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Next Stop: The Fourth Dimension, With Large Hadron Collider Experiments

Published on September 6, 2008

How did the universe come to be? What is it made of? What is mass? Can science prove that there are other dimensions? We may have answers soon. On September 10, 2008, the new CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the-atlas-experiment.jpgscheduled to turn on. The first high-energy collisions are expected to take place in October 2008. Scientists are calling it the largest experiment in the world. It’s taken about 6,000 researchers, $8 billion and ten years to build.

Continued

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How to tame a tornado/Atmospheric Vortex Engine

Published on June 26, 2008


Wind power is for wimps. Louis Michaud wants to turn twisters into the renewable energy source of the future.

Of all the natural phenomena that wreak havoc on planet Earth, tornadoes are perhaps the most fearsome. With wind speeds reaching upward of 300 miles (500 kilometres) an hour and funnels often exceeding two miles (three kilometres) in width, the most violent tornadoes can flatten neighbourhoods and mow down trees as though they were flimsy corn stalks. Now one scientist is trying to tame tornadoes, and use their awesome power as a renewable energy source.

Louis Michaud, a retired Exxon petrochemical engineer who lives in Ontario, Canada, has proposed using the wind of twisters to power turbines, which in turn could shuttle energy to thousands of homes, or power plants and factories. Farfetched as it may sound, Michaud has won some reputable backers, including noted hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. “Conventional wisdom says that forces of nature are way too great for us to be able to control a process like a tornado or a hurricane,” Michaud says. “But if you realize a tornado is actually a source of energy, then it’s just a matter of learning how to control it.”

Michaud’s method isn’t to chase twisters down, but to create them in what he calls an atmospheric vortex engine. The engine will work, Michaud says, much like the fireplace in your living room. Warm air will be drawn into a circular central chamber and allowed to rise up a vortex. As the warm air ascends, it draws air through turbines located on the periphery that convert the energy of the air’s motion into electricity.

The force with which the air rises is determined by the temperature difference between the rising warm air and the surrounding cooler air. The elegance of the atmospheric vortex engine, Michaud says, is that as the warm air enters the central chamber, it continually passes through angled ducts that cause the air to rotate like a natural tornado. The air can then twist its way into the upper atmosphere, creating what Michaud calls “a virtual chimney” in which the temperature difference between the top and the bottom is enough to generate energy.

Michaud’s idea has earned a $30,000 grant from Ontario’s Centre for Energy, and serious attention from private companies looking to invest. Michaud is also in the process of applying for a larger grant, some $3 million, from Ontario’s Ministry of Innovation. He has already built working models of his vortex engine, though none to full scale. (A finished engine will be on the order of 500 feet—150 metres—in diameter and 120 feet—35 metres—tall). Chief among Michaud’s concerns is proving he can control the tornadoes he wants to create. His first demonstration is slated for this spring in Sarnia, Ontario.

“What’s necessary at this point is to do proofs of concept,” says Emanuel, the hurricane expert at MIT. Michaud’s “idea is pretty simple and elegant. My own feeling is that we ought to be pouring money into all kinds of alternative energy research. There’s almost nothing to lose in trying this.”

Others agree. “His basic idea really works,” says University of Michigan Assistant Professor Nilton Renno, who has devoted his career to studying tornadoes and water spouts. “But it becomes sticky when you think about the issues of control. If a strong wind comes along while you’re trying to keep a vortex in place, what happens?”

Michaud has a number of responses to such a question, the most obvious being that, were conditions to become unsafe, he could shut off the air supply at the base of the engine. Other options include “vortex quenching”—dousing the twister with cold water—or the injection of air with reverse rotation. Besides, Michaud envisions his contraptions being most useful in a setting like the cooling tower of a power plant, where the waste heat from the plant’s operations could provide the warm air the vortex engine needs at its base. Were a strong wind to come along, an operator could switch the waste heat off, terminating the twister’s source. “Most power plants are in fairly isolated locations, and just by switching over to our concept they could derive 40 percent additional power,” Michaud says. “A 500-megawatt plant could increase its electrical output to 700 megawatts [enough to power a city of 500,000]. Now that’s the power of renewable energy.” If trying to tame tornadoes sounds silly, the prospect of harnessing their power certainly is not.
Ode Magazine, by Andrew Tolve, illustration by Charles Floyd, March 2008

Atmospheric Vortex Engine

Mechanical energy is produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere. A vortex-engine-charles-floyd-small.jpgprocess for producing a tornado-like vortex and concentrating mechanical energy where it can be captured is proposed. The existence of tornadoes proves that low intensity solar radiation can produce concentrated mechanical energy. It should be possible to control a naturally occurring process. Controlling where mechanical energy is produced in the atmosphere offers the possibility of harnessing solar energy without having to use solar collectors.
The Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) is a process for capturing the energy produced when heat is carried upward by convection in the atmosphere. The process is protected by patent applications and could become a major source of electrical energy. The unit cost of electrical energy produced with an AVE could be half the cost of the next most economical alternative.

