Extraterrestrial

[cosmoworld7]

There is a there a secret door to the universe

[SeriousMoney]

Reverse-engineering the brain... or "Way of the Borg?

Nanowire arrays can detect signals along individual neurons
Merger of nanowires and neurons could boost efforts to measure and understand brain activity
By Steve Bradt
FAS Communications

Opening a whole new interface between nanotechnology and neuroscience, scientists at Harvard University have used slender silicon nanowires to detect, stimulate, and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons.

Harvard chemist Charles M. Lieber and colleagues report on this marriage of nanowires and neurons this week in the journal Science.

"We describe the first artificial synapses between nanoelectronic devices and individual mammalian neurons, and also the first linking of a solid-state device -- a nanowire transistor -- to the neuronal projections that interconnect and carry information in the brain," says Lieber, the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "These extremely local devices can detect, stimulate, and inhibit propagation of neuronal signals with a spatial resolution unmatched by existing techniques."

Electrophysiological measurements of brain activity play an important role in understanding signal propagation through individual neurons and neuronal networks, but existing technologies are relatively crude: Micropipette electrodes poked into cells are invasive and harmful, and microfabricated electrode arrays are too bulky to detect activity at the level of individual axons and dendrites, the neuronal projections responsible for electrical signal propagation and interneuron communication.

By contrast, the tiny nanowire transistors developed by Lieber and colleagues gently touch a neuronal projection to form a hybrid synapse, making them noninvasive, and are thousands of times smaller than the electronics now used to measure brain activity.

Lieber's group has previously shown that nanowires can detect, with great precision, molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body, as well as single viruses. The group's latest work takes advantage of the size similarities between ultra-fine silicon nanowires and the axons and dendrites projecting from nerve cells: Nanowires, like neuronal offshoots, are just tens of nanometers in width, making the thin filaments a good match for intercepting nerve signals.

Because the nanowires are so slight -- their contact with a neuron is no more than 20 millionths of a meter in length -- Lieber and colleagues were able to measure and manipulate electrical conductance at as many as 50 locations along a single axon.

The current work involves measurement of signals only within single mammalian neurons; the researchers are now working toward monitoring signaling among larger networks of nerve cells. Lieber says the devices could also eventually be configured to measure or detect neurotransmitters, the chemicals that leap synapses to carry electrical impulses from one neuron to another.

"This work could have a revolutionary impact on science and technology," Lieber says. "It provides a powerful new approach for neuroscience to study and manipulate signal propagation in neuronal networks ata level unmatched by other techniques; it provides a new paradigm for building sophisticated interfaces between the brain and external neural prosthetics; it represents a new, powerful, and flexible approach for real-time cellular assays useful for drug discovery and other applications; and it opens the possibility for hybrid circuits that couple the strengths of digital nanoelectronic and biological computing components."

Lieber's co-authors on the Science paper are Fernando Patolsky, Brian P. Timko, Guihua Yu, Ying Fang, Andrew B. Greytak, and Gengfeng Zheng, all of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Their work was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Applied Biosystems.

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/08.24/99-nanowire.html

[SeriousMoney]

8 planets... see! I knew I got that one right on my 5th grade science test, but Sister Mary Constellation marked it wrong anyway.

Never had what it takes to be teacher's pet.

[AKvetch]

Pluto gets the boot as the planet count drops
18:10 24 August 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Stephen Battersby, Prague



Our solar system now has eight bona fide planets and three "dwarf planets" (Illustration: NASA/JPL)It's official: Pluto is no longer a planet. It is now only a "dwarf planet", one of three in the solar system.

The fate of Pluto was determined on Thursday by a vote among members of the International Astronomical Union in Prague.

They approved an initial resolution that requires a "planet" to dominate its neighbourhood, clearing most other stuff out of its path. "Dwarf planets", on the other hand, are large enough for gravity to make them round, but not big enough to clear out their orbits.

The decision to demote Pluto was not even close. One amendment would have left its status open to debate by creating two categories of planets – the eight "classical planets" as well as "dwarf planets" – that might have seemed to be on equal footing. But it was voted down overwhelmingly.

Astro-lobbyists
"The scientific community has realised that the classification used for Pluto for 75 years was not correct" says Gonzalo Tancredi of the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Tancredi was part of the group who lobbied to change the original draft definition, which would have included Pluto as a planet and possibly hundreds more icy objects. "I'm pretty happy," Tancredi told New Scientist.

So where does that leave the solar system? There are eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Then there are three recognised dwarf planets: Pluto, Ceres (formerly an asteroid), and the largest dwarf, UB313, popularly known as Xena. Many more dwarf planets will follow. Most will be icy middleweight objects in the Kuiper Belt out beyond Neptune, and one or two may be asteroids.

Tricky issues
A crumb of comfort for Pluto fans is that it will now become the prototype of a new class of object. After some confusion, the IAU members passed resolution 6a, which means that all the dwarf planets beyond Neptune will be named after Pluto.

But resolution 6b, naming them "plutonian objects", did not quite gain an overall majority – so nobody knows what they will be called. The decision will probably be left to an internal IAU committee.

A few tricky issues in the first draft definition have been avoided. One contentious point was that Pluto and its companion Charon would have become a double planet. But that idea has been dropped. Charon remains a moon.

And all these definitions are intended only for our solar system, rather than planets everywhere. "I think one of the problems with the original proposal was that they tried to hard to make sure to define every single thing that might ever be found," says Mike Brown of Caltech, who discovered Xena.

Ambiguous systems
"It's OK if we find planetary systems where things are more ambiguous. In fact, it would be extremely exciting," he told New Scientist.

The resolutions were changing right up to the last minute. A proposal to change dwarf planet to "planetino" was rejected, but the wording was changed to recognise the existence of satellites, which had been carelessly ignored in the previous draft.

Astronomers could yet discover another full-fledged planet, maybe a Mars-sized ball of ice orbiting way beyond Pluto, and sharing its orbit with only much smaller snowballs.

"It's not out of the question," Mark Bailey, an astronomer at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, told New Scientist. But simulations of planet formation suggest that it is unlikely, so chances are that the final planet count for our solar system will be eight.

[SeriousMoney]

Must've missed that one...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-715301659292255462&q=Antikythera&hl=en

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/index.php?lang=en

[AKvetch]

The History Channel has done a program about this. Very interesting.

[SeriousMoney]

And you thought your computer was old...

Revealed: world's oldest computer
Helena Smith
Sunday August 20, 2006
The Observer

It looks like a heap of rubbish, feels like flaky pastry and has been linked to aliens. For decades, scientists have puzzled over the complex collection of cogs, wheels and dials seen as the most sophisticated object from antiquity, writes Helena Smith. But 102 years after the discovery of the calcium-encrusted bronze mechanism on the ocean floor, hidden inscriptions show that it is the world's oldest computer, used to map the motions of the sun, moon and planets.
'We're very close to unlocking the secrets,' says Xenophon Moussas,an astrophysicist with a Anglo-Greek team researching the device. 'It's like a puzzle concerning astronomical and mathematical knowledge.'

Known as the Antikythera mechanism and made before the birth of Christ, the instrument was found by sponge divers amid the wreckage of a cargo ship that sunk off the tiny island of Antikythera in 80BC. To date, no other appears to have survived.

'Bronze objects like these would have been recycled, but being in deep water it was out of reach of the scrap-man and we had the luck to discover it,' said Michael Wright, a former curator at London's Science Museum. He said the apparatus was the best proof yet of how technologically advanced the ancients were. 'The skill with which it was made shows a level of instrument-making not surpassed until the Renaissance. It really is the first hard evidence of their interest in mechanical gadgets, ability to make them and the preparedness of somebody to pay for them.'

For years scholars had surmised that the object was an astronomical showpiece, navigational instrument or rich man's toy. The Roman Cicero described the device as being for 'after-dinner entertainment'.

But many experts say it could change how the history of science is written. 'In many ways, it was the first analogue computer,' said Professor Theodosios Tassios of the National Technical University of Athens. 'It will change the way we look at the ancients' technological achievements.'

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1854509,00.html

[SeriousMoney]

Or maybe a brane...

http://feynman.physics.lsa.umich.edu/~mduff/talks/1988%20-%20The%20Membrane%20at%20the%20End%20of%20...

[SeriousMoney]

It looks like...

Naw, couldn't be!

[AKvetch]

At the top center, is that a flying saucer or a recessed ceiling light?

[SeriousMoney]

Makes ya kinda wonder what or who else might lie unnoticed in old photographs!

It was just a year ago that Cal-Tech scientist and planet hunter Mike Brown announced he had discovered a 10th planet,
larger than Pluto and nicknamed "Xena," by painstakingly reviewing pictures taken in 2003 by the 200-inch mirror of
Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin telescope -- images so far away they had not been seen before.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2006/08/23/news/top_stories/11_02_548_21_06.txt

[SeriousMoney]

NASA FINDS DIRECT PROOF OF DARK MATTER

NASA via BBSNews - 2006-08-21 -- Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

Galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 also known as the "bullet cluster."


These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision...

In galaxy clusters, the normal matter, like the atoms that make up the stars, planets, and everything on Earth, is primarily in the form of hot gas and stars. The mass of the hot gas between the galaxies is far greater than the mass of the stars in all of the galaxies. This normal matter is bound in the cluster by the gravity of an even greater mass of dark matter. Without dark matter, which is invisible and can only be detected through its gravity, the fast-moving galaxies and the hot gas would quickly fly apart...

