contemplating the notion that things like consciousness, free choice, and even the idea of "me" are but convincing illusions fashioned by natural selection. Further, by losing free will we gain empathy, for we realize that in the end all of us, whether Bernie Madoffs or Nelson Mandelas, are victims of circumstance — of the genes we're bequeathed and the environments we encounter. With that under our belts, we can go about building a kinder world.

Germs...

Your body is made up of approximately 100 trillion human cells and 1,500 trillion microbes. By numbers you are little more than 10% you.
However, eukaryotic cells are significantly larger than prokaryotic cells, so those 1,500 trillion microbes only make up between 2 and 5 pounds of your weight.

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A size comparison of a neutron star to New York city. A neutron stars contain up to as much as 500,000 times the mass of the Earth in a sphere no larger than Brooklyn, United States.
A neutron star is a type of stellar remnant left behind after a supernova. Gravitational collapse occurs and if a black hole does not form, then a neutron star does.

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I'll gift you a better evening...

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47396187.../#.UL7uOmd696d

Spaceship Enterprise in 20 years? Beam me up!


By Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
updated 5/12/2012 12:13:38 AM ET


In Star Trek lore, the first Starship Enterprise will be built by the year 2245. But today, an engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the Enterprise complete with 1G of gravity on board, and says it could be done with current technology, within 20 years.

"We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise — so let's do it," writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE Dan.

This "Gen1" Enterprise could get to Mars in 90 days, to the moon in three, and "could hop from planet to planet dropping off robotic probes of all sorts en masse — rovers, special-built planes and satellites,” BTE Dan says.

Complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule and almost every other imaginable detail, the BTE website was launched just this week and covers almost every aspect of how the project could be done. This Enterprise would be built entirely in space, have a rotating gravity section inside of the saucer, and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from classic "Star Trek."


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“It ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” writes BTE Dan, even though his design moves a few parts around for better performance with today’s technology. This version of the Enterprise would be three things in one: a spaceship, a space station and a spaceport. A thousand people can be on board at once — either as crew members or as adventurous visitors.

While the ship will not travel at warp speed, with an ion propulsion engine powered by a 1.5GW nuclear reactor, it can travel at a constant acceleration so that the ship can easily get to key points of interest in our solar system. Three additional nuclear reactors would create all of the electricity needed for operation of the ship.

The saucer section would be a 0.3-mile-diameter (536-meter-diameter) rotating, magnetically suspended gravity wheel that would create 1G of gravity.

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The first assignments for the Enterprise would have the ship serving as a space station and spaceport, but then go on to missions to the moon, Mars, Venus, various asteroids and even Europa, where the ship's laser would be used not for combat but for cutting through the moon's icy crust to enable a probe to descend to the ocean below.

Of course, like all spaceships today, the big "if" for such an effort would be getting Congress to provide NASA the funding to do a huge 20-year project. But BTE Dan has that all worked out, and between tax increases and spreading out budget cuts to areas like defense, health and human services, housing and urban development, education and energy, the cuts to areas of discretionary spending are not large, and the tax increases could be small.

"These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the republic," says the website. "In fact, these will barely be noticed. It’s amazing that a program as fantastic as the building a fleet of USS Enterprise spaceships can be done with so little impact."

BTE Dan adds that "the only obstacles to us doing it are the limitations we place on our collective imagination." His proposal says that NASA could still receive funding for the science, astronomy and robotic missions it currently undertakes.

But he proposes not just one Enterprise-class ship, but multiple ships, one of which can be built every 33 years — once per generation — giving three new ships per century. "Each will be more advanced than the prior one. Older ships can be continually upgraded over several generations until they are eventually decommissioned."

BTE Dan, who did not respond to emails, lists himself as a systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years.

The website includes a blog, a forum and a Q&A section, where BTE Dan answers the question, "What if someone can prove that building the Gen1 Enterprise is beyond our technological reach?"

Answer: "If someone can convince me that it is not technically possible (ignoring political and funding issues), then I will state on the BuildTheEnterprise site that I have been found to be wrong. In that case, building the first Enterprise will have to wait for, say, another half century. But I don’t think that anyone will be able to convince me it can’t be done. My position is that we can — and should — immediately start working on it.”


buildtheenterprise.org

There really was a Bigfoot at one time. A giant ass intelligent Harry and the Henderson sumbitch.

Gigantopithecus!