A vortex engine consists of a cylindrical wall open at the top and with tangential air entries around the base. Heating the air within the wall using a temporary heat source such as steam starts the vortex. The heat required to sustain the vortex once established can be the natural heat content of warm humid air or can be provided in cooling towers located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors. The continuous heat source for the peripheral heat exchanger can be waste industrial heat or warm seawater. Restricting the flow of air upstream of the deflectors regulates the intensity of the vortex. The vortex can be stopped by restricting the airflow to deflectors with direct orientation and by opening the airflow to deflectors with reverse orientation. The electrical energy is produced in turbo-expanders located upstream of the tangential air inlets. The pressure at the base of the vortex is less than ambient pressure because of the density of the rising air is less than the density of ambient air at the same level. The outlet pressure of the turbo-expanders is sub-atmospheric because they exhaust into the vortex.

The Atmospheric Vortex Engine has the same thermodynamic basis as the solar chimney. The physical tube of the solar chimney is replaced by centrifugal force in the vortex and the atmospheric boundary layer acts as the solar collector. The AVE needs neither the collector nor the high chimney. The efficiency of the solar chimney is proportional to its height, which is limited by practical considerations, but a vortex can extend much higher than a physical chimney. The cylindrical wall could have a diameter of 200 m and a height of 100 m; the vortex could be 50 m in diameter at its base and extend up to the tropopause. Each AVE could generate 50 to 500 MW of electrical power.

Continued…


Keywords:

Anything that grows ‘can convert into oil’…Company finds natural solution that turns plants into gasoline

Published on June 4, 2008

By Joe Kovacs WorldNetDaily March 19, 2008

After three years of clandestine development, a Georgia company is now going public with a simple, natural way to convert anything that grows out of the Earth into oil.

J.C. Bell, an agricultural researcher and CEO of Bell Bio-Energy, Inc., says he’s isolated and modified specific bacteria that will, on a very large scale, naturally change plant material – including the leftovers from food – into hydrocarbons to fuel cars and trucks.

“What we’re doing is taking the trash like corn stalks, corn husks, corn cobs – even grass from the yard that goes to the dump – that’s what we can turn into oil,” Bell told WND. “I’m not going to make asphalt, we’re only going to make the things we need. We’re going to make gasoline for driving, diesel for our big trucks.”

Wood pulp is among the many natural materials that can be converted into oil and gasoline, according to Bell Bio-Energy, Inc., of Tifton, Ga.

The agricultural researcher made the discovery after standing downwind from his cows at his food-production company, Bell Plantation, in Tifton, Ga.

“Cows are like people that eat lots of beans. They’re really, really good at making natural gas,” he said. “It dawned on me that that natural gas was methane.”

Bell says he wondered what digestive process inside a cow enabled it to change food into the hydrocarbon molecules of methane, so he began looking into replicating and speeding up the process.

“Through genetic manipulation, we’ve changed the naturally occurring bacteria, so they eat and consume biomass a little more efficiently,” he said. “It works. There’s not even any debate that it works. It really is an all-natural, simple process that cows use on a daily basis.”

Naturally occurring bacteria used to convert biomass into hydrocarbons.

But does he think it will make environmentalists happy?

“They love this. We had one totally recognizable environmentalist from Hollywood say this is everything they ever had hoped for,” Bell said. “This could be considered the ultimate recycling of carbon. We are using the energy of the sun through the plant. We’re not introducing any new carbon [to the environment].”

The research has received strong support from the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture and committees in both chambers of Congress, and Bell plans further discussions in Washington, D.C., next week.

He expects to have the first pilot plant for the process running within two to three months, and will operate it for a year to collect engineering data to design full-scale production facilities. He thinks the larger facilities will be producing oil “inside the next two years.”

And just how much oil is in Bell’s bio-forecast?

“With minor changes in the agricultural and forestry products, we could create two to two and a half tons of biomass a year, and you’re looking at 5 billion barrels of oil per year. That would be about two-thirds of what we use now.”

Turning some of nature’s produce into energy has been done for years, especially when it comes to the conversion of corn and cellulose-based products into ethanol, used to extend gasoline volume and boost octane.

