Those exploding black holes (at least in theory — none has ever been observed) lit up a new strangeness of nature. Black holes, in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D images you see on bank cards. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists have been wondering ever since how this “holographic principle” — that we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall — applies to the universe and where it came from.
Karl Pribram, neuroscientist and pioneering theorist of the holonomic brain model that extended physicist David Bohm’s theory that without our ‘lenses,’ the universe would appear a hologram, discusses how our processing makes correlations to make a ‘space-time image’ in our holographic universe:
If you didn’t have telescopes what would you see? You would see a hologram. So not only the lenses of the eye, but all the lenses that we use to look microscopically, telescopically, we would see nothing but holograms. Because light bounces all over the place. Like coming in here, you diffused it even more by giving several sources, and that all has to be gathered and focused to make a space-time image. In acoustics, this is very well-known because if you build a concert hall and it has to sound just right, and people come in with their hair and clothes and so on, it’s a dead sounding concert hall. Because everything is refracted and absorbed and this and that. So you’ve got to have reflectors and so on and so forth, so you’ve got to build your hall to be much more reflective. That doesn’t mean that objects don’t exist, that stars don’t exist, you know, you can’t take it to the holographic universe being every and all, a total explanation, anymore than you can take brain function as being a total explanation. It’s one of the processing steps that we have, that we use, and a very powerful one. That’s why you don’t want to lose it. Its power is in making correlations. We’re so good at making correlations.
A new “dietary restriction” (not just calorie restriction) theory about how diet affects aging suggests that the drop in calories is not solely responsible for lifespan extension — in some species at least, perhaps it is also the accompanying drop in dietary protein.
Protein restriction is much less difficult to maintain than calorie restriction and may be more powerful in reducing insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) in humans (a promoter of aging), says Luigi Fontana, a professor of medicine at Washington University and head of the Division of Nutrition and Aging at the Italian National Institute of Health. Earlier findings from School of Medicine researchers had suggested that eating less protein may help protect against certain cancers that are not directly associated with obesity.
Fontana draws his conclusions from his studies of people who are practicing calorie restriction (“CRONies” —short for Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition). Fontana and colleagues previously have found that people on the very low-calorie diet have low blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, blood pressure scores equivalent to those of much younger individuals, a lower risk of developing diabetes and reduced body fat. These markers indicate less secondary aging.
Vegans and vegetarians have another advantage: proteins in meat and other animal products have high levels of methionine; studies show that cutting methionine lengthens life to a similar degree as calorie restriction.
Look to the skies tonight and early morning August 4th for the Northern Lights (or aurorae). The Sun’s surface has erupted and blasted tons of plasma (ionized atoms) into interplanetary space. That plasma is headed our way, and when it arrives, it could create a spectacular light show.
Aurorae normally are visible only at high latitudes. However, during a geomagnetic storm aurorae can light up the sky at lower latitudes. Sky watchers in the northern U.S. and other countries should look toward the north on the evening of August 3rd/4th for rippling “curtains” of green and red light.
“It’s the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time” said astronomer Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Our daily ventures in texting, emailing, blogging, tweeting and simply clicking has become an immense datascape of human activity, migration, interests, and lately, emotional wellness.
Several projects currently aim to track our sentiments on a global and local scale:
The Planetary Mood Ring: Billed as a ‘gigantic feelings aggregator’ works by submissions, called ‘moodies’, is sorted out by geo-spatial location and show moods of entire countries, cities or towns, highways, your own neighborhood, office or household. People are encouraged to enrich the whole Planetary Mood Ring by attaching words, videos and photos to their moodies, revealing the cause of their current mood. The project aims to provide a massive emotional pulse check on the planet that runs continually in the form of a colored collective ‘blip,’ represented as a color wheel inspired by the mood rings of the 1970s. For example. blue and violet would signify people being in cooler, calmer and more satisfied states whilst ambers and reds would represent a civilization in a deep state of angst.
We Feel FIne: Launched in 2005 by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale, in the form of a website, a book and collective artwork authored by everyone. We Feel Fine harvests human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.The community is encouraged to help visualize these sentiments via the gallery.
