What four psychological techniques did the government use to increase Navy SEAL passing rates?

What four psychological techniques did the government use to increase Navy SEAL passing rates?
by eric barker


Ever since reading The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228 I’ve been interested in Navy SEAL training, particularly the psychological aspects.

In his blog at Psychology Today, Bakari Akil covers a History channel documentary The Brain and what it revealed about the four techniques the Navy used to increase passing rates in the elite SEAL program:

1.) Goal Setting

“With goal setting the recruits were taught to set goals in extremely short chunks. For instance, one former Navy Seal discussed how he set goals such as making it to lunch, then dinner.”

2.) Mental Rehearsal

“With mental rehearsal they were taught to visualize themselves succeeding in their activities and going through the motions.”

3.) Self Talk

“As far as self talk is concerned, the experts in The Brain documentary made the claim that we say 300 to 1000 words to ourselves a minute. By instructing the recruits to speak positively to themselves they could learn how to “override fears” resulting from the amygdala, a primal part of the brain that helps us deal with anxiety.”

4.) Arousal Control

“And finally, with arousal control the recruits were taught how to breathe to help mitigate the crippling emotions and fears that some of their tasks encouraged.”

How successful were these techniques?

This very simple four step process increased their passing rates from 25 percent to 33 percent, which is excellent in a rigorous program as theirs. It demonstrates that achieving success doesn’t always have to be a complex process. A few minor additions and tweaks may be all that is needed.

How to Live Forever

How to Live Forever By Turning Your Brain Into Plastic
by George Dvorsky

We may never be able to freeze you at the moment of death and then reanimate you. But the good news is, there may be another way to keep your brain viable. A group of scientists have come up with a process called "chemical fixation and plastic embedding" — which essentially turns your brain into a hunk of exquisitely preserved plastic.

Here's how you can become immortal, by sealing your brain in amber.

To help us better understand the chemopreservation process, we spoke to futurist John Smart, the Vice President of theBrain Preservation Foundation (BPF), a nonprofit science research group working to evaluate the process, along with other potential preservation strategies.

Connections and patterns

There are two fundamental assumptions that underlie any science of brain preservation after death, whether it be cryonics or chemopreservation: connectomics and patternism.

Connectomics is about the full capturing, mapping, and understanding of how the brain works, starting with a map of which neurons connect to each other (what's called the "connectome"), plus some critical molecular features of the 1,000 or so synapses (bridges) each neuron makes to others (the "synaptome") and perhaps, a few learning-based changes in gene-protein networks in the nucleus of each neuron (the "epigenome"), which is believed to interact with our synapses in a way that's still a bit beyond our understanding.

The Human Connectome Project is largely underway thanks to the National Institutes of Health. Their goal is to ultimately build a connection map of a fully functional and healthy human brain. Connectomics holds relevance to chemopreservation in that it will inform us to the degree, scale, and level of accuracy required to properly preserve a brain. Moreover, as Sebastian Seung has said, "The connectome is us."

Assuming that you are your connectome, patternism is the leap of faith that comes next. If these molecular features of your brain determine memory and identity, and can be pristinely preserved through plastination, the information that is you will also be preserved. Subsequently, given sufficiently advanced technologies, the information that is you (i.e. your patterns) could be reconstituted into an analogous, living brain — whether it be biologically or digitally based.

"We appear to be our special, complex patterns," Smart told io9, "not our matter, or even our type of matter." He notes that each of the 250,000 or so people who have had cochlear implants has had one small nervous system pattern replaced, or "uploaded", into technology. Retinal implants are coming next. It's the pattern replication that we care about, not the matter, or "substrate."

Patternism, in conjunction with connectomics, may eventually reveal our neural correlates of identity — and allow us to preserve capacities like memories, thoughts, emotions, even consciousness. "Consciousness is transitory, it's like a pattern in a stream," said Smart, "and it's also overrated. You don't have it when you sleep, and it's rebooted, at a later time, from much more durable cellular and molecular patterns when you are knocked unconscious, given anesthesia, drowned for an hour in cold water with no EEG, and so on."

Identity, argues Smart, is what really matters — those patterns that are stored in our neural architectures. They may also be the patterns that can be preserved in plastic. That's what neuroscience is on the edge of answering. Perhaps.

How it works

Assuming that brain plastination eventually comes into practice, the first step, regrettably, is that you have to die.

This could be in or near a hospital, hospice, or your home. Moments after your death, a response team will start the process of emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion (EGP) for protein fixation (a kind of advanced embalming process). This has to happen within 15 minutes of your death, otherwise the first phase of neural degradation will start to set in; brain cells start to die on account of oxygen deprivation.

The infusion of this molecule by the response team basically freezes your brain into place, creating a snapshot of your identity and your long term memories — though you might lose some short-term memories when you resume life after reanimation, just as sometimes happens after brain trauma today. "Glutaraldehyde is a very small chemical that gets into all your cells, and locks down your proteins and cytoskeleton, creating a kind of molecular cage," said Smart, "all protein-related interactions grind to a halt because of this crosslinking."

After this, your body will be moved to a centralized facility where, over the course of several months, your brain will be carefully removed and placed into a bath. Unlike cryonics, this stage is not time sensitive (whereas the standard saying at cryonics facilities is "time is trauma"). It's at this point that a chemical called osmium tetroxide fixes all the fats and fluid membranes in the brain cells. Then, a series of acetone-like solvents are used to convert the brain into plastic where it can be stored at room temperature. "All the water gets leached, out, but all the protein (and presumably, the other critical features) is still there," says Smart, "and so are all the neural connections, as are all the neural weightings — including the three dimensional structure."

Slicing it up

Indeed, because the exact 3D structure of the brain is preserved, it can be reconstructed.

And this is where Kenneth Hayworth comes in, the President of the BPF and Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus. Hayworth is the co-inventor of a highly advanced brain slicing machine that can image neural circuits at the nanometer scale. He's designed and built several automated machines to implement this process.

What does this have to do with chemopreservation? By carving your plastic brain into nanometer thin slices, future scientists may be able to reconstruct its three dimensional structure using advanced microscopy — electron microscopes that can see down to the level of atoms if necessary. Then, using an automated re-compiling technique, along with the requisite computer program, your critical patterns will be reconstructed, slice by slice, in a computer. And if these patterns interact the same way that critical patterns interact in a living brain, any memories or experiences you want to donate, and perhaps your full identity, will return to the world.

We can't do this yet — and not by a long shot, but the theory is on the table, being advanced by brain emulation communities like Sebastian Seung's, WiredDifferently, and Randal Koene'sCarbonCopies. Eventually, once we have the requisite processing power, reanimation may become a reality. Smart suspects that affordable reanimation of brains (even a human's) could happen as early as a few decades from now, particularly if computer, robotics, scanning, and nanotechnologies don't level off in their improvement but continue to advance in exponential fashion, as they have so far.

Will it work?

Of course, we don't really know if this will work. The results of the connectome project will inform much of this. It's quite possible that chemical fixation will be inadequate in terms of both the amount of information stored, and its long term storage potential. Moreover, reanimation may not go as elegantly as planned. But as Smart notes, our brains our highly distributed, fungible and associative, making them resistant to daily damage. Neuroscientists think that memories are stored in a highly distributed, redundant way. You only may need to recover the majority of connections to infer, or recreate, the full memory.

A great proof of concept for both connectomics and patternism, Smart argues, would be the modeling and recovery of parts of a simple episodic memory, such as the way an organism was associatively trained during its lifetime, in a very simple model organism, like a worm, a fly, or a sea slug. For example, the first team to crack the long term memory code of the C. elegans nematode worm, an animal with just 302 neurons and roughly 6,000 synapses, now being preserved, scanned, and simulated by OpenWorm and other collaboration groups, would convince many of us that this technology might work.

Today, the Brain Preservation Foundation is running a prize competition to demonstrate that the connectome is perfectly preserved using both chemo and cryopreservation techniques, in mice, rabbit, and pig brains. But in a few more years, if neuroscientists continue to unravel the molecular patterns of memory and thought, we may look to connectomics not just as a way to advance science, improve medicine, and build smarter computers, but as a way for us to get to the future, too — if we want.

Top image: musicman/shutterstock.com. Inset images via Human Connectome Project, SciDirect, OpenWorm.

Enormous Black Hole Discovered

NGC 1277: Black Hole Size Might Make Galaxy Evolution Models Wobble
By News Staff | November 29th 2012 11:30 AM

A monster black hole has been detected. With 17 billion solar masses, it is significantly heavier than models predict and could be the most massive black hole known to date.

Astronomers believe there is a super-massive black hole at the heart of every galaxy and its mass ranges from several hundred thousand solar masses to a few billion. The black hole that has been best investigated sits at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and has around four million solar masses.

Studies of the masses of distant galaxies and their black holes have turned up an interesting relationship: accordingly, a black hole typically reaches only a tiny fraction - around 0.1 percent - of the total mass of all stars belonging to the parent galaxy. Although this relationship is not completely understood, it plays an important role in all current galaxy evolution models.

During a systematic search which started in 2010, a team headed by
Remco van den Bosch from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
has tracked down a black hole that could upset this generally accepted relationship - NGC 1277 in the Perseus Cluster.

The mass of the huge gravitational trap amounted to around 14 percent of NGC 1277's total mass - which is significantly more that the 0.1 percent stated above and means a factor of more than ten. In other words: the astronomers had expected a black hole of this size in an unstructured ("elliptic") galaxy at least ten times as big - but not in a small disk galaxy like NGC 1277. Is this a rare freak of nature, an exception? Preliminary analyses of further data point in a different direction: van den Bosch and colleagues have five other galaxies which are comparatively small, but might nevertheless have unusually massive central black holes. This will only be known for sure when detailed images of these galactic systems are available, however.


Invisible gravitational trap: the center of the NGC 1277 disk galaxy harbors a black hole with 17 billion solar masses. Credit: NASA / ESA / Andrew C. Fabian / Remco C. van den Bosch (MPIA)
To make this determination, the astronomers used the Hobby-Eberly telescope and archived images from the Hubble space telescope. The Hobby-Eberly telescope at the McDonald observatory in Texas has a main mirror measuring 11 by 9.8 meters in total and is comprised of 91 hexagonal sub-mirrors. The size of the optics mean the observation of each individual galaxy can be carried out relatively quickly and the team was able to obtain almost 700 galactic spectra.

The spectra enabled the astronomers to draw conclusions about the motions of the stars, which depend directly on the gravitation of the black hole. With the aid of specific changes, such as the shift of spectral lines (Doppler effect), they were able to derive the velocity, for example. The rule here: the more massive the black hole, the more rapid the motion of the stars in the center of the galaxy.

The team thus identified six candidate galaxies which were comparatively small and had to have large black holes. The archives of the Hubble space telescope already contained detailed images of NGC 1277. In order to determine the mass of the black hole, they created a dynamic model of the galaxy that includes all possible stellar orbits. Systematic comparisons of model and observation data then showed which orbits in combination with which mass value for the black hole provided the best explanation for the observations.

In the case of the NGC 1277 disk galaxy, the astronomers arrived at around 17 billion solar masses. Researchers don't know what the current record holder might be, estimates range from 6 and 37 billion solar masses, so if the true value is at the lower end, NGC 1277 will hold the record.

If the 5 other cases they are examining are confirmed and there are indeed more black holes like the one found in NGC 1277, then galaxy evolution models will need to account for it. They will particularly have to direct their attention to the early universe: the NGC 1277 galaxy appears to have formed more than eight billion years ago and has not changed very much since then. No matter how this gigantic black hole formed - it must have happened a long time ago.





The Perseus cluster is around 250 million light years away from Earth and The NGC 1277 member galaxy (arrow) looks comparatively compact, but it may have a ridiculous mass. Credit: David W. Hogg, Michael Blanton and the SDSS Collaboration

Scientists snap a picture of DNA’s double helix for the very first time

Scientists snap a picture of DNA’s double helix for the very first time

Though they've never actually seen it with their own eyes, scientists know that DNA's structure is composed of a spiraling corkscrew. They know this thanks to molecular theory and and an old-time technique called X-ray crystallography, where patterns of dots are converted into an overarching image using mathematics. But now, for the first time ever, scientists have actually snapped a real image of DNA using an electron microscope — spiraling corkscrew and all.

The image was taken by Enzo di Fabrizio from the University of Genoa, Italy. He choreographed the scene by pulling a small strand of DNA from a diluted solution and then propping it up like a clothesline between two nanoscopic silicon pillars.

The trick to the technique was in acquiring a discrete strand of DNA that could be stretched out and ready to view with an electron microscope. Di Fabrizio managed this by creating a pattern of pillars that repelled water — which resulted in quick moisture evaporation and a residual strand of DNA all ready to go.

Then, in order to create a high-resolution image, di Fabrizio drilled tiny holes in the base of the nanopillar bed and shone beams of electrons.

Aside from creating a cool image, the technique will allow the researchers to investigate DNA in greater detail, as well as seeing how it interacts with proteins and RNA.

The paper, "Direct Imaging of DNA Fibers: The Visage of Double Helix," was published in Nano Letters.

Supplementary source: New Scientist.

Images: Enzo di Fabrizio.

Trippy Tales: Altering the Mind (brief history of 8 substances)

Altering the Mind

Humans have been ingesting mind-altering substances for a very long time. Hallucinogen-huffing bowls 2,500 years old have been found on islands in the Lesser Antilles, and traditional cultures from the Americas to Africa use hallucinogenic substances for spiritual purposes. Here are some notable substances that send the mind tripping.

LSD

LSD is commonly known as "acid," but its scientific name is a mouthful: lysergic acid diethylamaide. The drug was first synthesized in 1938 from a chemical called ergotamine. Ergotamine, in turn, is produced by a grain fungus that grow on rye.

LSD was originally produced by a pharmaceutical company under the name Delysid, but it got a bad reputation in the 1950s when the CIA decided to research its effects on mind control. The test subjects of the CIA project MKULTRA proved very difficult to control indeed, and many, like counter-culture writer Ken Kesey, started taking the drug for fun (and for their own form of 1960s enlightenment).

Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca is referred to as a medicine and not only as a hallucinatory mixture of Amazonian infusions centered around the Banisteriopsis caapi vine. The brew has long been used by native South American tribes for spiritual rituals and healing, and like other hallucinogens, ayahuasca often triggers very intense emotional experiences (vomiting is also common). In 2006, National Geographic writer Kira Salak described her experience with ayahuasca in Peru for the magazine.

"I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable," Salak wrote. "Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to terrorize me. 'You will never leave here,' they said. 'Never. Never.'"

Nonetheless, Salak wrote, when she broke free of her hallucinations, her crippling depression was alleviated. It's anecdotal experiences like this that have led researchers to investigate the uses of hallucinogens as therapy for mental disorders such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Peyote

Peyote is a cactus that gets its hallucinatory power from mescaline. Like most hallucinogens, mescaline binds to serotonin receptors in the brain, producing heightened sensations and kaleidoscopic visions.

Native groups in Mexico have used peyote in ceremonies for thousands of years, and other mescaline-producing cacti have long been used by South American tribes for their rituals. Peyote has been the subject of many a court battle because of its role in religious practice; currently, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon allow some peyote possession, but only if linked to religious ceremonies, according to Arizona's Peyote Way Church of God.

'Magic' Mushrooms

The "magic" ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms is psilocybin, a compound that breaks down into psilocin in the body. Psilocin bonds to serotonin receptors all over the brain, and can cause hallucinations as well assynesthesia, or the mixture of two senses. Under the influence, for example, a person might feel that they can smell colors.

In keeping with the human tradition of eating anything that might alter your mind, people have been ingesting psilocybin-continuing mushrooms for thousands of years. Synthetic psilocybin is now under study as a potential treatment for anxiety, depression and addiction.

PCP

Best known by its street name, "angel dust," PCP stands for phencyclidine. The drug blocks receptors in the brain for the neurotransmitter glutamate. It's more dangerous than other hallucinogens, with schizophrenia-like symptoms and nasty side effects.

Those side effects are why PCP has no medical uses. The drug was tested as an anesthetic in the 1950s and used briefly to knock out animals during veterinary surgeries. But by the 1960s, PCP had hit the streets and was being used as a recreation drug, famous for the feelings of euphoria and invincibility it bestowed on the user. Unfortunately, a side effect of all that euphoria is sometimes truly destructive behavior, including users trying to jump out of windows or otherwise self-mutilating. Not to mention that high enough doses can cause convulsions.

Ibogaine

Derived from the African iboga plant, ibogaine is another hallucinogen with a long history of tribal use. More recently, the drug has shown promise in treating addiction, although mostly in Mexico and Europe where ibogaine treatment is not prohibited as it is in the U.S.

Using ibogaine as therapy is tricky, however. The drug can cause heart rhythm problems, and vomiting is a common side effect. The Massachusetts-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research (MAPS) reports that an estimated 1 in 300 ibogaine users die due to the drug. The group is studying the long-term effects of ibogaine on patients in drug treatment programs in New Zealand and Mexico.

Salvia divinorum

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Salvia divinorum, also known as seer's or diviner's sage, grows in the cloud forest of Oaxaca, Mexico. The native Mazatec people have long used tea made out of the leaves in spiritual ceremonies, but the plant can also be smoked or chewed for its hallucinogenic effects.

Salvia is not currently a controlled substance, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, but it is under consideration to be made illegal and placed in the same drug class as marijuana.

Ecstasy

Ecstasy, "E" or "X" are the street names for MDMA, or (get ready for a long one) 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. The drug acts on serotonin in the brain, causing feelings of euphoria, energy and distortions of perception. It can also nudge body temperatures up, raising the risk of heat stroke. Animal studies suggest that MDMA causes long-term and potentially dangerous changes in the brain, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

MDMA was first synthesized by a chemist looking for substances to stop bleeding in 1912. No one paid the compound much mind for the next half-decade, but by the 1970s, MDMA had hit the streets. It was popular at raves and nightclubs and among those who liked their music psychedelic. Today, ecstasy is still a common street drug, but researchers are investigating whether MDMA could be used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and cancer-related anxiety.

What Happens to the Brain in a Coma

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 26 November 2012 Time: 03:03 PM ET


In comatose patients, high-traffic brain regions go dark while less active regions spring to life, a new study suggests.

What Happens to the Brain in a Coma

What is going on inside the heads of individuals in a coma has been steeped in mystery. Now, a new study finds coma patients have dramatically reorganized brain networks, a finding that could shed light on the mystery of consciousness.

Compared with healthy patients in the study, high-traffic hubs of brain activity are dark in coma patients while more quiet regions spring to life.

"Consciousness may depend on the anatomical location of these hubs in the human brain network," said study co-author Sophie Achard, a statistician at the French National Center for Scientific research in Grenoble.

The findings have several important implications, said Indiana University neuroscientist Olaf Sporns, who was not involved in the study.

"It gives us a handle on what may be different between healthy conscious people and people who have loss of consciousness," Sporns told LiveScience. "The traffic patterns have totally reorganized. And maybe it's the rerouting of the traffic patterns that underlies the loss of consciousness," or the mysterious ability to be self-aware that seems to set humans apart from other animals. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

In the future, the research could also help doctors determine which coma patients are likely to recover based on activity in high-traffic brain regions, he said. The research could potentially even suggest ways to stimulate the brains of patients in a coma to improve their outcome, he added.

The study was published today (Nov. 26) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mystery of consciousness

Scientists still don't understand exactly how human consciousness works, but the twilight state of a coma could reveal some insight. Past research revealed that a person in a coma is closer to being anesthetized than being asleep. Other studies have found that vegetative and minimally conscious patients have very different brain activity.

But for the most part, it was hard to find obvious differences in brain functioning between healthy patients and those who have lost consciousness.

To tease out these differences, Achard and her colleagues took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans of 17 patients who were in a coma a few days after cardiac arrest and compared them with scans from 20 healthy volunteers who were at rest. Some patients, who had lost oxygen to the brain for up to 30 to 40 minutes, eventually recovered, but more than half died.

The team tracked 417 different brain regions for changes in blood flow — a marker of brain activity. They then correlated synchronized increases or decreases in activity between different regions.

In healthy patients, about 40 regions lit up in concert with many other parts of the brain. These high-traffic hubs, like busy airports, apparently process much of the electrical firing in the brain.

Rerouted brain traffic

But in the coma patients, many of these hubs were darkened, and other, normally peripheral regions took their place. Intriguingly, coma patients had fewer hubs in a region called the precuneus, which is known to play a role in consciousness and memory.

These central nodes of brain activity may hold the key to consciousness, Achard told LiveScience. Because they direct so much of the brain's traffic, they also require more oxygen and thus may be more vulnerable to its loss, the study authors write in the journal article.

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Atom Smasher Creates New Kind of Matter

Atom Smasher Creates New Kind of Matter
Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 27 November 2012


A proton collides with a lead nucleus, sending a shower of particles through the CMS detector.
CREDIT: CERN View full size image

Collisions between particles inside the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher have created what looks like a new form of matter.

The new kind of matter is called color-glass condensate, and is a liquidlike wave of gluons, which are elementary particles related to the strong force that sticks quarks together inside protons and neutrons (hence they are like "glue").

Scientists didn't expect this kind of matter would result from the type of particle collisions going on at the Large Hadron Collider at the time. However, it may explain some odd behavior seen inside the machine, which is a giant loop where particles race around underneath Switzerland and France.

When scientists sped up protons (one of the building blocks of atoms) and lead ions (lead atoms, which contain 82 protons each, stripped of their electrons), and crashed them into each other, the resulting explosions liquefied those particles and gave rise to new particles in their wake. Most of these new particles, as expected, fly off in all directions at close to the speed of light. [Photos: The World's Largest Atom Smasher (LHC)]

But recently scientists noticed that some pairs of particles were flying off from the collision point in correlated directions.

"Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us," MIT physicist Gunther Roland, whose group led the analysis of the collision data along with Wei Liof Rice University, said in a statement.

A similar flight pattern is seen when two heavy particles, such as lead and lead, crash into each other. In this case, the collisions create what's called quark-gluon plasma — a superhot soup of particles similar tothe state of the universe just after the Big Bang. This soup can sweep particles in the same direction, explaining why their flight directions would be correlated.

But quark-gluon plasma isn't possible with lead-proton collisions, like the ones in the new study. Now researchers think a different state of matter, the color-glass condensate, may act in a similar way. The color-glass condensate's dense swarm of gluons may also sweep particles off in the same direction, suggested Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist RajuVenugopalan, who first predicted the substance, which may also be seen after proton-proton collisions.

The mechanism may depend on a weird quirk of particles called quantum entanglement. Two particles can be entangled so that they retain a connection even after they are separated, and an action on one reverberates on the other.

Entangled gluons in the color-glass condensate could explain how particles flying away from the collision point might share information about their flight direction with each other, Venugopalan said.

The intriguing phenomenon was not expected to result from the LHC's run of proton-lead collisions, which was meant to serve as a reference point for comparison to other types of collisions.


"You don't expect quark-gluon plasma effects" with lead-proton collisions, Rolandsaid. "It was supposed to be sort of a reference run — a run in which you can study background effects and then subtract them from the effects that you see in lead-lead collisions.

The findings will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review B.

This story was provided by LiveScience, a sister site to SPACE.com. Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop

Police Raid 9-Year-Old Pirate Bay Girl, Confiscate Winnie The Pooh Laptop
November 22, 2012

An anti-piracy company has found itself in the middle of a huge controversy. CIAPC, the company that had The Pirate Bay blocked by ISPs in Finland, tracked an alleged file-sharer and demanded a cash settlement. However, the Internet account holder refused to pay which escalated things to an unprecedented level. In response, this week police raided the home of the 9-year-old suspect and confiscated her Winnie the Pooh laptop.

Very soon in the United States, letterswill be sent out to Internet account holders informing them that they should stop sharing copyrighted material on BitTorrent.

The message in the US from mainstream rightsholders is designed to be educational, but more aggressive companies carry out the same process but with a sting in the tail – a request for cash-settlement to make potential lawsuits go away.

One such request for cash landed on the doorstep of an Internet account holder in Finland during the spring. Known locally as TTVK, Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC sent the man a letter informing him that his account had been traced back to an incidence of online file-sharing.

To stop matters progressing further the man was advised to pay a settlement of 600 euros, sign a non-disclosure document, and move on with his life. He chose not to give in to the demands of CIAPC and this week things escalated as promised.

Tuesday morning the doorbell of the family home rang around 8am and the man, who works in the hospitality sector, had quite a shock. Police were at his door with a search warrant authorizing the hunt for evidence connected to illicit file-sharing.

Surprisingly, the man isn’t a previously unknown Kim Dotcom-related “co-conspirator”, nor does he run a warez site or BitTorrent tracker. He is, however, guilty of having a 9-year-old daughter with a taste for pop music.

Having failed in her quest to put enough money in her piggy bank to buy the latest album from local multi-platinum-selling songstress Chisu, in 2011 she turned to the Internet, first via Google and then The Pirate Bay.

The girl’s father said the resulting downloads didn’t work so the following day they went to the store to buy music. Nevertheless, this week’s police visit shows that CIAPC mean business, no matter how young the targets or whether or not they also buy music.

In concluding their search, the police confiscated the girl’s file-sharing weapon of choice – her Winnie The Pooh laptop – and according to her father offered some final words.

“It would have been easier for all concerned if you had paid the compensation,” the police advised

“I got the feeling that there had been people from the MAFIA demanding money at the door,” the girl’s father explained.

“At that point my jaw hit the floor and I wasn’t sure if I was awake or dreaming. So the investigator suggested, between the lines, that I empty my wallet and keep my family in hunger for the next two weeks so that they could get rid of the case? What the f––… is this how it goes? I could evade justice murder by skipping Christmas this year?”

“We have not done anything wrong with my daughter. If adults do not always know how to use a computer and the web, how can you assume that children or the elderly – or a 9-year-old girl – knows what they are doing at any given time online?

“This is the pinnacle of absurdity. I can see artists are in a position, but this requires education and information, not resource-consuming lawsuits,” he added.

Electronic Frontier Finland say that this week’s developments are an indication of just how far copyright enforcements issues have progressed in Finland.

“It is not in anyone’s interest, that in the name of the copyright, little girls are being harassed. This shows poor judgment, and consideration from TTVK and from the police,” vice chairman Ville Oksanen said in a statement.

However, there are signs that support might come from an unexpected corner. In a statement the artist in question – Chisu – said that she doesn’t want to sue anyone and that no artist needs this kind of media attention. Indeed, the criticism of the move on her Facebook page is fierce.

“I hope that the matter will be resolved soon and sorry to my 9-year-old girls,” Chisu wrote, pointing them to this free link to her music on Spotify.

Joonas Mäkinen of Finland’s Pirate Party welcomes Chisu’s comments but bemoans artists’ apparent lack of power to get anything done.

“It is sad to see how even the big artists have no idea what CIAPC / TTVK is doing in their name. And the worst part is that even after learning about this, like Chisu did just now and took part in the discussion on Facebook, they can’t stop it since all copyright protection and monitoring is centralized,” Mäkinen told TorrentFreak.

“I hope all musicians realize that the fan hunt that involves confiscating laptops and signing deals that require you to be silent about the payments are severely hurting the image of copyright and creators. Authors of works should actively rise up to say NO to what CIAPC/TTVK is doing if they wish to keep their fans,” he concludes.

CIAPC confirmed that the case against the 9-year-old is only the latest in a line of attempted settlements. Last fall a total of 28 Internet account holders settled with CIAPC, but of course we haven’t heard of the cases due to the confidentiality agreements recipients are required to sign.

How NASA might build its very first warp drive

A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein's law of relativity. We contacted White at NASA and asked him to explain how this real life warp drive could actually work.

The Alcubierre Drive

The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, "The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity," Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be "warped" both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

Michio Kaku dubbed Alcubierre's notion a "passport to the universe." It takes advantage of a quirk in the cosmological code that allows for the expansion and contraction of space-time, and could allow for hyper-fast travel between interstellar destinations. Essentially, the empty space behind a starship would be made to expand rapidly, pushing the craft in a forward direction — passengers would perceive it as movement despite the complete lack of acceleration.

White speculates that such a drive could result in "speeds" that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.


Full sizeIn terms of the engine's mechanics, a spheroid object would be placed between two regions of space-time (one expanding and one contracting). A "warp bubble" would then be generated that moves space-timearound the object, effectively repositioning it — the end result being faster-than-light travel without the spheroid (or spacecraft) having to move with respect to its local frame of reference.

"Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed," White told io9. "However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy."

And indeed, early assessments published in the ensuing scientific literature suggested horrific amounts of energy — basically equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter (what is 1.9 × 1027 kilograms or 317 Earth masses). As a result, the idea was brushed aside as being far too impractical. Even though nature allowed for a warp drive, it looked like we would never be able to build one ourselves.

"However," said White, "based on the analysis I did the last 18 months, there may be hope." The key, says White, may be in altering the geometry of the warp drive itself.
A new design

In October of last year, White was preparing for a talk he was to give for the kickoff to the 100 Year Starship project in Orlando, Florida. As he was pulling together his overview on space warp, he performed a sensitivity analysis for the field equations, more out of curiosity than anything else.


Full size"My early results suggested I had discovered something that was in the math all along," he recalled. "I suddenly realized that if you made the thickness of the negative vacuum energy ring larger — like shifting from a belt shape to a donut shape — and oscillate the warp bubble, you can greatly reduce the energy required — perhaps making the idea plausible." White had adjusted the shape of Alcubierre's ring which surrounded the spheroid from something that was a flat halo to something that was thicker and curvier.

He presented the results of his Alcubierre Drive rethink a year later at the 100 Year Starship conference in Atlanta where he highlighted his new optimization approaches — a new design that could significantly reduce the amount of exotic matter required. And in fact, White says that the warp drive could be powered by a mass that's even less than that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

That's a significant change in calculations to say the least. The reduction in mass from a Jupiter-sized planet to an object that weighs a mere 1,600 pounds has completely reset White's sense of plausibility — and NASA's.
Hitting the lab

Theoretical plausibility is all fine and well, of course. What White needs now is a real-world proof-of-concept. So he's hit the lab and begun work on actual experiments.

"We're utilizing a modified Michelson-Morley interferometer — that allows us to measure microscopic perturbations in space time," he said. "In our case, we're attempting to make one of the legs of the interferometer appear to be a different length when we energize our test devices." White and his colleagues are trying to simulate the tweaked Alcubierre drive in miniature by using lasers to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million.

Of course, the interferometer isn't something that NASA would bolt onto a spaceship. Rather, it's part of a larger scientific pursuit.

"Our initial test device is implementing a ring of large potential energy — what we observe as blue shifted relative to the lab frame — by utilizing a ring of ceramic capacitors that are charged to tens of thousands of volts," he told us. "We will increase the fidelity of our test devices and continue to enhance the sensitivity of the warp field interferometer — eventually using devices to directly generate negative vacuum energy."

He points out that Casimir cavities, physical forces that arise from a quantized field, may represent a viable approach.

And it's through these experiments, hopes White, that NASA can go from the theoretical to the practical.
Waiting for that "Chicago Pile" moment

Given just how fantastic this all appears, we asked White if he truly thinks a warp-generating spacecraft might someday be constructed.

"Mathematically, the field equations predict that this is possible, but it remains to be seen if we could ever reduce this to practice."


Full sizeWhat White is waiting for is existence of proof — what he's calling a "Chicago Pile" moment — a reference to a great practical example.

"In late 1942, humanity activated the first nuclear reactor in Chicago generating a whopping half Watt — not enough to power a light bulb," he said. "However, just under one year later, we activated a ~4MW reactor which is enough to power a small town. Existence proof is important."

His cautious approach notwithstanding, White did admit that a real-world warp drive could create some fascinating possibilities for space travel — and would certainly reset our sense of the vastness of the cosmos.

"This loophole in general relativity would allow us to go places really fast as measured by both Earth observers, and observers on the ship — trips measured in weeks or months as opposed to decades and centuries," he said.

But for now, pursuit of this idea is very much in science mode. "I'm not ready to discuss much beyond the math and very controlled modest approaches in the lab," he said.

Which makes complete sense to us, as well. But thanks to these preliminary efforts, White has already done much to instill a renewed sense of hope and excitement over the possibilities. Faster-than-light travel may await us yet.

Report: U.S. Planned On Blowing Up Moon With Nuke During Cold War In 1950s

November 26, 2012 11:42 AM 

WASHINGTON (CBSDC/AP) —

Would Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even had a moon to walk on if the United States had its way in the 1950s?

During the height of the Cold War, U.S. officials debated whether to detonate nuclear bomb on the moon in order to send a message to the Soviet Union, the Asian News International reports.

The secret project dubbed, “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” and nicknamed “Project A119,” was seriously being considered until it was scrapped because military officials were worried it would hurt the people on Earth.

The Daily Mail reports that astronomer Carl Sagan’s calculations were used regarding the dust and gas the blast would generate. The website also states that physicist Leonard Reiffel told the Associated Press in an interview in 2000 that a U.S. nuclear flash from Earth might have “intimidated” the Soviets.

The plan consisted of carrying a nuclear device some 238,000 miles to the moon on a missile that would have detonated on impact.

The Air Force declined comment to the AP on the report.

(TM and © Copyright 2012 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

Cracking the Quantum Safe

Cracking the Quantum Safe

Jesse Tise
By ADAM FRANK
Published: October 13, 2012

THIS summer, physicists celebrated a triumph that many consider fundamental to our understanding of the physical world: the discovery, after a multibillion-dollar effort, of the Higgs boson.

Given its importance, many of us in the physics community expected the event to earn this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Instead, the award went to achievements in a field far less well known and vastly less expensive: quantum information.

It may not catch as many headlines as the hunt for elusive particles, but the field of quantum information may soon answer questions even more fundamental — and upsetting — than the ones that drove the search for the Higgs. It could well usher in a radical new era of technology, one that makes today’s fastest computers look like hand-cranked adding machines.

The basis for both the work behind the Higgs search and quantum information theory is quantum physics, the most accurate and powerful theory in all of science. With it we created remarkable technologies like the transistor and the laser, which, in time, were transformed into devices — computers and iPhones — that reshaped human culture.

But the very usefulness of quantum physics masked a disturbing dissonance at its core. There are mysteries — summed up neatly in Werner Heisenberg’s famous adage “atoms are not things” — lurking at the heart of quantum physics suggesting that our everyday assumptions about reality are no more than illusions.

Take the “principle of superposition,” which holds that things at the subatomic level can be literally two places at once. Worse, it means they can be two things at once. This superposition animates the famous parable of Schrödinger’s cat, whereby a wee kitty is left both living and dead at the same time because its fate depends on a superposed quantum particle.

For decades such mysteries were debated but never pushed toward resolution, in part because no resolution seemed possible and, in part, because useful work could go on without resolving them (an attitude sometimes called “shut up and calculate”). Scientists could attract money and press with ever larger supercolliders while ignoring such pesky questions.

But as this year’s Nobel recognizes, that’s starting to change. Increasingly clever experiments are exploiting advances in cheap, high-precision lasers and atomic-scale transistors. Quantum information studies often require nothing more than some equipment on a table and a few graduate students. In this way, quantum information’s progress has come not by bludgeoning nature into submission but by subtly tricking it to step into the light.

Take the superposition debate. One camp claims that a deeper level of reality lies hidden beneath all the quantum weirdness. Once the so-called hidden variables controlling reality are exposed, they say, the strangeness of superposition will evaporate.

Another camp claims that superposition shows us that potential realities matter just as much as the single, fully manifested one we experience. But what collapses the potential electrons in their two locations into the one electron we actually see? According to this interpretation, it is the very act of looking; the measurement process collapses an ethereal world of potentials into the one real world we experience.

And a third major camp argues that particles can be two places at once only because the universe itself splits into parallel realities at the moment of measurement, one universe for each particle location — and thus an infinite number of ever splitting parallel versions of the universe (and us) are all evolving alongside one another.

These fundamental questions might have lived forever at the intersection of physics and philosophy. Then, in the 1980s, a steady advance of low-cost, high-precision lasers and other “quantum optical” technologies began to appear. With these new devices, researchers, including this year’s Nobel laureates, David J. Wineland and Serge Haroche, could trap and subtly manipulate individual atoms or light particles. Such exquisite control of the nano-world allowed them to design subtle experiments probing the meaning of quantum weirdness.

Soon at least one interpretation, the most common sense version of hidden variables, was completely ruled out.

At the same time new and even more exciting possibilities opened up as scientists began thinking of quantum physics in terms of information, rather than just matter — in other words, asking if physics fundamentally tells us more about our interaction with the world (i.e., our information) than the nature of the world by itself (i.e., matter). And so the field of quantum information theory was born, with very real new possibilities in the very real world of technology.

What does this all mean in practice? Take one area where quantum information theory holds promise, that of quantum computing.

Classical computers use “bits” of information that can be either 0 or 1. But quantum-information technologies let scientists consider “qubits,” quantum bits of information that are both 0 and 1 at the same time. Logic circuits, made of qubits directly harnessing the weirdness of superpositions, allow a quantum computer to calculate vastly faster than anything existing today. A quantum machine using no more than 300 qubits would be a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times faster than the most modern supercomputer.

Going even further is the seemingly science-fiction possibility of “quantum teleportation.” Based on experiments going on today with simple quantum systems, it is at least a theoretical possibility that one day objects could be reconstituted — beamed — across a space without ever crossing the distance.

When a revolution in science yields powerful new technologies, its effect on human culture is multiplied exponentially. Think of the relation between thermodynamics, steam engines and the onset of the industrial era. Quantum information could well be the thermodynamics of the next technological revolution.

The discovery of the Higgs — the confirming stroke of a grand, overarching theory of matter — will, eventually, yield a Nobel Prize, and when it comes the award will be justly deserved.

But the discovery’s impact on human society will most likely be dwarfed by the consequences of quantum information theory. The steady advances at its frontiers are turning us into safecrackers, nimbly manipulating the tumblers guarding the deepest secrets of nature and our own place within it. What we find when the locks snap open on the quantum world will surely be something far richer and far greater than our imaginations today can conceive.

A professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and the author of “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 14, 2012, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: Cracking the Quantum Safe.

World’s biggest flower

World’s biggest flower blooms in Switzerland (PHOTOS)
Published: 23 November, 2012, 05:38
Edited: 23 November, 2012, 11:49


Visitors look at the Arum Titan "Amorphophallus titanum", the largest flower in the world, as it blossoms for a second time on late November 19, 2012.(AFP Photo / Sebastien Bozon)

The world’s largest flower has blossomed in Basel. The monster stinky plant, which boasts the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world, is 2.27 meters tall and blooms for just a couple of days once every few years.

Titan Arum, which originates in the jungles of Sumatra, is not just the biggest flower in the world – it is also one of the stinkiest. Its flowers release an odor reminiscent of decomposing flesh. Luckily, it rarely blooms outside its natural environment.

The Swiss botanical garden was lucky enough to have two of the flowers bloom in just 18 months. The last time Titan Arum blossomed there was in April 2011. Before that, the plant blossomed in Switzerland only in 1936.

The blossoming flower was constantly under the eye of online cameras, so that everyone keen to see the remarkable botanic event could take a glimpse. Others who are not turned away by the horrible smell of rotting meat visited the botanic garden in Basel to see the monster flower with their own eyes.

The last floral appearance of the Titan Arum in Basel attracted some 25,000 visitors.

(Image from titanwurz.unibas.ch)

(Image from titanwurz.unibas.ch)

Visitors look at the Arum Titan "Amorphophallus titanum", the largest flower in the world, as it blossoms for a second time on late November 19, 2012.(AFP Photo / Sebastien Bozon)

The Arum Titan "Amorphophallus titanum", the largest flower in the world, is pictured as it blossoms for a second time on late November 19, 2012.(AFP Photo / Sebastien Bozon)

Imagination, Imaginal Cells, and Evolutionary Leaps | THE RABBIT

Gene Therapy Goes On Sale Mid-2013

The West's First Gene Therapy Goes On Sale Mid-2013We're tampering with genes to cure a rare metabolic disorder--and that's likely just the beginning.
By Clay DillowPosted 11.06.2012 at 2:45 pm

Gene Therapy: Tampering With DNA Using genes to generate protein therapies in the body. National Institutes of Health




The first gene therapy to be approved in the West will hit the market by the middle of next year, opening the masses to a controversial treatment that directly alters a patient’s own DNA. Dutch biotech uniQure’s Glybera was approved for sale by the European Commission late last month.

Gene therapies emerged--appropriately--about the same time the first human genome was being mapped during the 1990s, though the study of gene therapies goes back as far as the 1970s. They work by actually tampering with a person’s DNA--usually by encoding a functioning gene to replace a mutated one, or by introducing DNA that encodes a therapeutic protein into the body. Clinical trials have gone on for years. Early on, failures caused many to dismiss the idea of tampering with genes. But later--in the following decade--many in the medical community changed their minds after witnessing a series of successes. Among them: China, which approved its first gene therapy in 2003.

In the West, however, gene therapy has been a source of constant debate, and that’s what makes this development notable. Gene therapies carry a lot of promise, including the ability to treat any number of inherited diseases that have few treatment options. They are a way to literally tinker with the fundamental material that tells our cells how to function, so their potential is indeed vast--if we can make them work.

Glybera will treat lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD), an extremely rare inherited disorder affecting the metabolism of certain fat particles. It affects something like one or two people in a million, so it’s not like we’re curing blindness here. Gene therapy is still limited to single-gene disorders--and most common diseases are more complex multi-gene problems.

Still, the acceptance of the first gene therapy into Western medicine could mark a turning point for gene medicine, provided nothing goes wrong. Many labs are still working on gene therapies for a number of conditions, and uniQure itself is working on additional genetic therapies for everything from hemophilia to Parkinson’s. Even limited success there would naturally be a huge leap forward for medical science.

News
First gene therapy to go on sale in Europe in 2013
Tuesday, 6 November 2012

Agençe France-Presse


Gene therapy, approved in China as long ago as 2003, will be made available in Europe from mid-2013. It works by modifying a patient's DNA, offering the theoretical hope of blocking inherited diseases.

Credit: Veer Images

THE HAGUE: Dutch biotech company uniQure said it would start selling the first human gene therapy to be approved in the West by mid-2013 and predicted an explosion of similar therapies to come.

The European Commission approved Glybera on October 25, making the drug for treating the extremely rare disorder lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD) the first to be approved for sale in Europe or North America.

"We believe that after Glybera's approval gene therapy is at the beginning of a period of rapid growth similar to the development of the antibody business in the last decade," uniQure chief executive Joern Aldag said in a statement.

Blocking inherited disease

Gene therapy works by modifying a patient's DNA to combat a specific disease, and has been experimented with to treat everything from blindness to depression and brain wasting diseases.

But the relatively unknown treatments have struggled to obtain regulatory approval in the West, although authorities in China approved a gene therapy for treating head and neck cancer as long ago as 2003.

Gene medicine burst on the medical scene in the late 1990s and is one of the most alluring areas of biotechnology, offering the theoretical promise of blocking or reversing inherited disease.

But this new frontier has also been hit by occasional setbacks, notably an unexpected or uncontrollable response from the immune system.

Successes few, limited to single-gene disorders

So far, successes have been few, limited to single-gene disorders – as opposed to complex multi-gene disorders that account for the most common diseases.

Setbacks included the tragic death of an 18-year-old U.S. volunteer, Jesse Gelsinger, in 1999, and the development of cancer among two French children treated for ‘bubble baby’ syndrome, a chronic lack of immune defences.

Glybera treats LPLD, an inherited disease that affects around one or two people in a million, by preventing them from metabolising certain fat particles in the blood.

"First commercial sales of Glybera in Europe are expected in summer 2013," uniQure said, with the company also seeking approval for the drug in North America.

The company said it was developing a raft of other gene therapies to treat diseases including blood clotting disorder haemophilia B, metabolic disorder acute intermittent porphyria, central nervous system disorder Parkinson's and enzyme disorder Sanfilippo B.

Today's Turkeys Are Genetically Barren Compared To Their Wild Ancestors

Today's Turkeys Are Genetically Barren Compared To Their Wild Ancestors
Ancient turkeys weren’t your average Butterball.
By Rebecca BoylePosted 11.20.2012 at 1:00 pm


Gobble Gobble Turkey This turkey is of the Merriam’s subspecies, one of six turkey subspecies. All commercial turkey lines descend from the South Mexican turkey subspecies, which is extinct in the wild.Dan Garber

We Americans raised about 254 million turkeys this year, and ran up a $9.1 million turkey trade deficit by importing even more birds from Canada, according to the Census Bureau. But the fowl we’ll eat this Thursday do not bear much resemblance to the birds enjoyed by European settlers in 1621. They’re genetically distinct from their wild ancestors--in fact, they have almost no genetic variation at all, geneticists say.

What's more, the turkeys on our dinner table this week have less genetic variation than both their wild counterparts and other domesticated animals, including pigs and chickens. The lack of variance can be explained by the way Americans like their turkeys--big and huge-breasted. Variation in genes that code for those traits can lead to more scraggly and therefore less appetizing turkeys.


Rob Fleischer, head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, said the team wanted to compare how domestic Thanksgiving turkeys compared with their ancestral wild brethren from southern Mexico.



“Ancient turkeys weren’t your Butterball,” he said in a statement.

To figure this out, SI scientists sequenced the full genomes of birds from seven different commercial turkey-breeding lines, as well as the genomes of three south Mexican turkeys collected in 1899. Those turkeys’ DNA was extracted at the National Zoo from samples stored in the Smithsonian’s collections. Fleischer said the museum specimens worked surprisingly well. This will help geneticists nail down the genes involved in turkey domestication and enfattening.

Europeans apparently discovered turkeys in Mexico during the Spanish Conquest and brought them to Europe, where breeders created different varieties. Researchers say it’s important to know the differences between ancient and modern turkeys, just in case something happens to our very genetically non-diverse population.

The new research is published in BMC Genomics.

Great Apes Might Experience Mid-Life Crises Just Like Humans

Great Apes Might Experience Mid-Life Crises Just Like Humans
A cross-species approach to studying well-being shows that these crises may be biologically built in.
By Rebecca BoylePosted 11.19.2012


Ape Ennui Chimpanzees and orangutans experience midlife crises just like humans do, except they can't go out and buy convertibles to cure their middle-age malaise. Wikimedia Commons

Across cultures and countries, humans experience a pretty well-defined U-shaped curve in our happiness. We’re happy when we’re young, and well-being descends into its nadir during midlife, only to rise again in old age. Midlife crises are a cliche, but they’re real--and they’re just as real in our primate cousins, apparently.

A study of 336 chimpanzees and 172 orangutans found a similar U-curve in their well-being, according to researchers in the UK, US and Japan. The animals were housed in zoos and sanctuaries in the US, Japan, Canada, Australia and Singapore, and keepers and caretakers measured their well-being. The animals received happiness scores, adapted from similar subjective measurements used on humans. It turns out they also experience a U-shaped curve in happiness throughout life, the researchers say.

It cannot be because of mortgages, marital breakup, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those.

Obviously, economic changes, social forces and cultural norms influence midlife unhappiness in humans, and the researchers say they’re not ruling that out. But the fact that great apes also experience a happiness drought in midlife suggests there are evolutionary and biological reasons.

“We hoped to understand a famous scientific puzzle: why does human happiness follow an approximate U-shape through life?” said economist Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick. “We ended up showing that it cannot be because of mortgages, marital breakup, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those.”

There are several possible biological explanations, the authors say in their paper. Happiness is associated with longevity in both humans and apes, so it makes sense that older apes are happy. It could also be that the U-shape in happiness stems from changes in brain structure that happen as humans and other apes age, the researchers say. Or, and this is interesting, it could be that older adults rely on behavior to regulate their emotions. “For example, they may seek out situations and group members that elicit more positive emotions or shift to goals that are more attainable in older age,” the authors say. We buy nice cars; middle-aged apes hang out with different friends.

“Our results imply that human wellbeing’s curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with great apes,” the authors write.

The study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

3 Deer use Automatic Doors to enter Iowa store

3 deer use automatic doors to enter Iowa store

Updated 10:38 a.m., Monday, November 19, 2012

CORALVILLE, Iowa (AP) — Shoppers in Iowa got an unusual glimpse of wildlife Monday morning when a doe and two fawns wandered into a department store.

Coralville Police Chief Barry Bedford says the deer used doors that open automatically to get into a Kohl's store.

He says the fawns stayed in the store's vestibule, but their mother made it into the store and headed toward the back.

Police say employees opened up some back doors and the doe exited. The two fawns turned around and used the automatic exit doors to leave the store.

No injuries or damage was reported.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/3-deer-use-automatic-doors-to-enter-Iowa-store-4050438.php#ixzz2ChTjeoXJ

How the Greenest Skyscraper Complex Ever Is Rising Out of the Rubble of the World Trade Center

How the Greenest Skyscraper Complex Ever Is Rising Out of the Rubble of the World Trade Center
By Andrew Tarantola - Gizmodo


From Overhead A view of the entire construction zone, with the Hudson River at the top of the photo.Getty Images: Mario Tama
View Photo Gallery

On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center transformed from a pair of gleaming towers into a carcinogenic pile of smoldering rubble that's still killing people. Currently rising out of that rubble, though, is a complex with the most environmentally advanced technologies ever attempted at the scale.







Click to launch a gallery showing the World Trade Center complex under construction.


LIVE AT LEEDS

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Certification is an internationally-recognized third-party verification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council to confirm that a building—or community, for that matter—was designed and constructed with the aim of improving energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions, indoor environmental quality, and intelligent resource management.

For the new WTC complex to qualify for the LEED Gold Certification—the second highest attainable below Platinum status—it must meet a number of requirements, among which include achieving a Net Zero CO2 footprint for all base building electricity consumption and reduction of the complex's energy consumption to 20 percent below New York State's energy code requirements.

"The building [in this case, 1 World Trade Center] is designed to achieve a gold level certification. Which, for a project of its size, would be a first of its kind, Eduardo Del Valle, Director of Design Management at 1 World Trade Center, told us. "Now, there are some other projects in New York City that have achieved a Platinum certification, which is the highest—but not on this scale."
ENERGY CONSERVATION AND PRODUCTION

One means of achieving these goals is "Daylighting"—which thankfully involves neither Bruce Willis nor Cybill Shepherd. Instead, as Del Valle points out, "if enough daylight is coming into the window it automatically dims the interior lights. It's all about reducing energy consumption. Every space within 15 feet of the facade will be equipped with dimming devices."

This practice not only benefits the WTC complex's energy consumption, but the occupants of the towers as well, increasing productivity and reducing the rate of minor illnesses, as well aspromoting bone health and increase the activity of natural killer cells simply by improving the quality of light. Because humans require exposure to UVB light in order to synthesize Vitamin D, the dimming of artificial lights and use of ultra-clear glass to allow more natural light in.

When the sun isn't shining, the WTC complex employs hydrogen fuel cells to provide approximately 1.2 megawatts of power and steam turbines which, according to DelValle, "take the wasted steam that happens during steam generation and converts that into electricity."
BREATHING EASIER

During construction, the complex is requiring its contractors to use only ultra-low sulfur diesel fuels—a "clean diesel" that reduces nitrogen oxide and particulate emissions and is considered one of the cleanest (comparatively speaking) fuels available. This implementation is so effective that New York City and State now require that non-road construction equipment used on public construction projects by public agencies use ULSD. In addition, all construction vehicles are equipped with extra particulate filters to further reduce their impact. Finally, the materials used in the complex cannot include any Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC)—a variety of chemicals that leach from building materials in gaseous form with both short- and long-term health effects.

After construction is complete, Del Valle states that, to further improve indoor air quality, they're going to watch it like a cybernetic hawk:

"CO2 monitors control ventilation and make the building healthier and improve indoor air quality. If the CO2 sensor sends a signal to the air handler software, telling it you need more fresh air in a certain space because there's more CO2 than there should be, it automatically increases the fresh air mix coming into that space. We have over 3,000 points of monitoring."

In addition, the WTC will improve the air of the greater Manhattan Financial District by reducing the amount of vehicular traffic in the area by providing ample public transportation access and extensive facilities for bicycle commuters.
HARVESTING THE RAIN

It rains in New York City, on average, 60 inches a year—second only to Miami. Rather than simply let this precipitation run off the buildings and into storm drains, the WTC will collect and store that rain water for later use in its new high-efficiency evaporative cooling towers and for irrigating greenery within the 16-acre complex. (Since it hasn't been treated, the harvested rainwater cannot be used as a potable source.)



WTC: River Water Pump Station: Image Courtesy of WTC Progress / Flickr


HARVESTING THE HUDSON

New York, as with most areas of the country outside of the confines of Northern California, requires significant air-conditioning service throughout the year. The occupants of the new WTC complex will stay frosty in even the muggiest of Autumnal weather thanks to the new and highly efficient 12,500-ton Central Chiller Plant (CCP) that uses water from the Hudson River to cool the WTC Transportation Hub, National September 11 Memorial and Museum, retail space and other non-commercial areas.
FULL SIZE

Located in the far Southwest corner of the complex—roughly in the same area as the previous plant—the CCP employs water extracted through the River Water Pump Station (RWPS), on the other side of the West Side Highway, to chill (and heat, during the Winter) water for distribution to the rest of the complex.

It will circulate 30,000 gallons of river water every minute. That's enough to fill 750 bath tubs, flush 10,000 toilets, and cool the same amount as approximately 2,500 home air-conditioners.

"It uses the Hudson as a way of both dissipating heat and preheating water," Del Valle explained. "Because water below a certain depth is a pretty constant temperature (about 45-50 degrees Fahrenheit), so what happens is, during the winter it takes less energy to heat and circulate it, and conversely, in the summer it takes less to cool it."
RECYCLING, REDUCING, REUSING

The new World Trade Center is already 75 percent old. Everything from the gypsum boards to the ceiling tiles contains a minimum of 75 percent post-industrial recycled content. This reduces the environmental footprint, not only on-site, but reduces the stress on the natural resources and energy needed to produce them.

At the same time, the WTC construction project recycles an incredible 80 percent of the waste generated at the site. According to Del Valle, "We've exceeded our original target by about 20 percent. The contractors have been really good, we've been watching and documenting how the material is recycled and sent back to the plants. It's really a cycle that's feeding on itself."

Monster Machines is all about the most exceptional machines in the world, from massive gadgets of destruction to tiny machines of precision, and everything in between.

A civilization can distinguish itself by how well it responds to disaster, and 10 years later, 9/11 is as much a story about recovery and rebuilding as it a story of terrible loss and tragedy. As a nation, our political and economic response has been imperfect—possibly even dead wrong—but we're focusing on the mechanical marvels that have helped us bounce back.

Ten Top Futurist Predictions For 2013 And Beyond

Ten Top Futurist Predictions For 2013 And Beyond
Posted by JacobSloan on November 16, 2012
The World Future Society has revealed its top ten expectations, which could alternately be seen as utopian or dystopian, for the world in which we will soon be living. Including, robots will care for our elderly, a profit-driven space race will unfold, “the cloud” will run our lives, and neurotechnology will know what we are about to do before we do it:


The “cloud” will become more intelligent, not just a place to store data. Cloud intelligence will evolve into becoming an active resource in our daily lives, providing analysis and contextual advice. Virtual agents could, for example, design your family’s weekly menu based on everyone’s health profiles, fitness goals, and taste preferences, predict futurist consultants Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth.

Robots will become gentler caregivers in the next 10 years. Lifting and transferring frail patients may be easier for robots than for human caregivers, but their strong arms typically lack sensitivity. Japanese researchers are improving the functionality of the RIBA II (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance), lining its arms and chest with sensors so it can lift its patients more gently.

Neuroscientists may soon be able to predict what you’ll do before you do it. The intention to do something, such as grasp a cup, produces blood flow to specific areas of the brain, so studying blood-flow patterns through neuroimaging could give researchers a better idea of what people have in mind. One potential application is improved prosthetic devices that respond to signals from the brain more like actual limbs do.

Ever Wonder What Grows In Your Belly Button?

Belly button samples reveal wonderland of fluffy fauna
18:13 14 November 2012
Picture of the Day
Joanna Carver, reporter

(Image: Belly Button Biodiversity)

If you were told you had an ecosystem living in your belly button, it might come as a bit of shock. Well, you probably do. These are just a few of the samples that Belly Button Biodiversity (BBB), a group of scientists from North Carolina University in Raleigh and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, have taken from themselves as well as students, science bloggers and others.

BBB want to strike down the "bad bacteria" stereotype and teach the world that many bacteria are harmless, helpful and a lot of times just hanging around, mooching off your body. The navel is an ideal place for bacteria to thrive because it's isolated and most people don't bother to wash it. But what BBB wondered was, do the bacteria change from person to person?

BBB grew the bacteria from hundreds of swab samples and found that most people's belly button ecosystems are pretty unique. They found a total of 2368 types of bacteria, with 2188 present on fewer than 10 per cent of the samples.

Several of BBB's samples are posted online. The top left is a bacillus that produces antibiotic compounds that can kill other bacteria as well as foot fungi. The bottom right is a type of clostridial bacterium, whose diverse family includes botulism and gangrene bacteria, though many of them are harmless.

Distant Black Holes Map Universe's Dark Energy History

Distant Black Holes Map Universe's Dark Energy History
by SPACE.com Staff
Date: 14 November 2012 Time: 01:43 PM ET






Light from distant quasars (red dots at left) is partially absorbed as it passes through clouds of hydrogen gas. Astronomers working on the BOSS survey used this effect to study the history of dark energy in the universe's ancient past.
CREDIT: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Nic Ross, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, Berkeley Lab; and Springel et al, Virgo Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

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Extremely bright black holes gobbling up matter in the distant universe have provided a window back in time for astronomers to study dark energy more than 10 billion years ago.

Dark energy is the mysterious force thought to be pulling everything in the universe apart, causing space-time to expand and galaxies to move farther and farther away from each other, all at an accelerating clip.

Dark energy, whatever it is, currently appears to be beating out the attractive of force of gravity that works to pull galaxies and everything in the universe closer together. However, that wasn't always the case. When the universe was young, astronomers think dark energy's impact was small, and gravity won out.

To confirm this idea and learn about when gravity lost the fight to dark energy, astronomers must look back in time. They do that by studying extremely far objects whose light has taken billions of years to reach us on Earth, thus presenting a picture of them as they were long ago. [Images: The Big Bang & Early Universe]

Now, researchers report observations of the early universe from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which studied thousands of distant objects called quasars to map out the universe up to 11.5 billion years ago. Quasars are active black holes that release copious amounts of light as they gorge on matter.

"No technique for dark energy research has been able to probe this ancient era before, a time when matter was still dense enough for gravity to slow the expansion of the universe, and the influence of dark energy hadn't yet been felt," BOSS principal investigator David Schlegel, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement. "In our own time, expansion is accelerating because the universe is dominated by dark energy. How dark energy effected the transition from deceleration to acceleration is one of the most challenging questions in cosmology."

The BOSS scientists used the Sloan Foundation Telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to observe more than 48,000 far-away quasars. The measurements were what are called spectra, which break light up into its constituent wavelengths. In this case, the spectra revealed key information about clouds of gas that the quasars' light traveled through on its journey from them to the telescope.

By studying the distribution of gas throughout the universe, the scientists pieced together a large-scale map of how matter is spread out in space. This spread reveals variations — called baryon acoustic oscillations — that arose soon after the universe was born and which provide a cosmic ruler to measure how quickly the universe was expanding at various stages in the past.

"We are seeing back to the matter-dominated universe, when expansion was decelerating and dark energy was hard to see," said Berkeley astrophysicist Martin White. "The transition from decelerating expansion to accelerating expansion was a sharp one, and now we live in a universe dominated by dark energy. The biggest puzzle in cosmology is, why now?"

The mapping technique using quasar spectra has never been done before, and represents a technological breakthrough, the researchers said.

"When I presented this idea to a conference of cosmologists in 2003, they thought it was crazy," White said. "Nine years later, BOSS has shown that it's an amazingly powerful technique. It has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.


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Gallery: Dark Matter Throughout the Universe