The Energy Information Administration says in 2005, total U.S. ethanol production was 3.9 billion gallons, or 2.9 percent of the total gasoline pool.

Bell admits his bacterial breakthrough has been kept under wraps until now, but he plans to explain it all once his website is fully operational.

Bell Bio-Energy, Inc., aims to use modified bacteria like this to convert biomass into oil and gasoline within two years.

“We’re actually gonna tell people how we do it, with streaming video. We’re to the point now with our patent that we can say more and we fully intend to.

“We want to develop public support so they can understand what we’re doing; to develop political support, because this is a combination of making the United States more independent from foreign oil sources; make [the country] healthier from an economic point of view; and it goes a long way to solving the environmental problems a lot of people are concerned about.”

When asked why he thought no one else has patented this process, Bell answered, “It literally is because it’s too simple. Everyone was looking for a real complicated mechanism. We looked at how it occurs naturally. But it’s now going to develop in a hurry.”

Recalling other great inventions, Bell cited on another person with his last name.

“Alexander Graham Bell put together stuff that was already on the shelf and made a phone. I don’t want to compare myself to the great inventors. I’m not there yet, but to be able to look at simple things and create things from them, that’s how we think in this company.”


Study Documents the Power of Indoor Plants

Published on April 25, 2007

By Melinda Wenner
Special to LiveScience
posted: 17 April 2007
10:42 am ET

Green thumb or not, most of us have at least one houseplant because even the most pathetic mini-shrub offers our citified selves a slender link back to nature, according to new research.

Previous studies have suggested that plants lower the levels of indoor contaminants and keep people feeling healthier. After noticing how much joy his wife got from plants, Clas Bergvall, an ethnologist at Umeå University in Sweden, wanted to know what they did for people emotionally—so he dedicated his doctoral dissertation to the subject.

In the eight years since he began his research, Bergvall has found that people across centuries share an almost metaphysical connection to plants, and that when brought into the home, plants have an enormous positive impact on well-being.

For one thing, plants seem to make people more contemplative and self-reflective, Bergvall told LiveScience. Plants are often linked to people, places and memories—they are often given as gifts from close friends, for example—so having them around helps people snap out of their busy lives and think about things that are important to them, he said. Continued


Simple Injection Shows Promise for Treating Paralysis

Published on April 24, 2007

By Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
posted: 23 April 2007
12:55 am ET

Paralyzed lab rodents with spinal cord injuries apparently regained some ability to walk six weeks after a simple injection of biodegradable soap-like molecules that helped nerves regenerate.

The research could have implications for humans with similar injuries.

“It will take a long time, but we want to offer at least some improvement, to improve quality of life for people with these injuries,” materials scientist Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., told LiveScience. “Anything would be considered a breakthrough, because there’s nothing right now.”

The soap-like molecules contain a small piece of laminin, a natural protein important in brain development. After these molecules are injected into the body, they react with chemicals there, assembling themselves instantly into scaffolds of super-thin fibers just six billionths of a meter wide, roughly a hundredth a wavelength of orange light. They biodegrade after roughly eight weeks.

The scientists experimented with their molecules on dozens of mice and rats that experienced spinal cord injuries that paralyzed their hind legs, “the kind of very hard blow people might experience after falling off skiing slopes or getting in car accidents,” Stupp said. His colleague, neurologist John Kessler, became active in this work after Kessler’s daughter was paralyzed in a skiing accident.

After six weeks, damaged nerves regenerated enough for the paralyzed legs of the rodents to regain some ability to walk.

“There’s a special scale to monitor how much function they regained, ranging from 0 to 21,” Stupp explained. “At 21, function is perfect. At 6 or 7, limbs are just paralyzed, and the mice were just dragging them along. If you go to 9 to 12, the animal can now actually move the limbs. Not perfectly—awkwardly—but they move. So two or three points on that scale makes a huge difference.”

“We’ve been able to go from a 7 to a 9 in the mouse, and in the rat, the highest was 12,” he said. The findings are to be presented today at a meeting of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies in Washington, D.C.

The researchers are currently in talks with the FDA regarding their work and hope to start phase I clinical trials (for toxicity and safety testing) in humans two years from now, Stupp said. The idea he and his colleagues have for these molecules is to administer them within a day or so after spinal cord injuries, before scar tissue begins to form that can suppress healing. Past experiments have shown these molecules can actually turn neural stem cells (which might otherwise become scar cells) into neurons instead.
Continued


Sun Blamed for Warming of Earth and Other Worlds

Published on March 12, 2007

By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 March 2007
07:27 am ET

Earth is heating up lately, but so are Mars, Pluto and other worlds in our solar system, leading some scientists to speculate that a change in the sun’s activity is the common thread linking all these baking events.