The hot gas in this collision was slowed by a drag force, similar to air resistance. In contrast, the dark matter was not slowed by the impact, because it does not interact directly with itself or the gas except through gravity. This produced the separation of the dark and normal matter seen in the data. If hot gas was the most massive component in the clusters, as proposed by alternative gravity theories, such a separation would not have been seen. Instead, dark matter is required...

http://bbsnews.net/article.php/20060821225730115

[SeriousMoney]

Dark Matter: Strong Gravitational Lensing

http://www.lsst.org/Science/fs_darkmatter.shtml

[AKvetch]

"Dark matter" is real, scientists say
Tue Aug 22, 2006 2:46 PM ET
By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) - A team of U.S. scientists has found the first direct evidence of the existence of "dark matter," a little-understood substance with a huge influence on gravity, the team's leader said on Tuesday.

Scientists still do not know what exactly dark matter is, but have theorized it must exist to account for the amount of gravity needed to hold the universe together.

They estimate that the substance accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the matter in the universe. The more familiar kind of matter, which can be seen and felt, makes up the rest.

Now researchers led by University of Arizona astronomer Doug Clowe say they have evidence to back up their theories.

Using orbiting telescopes, the researchers watched two giant gas clouds in outer space collide over a 100-hour period. As the clouds clashed, they said, the visible gas particles slowed, pulling away from the invisible dark matter particles.

The researchers said they could detect the dark matter particles by their gravitational pull on the surrounding visible particles.

"This is the first time we've been able to show that (dark matter) has to be out there, that you can't explain it away," Clowe told Reuters. "We haven't actually been able to see the dark matter particles themselves, but what we have been able to do is ... image the gravity that they're generating."

Some skeptics have argued that dark matter does not exist.

They assert that scientists err in assuming that gravity exerts the same pull whether holding a plate on a table or influencing the travel of stars. Revising the laws of gravity at the interstellar scale would better explain the universe's structure, they argue.

'STRONGEST EVIDENCE'

The research team also included scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and used telescopes operated by NASA.

Their research is scheduled to be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Rachel Bean, a professor at Cornell University who specializes in dark matter and was not involved in the research, called the results convincing.

"It is certainly the strongest evidence we've seen to date that actually solves this dark-matter problem," Bean said.

She said the finding should encourage scientists to concentrate their efforts on determining what dark matter is, rather than developing revised rules of gravity.

"It's very difficult to explain these observations with anything other than particle theory," Bean said. "The dark matter quandary to some extent is helped by these observations, because it helps target the theorists to try and look at particle physics, rather than gravity."

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-08-22T184622Z_01_N22251...

[SeriousMoney]

http://www.edge.org/

[SeriousMoney]

Why Darwin Matters
The Case Against Intelligent Design
Michael Shermer

None writes so fiercely in defense of evolution as Shermer, a Scientific American columnist and founder and director of the Skeptics Society. With the sustained indignation of a former creationist, Shermer is savage about the shortcomings of intelligent design and eloquent about the spirituality of science. In "Why Darwin Matters," he has assembled an invaluable primer for anyone caught up in an argument with a well-intentioned intelligent design advocate.



A creationist-turned-scientist demonstrates the facts of evolution and exposes Intelligent Design’s real agenda

Science is on the defensive. Half of Americans reject the theory of evolution and “Intelligent Design” campaigns are gaining ground. Classroom by classroom, creationism is overthrowing biology.

In Why Darwin Matters, bestselling author Michael Shermer explains how the newest brand of creationism appeals to our predisposition to look for a designer behind life’s complexity. Shermer decodes the scientific evidence to show that evolution is not “just a theory” and illustrates how it achieves the design of life through the bottom-up process of natural selection. Shermer, once an evangelical Christian and a creationist, argues that Intelligent Design proponents are invoking a combination of bad science, political antipathy, and flawed theology. He refutes their pseudoscientific arguments and then demonstrates why conservatives and people of faith can and should embrace evolution. He then appraises the evolutionary questions that truly need to be settled, building a powerful argument for science itself.

Cutting the politics away from the facts, Why Darwin Matters is an incisive examination of what is at stake in the debate over evolution.

Published August, 2006 by Holt & Company, Henry, Hardcover, 224 Pages, ISBN 0805081216, List Price $0.00 http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&endeca=1&isbn=0805081216&...

[AKvetch]

Why doesn't America believe in evolution?
09:00 20 August 2006
From New Scientist Print Edition. Jeff Hecht

Public acceptance of evolutionHuman beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.



Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."

Miller's report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. "We don't seem to be going in the right direction," Miller says.

There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. "That is a group of people that can be reached," says Scott.

The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.

Ironically, the separation of church and state laid down in the US constitution contributes to the tension. In Catholic schools, both evolution and the strict biblical version of human beginnings can be taught. A court ban on teaching creationism in public schools, however, means pupils can only be taught evolution, which angers fundamentalists, and triggers local battles over evolution.

These battles can take place because the US lacks a national curriculum of the sort common in European countries. However, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind act is instituting standards for science teaching, and the battles of what they should be has now spread to the state level.

Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don't agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9786-why-doesnt-america-believe-in-evolution.html

[SeriousMoney]

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds...

http://www.becominghuman.org/

[AKvetch]

Xena's now a planet
August 16, 2006 - 12:34PM


Planet name inspiration? ... Xena Warrior Princess

Astronomers, hold on to your telescopes.

The solar system has 12 planets, not nine.

That's the earthshaking conclusion of an influential international committee, which on Wednesday will recommend a new definition of what qualifies as a planet.

The change is necessary, experts say, because of discoveries in the past decade that have revealed a glut of Pluto-sized bodies beyond the orbit of Pluto - until now considered the farthest planet from the sun.

Those findings sparked an intense debate among planet-watchers: Should the new worlds be welcomed as planets, or was it a mistake to call tiny Pluto a planet in the first place?

Now there's an answer that just might satisfy Pluto-boosters and Pluto-phobes alike.

A seven member panel of astronomers, historians and one science writer gathered in Paris last month under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union to settle the question. After a sleepless night, they agreed on a simple yet revolutionary approach to the problem.

A planet, they decreed, is any star-orbiting object so large that its own gravity pulls in its rough edges, producing a near-perfect sphere.

That definition excludes 200,000 small, odd-shaped rocks, comets and asteroids that wander around the sun.

It also means Pluto remains a planet.

But the new definition also includes three other big space rocks, including one currently considered an asteroid and another long described as a moon of Pluto.

Also to be included is an icy body beyond Pluto, which would belong to a class of planets to be known as "plutons".

"In a day and a half of hammering it out, we came up with this unanimous recommendation," said Owen Gingerich, chairman of the IAU's "planet definition committee" and an emeritus historian of astronomy at Harvard University.

Because planet-seekers are finding new worlds beyond Pluto at a steady clip, the list of newly defined planets could grow well beyond 12 - perhaps dozens more worlds await.

Astronomers from around the world are scheduled to vote on the new definition on August 24 at the IAU's meeting in Prague. It would constitute the first official recognition of new planets since Pluto's discovery in 1930.

Gingerich said he has already received backing from 10 of the group's division chairmen. Although there's nothing binding about the coming vote, the IAU is considered the world's authoritative source on the naming of heavenly bodies.

The proposed planet definition got an endorsement from an unlikely source - Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who has argued that Pluto is not in the same class as the other eight "classical" planets. He said although there were other good definitions that would have left Pluto out, he supports the new proposal because it offers the first clear standard of planethood.

"What a planet is has never been defined, not since 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece," Tyson said. "Provided this definition is unambiguous, I'll take it."

Tyson said the requirement of roundness gives a tidy standard. Objects typically do not have enough mass for gravity to pull them into spheres unless they are at least 500 miles (804 km) across.

"By and large, these things are either round or not round - they're not sort of round," Tyson said.

Finding a solution to the "Pluto problem" has proven a surprisingly emotional task for the staid astronomical profession.

One of the most prominent volleys in the dispute came in 2000, when Tyson's planetarium banished Pluto from a display of the planets. One reason for the snub was that with a diameter of about 2,200 km, Pluto is smaller than Earth's moon, and is unlike the gas giants that dominate the rest of the outer solar system. Efforts to demote Pluto brought ire from a public that had grown attached to the minuscule yet plucky planet.

Some experts floated the idea that nothing smaller than Mercury should be called a planet. But that seemed arbitrary, and no better than keeping Pluto's status solely out of sentiment.

Members of the IAU committee kept their deliberations and conclusion under close wraps over the past month.

Richard Binzel, a committee member and asteroid specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared the decision to white smoke emerging from the Vatican upon selection of a new pope.

Binzel said that after a discouraging first day of deliberations, the members were surprised to find a definition that appealed to all of them.

"We want this definition to apply not only in our solar system, but in other solar systems as well," Binzel said.

The three new planets encompassed by the group's definition would be the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's moon Charon and an object beyond Pluto called 2003 UB313, unofficially known as Xena.

For Ceres, it would be a belated promotion. By far the largest asteroid at 933 km across, Ceres actually was called a planet when first discovered in 1801. But further findings of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter led astronomers to class it with those smaller objects. A study last year of Hubble Space Telescope images proved that Ceres is round, placing it within the new definition.

Although Charon is called Pluto's moon, it was included in the new planet definition because many astronomers believe the two worlds comprise a "double planet" system.

Pluto and Charon orbit each other, and their common centre of gravity lies outside Pluto, unlike any other planet-moon system.

The existence of Xena was announced last year by Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, who also served on the IAU committee. Hubble Space Telescope images have shown the object is at least as big as Pluto. Brown and other experts believe there may be dozens of such worlds in an area called the Kuiper Belt.

