Science Bites! Options

[Gerard]

As above, so below


[attachment=10607:neuron_universum.jpg]

[Gerard]

Cosmic Rebirth Encoded in Background Radiation?

By Ian O'Neill | Sun Nov 28, 2010

They say that fact is often stranger than fiction, and it would appear that fact and a science fiction storyline have just collided in a big way.
Scientists analyzing the ubiquitous cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) observed throughout the Universe have claimed they've discovered a pattern in its signal.
And having watched a recent episode of Stargate Universe (SGU) -- an awesome sci-fi series, and one of my favorites -- a storyline involving a pattern in the CMBR has just aired. Although the SGU CMBR pattern has a very different origin to what this most recent discovery is suggesting, it is a testament to how awesome accurate science fiction writing can be.
Before we can understand what this pattern is -- or why there's any kind of connection with SGU -- we first need to understand where this radiation came from.

What is Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation?

CMBR is a relic of the birth of our Universe, when the entire cosmos was filled with hot plasma. The plasma emitted strong electromagnetic radiation, but as the Universe grew, this radiation lost energy as it traveled through the expanding void. Like a rubber sheet being stretched, the fabric of space-time expanded, stretching the radiation itself.
Over billions of years, this primordial radiation was red-shifted so much by universal growth that it's become nothing more than a background echo of microwave noise. But it's there, everywhere, and it can be measured.
The CMBR provides strong evidence of a Big Bang (i.e., everything came from a compressed, hot state) and universal inflation (i.e., the rapid expansion of the Universe immediately after the Big Bang).
Although instruments such as NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have measured slight temperature variations in the CMBR -- known as anisotropies (pictured below) -- revealing startling clues as to the structure, age and history of the Universe, this new controversial discovery suggests the CMBR contains something else.

A Pattern

In an unpublished paper submitted to the arXiv preprint service, world-renowned Oxford University physicist Roger Penrose and co-author Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia have announced a pattern in the CMBR that could reveal events that occurred before the Big Bang.
If Penrose and Gurzadyan suggested that evidence of a pre-Big Bang Universe survived into our Universe without any physical proof, it would be highly speculative at best; the kind of discussion you'd only have in an advanced theoretical physics class. But this study has used data from WMAP and the balloon-borne BOOMERang experiment, adding some 'meat' to this hypothesis.
The problem is that it is generally accepted that the Big Bang, end ensuing inflation, destroyed any hint of what came before. We cannot "see" what happened before the Big Bang because, as far as we're concerned, it didn't. But Penrose and Gurzadyan have decided to put their hypothesis out there and, unsurprisingly, it's causing one hell of a stir.

A Cyclical Universe?

According to the pair of physicists, there is a circular pattern embedded in the CMBR like ripples (pictured top). These ripples show slight decreases in average temperature in a cyclical manner. The reason? This could be evidence for repeated birth and death of the Universe, or universes, that came before our current 13.75 billion year-old Universe.

The dark circles show regions of the universe that are cooler than average. Could each ring provide information about what happened before the Big Bang? (V.G.Gurzadyan and R.Penrose)

Full story: here

[Homer]

Amazing video...

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/scien...18aug_cmemovie/

"August 18, 2011: For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.

“The movie sent chills down my spine,” says Craig DeForest of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small.” ..."

[Gerard]

God particle may not exist after all

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

A particle believed to have played a key role in the creation of the universe might not exist after all, a media report said Tuesday quoting experts.

Scientists said last month that they were close to cornering the elusive Higgs boson or 'God particle' - a tiny but vital element in the construction of life as we know it.

But hope is now fading after the disappearance of signals scientists had hoped would lead them to it, the Daily Mail reported.

The CERN research centre, whose giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been carrying out the work under the mountains on the French-Swiss border, announced its scepticism at a conference in Mumbai.

Guido Tonelli, from one of the two LHC detectors chasing the Higgs, said: "Whatever the final verdict on Higgs, we are now living in very exciting times for all involved in the quest for new physics."

CERN said new results, which updated findings that caused excitement at another scientific gathering in Grenoble last month, "show that the elusive Higgs particle, if it exists, is running out of places to hide", the Mail reported.

The centre's research director Sergio Bertolucci told the conference at Mumbai's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research that if the Higgs did not exist "its absence will point the way to new physics".

Under what is known as the Standard Model of physics, the boson - named after British physicist Peter Higgs - is posited as having been the agent that gave mass and energy to matter just after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

As a result, flying debris from that primeval explosion could come together as stars, planets and galaxies.

In the subterranean LHC, which began operating in March 2010, CERN engineers and physicists have created billions of miniature versions of the Big Bang by smashing particles together at just a fraction under the speed of light.

The results of those collisions are monitored by hundreds of physicists, not just at CERN but in linked laboratories around the world which sift through the vast volumes of information generated by the LHC, the Mail said.

For some scientists, the Higgs remains the simplest explanation of how matter got mass. It remains unclear what could replace it as an explanation.

[Brainiac]

Scientists witness birth of a planet

Astronomers have for the first time captured images of a planet forming around a star, which could shed light on the way in which planets and solar systems form.

The discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and appears on the pre-press physics website arXiv.org.

Dr Michael Ireland from Sydney's Macquarie University is part of an international team of astronomers who made the discovery. They used the giant 10-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii to study a very young, newly formed star called LkCa15 in the Taurus-Auriga star forming region, about 450 light years way.

The star is almost the same size as the Sun, but only a few million years old.

[Brainiac]

Report: Dutch 'Lord of the Data' Forged Dozens of Studies

One of the Netherlands' leading social psychologists made up or manipulated data in dozens of papers over nearly a decade, an investigating committee has concluded.

Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September after three junior researchers reported that they suspected scientific misconduct in a study that claimed eating meat made people more aggressive. Soon after being confronted with the accusations, Stapel reportedly told university officials that some of his papers contained falsified data. The university launched an investigation, as did the University of Groningen and the University of Amsterdam, where Stapel had worked previously. The Tilburg commission today released an interim report (in Dutch), which includes preliminary results from all three investigations. The investigators found "several dozens of publications" in which fictitious data has been used. Fourteen of the 21 Ph.D. theses Stapel supervised are also tainted, the committee concluded.

[Click headline to read more]

[Brainiac]

The dreams and hallucinations of cloistered monks

French sleep scientists have studied a group of monks who have virtually no contact with the outside world and have taken a vow of silence. The monks are of scientific interest owing to the tradition of having two sleep periods per night interrupted by a 2-3 hour prayer and psalm reading session.

The research group were interested in how the sleep-regulating circadian rhythm adjusts to this two sleep system.

It turns out that the automatic rising and falling of body temperature seemed to sync with the two-period sleep patterns but that the monks still had sleep problems (difficulty sleeping, waking, daytime sleepiness). This suggests that they were not fully adjusted, even after decades of practice (the researchers report that “They all used several (two to six) alarm clocks”!)

Delightfully, the monks were also asked about their tendency to hallucinate and about the content of their dreams. Although only ten individuals were studied, the answers are oddly appropriate for members of a silent, closed order.

Six monks had experienced mild (n = 4, ringing of the cell door at sleep offset or of the alarm clock, feeling that someone hit them briefly in the back, waking-up during the second sleep while mentally singing psalms) and moderate (n = 2, nightmarish, prolonged feeling of a demoniac presence at sleep onset after Matins) sleep-related hallucinations vs. one control (p = .06). Occasional nightmares were more frequent in monks than in controls.

All monks reported dreaming more often after than before the Matins [midnight prayers in between the two sleep periods], and to have conversations in their dreams. These conversations were rare (n = 3), hard to understand (n = 2), or frequent (n = 5). As for prayers, six monks were able to pray while dreaming, although it was rare, whereas two others dreamt of acts of piety, or imagined a disrupted liturgy, and finally two of them dreamt they were never monks.

[metamorphosis]

Can time be reversed? Link to BBC

Albert Einstein better be watching his back. Physicists have added fuel to a fire that could destroy one of Einstein's fundamental notions: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
Or from NPR
Well, back in September, a team of scientists first claimed that a sub-atomic particle called the neutrino could travel faster than the speed of light. Needless to say, there were skeptics. Now, physicists have done it again with a fine-tuned experiment that matches the previous results.

[Prisni]

If pigs had wings, pigs could fly?

[metamorphosis]

If pigs had wings, pigs could fly?

Probably since i have heard that Honey Bees can not fly. (although it is folk lore i think)

[Brainiac]

This could be the beginning of a very exciting time in physics.

Starts With A Bang!: Neutrino Test Results

[Brainiac]

'Chimera' monkeys created in lab by combining several embryos into one

The world's first monkeys to be created from the embryos of several individuals have been born at a US research centre.

[Link to Video]

Scientists at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre produced the animals, known as chimeras, by sticking together between three and six rhesus monkey embryos in the early stages of their development. Three animals were born at the laboratory, a singleton and twins, and were said to be healthy, with no apparent birth defects following the controversial technique.

The chimeras have tissues and organs made up of cells that come from each of the contributing embryos. The mixtures of cells carried up to six distinct genomes. "The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs," said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who led the research. "The possibilities for science are enormous."

Scientists named the singleton Chimero, and the twins Roku and Hex, meaning six in Japanese and Greek. Hex was born after merging six individual embryos, according to a report in the journal Cell. "To our knowledge, these infants are the world's first primate chimeras," the authors write. While all three monkeys are biologically male, blood tests revealed that Roku carried both male and female cells.

The first chimeric animals were created by researchers in the 1960s, when experiments with mouse embryos showed they could combine to form a single mouse of normal size. Since then, scientists have created chimeric versions of rats, rabbits, sheep and cattle. Mitalipov's team produced the chimeric monkeys by carefully pushing four-day-old embryos together in a culture dish and waiting for them to grow. Within a few days, 90% of them had grown into early stage embryos called blastocysts that contained at least twice as many cells as usual.