Others argue that such claims are misleading and create the false impression that rapid global warming, as Earth is experiencing, is a natural phenomenon.

While evidence suggests fluctuations in solar activity can affect climate on Earth, and that it has done so in the past, the majority of climate scientists and astrophysicists agree that the sun is not to blame for the current and historically sudden uptick in global temperatures on Earth, which seems to be mostly a mess created by our own species.

Wobbly Mars

Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, recently linked the attenuation of ice caps on Mars to fluctuations in the sun’s output. Abdussamatov also blamed solar fluctuations for Earth’s current global warming trend. His initial comments were published online by National Geographic News. Continued


The Z Machine

Published on November 16, 2006

An electrical storm lights up the surface of the Z machine, an accelerator built to simulate what happens during a nuclear explosion. The electrical discharges result from powerful electric fields that the experiment produces.

Housed at Sandia National Laboratories, the Z machine attracted a lot of attention eight years ago when its energy output more than quadrupled – raising hopes that the reactions in the Z could provide a new source of clean, abundant power. To help further progress towards this end, the machine is getting a $61.7 million upgrade, officials announced recently.

The Z uses a short burst of intense electricity – only a few 10 billionths of a second long – that forces an ionized gas to implode. The process is called a z-pinch because the pulse creates a magnetic field that squeezes particles in the vertical direction, which math books usually label as the “z-axis.”

At the center of the z-pinch, in the space of a small soup can, gas particles race at each other at a million miles an hour. Article continued here


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NASA Finds Direct Proof of Dark Matter

Published on September 23, 2006

Here’s a link which was sent to me from a reader regarding Theoretical Physics and proposed theories. Thank you to David B.
NASA Finds Direct Proof of Dark Matter


Science stands with spirituality in new book

Published on July 26, 2006

By David Royer/staff
droyer@newsleader.com

STAUNTON — It began about three years ago, Francis Collins recalled, with a series of lectures at Harvard University.

Hundreds turned out to hear him, the nation’s leading geneticist, speak on a topic normally considered taboo territory for a trained scientist: spirituality, and its relationship to science.

Pen soon met paper on a book that, in some ways, Collins began writing ever since he abandoned atheism and reached for religion as a young doctor 30 years ago.

“The Language of God,” a book that challenges religion and science as it embraces them both, reached bookstores this month, as the debate between pure science and pure belief reaches ever-more shrill tones.

Collins is making his rounds in the media, appearing in Time magazine this month, on the Charlie Rose show Tuesday night and, on Aug. 5, in his humble hometown of Staunton.

His book’s premise — that both disciplines can enlighten each other — describes Collins’ own quest to walk a middle path between Genesis and Darwin, and his desire to ease the sense of conflict between the twin towers that dominate his worldview.

“I’m troubled by the way in which the discussion of science and faith has been dominated by extreme voices on both ends of the spectrum,” said Collins, a Robert E. Lee High School graduate who, as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, helped create the road map of the human gene in 2003.

“There are many of us who live in harmony in the middle of this spectrum.”

The middle of the spectrum can be a knife-edge for many scientists, Collins said, in disciplines like genetics that crank out discoveries that seem to turn the age-old stories of the Bible into allegorical fairy tales.

Scientists have long fallen into a camp dominated by a clinical sort of atheism that discourages religious belief as too soft for science, but substitutes science as a sort of faith, he said. Meanwhile, a backlash by Christian fundamentalists who misinterpret scientific discoveries, he fears, could dampen scientific inquiry.

Collins bridges the gap by what he calls BioLogos, or theistic evolution.

To him, the Darwinian processes that shaped life over billions of years of evolution are beyond debate. Yet to the believer’s mind — his mind — they can reinforce faith in a miraculous creator, he said.

His position has taken criticism from evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, who argue that scientific evidence has shut the door on the supernatural forever.

Collins, when asked whether the creation story in Genesis should be abandoned as fiction, leaves a bit of wiggle room and says the topic needs to be further explored.

Still, many on both sides of the spectrum are pleased with Collins’ middle path.

“I think it’s worthwhile to have people like Francis Collins out there,” said Nick Matzke, spokesman for the National Center for Science Education, a California-based organization that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools, according to its Web site.