That doesn't mean schoolchildren need to ditch reliable old mnemonics for the planets' names and order - such as My Very Earnest Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. Gingerich said that although our definition of a planet may expand, the solar system still is dominated by the eight largest planets.

"I'd suggest (students) focus on the classical eight planets, plus this category of plutons," Gingerich said.

Tyson believes the great planetary debate has distracted from teaching about the origins of the solar system.

[SeriousMoney]

Xena, tell me it ain't so!

Persephone is the most frequently-suggested name for a tenth planet. The major planets are, by tradition, named after Greco-Roman gods; in Greco-Roman mythology Roman Pluto corresponds to Greek Hades, and Persephone is Hades' wife, held in the darkness of the underworld, hence hers is thought an appropriate name for the 10th planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_planet

"Xena is about to undergo the worst case of global warming of any planet in the solar system," Brown said. "The change will be equivalent to Earth's heating up to an average temperature of 400 degrees - but then the cycle will repeat and Xena will get cold again." http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Xena_Poses_A_Bright_Mystery.html

[AKvetch]

Claims that 2003 UB313 has been officially named 'Xena' or 'Lila' are incorrect; 'Xena' is an informal codename used by its discoverers among themselves, and 'Lila' is a name in the address of the website where the object was announced, after the newly-born daughter of one of the discoverers. Neither name was submitted to the IAU.

Good article and more links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_UB313

[SeriousMoney]

Xena, you go girl!

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4789531.stm

[AKvetch]

Astronomers will convene this month to consider dropping Pluto from planets’ ranks.

By MATT STEARNS
The Star’s Washington correspondent
Posted on Sun, Aug. 13, 2006

WASHINGTON | In articles about his life, they always called Clyde Tombaugh “a Kansas farm boy,” as if to draw sharp contrast with the cosmic magnitude of his signature achievement.

Discovering a planet, after all, is a rare distinction. There are, most schoolchildren will tell you, only nine in our solar system.

But soon, there could be eight: Pluto, that Kansas farm boy’s best-known scientific contribution, faces demotion.

At a conference in Prague, Czech Republic, later this month, the International Astronomical Union, which oversees such matters, is scheduled to consider a resolution that defines a planet.

Driven largely by controversy over the status of Pluto, which doesn’t share several key attributes of the solar system’s eight other planets, the resolution could mean Pluto’s dismissal from that select group.

Instead, it could become one of thousands of small, icy objects in the decidedly less glamorous Kuiper Belt, just beyond Neptune.

The alternative being considered by the astronomers is to maintain Pluto’s planetary credentials — but that would potentially open the door to dozens more planets. Some objects in the Kuiper Belt are bigger than Pluto.

“This is such a hot issue,” said Steve Maran, author of Astronomy for Dummies. “They (usually) never rule on things like this. … There’s a lot more to it than science.”

The committee writing the resolution has worked in secret. Few people know what it will recommend. Those who know aren’t talking, even to longtime colleagues in the small world of big-time astronomy. Egos are involved. Some say U.S. jingoism has raised its head (Pluto is the only one of the nine planets discovered by an American). And there’s no guarantee that the conference will accept the resolution, whatever it is.

From a purely scientific perspective, downgrading Pluto is no big deal, said Daniel Green of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

“All through history, we’ve changed the number of planets,” Green said. “There used to be only seven planets. People thought the sun and the moon were planets and the Earth wasn’t. Things change.”

Tombaugh’s tale

The last time things changed this much was Feb. 18, 1930.

That’s the day Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., discovered Pluto by examining hundreds of thousands of tiny stars on photos of the sky taken with a powerful telescope on consecutive nights.

He was 24 at the time, no college education, low man on the totem pole at the observatory. The heavens had obsessed him for most of his life. He even made his own high-powered telescopes at the family farm north of the western Kansas town of Burdett, grinding glass for them in a root cellar that provided perfect temperatures for such delicate work.

“Many a time I have got up, long after midnight and there he would be, out with his telescope, even after a long hard day’s work plowing or in harvest,” Tombaugh’s mother told The Kansas City Star after her son’s discovery. “I would call to him to come in and go to bed. … But he’d be out there till daylight came and the stars faded out.”

Tombaugh used his homemade telescopes to map planetary movements and sent his best work to Lowell Observatory, whose search for a new planet fired his imagination. A job offer followed, and Tombaugh stayed on the farm just long enough to earn money to buy a one-way train ticket to Flagstaff.

“There are 15 million stars in the sky as bright or brighter than Pluto, 15 million,” Tombaugh told National Public Radio in 1995, two years before his death at age 90. “I had to pick one image out of the 15 million. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and that’s what most people aren’t willing to do; it’s brutal.

“But I knew that if I didn’t do this job they’d send me back home. And this is much better than pitching hay.”

The discovery made Tombaugh a celebrity and won him a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He worked summers on the family farm while studying astronomy, then spent decades gazing at the stars, teaching his passion, and making a series of important, if less celebrated, scientific contributions.

“Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That made him famous,” said Reta Beebe, an astronomy professor at New Mexico State University, where Tombaugh did much of his work. “The science he did was the search for others, the huge grunt work that he did.”

The controversy

Virtually since its discovery, questions have dogged Pluto. It just wasn’t like the other planets: Too small. Erratic orbit. Not enough of a rocky center.

Generations of schoolchildren labored to memorize the names of nine planets. Yet many scholars questioned Pluto’s inclusion in the Big Nine; “a propaganda effort by the Lowell Observatory,” Green said.

In 2000, the Hayden Planetarium in New York City opened a new solar system exhibit. Conspicuously missing among the planets: Pluto. An argument that had engulfed scientific circles exploded into public view.

“My files are overfilled with hate mail from elementary students,” said Neil deGrasse Tyson, the planetarium’s director, who called Pluto “a vagabond of the solar system.”

The arguments for keeping Pluto as a planet: It is a large, round object that orbits the sun. It has an atmosphere. It has moons.

“It just fits into the bag of being a planet better,” said Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. “We know enough to know it’s not just an inert ball of ice.”

Then there’s the cultural argument: After 76 years, people are used to it.

“I’ve never heard of anyone who’s not a scientist who thinks Pluto is not a planet,” Maran said. “It comes down to who owns Pluto?”

Certainly, the schoolchildren of America feel a kinship to the tiny, distant planet that shares a name with a much-loved Disney character.

“If you give an assignment to pick a planet, there’s always a fight over Pluto,” said Brenda Beecher, a former science teacher in Burdett, where a marker along Kansas 156 outside town commemorates Tombaugh’s achievement.

In Burdett, population about 250, they use the Tombaugh connection even today to teach youngsters to dream big, that “they can do something worldwide if they want,” Beecher said.

Pint-size lobbyists are working the highest levels, but science and sentiment are rare bedfellows.

“My niece said to me, ‘Are you going to demote Pluto?’ ” said Robert Williams, a vice president of the International Astronomical Union who is deeply involved in the deliberations on Pluto. “If that’s the way it is, that’s what we do. It’s not written in stone anywhere there’s got to be a numerable number of planets. If it upsets schoolchildren, I regret that.”

And what of the legacy of Tombaugh, whose life story reads like Frank Capra and Horatio Alger conspired to concoct the most sepia-toned of unlikely tales?

Annette Tombaugh-Sitze, his daughter, said Tombaugh always was bothered by questions about Pluto’s status. But she’s sure he’s having the last laugh: His ashes are aboard a research spaceship hurtling toward Pluto, his majestic discovery. Whatever it is.

“Dad’s on a great adventure,” she said.


http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/15261363.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

[SeriousMoney]

A case for extraterrestrial life

A two-year survey of enormous interstellar dust clouds has turned up eight organic molecules in two different regions of space. One is a stellar nursery awash in light while the other is a cold, starless void.

The finding, detailed in the current issue of Astrophysical Journal, supports other recent studies suggesting molecules important for life commonly form in the gas and dust clouds that condense to form stars and planets.

Taken together, the findings suggest that the chemical ingredients necessary for life began taking shape long before our planet was formed.

Many scientists now accept the notion that ancient meteorites and comets helped jumpstart life on our planet by bringing a significant amount of water, organic molecules and even amino acids to early Earth.

Scientists now think those imprisoned organic molecules were likely created in the massive dust and gas clouds that eventually coalesced into planets and stars, comets and meteorites. Dust clouds are thought to form when events such as novas and supernovas caused chemical elements and molecules created during thermonuclear reactions inside stars to be ejected into space.

http://space.com/scienceastronomy/060808_st_life_molecules.html

[AKvetch]

That clears things up, or does it?

[SeriousMoney]

Laws of nature
By Robert Lee Hotz
July 30, 2006

A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin sparked a scientific revolution. Now that revolution has become a culture war. But does the concept of “intelligent design” have validity as an alternative to evolution? Three new books look beyond the rhetoric.

The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
David Quammen
Atlas Books/W.W. Norton: 304 pp., $22.95

Intelligent Thought
Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Edited by John Brockman
Vintage: 258 pp., $14 paper

Why Darwin Matters
The Case Against Intelligent Design
Michael Shermer
Times Books/Henry Holt: 202 pp., $22

In the border war between science and faith, the doctrine of "intelligent design" is a sly subterfuge — a marzipan confection of an idea presented in the shape of something more substantial.

As many now understand — and as a federal court ruled in December — intelligent design is the bait on the barbed hook of creationist belief, intended to sidestep legal restrictions on the teaching of religion in public-school science classes. The problem is not its underlying theology — a matter properly left to individual religious belief — but its disingenuous masquerade as a form of legitimate scientific inquiry.

