SCIENCE AND SPECULATION

INFLUENZA: A Real Threat

2007-10-27T16:32:00.000-04:00

H5N1: Humanity's second greatest threat

I call it the second greatest threat because I believe george W. bush currently holds first place in the "threat to human life" category.

As I post this in October 2007 the bird flu virus is making a couple of significant mutations that will allow it to transfer more easily from birds to humans. While this is a scary development, it also is a hopeful one. Meaning, we are one step closer in figuring out how the "jump" from birds to humans is made. Maybe knowing how it happens will allow our scientists to find a way for preventing it.

The last killer pandemic was in 1918. I've read numbers ranging between 20 MILLION and 50 MILLION deaths in that year. My paternal and maternal grandparents were all approximately five years old during this tragedy. I'm thankful they lived. If any one of the four of them had died I would either not exist today or be a different person (which is the same as saying I (this I) would not exist. That scenario is the same for anyone reading this, regardless of how many lines of progeny you go back, whether it's one, two or three.

Pandemic test undertaken by financial services paints dire scenario

Patrick Thibodeau

October 24, 2007 (Computerworld) If a pandemic strikes the U.S., it will kill about 1.7 million people, hospitalize 9 million, exhaust antiviral medications and reduce basic food supplies, according to a planning scenario developed by financial service firms preparing for such a catastrophe.

This particular disaster occurred only on paper. But those grim numbers are some of the pandemic planning assumptions used by nearly 3,000 banks, insurance companies and security firms in a just-concluded, three-week, paper-based exercise that may have been the largest pandemic test of its kind.

In each week of this drill, participants -- some 10,000 people were involved -- received an updated scenario and were asked to assess their capability to deliver services as the pandemic deepened and then abated.

"We wanted to look at the impact a pandemic can have on our sector," said George Hender, chairman of the Financial Services Coordinating Council, in a teleconference Wednesday. "One of the things that we tried to do is put some real stress on the firms."

During the height of the pandemic, which was estimated to occur midway through the scenario, participants were asked to consider operating with an absentee rate of nearly 50% -- above the 35% to 40% rate federal officials believe may actually happen, said Hender. "We deliberately took the rate up much higher to see where their stress points were," he said.

The financial services groups are now sharing the pandemic flu exercise information, and all the scenarios are available for download.

The U.S. Department of Treasury is also a sponsor of the test, and Valerie Abend, deputy assistant secretary for critical infrastructure protection and compliance at the department, said the financial services industry has been "thinking long and hard about a pandemic."

"We are one of the most prepared, I would argue, if not the most prepared of the critical infrastructures that are out there," said Abend.

But the financial services firms won't really know how prepared they are until the end of the year. The thousands of pages of data collected during the test, which began in the last week of September, are still being analyzed and a final report is due at year's end. But based on some preliminary feedback from participants, the financial service firms weren't handing out too many gold stars for readiness.

When asked "based on the lessons learned from the exercise, how effective are your organization's business continuity plans for a pandemic," 56% answered "moderately," the next highest group was "minimally," at 28%. Only 12% said their business continuity planning was very effective.

The three-week scenario compresses the 12-week period a pandemic wave would likely last. Among the other things that may happen in an actual pandemic are school closings, as well as blackouts or brownouts in major metro areas because of degraded service as a result of absenteeism. Internet service throughput could be reduced by 50% due to congestion, and Web browsing timeouts would become common. Airlines would cut schedules, and garbage would pile up on streets.

Many frustrations would arise. Working ATMs might be scarce, and call centers may not have enough staff to help. Health insurance claim volume would rise 20%. Auto claims are expected to fall 10%, since there would be less traffic on the road. But for those who are driving, gas prices would be high and fuel supplies reduced.

HERE is some interesting reading about the 1918 PANDEMIC.

I knew it all along. Really.

Study Reveals Why Flu Thrives in Winter

Dave Mosher
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com

For the first time, scientist have solid evidence suggesting exactly why the flu is so common in winter.

A new animal study suggests that the influenza virus' success hinges on low relative humidity and cold temperatures. Such conditions keep the virus more stable and in the air longer than warm, humid conditions, scientists said. And apparently, the frosty weather's role is more important than that of the human body in helping the virus thrive.

"We've always thought the immune system wasn't as active during the winter, but that doesn't really seem to be the case," said study coauthor Peter Palese, a virologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

When we cough or sneeze, tiny droplets of water enter the air and hang around until they drop to the ground—or an unsuspecting passerby breathes them in. Once inside our airways, any flu viruses that have hitched a ride on the droplets can launch an attack.

"We found that the flu's transmission period is much, much longer when temperatures and humidity levels are low," Palese told LiveScience.

He thinks that the conditions not only suck away the droplet's water weight, allowing them to float in the air longer, but also dry out virus-blocking mucous and cells in our airways. Bigger viral doses combined with the body's disabled means to flush them out, Palese said, gives the flu a better fighting chance to infect a person, regardless of their immune system's strength.

This correlation has been obvious, Palese acknowledged, but solid explanations for wintertime viral success have eluded scientists because modeling human-like disease transmission in animals is difficult. Many animals, such as mice, fail to transmit the viruses that make humans sick.

"The only animals that can model virus transmission are ferrets, but they're very expensive, big and hard to work with," he said. "They also like to bite a lot." By reading an 88-year-old medical study, however, Palese's team discovered that guinea pigs simulate human coughing and sneezing extremely well.

"I never believed what my grandmother told me about getting sick when it's cold, but it turns out she was right," Palese said. "Guinea pigs aren't humans, but this is some of the best evidence yet to explain the seasonality of the flu."

Although the flu spreads primarily through the air, the viruses can survive on doorknobs, handrails and other surfaces. Medical experts report that frequent hand washing, especially before meals, can lower the risk of picking up as well as transmitting diseases such as the flu.

Palese and his colleagues' complete findings are detailed in the October issue of the online journal PLoS Pathogens.

SOURCE

Also see some really interesting facts, answered questions and a video on the potential for a BIRD FLU PANDEMIC.

DIFFERENT DINOSAUR SPECIES

2007-10-20T00:46:00.001-04:00

A previously, unknown to man, species of dinosaur has been discovered AND IT'S A GIANT!

Dinosaur skeleton unearthed in Argentina

By MICHAEL ASTOR, Associated Press Writer

The skeleton of what is believed to be a new dinosaur species — a 105-foot plant-eater that is among the largest dinosaurs ever found — has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said Monday.

Scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They named it Futalognkosaurus dukei after the Mapuche Indian words for "giant" and "chief," and for Duke Energy Argentina, which helped fund the skeleton's excavation.

"This is one of the biggest in the world and one of the most complete of these giants that exist," said Jorge Calvo, director of the paleontology center at the National University of Comahue, Argentina. He was lead author of a study on the dinosaur published in the peer-reviewed Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
Scientists said the giant herbivore walked the Earth some 88 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period.

Since the first bones were found on the banks of Lake Barreales in the Argentine province of Neuquen in 2000, paleontologists have dug up the dinosaur's neck, back region, hips and the first vertebra of its tail.

"I'm pretty certain it's a new species," agreed Peter Mackovicky, associate curator for dinosaurs at Chicago's Field Museum, who was not involved with the discovery. "I've seen some of the remains of Futalognkosaurus and it is truly gigantic."

Alexander Kellner, left, a researcher with the Brazilian National Museum, and Argentine paleontologists Jorge Calvo, center, and Juan Porfiri, display parts of a skeleton of what could be a new dinosaur species, a 105-foot plant-eater, Futalognkosaurus dukei dinosaur, during a news conference in Rio de Janeiro, Monday, Oct. 15, 2007. The Patagonian dinosaur was uncovered on the banks of Lake Barreales in the Argentine province of Neuquen and according with the scientists the giant herbivore walked the Earth some 88 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period. (AP Photo/Ricardo Morales)

Calvo said the neck alone must have been 56 feet long, and by studying the vertebrae, they figured the tail probably measured 49 feet. The dinosaur reached over 43 feet tall, and the excavated spinal column weighed about 9 tons when excavated. One neck vertebra alone measured more than 3 feet high.

Jeff Wilson, an assistant professor of paleontology at the University of Michigan, who was asked to review the finding, said he was impressed by the sheer amount of skeleton recovered.

"I should really try to underscore how incredible it is to have partial skeleton of something this size," Wilson said in telephone interview. "With these kind of bones you can't study them by moving them around on the table; you have to move around them yourself."

"It shows us the upper limit for dinosaur size," Wilson added. "There are some that are bigger but they all top out around this size."

Patagonia also was home to the other two largest dinosaur skeletons found to date — Argentinosaurus, at around 115 feet long, and Puertasaurus reuili, 115 feet to 131 feet long.

Comparison between the three herbivores, however, is difficult because scientists have only found few vertebrae of Puertasaurus, and while the skeleton of Futalognkosaurus (FOO-ta-long-koh-SOHR-us) is fairly complete, scientists have not uncovered any bones from its limbs.

North America's dinosaurs don't even compare in size, Mackovicky added in a phone interview. "Dinosaurs do get big here, but nothing near the proportions we see in South America."

The site where Futalognkosaurus was found has been a bonanza for paleontologists, yielding more than 1,000 specimens, including 240 fossil plants, 300 teeth and the remains of several other dinosaurs.

"As far as I know, there is no other place in the world where there is such a large and diverse quantity of fossils in such small area. That is truly unique," said Alexander Kellner, a researcher with the Brazilian National Museum and co-author of the dinosaur's scientific description.

SOURCE

MISHANDLING OF GERMS

2007-10-10T21:02:00.001-04:00

If you read through this article you'll soon come to realize that our fate; our possible exposure to deadly viral/bacterial toxins is in the hands of people who have a large number of idiots in their midst. Sure there are lots of accidents, but there's also lots of carelessness which causes "accidents". In the future, an extinction level action could be caused by one of these idiots. Maybe it has always been this way. Maybe we've been "within an inch of going out" for the last thirty years. Who knows? Remember, this is only one article and these are only a few incidents that have been reported or discovered. And this is only one country. If humanity doesn't fall victim to itself, it may to ever strengthening, ever mutating strains of the deadly toys of idiots.

Mishandling of germs on rise at US labs

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer

American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing as more labs do the work.

No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented cases reflect poorly on procedures and oversight at high-security labs, some of which work with organisms and poisons that can cause illnesses with no cure. In some cases, labs have failed to report accidents as required by law.

The mishaps include workers bitten or scratched by infected animals, skin cuts, needle sticks and more, according to a review by The Associated Press of confidential reports submitted to federal regulators. They describe accidents involving anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria at 44 labs in 24 states. More than two-dozen incidents were still under investigation.

The number of accidents has risen steadily. Through August, the most recent period covered in the reports obtained by the AP, labs reported 36 accidents and lost shipments during 2007 — nearly double the number reported during all of 2004.

Likewise, the number of labs approved by the government to handle the deadliest substances has nearly doubled to 409 since 2004, and there are now 15 of the highest-security labs. Labs are routinely inspected by federal regulators just once every three years, but accidents trigger interim inspections.

In a new report by congressional investigators, the Government Accountability Office said little is known about labs that aren't federally funded or don't work with any of 72 dangerous substances the government monitors most closely.

"No single federal agency ... has the mission to track the overall number of these labs in the United States," said the GAO's report, expected to be released later this week. "Consequently, no agency is responsible for determining the risks associated with the proliferation of these labs."

The House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee plans hearings Thursday on the issue. The lab incidents have sparked bipartisan concern.

"It may be only a matter of time before our nation has a public health incident with potentially catastrophic results," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., the panel's chairman.

The subcommittee's senior Republican, Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, added: "Currently, there is a hodgepodge system of federal oversight regulating the ... laboratories responsible for researching the deadliest germs and diseases. At Thursdays hearing, I expect to probe witnesses about how to improve oversight of these laboratories in a post 9-11 world."

Lab accidents have affected the outside world: Britain's health and safety agency concluded there was a "strong probability" a leaking pipe at a British lab manufacturing vaccines for foot-and-mouth disease was the source of an outbreak of the illness in livestock earlier this year. Britain was forced to suspend exports of livestock, meat and milk products and destroy livestock. The disease does not infect humans.

Accidents aren't the only concern. While medical experts consider it unlikely that a lab employee will become sick and infect others, these labs have strict rules to prevent anyone from stealing organisms or toxins and using them for bioterrorism.

The reports were so sensitive the Bush administration refused to release them under the Freedom of Information Act, citing an anti-bioterrorism law aimed at preventing terrorists from locating stockpiles of poisons and learning who handles them.

ILC Dover technician William Ayrey is seen in a self-contained biosuit in Frederica, Del., Monday Oct. 1, 2007. Suits made by ILC Dover, and other manufacturers, are worn in the highest security level laboratories that work with dangerous germs and toxins. Suits such as these protect workers from organisms and poisons so dangerous that illnesses they cause have no cure. (AP Photo/Gary Emeigh)

Among the previously undisclosed accidents:

_In Rockville, Md., ferret No. 992, inoculated with bird flu virus, bit a technician at Bioqual Inc. on the right thumb in July. The worker was placed on home quarantine for five days and directed to wear a mask to protect others.

_An Oklahoma State University lab in Stillwater in December could not account for a dead mouse inoculated with bacteria that causes joint pain, weakness, lymph node swelling and pneumonia. The rodent — one of 30 to be incinerated — was never found, but the lab said an employee "must have forgotten to remove the dead mouse from the cage" before the cage was sterilized.

_In Albuquerque, N.M., an employee at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute was bitten on the left hand by an infected monkey in September 2006. The animal was ill from an infection of bacteria that causes plague. "When the gloves were removed, the skin appeared to be broken in 2 or 3 places," the report said. The worker was referred to a doctor, but nothing more was disclosed.

_In Fort Collins, Colo., a worker at a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility found, in January 2004, three broken vials of Russian spring-summer encephalitis virus. Wearing only a laboratory coat and gloves, he used tweezers to remove broken glass and moved the materials to a special container. The virus, a potential bio-warfare agent, could cause brain inflammation and is supposed to be handled in a lab requiring pressure suits that resemble space suits. The report did not say whether the worker became ill.

Other reports describe leaks of contaminated waste, dropped containers with cultures of bacteria and viruses, and defective seals on airtight containers. Some recount missing or lost shipments, including plague bacteria that was supposed to be delivered to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in 2003. The wayward plague shipment was discovered eventually in Belgium and incinerated safely.

The reports must be submitted to regulators whenever a lab suffers a theft, loss or release of any of 72 substances known as "select agents" — a government list of germs and toxins that represent the horror stories of the world's worst medical tragedies for humans and animals.

A senior CDC official, Dr. Richard Besser, said his agency is committed to ensuring that U.S. labs are safe and that all such incidents are disclosed to the government. He said he was unaware of any risk to the public resulting from infections among workers at the high-security labs, but he acknowledged that regulators are worried about accidents that could go unreported.

"If you're asking if it's possible for someone to not report an infection, and have it missed, that clearly is a concern that we have," Besser said.

Texas A&M's laboratory failed to report, until this year, one case of a lab worker's infection from Brucella bacteria last year and three others' previous infection with Q fever — missteps documented in news reports earlier this year. The illnesses are characterized by high fevers and flu-like symptoms that sometimes cause more serious complications.