Matzke described theistic evolution as a “reasonable position” that accepts science while respecting personal faith. It should not be confused with intelligent design, a recent attempt to undermine Darwinian evolution that some say should be taught as an alternative to evolution, he said. Click here for the continued article.


Discovery Offers Hope to Chronic Pain Sufferers

Published on July 25, 2006

By Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
posted: 25 July 2006
09:30 am ET

More than 70 percent of people with chronic pain have lived with it for more than three years, according to the American Chronic Pain Association. A third of those have suffered pain for more than a decade.

Now, scientists have discovered the molecular pathway for chronic pain in rats, offering hope to the nearly one in six Americans who endure aches, burning sensations and throbbing long after their injuries have healed.

The pathway was described previously in the California sea slug, which is an invertebrate, but it has been recently confirmed in rats by Richard Ambron and Ying-Ju Sung of Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and a colleague.

Painful Facts
How pain hurts Americans:

1 in 6 suffers from arthritis.
More than 26 million between the ages of 20 and 64 have frequent back pain.
More than 25 million have migraines.
Pain costs an estimated $100 billion each year.
SOURCE: American Pain Foundation

The central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) is colored blue, and the peripheral nervous system (major peripheral nerves) are yellow. Shown are the brain inside the cranium, spinal cord inside the vertebral column, and the spinal nerves coming out of the intervertebral foramen.

The Pain Truth
How and Why We Hurt

Rats have a nervous system that more closely resembles our own and they are often used as model organisms for studies of pain in humans.

“A finding in invertebrates does not necessarily translate into a result that is also true for vertebrates,” Ambron told LiveScience. “This is a major advance because we were able to show that the pain pathway was conserved in rats.”

Pain research
The worldwide painkiller market was worth $50 billion in 2005, but current medications for chronic pain, meaning pain that lasts weeks, months and even years, leave much to be desired. Companies have shied away from developing new pain drugs in part due to troubles with Vioxx and Celebrex—called COX-2 selective non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Vioxx and Celebrex were reported a couple years ago to increase the risk of heart disease and stroke as side effects.

Aside from the problems with the COX-2 drugs, acetaminophen is little help, and morphine and other narcotics are addictive and sedate the patient.

The uncertainty around COX-2 drugs has left people in chronic pain with few choices, Ambron said. Click here to continue


Body’s Own Molecules Being Customized to Fight Cancer

Published on July 20, 2006

Body’s Own Molecules Being Customized to Fight Cancer By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 19 July 2006
04:54 pm ET


Stem cells regrow damaged nerves in rats: study

Published on June 20, 2006

Stem cells regrow damaged nerves in rats: study


Coral reef ecosystem may fight illnesses Sun Jun 18, 10:49 AM ET

Published on

Biomedical researchers who dove down nearly 3,000 feet to search a newly-discovered coral reef found treasures they say may help doctors fight cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other illnesses.

Scientists with the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution descended to water sunless, black water in the Florida Straits, a passage located between the Keys and Cuba.

There, they found a new coral reef ecosystem that features man-size coral thickets and limestone towers.

“Gorgeous. Oh, beautiful goblets, just gorgeous,” said Shirley Pomponi, president of Harbor Branch. “It’s a richer area than we thought, for sure.”

Most importantly, they also found sponges and coral, including a new species of bamboo coral. Scientists have previously used chemicals from the underwater finds to fight diseases.

Researchers discovered hints of the reef’s existence in the 1970’s, but didn’t witness the real majesty of this unknown ecosystem until December. Using solar technology developed at the University of Miami, they located sites that sustain themselves without sunlight or obvious energy, according to Mark Grasmueck, a UM assistant professor.

Armed with a robotic torpedo, advanced sonars, sensors and cameras, explorers descended in a state-of-the art, submersible bubble the size of two vehicles.

Now, researchers will take what they brought up from those depths to laboratories and search for new medicinal compounds that might exist.

John Reed, Harbor Branch’s chief scientist said the goal is to find “something that kills cancer cells and doesn’t kill anything else.”

Information from: The Miami Herald, http://www.herald.com


Goan links science, spirituality by Out-of-Body experience

Published on May 31, 2006
HERALD NEWS BUREAU

PANJIM, MAY 31 - A Goan engineering student at Florida International University in USA is set to present on the controversial out-of-body experience at the 25th Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration at Utah Valley State College, USA, on June 8.

Nelson Abreu is clearly not a typical electrical engineering student. Outside formal university pursuits, he has been researching the out-of-body experience (OBE) and other phenomena that cross traditional academic boundaries since high school.

Nelson, who was born in Lisbon, traces his roots to Goa, where his father, Magno Abreu, hails from Chorao and mother, Lilia Correia, is from Bardez.