Proponents of intelligent design argue that the diversity of life can be explained best by a guiding intelligence — be it a supreme deity or a space alien — not the undirected action of evolution and natural selection. By the tenets of intelligent design, life in the universe is simply too complex to have happened by accident. Supporters argue that theirs is a scientific theory that can be tested through experiments, like other scientific ideas. The systematic campaign to make intelligent design part of school curriculums as a scientific alternative to the teaching of evolution has triggered dozens of legal and legislative disputes in 31 states, including California.

Until recently, however, those scientists most qualified to defend evolutionary biology were strangely reluctant to confront these dissenters publicly. Now, in three quite different books — a collection of essays, a biography of Charles Darwin's intellectual life and a debunker's guide to the debate — some of the nation's most distinguished thinkers step forward as expert witnesses to challenge the ruse of intelligent design directly.

Taken together, these works are essential reading for anyone who sincerely wants to "teach the controversy" as intelligent design advocates so often urge — or to understand its dishonesty. As distillations of the best thinking on this ploy, they ought to be required reading for every high school science teacher and school board member in America.

In exploring the shortcomings of intelligent design, these writers also highlight a broader struggle over the evidence of existence that is as old as science and revealed religion.

Simply put, Darwin documented the transformational power of sex and death. The struggle to survive and reproduce is the natural engine of variation, he determined. In any species, more are often born than can survive. Even a slight hereditary advantage may favor one over the other. Those who survive will pass their competitive edge on to their offspring. In this way, limbs could become wings and, in 3 billion or 4 billion years, microbes could evolve into men.

Modern evolutionary biology emphasizes the underlying unity of life, as amply documented in the genetic code shared by all organisms, which genome mapper and evangelical Christian Francis Collins has called "the language in which God created life."

For those seeking faith-based alternatives to Darwin, however, evolutionary theory commits an unforgivable affront, these authors write. It unseats humanity as master of a divine creation. With its emphasis on the mechanism of natural selection, it puts people on equal biological footing with barnacles and baboons.

"[L]et's be clear: This is not evolution versus God," writes David Quammen in "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution." "The existence of God — any sort of god, personal or abstract, immanent or distant — is not what Darwin's evolutionary theory challenges. What it challenges is the supposed godliness of Man — the conviction that we above all other life forms are spiritually elevated, divinely favored, possessed of an immaterial and immortal essence, such that we have special prospects for eternity, special status in the expectations of God, special rights and responsibilities on Earth."

Quammen does not flinch from "the horrible challenge" implied by Darwin's idea: "In plain language, a soul or no soul? An afterlife or not? Are humans spiritually immortal in a way that chickens or cows are not, or just another form of temporarily animated meat?"

Many religious groups have accommodated the insights of evolution as an explanation of the natural world no different than findings from astronomy, medicine or meteorology, without losing faith in a divine will — reinterpreting religious texts in line with modern scientific findings. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Catholics and mainstream Protestants all have their own nuanced theological responses to evolutionary theory.

By some measures, half of all Americans still reject the theory of evolution. Some simply don't know the difference between an opinion, a belief, a hypothesis and a formal scientific theory. But for others, the theory of evolution prompts a genuine crisis of faith.

Seventy percent of evangelical Christians believe that living things have always existed in their current form, compared with 32% of mainline Protestants and 31% of Catholics, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Intelligent design is a uniquely American phenomenon, but only one of at least eight variations of the creationist idea, explains Michael Shermer in "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design."

Fundamentalist proponents of intelligent design, however, make no broad claim for classroom equality on behalf of all religions because, they insist to the general public, theirs is not a faith-based initiative but "a scientific dissent from Darwinism." But as evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne at the University of Chicago notes, one of intelligent design's leading proponents, William A. Dembski, undermines that objective stance: "[A]ny view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient." He quotes from Dembski's book "Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology."

Indeed, the effort to inject intelligent design into science classrooms is an attempt to narrow the common ground of a secular society, writes science publishing impresario John Brockman, who commissioned a collection of essays called "Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement." "[R]eligious fundamentalism is on the rise around the world, and our own virulent domestic version of it, under the rubric of 'intelligent design,' by elbowing its way into the classroom abrogates the divide between church and state that has served this country so well for so long."

In "Intelligent Thought," Brockman persuaded 16 distinguished scientists to address the controversy from the pulpit of their technical expertise. The assembled are knowledgeable, humane and deeply passionate about science as a way of knowing the world around us. The result is a teaching moment that encompasses all the ages of the Earth.

Evolutionary biologist Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago writes of the way living things emerged from the seas and describes the recently discovered fossil specimen of that first terrestrial explorer. Paleontologist Tim D. White of UC Berkeley lays out the forensic evidence of pre-human descent. Nicholas Humphrey, a professor at the Center for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, muses on how natural selection might have produced human consciousness. Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker holds forth on the evolution of ethics. Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser discusses the proper role of evolution in the science curriculum.

Several essayists worry that the passions stirred by the intelligent design debate go well beyond the natural tension between science and religion. They suspect that baser political motives are at work in a strategy crafted to discredit science itself as an independent auditor of political claims about global warming, stem-cell research, pollution and high-tech military systems.

"Whether or not evolution is compatible with faith, science and religion represent two extremely different worldviews, which, if they coexist at all, do so most uncomfortably," writes Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind in "Intelligent Thought." "Today, in the United States, science and religion are in an angrier struggle than at any time within living memory. In itself, an intellectual battle of ideas is not at all a bad thing. But what I and many other people find deeply disturbing are the mechanisms that drive the conflict. It seems that both sides are pawns in a bigger game, a game of politics and power."

Tufts University philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, however, has no patience with conspiracy theory. The intelligent design movement is simply a "hoax," he writes. Although its proponents claim that theirs is a scientific endeavor, they so far have produced "no experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding; no observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking."

What they offer instead is a glib debater's ploy: "First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work, provoking an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence there is a 'controversy' to teach," Dennett writes. "You can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point amid all the difficult details."

None writes so fiercely in defense of evolution as Shermer, a Scientific American columnist and founder and director of the Skeptics Society. With the sustained indignation of a former creationist, Shermer is savage about the shortcomings of intelligent design and eloquent about the spirituality of science. In "Why Darwin Matters," he has assembled an invaluable primer for anyone caught up in an argument with a well-intentioned intelligent design advocate.

"Christians should embrace modern science for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity in a depth and detail unmatched by ancient texts," Shermer writes. "In contrast, Intelligent Design creationism reduces God to an artificer, a mere watchmaker piecing together life out of available parts in a cosmic warehouse."

Surely, the most persuasive case for evolution arises from the example of Darwin's own struggle with the implications of the undirected but efficient process of life he had uncovered — for Darwin himself began as a proponent of intelligent design.

Award-winning science writer Quammen brilliantly and powerfully re-creates the 19th century naturalist's intellectual and spiritual journey in "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin," which was conceived as a popular companion to more scholarly volumes on Darwin's life.

As Quammen so ably documents, Darwin clearly understood the challenge that natural selection posed to the conventional Victorian Christian faith that sustained his friends and family. No one was more reluctant to espouse it publicly or more distressed by its implications. Indeed, it steadily undermined his own belief in God, drove a wedge in his marriage and nearly broke his health. He brooded privately over his findings for 21 years before making them public.

Yet he finally embraced his brainchild, impelled by an unflinching intellectual honesty, the weight of the evidence and the imperative of an undeniable idea. "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection," Darwin wrote, "than in the course which the wind blows."

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-hotz30jul30,0,3271158.htmlstory?coll=cl-bookrevie...

[SeriousMoney]

Visualising invisibility
physorg.com, July 31, 2006

Invisibility has been an ingredient of myths, novels and films for millennia – from Perseus versus Medusa in Greek legend to James Bond’s latest car and Harry Potter’s cloak. A new study published today by the Institute of Physics reveals that invisibility is closer than we think.

The paper, Notes on conformal invisibility devices, published in the New Journal of Physics describes the physics of several theoretical devices that could create the ultimate illusion – invisibility.

“Objects are visible because they reflect light rays” says author Dr Ulf Leonhardt at St Andrews University, Scotland. “To be invisible, an object would have to let light pass through it, like H. G. Well’s Invisible Man. Alternatively light would have to bend around an object for it to be invisible. The ideas in this paper are based around devices that will bend light or radio waves around a hole inside the device. Any object placed inside the hole will become invisible. The light would flow round the hole like water around an obstacle.”

The bending of light is the cause of many optical illusions, such as mirages in the desert. Light bends in the hotter air near the ground in the desert and this causes a reflection of the sky on the ground – a mirage.

Dr Leonhardt went on to say “The devices work by bending light, as in a mirage. However, a mirage involves the reflection of light which produces the shiny image that can be seen: an invisibility device bends light without producing an image. To do this, the devices must have carefully designed refractive index profiles. The paper explains the physics and mathematics behind the devices using images rather than complex equations: it visualizes invisibility.”

The refractive index is a measure of the optical length that light has to travel in a medium: the higher the refractive index, the longer the optical path is to the light ray. Light rays bend when the refractive index of the medium they are travelling through varies. According to Fermat’s Principle of optical paths, light will follow the shortest optical path length. In the case of the mirage, air closer to the desert ground is hotter and has a lower refractive index than the cooler air higher up. Therefore light bends close to the desert floor in order to stay in the lower refractive index region.