"The major problems at Texas A&M went undetected and unreported, and we don't think that it was an isolated event," critic Edward Hammond said. He runs the Sunshine Project, which has tracked incidents at other labs for years and first revealed the Texas A&M illnesses that the school failed to report.

Rules for working in the labs are tough and are getting more restrictive as the bio-safety levels rise. The highest is Level 4, where labs study substances that pose a "high risk of life-threatening disease for which no vaccine or therapy is available." Besides wearing wear full-body, air-supplied suits, workers undergo extensive background checks and carry special identification cards.

"The risk that a killer agent could be set loose in the general population is real," Hammond said.

In other lab accidents recounted in the reports, the Public Health Research Institute in Newark, N.J., was investigated by the FBI in 2005 when it couldn't account for three of 24 mice infected with plague bacteria. The lab and the CDC concluded the mice were cannibalized by other plague-infested mice or buried under bedding when the cage was sterilized with high temperatures.

The lab's director, Dr. David Perlin, told the AP it would be impossible for mice to escape from the building and said a worker failed to record their deaths.

"I feel 99 percent comfortable that was the case," Perlin said. "The animals become badly cannibalized. You only see bits and pieces. They're in cages with shredded newspaper. You really have to search hard with gloves and masks."

A worker at the Army's biological facility in Fort Detrick, Md., was grazed by a needle in February 2004 and exposed to the deadly Ebola virus after a mouse kicked a syringe. She was placed in an isolation ward called "The Slammer," but the Army said she did not become ill.

In other previously undisclosed accidents:

In Decatur, Ga., a worker at the Georgia Public Health Laboratory handled a Brucella culture in April 2004 without high-level precautions. She became feverish months later and tested positive for exposure at a hospital emergency room in July. She eventually returned to work. The lab's confidential report defended her: "The technologist is a good laboratorian and has good technique."

In April this year at the Lovelace facility in Albuquerque, an African green monkey infected intentionally with plague-causing bacteria reached with its free hand and scratched at a Velcro restraining strap, cutting into the gloved hand of a lab worker. The injured worker at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute received medical treatment, including an antibiotic.

The National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa, reported leaks of contaminated waste three times in November and December 2006. While one worker was preparing a pipe for repairs, he cut his middle finger, possibly exposing him to Brucella, according to the confidential reports.

A researcher at the CDC's lab in Fort Collins, Colo., dropped two containers on the floor last November, including one with plague bacteria.

A worker at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research-Naval Medical Research Center in Silver Spring, Md., sliced through two pair of gloves while handling a rat carcass infected with plague bacteria. The May 2005 report said she was sent to an emergency room, which released her and asked her to return for a follow-up visit.

SOURCE
(this is a yahoo link which won't have much of a "shelf life" - it could disappear any day)

The Yucatan Peninsula / The Chicxulub Crater

2007-09-24T21:37:00.000-04:00

Here are two articles on the same subject - a very interesting subject to me.
Just so you know, we're WAY overdue for another hit. I mean like in any day now. And all we have watching the near Earth objects are a handful of private people working their asses off watching 1-3% of the sky. We're JUST NOW at the end of the asteroid shower that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs

By Will Dunham

A collision 160 million years ago of two asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter sent many big rock chunks hurtling toward Earth, including the one that zapped the dinosaurs, scientists said on Wednesday.
Their research offered an explanation for the cause of one of the most momentous events in the history of life on Earth -- a six-mile-wide (10-km-wide) meteorite striking Mexico's Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago.
That catastrophe eliminated the dinosaurs, which had flourished for about 165 million years, and many other life forms, and paved the way for mammals to dominate the Earth and the eventual rise of humankind, many scientists believe.
The impact is thought to have triggered a worldwide environmental cataclysm, expelling vast quantities of rock and dust into the sky, unleashing giant tsunamis, sparking global wildfires and leaving Earth shrouded in darkness for years.
U.S. and Czech researchers used computer simulations to calculate that there was a 90 percent probability that the collision of two asteroids -- one about 105 miles wide and one about 40 miles wide -- was the event that precipitated the Earthly disaster.
The collision occurred in the asteroid belt, a collection of big and small rocks orbiting the sun about 100 million miles from Earth, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
The asteroid Baptistina and rubble associated with it are thought to be leftovers, the scientists said.
Some of the debris from the collision escaped the asteroid belt, tumbled toward the inner solar system and whacked Earth and our moon, along with probably Mars and Venus, said William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the researchers.
DEADLY COLLISION

The collision is believed to have doubled for a while the number of impacts occurring in this part of the solar system.
In fact, while the bombardment of this region of the solar system due to this shower of debris peaked about 100 million years ago, the scientists said the tail end of the shower continues to this day. Bottke said many existing near-Earth asteroids can be traced back to this collision.
"Imagine breaking up a big, big boulder on top of a hill and all the fragments rolling down the hill. And somewhere at the bottom is a village called Earth," Bottke said in a telephone interview.
The dinosaur-destroying meteorite, thought to have measured 6 miles across, plunged into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and blasted out the Chicxulub (pronounced CHIK-shu-loob) crater measuring about 110 miles wide. The researchers looked at evidence on the composition of this meteorite and found it consistent with the stony Baptistina.
The researchers estimated that there also was about a 70 percent probability that the prominent Tycho crater on the Moon, formed 108 million years ago and measuring about 55 miles
across, also was carved out by a remnant of the earlier asteroid collision.
Philippe Claeys of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, who was not involved in the research, said by e-mail the findings were "clear evidence that the solar system is a violent environment and that collisions taking place in the asteroid belt can have major repercussions for the evolution of life on Earth."
Bottke emphasized that point. "Dinosaurs were around for a very long time. So the likelihood is they would still be around if that event had never taken place," Bottke said.
"Was humanity inevitable? Or is humanity just something that happened to arise because of this sequence of events that took place at just the right time. It's hard to say."

Asteroid “crime family” blamed in dinosaur wipeout

Sept. 5, 2007
Courtesy Southwest Research Institute
and World Science staff

Astronomers have long believed that some sort of asteroid or comet impact killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. Now they say they have likely identified what the object was—or at least, which family it came from.

The dinosaurs fell victim to one of many broken-up chunks of a once-bigger asteroid, a group known as Baptistina family asteroids, researchers say. In fact, they add, fragments of that same rock have been pelting Earth for eons, and we’re only about now at the bombardment’s end.
The U.S.-Czech research team combined observations with computer simulations to reach the conclusions. They estimated that the parent body of the dinosaur-killer was some 170 kilometers (106 miles) wide.

Around 100 million years before the dinosaurs’ catastrophic end, this colossus was floating through space deep inside the Solar System’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the scientists said. That’s when it slammed into another asteroid about a third as wide, creating thousands of large chunks.

One of those eventually found its way here and wiped out the great reptiles, the scientists continued. With 90 percent certainty it left the giant pockmark now called Chicxulub crater on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, they said.

But that fragment wasn’t the only one to disrupt Earth or its neighborhood, the scientists added: a huge Moon crater called Tycho also has 70 percent likelihood of being caused a Baptistina family member.

When the parent body broke up, its offspring continued moving in similar orbits to its own, the researchers explained. But these orbits gradually changed due to forces produced when they absorbed sunlight and re-emitted the energy as heat. The family spread out, and some members drifted into a nearby “dynamical superhighway,” a zone from which they could escape the main asteroid belt and slip into orbits that cross Earth’s path.

The computations suggest that about 20 percent of surviving multi-kilometer- sized fragments in the Baptistina family were lost in this way, with some 2 percent of those going on to strike Earth. The result: a pronounced increase in the number of large asteroids hitting our planet, the research team said.

Both Earth and Moon show evidence of a two-fold increase in the formation rate of large craters over the last 100 to 150 million years, they continued. “The Baptistina bombardment produced a prolonged surge in the impact [rate] that peaked roughly 100 million years ago,” said David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, one of the researchers.

“We are in the tail end of this shower now. Our simulations suggest that about 20 percent of the present-day, near-Earth asteroid population can be traced back to the Baptistina family,” said the institute’s William Bottke, another collaborator.

Further evidence implicating the Baptistinas comes from the 180-kilometer wide Chicxulub crater, long thought to be associated with the dinosaurs’ misfortune, researchers added. Samples from the crater reveal a chemical composition consistent with that of the Baptistina asteroids, which are of a type known as carbonaceous chondrites. These are of great interest to scientists because of their primitive makeup: they’re believed to consist of pristine material similar to that of the cloud from which the Solar System formed.
SOURCE

Living Forever? Is Immortality Even Possible?

2007-09-18T13:40:00.000-04:00

Nanotechnology is coming. I posted about it before HERE. The old saying, "It takes money to make money", is still true, and there's still time to become very wealthy with the right investments. That is, if the bush/cheney fiasco doesn't collapse our entire monetary system. If that happens, none of this will matter because we'll all be on all fours wrestling stale candy bars from rat's mouths and fresh water will make a wealthy "barterer".

Anyway, this is a good article. It may be considered "fringe" by the status quo, but what revolutionary idea/invention wasn't? And if it is "fringe", it's intelligent "fringe".

Ray Kurzweil Aims to Live Forever

By Jay Lindsay, Associated Press

WELLESLEY, Mass. (AP) -- Ray Kurzweil doesn't tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn't take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else.

As part of his daily routine, Kurzweil ingests 250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea. He also periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, down to his "tactile sensitivity.'' Adjustments are made as needed.

"I do actually fine-tune my programming,'' he said.

The famed inventor and computer scientist is serious about his health because if it fails him he might not live long enough to see humanity achieve immortality, a seismic development he predicts in his new book is no more than 20 years away.

It's a blink of an eye in history, but long enough for the 56-year-old Kurzweil to pay close heed to his fitness. He urges others to do the same in "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.''

The book is partly a health guide so people can live to benefit from a coming explosion in technology he predicts will make infinite life spans possible.

Kurzweil writes of millions of blood cell-sized robots, which he calls "nanobots,'' that will keep us forever young by swarming through the body, repairing bones, muscles, arteries and brain cells. Improvements to our genetic coding will be downloaded via the Internet. We won't even need a heart.

The claims are fantastic, but Kurzweil is no crank. He's a recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize, which is billed as a sort of Academy Award for inventors, and he won the 1999 National Medal of Technology Award. He has written on the emergence of intelligent machines in publications ranging from Wired to Time magazine. The Christian Science Monitor has called him a "modern Edison.'' He was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. Perhaps the MIT graduate's most famous inventions is the first reading machine for the blind that could read any typeface.

During a recent interview in his company offices, Kurzweil sipped green tea and spoke of humanity's coming immortality as if it's as good as done. He sees human intelligence not only conquering its biological limits, including death, but completely mastering the natural world.

"In my view, we are not another animal, subject to nature's whim,'' he said.
Critics say Kurzweil's predictions of immortality are wild fantasies based on unjustifiable leaps from current technology.

"I'm not calling Ray a quack, but I am calling his message about immortality in line with the claims of other quacks that are out there.'' said Thomas Perls, a Boston University aging specialist who studies the genetics of centenarians.

Sherwin Nuland, a bioethics professor at Yale University's School of Medicine, calls Kurzweil a "genius'' but also says he's a product of a narcissistic age when brilliant people are becoming obsessed with their longevity.

"They've forgotten they're acting on the basic biological fear of death and extinction, and it distorts their rational approach to the human condition,'' Nuland said.

Kurzweil says his critics often fail to appreciate the exponential nature of technological advance, with knowledge doubling year by year so that amazing progress eventually occurs in short periods.

His predictions, Kurzweil said, are based on carefully constructed scientific models that have proven accurate. For instance, in his 1990 book, "The Age of Intelligent Machines,'' Kurzweil predicted the development of a worldwide computer network and of a computer that could beat a chess champion.

"It's not just guesses,'' he said. "There's a methodology to this.''

Kurzweil's been thinking big ever since he was little. At age 8, he developed a miniature theater in which a robotic device moved the scenery. By 16, the Queens, N.Y., native built his own computer and programmed it to compose original melodies.
His interest in health developed out of concern about his own future. Kurzweil's grandfather and father suffered from heart disease, his father dying when Kurzweil was 22. Kurzweil was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in his mid-30s.

After insulin treatments were ineffective, Kurzweil devised his own solution, including a drastic cut in fat consumption, allowing him to control his diabetes without insulin.

His rigorous health regimen is not excessive, just effective, he says, adding that his worst sickness in the last several years has been mild nasal congestion.

In the past decade, Kurzweil's interests in technology and health sciences have merged as scientists have discovered similarities.

"All the genes we have, the 20,000 to 30,000 genes, are little software programs,'' Kurzweil said.

In his latest book, Kurzweil defines what he calls his three bridges to immortality. The "First Bridge'' is the health regimen he describes with co-author Dr. Terry Grossman to keep people fit enough to cross the "Second Bridge,'' a biotechnological revolution.

Kurzweil writes that humanity is on the verge of controlling how genes express themselves and ultimately changing the genes. With such technology, humanity could block disease-causing genes and introduce new ones that would slow or stop the aging process.

The "Third Bridge'' is the nanotechnology and artificial intelligence revolution, which Kurzweil predicts will deliver the nanobots that work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains. These intelligent machines will destroy disease, rebuild organs and obliterate known limits on human intelligence, he believes.

Immortality would leave little standing in current society, in which the inevitability of death is foundational to everything from religion to retirement planning. The planet's natural resources would be greatly stressed, and the social order shaken.

Kurzweil says he believes new technology will emerge to meet increasing human needs. And he said society will be able to control the advances he predicts as long as it makes decisions openly and democratically, without excessive government interference.

But there are no guarantees, he adds.

Meanwhile, Kurzweil refuses to concede the inevitably of his own death, even if science doesn't advance as quickly as he predicts.

"Death is a tragedy,'' a process of suffering that rids the world of its most tested, experienced members -- people whose contributions to science and the arts could only multiply with agelessness, he said.

Kurzweil said he's no "cheerleader'' for unlimited scientific progress and added he knows science can't answer questions about why eternal lives are worth living. That's left for philosophers and theologians, he said.

But to him there's no question of huge advances in things that make life worth living, such as art, cultural, music and science.

"Biological evolution passed the baton of progress to human cultural and technological development,'' he said.

Lee Silver, a Princeton biologist, said he'd love to believe in the future as Kurzweil sees it, but the problem is, humans are involved.

The instinct to preserve individuality, and to gain advantage for yourself and children, would survive any breakthrough into biological immortality -- which Silver doesn't think is possible. The gap between the haves and have-nots would widen and Kurzweil's vision of a united humanity would become ever more elusive, he said.
"I think it would require a change in human nature,'' Silver said, "and I don't think people want to do that.''
SOURCE

NOT SOON ENOUGH

2007-07-24T15:45:00.000-04:00

Take a leap into hyperspace

Haiko Lietz

EVERY year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics awards prizes for the best papers presented at its annual conference. Last year's winner in the nuclear and future flight category went to a paper calling for experimental tests of an astonishing new type of engine. According to the paper, this hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics. Can they possibly be serious?

The AIAA is certainly not embarrassed. What's more, the US military has begun to cast its eyes over the hyperdrive concept, and a space propulsion researcher at the US Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has said he would be interested in putting the idea to the test. And despite the bafflement of most physicists at the theory that supposedly underpins it, Pavlos Mikellides, an aerospace engineer at the Arizona State University in Tempe who reviewed the winning paper, stands by the committee's choice. "Even though such features have been explored before, this particular approach is quite unique," he says.