A Miami Herald Silver Knight award recipient in 2000, Abreu is attempting to bring the scientific rigour and technical prowess of engineering to questions usually relegated to the clergy, mystics, or New Age aficionados.

“I cannot mock people who think their Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE’s) are real, because I have experienced the OBE myself. This experience feels as real as the normal waking state,” said Nelson.

However, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory intern is the first to concede that it takes much more than that to prove the experience is not merely a vivid mental construct of physiological origin.

Since 1998, Abreu and a few hundred colleagues throughout the world have been studying and developing techniques to “project,” as they call it, by will. The objective is to develop a way for scientists to have many of these experiences themselves.

“Science can only begin to understand the OBE when researchers are able to repeatedly study the occurrence first hand,” he says.

At the 25th Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration in Orem, Utah, the young investigator will present his Punctuated Relaxation Technique and discuss how developments such as this one may help advance a science of subjective phenomena that is not constrained by physical limits.

Abreu speculates that the out-of-body experience allows us to glimpse into the multidimensional universe akin to redictions of modern physical theories like string theory.

Investigators like Nelson Abreu think the out-of-body experience is at least as revolutionary as the telescope. Through personal experiences, he predicts scientists will be able to understand phenomena that are now considered “paranormal” and the millennial question of survival of the consciousness after death.

Such futuristic experiments are already underway. Take the Image Target experiments of Rodrigo Medeiros - another electrical engineer - and Patricia Sousa, an international lecturer on the NDE. Participants are asked to describe a picture randomly selected by a computer locked away at the offices of the International Academy of Consciousness in South Miami.

“Though participants rarely make it to the target location, the observations we get can be uncanny,” says Medeiros, “down to photographic precision.”


The Psychological Strain of Living Forever

Published on May 25, 2006

I find this article amusing because the spiritual side to the why and how we are here is never really discussed.__Myswizard

Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Wed May 24, 12:02 PM ET

In Oscar Wilde’s novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the main character barters his soul for eternal youth but becomes wicked and immoral in the process.

Leon Kass believes humanity risks striking a similar Faustian bargain if it pursues technology that extends life spans beyond what is natural.

If our species ever does unlock the secrets of aging and learns to live forever, we might not lose our souls, but, like Dorian, we will no longer be human either, says Kass, a bioethicist at the University of Chicago and a longtime critic of life-extension research. For Kass, to argue that life is better without death is to argue “that human life would be better being something other than human.”

Kass’ position is controversial, but it gets at some of the central issues surrounding the life extension debate: What is aging? Is it a disease to be cured or a natural part of life? If natural, is it necessarily good for us?

Virtues of mortality

In numerous presentations and papers throughout the years, Kass has argued for what he calls the “virtues of mortality.” First among them is the effect mortality has on our interest in and engagement with life. To number our days, Kass contends, “is the condition for making them count and for treasuring and appreciating all that life brings.”

Kass also believes that the process of aging itself is important because it helps us make sense of our lives.

A 2003 staff working paper drawn up by the U.S. President’s Council of Bioethics—then headed by Kass—states: “The very experience of spending a life, and of becoming spent in doing so contributes to our sense of accomplishment and commitment, and to our sense of the meaningfulness of the passage of time, and of our passage through it.”

Technology that retards aging, the report argues, would “sever age from the moorings of nature, time and maturity.”

Reality sets in

Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute in New York, agrees that the pursuit of extension technology is unwise, but thinks Kass’ views are too extreme.

“His view is that the fact that we’re going to die makes us think more seriously about our life,” Callahan said. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I’m 75 now, and that certainly hasn’t been my experience.”

Callahan also questions the idea that our humanity is somehow tied to our sense of finitude.

“I don’t think one can make our humanity dependent on the length of our life,” Callahan told Livescience. “Even if we live to be 500, we’ll still be human beings.”

Besides, other critics say, Kass is primarily concerned with immortality, something that most scientists say will never happen. “There is no research into extending the life span thousands of years,” said Richard Miller, a pathologist at the University of Michigan. “That’s fantasy.”

Even when applied to the more modest and realistic goal of extending our life spans by a few years or decades, or even doubling it, Kass’ arguments don’t hold up, said Chris Hackler, head of the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas.

“We live [longer now] than we did a century ago but that doesn’t mean we take life any less seriously or less creatively, so I don’t know why projecting that for a doubled lifespan would be radically different,” Hackler said in a recent telephone interview.