Dr Leonhardt added “The next step is actually making one of these theoretical devices. There are advances being made in metamaterials that mean the first devices will probably be used for bending radar waves or the electromagnetic waves used by mobile phones. Such devices may be useful in wireless technology, for instance in protecting sensitive electronics from mobile-phone radiation in airplanes. After these have been developed, it is possible that devices that work for visible light are not too far behind.”

Abstract link: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1367-2630/8/7/118
Source: Institute of Physics
http://www.physorg.com/news73577617.html

[SeriousMoney]

Mysterious quasar casts doubt on black holes
18:21 27 July 2006
NewScientist.com news service
David Shiga



The hole in the disc of matter in quasar Q0957+561 shown in this artist's impression could be the sign of an exotic compact object called a MECO (Image: Christine Pulliam/CfA)A controversial alternative to black hole theory has been bolstered by observations of an object in the distant universe, researchers say. If their interpretation is correct, it might mean black holes do not exist and are in fact bizarre and compact balls of plasma called MECOs.

Rudolph Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, led a team that observed a quasar situated 9 billion light years from Earth. A quasar is a very bright, compact object, whose radiation is usually thought to be generated by a giant black hole devouring its surrounding matter.

A rare cosmological coincidence allowed Schild and his colleagues to probe the structure of the quasar in much finer detail than is normally possible. Those details suggest that the central object is not a black hole. "The structure of the quasar is not at all what had been theorised," Schild told New Scientist.

A black hole, as traditionally understood, is an object with such a powerful gravitational field that even light is not fast enough to escape it. Anything that gets within a certain distance of the black hole's centre, called the event horizon, will be trapped.

A well accepted property of black holes is that they cannot sustain a magnetic field of their own. But observations of quasar Q0957+561 indicate that the object powering it does have a magnetic field, Schild's team says. For this reason, they believe that rather than a black hole, this quasar contains something called a magnetospheric eternally collapsing object (MECO). If so, it would be best evidence yet for such an object.

Flickering clues

The researchers used gravitational lensing to make their close observation of the quasar. This technique exploits rare coincidences that can occur when a galaxy sits directly between a distant object and observers on Earth.

The gravity of the intervening galaxy acts like a lens. As the intervening galaxy's individual stars pass in front of the quasar, this bending varies, making the quasar appear to flicker.

Carefully scrutinising this flickering allowed the researchers to probe fine details of the quasar's structure that are normally far too small to be resolved by even the most powerful telescopes.

Magnetic sweep

The researchers found that the disc of material surrounding the central object has a hole in it with a width of about 4000 Astronomical Units (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). This gap suggests that material has been swept out by magnetic forces from the central object, the researchers say, and must therefore be a MECO, not a black hole.

"I believe this is the first evidence that the whole black hole paradigm is incorrect," says Darryl Leiter of the Marwood Astrophysics Research Center in Charottesville, Virginia, US, who co-authored the study. He says that where astronomers think they see black holes, they are actually looking at MECOs.

According to the MECO theory, objects in our universe can never actually collapse to form black holes. When an object gets very dense and hot, subatomic particles start popping in and out of existence inside it in huge numbers, producing copious amounts of radiation. Outward pressure from this radiation halts the collapse so the object remains a hot ball of plasma rather than becoming a black hole.

Extremely complex

But Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, in College Park, US, says the evidence for a MECO inside this quasar is not convincing. The apparent hole in the disc could be filled with very hot, tenuous gas, which would not radiate much and would be hard to see, he says. "Especially if you're looking with an optical telescope, which is how these observations were made, you wouldn't see that gas at all," he told New Scientist.

Leiter says this scenario would leave other things unexplained, however. The observations show that a small ring at the inner edge of the disc is glowing, which is a sign that it has been heated by a strong magnetic field, he says. In Reynolds's scenario, one would expect a much broader section of the disc to be heated, he says.

In any case, says Reynolds, it is difficult to draw conclusions from the team's detailed comparisons of their observations with models of black holes because those models are far from definitive. "We know the accretion of gas into black holes is an extremely complex phenomenon," he says. "We don’t know precisely what that would look like."

"It would be truly exciting if there was compelling evidence found for a non-black-hole object in these quasars," Reynolds adds. "I just don't think that this fits."

Journal reference: The Astronomical Journal (vol 132, p 420)

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn9620-mysterious-quasar-casts-doubt-on-black-holes.html

[SeriousMoney]

"In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?" -Stephen Hawking

Any of you genii or savants out there got an answer for Stephen? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060704195516AAnrdOD

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060707/people_hawking.html?.v=6

[SeriousMoney]

Kurzweil is also optimistic about radical life extension. "I expect that within 15 years, we'll be adding more than a year each year to remaining life expectancy. So my advice is: take care of yourself the old-fashioned way for a while longer and you may get to experience the remarkable century ahead."

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D5644

[SeriousMoney]

According to Ray Kurzweil & his law of accelerating returns, Hawkings may be behind the curve, so to speak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Accelerating_Returns

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

[cosmoworld7]

read that article yesterday, was an interesting read but I think Hawkings is a bit too eager and his estimates are too ambitions. What did you think?

[SeriousMoney]

Hawking: Humans Must Spread Out in Space
HONG KONG, Jun. 14, 2006

(AP) The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture Thursday were sold out.

Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist _ author of the global best-seller "A Brief History of Time" _ uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

One of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation, Hawking has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.

However, Alan Guth, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Hawking's latest observations were something of a departure from his usual research and more applicable to survival over the long-term.

"It is a new area for him to look at," Guth said. "If he's talking about the next 100 years and beyond, it does make sense to think about space as the ultimate lifeboat."

But, he added, "I don't see the likely possibility within the next 50 years of science technology making it easier to survive on Mars and on the moon than it would be to survive on earth."

"I would still think that an underground base, for example in Antarctica, would be easier to build than building on the moon," Guth said.

Joshua Winn, an astrophysicist at MIT, agreed. "The prospect of colonizing other planets is very far off, you must realize," he said.

Hawking's "work has been highly theoretical physics, not in astrophysics or global politics or anything like that," Winn added. "He is certainly stepping outside his research domain."

Hawking's comments Tuesday were reminiscent of the work of American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Sagan, a Cornell University professor and NASA-decorated scientist who died in 1996, noted that organic molecules, the kind that life on Earth is dependent on, appear to be almost everywhere in the solar system.

Sagan played a leading role in the U.S. space program, helping design robotic missions and contributing to the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo expeditions.

But his work also focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins, ideas popularized in his best-selling 1985 novel, "Contact," which was made into a film starring Jodie Foster.

At Tuesday's news conference, Hawking said he too was venturing into the world of fiction. He plans to team up with his daughter, 35-year-old journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking, to write a children's book about the universe aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.

"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," said Lucy Hawking. They did not provide further details.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D5634

[AKvetch]

UFO study finds no sign of aliens
Mark Simpson
BBC News

[Note: short video accessed through link below]

The 400-page report was kept secret for six years

A confidential Ministry of Defence report on Unidentified Flying Objects has concluded that there is no proof of alien life forms.

In spite of the secrecy surrounding the UFO study, it seems citizens of planet Earth have little to worry about.

The report, which was completed in 2000 and stamped "Secret: UK Eyes Only", has been made public for the first time.

Only a small number of copies were produced and the identity of the man who wrote it has been protected.

His findings were only made public thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, after a request by Sheffield Hallam University academic Dr David Clarke.

The four-year study - entitled Unidentified Aerial Phenomena in the UK - tackles the long-running question by UFO-spotters: "Is anyone out there?"

The answer, it seems, is "no".

The 400-page report puts it like this: "No evidence exists to suggest that the phenomena seen are hostile or under any type of control, other than that of natural physical forces."

It adds: "There is no evidence that 'solid' objects exist which could cause a collision hazard."

So if there are no such things as little green men in spaceships or flying saucers, why have so many people reported seeing them?

Well, here is the science bit.

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

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

"They appear to originate due to more than one set of weather and electrically-charged conditions and are observed so infrequently as to make them unique to the majority of observers."

People who claim to have had a "close encounter" are often difficult to persuade that they did not really see what they thought they saw. The report offers a possible medical explanation.

"The close proximity of plasma related fields can adversely affect a vehicle or person," states the report.

"Local fields of this type have been medically proven to cause responses in the temporal lobes of the human brain. These result in the observer sustaining (and later describing and retaining) his or her own vivid, but mainly incorrect, description of what is experienced."

There are, of course, other causes of UFOs - aeroplanes with particularly bright lights, stray odd-shaped balloons and strange flocks of birds, to name but a few.

Yet, it will be difficult to convince everyone that there is a rational explanation for all mysterious movements in the sky.

Some UFO-spotters believe governments will always cover up the truth about UFOs, because they are afraid of admitting that there is something beyond their control.

It is not clear how much time and effort the MoD has spent looking at the skies in recent years, but it appears there are no plans for an in-depth UFO report like the one written in 2000.

A MoD spokesperson said: "Both this study and the original "Flying Saucer Working Party" [already in public domain in the national Archives] concluded that there is insufficient evidence to indicate the presence of any genuine unidentified aerial phenomena.

"It is unlikely that we would carry out any future studies unless such evidence were to emerge."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/4981720.stm

Published: 2006/05/07 12:35:27 GMT

[SeriousMoney]

Maybe they should use loonies, and save a few cents (sense)!

[AKvetch]

NASA Announces Plan To Launch $700 Million Into Space
May 3, 2006 | Issue 42•18

CAPE CANAVERAL, FL—Officials at the Kennedy Space Center announced Tuesday that they have set Aug. 6 as the date for launching $700 million from the Denarius IV spacecraft, the largest and most expensive mission to date in NASA's unmanned monetary-ejection program.