The researchers implanted the chimeric embryos into five female rhesus monkeys, all of which became pregnant. Tests on the foetuses confirmed that all of the animals' organs and tissues contained cells from more than one embryo.

Chimeric animals – mice in particular – have become a powerful tool in scientific research. They are used to shed light on the exquisite process of embryonic development, such as why a particular cell gives rise to a specific kind of tissue, and to explore how individual genes work. The creation of chimeric animals has also been used to test whether embryonic stem cells stored in laboratories are likely to turn into working tissues when injected into the body. A standard test is to inject stem cells into an early stage embryo. If the embryo grows into a chimeric animal, it means the stem cells have been incorporated into the animal's tissues and organs.

In a series of experiments described in the same paper, the researchers found it impossible to create chimeric monkeys by injecting stem cells into early stage embryos. Only when very young embryos were merged together could they make chimeric animals.

The difficulties the scientists faced could herald future problems in using embryonic stem cells to grow new tissues in humans. While stem cells inside embryos can grow into any tissue or organ, lines of embryonic stem cells cultured in labs seem to lose this ability, at least to some extent. "If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos," said Mitalipov.

Robin Lovell-Badge, head of genetics at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, said there has been a suspicion that most human and monkey embryonic stem cell lines are different.

"This work supports this notion, as the macaque embryonic stem cells tested were unable to mix in with cells of the host embryos. This may be reassuring to those who worry that human embryonic stem cells could be used to make chimeric people, although in itself this should not be a concern, as such rare individuals already exist from the spontaneous merger of two early embryos. But it may be a concern for regenerative medicine if such cells are not as flexible as hoped," he said.

[Brainiac]

Fun Fact: The LHC Magnets cost the same per kilogram as fine Swiss chocolate. A chocolate LHC would have cost the same as the real one!

[ePiTau]

Evolution seen in 'synthetic DNA'

Interesting, provocative, expected, required...

Excerpt:
"We've been able to show that both heredity - information storage and propagation - and evolution, which are really two hallmarks of life, can be reproduced and implemented in alternative polymers other than DNA and RNA," Dr Holliger explained.

"There is nothing 'Goldilocks' about DNA and RNA - there is no overwhelming functional imperative for genetic systems or biology to be based on these two nucleic acids."

In an accompanying article in Science, Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute wrote that "the work heralds the era of synthetic genetics, with implications for exobiology (life elsewhere in the Universe), biotechnology, and understanding of life itself".

But the work does not yet represent a full synthetic genetics platform, he pointed out. For that, a self-replicating system that does not require the DNA intermediary must be developed.

With that in hand, "construction of genetic systems based on alternative chemical platforms may ultimately lead to the synthesis of novel forms of life".

[Gomer]

"But the work does not yet represent a full synthetic genetics platform, he pointed out. For that, a self-replicating system that does not require the DNA intermediary must be developed."

The cigar will be awarded at a future time by an artificial person.

[Brainiac]

Just see, now this artificial DNA is evolving. This reminds me of a discussion I had a few months ago with some 'Goddidit', where I said something to the effect of: "If there was any truth at all in your Bhagavatam, Upanishads and all your scriptures, it would have described evolution as the reason for why life arose on this planet. These scriptures, which are supposed to be the internal spiritual revelations of your Rishis, shows that your Rishis could not possibly have known the truth about the origins of life since most scriptures even of other religions describe a creationl story of some sort."

Then come the apologist replies: "Maybe so, but perhaps they submitted creation stories because man was at an early period of development and creation stories were all man could handle at that point."

So I said: "That's even worse, and is more proof that the scriptures are utterly erroneous. Your Rishis were also supposed to be tri-kala-jnanis, meaning that they could see the future. They would thus have known that stupid arguments like these would occur and continue endlessly, and to prevent this they could and should have been straight from the beginning."

That was all paraphrasing, but that's the gist.

[Gomer]

It's official - spiritual people have multiple G Spots! Love of god has deep roots...

""We have found a neuro-psychological basis for spirituality, but it's not isolated to one specific area of the brain," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in University of Missouri School of Health Professions, who led the study."

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.co...obe-human-brain

[Gomer]

Then come the apologist replies: "Maybe so, but perhaps they submitted creation stories because man was at an early period of development and creation stories were all man could handle at that point."

Some Creationists claim that the dinosaur fossils were planted by god to fool the non-believers.

[ePiTau]

Then come the apologist replies: "Maybe so, but perhaps they submitted creation stories because man was at an early period of development and creation stories were all man could handle at that point."

Some Creationists claim that the dinosaur fossils were planted by god to fool the non-believers.

Planted by Satan, Gomer, that's the version I heard!

[Gomer]

Planted by Satan, Gomer, that's the version I heard!

Ahhh, yes, the Fallen Angel. Lila, my friend, Lila.