Hackler also points out that even if people could potentially live to be 180, they could still die from accidents or disease: It is not the knowledge that we will die by some certain age that spurs us to make the most of life, Hackler says, but the awareness that we can die at any moment—and that will not change even if we are immortal.

Eternal bore

Instead of worrying about what longer life will do to our sense of humanity, Callahan and Hackler wonder what the heck people are going to do with all their extra time. Longer life means more time for boredom to creep in.

“Let’s face it, most peoples’ jobs aren’t all that fascinating,” Hackler said. “They put in a 9-to-5 and they’re glad to have the weekend. So you wonder if having twice as much of this is a good thing, or if you’d get totally burned out.”

Hackler can’t imagine himself ever getting tired of living, but he knows not everyone will feel same way. Determining how much ennui the average person can bear will be important if life extension ever becomes a reality, Hackler says, because extended boredom could result in prolonged unhappiness or higher incidences of suicide.

Against concerns of chronic boredom, those in favor of extending life spans significantly say, “speak for yourself.” Aubrey de Grey from the University of Cambridge believes longer life will invigorate people to do the things they’ve always wanted to do. “There are things that no one attempts today because they feel they’ll never get them done in a lifetime,” de Grey writes. “If a lifetime is a lot longer they’ll try them.”

Callahan thinks this kind of thinking gives the average person too much credit.

“I don’t believe that if you give most people longer lives, even in better health, they are going to find new opportunities and new initiatives,” Callahan has said. “They will want to come and play more golf maybe, but they aren’t going to contribute lots of brand new ideas, at least the ones I know.”

Moderation

Even if people had all the time in the world, they will never be able to do all the things they wanted to do, Callahan argues.

“Even if you’ve seen everything, you might say ‘Well, I want to go see India once again,’” he told LiveScience. “It seems there’s a possibly never-ending cycle there.”

If people end up doing most of the things on their to-do lists by the time they reach 80, then perhaps that is good enough.

“The fact that there are still some countries that I’ve never been to does not ruin my life,” Callahan said. “I’ve never been to Nepal or Antarctica but it’s hard to work that up to some great tragedy of my life.”


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Light Travels Backward and Faster than Light

Published on May 23, 2006
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 18 May 2006
12:51 pm ET

It sounds nuts, but a scientist says his team has made light go backward. And this is not a simple trick of mirrors.

Previous work has slowed light to a crawl. But in the new research, a pulse of light is given a negative speed and—as if just to make your head spin—the researcher says the experiment made light appear to exceed its theoretical speed limit.

If you totally confused, don’t worry. This reporter doesn’t get it either. Nor do a lot of really smart scientists.

“I’ve had some of the world’s experts scratching their heads over this one,” says Robert Boyd, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester. “It’s weird stuff.”

The research was reported in the May 12 issue of the journal Science. Though not normally stated in news reports, Science is a peer-reviewed journal. That means some experts read Boyd’s paper and said it was good to publish.

We’re going to let Boyd do the explaining. And this next sentence is the crux of it all:

“We sent a pulse through an optical fiber, and before its peak even entered the fiber, it was exiting the other end. Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward, linking the input and output pulses.”

“The pulse of light is shaped like a hump with a peak and long leading and trailing edges. The leading edge carries with it all the information about the pulse and enters the fiber first. By the time the peak enters the fiber, the leading edge is already well ahead, exiting. From the information in that leading edge, the fiber essentially ‘reconstructs’ the pulse at the far end, sending one version out the fiber, and another backward toward the beginning of the fiber.”

Faster than light

Let’s put that another way, verbatim from a statement issued by the University of Rochester:

“As the pulse enters the material, a second pulse appears on the far end of the fiber and flows backward. The reversed pulse not only propagates backward, but it releases a forward pulse out the far end of the fiber. In this way, the pulse that enters the front of the fiber appears out the end almost instantly, apparently traveling faster than the regular speed of light.”

What about Einstein, who said nothing can exceed light-speed?

“Einstein said information can’t travel faster than light, and in this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light,” Boyd said.

A spokesperson at the university’s communications department added this: “Everything that defines the pulse that enters, also defines the pulse that exits. But the energy of the light does not travel faster than light.”


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UK says UFOs caused by natural forces by Tim Castle

Published on May 8, 2006

Sun May 7, 1:29 PM ET

Hopes — or fears — that the Earth has been visited by alien life forms have been dismissed in an official report by British defense specialists.

The Ministry of Defense confirmed on Sunday a secret study completed in December 2000 had found no evidence that “flying saucers” or unidentified flying objects were anything other than natural phenomena.