"This is an exciting opportunity to study the effect of a hard-vacuum, zero-gravity environment on $50 and $100 bills," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who noted that prior Project Denarius missions only studied space's effect on fives and singles. "Whether the money is immediately incinerated because of hard radiation, or freezes in the near-absolute-zero temperature and shatters into infinitesimal pieces, or drifts aimlessly through the cosmos before being sucked through a black hole into another dimension, it will provide crucial information for our next series of launches, which will consist of even greater sums of money, in larger denominations."

Denarius IV, the fourth in a series of unmanned monetary-dispersal probes, will leave Earth's atmosphere at 36,500 miles per hour—the highest velocity at which money has ever departed the planet.

Said Project Denarius lead scientist Dr. Lou Weaver: "The craft's time-release hatches, using cutting-edge ATM money-ejecting technology, will systematically discharge the currency at intervals of $50,000 every three seconds. Cameras on the craft's exterior will capture images of the bills as they majestically pirouette into the heavens, dotting the black void of space with elegant spirals of green." Until now, the image of money floating in space was available only through artists' renderings.

Far more ambitious in scope than the previous missions of $88 million, $110 million, and $375 million, Denarius IV is a two-stage spacecraft. Its solar probe, Croesus, will disengage from the main craft in October and release $12 million into the sun. The craft, with its remaining payload of $688 million, will travel across the solar system, reaching Jupiter by June 2007. Once there, it will eject the money from the cargo bay in what will be the largest single financial deployment in NASA history.

"This is just another step in our long-term goal to put $1 billion on Mars," Weaver added.

NASA is continuing to perform extensive endurance tests on portions of the $700 million, including acclimating it to extreme atmospheric pressure by deploying a sample stack of $200 million to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; strengthening its resilience in high-temperature conditions by sealing it in airtight containers and lowering them into the lava flow of Hawaii's Mauna Loa; and replicating the high-acceleration environment of space travel by shooting bundles of dimes out of magnetic-rail accelerators at thousands of feet per second into giant axial fans.

Some in the private sector are attempting their own currency-expelling spaceflights, including Virgin CEO Richard Branson, whose Virgin Galactic plans to eject £2 million from the still-theoretical SpaceShipThree orbital aircraft. Yet Griffin felt confident that NASA is far ahead of its private counterparts and rival state-run space agencies, saying that Project Denarius will be the "jewel in the crown" of taxpayer-financed space exploration.

Although polls indicate that a majority of Americans support the NASA mission, some fear a repeat of 2003's Denarius III disaster, in which hundreds of thousands of dollars burned up in Earth's atmosphere when the ship exploded shortly after leaving the launchpad. Reports suggest that one of the craft's solid-gold money clips failed during liftoff.

NASA officials dismissed the risk, saying that, should the mission fail, the lost money could be replaced by any of the other stores of $700 million the agency has in reserve, and that the mission could be re-launched as early as January 2007.

[SeriousMoney]

Talk about bum luck!

the odds of impact currently stand at just one in six million

That's 29 times greater than the odds of winning the MegaMillions lottery! http://www.megamillions.com/howtoplay/game_instructions.asp

In other words, 29 asteroids have to strike planet earth before you win the big one!

Carl prefers the odds of lightning strikes?

Man Survives 4th Lightning Strike
Aug. 15, 2005

(CBS) According to the National Weather Service, the odds of getting struck by lightning are one in 700,000. But for Carl Mize, the odds are much greater.

Mize, a University of Oklahoma physical plant worker, has been struck four times, most recently earlier this month. And while lightning injuries can be serious and even fatal, Mize has suffered relatively minor injuries.

"I have a hole in my tennis shoe," the 45-year-old, Mize, told The Early Show co-anchor Rene Syler of his latest strike.

As the bolt hit, he said his right foot bounced off the ground and his body tensed up. He then pulled off his tennis shoe and found his toes completely numb, he said.

"We were repairing a water line break up on the north campus, and a storm rolled in pretty fast," he said. Mize was the acting supervisor of a crew of four, using a backhoe to dig up a broken water line.

His co-workers, who know his history, saw lightning in the distance and began joking. Mize said co-worker Dennis Maddox told him "I'm getting away from you!" and then walked away. Mize, who has worked on utility crews at OU for 23 years, laughed at Maddox's fear- for about two seconds. Then the bolt hit.

"The guy that rides in the truck with me, he wants hazardous duty pay now," Mize told Syler laughing.

When lightning hits, Mize said he hears a big clap of thunder and has seen flashes of "blue flame." Mize said his heartbeat slowed after the latest strike, complicating an existing heart condition. He spent four days at Norman Regional Hospital and he had to go through a number of tests before being released.

Mize's introduction to lightning strikes came in 1978, when he was a young bull rider on the rodeo circuit. Mize was competing in Claremore, Okla., when a thunderstorm caused a delay. He grabbed the handle of his pickup just as lightning struck it.

Paramedics on the rodeo grounds checked him, and he refused to go to the hospital, he said.

"I was young and dumb then," Mize said.

On May 3, 1999, Mize was standing near a swing set at a relative's home in Lexington, watching turbulent weather in the distance. He had his hand on a swing chain.

"Not the smartest thing in the world to do," he said.

Lightning hit the swing set and knocked him back.

On Aug. 9, 1996, he was repairing a streetlight at OU when lightning hit a nearby 40-foot pine tree, splitting the tree in half and knocking Mize unconscious.

"It hit the tree and went over into a street light pole and knocked the top of it and followed that cable around to where I was working on it," Mize explained, "That's when it hit me. It went through my arm and then back out of my chest."

When Mize returned to work, his coworkers gave him a hard hat with a lightning bolt painted on it.

"We have a lot of pranksters around here," his supervisor Tom Hughes said.

Asked if he considered getting a desk job, Mize said, "No. I enjoy being outside. It's all right. I just need to stay in when the clouds are around."

Mize is heading back to work later Monday morning.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/08/15/earlyshow/living/main778521.shtml

[AKvetch]

Big new asteroid has slim chance of hitting Earth
18:21 02 May 2006

From New Scientist Print Edition.
David Chandler

A newly discovered asteroid is now the biggest thing known with a possibility of hitting the Earth in this century – and it is also the one that could hit the soonest.

But the odds of impact currently stand at just one in six million, reducing the fear factor somewhat, and these odds should further diminish with additional observations. This latest addition to NASA-JPL's list of potentially hazardous asteroids was discovered on 27 April 2006.

The asteroid, called 2006 HZ51, has an estimated diameter of about 800 metres and is the one of the largest objects ever to make the list. An object of that size would cause widespread devastation if it did strike the Earth.

HZ51 also has one of the shortest lead-times to a potential impact of any such object yet found, and the shortest of any potential Earth-impactor currently on the list. The earliest of its 165 possible impact dates is just over two years away, on 21 June 2008.

Hollywood movies
Dan Durda, an asteroid expert and president of the B612 Foundation – which aims to anticipate and prevent such impacts – thinks the discovery of HZ51 highlights that at present there are no good options when faced with so little time to prepare. "There really isn't a whole lot we could do," he told New Scientist. "Most of the options that don't resemble a Hollywood movie involve deflection techniques that require many years or decades."

Other than stockpiling food and supplies and evacuating the regions most likely to be affected, he said, we would have to "hunker down and take the impact".

But this is an unusual case, statistically speaking. It is far more likely that Earth's nations would benefit from a much greater lead time before a potential impact, allowing more time for planning.

For example, the second-most imminent threat now on the list is the asteroid Apophis, which has about a 1-in-6000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 – plenty of time to prevent it.

Altering orbits
The B612 Foundation has been pushing for a mission to place a tracking device on Apophis sometime in the next decade, so that the possibility of impact can be definitively proved or ruled out. The foundation also wants to send a mission to test ways of altering the orbit of a non-threatening asteroid, to test the viability of such methods.

But the chance of an impact by Apophis might be ruled out as early as this weekend, which will be the last chance until 2013 to observe it by radar, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

As for the newfound 2006 HZ51, the orbit calculations so far are based on just over 24 hours of observations, and so are likely to change quickly and should not be seen as a serious concern. As Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US, explains: "Almost certainly, observations from one or two more nights will put this to bed as a zero probability."

[AKvetch]

Thanks to janetcanada for this. Be sure to mark your calendar.

http://www.exopoliticsinstitute.org/Eric-Julien-25-MAY-2006-En.htm

[SeriousMoney]

Bring it on! Just make sure they wear their sneakers on the floor.

[AKvetch]

By the time the light is seen it may be too late...

[SeriousMoney]

Looking for alien lasers, not radios
New Scientist, 11 April 2006

For almost 50 years, since SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) projects began in earnest, people have concentrated on detecting radio signals, says Paul Horowitz, an astronomer at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US. But recently, researchers have come to think alien civilisations could also plausibly use laser light to communicate.


The curvature of the OSETI telescope's mirror is spherical not parabolic, which is less expensive and suitable if images are not the prime requirement (Image: Paul Horowitz)The first optical telescope dedicated to the hunt for alien signals has opened.

Horowitz led the construction of the Planetary Society's Optical SETI (OSETI) telescope at Harvard's Oak Ridge Observatory. Once running, OSETI's processors will carry out a trillion measurements per second, in a year-round survey of the sky. It will be able to pick out flashes of light that are only a billionth of a second long.