Classification: Chordata,* ‬Mammalia,* ‬Primates,* ‬Hominidae,* ‬Ponginae.
Species: G.* ‬blacki,* ‬G.* ‬bilaspurensis,* ‬G.* ‬giganteus.
Diet: Herbivore.
Size: Roughly estimated to be up to* ‬3* ‬meters tall and up to* ‬540* ‬kilograms in weight for largest species G.* ‬blacki,* ‬while smaller species like G.* ‬giganteus are only half this size.* ‬However the lack of other known fossils makes these estimates far from certain.
Known locations: China,* ‬India and Vietnam.
Time period: Messinian of the Miocene through to Late Ionian of the Pleistocene.* ‬Possibly slightly later.

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Discovery and species
During* ‬1935* ‬the palaeontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald visited a Chinese apothecary shop in Hong Kong and discovered an unusually large molar,* ‬a tooth similar to the large flat ones that you have towards the back of your mouth.* ‬Fossils like this are often found in Traditional Chinese medicine where they are called* ‘‬dragon bones*’‬,* ‬but this tooth did not come from a mythical creature,* ‬instead study revealed it to have come from some kind of gigantic ape.* ‬When describing it as a new genus the choice of name was obvious and so von Koenigswald created* ‬Gigantopithecus with literally translates as* ‘‬giant ape*’‬.

Since this first discovery over one thousand three hundred teeth have been tracked down,* ‬many of them from the Traditional Chinese medicine market.* ‬More excitingly however are the discoveries of some lower jaws which have allowed palaeontologists and primatologists to infer a little about what Gigantopithecus might have been like.* ‬Unfortunately this is where the clues stop as so far no other parts of the skeleton or even the skull have so far been found.

The most famous species of Gigantopithecus known is G.* ‬blacki which seems to be the largest of the known species.* ‬This was the first species to be named and so far is known from caves in South East Asia* ‬and is represented by both teeth and mandibles.* ‬Another species is G.* ‬giganteus,* ‬but this is something of a misnomer as it actually seems to be only half the size of G.* ‬blacki.* ‬This species is however known from India,* ‬and the size difference might be down to a different climatic adaptation,* ‬even though there is evidence to suggest that it also inhabited parts of China.* ‬Another Indian species is G.* ‬bilaspurensis and this species really stands out from the other two because its remains are dated to as far back as the late Miocene period,* ‬extending the temporal range of* ‬Gigantopithecus for many millions of years between the Miocene and Pleistocene periods.

Ummm no. Math fail.

Really? It was posted on http://saganet.org/

I didn't really think about the math.......

You wouldn't see the moon landing, but you could see the Chiefs draft Percy Snow.

Nothing wrong with the math, except for a little bit of rounding.

Light traveling from the moon to the mirror takes 22 years. Light from the mirror to the earth another 22.

22+22=44 years. Years from July 1969 to December 2012 = 43.5

Religious bigot fail.

Ohhhhhhhh. I was assuming that the observer was at a telescope 22 light years away. I misread it.

Just think...wait a little longer and we can watch the Chiefs win Super Bowl IV !

There's little room in precise for rounding... :D

Ahh yes I am used to the mirrors in my telescope so I assumed the mirrors were in the telescope not reflecting an image back at us. My bad. Dave math fail.

Perhaps not a Moon landing, but these are some of the kids who might very well be part of the next landing somewhere. If you've never seen what these high school kids can do, it might be worth a look-see... Obviously I'm a homer for this team, but the truth is they're all awesome. And it's so cool that in this day and age these kids are afforded the opportunity to do these things on the scale they're doing them. And if you've never looked into the larger "FIRST" (For the Inspiration of Science and Technology) program, it too is worth a look. If your a science nerd. I higher a lot of engineers, and when my son got into this, for the first time in a long time I had hope that, in time, we'd be able to honestly compete on the world stage. LOL, a call to Cisco, Microsoft or Dell might actually get answers state-side for a change!

The good news is, in a few short weeks, many of the same kids you see in this video will spend countless hours in that same "shop" designing and building a different robot for a different game. They get six weeks to go from knowing what "the game" is to designing and building the robot. After those six weeks are done, they have to "bag" the robot until the night before their first competition.

I never had anything this cool when I was in high school... I was pretty-much stuck with football, baseball and wrestling. The chess, debate, foreign language and clubs didn't pique my interests.

Enjoy...

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In the words of Ronald Raygun, I will not speak ill of any of my fellow science fans.

OMG Robits!

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Officially, there's an innocuous reason for the giant arm: a stereo vision system, in tandem with GPS, lets the robot precisely deliver one-pound payloads with the kind of reach that us fleshy anthropods wouldn't have. We're not quite so comforted after realizing that the robot can find its target without human input, however. DARPA sees the V-Bat as a stepping stone towards more autonomous vehicles, and it likely has noble intentions at heart.

Yeah, good point...Insult rescinded.