D-Tower: D-Tower is an art piece, commissioned by the city of Doetinchem in the Netherlands, that maps the emotions of the inhabitants of Doetinchem. A collaboration with NOX, a Rotterdam architecture firm and Serafijn, a Rotterdam artist, the project utilizes a physical structure (tower) to convey the daily moods of 50 selected people from the small town, who answer different questions on the website daily. From this data, the tower illuminates to show the feeling of the day, in the form of blue for happiness, red for love, green for hate and yellow for fear.
Lars Spuybroek, architect, NOX, explains his public project of turning a tower into an emotional symbol of a small town in the Netherlands:
First, I guess, I would have to explain what a D-Tower is. That’s another collaboration I did with an artist also from Rotterdam. His name is Serafijn. He is doing a lot of art in the community, either with video or interactive, and we collaborated. We were asked to do a tower, whatever it was, but it needed to be a tower because the Mayor thought it should be a tower. And we suggested a website and they liked that idea a lot, and they said, “Yeah, you can do a website, but you also have to do a tower.” [laughs] So then at a certain moment it became a tower, a website, and a questionnaire. And the questionnaire was on four emotions: love, hate, happiness and fear. And, basically, what we do is each year 50 people are selected. There’s a small town in the East of the Netherlands, on the German border that has 50,000 inhabitants. And of these 50,000, each year 50 get the password. And these 50 people are from all the neighborhoods in the city. So it’s well represented. And each of these 50 they can access the website but we cannot because it’s a certain part of the website that’s only for them with the password. And each four days they get a new set of questions about their emotional lives.
And the website has these four landscapes. So we can see, on the website, we can see how love is doing, how hate is doing – how these four emotions are doing according to the peaks and valleys of the responses on this graph. Now what happens is that each evening when the sun sort of sets the computer can check which emotion is doing the best that day. So when love is #1 the tower becomes red. Because there is this tower in this city. With happiness, it’s blue. With hate, it’s green. And with fear, it’s yellow. So there is this object in the city, there’s this object in the city, and people come from work, it’s a very prominent place in the city. And they can actually, when they drive home and it’s getting dark, they can see if it’s green for hate or blue for happiness. That is very intense. Because the moment they see that object as having one color they know it is representing the whole city.
So this idea of qualia immediately is coloring the whole city. This is directly connected to emotions. More like a symbolism. More like a symbol.
Visual of Sub-Biosphere 2 concept for a self-sustaining marine environment for human, animal and plant life by Pauley Interactive.
Drawing from the vision of Biosphere 2, the man-made closed-ecological system in Arizona, Phil Pauley, a London-based concept designer, is looking to the build a self-sustainable underwater habitat called Sub-Biosphere 2.
Designed for ‘aquanauts,’ tourism and oceanographic life sciences as well as long-term human, plant and animal habitation, the Sub-Biosphere 2 (SBS2) will have a central supporting biome powering and controlling eight interactive living biomes – each representing a different ecosystem. According to Pauley, all life-support systems for air, water, food, electricity, and other resources will be sustained by the innovative control of variant atmospheric pressures that occur at depth. The SBS2 will also act as a seed bank supporting the human, animal and plant life in the biomes.
The SBS2 will be able to float or submerge and as it dives, the pressure at depth against the forces of air would act like a heart and lungs, sustaining the life within the biomes—which is something to consider, given the success and failure of its mentor, Biosphere 2, which was terminated in 1994 and now serves as a as a center for research, teaching and learning about Earth and its living systems, managed by the University of Arizona. Opinions vary on the eventual failure of the Biosphere 2 project, but most agree that it came down to human nature—feelings of isolation or problems with the management team. Something Pauley and his SBS2 team will have to consider with confining human beings into the SBS2.
Lapsed video photography of shapeshifting material via ZDNet
Scientists at Harvard University and M.I.T. have invented self-folding sheets of fiberglass that can flex themselves origami-like into shapes of airplanes and boats.