Unique it certainly is. If the experiment gets the go-ahead and works, it could reveal new interactions between the fundamental forces of nature that would change the future of space travel. Forget spending six months or more holed up in a rocket on the way to Mars, a round trip on the hyperdrive could take as little as 5 hours. All our worries about astronauts' muscles wasting away or their DNA being irreparably damaged by cosmic radiation would disappear overnight. What's more the device would put travel to the stars within reach for the first time. But can the hyperdrive really get off the ground?

“A hyperdrive craft would put the stars within reach for the first time”

The answer to that question hinges on the work of a little-known German physicist. Burkhard Heim began to explore the hyperdrive propulsion concept in the 1950s as a spin-off from his attempts to heal the biggest divide in physics: the rift between quantum mechanics and Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Quantum theory describes the realm of the very small - atoms, electrons and elementary particles - while general relativity deals with gravity. The two theories are immensely successful in their separate spheres. The clash arises when it comes to describing the basic structure of space. In general relativity, space-time is an active, malleable fabric. It has four dimensions - three of space and one of time - that deform when masses are placed in them. In Einstein's formulation, the force of gravity is a result of the deformation of these dimensions. Quantum theory, on the other hand, demands that space is a fixed and passive stage, something simply there for particles to exist on. It also suggests that space itself must somehow be made up of discrete, quantum elements.

In the early 1950s, Heim began to rewrite the equations of general relativity in a quantum framework. He drew on Einstein's idea that the gravitational force emerges from the dimensions of space and time, but suggested that all fundamental forces, including electromagnetism, might emerge from a new, different set of dimensions. Originally he had four extra dimensions, but he discarded two of them believing that they did not produce any forces, and settled for adding a new two-dimensional "sub-space" onto Einstein's four-dimensional space-time.

In Heim's six-dimensional world, the forces of gravity and electromagnetism are coupled together. Even in our familiar four-dimensional world, we can see a link between the two forces through the behaviour of fundamental particles such as the electron. An electron has both mass and charge. When an electron falls under the pull of gravity its moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. And if you use an electromagnetic field to accelerate an electron you move the gravitational field associated with its mass. But in the four dimensions we know, you cannot change the strength of gravity simply by cranking up the electromagnetic field.

In Heim's view of space and time, this limitation disappears. He claimed it is possible to convert electromagnetic energy into gravitational and back again, and speculated that a rotating magnetic field could reduce the influence of gravity on a spacecraft enough for it to take off.

When he presented his idea in public in 1957, he became an instant celebrity. Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who at the time was leading the Saturn rocket programme that later launched astronauts to the moon, approached Heim about his work and asked whether the expensive Saturn rockets were worthwhile. And in a letter in 1964, the German relativity theorist Pascual Jordan, who had worked with the distinguished physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg and was a member of the Nobel committee, told Heim that his plan was so important "that its successful experimental treatment would without doubt make the researcher a candidate for the Nobel prize".

But all this attention only led Heim to retreat from the public eye. This was partly because of his severe multiple disabilities, caused by a lab accident when he was still in his teens. But Heim was also reluctant to disclose his theory without an experiment to prove it. He never learned English because he did not want his work to leave the country. As a result, very few people knew about his work and no one came up with the necessary research funding. In 1958 the aerospace company Bölkow did offer some money, but not enough to do the proposed experiment.

While Heim waited for more money to come in, the company's director, Ludwig Bölkow, encouraged him to develop his theory further. Heim took his advice, and one of the results was a theorem that led to a series of formulae for calculating the masses of the fundamental particles - something conventional theories have conspicuously failed to achieve. He outlined this work in 1977 in the Max Planck Institute's journal Zeitschrift für Naturforschung, his only peer-reviewed paper. In an abstruse way that few physicists even claim to understand, the formulae work out a particle's mass starting from physical characteristics, such as its charge and angular momentum.
Yet the theorem has proved surprisingly powerful. The standard model of physics, which is generally accepted as the best available theory of elementary particles, is incapable of predicting a particle's mass. Even the accepted means of estimating mass theoretically, known as lattice quantum chromodynamics, only gets to between 1 and 10 per cent of the experimental values.

Gravity reduction
But in 1982, when researchers at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg implemented Heim's mass theorem in a computer program, it predicted masses of fundamental particles that matched the measured values to within the accuracy of experimental error. If they are let down by anything, it is the precision to which we know the values of the fundamental constants. Two years after Heim's death in 2001, his long-term collaborator Illobrand von Ludwiger calculated the mass formula using a more accurate gravitational constant. "The masses came out even more precise," he says.

After publishing the mass formulae, Heim never really looked at hyperspace propulsion again. Instead, in response to requests for more information about the theory behind the mass predictions, he spent all his time detailing his ideas in three books published in German. It was only in 1980, when the first of his books came to the attention of a retired Austrian patent officer called Walter Dröscher, that the hyperspace propulsion idea came back to life. Dröscher looked again at Heim's ideas and produced an "extended" version, resurrecting the dimensions that Heim originally discarded. The result is "Heim-Dröscher space", a mathematical description of an eight-dimensional universe.

From this, Dröscher claims, you can derive the four forces known in physics: the gravitational and electromagnetic forces, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But there's more to it than that. "If Heim's picture is to make sense," Dröscher says, "we are forced to postulate two more fundamental forces." These are, Dröscher claims, related to the familiar gravitational force: one is a repulsive anti-gravity similar to the dark energy that appears to be causing the universe's expansion to accelerate. And the other might be used to accelerate a spacecraft without any rocket fuel.

This force is a result of the interaction of Heim's fifth and sixth dimensions and the extra dimensions that Dröscher introduced. It produces pairs of "gravitophotons", particles that mediate the interconversion of electromagnetic and gravitational energy. Dröscher teamed up with Jochem Häuser, a physicist and professor of computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzgitter, Germany, to turn the theoretical framework into a proposal for an experimental test. The paper they produced, "Guidelines for a space propulsion device based on Heim's quantum theory", is what won the AIAA's award last year.

Claims of the possibility of "gravity reduction" or "anti-gravity" induced by magnetic fields have been investigated by NASA before (New Scientist, 12 January 2002, p 24). But this one, Dröscher insists, is different. "Our theory is not about anti-gravity. It's about completely new fields with new properties," he says. And he and Häuser have suggested an experiment to prove it.

This will require a huge rotating ring placed above a superconducting coil to create an intense magnetic field. With a large enough current in the coil, and a large enough magnetic field, Dröscher claims the electromagnetic force can reduce the gravitational pull on the ring to the point where it floats free. Dröscher and Häuser say that to completely counter Earth's pull on a 150-tonne spacecraft a magnetic field of around 25 tesla would be needed. While that's 500,000 times the strength of Earth's magnetic field, pulsed magnets briefly reach field strengths up to 80 tesla. And Dröscher and Häuser go further. With a faster-spinning ring and an even stronger magnetic field, gravitophotons would interact with conventional gravity to produce a repulsive anti-gravity force, they suggest.

“A spinning ring and a strong magnetic field could produce a repulsive anti-gravity force”

Dröscher is hazy about the details, but he suggests that a spacecraft fitted with a coil and ring could be propelled into a multidimensional hyperspace. Here the constants of nature could be different, and even the speed of light could be several times faster than we experience. If this happens, it would be possible to reach Mars in less than 3 hours and a star 11 light years away in only 80 days, Dröscher and Häuser say.

So is this all fanciful nonsense, or a revolution in the making? The majority of physicists have never heard of Heim theory, and most of those contacted by New Scientist said they couldn't make sense of Dröscher and Häuser's description of the theory behind their proposed experiment. Following Heim theory is hard work even without Dröscher's extension, says Markus Pössel, a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. Several years ago, while an undergraduate at the University of Hamburg, he took a careful look at Heim theory. He says he finds it "largely incomprehensible", and difficult to tie in with today's physics. "What is needed is a step-by-step introduction, beginning at modern physical concepts," he says.

The general consensus seems to be that Dröscher and Häuser's theory is incomplete at best, and certainly extremely difficult to follow. And it has not passed any normal form of peer review, a fact that surprised the AIAA prize reviewers when they made their decision. "It seemed to be quite developed and ready for such publication," Mikellides told New Scientist.

At the moment, the main reason for taking the proposal seriously must be Heim theory's uncannily successful prediction of particle masses. Maybe, just maybe, Heim theory really does have something to contribute to modern physics. "As far as I understand it, Heim theory is ingenious," says Hans Theodor Auerbach, a theoretical physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who worked with Heim. "I think that physics will take this direction in the future."

It may be a long while before we find out if he's right. In its present design, Dröscher and Häuser's experiment requires a magnetic coil several metres in diameter capable of sustaining an enormous current density. Most engineers say that this is not feasible with existing materials and technology, but Roger Lenard, a space propulsion researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico thinks it might just be possible. Sandia runs an X-ray generator known as the Z machine which "could probably generate the necessary field intensities and gradients".

For now, though, Lenard considers the theory too shaky to justify the use of the Z machine. "I would be very interested in getting Sandia interested if we could get a more perspicacious introduction to the mathematics behind the proposed experiment," he says. "Even if the results are negative, that, in my mind, is a successful experiment."

From issue 2533 of New Scientist magazine, 05 January 2006, page 24

Who was Burkhard Heim?
Burkhard Heim had a remarkable life. Born in 1925 in Potsdam, Germany, he decided at the age of 6 that he wanted to become a rocket scientist. He disguised his designs in code so that no one could discover his secret. And in the cellar of his parents' house, he experimented with high explosives. But this was to lead to disaster.
Towards the end of the second world war, he worked as an explosives developer, and an accident in 1944 in which a device exploded in his hands left him permanently disabled. He lost both his forearms, along with 90 per cent of his hearing and eyesight.

After the war, he attended university in Göttingen to study physics. The idea of propelling a spacecraft using quantum mechanics rather than rocket fuel led him to study general relativity and quantum mechanics. It took an enormous effort. From 1948, his father and wife replaced his senses, spending hours reading papers and transcribing his calculations onto paper. And he developed a photographic memory.
Supporters of Heim theory claim that it is a panacea for the troubles in modern physics. They say it unites quantum mechanics and general relativity, can predict the masses of the building blocks of matter from first principles, and can even explain the state of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

ABELL 2218

2007-07-24T15:15:00.000-04:00

Since I was a child I have had an extraordinary interest in space and time. Spacetime. Our telescopes allow us to look back in time. The more distant the object we see, the further back in time we see it. On a smaller scale you can do this right now. Anything you look at- a tree on the horizon, the Moon, even yourself in a mirror is really a past version. You are seeing the object of your current vision as it was at the time the light left it. The determining factor is the amount of time it takes for light reflecting from that object to reach your retina. In most cases, it is unnoticeable to you. In all cases, it is not really considered. Light from the Sun in the sky takes 8 minutes to "reach" us here on Earth, hence the Sun is said to be 8 light minutes away. If it were to go supernova, we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes. Of course, the knowledge at that point wouldn't do us any good because we'd be dead.

Although none of us living on this tiny little insignificant "speck of dust" can comprehend the vastness of space, it certainly fascinates us. It is our true larger environment and it has been in existence for over 15 BILLION years and will exist BILLIONS of years after our species has succumbed to a natural or self-made disaster. We have only existed for an instant and will be gone "in the blink of an eye". To us, the Universe is eternal.

Abell 2218: A Galaxy Cluster Lens

Credit: W. Couch (University of New South Wales), R. Ellis (Cambridge University), NASA
Explanation: Gravity can bend light. Almost all of the bright objects in this Hubble Space Telescope image are galaxies in the cluster known as Abell 2218. The cluster is so massive and so compact that its gravity bends and focuses the light from galaxies that lie behind it. As a result, multiple images of these background galaxies are distorted into faint stretched out arcs - a simple lensing effect analogous to viewing distant street lamps through a glass of wine. The Abell 2218 cluster itself is about 3 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Draco.
Courtesy NASA, January 11, 1998 Hubble photograph)
MUCH MORE AT DISCOVER THE COSMOS!

POSSIBLE LINK

2007-07-17T22:41:00.000-04:00

Here's another blow to those silly and ignorant bush lovin' creationists:

Possible Link to Lucy's Ancestors Found

Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor

LiveScience.com

New jaw fossils might suggest a direct line of descent between two species of early humans, including the one to which "Lucy" belongs.

The 3.2 million-year-old Lucy, the earliest known hominid, was found in Ethiopia in 1974 by U.S. paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray. Lucy and her kind, Australopithecus afarensis, stood upright and walked on two feet, though they might also have been agile tree-climbers.

Anthropologists have suspected an ancestor-descendant relationship between the Lucy species and a predecessor--Australopithecus anamensis--based on their similarities but lacked fossils from an intervening period.

Now, Australopithecus fossils found in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar Region, Ethiopia, fill the date gap between A. anamensis (4.2 to 3.9 million years ago)—and the Lucy species (3.0 to 3.6 million years ago). The species identifications for all the bones remain uncertain, though it appears that some are A. afarensis.

Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a physical anthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, says his team's 2007 field season in the Woranso-Mille region uncovered the key evidence.

"We recovered fossil hominids that date to between 3.5 and 3.8 million years ago," Haile-Selassie said in a prepared statement. "These specimens sample the right time to look into the relationship between Australopithecus anamensis and Australopithecus afarensis and will play a major role in testing the ancestor-descendant hypothesis."

The team had found teeth from this time frame at the site over the past few years, but the new material includes more complete jaws that will enable better comparisons, he said.

At least 40 hominid specimens have been recovered from the site so far, including the complete jaws and a partial skeleton found in 2005.

Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania have yielded many of the earliest hominid and ape fossils that have allowed anthropologists to piece together the history of human evolution.

SOURCE

HYPERION

2007-07-05T18:32:00.000-04:00

Key to Giant Space Sponge Revealed

Ker Than
Staff Writer
SPACE.com

One of the strangest moons in our solar system is Hyperion, a Saturnian satellite so pockmarked by deep craters that it looks like a giant, rotating bath sponge adrift in space. New image analyses suggest the moon's odd appearance is the result of a highly porous surface that preserves craters, allowing them to remain nearly as pristine as the day they were created.

The finding is just one of several new details about the quirky moon revealed in two studies published in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature. Scientists determined that Hyperion is composed mostly of water ice and that the bottoms of its craters are covered in a dark red gunk that could be the key to resolving some of the moon's other strange properties.

One odd moon

Hyperion is all kinds of weird. It is one of the largest non-spherical bodies in the solar system. The moon is oval shaped and about 250 miles (400 km) at its widest point. Unlike most of Saturn's other satellites, it is not tidally locked to the ringed-planet. Earth's moon is tidally locked, which is why we always see the same face of it. Instead, Hyperion undergoes "chaotic rotation," meaning its axis of rotation shifts so much that scientists can't reliably predict its orientation in space.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Hyperion, however, is its extremely pitted appearance. Hundreds of craters cover the surface, with most averaging 1 to 6 miles (2 to 10 kilometers) wide.

The latest analyses of data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during its flybys of Hyperion in 2005 and 2006 show that about 40 percent of the moon is empty space.