And because it does not need to take high-resolution images, it is much cheaper than other professional telescopes, costing just $50,000 to build. "It's really a light bucket," says Horowitz. "It won't take pretty pictures."

The OSETI telescope has a mirror 1.8 metres (72 inches) in diameter, and custom-built photomultiplier tubes and processing chips.

Unidirectional signal

OSETI opens on Tuesday April 11 to begin its search. "It may be a longshot," says Horowitz. "But this has such important implications, someone should be doing it."

Horowitz believes that radio astronomy searches still play an important role in the search for alien life. Alien civilizations would actually find radio better for long-range communication because radio waves are not blocked by dust within galaxies, he says.

But optical laser pulses could also filter through many regions of the sky, says Horowitz. And since laser light is unidirectional, it will be easier to pinpoint the location from which a signal originates.

Astronomer, Luc Arnold, at the Observatory of Haute-Provence in France, has researched how space-based telescopes could be used to detect laser pulses produced by alien civilisations.

He is excited by OSETI's fast processing power, which makes a ground-based search possible. "Radio SETI should not be the only method considered," says Arnold. "We must remember that ET could be quite imaginative."

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/mg19025473.000-looking-for-alien-lasers-not-radios.html

[SeriousMoney]

Apr 07, 2006
When Asteroids Become Comets

The surprising discovery of asteroids with comet tails supports the longstanding claim of the electrical theorists—that the essential difference between asteroids and comets is the shape of their orbits.

According to a recent story in USA Today, astronomers are “rethinking long-held beliefs about the distant domains of comets and asteroids, abodes they've always considered light-years apart”. The discovery has forced astronomers to speculate that some asteroids are actually “dirty snowballs in disguise”.



For many years the standard view of asteroids asserted that they are composed of dust, rock, and metal and that most occupy a belt between Mars and Jupiter. In contrast, comets were claimed to arrive from a home in deep space, most coming from an imagined “Oort Cloud” at the outermost reaches of the solar system, where they are supposed to have accreted from leftover dust and ices from the formation of the solar system.

But now, “the locales of comets and asteroids may not be such a key distinction”, states Dan Vergano, reporting on the work of two University of Hawaii astronomers, Henry Hsieh and David Jewitt. In a survey of 300 asteroids lurking in the asteroid belt, the astronomers detected three objects that “look a lot like comets … ejecting little comet tails at times from their surfaces”. The three red circles in the illustration above describe the orbits of these bodies

Of course, this is not the first instance of an 'asteroid' sporting a cometary tail. The asteroid Chiron, orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, was seen to develop a coma and tail between 1988 and 1989. It is now officially classified as both an asteroid and a comet. Chiron belongs to a class of objects called 'Centaurs' crossing the orbits of various gas giants. Though they move on minimally eccentric orbits through a relatively remote and weak region of the Sun’s electric field, Wallace Thornhill and other electrical theorists believe these bodies should all be watched carefully for telltale signs of minor cometary activity. And in fact the asteroid 60558 Echeclus, discovered in 2000, did display a cometary coma detected in 2005, and it too is now classified as both an asteroid and a comet.

In the electric view, there is no fundamental distinction between a comet and an asteroid, apart from their orbits. Comets are not primordial objects formed by impact accretion – an improbable and unfalsifiable model (“it happened long, long ago and far, far away”). Asteroids, comets and meteorites are all 'born' in interplanetary electrical events. Their distinctive orbital groupings and spectral features simply point to separate catastrophic events and to different planetary bodies involved in different phases of solar system history.

A comet is simply an electrical display and was recognized as such by scientists in the 19th century. So an 'asteroid' on a sufficiently elliptical orbit will do precisely what a comet does—it will discharge electrically. What distinguishes the cometary 'asteroids', observed by the University of Hawaii astronomers, are the paths they follow, moving them through the radial electric field of the Sun to a greater extent than is typical of other bodies in the 'asteroid belt' (See chart above). Cometary effects may also be expected from an asteroid if it passes through the huge electric comet tail [called the magnetosphere] of a giant planet.

The astronomers’ recent investigation only reinforces the argument of the electrical theorists: The electric model is eminently testable, with highly specific and unique predictions; and it has so far met every test provided by the space age.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060407cometasteroid.htm

[SeriousMoney]

Nanopore Method Could Revolutionize Genome Sequencing
By Sherry Seethaler, April 6, 2006
UCSD Press Relaease

A team led by physicists at the University of California, San Diego has shown the feasibility of a fast, inexpensive technique to sequence DNA as it passes through tiny pores. The advance brings personalized, genome-based medicine closer to reality.



The paper, published in the April issue of the journal Nano Letters, describes a method to sequence a human genome in a matter of hours at a potentially low cost, by measuring the electrical perturbations generated by a single strand of DNA as it passes through a pore more than a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Because sequencing a person’s genome would take several months and millions of dollars with current DNA sequencing technology, the researchers say that the new method has the potential to usher in a revolution in medicine.

“Current DNA sequencing methods are too slow and expensive for it to be realistic to sequence people’s genomes to tailor medical treatments for each individual,” said Massimiliano Di Ventra, an associate professor of physics at UCSD who directed the project. “The practical implementation of our approach could make the dream of personalizing medicine according to a person’s unique genetic makeup a reality.”

The physicists used mathematical calculations and computer modeling of the motions and electrical fluctuations of DNA molecules to determine how to distinguish each of the four different bases (A, G, C, T) that constitute a strand of DNA. They based their calculations on a pore about a nanometer in diameter made from silicon nitride—a material that is easy to work with and commonly used in nanostructures—surrounded by two pairs of tiny gold electrodes. The electrodes would record the electrical current perpendicular to the DNA strand as the DNA passed through the pore. Because each DNA base is structurally and chemically different, each base creates its own distinct electronic signature.

Previous attempts to sequence DNA using nanopores were not successful because the twisting and turning of the DNA strand introduced too much noise into the signal being recorded. The new idea takes advantage of the electric field that drives the current perpendicular to the DNA strand to reduce the structural fluctuations of DNA while it moves through the pore, thus minimizing the noise.

“If nature was very unkind, then the DNA would always fluctuate so much as it passes through the nanopore that measuring the current would not give us any information about what base is present at a particular location,” explained Michael Zwolak, a graduate student in physics at the California Institute of Technology who contributed to the study. “However, we have identified a particular way to operate the nanopore/electrode system that suppresses some of the fluctuations so they aren't so great as to destroy the distinguishability of the bases.”

The researchers caution that there are still hurdles to overcome because no one has yet made a nanopore with the required configuration of electrodes, but they think it is only a matter of time before someone successfully assembles the device. The nanopore and the electrodes have been made separately, and although it is technically challenging to bring them together, the field is advancing so rapidly that they think it should be possible in the near future.

In addition to the speed and low cost of the nanopore method, the researchers calculate that it will ultimately be significantly less error-prone than current methods.

“The DNA sequencing method we propose has the potential of having fewer errors than the present method, which is based on the Sanger method,” said Johan Lagerqvist, a graduate student in physics at UCSD and the lead author on the paper. “It should be possible to sequence strands of DNA that are tens of thousands of base pairs in length, possibly as long as an entire gene, in one pass through the nanopore. With the Sanger method it is necessary to chop the DNA into smaller pieces, copy the DNA and use multiple sequencing machines, which introduces additional sources of error.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. The NIH funds are from a program launched in 2004 to encourage researchers to pursue a wide range of ideas to sequence a mammal-sized genome for $1,000. The researchers say that as physicists they take a unique approach to the problem.

“We don’t think of it as DNA, we view it as a bunch of atoms and electrons that behave in ways we can predict and manipulate,” said Di Ventra.

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/sfastdna.asp

[SeriousMoney]

Study, in a First, Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance
By KENNETH CHANG
New York Times, April 7, 2006

By reconstructing ancient genes from long-extinct animals, scientists have for the first time demonstrated the step-by-step progression of how evolution created a new piece of molecular machinery by reusing and modifying existing parts.

The researchers say the findings, published today in the journal Science, offer a counterargument to doubters of evolution who question how a progression of small changes could produce the intricate mechanisms found in living cells.

"The evolution of complexity is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology," said Joseph W. Thornton, professor of biology at the University of Oregon and lead author of the paper. "We wanted to understand how this system evolved at the molecular level. There's no scientific controversy over whether this system evolved. The question for scientists is how it evolved, and that's what our study showed."

Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, "If it would be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

Discoveries like that announced this week of a fish with limblike fins have filled in the transitions between species. New molecular biology techniques let scientists begin to reconstruct how the processes inside a cell evolved over millions of years.

Dr. Thornton's experiments focused on two hormone receptors. One is a component of stress response systems. The other, while similar in shape, takes part in different biological processes, including kidney function in higher animals.

Hormones and hormone receptors are protein molecules that act like pairs of keys and locks. Hormones fit into specific receptors, and that attachment sends a signal to turn on — or turn off — cell functions. The matching of hormones and receptors led to the question of how new hormone-and-receptor pairs evolved, as one without the other would appear to be useless.

The researchers found the modern equivalent of the stress hormone receptor in lampreys and hagfish, two surviving jawless primitive species. The team also found two modern equivalents of the receptor in skate, a fish related to sharks.

After looking at the genes that produced them, and comparing the genes' similarities and differences among the genes, the scientists concluded that all descended from a single common gene 450 million years ago, before animals emerged from oceans onto land, before the evolution of bones.

The team recreated the ancestral receptor in the laboratory and found that it could bind to the kidney regulating hormone, aldosterone and the stress hormone, cortisol.

Thus, it turned out that the receptor for aldosterone existed before aldosterone. Aldosterone is found just in land animals, which appeared tens of millions of years later.