The 400-page report, released under freedom of information laws to an academic from the northern city of Sheffield, concluded that meteors and unusual atmospheric conditions could explain UFO sightings such as bright lights in the sky.

“No evidence exists to suggest that the phenomena seen are hostile or under any type of control, other than that of natural physical forces,” the report said, according to extracts quoted by the BBC.

“Evidence suggests that meteors and their well-known effects, and possibly some other less-known effects, are responsible for some unidentified aerial phenomena.

“Considerable evidence exists to support the thesis that the events are almost certainly attributable to physical, electrical and magnetic phenomena in the atmosphere, mesosphere and ionosphere,” it said.

A Ministry of Defense (MOD) spokesman said the full report, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK Air Defense Region,” would be published on its Web site on May 15.

The ministry publishes annual lists of UFO sightings on its Web site, which rank among its most viewed — and bizarre — pages.

In 2005 the ministry was asked under freedom of information laws for details of its plans for “dealing with the arrival of extra-terrestrials.”

An unnamed defense official replied: “While we remain open-minded, to date the MOD knows of no evidence which substantiates the existence of these alleged phenomena and therefore has no plans for dealing with such a situation.”


Atom Breaks Rules, Beats Friction

Published on April 1, 2006

Atom Breaks Rules, Beats Friction
By Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 30 March 2006
02:05 pm ET

Scientists have found a molecule that can spin freely in liquid, clearing out water like a person swinging suitcases would clear a crowded room.

The molecule spins without causing friction [Video]. That shouldn’t be possible, according to a chemical physics theory. The finding could alter the way scientists think about chemical reactions in liquids.

Researchers hit a drop of iodine cyanide and water with pulses from an ultraviolet laser, exciting one type of molecule to reconfigure into a small, peanut shape with a carbon atom on one end, a nitrogen atom on the other.

The molecule heated up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit (4,427 Celsius) and started spinning at a furious 270 trillion rotations per minute.

Outta my way

Within the first quarter-turn, the molecule created a shock wave that kicked away surrounding water molecules. The peanut molecule created a nearly frictionless zone for itself in the 10-trillionths of a second the reaction lasted.

“If you give it enough spin, it pushes all the guys around it away, and it builds itself a little bubble,” said study coauthor Stephen Bradforth of the University of Southern California. “It’s destroyed the friction in the liquid around it by completely reshaping its environment.”

After the molecule completed about 10 rotations, the shock dwindled and the water molecules rushed back in.

Despite its fleeting nature, the reaction managed to smash the linear response theory, a chemistry model that states such a thing can’t happen in a liquid environment.

“You can see molecules behave this way in gases, but not in liquids,” said study coauthor Richard Stratt, a chemical theorist at Brown University.

Breaking other laws

The molecule’s activity also runs against Newton’s third law of motion, which states that for every action there is an equal, but opposite, reaction. In the new experiment, there water molecules are displaced, but they don’t in turn do anything to the peanut molecule.

Friction is important in chemistry. Molecules rub, grind, and bang against each other they generate heat that speeds up reactions. Friction in gas reactions is reduced due to the relatively far distances between molecules, but the close proximity of molecules in liquid form makes friction nearly unavoidable.

Although the discovery has no immediate practical use, it changes the way scientists think about the 90 percent of all chemical reactions that take place in liquid, Bradforth said. One potential use could be to manipulate reactions by isolating molecules from their surroundings and reducing the production of useless byproducts.

“The main reason we’re so excited by these results is that friction is how energy is shuttled around in chemical reactions,” Stratt told LiveScience. “If it doesn’t operate or it operates differently than we always thought, that makes us wonder if there are entirely new ways we ought to thinking about how chemical reactions take place.”

The research is detailed in the March 31 issue of the journal Science.


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Altruistic Love Related to Happier Marriages

Published on February 14, 2006

An article I found which directly relates to relationships and levels of consciousness. The term altruism is used here, but may be substituted with kindness or compassion… Myswizard

Altruistic Love Related to Happier Marriages
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 09 February 2006
06:42 am ET

Altruism may breed better marriages, a new study suggests. Or, the data might mean that good marriages make people more altruistic.

Whatever, altruism and happiness seem to go together in the realm of love.

“Altruistic love was associated with greater happiness in general and especially with more marital happiness,” concludes Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in a report released today.

I do

Study participants were asked whether they agreed with statements that define altruism, such as, “I’d rather suffer myself than let the one I love suffer,” and “I’m willing to sacrifice my own wishes to let the one I love achieve his or hers.”

Those who agreed with the statements tended to also report happiness with their spouses.

Am