Hyperion's high porosity could explain its sponge-like appearance, scientists say. A large meteor striking Earth's moon will gouge a deep hole on the surface and send up a giant spray of rock and dust. The excavated material rains back down onto the lunar surface and into other craters, partially filling them in. In contrast, the surface of Hyperion is so brittle that an object striking it will create a hole but not send any material flying. Surrounding craters remain as deep as when they first formed.

"Theoretical work suggests that if you have a porous target, craters may be more compressional instead of being explosive and tossing stuff out," said Peter Thomas of Cornell University, who led one of the studies.

Mystery gunk

The new analyses also confirmed that Hyperion is composed mostly of water ice with very little rock. "We find that water ice is the main constituent of the surface, but it's dirty water ice," said Dale Cruickshank, a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center who led the second study. "Fresh water ice would look very bright in reflected sunlight, but this is definitely dingy."

Cruickshank's team attributes the moon's dinginess to contamination by a dark, organic material that litters Hyperion's surface and is concentrated in several of its craters.

The reddish gunk contains long chains of carbon and hydrogen and appears very similar to material found on other Saturnian satellites, most notably Iaeptus.

The third-largest moon of Saturn, Iaeptus is an unusual two-toned world with one half covered in gleaming ice and the other half coated in the same mysterious dark material that covers Hyperion.

A smashing idea

This link has some scientists speculating that Hyperion's strange shape and Iaeptus' odd paint job share a common origin. "Maybe Hyperion got hit and is the origin of this dark stuff which then got spewed out and got swept up by Iapetus," Cruickshank told SPACE.com.

According to this idea, a giant object collided with a still-round Hyperion in the distant past. The impact sent Hyperion into a cosmic spin that it is still reeling from today and caused a shower of dust-like particles to fly outwards through space, where it struck an unaware Iapetus full in the face.

"That's not completely implausible," Cruickshank said. If Iapetus "ran into a dust storm as it orbited around Saturn, the dust would be distributed the way we see it."
As to what the object might have been that struck Hyperion, Cruickshank notes that the same reddish gunk can also be found on other icy objects in the outer solar system, including other moons, Kuiper belt objects and comets.

INTUITIVE EATING

2007-06-24T09:52:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting ~~idea~~ practice/implementation:

Professor Loses Weight With No-Diet Diet

By BROCK VERGAKIS, Associated Press Writer

When Steven Hawks is tempted by ice cream bars, M&Ms and toffee-covered almonds at the grocery store, he doesn't pass them by. He fills up his shopping cart.
It's the no-diet diet, an approach the Brigham Young University health science professor used to lose 50 pounds and to keep it off for more than five years.

Hawks calls his plan "intuitive eating" and thinks the rest of the country would be better off if people stopped counting calories, started paying attention to hunger pangs and ate whatever they wanted.

As part of intuitive eating, Hawks surrounds himself with unhealthy foods he especially craves. He says having an overabundance of what's taboo helps him lose his desire to gorge.

There is a catch to this no-diet diet, however: Intuitive eaters only eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full.

That means not eating a box of chocolates when you're feeling blue or digging into a big plate of nachos just because everyone else at the table is.

The trade-off is the opportunity to eat whatever your heart desires when you are actually hungry.

"One of the advantages of intuitive eating is you're always eating things that are most appealing to you, not out of emotional reasons, not because it's there and tastes good," he said. "Whenever you feel the physical urge to eat something, accept it and eat it. The cravings tend to subside. I don't have anywhere near the cravings I would as a 'restrained eater.'"

Hawks should know. In 1989, the Utah native had a job at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and wanted to return to his home state. But at 210 pounds, he didn't think a fat person could get a job teaching students how to be healthy, so his calorie-counting began.

He lost weight and got the job at Utah State University. But the pounds soon came back.

For several years his weight fluctuated, until he eventually gave up on being a restrained eater and the weight stayed on.

"You definitely lose weight on a diet, but resisting biological pressures is ultimately doomed," Hawks said.

Several years later and still overweight at a new job at BYU, Hawks decided it was time for a lifestyle change.

He stopped feeling guilty about eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips. He also stopped eating when he wasn't hungry.

Slowly and steadily his weight began to drop. Exercise helped.

His friends and co-workers soon took notice of the slimmer Hawks.

"It astonished me, actually," said his friend, Steven Peck. "We were both very heavy. It was hard not to be struck."

After watching Hawks lose and keep the weight off for a year and a half, Peck tried intuitive eating in January.

"I was pretty skeptical of the idea you could eat anything you wanted until you didn't feel like it. It struck me as odd," said Peck, who is an assistant professor at BYU.

But 11 months later, Peck sometimes eats mint chocolate chip ice cream for dinner, is 35 pounds lighter and a believer in intuitive eating.

"There are times when I overeat. I did at Thanksgiving," Peck said. "That's one thing about Steve's ideas, they're sort of forgiving. On other diets if you slip up, you feel you've blown it and it takes a couple weeks get back into it. ... This sort of has this built-in forgiveness factor."

The one thing all diets have in common is that they restrict food, said Michael Goran, an obesity expert at the University of Southern California. Ultimately, that's why they usually fail, he said.

"At some point you want what you can't have," Goran said. Still, he said intuitive eating makes sense as a concept "if you know what you're doing."

Intuitive eating alone won't give anyone six-pack abs, Hawks said, but it will lead to a healthier lifestyle. He still eats junk food and keeps a jar of honey in his office, but only indulges occasionally.

"My diet is actually quite healthy. ... I'm as likely to eat broccoli as eat a steak," he said. "It's a misconception that all of a sudden a diet is going to become all junk food and high fat," he said.

In a small study published in the American Journal of Health Education, Hawks and a team of researchers examined a group of BYU students and found those who were intuitive eaters typically weighed less and had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than other students.

He said the study indicates intuitive eating is a viable approach to long-term weight management and he plans to do a larger study across different cultures. Ultimately, he'd like intuitive eating to catch on as a way for people to normalize their relationship with food and fight eating disorders.

"Most of what the government is telling us is, we need to count calories, restrict fat grams, etc. I feel like that's a harmful message," he said. "I think encouraging dietary restraint creates more problems. I hope intuitive eating will be adopted at a national level."

___
On the Net:
National Institute for Intuitive Eating http://www.intuitiveeating.com

Mice and an ANTI-FAT PROTEIN

2007-06-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

Humans share 99% of genes with mice (how about that for proof of evolution?). In fact, 81% of those genes are identical. In other words, we share a common ancestor. Its not a stretch to expect numerous breakthroughs for human physiology since both genomes have been mapped out. As technology expands exponentially and discoveries are made everyday, this one could be working any day. The slowdown will be in the government's approval. Europe always has the latest "goodies" long before the United States. Anyway, in this case, if its offered I'm sure there will be plenty of "guinea pig" volunteers. But hey, as the article states, there's always a sensible diet with a combination of the proper exercising.

Anti-Fat Protein Keeps Overeating Mice Slim

By E.J. Mundell

HealthDay Reporter
Mice gorging on high-calorie, high-fat diets for two weeks stayed slender, thanks to an "anti-obesity" protein injected into their brains, Italian researchers report.

Eating all you want and never getting fat does seem like a dream come true. And experts cautioned that it might stay a dream -- at least for humans -- for the foreseeable future.

"Whether this translates to humans and whether it translates to humans without tremendous side effects is another story," said Cathy Nonas, director of the obesity and diabetes programs at North General Hospital in New York City, and a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association.

The study was published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to Nonas, a "wonder drug" that wards off obesity while allowing people to eat all they want has long been the goal of pharmaceutical companies worldwide. So far, most research efforts have focused on agents that "rev up" metabolism to burn off excess calories.

"People have been working on the idea of looking at molecules, peptides, to see whether they could increase energy expenditure without major side effects," Nonas said.

This latest research, led by Alessandro Bartolomucci of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, in Rome, focused on a protein byproduct of the Vgf gene, which has long been linked to metabolism.

Bartolomucci's group first identified this protein, a peptide called TLQP-21, in the brains of rats. "It was an unproved assumption that VGF-derived peptides could regulate metabolism," the Italian team noted.

Exploring further, the researchers isolated TLQP-21 and injected it into the brains of lab mice every day for 14 days. At the same time, the mice were given high-fat diets that would normally trigger weight gain.

In this case, however, that didn't happen.

According to the researchers, the mice stayed slim because the peptide boosted their metabolic rate.

"When TLQP-21 is chronically injected into the cerebral ventricles, it increases [the mice's] energy expenditure and rectal temperature," Bartolomucci explained. Both of these changes signified a sped-up metabolism.

The peptide also affected key factors in metabolism and calorie-burning, he said. These included a rise in blood levels of the hormone epinephrine, as well as changes in locomotor and thyroid function.

Furthermore, in treated mice placed on a standard diet, "adipose [fat] tissue slightly decreased," Bartolomucci said. At the same time, the number of cellular receptors linked to fat-burning and energy expenditure rose.

All of this could explain why mice fed the high-fat diet kept their skinny physiques when they were given TLQP-21, Bartolomucci said.

The Italian researcher believes TLQP-21 has potential as an anti-obesity agent for use in humans. But he stressed that, "we are in an early stage of research. Indeed, this is the first study where the peptide is identified and the first study where its role in metabolic function has been tested."

Nonas agreed that it is a very big leap to assume that safety and efficacy in mice will translate to humans. First of all is the problem of drug-delivery.

"You can only do brain injections to a rat and a mouse," she pointed out. "You'd have to go a long way before you could take that and turn it into something that would work in a pill form or be injected into fat tissue."

The potential side effects of revving up the metabolism are also daunting. "You can have cardiac side effects, things like irregular heartbeat," Nonas said. "Then, there are headaches, heat and temperature-control things."

And even if people could eat high-fat diets without gaining weight, that doesn't mean they'd stay healthy. "We know plenty of people who are lean all their lives and still have clogged arteries from eating unhealthy foods," Nonas pointed out.

Any anti-obesity pill would only offer people a boost in fighting weight gain -- it would probably never be the total solution, she said.

In the meantime, people do have a proven, effective way of fighting or reducing obesity -- sensible diets and regular exercise.

"I'm not saying that that isn't really hard to do," Nonas said. "It will never be easy. But there will never be any magic bullet."

LAKES...of Methane on TITAN

2007-06-19T17:06:00.000-04:00

Lost lakes of Titan are found at last

Lakes of methane have been spotted on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, boosting the theory that this strange, distant world bears beguiling similarities to Earth, according to a new study.

Titan has long intrigued space scientists, as it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere -- and its atmosphere, like Earth's, mainly comprises nitrogen.

Titan's atmosphere is also rich in methane, although the source for this vast store of hydrocarbons is unclear.

Methane, on the geological scale, has a relatively limited life. A molecule of the compound lasts several tens of millions of years before it is broken up by sunlight.
Given that Titan is billions of years old, the question is how this atmospheric methane gets to be renewed. Without replenishment, it should have disappeared long ago.

A popular hypothesis is that it comes from a vast ocean of hydrocarbons.

But when the US spacecraft Cassini sent down a European lander, Huygens, to Titan in 2005, the images sent back were of a rugged landscape veiled in an orange haze.
There were indeed signs of methane flows and methane precipitation, but nothing at all that pointed to any sea of the stuff.

But a flyby by Cassini on July 22 last year has revealed, thanks to a radar scan, 75 large, smooth, dark patches between three and 70 kilometers across (two and 42 miles) across that appear to be lakes of liquid methane, scientists report on Thursday.

They believe the lakes prove that Titan has a "methane cycle" -- a system that is like the water cycle on Earth, in which the liquid evaporates, cools and condenses and then falls as rain, replenishing the surface liquid.

As on Earth, Titan's surface methane may well be supplemented by a "table" of liquid methane that seeps through the rock, the paper suggests.

Some of the methane lakes seem only partly filled, and other depressions are dry, which suggests that, given the high northerly latitudes where they were spotted, the methane cycle follows Titan's seasons.

In winter, the lakes expand, while in summer, they shrink or dry up completely -- again, another parallel with Earth's hydrological cycle.

The study, which appears on Thursday in the British weekly journal Nature, is headed by Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research in Virginia and University College London.
Titan and Earth are of course very different, especially in their potential for nurturing life. Titan is frigid, dark and, as far as is known, waterless, where as Earth is warm, light and has lots of liquid water.

But French astrophysicist Christophe Sotin says both our planet and Titan have been sculpted by processes that, fundamentally, are quite similar.

The findings "add to the weight of evidence that Titan is a complex world in which the interaction between the inner and outer layers is controlled by processes similar to those that must have dominated the evolution of any Earth-like planet," Sotin said in a commentary.

"Indeed, as far as we know," Sotin added, "there is only one planetary body that displays more dynamism than Titan. Its name is Earth."

HABITABLE PLANET FOUND

2007-06-17T23:05:00.000-04:00

Our SCIENTISTS have discovered this. And its promising WHY? We haven't even been to the Moon since the early 70s. Our "space program" with all of its unmanned missions is weak at best. Maybe someday it will matter that there are possibly TENS OF BILLIONS of "Class M" planets out there, but unfortunately I'll never live to see those pioneering days. I still can't help being excited to hear about this though.

Potentially habitable planet found

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.

There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.
"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.
What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.
The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.

Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right — or at least that's what scientists think.

"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."

Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one — simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves — will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.

Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.

"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."

The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.

Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.

Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.

But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.

Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.
The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.

Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.

A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.

"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.

UFOs and their occupants

2007-06-17T22:43:00.000-04:00

What the hell are these things? I used to think that the UFOs were extraterrestrial in nature. Now...I just don't know what to think. I do believe that Travis Walton, Whit Strieber, Betty Andreasson, Karla Turner and thousands of other "abductees"- famous and not so famous ARE TELLING THE TRUTH. I believe there are greys and other humanoids. Maybe they're from "shadow worlds/existences with abilities that seem extraordinary and magical to us. I, like many others, would like to know the truth in my lifetime.

UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer

For decades now, eyes and sky have met to witness the buzzing of our world by Unidentified Flying Objects, termed UFOs or simply flying saucers. Extraterrestrials have come a long way to purportedly share the friendly skies with us.

UFOs and alien visitors are part of our culture—a far-out phenomenon when judged against those "low life" wonders Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

And after all those years, as the saying goes, UFOs remain a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Why so? For one, the field is fraught with hucksterism. It's also replete with blurry photos and awful video. But then there are also well-intentioned and puzzled witnesses [See Top 10 Alien Encounters Debunked].

Unusual properties
There have been advances in the field of UFO research, said Ted Roe, Executive Director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP), based in Vallejo, California.

"The capture of optical spectra from mobile, unpredictable luminosities is one of those innovations. More work to be done here but [there are] some good results already."

NARCAP was established in 2000 and is dedicated to the advancement of aviation safety issues as they apply to, what they term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
Roe said that a decade from now, researchers should have even better instrumentation at their disposal and better data on UAP of several varieties. His forecast is that scientific rigor will prevail, demonstrating that there are "stable, mobile, unusual, poorly documented phenomena with quite unusual properties manifesting within our atmosphere," he told SPACE.com.

Paradigm shifting
NARCAP has made the case that some of these phenomena have unusual electromagnetic properties. Therefore, they could disrupt microprocessors and adversely effect avionic systems, Roe explained, and that for those reasons and others UAP should be considered a hazard to safe aviation.

"It is likely that either conclusion will fly in the face of the general assertion that UAP are not real and that there are no undocumented phenomena in our atmosphere," Roe continued. That should open the door, he said, to the realization that there's no good reason to discard outright the possibility that extraterrestrial visitation has occurred and may be occurring.