"It had a different function and was exploited to take part in a new complex system when the hormone came on the scene," Dr. Thornton said.

What happened was that a glitch produced two copies of the receptor gene in the animal's DNA, a not-uncommon occurrence in evolution. Then, for reasons not understood, two major mutations made one receptor sensitive just to cortisol, leading to the modern version of the stress hormone receptor. The other receptor became specialized for kidney regulation.

Dr. Thornton said the experiments showed how evolution could and did innovate functions over time. "I think this is likely to be a very common theme in how complex molecular systems evolved," he said.

Christoph Adami, a professor of life sciences at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, Calif. who wrote an accompanying commentary in Science, said the research showed how evolution "takes advantage of lucky circumstances and builds upon them."

Dr. Thornton said the experiment refutes the notion of "irreducible complexity" put forward by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University.

Dr. Behe, a main advocate of intelligent design, the theory that life is so complicated that the best explanation is that it was designed by an intelligent being, has compared an irreducibly complex system to a mousetrap. Take away any piece, and the mousetrap fails to catch mice. Such all-or-none systems could not have arisen with incremental changes, Dr. Behe has argued.

Dr. Thornton said the key-and-lock mechanism of a hormone-receptor pair was "an elegant exemplar of a system that has been called irreducibly complex."

"Of course," he added, "our findings show that it is not irreducibly complex."

Dr. Behe described the results as "piddling." He wondered whether the receptors with the intermediate mutations would be harmful to the survival of the organisms and said a two-component hormone-receptor pair was too simple to be considered irreducibly complex. He said such a system would require at least three pieces and perform some specific function to fit his notion of irreducibly complex.

What Dr. Thornton has shown, Dr. Behe said, falls within with incremental changes that he allows evolutionary processes can cause.

"Even if this works, and they haven't shown that it does," Dr. Behe said, "I wouldn't have a problem with that. It doesn't really show that much."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/science/07evolve.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&am...

[SeriousMoney]

I hope you you notified Berkeley! http://astro.berkeley.edu/index.html

[SeriousMoney]

Blue ring discovered around Uranus
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 06 April 2006

BERKELEY – The outermost ring of Uranus, discovered just last year, is bright blue, making it only the second known blue ring in the solar system, according to a report this week in the journal Science.



A comparison of the outer rings of Saturn (at top) and Uranus, where each system has been scaled to a common planetary radius. The recently discovered outer ring of Uranus, like that of Saturn, is blue because the material in these rings is smaller than the material in the inner, red rings. Credit: Imke de Pater, Heidi Hammel, Seran Gibbard, Mark Showalter, courtesy Science

Perhaps not coincidentally, both blue rings are associated with small moons.

"The outer ring of Saturn is blue and has Enceladus right smack at its brightest spot, and Uranus is strikingly similar, with its blue ring right on top of Mab's orbit," said Imke de Pater, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "The blue color says that this ring is predominantly submicron-sized material, much smaller than the material in most other rings, which appear red."

The authors of the paper in the April 7 issue of Science are de Pater, Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.; Heidi B. Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.; and Seran Gibbard of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The similarity between these outer rings implies a similar explanation for the blue color, according to the authors. Many scientists now ascribe Saturn's blue E ring to the small dust, gas and ice particles spewed into Enceladus' orbit by newly discovered plumes on that moon's surface. However, this is unlikely to be the case with Mab, a small, dead, rocky ball, about 15 miles across - one-twentieth the diameter of Enceladus.

Instead, the astronomers suspect both rings owe their blue color to subtle forces acting on dust in the rings that allow smaller particles to survive while larger ones are recaptured by the moon.

"We know now that there is at least one way to make a blue ring that doesn't involve plumes, because Mab is surely too small to be internally active," said Showalter. He and astronomer Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., discovered Mab in Hubble Space Telescope images in 2003.

The likely scenario to explain Saturn's blue ring was proposed before plumes were discovered last November as the Cassini spacecraft flew by Enceladus. As modeled for the E ring, meteoroid impacts on the surface of Enceladus scatter debris into its orbit, probably in a broad range of sizes. While the larger pieces remain within the moon's orbit and eventually are swept up by the moon, smaller particles are subject to subtle forces that push them toward or away from the planet out of the moon's orbit. These forces include pressure from sunlight, magnetic torques acting on charged dust particles, and the influence of slight variations in gravity due to the equatorial bulge of Saturn.

The net result is a broad ring of smaller particles, most less than a tenth of a micron across - a thousandth the width of a human hair - that scatter and reflect predominantly blue light.

"This model can be transferred directly to what we now see in Uranus, although we still need to understand the details of the process," de Pater said.

All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are reddish. Though they contain particles of many sizes that reflect many wavelengths of light, red dominates not only because larger particles - many microns to meters across - are abundant, but also because the material itself may be reddish, perhaps from iron.

"Arguing by analogy, the two outermost rings, the two rings that have satellites embedded in them, are both the blue rings. That can't be coincidental, there has to be a common thread of dynamics that is causing both of these phenomena," Showalter said.

The discovery of the blue ring came after combining ground-based near-infrared observations by the Keck Telescope in Hawaii and visible-light photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. De Pater, Hammel and Gibbard have observed Uranus since 2000 with the second-generation NIRC2 infrared camera using the adaptive optics system on the Keck II telescope, and in August 2005 obtained 30 new images of the planet in hopes of seeing new features as the ring plane moves edge-on to Earth.

Showalter and Lissauer, on the other hand, captured numerous visible-light images of Uranus between 2003 and 2005 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Neither team realized it had captured pictures of new rings until an extensive analysis, basically piling image upon image until faint features stood out from the background. In December 2005, as Showalter and Lissauer reported finding two new rings - Uranus's 12th and 13th - and two new moons, Mab and Cupid, numbers 26 and 27, de Pater, Hammel and Gibbard reported seeing the red, innermost of the two new rings but not the outermost. The blue ring peaks in brightness about 97,700 kilometers from the planet's center, exactly at Mab's orbit.

Further analysis proved to both teams that the outer ring seen in visible light was definitely not observable in the near-infrared, and so must be blue. The analysis also showed that Mab, which like its ring could not be seen in the infrared, is probably covered with water ice, like the other outer moons of Uranus, and is probably Uranus's smallest moon.

De Pater's research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Technology Center for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz. Hammel is supported by NASA, while Gibbard is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Showalter's work is supported by NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/04/06_bluering.shtml

[SeriousMoney]

Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers
Scientific American, April 06, 2006

Paleontologists working in the Canadian Arctic have discovered the fossilized remains of an animal that elucidates one of evolution's most dramatic transformations: that which produced land-going vertebrates from fish. Dubbed Tiktaalik roseae, the large, predatory fish bears a number of features found in four-limbed creatures, a group known as tetrapods.



Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and his colleagues found Tiktaalik on Ellesmere Island, some 600 miles from the North Pole, in deposits dating to 375 million years ago. Like all fish, Tiktaalik possesses fins and scales. But it also has a number of distinctly un-piscine characteristics, including a neck, a flat, crocodilelike skull, and robust ribs. As such Tiktaalik neatly fills the gap between previously known tetrapodlike fish such as Panderichthys, which lived some 385 million years ago, and the earliest tetrapods, Ichthyostega and Acanthostega, which lived about 365 million years ago. "Tiktaalik blurs the boundary between fish and land animals," Shubin observes. "This animal is both fish and tetrapod; we jokingly call it a 'fishapod.'"

Especially significant is the anatomy of Tiktaalik's pectoral fin, which contains the makings of a proper tetrapod arm. Thanks to the spectacular three-dimensional preservation of the bones--many of which were found still articulated--and the discovery of multiple specimens, the researchers were able to estimate the range of motion of the fin bones. "Most of the major joints of the fin are functional in this fish," Shubin notes. "The shoulder, elbow and even parts of the wrist are already there and working in ways similar to the earliest land-living animals." Tiktaalik, the scientists believe, used its fins to support its body on a substrate.

That doesn't mean Tiktaalik was primarily a fish out of water, however. Today Ellesmere Island is the icy dominion of the polar bear. But 375 million years ago, as part of a supercontinent that straddled the equator, it was a subtropical delta. Based on the sedimentological profile of the rock in which Tiktaalik was found, the team posits that it spent most of its time in shallow water. "This kind of shallow stream system seems to be the place where many features of land living animals first arose," comments team member Ted Daeschler of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. ("Tiktaalik" is the local Inuktikuk word for a large freshwater fish seen in the shallows.)

Tiktaalik is already drawing comparisons to the iconic early bird, Archaeopteryx, for its explanatory power as a transitional fossil. But it certainly leaves room for more discoveries, especially those bridging the new gap between it and the first tetrapods, along with those that contain clues to the origin of the tetrapod hindlimb. Two papers detailing the findings, as well as an accompanying commentary, appear today in Nature.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000A040D-36A2-1434-B6A283414B7F0000

[cosmoworld7]

Even from outer space our Blue Planet is Amazing, lets hope we keep it that way for future generations.

[SeriousMoney]

Bad news... someone found Tangium in earth fungi. I think Supreme Commander Kasha Ak-Bej is reconsidering.

tangium, in Hymenoptera, ventral ramus, q.v. (Tuxen, after Ross). http://antbase.org/databases/glossary_files/glossary_QU.htm

https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/2322/1/V26N06_294.pdf+tangium+fungi&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=10" target="_blank">http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:sln0uyfKJGgJ:https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/2322/1/V26...

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1529-8817.1998.340126.x