Less than a half-millimeter thick and connected by elastic silicone rubber creases, the self-folding sheets are one step closer to “programmable matter” that could one day serve to bend and crease into any three-dimensional shape.
To make the sheets self-folding, computer scientist Daniela Rus at MIT and her colleagues embedded strips just 100 microns thick — as wide as a human hair — made of a “shape-memory” nickel-titanium alloy that changes shape when heated or cooled. They also included flexible, stretchable copper-laminated plastic mesh ribbons on the sheets that served as wires.
The sheets shift from flat to bent when electricity is applied to heat the shape memory alloy strips, causing the entire sheet to fold with them.
“The underlying theme here is to have a structure that can choose different shapes on demand for whatever you might use them for,” said researcher Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard University.
To program each crease to fold in the right direction and order, the researchers are developing stickers that contain all the circuits needed to connect and trigger the correct actuators for making specific complex three-dimensional shapes.
The researchers foresee a number of potential applications:
* Measuring cups that fold to hold anywhere from a quarter teaspoon to multiple cups.
* Shelves that fold into as many divisions as required.
* A puckering sheet that can display information for the blind or people in the dark.
* A Swiss army knife of sorts able to form a tripod, wrench, antenna, or splint.
Currently the researchers power the sheets by wiring them to external controllers. Wood suggests that future sheets could include energy storage or energy harvesting layers, such as solar panels, and could also be wirelessly powered.
Instead of employing shape memory alloy strips, the actuators could be made of a number of other materials as well, such as artificial muscles.
At the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues attendees assessed the risks and benefits of synthetic biology. Advocates heralded the field’s shiny prospects for health and commerce while others cautioned against environmental hazards and potential widening of socioeconomic gaps.
Proponents included: Craig Venter, American biologist and founder of J. Craig Venter Institute who is known for sequencing the human genome; Drew Endy, synthetic biologist, assistant professor at Stanford University and leading enabler of open source biotechnology; Chemical engineer Kristala Prather, head of Prather Research Group @ MIT; and George Church, molecular geneticist who initiated the Personal Genome Project and founded the personal genomic company, Knome.
Concerned bioethicists and scientists included: Allison Snow from the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology at Ohio State University; Technology historian Jim Thomas; Greg Kaebnick, Research Scholar at The Hastings Center and editor of the Hastings Center Report; and Allen Buchanan, professor of philosophy at Duke University.
According to Bioethics.org, the Commission is requesting public input until September 1st and their report on SynBio recommendations and implications is due on Obama’s desk in November of this year.
via Biopolitical Times, the weblog of the Center for Genetics and Society
Photo of magnetic solar coronal loops via Eureka Alert by TRACE
Musical sounds created by longitudinal vibrations within the Sun’s atmosphere, have been recorded and accurately studied for the first time by experts at the University of Sheffield, shedding light on the Sun’s magnetic atmosphere.
Using state-of-the-art mathematical theory combined with satellite observations, a team of solar physicists from the University have captured the music on tape and revealed the harmonious sounds are caused by the movement of giant magnetic loops in the solar corona -the outermost, mysterious, and least understood layer of the Suns atmosphere. Most importantly, the team studied how this sound is decaying, giving an unprecedented insight into the physics of the solar corona.
High-resolution images taken by a number of satellites show that the solar corona is filled with large banana-shaped magnetic structures known as coronal loops. It is thought that these giant magnetic loops, some of them over a few 100,000 km long, play a fundamental role in governing the physics of the corona and are responsible for huge atmospheric explosions that occur in the atmosphere, known as solar flares.
These giant coronal loops have also been observed to undergo periodic (oscillatory) motion, which can be thought of as someone plucking a guitar string (transversal oscillations) or blowing the wind-pipe instrument (longitudinal oscillations). With the length and thickness of the string fixed, the pitch of the note is determined by the tension of the string and the tone is made up of the harmonics of the modes of oscillation. In this sense, the solar atmosphere is constantly pervaded by the music of the coronal loops.
Video from the Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer, showing eruptions from the solar corona.
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