"Physics is leading to new and potentially paradigm shifting understandings about the nature of our universe and its physical properties," Roe said. "These understandings may point the way towards an acceptance of the probability of interstellar travel and communication by spacefaring races."

Sacred cows to the slaughter
As UFO debunker Robert Sheaffer's web site proclaims, he's "skeptical to the max." He is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and a well-known writer on the UFO scene.

Being an equal-opportunity debunker, Sheaffer notes that he refutes whatever nonsense, in his judgment, "stands in the greatest need of refuting, no matter from what source it may come, no matter how privileged, esteemed, or sacrosanct … sacred cows, after all, make the best hamburger."

Sheaffer told SPACE.com, in regards to the cottage industry of UFO promoters, there's a reason there are still so many snake-oil sellers.

"It's because nobody, anywhere, has any actual facts concerning alleged UFOs, just claims. That allows con-men to thrive peddling their yarns," Sheaffer said. "UFO believers are convinced that the existence of UFOs will be revealed 'any day now'. But it's like Charlie Brown and the football: No matter how many times Lucy pulls the football away—or the promised 'disclosure' fails to happen—they're dead-certain that the next time will be their moment of glory."

Trash from the past
"I would have to say that we're stuck in neutral," said Kevin Randle, a leading expert and writer on UFOs and is known as a dogged researcher of the phenomena. There's no real new research, he said, and that's "because we have to revisit the trash of the past."

Randle points to yesteryear stories, one stretching back in time to a supposed 1897 airship crash in Aurora, Texas, long proven to be a hoax by two con men—yet continues to surface in UFO circles.

Then there's the celebrated Thomas Mantell saga, a pilot that lost his life chasing a UFO in 1948. There are those that contend he was killed by a blue beam from a UFO, Randle said "even though we have known for years that the UFO was a balloon and he violated regulations by climbing above 14,000 feet without oxygen equipment. I mean, we know this, and yet there are those who believe that Mantell was killed by aliens."
Randle's advice is to the point: "We need to begin to apply rigorous standards of research … stop accepting what we wish to believe even when the evidence is poor, and begin thinking ahead."

Paucity of physical evidence
"I've no doubt that UFOs are here to stay," said Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "I'm just not convinced that alien craft are here to stay … or for that matter, even here for brief visits.

"First, despite a torrent of sightings for more than a half-century, I can't think of a single, major science museum that has alien artifacts on display," Shostak said. "Contrast this paucity of physical evidence with what the American Indians could have shown you fifty years after Christopher Columbus first violated their sea-space. They could have shown you all sorts of stuff—including lots of smallpox-infested brethren—as proof that they were being 'visited,'" he said.

When it comes to extraterrestrial visitors in the 21st century, the evidence is anecdotal, ambiguous, or, in some cases, artifice, Shostak suggested.

Calling it "argument from ignorance", Shostak pointed to the claim that aliens must have careened out of control above the New Mexico desert simply because some classified government documents sport a bunch of blacked-out text. "How does the latter prove the former?"

Sure, the missing verbiage is consistent with a government cover-up of an alien crash landing, Shostak said. "But it's also consistent with an infinitude of other scenarios…not all of them involving sloppy alien pilots," he added.

Shostak said that it is not impossible that we could be visited. It doesn't violate physics to travel between the stars, although that's not easy to do.

"But really, if you're going to claim—or for that matter, believe—that extraterrestrials are strafing the cities, or occasionally assaulting the neighbors with an aggression inappropriate for a first date, then I urge you to find evidence that leaves little doubt among the professionally skeptical community known as the world of science."

Residue of sightings
Why is there precious little to show that world of science that UFOs merit attention?
"Obviously there is not a simple answer, but part of it is reluctance of the scientific community to support such research," explained Bruce Maccabee, regarded as a meticulous researcher and an optical physicist using those talents to study photographs and video of unexplained phenomena.

Why this reluctance?

"In my humble opinion it is largely a result of 'tradition'…tradition set by the U.S. Air Force in the early years when they publicly stated that everything was under control, they were investigating…and finding nothing that couldn't be explained," Maccabee said.

Nevertheless, Maccabee observed, work on the phenomenon will carry on.
"UFO studies will continue until all the old cases have either been explained or admitted to being unexplainable—meaning a residue of sightings that could be ET related—and/or until people stop seeing unexplainable UFO-like events throughout the world," Maccabee concluded.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE SPLIT

2007-06-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

Keep in mind that this is an objective consideration of theory. I'm on a "different side" of a lot of this article. You may want to read my site on TIMETRAVEL (TIME TRAVEL) which can be accessed at the sidebar on the right.

My So-Called Universe

Our cozy world is probably much bigger—and stranger—than we know.

By Jim Holt

One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe. The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as "frivolous fantasies." If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion?

Before getting to why you should or should not believe in multiple universes, there's a semantic point we ought to deal with. If the universe is, as the dictionary has it, "all existing things ... regarded as a whole," then isn't it true by definition that there is only one such thing? (After all, uni- is built right into the word itself.) Well, yes. But when physicists and philosophers talk about different space-time domains being "two universes," what they generally mean is that those regions are 1) very, very large; 2) "causally isolated" from each other (meaning that an event in one cannot have an effect in another); and hence 3) mutually unknowable by direct observation (since observing something means causally interacting with it). The case for saying the two domains are separate universes is further strengthened if 4) they have very different characters: if, say, one of them has three spatial dimensions (like ours), whereas the other has 17 dimensions. Finally—and here is the existentially titillating possibility—two domains might be called separate universes if 5) they are "parallel," meaning that they contain somewhat different versions of the same entities, like your own alter ego.

Thinkers who entertain the possibility that there are lots of universes have invented a new term for the entire ensemble: "the multiverse." Why believe in the multiverse? The "pro" camp has essentially two kinds of arguments.

One—the good kind—is that the existence of other universes is logically implied by the theories that best explain features of our own universe. For instance, measurements of the cosmic background radiation (the echo left over from the big bang) indicate that the space we live in is infinite and that matter is spread randomly throughout it. Therefore, all possible arrangements of matter must exist out there somewhere—including exact and inexact replicas of our own world and the beings in it. The idea is a bit like that of monkeys in front of typewriters eventually typing out all of Shakespeare: Quantum theory says that nature is discrete, so the visible universe we inhabit is characterized by a finite amount of information; if space is infinite, this informational pattern is bound to repeat at vast enough distances. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that there should be an exact copy of you around 10 to the 10 to the 28th light-years away.

A more extravagant kind of multiverse is entailed by the theory of "chaotic inflation." Proposed by Andrei Linde to explain why our universe looks the way it does—big, uniform, and flat—inflation theory also predicts that big bangs should be a fairly routine occurrence, giving rise to an eternal network of universes tied together by impassable "wormholes." These universes, according to the theory, would have different physical characteristics. This kind of multiverse has become the bane of natural theologians.

Here's why. One reason for believing in God is that our own universe seems improbably fine-tuned for life. It's as though a cosmic designer had carefully adjusted the physical laws to ensure that beings like us would eventually shimmer onto the scene. But if our universe is one among a vast ensemble of universes with randomly varying physical constants, then it is only to be expected that a few of these universes should be life-fostering. Add to this the fact that if we exist at all, we are bound to find ourselves in a universe that is congenial to us—the so-called "anthropic principle"—and the presumed fine-tuning of our universe seems wholly unremarkable. No need to invoke the God hypothesis to answer the question, why are we here?

But some thinkers want to turn this reasoning around. They insist that other universes must exist precisely to make certain conceptual mysteries go away. This is the second kind of argument for the multiverse—the bad kind, since it has nothing to do with empirical observation.

One version of this argument derives from attempts to make sense of quantum theory. Take the famous paradox of Schrödinger's Cat—the unfortunate feline, who, because of the quantum superposition of possibilities, is simultaneously alive and dead. According to the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, Schrödinger's experiment splits the universe into two parallel copies, one with a live cat, the other with a dead one (and each with a version of you). Physicists who buy into this interpretation—and many distinguished ones do—claim that each universe splits into something like 10 to the 100th copies every second, all of them equally real. Yet, since quantum theory forbids these parallel worlds from interacting, there is no experimental way to confirm their reality.

Another version of this backward argument for multiple universes was championed by the late Princeton philosopher David K. Lewis. Lewis believed (or at least pretended to) that all logically possible universes are as real as the one we call the "actual" one. Why? Because their existence would neatly solve a wide range of philosophical problems. Take the problem of counterfactuals. What does it mean to say, "If JFK hadn't gone to Dallas, the Vietnam War would have ended earlier"? According to Lewis, the counterfactual statement is true only if there is an alternative universe in which JFK didn't go to Dallas and the Vietnam War did end earlier. His "modal realism" entails that there is even a universe containing the Greek gods and is primarily a linguistic philosophical argument rather than a scientific one.

As for the arguments against the multiverse, they boil down to these three.
1) It's not science. Both Paul Davies and Martin Gardner claim that the proposition "the multiverse exists" has no empirical content and hence amounts to empty metaphysics. But the hypotheses that imply it do lead to testable predictions, some of which jibe with the evidence collected so far. In the next decade, as Max Tegmark points out, improved measurements of the microwave background radiation and of the large-scale distribution of matter may fortify or knock down two pillars of the multiverse: the infinitude of space and the theory of chaotic inflation.

2) Alternative universes should be shaved away by Occam's Razor. Both Davies and Gardner complain that the multiverse notion is too extravagant. "Surely the conjecture that there is just one universe and its Creator is infinitely simpler and easier to believe than that there are countless billions upon billions of worlds," Gardner writes. Is it? Our universe came into being with the big bang, and (as the Canadian philosopher John Leslie has observed) it would be exceedingly odd if the mechanism behind this event bore the label "THIS MECHANISM OPERATED ONLY ONCE." A computer program that prints out the entire sequence of numbers is much simpler than one that prints out only a single number of any length. And besides, why should simple theories be more probable than extravagant ones?

3) The multiverse, if real, would reduce our own world to a Matrix-like simulation. This objection, voiced by Davies, is surely the most bizarre of the lot. If there really were myriad universes, Davies argues, then some would contain advanced technological civilizations that could use computers to simulate consciousness and create endless virtual worlds. So, he continues, taking the multiverse theory at face value means "there is no reason to expect our world—the one in which you are reading this right now—to be real as opposed to a simulation." This is a terrible argument for at least two reasons. If it were valid, it would rule out technologically advanced civilizations in this universe since they, too, would presumably create such simulations. And the hypothesis that we are living in a simulation itself has no empirical content. We cannot even talk about it coherently, as Hilary Putnam has pointed out, since our words could refer only to things "inside" the alleged simulation.

How seriously should you take multiple universes? That depends on how scrupulous you are about your ontological commitments. I know people who still regard atoms as theoretical fictions. I have friends who claim to doubt the reality of the past, of the future, of other minds. I have heard of academics—though I cannot believe they actually exist—who think that the cosmos is a social construction. But I am a robust scientific realist. If an empirically sound theory entails that unobservable entities exist, then I take them at face value. After all, reality has over and over again turned out to be much more inclusive than we've given it credit for being. Just a century ago, our puny Milky Way was thought to comprise the entire cosmos.

If the choices we make in our everyday lives seem a little absurd from the viewpoint of a single vast and eternal universe, then, from the viewpoint of an infinite ensemble of universes containing infinite copies of ourselves, all making every possible choice, they are absolutely absurd. Thankfully, in our own little world, those choices remain terribly meaningful and important.

Déjà Vu

2007-06-15T23:24:00.000-04:00

Patients Suffer Deja Vu ... Over and Over

Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com

Imagine suffering from chronic déjà vu. You don't even go to the doctor because you feel like you've already been there.

"We had a peculiar referral from a man who said there was no point visiting the clinic because he'd already been there, although this would have been impossible," said psychologist Chris Moulin, who runs a memory clinic at the University of Leeds in the UK.

So Moulin has started the first known study of the condition.

Déjà vu hits most of us now and then. We're struck by the sensation that we have experienced an event before, even though we can't fully remember it or perhaps know it didn't really happen. The sensation is fleeting, so researchers can't study it.
But Moulin figures chronic déjà vu sufferers offer an opportunity to do research that might unlock the secrets of the everyday variety.

The man who thinks he's been to Moulin's clinic even gave details of the visit that never occurred. He has déjà vu so bad that he doesn't watch TV news because he feels like he's seen it all before, Moulin said. Things get tricky when the man is asked to predict what's ahead, however.

"When this particular patient's wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV program he'd claimed to have already seen, he said, 'How should I know? I have a memory problem!'"

Moulin and colleagues have since found other patients, now that they know what to look for.

The condition can cause depression and is sometimes diagnosed as a state of delusion. But Moulin's team believes it to be a dysfunction of memory.

"The exciting thing about these people is that they can 'recall' specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred," Moulin said. "It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work."

ST. PARIS OHIO: 1932

2007-06-15T23:10:00.000-04:00

The description for this one reads:

"The unidentified flying object in the picture could not have been a street lamp, simply because there were no street lamps there at the time. There are no power poles or power lines visible anywhere in this picture. Summer 1932, Mid-day, St. Paris, Ohio. This picture of George Sutton of St. Paris, Ohio, taken near mid-day (as may be seen from the shadows on the ground) shows a vintage automobile with a 1932 license plate on the front bumper. The owner of the photo album says there were no electric street lights along this road in those days. Nobody has been able to account for the dark object seen over Sutton's left shoulder in this photograph."

EINSTEIN

2007-06-15T22:29:00.001-04:00

A brief biography of a very intelligent man that has advanced our Science and motivated more Scientific minds than probably anyone else in our history...

Saturday April 14, 2005 12:04 PM
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer

He stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue like the Beatles or Marilyn Monroe. He could've been president of Israel or played violin at Carnegie Hall, but he was too busy thinking. His musings on God, love and the meaning of life grace our greeting cards and day-timers. Fifty years after his death, his shock of white hair and droopy mustache still symbolize genius.
Who else could it be but Albert Einstein?
Einstein remains the foremost scientist of the modern era. Looking back 2,400 years, only Newton, Galileo and Aristotle were his equals.
Around the world, universities and academies are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miracle year" when he published five scientific papers in 1905 that fundamentally changed our grasp of space, time, light and matter. Only he could top himself about a decade later with his theory of general relativity.
Born in the era of horse-drawn carriages, his ideas launched a dazzling technological revolution that has generated more change in a century than in the previous two millennia.
Computers, satellites, telecommunication, lasers, television and nuclear power all owe their invention to ways in which Einstein peeled back the veneer of the observable world to expose a stranger and more complicated reality underneath.
And, he launched an intellectual quest for a single coherent law that governs the universe. Einstein said such a unified super-theory of everything, still unwritten, would enable us to "read the mind of God."
"We are a different race of people than we were a century ago," says astrophysicist Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, "utterly and completely different, because of Einstein."
Yet there is more, and it is why Einstein transcends mere genius and has become our culture's grandfatherly icon.
He escaped Hitler's Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders.
He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1,400 pages.
His letters reveal a tumultuous personal life — married twice and indifferent toward his children while obsessed with physics. Yet he charmed lovers and admirers with poetry and sailboat outings. Friends and neighbors fiercely protected his privacy.
And, yes, he was eccentric. With hair like that, how could he not be?
He famously stuck his tongue out at photographers — that is, when he wasn't wearing a Native American war bonnet or some other get-up. Cartoonists loved him.
He never learned to drive. He would walk home from his office at Princeton University, sockless and submerged in the pursuit of the "eternal riddle," letting his umbrella rattle against the bars of an iron fence. If his umbrella skipped a bar, he would go back to the beginning of the fence and start over.
In those solitary moments, he unconsciously demonstrated the traits — intense concentration, disregard for fashion and innate playfulness — that would rescue him when, inevitably, he would be interrupted by both presidents and passers-by to explain the universe.
"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something," Einstein once said, "wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."

___
Today, there are curiously few statues of the man. The most notable is a 12-foot bronze at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington depicting the wrinkled old sage gazing at his famous Emc2 formula. Tourists climb into his lap for snapshots.
Rolf Sinclair despises it. "It's one of the worst pieces of public sculpture," says the retired National Science Foundation physics program officer. "It makes him look like one of the Three Stooges reading his horoscope."
The Einstein that Sinclair and others would prefer immortalized is circa 1905, when he was 26 and about to rock the world.
By day, he worked in the Swiss patent office in Bern. He called it his "cobbler's job," but for seven years he analyzed a stream of inventions dealing with railroad timekeeping and other matters of precision that raised cosmic possibilities in his fertile mind.
After hours, he would work furiously on his "thought experiments," that smashed through the limits of established physics.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge," Einstein said. "The important thing is to not stop questioning."
In 1905, he published five landmark papers without footnotes or citations. It marked the beginning of an unrivaled, two-decade intellectual burst.
Here is a brief chronology of his miracle year:
March, 1905: Conventional physics described light as a wave and could not explain how light can knock electrons off metal. Einstein showed that light is made of tiny packets of energy, or quanta, that can behave like individual particles, too.
This duality is the basis of quantum theory, a pillar of modern physics so paradoxical that even Einstein didn't entirely buy into it. His explanation of this "photoelectric effect" won him the Nobel prize in 1921.
April: Based on cafe conversations over tea, Einstein submits a paper that determined the size of sugar molecules by calculating their diffusion in the liquid.
May: He shows how particles (like pollen) that appear to be independently moving in water are being jostled by atoms in water that are moving chaotically. Known as Brownian motion, Einstein's calculations confirmed the atom's existence and by extension, the makeup of chemical elements.
June: Einstein's paper on "special relativity" separates him from the mainstream physics crowd. Newton considered gravity to be absolute — mass attracts mass. It's what makes gas and dust form stars and debris form planets.
But Einstein sought to explain anomalies in this rule. Scientists had concluded that light was just one of many kinds of electromagnetic waves moving through an unseen medium they called ether, and the speed of light is always the same.
Einstein recalled a teenage daydream of racing a light beam. According to the physics of his day, if he moved as fast as the light, then the beam would be stationary in space.
Einstein said the speed of light is constant at 186,282 miles per second. But it will appear different depending on where you are and how fast you are traveling.
For example, clocks on orbiting satellites run a bit slower because the satellites are orbiting at 17,000 mph. They have programs that help them align with clocks on Earth.
Or, suppose you were to "witness" a star exploding into a supernova. The explosion occurred thousands of years ago, but it has taken that long for the light to reach you here.
November: Einstein publishes an extension of special relativity regarding the conversion of mass into energy, noting that the "mass of a body is a measure of its energy content." In 1907, he abbreviated it to what would become science's most famous equation: The amount of energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, or Emc2.
C2 is such a huge number that even small amounts of mass pack big power.
This became the theoretical basis for both atomic explosions and atomic energy.
"Each of these papers is a landmark in physics," said University of Maryland physicist S. James Gates. "And yet all of his work in 1905 is a prelude to his greatest composition — the theory of general relativity."
Special relativity was incomplete because it did not deal with gravity. To Newton, gravity was a constant, absolute force. Drop an apple and it hits the ground. A planet traces a curved orbit because the sun's gravity tugs at the planet.
In Einstein's relative world, matter warps the time and space around it. So, the sun's mass dents and distorts the space-time fabric, curving the planet's trajectory.
He reasoned that even particles of light, which have very tiny mass, should be affected in this way.
In 1919, astronomers watching a solar eclipse observed the light from a distant star being deflected by the darkening sun's mass — by a few hundredths of a millimeter.
General relativity laid the foundation for all kinds of discoveries, such as the Big Bang, the expansion of the universe and black holes.
Yet relativity is both so profound and confounding that even other physicists have trouble grasping its nuances.
Einstein described relativity this way: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
___
In a lifetime that coincided with Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable, it's hard to imagine Einstein as a lady's man. With that hair? And those rumpled clothes?
He had a passionate personality that drew admirers. But physics always was his first love and that was the trouble.
The young Einstein's indifferent, even ruthless, nature is evident in his dealings with his first wife, Mileva Maric. She and Einstein were students at the renowned Swiss National Polytechnic in Zurich.
In effusive letters and poetry, he called her Dollie and himself Johnny.
She gave birth to an out-of-wedlock daughter at her parents' home in Hungary. The baby either died or was adopted. Einstein never saw the child.
The episode ended Mileva's career before it began. She appears to have been a sounding board for his ideas, but historians doubt she was a true collaborator. They married in 1902 and Mileva bore two sons, but their passion soured as Einstein's reputation grew. He complained that he had no time for marital "chatter."
He and Mileva separated in 1914.
"You make sure ... that I receive my three meals regularly in my room," he wrote in his cold list of conditions. "You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way."
But eight years later, he gave her the $32,000 purse from his Nobel Prize for physics.
Einstein had an affair with his German cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, and she nursed him back to health when he collapsed from nervous exhaustion in 1917. They married two years later, but she soon found herself tolerating his girlfriends. They emigrated to Princeton, where she died in 1936.
Until his own death from heart disease on April 18, 1955, relatives and his secretary kept house for Einstein at 112 Mercer Street. He also developed attachments to several women who shared his love of music, sailing and world affairs.
One was an alleged Soviet spy, Margarita Konenkova, a Russian emigre married to a Greenwich Village sculptor.
Another was Johanna Fantova. She and her husband had met the scientist in Prague's intellectual circles that included the novelist Franz Kafka. She emigrated to Princeton alone in 1939. She cut Einstein's hair and he telephoned several times a week. In her diary, she included this charming line of verse from the physicist:
"Exhausted from a silence long/ This is to show you clear how strong/ The thoughts of you will always sit/ Up in my brain's little attic."
As an old man, he revealed to Fantova a melancholy side.
"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist," he said. "I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me."

Scientists Create Robot Controlled By Human Thought

2007-06-15T22:10:00.000-04:00

Then I guess its just advanced remote control. HA!HA!

Human Thoughts Control New Robot

Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Fri Dec 15, 4:55 PM ET

Scientists have created a way to control a robot with signals from a human brain.
By generating the proper brainwaves—picked up by a cap with electrodes that sense the signals and reflect a person's instructions—scientists can instruct a humanoid robot to moves to specific locations and pick us certain objects [video].
The commands are limited to moving forward, picking up one of two objects and bringing it to one of two locations. The researchers have achieved 94 percent accuracy between the thought commands and the robot's movements.
"This is really a proof-of-concept demonstration," said Rajesh Rao, a researcher from the University of Washington who leads the project. "It suggests that one day we might be able to use semi-autonomous robots for such jobs as helping disabled people or performing routine tasks in a person's home."
The person wearing the electrode cap watches the robot's movement on a computer screen through two cameras installed on and above the robot.
When the robot's camera sees the objects that are to be picked up it passes on the information to the user's computer screen. Each object lights up randomly on the computer screen. When a person wants something picked up and it happens to light up, the brain registers surprise and sends this brain activity to the computer and then to the robot as the choice object. The robot then proceeds to pick up the object.
A similar algorithm is used to decide where the robot will go.
"One of the important things about this demonstration is that we're using a 'noisy' brain signal to control the robot," Rao said. "The technique for picking up brain signals is non-invasive, but that means we can only obtain brain signals indirectly from sensors on the surface of the head, and not where they are generated deep in the brain. As a result, the user can only generate high-level commands such as indicating which object to pick up or which location to go to, and the robot needs to be autonomous enough to be able to execute such commands."
In the future, the researchers hope to make the robot more adaptive to the environment by having them carry out more complex commands.
"We want to get to the point of using actual objects that people might want the robot to gather, as well as having the robot move through multiple rooms," Rao said.
The results of this research were presented last week at the Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing meeting in Whistler, B.C.

Video: See the Robot in Action
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The Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind

Original Story: Human Thoughts Control New Robot

ASTRONOMERS FIND INFANT VERSION OF SOLAR SYSTEM

2007-06-15T21:33:00.000-04:00

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer

New observations of a young star and its surroundings are like a snapshot of our own solar system when it was forming, astronomers announced Friday.

The star, just a million years old, is surrounded by a disk of dust, the sort of "protoplanetary" disk from which planets formed around our Sun, according to theory. In the disk is a gap that astronomers say likely was formed by one or more giant gas planets, something similar to Jupiter and the other planets we're familiar with.

The planets have not been imaged. Rather, the dust and the gap have been seen.

The thinking is that when giant planets develop, they gather the dust from their orbital path, sweeping clean a region of space around the star.

Similar setups have been seen around other stars, but few have been so young. This is the first evidence for a planet around a star so young that is also Sun-like.

The star, GM Aurigae, is about 420 light-years away. It is 1.05 times as massive as the Sun. If the system were overlaid onto our own solar system, the newly discovered gap would extend roughly from the orbit of Jupiter to the orbit of Uranus.

"GM Aurigae is essentially a much younger version of our Sun, and the gap in its disk is about the same size as the space occupied by our own giant planets," said Dan Watson, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. "Looking at it is like looking at baby pictures of our Sun and outer solar system."

The observations were made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The finding, along with a similar one last year, has astronomers puzzled that large planets could form so quickly.

Conventional theory holds that all planets form first as a rocky core. Earth and the other three terrestrial planets stopped there. But the gas giants then use an ever-building core to begin to attract an vast envelope of gas and dust.

An alternative theory goes like this: Rocky planets form in the conventional way, but gas giants don't. Instead, they collapse, over a few thousand years, out of a knot in the ring of gas and dust.

"The results pose a challenge to existing theories of giant-planet formation, especially those in which planets build up gradually over millions of years," said Nuria Calvet, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan and lead author of a paper on the results in the Sept. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Studies like this one will ultimately help us better understand how our outer planets, as well as others in the universe, form."

Oldest Planet

Hottest Planet

Farthest Planet

SOURCE

TRIPINDICULAR

2007-05-14T18:05:00.000-04:00

I'm not scared of anything...except maybe this stuff. I've known about it for years. I've read a lot about it. I don't ever want to be within ten feet of it, let alone ingest it. I'm pretty sure that I'd never live through the experience- or worse yet, live the rest of my life like that. Remember, the mind is the most powerful thing there is.

From: Scotto
Subject: Terence on Psychedelics and DMT (2)
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 92 20:53:34 EDT

Terence McKenna
Excerpted w/o Permission from
'A Weekend With Terence McKenna,' Feb 1992

DMT is the strongest hallucinogen there is. If it's possible to get more loaded than that, I don't want to know about it, and I say so when I'm there. I say, 'My God, if you can get more loaded than this, keep it away from me.' So that's it, it's the strongest. It's also the shortest acting. DMT when smoked in most people is, return you to normal in under ten minutes. Under ten minutes! Now, this is interesting because people who think there's nothing to this should actually invest the ten minutes to find out what's, you know... A ten minute DMT trip is worth twenty years of academic pharmacology, art history, psychology and all this other malarky. Because then you just say, 'Okay, I got it, I got it...' Another very interesting thing about DMT is, it occurs naturally in the human brain. Well, now what's going on here? He's saying the strongest drug, the fastest drug, is the most natural drug? It means that, you know, you don't have to sail off into 3-hydroxy-4-peridal- enmethylmarubyshtick or something like that to get into the exotic realms. No -- a human metabolite, which takes only ten minutes to undergo its entire exfoliation and quenching, is the strongest of all.

Well, then, what is it? What does 'strong' mean? What is a strong psychedelic? You know, it's highly personal. Every psychedelic trip is. But what happens on DMT for a large number of people -- I mean, we don't have any statistics, but -- it is a completely confounding experience. I mean, you may have had the expectation, you might think if you had never had a psychedelic experience that it sort of begins like the Bach B minor fugue, and goes from there as you rise into the realms of light and union with the deity or something like that. That's not what happens on DMT. What happens on DMT I referred to this morning: a troop of elves smashes down your front door, and rotates and balances the wheels on the afterdeath vehicle, present you with the bill and then depart. (laughter) And it's completely paradigm shattering. I mean, you know, union with the white light you could handle. (laughter) An invasion of your apartment by jewelled self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace that are speaking demotic Greek is *not* something that you anticipated and could handle. Sometimes people say, 'Is DMT dangerous? It sounds so crazy. Is it dangerous?' The answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment. (laughter)

Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised. And a moment will come that will wipe the smile right off your face. (laughter)

One thing that endears DMT to me is, I like to say, it doesn't affect your mind. It doesn't seem to affect your mind. In other words, you don't change under the influence of DMT. You don't become a kinder, gentler person. YOu don't sink into, you know, a line of drool from one corner of your mouth as you sit there twitching. *You* don't change. What happens is, the world is completely replaced, instantly, 100 percent, it's all gone. And what is put in its place, not one iota of what is put in its place was taken from this world. So its a 100% reality channel switch. They don't even retain three dimensional space and linear time. It's not like you go to an exotic place, Morroco or New Guinea. It's like reality is swapped out for something else, and when you try to say what it is, you realize that language has evolved in this world, and it can serve no other, or it takes years of practice. So what you're looking at is literally the unspeakable. The indescribably falls into your lap. And when you try -- you're loaded, right, you're there, and you're trying to explain to yourself what's happening, and so this is like you try to pour water over the transdimensional objects in front of you, the water of language. And it just beads up and flows off like water off a duck's back. You cannot say what's there.

And I've spent, I don't know, twenty-five years fiddling with this. It's become the compass of my inspiration, trying to say what is on the other side of that boundary. Just two large tokes away at any given time is this non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, irrational, un-Englishable place, but it's not smooth and empty and clear. That's not what gives it its indescribability. What gives it is indescribability is its utter weridness, its alienness, its power to astonish.

What happens to me when I smoke DMT is, there's a kind of going toward it. There's a sequella of events which lead to the antechamber of the mystery. I mean, you take a toke, you feel strange. Your whole body feels odd. You take a second toke, all the oxygen seems to have been pumped out of the room. Everything jumps into clarity. It's that visual acuity thing. You take a third toke if you're able, and then you lay back, and you see this thing which looks like a rose or a chyrsanthemum, this orange spinning flowerlike thing. It takes about fifteen seconds to form, and it's like a membrane. And then, you break through it. You break through it, and then you're in this place, and there's an enormous cheer which goes up as you pass through this membrane. Some of you may know the Pink Floyd song about how the gnomes have learned a new way to say hoo-ray? They're waiting. And you burst into this place, and you're saying, you know, 'Geez, you know, this stuff is really speedy.' (laughter) That's like describing a Space Shuttle launching as noisy, you know? (laughter) And you say, 'Am I all right? Am I all right?' That's the first question, and so then you run your mind around the track, and you say, 'Hmm. Heartbeat normal? Yeah, normal, heartbeat normal. Pulse normal? Breathing? Breathe breathe breathe, yes.' But what's right here, right here and from here out is this thing which, no matter how much science fiction you've done, no matter how much William Burroughs you've read, no matter how much time you've spent in the company of the weird, the bizarre, the autre, and the peculiar, you weren't ready. (laughter) And it's completely real. It's in a way more real than the contents of ordinary reality, because, see how the shadows here are muted and there's a lot of transitional zones from one color to another and so forth? This isn't like that. This is crystalline, clear, solid, you can see the light reflected in the depths of these objects, and everything is very brightly colored, and everything is moving very, very rapidly.

And there are entities there. It's not about calling them up or the whisperings of them. No, they're IN YOUR FACE. (laughter) And they're right here, and they're worse than in your face, because what they do is, they jump into your chest and then they jump out. And you have to keep saying, 'Keep breathing, keep breathing, don't freak out, pay attention.' And the entities speak to you, and they speak both in English and another way which we'll get to in a minute. But in English what they say is, 'Do not give way to wonder. Hang on. Don't just go gaga with disbelief. Pay attention. Pay attention.' And what they're trying to do is they're trying to show you something. They are very aware of the fleeting nature of this encounter. And they say, you know, 'Don't spiral off into amazement, and start raving about God and all that. Forget that. Pay attention to what we're doing.'

And then, what they're doing is they're dancing around, they're jumping around, they're emerging explicitly out of the background, bounding toward you, jumping into your chest, bounding away, and they offer, they make offerings. And they love you, that's the other thing. They say this. They say, 'We love you. You come so rarely. And, you know, here you are. Welcome, welcome.' And they make these offerings. And the offerings are objects of some sort. And now remember, you are not changed. You're exactly the person you were a few minutes before. So you're not exalted or depressed. You're just trying to make sense of this. And the objects which they offer are like, Faberge eggs, or exquisitely tooled and enamelled pieces of machinery, but they don't have rigid outlines. They objects are themselves somehow alive, and transforming and changing. So when these creatures -- I call them 'tykes' -- when these tykes offer you these objects, you like, you grok it, you look it and immediately, because you are yourself, you have this realization: my God, if I could get this thing back into my world, history would never be the same. A single one of these objects is somehow, you can tell by looking at it, this would confound my world beyond hope of recovery. It cannot exist. What I'm being shown is a tiny area where miracles are transformed.

And the creatures, the tykes, are singing. They are speaking in a kind of translinguistic glossil alia. They are actually making these objects with their voices. They are singing these things into existence. And what the message is, is 'Do what we're doing. You can do what we're doing. DO IT.' And they get quite pushy about this. They say, you know, 'Damn it, DO IT!' And you're saying, 'Bu...bu...bu...bu...' And they say, 'No, DO IT! Do it NOW! DO IT!' And you say, 'I can't handle this,' you know, and then this kind of reaction goes on for awhile. Well, then, I actually...I don't take credit for it, it was not willed, but like something comes up from inside of you. Something comes out of you, and you discover you can do it, that you can use language to condense objects into existence in this space. It's the dream of all magic, but here it is, folks, happening in real time. And then they're just delighted. They just go mad with delight and turn somersaults and turn themselves inside out and they all jump into your chest at once.

And after many encounters of this sort...I mean, when I first did DMT, I couldn't bring anything out of it. I mean, I just said, you know, 'It's the damndest thing I've ever encountered and I can't say anything about it and I don't think I ever will be able to say anything about it.' But by going back repeatedly and working at it, I think I've gotten a pretty coherent -- well, let's not go that far. (laughter) I think I've got a pretty clear metaphor anyway for what's happening in there, and I think a lot of people have this experience. When you talk to shamans, they say, 'Oh, well, yes, the helping spirits. Those are the helping spirits. They can help you cure, find lost objects, you didn't know about the helping spirits?' And you say, 'Well, I knew, but I, I had no idea that it was so literal.' And they say, 'Oh, no, that's the helping spirits.'

But then, the other thing they say, if you press a shaman, if you say, 'Well, what exactly is a helping spirit?' They say, 'Well, a helping spirit is an ancestor.' You say, 'You mean to tell me that those are dead people in there?' They say, 'Well, yes, ancestor, dead person. You didn't know about ancestors apparently. This is what happens to people who die.' And you say, 'My God, is it possible that what we're breaking into here is an ecology of souls?' That these are not extraterrestrials from Zenebelganooby or Zeta Reticula Beta. These are the dear departed. And they exist in a realm which, for want of a better word, let's call eternity. And somehow this drug, or whatever it is, is allowing me to see across the veil. This is the lifting -- you want to talk about boundary dissolution. It's one thing to get tight to your partner, it's quite another to get tight to the dear departed of centuries past. That's a serious boundary dissolution when that happens.

What these creatures want, according to them, is they want us to transform our language somehow. And I don't know what this means. I mean, at this point in the weekend and in my life, we all are on the cutting edge, and nobody is ahead of anybody else. Clearly we need to transform our language, because our culture is created by our language, and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer. Somehow we need to transform our language, but is this what they mean? That we're supposed to condense machines out of the air in front of us? How does this relate to the persistent idea, promulgated by Robert Graves and other people, that there is a primal language of poetry? That poetry as we know it is a pale, pale thing, and that at some time in the human past, people were in command of languages which literally compel belief. They *compel* belief, because they don't make an appeal through argument or metaphor. They compel belief because they are able to present themselves as imagery. You know, William Blake said, 'If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it WILL be believed.'

And it's very confusing, because you wonder, have people been doing this for thousands of years? And if so, have they always encountered this tremendous urgency on the other side? If people have been doing it for thousands of years, why is there this urgency on the part of these entities? And who exactly and what exactly are they? It appalls me, you can probably tell, that I have to talk about this, because I am not, this is not my baliwick. I mean, I'm a rationalist who's just had a very weird set of experiences, but I am a rationalist. I mean, I have no patience with channelling, you know, the lords of the many rays, the divas and, you know, there's this whole thing going around about disincarnate intelligence, mostly under the control of fairly, shall we say, non-rigorous thinkers. (laughter) But I like to think that I am a rigorous thinker, and yet, here I am, telling you that, you know, elf legions await in hyperspace one toke away.

The difference between my rap and, you know, the finned horned folks or somebody like that is that we have an operational method for testing my assertion. We can all smoke DMT, or you can make it your business to now find out about this, and see for yourself. And not everybody agrees with me. I mean, some people say it wasn't anything like that. But some people agree, and I think if you get two out of ten agreeing with a rap like this, then you'd better pay attention. (laughter)

(End of Part Two of Three)
Faithfully keyed in by Scotto the Incongruous

MORE HIGH STRANGENESS:

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FUTURE HI CHIMES IN

30 BILLION EARTHS?

2007-05-13T22:13:00.000-04:00

30 Billion Earths?
New Estimate of Exoplanets in Our Galaxy
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
29 January 2002

Chances are you haven't spent a whole lot of time wondering how many Jupiter-like planets exist in our galaxy. But Charley Lineweaver has, because it bears on a more important question: How many potentially habitable planets are there?

New calculations by Lineweaver and Daniel Grether, both of the University of New South Wales in Australia, provide an encouraging answer to this question. The researchers expect a flood of Jupiters will be found, perhaps 50 percent more than currently expected.

Each such discovery would be significant in the hunt for planets that could harbor life.

Why? Because much of the evolution of our own solar system, including the formation of Earth, was orchestrated or affected by Jupiter, the largest planet with by far the bulk of the solar system's mass, excepting the Sun, of course.

"Our solar system is Jupiter and a bunch of junk," as Lineweaver puts it.

Our protector

When Jupiter developed, it simply bullied other objects into position or out of existence. Then the mighty gas giant became Earth's protector.

Though the fledgling Earth was pummeled by asteroids and comets, making it difficult for life to take hold, it could have been much worse. Jupiter shielded Earth from an even heavier bombardment of debris that made its way from the outskirts of the new system toward its central star.

That protective role continues. In 1994, Jupiter used its immense gravity to lure comet Shoemaker-Levy into a death plunge. Had the comet hit Earth, it would have sterilized much or all of the planet.

For now, no one knows whether our solar system represents a common method of formation and evolution. In fact, discoveries over the past six years seem to indicate otherwise. Most of the roughly 80 planets discovered outside our solar system are much more massive than Jupiter. They also orbit perilously close to their host stars, locations that would likely prevent rocky planets from forming in so-called habitable orbits.

But experts attribute these findings to the limitations of technology. Smaller planets in more comfortable orbits around other stars simply can't be detected. Yet.

How many Jupiters?

All this in mind, Lineweaver and Grether worked out some new calculations for the prevalence of planets that are about Jupiter's size at about the same distance from their host stars. The calculations are based on some of the most recent extrasolar planet discoveries, in which ever-smaller objects are being detected at ever-greater distances from their host stars.

So how many Jupiters are out there orbiting Sun-like stars in the Milky Way Galaxy?
"At least a billion, but probably more like 30 billion," Lineweaver told SPACE.com.
And the math behind that?

"There are about 300 billion stars in our galaxy. About 10 percent (or 30 billion) are roughly Sun-like," he explained. "At least 5 percent (1.5 billion) but possibly as many as 90 percent or 100 percent (about 30 billion) of these have Jupiter-like planets."

These estimates would vary based on exactly what you call Jupiter-like or Sun-like, Lineweaver said.

What about Earths?

The calculations, which are part of a paper that has been submitted to the journal Astrobiology, don't bear directly on worlds like our own. But with what's known of planet formation, some speculation is possible.

"A reasonable guess is the same number of Earths as Jupiters," Lineweaver said.
That, however, depends heavily on how one defines Earth-like. If one includes rocky planets in general, like Mercury, Venus and Mars, "then they are probably more common than Jupiters," he said. If, however, you mean rocky planets with liquid water at the surface, "then we really can't answer that very well. They may be as common as Jupiters, or they may be much less common."

Alan Boss, an expert in planetary system formation at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said the new calculations for Jovian twins seem reasonable. Trying then to estimate the number of Earth-like planets requires "a leap of faith, but one which appears to be plausible," he said.

"As the veil covering the unseen portions of discovery space is lowered in the next decade, I expect we will find that Jupiter-like planets are commonplace," said Boss, who was not involved in the new study. "Whether or not that also means Earth-like planets are common can only be proven by NASA's Kepler mission."

Kepler, recently approved to launch in 2006, will monitor 100,000 stars for telltale dips in light indicating an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit has crossed in front of the star. While it would not take photographs, Kepler could provide the first census of planets that have the potential to support life.

SOURCE

NANOSCIENTISTS

2007-05-13T21:34:00.000-04:00

Scientists Find Flaw In Quantum Dot Construction

Science Daily — ATHENS, Ohio Nanoscientists dream of developing a quantum computer, a device the size of a grain of sand that could be faster and more powerful than today's PCs. They've identified tiny artificial atoms called "quantum dots" as the most likely materials to build these machines, but have been puzzled by the dots' unpredictable behavior at the nanoscale.

This illustration shows a quantum dot (blue central bulge) bombarded from the top with laser light. The laser produces excitations (called excitons) inside the dot, and the electric fields generated by the top and bottom gold contacts pull the electrons (yellow) and holes (red) away. Other electrons/holes are undesirably produced instead on the wetting layer, causing interference. The semiconductor compounds used in these experiments are Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) and Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs). (Courtesy of Jose Villas-Boas, Ohio University postdoctoral fellow)

Now a team of Ohio University physicists thinks it's found the problem and has proposed a blueprint for building a better quantum dot. The researchers, who published their findings in this week's issue of Physical Review Letters, argue that defects formed during creation of the quantum dots operate as a barrier to scientific experimentation.

Experimental scientists in Germany had blasted the quantum dots with light to create the quantum mechanical state needed to run a quantum computer. But they couldn't consistently control that state, explained Sergio Ulloa, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy. Jose Villas-Boas, a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio University, Ulloa and Associate Professor Alexander Govorov developed theoretical models to learn what went wrong.

The problem, they argued, happens during the creation of the type of quantum dots under study. Using a molecular beam epitaxy chamber, scientists spray paint a surface with atoms under high temperatures, creating an atomic coating. As more layers are added, the quantum dots bead up on the surface like droplets of water, Ulloa said. But a fine residue left behind on the surface that Ulloa calls the "wetting layer" can cause problems during experiments. When experimental scientists blasted the quantum dots with a beam of light in previous studies, the wetting layer caused interference, instead of allowing the light to enter the dot and trigger the quantum state, he explained.

The study suggests that scientists could tweak the process by re-focusing the beam of light or changing the duration of the light pulses to negate the effects of the wetting layer, Villas-Boas said. One experimental physicist already has used the theoretical finding to successfully manipulate a quantum dot in the lab, he added. "Now that they know the problem, they realize there are a few ways to avoid it," Villas-Boas said.

The new finding ultimately could lead to the creation of a better quantum dot and can help scientists understand more about quantum states, Ulloa added. "It's one more step towards the holy grail of finding a better quantum bit, which hopefully will lead to a quantum computer," he said.

Nanoscientists are creating quantum dots in many different ways, Ulloa noted, for use in various applications. The self-assembled type under study could be used in optical electronics and quantum computers. Other types, such as dots grown in a solution, might be used for solar energy applications.

The study also will help the Ohio University team better understand how to control the spin of electrons a property that could be the underlying mechanism behind faster, more efficient future electronic devices, he added.

###

The research was supported by grants from the Department of Energy, the Indiana 21st Century Fund, the Ohio University Postdoctoral Fellow Program, and the FAPESP fellowship. The researchers are members of Ohio University's Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute, http://www.ounqpi.org/.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Ohio University.

ET Visitors

2006-12-13T00:39:00.000-05:00

ET Visitors: Scientists See High Likelihood

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilizations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.

Fermi’s brooding on the topic was later labeled "Fermi’s paradox". It is a well-traveled tale from the 1950’s when the scientist broached the subject in discussions with colleagues in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Thoughts regarding the probability of earthlike planets, the rise of highly advanced civilizations "out there", and interstellar travel -- these remain fodder for trying to respond to Fermi’s paradox even today.

Now a team of American scientists note that recent astrophysical discoveries suggest that we should find ourselves in the midst of one or more extraterrestrial civilizations. Moreover, they argue it is a mistake to reject all UFO reports since some evidence for the theoretically-predicted extraterrestrial visitors might just be found there.

The researchers make their proposal in the January/February 2005 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS).

Curious situation
Pick up any good science magazine and you’re sure to see the latest in head-scratching ideas about superstring theory, wormholes, or the stretching of spacetime itself. Meanwhile, extrasolar planetary detection is on the verge of becoming mundane.

"We are in the curious situation today that our best modern physics and astrophysics theories predict that we should be experiencing extraterrestrial visitation, yet any possible evidence of such lurking in the UFO phenomenon is scoffed at within our scientific community," contends astrophysicist Bernard Haisch.

Haisch along with physicists James Deardorff, Bruce Maccabee and Harold Puthoff make their case in the JBIS article: "Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation".

The scientists point to two key discoveries made by Australian astronomers and reported last year that there is a "galactic habitable zone" in our Milky Way Galaxy. And more importantly that Earth’s own star, the Sun, is relatively young in comparison to the average star in this zone -- by as much as a billion years.

Therefore, the researchers explain in their JBIS article that an average alien civilization would be far more advanced and have long since discovered Earth. Additionally, other research work on the supposition underlying the Big Bang -- known as the theory of inflation -- shores up the prospect, they advise, that our world is immersed in a much larger extraterrestrial civilization.

Point-to-point distances
Given billion-year advanced physics, might not buzzing around the galaxy be possible?

Even today superstring theory hypothesizes other dimensions... which could be habitable Universes adjacent to our own, the researchers speculate. It might even be possible to get around the speed of light limit by moving in and out of these dimensions.

"What we have done is somewhat of a breakthrough," Haisch told SPACE.com. "We have pulled together various recent discoveries and theoretical issues that collectively point to the strong probability that we should be in the midst of one or more huge extraterrestrial civilizations," he said.

Haisch said that superstring dimensions and wormhole and spacetime stretching possibilities address the "can't get here from there" objection often argued in view of the interstellar, point-to-point distances involved. Also, diffusion models predict that even a single civilization could spread across the Galaxy in a tiny fraction of the age of the Galaxy - even at sub-light speeds, he said.

ET signature in the data
Can the scientific community bring itself to consider any evidence coming from mysterious sightings of strange things by the public?

In large measure, the scientific community seemingly has eyed ET visitation as far from being serious stuff to cogitate over. Why so?

"The dismissal has several causes, all reinforcing each other," Haisch responded. "Most of
the observations are probably misinterpretations, delusions and hoaxes. I have seen people get confused by Venus or even Sirius when it is flashing colors low in the sky under the right conditions. Having been turned off by this, most scientists never bother to look any further, and so are simply blissfully ignorant that there may be more to it," he said.

Deardorff, the lead author of the JBIS article, points out in a press statement: "It would take some humility for the scientific community to suspend its judgment and take at least some of the high quality reports seriously enough to investigate…but I hope we can bring ourselves to do that."

According to Haisch, there is a motivation not just for scientific tolerance of the UFO issue, but a strong scientific prediction that there ought to be some genuine ET signature in the data.

"This potentially changes the relationship of the UFO phenomenon to science in a significant way. It takes away the ‘not invented here’ prejudice, pointing out that a ‘yes’ to ET visitation is exactly what side our current physics and astrophysics theories would come down on as the most likely situation," Haisch concluded.

KARLA TURNER, PH.D.

2006-12-13T00:03:00.000-05:00

KARLA TURNER, A Life Intruded Upon

Dr. Karla Turner: Abduction Investigator And Human Rights Activist

A Posthumous Tribute by John Chambers, Reprinted by Permission of UFO Magazine

If you wanted to find four words to describe the life of alien abduction investigator Karla Turner, Ph.D., those words might be "intrepid human rights activist." A former college instructor who held a doctorate in Old English Studies from the University of North Texas, Turner had authored three books on the abduction phenomenon, Into the Fringe (1992), Taken (1994), and, with psychic Ted Rice, Masquerade of Angels (1994). She was convinced that the aliens were here not to help us out, but to steal from us the sovereignty of our souls.

She wanted us to fight back--with the same courage that she herself showed when, after a period of struggle, she succumbed to a particularly virulent form of breast cancer, on Jan. 9, 1996.

The diminutive scholar, author and activist, who was born in 1947 and made her home in Roland, Arkansas, had been involved in alien abduction work since 1988. Two traits, she had come to conclude, characterized alien behavior above all:

deceitfulness and cruelty. In *Into the Fringe, published by Berkley, she recounted the abduction experiences of herself, her husband Casey (an assumed name), and several other members of her family. The family had first became aware of their experiences in 1988. Later, they were able to recall abduction events going back to their childhoods; the experiences were uniformly disturbing. In er second book, *Taken (published, like Masquerade of Angels, by her own press, Kelt Works, in Roland), Turner told the stories of eight female abductees who had contacted her after the publication of her first book. *Masquerade of Angels was the biography of Louisiana psychic Ted Rice, who, used to channeling benevolent entities, then becoming aware of his alien abduction experiences, first believed the aliens were benign, then came to the conclusion that they were no more than remorseless predators.

From beginning to end, Turner had been struck by how contradictory the stories of the aliens were. They would, she averred, say anything they wanted to attain their ends. As the abductees in *Taken reported it, the aliens insisted variously that they had come to help us cope with upcoming ecological disaster, interbreed for our good and theirs, help us evolve, take our genetic material to revivify their dying race. Sometimes they claimed they had outright created us; other times, that they were genetically altering us for our own good.

In one of the most moving accounts in the annals of alien abductions, Turner tells Ted Rice's story, in *Masquerade of Angels, of how, as an 8-year-old boy, Rice found himself along with his much-beloved grandmother inside a UFO and surrounded by a variety of aliens, including a tall reptoid. The aliens brought out the grandmother's husband, who had been dead for six years, and insisted she have sex with him. Partway through the act, the grandfather metamorphosed into the tall reptoid. Now the reptoid demanded to have sex with Rice. The boy's grandmother refused to allow this, even though the aliens insisted she would be dead in two days if she did not renege. Two days later, the grandmother was indeed dead of a massive heart attack.

The blatant deceit of this incident shaded over into Turner's other area of contention with the aliens: often, they were cruel, inflicting physical and mental pain on the abductees. One of the *Taken interviewees was so traumatized by her experience of impregnation on a UFO that she could not resume normal sex. Another suffered a bloody, painful miscarriage in her own bathroom. On account of a pulling action by the aliens, a third victim sustained a spinal injury so severe that her doctor warned her it could prove permanent. And these physical problems were accompanied by the usual emotional trauma of the abductee: confusion, terror, paranoia and ambivalence.

If abductees often came to believe that the aliens must somehow have some lofty purpose, this was because, insisted Turner, they have total control over our minds. Turner cited many cases pointing to a psychic technology that enabled the aliens to make us see whatever they wanted us to see. They could create virtual reality scenarios at will, she was certain. The abductees took home from their abduction experiences as memories whatever the aliens wanted them to remember. Even what was revived under hypnosis might only be a screen memory.

Turner was profoundly at variance with those who claimed we would see the alien abduction phenomenon as benign, if only we could understand it--but we were not capable of understanding it. The author spelled out in Taken what became her credo: "In spite of what some prominent abduction theorists tell us about avoiding thinking in terms of 'good and evil' or 'positive and negative' when it comes to the aliens, this cannot be done, nor should it be. For these women, for my husband and myself, for all abductees, knowing that we have been made a part of this agenda and that we have been implanted, trained, and programmed to participate in some future scenario, how can we not ask to what purpose our minds, bodies, and souls will be used?"

Turner entertained at least one comprehensive theory about why the alien abductions took place. At least one group, she suspected, the reptoids, needed to eat our bodies. Rice had provided her with a chilling account (similar to accounts in *Taken) of an alien abduction during which reptoid aliens actually murdered the psychic (Rice watched this, as if disembodied, from a distance), then sucked the soul out of his body into a black box. In a short time, they re-released the soul back into a clone of his body, which they had manufactured apparently using organic materials reaped from cattle mutilations. Turner believed the reptoids then ate Rice's original body--and in general need to ingest human bodies--because it was saturated with the emotional and/or the soul vibrations of the human; the reptoids did not eat cloned bodies, she speculated, because they had not become imbued with soul/emotion substance in the course of living. (Turner also wondered if the oft-mentioned hybrids might not simply be organic fodder used to manufacture the bodies of the zombie-like, carefully-regimented 'greys.')

What Turner perceived as the deceit and cruelty of the aliens-- along with the total lack of reciprocity in their actions--made her into a human rights activist who insisted that we must stand up for ourselves and seize back our souls from this rapacious, non-human species (she speculated that the aliens had developed parallel to us, on this Earth, then become transdimensional). "To accept a spiritual explanation for the abduction process and the abducting entities," she told an interviewer for *Contact Forum in May/June, 1995, "is foolhardy and potentially dangerous to our souls." To another interviewer she reiterated that, if we do not rouse ourselves, "we may come to the point where we cede the sovereignty of our souls. We should stand up for our souls. I think there is a possibility of finding out how to change the situation."

Until shortly before her death, Turner regularly issued veritable calls to arms from the podiums of UFO conferences across the U.S. and abroad. The aliens, she said time and again, used their powers to control our perceptions and practice disinformation in order to break down our resistance and deceive us into believing they were interested in our well-being--when they were not. All the evidence, she said, suggested their purposes were totally self-serving and without regard for the needs of homo sapiens. Now was the time, she insisted, "to work at getting back control."
How could this be done? Turner contended the best defense against alien intrusions was not "abduction therapy"--though that could be helpful--but abduction research itself. To audiences around the country she listed what she considered to be the only "facts" that might be construed about the alien invaders:

* We do not know with any certainty what they are.
* At least some of the aliens lie.
* During encounters, they control our perceptions.
* They can implant false memories.
* What we report about them is what they want us to report.
* The alien agenda has physical aims and procedures that have nothing to do with reproduction.
* From childhood, they manipulate us physically, spiritually, and sexually.
* They create virtual reality scenarios that are absolutely real to the abductees.
* They show an extraordinary interest in human souls and in our thoughts.
* There is some element of human involvement in UFO phenomenon.

Turner suspected the military sometimes harassed abductees after they had been harassed by the aliens; but the Arkansas researcher did not reveal facts for fear of endangering friends.

The abductee/author insisted the aliens were engaged in a propaganda war to convince us that their designs were more benevolent than they were. They might be creating virtual reality scenarios of cross-breeding, she thought, to suggest that we share commonalities with them and that they need us. But, she said, there are just as many accounts of, for example, brain operations as there are of fetal transplants. In a propaganda campaign that included demonstrating their superiority and their proprietary relationship to us--and in consistently painting a benevolent picture of themselves--they were basically concerned, she had become certain, to "debase and lower our self-view, and to break down our resistances."

Articulately, always with sensitivity, the former college lecturer maintained there were a number of steps abductees could take in the face of alien provocation:

* Educate themselves about the phenomenon; there is some control in knowledge.
* Let go of fear; it is through fear that negative entities maintain control. Anger is a more effective defense than fear.
* Abductees should be aware of how they're reacting; they should learn to step out of themselves, and to maintain perspective.
* Maintain a good quality of life.
* Be realistic about what can and cannot be done.
* Stay close to their families.
* Confide. "The hell with the results," says Turner. "You don't need the burden of carrying this around [without being able to talk about it]."

If the terrors of the abduction experience made us grow stronger, concluded Turner, it was not because the aliens wanted us to have this strength, but because we willed it ourselves. Similarly, she insisted, we should take into our own hands this appalling violation of our rights as human beings, and fight it with all the resources which we could muster out of the richness of human creativity and experience.

This brave and defiant refusal, in the name of humanity, to countenance suffering from an alien tyrant masquerading as a benefactor, is Karla Turner's final legacy.

SCIENCE AND SPECULATION

INFLUENZA: A Real Threat

H5N1: Humanity's second greatest threat

Pandemic test undertaken by financial services paints dire scenario

Patrick Thibodeau

Study Reveals Why Flu Thrives in Winter

Dave MosherLiveScience Staff WriterLiveScience.com

For the first time, scientist have solid evidence suggesting exactly why the flu is so common in winter.

"We found that the flu's transmission period is much, much longer when temperatures and humidity levels are low," Palese told LiveScience.

Although the flu spreads primarily through the air, the viruses can survive on doorknobs, handrails and other surfaces. Medical experts report that frequent hand washing, especially before meals, can lower the risk of picking up as well as transmitting diseases such as the flu.

DIFFERENT DINOSAUR SPECIES

Dinosaur skeleton unearthed in Argentina

By MICHAEL ASTOR, Associated Press Writer

MISHANDLING OF GERMS

Mishandling of germs on rise at US labs

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer

The reports were so sensitive the Bush administration refused to release them under the Freedom of Information Act, citing an anti-bioterrorism law aimed at preventing terrorists from locating stockpiles of poisons and learning who handles them.

Among the previously undisclosed accidents:

"The risk that a killer agent could be set loose in the general population is real," Hammond said.

In other previously undisclosed accidents:

The Yucatan Peninsula / The Chicx­u­lub Crat­er

Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs

By Will Dunham

DEADLY COLLISION

Asteroid “crime family” blamed in dinosaur wipeout

Sept. 5, 2007Courtesy Southwest Research Instituteand World Science staff

Living Forever? Is Immortality Even Possible?

Ray Kurzweil Aims to Live Forever

By Jay Lindsay, Associated Press

NOT SOON ENOUGH

Take a leap into hyperspace

Haiko Lietz

“A hyperdrive craft would put the stars within reach for the first time”

From issue 2533 of New Scientist magazine, 05 January 2006, page 24

ABELL 2218

Abell 2218: A Galaxy Cluster Lens

POSSIBLE LINK

Possible Link to Lucy's Ancestors Found

Robin LloydLiveScience Senior Editor

LiveScience.com

HYPERION

Key to Giant Space Sponge Revealed

Ker ThanStaff WriterSPACE.com

One odd moon

Mystery gunk

A smashing idea

INTUITIVE EATING

Professor Loses Weight With No-Diet Diet

By BROCK VERGAKIS, Associated Press Writer

Mice and an ANTI-FAT PROTEIN

Anti-Fat Protein Keeps Overeating Mice Slim

By E.J. Mundell

LAKES...of Methane on TITAN

Lost lakes of Titan are found at last

But a flyby by Cassini on July 22 last year has revealed, thanks to a radar scan, 75 large, smooth, dark patches between three and 70 kilometers across (two and 42 miles) across that appear to be lakes of liquid methane, scientists report on Thursday.

HABITABLE PLANET FOUND

Potentially habitable planet found

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

UFOs and their occupants

UFO Research: Findings vs. Facts

By Leonard DavidSenior Space Writer

PARALLEL UNIVERSE SPLIT

My So-Called Universe

By Jim Holt

Déjà Vu

Patients Suffer Deja Vu ... Over and Over

Robert Roy BrittLiveScience Managing EditorLiveScience.com

ST. PARIS OHIO: 1932

EINSTEIN

Saturday April 14, 2005 12:04 PMBy JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer

Scientists Create Robot Controlled By Human Thought

Human Thoughts Control New Robot

Sara GoudarziLiveScience Staff WriterLiveScience.com Fri Dec 15, 4:55 PM ET

ASTRONOMERS FIND INFANT VERSION OF SOLAR SYSTEM

By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writer

TRIPINDICULAR

30 BILLION EARTHS?

30 Billion Earths?New Estimate of Exoplanets in Our Galaxy By Robert Roy BrittSenior Science Writerposted: 07:00 am ET29 January 2002

Our protector

How many Jupiters?

Dave Mosher
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com

The Yucatan Peninsula / The Chicxulub Crater

Sept. 5, 2007
Courtesy Southwest Research Institute
and World Science staff

Robin Lloyd
LiveScience Senior Editor

Ker Than
Staff Writer
SPACE.com

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer

Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
LiveScience.com

Saturday April 14, 2005 12:04 PM
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer

Sara Goudarzi
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com Fri Dec 15, 4:55 PM ET

By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer

30 Billion Earths?
New Estimate of Exoplanets in Our Galaxy
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
29 January 2002

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer