Anthropology Wastes Time

'Time' not necessarily deeply rooted in our brains

May 20, 2011

• article
• comments (9)
• text-to-speech
• share

(Medical Xpress) -- Hidden away in the Amazonian rainforest a small tribe have successfully managed what so many dream of being able to do – to ignore the pressures of time so successfully that they don’t even have a word for it.

It is the first time scientists have been able to prove 'time' is not a deeply entrenched human universal concept as previously thought.

Researchers, led by Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth Department of Psychology, studied the way in which time was talked about and thought about by the Amondawa people of Brazil. Their research is published in the journal Language and Cognition.

Professor Sinha said: "For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are 'people outside time', but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time."

Team members including linguist Wany Sampaio and anthropologist Vera da Silva Sinha, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like 'next week' or 'last year'. There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons. They also found nobody in the community has an age. Instead, they change their names to reflect their life stage and position within their society, so that for example a little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling, and take on a new one.

Professor Sinha said: "We have so many metaphors for time and its passing – we think of time as a 'thing' – we say 'the weekend is nearly gone'; 'she's coming up to her exams'; 'I haven't got the time', and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren't. We've created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don't talk like this and don't think like this, unless they learn another language.

"We didn't expect to find this – we had studied the same language earlier and were going back to further our understanding of its metaphors. We were surprised to find that space metaphors for time and the abstract concept of time are simply absent from the language and culture.

"For these fortunate people time isn't money, they aren't racing against the clock to complete anything, and nobody is discussing next week or next year; they don't even have words for 'week', 'month' or 'year'. You could say they enjoy a certain freedom.

"It strikes us as strange that such 'time-free' cultures exist," says Professor Sinha, "but many Amazonian languages, including Amondawa, don't have numbers beyond four or five, and if you don't have the numbers, you don't have time as an abstract, measurable 'thing'.

"Time is more to do with experience than being inborn in us. The only real biological clock is the ageing of our bodies. All our complex concepts of time are cultural inventions, a kind of technology of the mind.

"The Babylonians invented the 24-hour day, and the convention of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and we're so used to being ruled by the calendar and clock that we don't reflect on it. But our notion of time is a double-edged sword. We wouldn't have the benefits of our socially and technologically complex society without it. But it's also, as we know, a burden and a source of increasing stress in our modern 24/7 lifestyle."

Time catches up with us all in the end, though. First contacted by the outside world in 1986, the Amondawa continue their traditional way of life, hunting, fishing and growing crops. But along with health care, electricity and television has come the Portuguese language. Like many of the world's 7,000 or so languages, Amondawa is threatened with extinction.

"We are now aware of the great riches still to be discovered in the world's biodiversity, and we know we should preserve this for future generations," says Professor Sinha. "But linguistic and cultural diversity is also a treasure trove, not just for scientists, but for everyone's understanding of what it means to be human. We can't and shouldn't try to stop change, but we should help empower people like the Amondawa to determine their own future and keep their language and traditions alive. That's why work like that of Wany and Vera, who helped the community set up a native-language based school, is so important."

Provided by University of Portsmouth

What differentiates humans from all other biological life forms is our unique ability to self consciously improve upon nature via scientific progress. However, most "anthropologists" are trained to ignore this distinction and like Aristotle view humans as mere talking beasts...This is why they have such a mawkish, and silly sentimental reaction to keeping their conception of the "diversity" of this "human zoo" pristine and untouched. Their mentality is that their own brand of investigation despoils humanity, which ironically happens to be true. But this says nothing about the true purpose of science, because theirs is but a sorry farce...

The Ironic Fate of Dominique Strauss-Kahn

If your author were given to anthropomorphisms, I would imagine that somewhere on high an angelic host must be heartily amused at the charges of sodomic rape brought against Messier Strauss-Kahn. For it is certain that the institution he heads has been engaged for lo these many years in rapine of nation after nation with their killer IMF conditionalities. Yes, Acadia, the evil Olympian gods which Socrates (who died for bringing forward the truth) exposed as manufactured frauds of the ancient oligarchy are once again afoot. Today they are in the disguise of  financial "elites" and "technocrats" scheming to stuff the pockets of their masters with filthy lucre at the expense of your children's future being swallowed up in a disgusting parody of the myths about these evil oligarchic gods. Today, we are as if shackled watching the would be soothsayers' 3-D mime show extravaganza on the cave wall, produced in Hollywood, of course, which tells us that Gaia, mother earth (that whore) must be appeased with the blood of her sinful human creatures...Their crime? Daring to grasp the Promethean fire of the intellect and drag humanity out of that putrid cave. Daring to shout from the rooftops that it is evermore our destiny to explore and to live amongst the stars. Daring to propose that the bluff of the City of London and Wall Street be called...

Happy Days ...Er Meals Are Here Again

Stock markets, those Delphic harbingers of all good things to come, are soaring up one per cent today. Hazzah...The reason? McDonalds hired 50,000 low paid serfs...er servers. What a world...

Monstrous moonshine at work?

Some Black Holes May Pre-Date The Big Bang, Say Cosmologists

If the Universe expands and contracts in cycles of Big Bangs and Crunches, some black holes may survive from one era to the next, according to a new analysis

Sounds to me like these fine feathered astronomers must have got into some of their mathematician brethren's monstrous moonshine before formulating this theory...

Geithner Exposes Obama's Fraud

It was hard today, even to find the item in the news. Geithner says that he will not regulate foreign exchange derivatives. It is even harder to find out that Representative Marci Kaptur has put forward a bill that would reinstate Glass-Steagall. Representative Maria Cantwell, who failed previously to reinstate Glass-Steagall commented on Geithner's pronunciamento:

 “I can’t believe the first decision the administration would make to carry out Dodd-Frank would be an anti-transparency decision. The idea that the foreign-exchange markets are not at risk is preposterous — we now know that they required multitrillion-dollar bailouts. Anytime you have a lack of transparency, there is potential for abuse.”


Here is Marci Kaptur grilling Geithner on his abject subservience to Goldman Sachs:

Meanwhile, we are regaled everywhere by the usual grinning idiots in the media... 

The Disgusting Malodorous Media

This morning, when I arose to exercise, as is my wont, I turned on the television to view what passes as "the news." Every single "news" channel and then some, had interrupted their "normal programming" to provide us with the nauseating spectacle of the Royal Wedding. The same Royal family which our founders suffered the ultimate sacrifice from which to free ourselves. Here "liberal" and "conservative" networks alike abjectly fawned over and gushed their hardly hidden preference that we might have once again the pageantry of such a royal family here. The same Royal family whose current figurehead's consort openly avows that he so hates humanity that he wishes to be reincarnated as a deadly virus to reduce the population. Like Poe's purloined letter the truth is right under your nose, but you will not see it. If you would but stop larding on the perfume provided by our disgraceful media "stars," the stench of this Royal Rot would make you very, very ill, indeed...

Pacemaker or Autowaves, Biophysical and Noetic Curvature, and Shockwaves

For the first time, it has been shown by researchers at UC San Diego that regular electrical oscillatory waves in the brain are a requirement for the proper firing of neurons that provide a nodal grid that acts as a conformal mapping as a kind of spatial sensory compass. There are a number of profound implications of this development which I will attempt to illustrate here.

The first broad implication has to do with the concept of a conformal mapping per se. Gauss showed that the natural alternation of negative to positive curvature of surfaces that we encounter everywhere in nature may be conformally mapped via normals to a tangent plane onto a unit hypersphere. (Hilbert gives a visual illustration of this in his book Geometry and the Imagination.) Riemann continued and expanded upon this concept to evolve the so-called Riemann surface function, which provides a framework for a rigorous network of nodes or branch points that allow functional passage from imaginary sheets (imaginary understood here in the sense of the complex plane) on this Gaussian unitary sphere. Now, pause here and consider how this non Euclidean geometric model might apply to the research cited above. What do we have but such a one to one mapping by our mental sensorium of the "outer space" through which we must navigate. As we move through this space, neurons can fire appropriately to provide layer upon layer of continuous maps so that we may consciously access a memory through the processing of  electrical impulses at these nodes. I will return to this theme shortly after a necessary ellipsis below.

This, I hope, aptly illustrates what to most readers is a remarkable sort of prescience of the genius of a Gauss and a Riemann. However, this quality of thinking needs to be demystified, if humanity is to meet the pressing requirements of the mission of getting off this planet and colonizing space, such that these apparently inaccessible powers of mind become the common property of all. Gauss and Riemann built upon the revolution in scientific methodology introduced by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Here, I must point out that the attempt to characterize Cusa as a Christian "mystic" by modern academics is a completely obfuscatory slander, either resulting from ignorant incompetence or worse intentional malevolence. Ironically, it is Cusa's concept that the microcosm and the macrocosm are necessarily intimately connected in their mutually evolving creative development that laid the foundation for breaking the chains of the destructive and insane precepts of Ptolemaic/Euclidean mystical scholasticism. This too, followed upon Dante's revolutionary ecumenical characterization in the Paradisio, where he foreshadowed Kepler's and Einstein's relativity by placing his frame of reference on the moon and thereby dispelling the mythology that there is some mystical priority of earth's place somehow mirrored  in a pantheon of fixed feudal relationships. Thus, Cusa promoted the return to the Platonic/Pythagorean  measurement of the curvature of the earth by the very same Gaussian normal vector to the tangent plane method by Eratosthenes in Egypt some 1700 years earlier. It is no accident, that Cusa recognized that what was to become the colonization of the new world was a necessary flanking precursor of the universal rights of humanity for development that he enunciated in his writings. This method of Cusa of comprehending and hypothesizing the underlying continuous creative composition of the physical macrocosm and noetic microcosm then, constitutes the basis for a true scientific method of investigation. This revolutionary method so challenges the authority of the establishment arbiters of the second law of thermodynamic plodding, Ockhamite sense certainty method that it is all but forbidden in accepted "peer reviewed" publications to merely allude to these actual facts.

Returning to the matter at hand, I turn next to the question of the pacemaker wave referenced above or what many Russian scientists have labeled the autowave. Again, here in writing of wave phenomena, I must return to the towering figure of Bernhard Riemann. Before there was any physical proof of sonar/pressure shockwaves, Riemann used his method of starting from elements of known physical constraints to adumbrate how shockwaves would develop. He reasoned in his paper  from 1860 "The propagation of planar air waves of finite amplitude" that there is a sort of limit imposed for the propagation of waves through a medium. Furthermore, if the source of propagation of wave exceeded this limit a bunching up of waves would occur that might disrupt the medium itself. This we know today, of course, as the familiar sonic boom. (As an update, I learned that shockwaves emanating from the sun in the early solar system have been identified as responsible for stripping volatile elements from chondrites  that then coalesced to form planets.)

Let us extrapolate this principal given what we have uncovered of some other wavelike phenomena since Riemann's time. The general phenomena of solitonic waves, I believe are examples of extreme wave formations that tend to bridge what Vernadsky characterized as the disparate domains of the lithosphere and biosphere (and as I believe also have a correlative in the noosphere.) It has recently been hypothesized for instance that soliton/anti soliton energetics in phage dynamics can account for transitions from active lysogenic to dormant lytic states. Long lived relatively stable wave phenomena that underlie the proper functioning of the biosphere are evident, whether they be aortic pacemaker waves, calcium brainwaves or quantum wave phenomena along the double helix of DNA.

A question that we may pose, building upon Riemann's work, is what happens in the biophysical domain when the velocity of wave propagation tends to surpass the transparency for propagation in that medium? Certainly, the catastrophic malfunction of a heart attack and epilepsy, for example, are evidence that  these pacemaker waves have dynamically overloaded the biological medium. The means to solving such anomalies, is of course the appropriate province of medical research. Further we see similar destructive such anomalies in the domain of Vernadsky's lithosphere, for what are hurricanes but a kind of soliton dynamic, similarly earthquakes are characterized by disruptive gravity waves, solar flares as plasma wave events, and are not the very phenomena of black holes that can rip apart the center of galaxies themselves a type of soliton? Likewise here, it must be a mission of science to secure humanity against such threats.

Now, finally let us drive the analogy with these anomalous soliton-like formations into the domain of the noosphere. One can think of the radiation of technology in human society over time as operating similarly to the kind of standing waves in the brain. For a society, the successive "waves" of transmission of knowledge through culture and education provides the preconditions  for its continued functioning and survival. However, a crisis is encountered whenever there is a limit of resource transparency for the prevailing mode of technology. As LaRouche has shown, what constitutes resources must be redefined via a breakthrough in scientific creativity. This is the quality that uniquely distinguishes the noosphere. This is what Cusa characterizes as an immanent power of humanity. But it is a mission which is also a choice. Nowhere else is there freedom in this sense. And it is truly this gift that Cusa proffered when he collaborated with Toscanelli to revive Eratosthenes non Euclidean method to send Columbus to the new world so that humanity might escape the clutches of those that would have us be slaves.

Humanity's Necessary Mission

It is self evident to any thinking and sentient mortal dwelling on this planet that we as a species must colonize space. This is the case for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is to put an end to the lunacy of warfare among us. Therefore, in a well ordered society which we must strive to create, anything that contributes to this goal must be promoted and nurtured and that which deflects us from that mission must be deterred. It is for this simple reason that the current President of these United States, Barack Obama, and his co-conspirators are treasonous to our nation's and humanity's raison d'etre. Therefore his removal from office as unfit to serve under the 25th amendment should be invoked. This, of course, would apply to most of our so-called leading figures in both of our political parties today. Let this serve as a fitting prayer and invocation on this Saturday before Easter.

On the Other Hand

This article however, must be commended. It is my opinion that if biophysics and the sciences in general were presented in this way, we would not have such a nation of blockheads and dunces to deal with...

Safeguarding genome integrity through extraordinary DNA repair

April 19, 2011 by Paul Preuss

• article
• comments (3)
• text-to-speech
• share

Enlarge

Heterochromatin (purple) accounts for a third of the chromatin in both humans and fruit flies. Some heterochromatin forms the telomeres that cap the ends of the chromatids, and much is concentrated near the centromere, where sister chromatids are joined. Accurate repair of double-strand breaks in heterochromatin is challenging, because most of its DNA consists of short, repeated sequences.

(PhysOrg.com) -- DNA is under constant attack, from internal factors like free radicals and external ones like ionizing radiation. About 10 double-strand breaks – the kind that snap both backbones of the double helix – occur every time a human cell divides. To prevent not only gene mutations but broken chromosomes and chromosomal abnormalities known to cause cancer, infertility, and other diseases in humans, prompt, precise DNA repair is essential.

Ads by Google

DNA Methyltransferase - New Radiolabeled Assay Available Gold Standard for HTS & Profiling - www.ReactionBiology.com

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), working with cell lines of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, have discovered an unsuspected and dramatic process by which double-strand breaks in heterochromatin – one of the two major kinds of chromatin that make up chromosomes, which accounts for a third of the chromatin in both humans and fruit flies – are repaired in a series of steps. The repair starts where the break occurs, but stalls until the repair site physically moves away from the original heterochromatin region, before continuing to completion.
Unlike euchromatin, where most of an organism’s genes reside and where most DNA consists of long, unrepetitive sequences of base pairs, DNA in heterochromatin consists mostly of short repeated sequences that don’t code for proteins; indeed, heterochromatin was long regarded as containing mostly “junk” DNA.
Heterochromatin is now known to be anything but junk, playing a crucial role in organizing chromosomes and maintaining their integrity during cell division. It is concentrated near centromeres, where chromatids are in closest contact, which are required to transmit chromosomes from one generation to the next. Maintaining heterochromatin structure is necessary to the normal growth and functions of cells and organisms.
“Heterochromatin poses more of a problem for DNA repair than euchromatin,” says Gary Karpen, whose group in Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division discovered the new repair mechanism. “It has lots of short sequences – many of them only about five base-pairs each – which are repeated millions of times.”
“Repair of simple repeated sequences is particularly challenging,” says Irene Chiolo, first author of the group’s paper reporting the results in the journal Cell. “They can promote chromosome aberrations, with severe consequences for the genome stability of dividing cells” – abnormalities that are a hallmark of cancer cells and cause birth defects.

Ads by Google

Danica Patrick Honda Film - Watch now to discover the upside of failure through Danica Patrick. - www.honda.com

Finding the right path
With the stakes so high, how can cells insure fast, accurate repair of double-strand breaks? Two main repair pathways are available. One method, nonhomologous end-joining, simply cleans up the ends of the broken strands and glues them back together regardless of sequence. This might seem a good choice for heterochromatin: it almost always creates small deletions or mutations, but these are in repetitive, noncoding sequences and do not affect genes.
Far more accurate but more complex is homologous recombination, a mechanism involving many steps where something could go wrong. Upon detecting a double-strand break in DNA, several proteins rush to the damaged area. The protein machinery trims back the ends of the broken strands (called ‘resection’)to produce single-strand regions recognized by other proteins, including one called ATRIP.
Another protein, Rad51, is recruited to form filaments on the single-stranded DNA. Rad51 and its associated proteins search for a complementary sequence of DNA in a neighboring chromatid or homologous chromosome. They invade and open that DNA to form a “D-loop” – like untwisting a rope to open and expose its individual strands. Using the exposed complementary sequence as a template, proteins rebuild the broken DNA into a copy of the sequence that was originally damaged; in this way the broken double strand is remade with its damaged section accurately reproduced.
It’s an ideal method for repairing breaks in gene-rich euchromatin. In repetitive heterochromatin, however, danger arises because completely different chromosomes lying close to the site of the break may have great lengths of repeated short sequences that look identical to the region around the break itself. What starts as a repair process may end up splicing different chromosomes together, a common abnormality in cancer cells.

Enlarge

In this highly simplified and abbreviated impression of homologous repair, proteins (not shown) first trim back the ends of the broken strands (‘resection’), which are recognized by other proteins including ATRIP. Still more proteins, including Rad51, are recruited to form filaments that invade a neighboring chromatid or homologous chromosome having the complementary sequence. Both filaments use these templates (only one filament is shown working here) to accurately reproduce the damaged double strand.

For heterochromatin to employ such a potentially risky repair process seemed counterintuitive. In earlier experiments looking for key signs of repair in mouse heterochromatin after irradiation, classic markers of double-strand break repair by either nonhomologous end-joining or homologous recombination were both absent. In fact it seemed possible that, somehow, such breaks didn’t occur in heterochromatin. “There were no signs of repair half an hour after the cells were exposed to ionizing radiation,” says Karpen. “But our group looked at Drosophila cells just 10 minutes after radiation exposure. Now the early signs of homologous recombination were clearly evident.”
After half an hour, however, these signs too – signals from modified histones, the component proteins that form the “spools” around which the DNA “thread” is wound in chromatin, as well as signals from ATRIP recruitment – were missing from the heterochromatin domain. What had become of the repair process?
Now you see it, now you don’t
In a series of experiments, Karpen and Chiolo and their colleagues found that in heterochromatin the early stages of homologous recombination – resection and ATRIP loading – appear within three minutes after the damage occurs. The next steps in homologous recombination seemed blocked from entering the heterochromatin at this stage. These steps – the activity of the Rad51 proteins in preparing invasive filaments of single-strand DNA – are the most dangerous, where mistaken recombination could easily occur.
By 30 minutes after radiation damage was inflicted, the entire domain had swollen and began sending out expanding and contracting ‘fingers’ of chromatin. Now, after the relocation of the damaged DNA to outside the heterochromatin, the Rad51 proteins did appear; the researchers found them moving with the ends of the heterochromatin ‘fingers’. After an hour the whole domain partially contracted again, indicating that the broken DNA had moved to the periphery of the heterochromatin domain in order to load Rad51 protein and complete the repair process.
“There are a lot of moving parts here,” says Karpen. “It opens new ways of thinking about DNA repair and investigating the process.”
It’s common to picture chromosomes as rather floppy tubes of stuff that are tightly cinched in their middles to form X-shaped figures, but in fact this is a condensed state that occurs only briefly during mitosis, when cells divide. Most of the time chromosomes aren’t condensed – instead they exist as somewhat diffuse clouds of DNA.
“In the last 20 years researchers have found that the DNA for each chromosome occupies a separate domain in the nucleus, even when chromosomes are decondensed,” says Chiolo. “From these ‘chromosomal territories’ the DNA moves to accomplish certain functions, for example gene transcription, by going to where the proteins are. We now observe that similar movements occur even during DNA repair.”
Says Karpen, “The process we discovered is an extreme version of this dynamism, where the DNA repair process starts in one domain, then the damaged DNA goes elsewhere to complete repair. It would seem that starting repair in one place, then moving elsewhere is risky, and could result in unrepaired damage, which is just as dangerous to the cell as abnormal recombination with a different chromosome.”
Says Chiolo, “Stability is the key. The presence of resected DNA ends is extremely dangerous in heterochromatin only if Rad51 is loaded onto broken DNA.” Sure enough, the researchers discovered that a protein complex called Smc5/6 blocks Rad51 recruitment until the damaged DNA is moved outside the heterochromatin.
Chiolo says, “This mechanism is crucial for safeguarding the genome by blocking aberrant recombination between different chromosomes, and promoting safe repair from a sister chromatin, or homolog, after the double-strand break has relocated outside the heterochromatin domain”.
Homologous recombination is a complex mechanism with multiple steps, but also with many points of regulation to insure accurate recombination at every stage. This could be why this method has been favored during evolution. The machinery that relocalizes the damaged DNA before loading Rad51 might have evolved because the consequences of not having it would be terrible.
Karpen and Chiolo and their colleagues are now at work on the next steps in the research, investigating the many unanswered questions about how this surprisingly dynamic mechanism of DNA repair works and what happens when it fails. Perhaps most important is learning whether the unexpectedly sophisticated approach to homologous recombination in Drosophila heterochromatin is conserved in other organisms, including humans.
“Double-strand breaks in heterochromatin move outside of a dynamic HP1a domain to complete recombinational repair,” by Irene Chiolo, Aki Minoda, Serafin U. Colmenares, Aris Polyzos, Sylvain V. Costes, and Gary H. Karpen, appears in the March 4, 2011 issue of Cell and is available online to subscribers.
Provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (news : web)

The Trouble with Mathematics Masquerading as Science

Here, dear friends,  in one fell swoop is a sort of preamble to everything that is wrong with today's so called scientific method:

Generalized entropies and the transformation group of superstatistics

1. Rudolf Hanel^a,
2. Stefan Thurner^a,^b, and
3. Murray Gell-Mann^b,¹

+ Author Affiliations

1. ^aSection for Science of Complex Systems, Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, 1090 Vienna, Austria; and
2. ^bSanta Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501

1. Contributed by Murray Gell-Mann, March 3, 2011 (sent for review February 17, 2011)

Abstract

Superstatistics describes statistical systems that behave like superpositions of different inverse temperatures β, so that the probability distribution is , where the “kernel” f(β) is nonnegative and normalized [∫f(β)dβ = 1]. We discuss the relation between this distribution and the generalized entropic form . The first three Shannon–Khinchin axioms are assumed to hold. It then turns out that for a given distribution there are two different ways to construct the entropy. One approach uses escort probabilities and the other does not; the question of which to use must be decided empirically. The two approaches are related by a duality. The thermodynamic properties of the system can be quite different for the two approaches. In that connection, we present the transformation laws for the superstatistical distributions under macroscopic state changes. The transformation group is the Euclidean group in one dimension.

Update on Model of Hearing

The researchers, Reichenbach and Hudspeth, that hypothesized a mechanism for sound amplification of the inner ear that I reported on in this blog from last September, have now put their theory in practice in design of a microphone that eliminates feedback and provides a capacity for tremendous sensitivity.

Unidirectional mechanical amplification as a design principle for an active microphone

Tobias Reichenbach, A. J. Hudspeth

(Submitted on 14 Apr 2011)

Amplification underlies the operation of many biological and engineering systems. Simple electrical, optical, and mechanical amplifiers are reciprocal: the backward coupling of the output to the input equals the forward coupling of the input to the output. Unidirectional amplifiers that occur often in electrical and optical systems are special non-reciprocal devices in which the output does not couple back to the input even though the forward coupling persists. Here we propose a scheme for unidirectional mechanical amplification that we utilize to construct an active microphone. We show that amplification improves the microphone's threshold for detecting weak signals and that unidirectionality prevents distortion.

DNA is more intelligent than Einstein's enemies

It appears that contrary to Mr Heisenberg's qualms about the know-ability of the quantum world, DNA is quite able to choose the quantum spin it reacts with. Providing once again more evidence for appropriate animadversion to the methods of statistical mechanistic empircism.To wit:

Biological Molecules Select Their Spin

02 Apr
2011

Quantum Physics

New findings could help build better biomedical devices

Do the principles of quantum mechanics apply to biological systems? Until now, says Prof. Ron Naaman of the Institute’s Chemical Physics Department (Faculty of Chemistry), both biologists and physicists have considered quantum systems and biological molecules to be like apples and oranges. But research he conducted together with scientists in Germany, which appeared recently in Science, definitively shows that a biological molecule – DNA – can discern between quantum states known as spin.

Quantum phenomena, it is generally agreed, take place in extremely tiny systems – single atoms, for instance, or very small molecules. To investigate them, scientists must usually cool their material down to temperatures approaching absolute zero. Once such a system exceeds a certain size or temperature, its quantum properties collapse, and “every day” classical physics takes over. Naaman: “Biological molecules are quite large, and they work at temperatures that are much warmer than the temperatures at which most quantum physics experiments are conducted. One would expect that the quantum phenomenon of spin, which exists in two opposing states, would be scrambled in these molecules – and thus irrelevant to their function.”

But biological molecules have another property: they are chiral. In other words, they exist in either “left-” or “right-handed” forms that can’t be superimposed on one another. Double-stranded DNA molecules are doubly chiral – both in the arrangement of the individual strands and in the direction of the helices’ twist. Naaman knew from previous studies that some chiral molecules can interact in different ways with the two different spins. Together with Prof. Zeev Vager of the Particle Physics and Astrophysics Department, research student Tal Markus, and Prof. Helmut Zacharias and his research team at the University of Münster, Germany, he set out to discover whether DNA might show some spin-selective properties.

The researchers fabricated self-assembling, single layers of DNA attached to a gold substrate. They then exposed the DNA to mixed groups of electrons with both directions of spin. Indeed, the team’s results surpassed expectations: The biological molecules reacted strongly with the electrons carrying one of those spins, and hardly at all with the others. The longer the molecule, the more efficient it was at choosing electrons with the desired spin, while single strands and damaged bits of DNA did not exhibit this property. These findings imply that the ability to pick and choose electrons with a particular spin stems from the chiral nature of the DNA molecule, which somehow “sets the preference” for the spin of electrons moving through it.

In fact, says Naaman, DNA turns out to be a superb “spin filter,” and the team’s findings could have relevance for both biomedical research and the field of spintronics. If further studies, for instance, bear out the finding that DNA only sustains damage from spins pointing in one direction, then exposure might be reduced and medical devices designed accordingly. On the other hand, DNA and other biological molecules could become a central feature of new types of spintronic devices, which will work on particle spin rather than electric charge, as they do today.

Prof. Ron Naaman is head of the Nancy and Stephen Grand Research Center for Sensors and Security, and his research is supported by Rachel Schwartz, Canada. Prof. Naaman is the incumbent of the Aryeh and Mintzi Katzman Professorial Chair.

The Cat's Out Again

 “The human toll here,” Larry Kudlow declared, “looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.” 


Question for Mr Kudlow: How did you calculate the loss of human life? In yen or dollars? The bailing out of the vast pyramid of gambling debt from the city of London and Wall Street that is currently costing untold human suffering throughout the globe should, I think, make Ludlow and his ilk smile to themselves considerably...

Amazing True Stories

"Some respond to Japan earthquake by pointing to global warming"


This shocking news just in: Loss of gray matter proven to be caused by global warming!

Cui Bono?

"Speaking at Cambridge Science Festival next week, Professor Ed Bullmore will describe how new ways of looking at the network organisation of the human brain show that it has a surprising amount in common with the worm brain, computer chips, stock markets, and many other complex systems."


Apparently, by some remarkably ironic twist of fate, Professor Bullmore has the most apropos appellation that anyone might possibly imagine.

A Brilliant Bit of Hypothesizing

Bravo! This bit of astounding detective work certainly has the ring of truth to it. By combining two principles which are prevalent in all classes of biota,viz: least action and asymmetry, these researchers have broken new scientific ground. This builds upon the rigorous touchstone work of Louis Pasteur and provides further evidence to the overarching rule of biophysical hypothesis formation resulting from the premise that that which distinguishes the organic from the inorganic spheres is critical.

Nanotubes: Cellular membranes on supply

March 11, 2011

• article
• comments (0)
• text-to-speech
• share

Enlarge

Nanotube formation in a vesicle containing two droplets (PEG - dark, and dextran - green). The membrane is labelled in red. After deflation of the vesicle, nanotubes form within the PEG-rich phase and accumulate at the interface between the two droplets. (a-c) Vertical cross sections of the vesicle; (d) top view of the nanotubes located at the interface. © Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces

(PhysOrg.com) -- When unfolding a tent for the first time, you may wonder how the huge tarpaulin fits into a bag the size of a football. Biologists wonder about something similar: when a cell divides, the surface area of the cell membrane grows. Moreover, when molecules are brought from one organelle to another inside the cell, membrane-enclosed transport vesicles are formed. So that membranes can be made available quickly, they are stored within the cells in the form of nanotubes, tubular membrane structures – similarly to a tarpaulin that has been folded together. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam have now discovered a mechanism used by cells to generate stable membrane nanotubes.

Ads by Google

free DIY solar Power PDF - make your own solar panels and save a fortune. Free 'how to' PDF - www.DIYsolarpowerPDF.com

Tubular membrane structures can be found in many areas of a cell: in the Golgi apparatus, a type of sorting station in which transport vesicles are formed; in the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell; or in the endoplasmic reticulum, a type of duct network within cells. The tubes have a diameter ranging from a few nanometres (one millionth of a millimetre) to a few micrometres (one thousandth of a millimetre). The thinner the tubes, the greater the surface to volume ratio. They are therefore ideal for storing a lot of membrane in rather small spaces. Researchers believe that motor proteins can use energy to pull nanotubes from cellular membranes. “However, motor proteins are not always found in the areas of the cell where membrane nanotubes are formed,” says Rumiana Dimova, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and co-author of the study. For this reason, she believes that there must be another mechanism to generate stable nanotubes.

The Potsdam-based researchers may have now found the answer to the riddle. “The mechanism generates stable nanotubes without forces having to be exerted on the membrane. It therefore seems to work without the need for motor proteins,” says Dimova. Part of the mechanism is based on a phenomenon that is omnipresent in the world of membranes, the so-called osmosis. If certain molecules are present in a larger concentration outside the cell than inside the cell – i.e. they form a so-called hypertonic solution – then water will flow out of the cell and the cell will contract.

The researchers in Potsdam have reproduced such concentration differences using artificial vesicles the size of a cell, which contain a mixture of two polymers, namely polyethylene glycol (PEG) and dextran. “Biopolymers are found in a similarly high concentration in living cells,” says Dimova. “For this reason, we consider the vesicle to be a good model of a cell.” The researchers transferred the vesicle to a hypertonic solution, which caused the vesicle to release water and to shrink in volume.

However, what happened was completely different to a scenario in which, for instance, a beach ball is deflated and then simply collapses into a flat pancake. The outflow of the water caused the concentration of the dissolved polymers in the vesicle to rise. This, in turn, caused the two polymers to separate. As a result, two separate droplets of different sizes formed in the vesicle, much like the shape of a snowman with one large sphere (mainly containing PEG molecules) and one smaller sphere (predominantly containing dextran molecules).

Using a fluorescence microscope, the Potsdam-based researchers observed that membrane nanotubes formed in the PEG-rich area and accumulated at the interface between the two droplets. The scientists showed that about 15 % of the membrane surface had been stored in the tubes. The resolution of the microscope was not sufficient to be able to determine the diameter of the tubes. However, the researchers estimate it to be about 240 nanometres.

The researchers also have an explanatory model for the emergence and stability of the nanotubes. They found that solution flows of different densities are triggered when the polymers are separated. These exert forces on the membrane and thus contribute to the formation of the tubes.

The next question the scientists asked was what causes the membrane tubes to remain stable. A theoretical analysis of the observed membrane shapes revealed that stable tubes only emerge if the two sides of the membrane have an asymmetrical, molecular structure. This asymmetry is caused by the interaction between the membrane and the biopolymers. There is a high concentration of PEG molecules on one side, whereas on the other side there are no such molecules. Because the PEG interacts with the lipid molecules within the membrane, the membrane attempts to curve inwards. The formation of nanotubes accommodates this behaviour of the cellular membrane. The researchers observed that the nanotubes disappear again if the vesicle is allowed to inflate once again through osmosis.

“For natural cells, it is easy to generate asymmetry – similarly to what we have seen in our experiment,” says Dimova. The bio-physicist therefore believes that the newly discovered mechanism could be used in living cells to store the membrane surface. However, proof of this is still pending.

More information: Yanhong Li, Reinhard Lipowsky, Rumiana Dimova, Membrane nanotubes induced by aqueous phase separation and stabilized by spontaneous curvature, PNAS; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1015892108

Provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (news : web)

Woo, woo

LSE director quits over Libya links


Oh my word. It looks like Sir Davies (if that is what he is) had taken the title of a song of another graduate of the wretched London School of Economics Mick Jagger too much to heart. I refer of course to Sympathy for the Devil... Bully!


(By the Bye. One mustn't forget the cozy relation that the British upper crust always seems to have with many other assorted nasties in that neck of the desert. Viz: the Al Yamamah- BAE scandal which they have so meticulous­ly covered up for state security reasons, you understand­. And don't forget that the same tattered excuse was used to cover up the "suicided" David Kelly who was exposing Blair's skull- duggery. Etc., etc.)

Sherrod Brown apologizes for Hitler comment

Alas, cowardice in the face of an enemy...
One would hope that more Democrats start coming to their senses and throw off this delusion of not wanting to hurt these bullies' self esteem by aptly characterizing them as Sherrod Brown has done. The question is when will they start aptly characterizing Obama as nothing but Wall Street's cats-paw at best and their useful idiot more pointedly?

How Barack Obama Is A Traitor to the Unique Mission of the United States

One may not utter the words in the title of this writing lightly. It is only with a comprehensive understanding of why the mission of these United States in world history necessarily calls upon our nation's chosen President to lead the globe out of its current unfolding existential crisis, that the full force of the charge of treachery is truthfully justified. It has been a providential endowment nearly miraculous that the idea embodied in our constitution that the nation exists in order to benefit the future well being of its citizens both materially and otherwise that absolutely separates us apart from the long succession of failures of governments in history. That overarching principle places the responsibility upon our shoulders to rise above the degradation that has been imposed on us over the years since we acted to pull the world away from the doom of a lasting dark age had we not prevailed in last century's World War II. However, the immoral compromise we made as a people beginning with Truman's monstrous relegation and undermining of this nation's mission instead to abjectly subserve as an instrument of an intended banker's dictatorship for world government has put us and the planet in grave peril at the moment of this writing.

It is unfortunate that for most of my fellow citizens these foregoing words will fall on deaf ears. Edgar Alan Poe, who was truly one of the most patriotic writers we have yet produced, said of the biography of Washington by James Kirke Paulding:

"We have read Mr. Paulding’s Life of Washington with a degree of interest seldom excited in us by the perusal of any book whatever. We are convinced by a deliberate examination of the design, manner, and rich material of the work, that, as it grows in age, it will grow in the estimation of our countrymen, and, finally, will not fail to take a deeper hold upon the public mind, and upon the public affections, than any work upon the same subject, or of a similar nature, which has been yet written — or, possibly, which may be written hereafter. Indeed, we cannot perceive the necessity of anything farther upon the great theme of Washington. Mr. Paulding has completely and most beautifully filled the vacuum which the works of Marshall and Sparks have left open. He has painted the boy, the man, the husband, and the Christian. He has introduced us to the private affections, aspirations, and charities of that hero whose affections of all affections were the most serene, whose aspirations the most God-like, and whose charities the most gentle and pure. He has taken us abroad with the patriot-farmer in his rambles about his homestead. He has seated us in his study and shown us the warrior-christian in unobtrusive communion with his God. He has done all this too, and more, in a simple and quiet manner, in a manner peculiarly his own, and which mainly because it is his own, cannot fail to be exceedingly effective. Yet it is very possible that the public may, for many years to come, overlook the rare merits of a work whose want of arrogant assumption is so little in keeping with the usages of the day, and whose striking simplicity and naiveté of manner give, to a cursory examination, so little evidence of the labor of composition. We have no fears, however, for the future. Such books as these before us, go down to posterity like rich wines, with a certainty of being more valued as they go. They force themselves with the gradual but rapidly accumulating power of strong wedges into the hearts and understandings of a community."


Reading this unfortunately forgotten tome, it becomes immediately evident that Paulding conveyed the unique mission of America embodied in the life of George Washington as a complete and singular experiment upon which the future of humanity rested then and now.  I urge you, dear reader to take this volume up. You will be none the worse for it.


Returning to the purpose, we are now come to a worldwide upheaval and conflagration that is the direct result of Obama's abject kowtowing to the orders of City of London and its junior partners on Wall Street. The only way out of the impending spiral of global immiseration and chaos is to throw off the yoke of our historic enemy, the British empire. It is in this light, that we justly charge the minions, Obama being chief among them, of this crumbling financial empire with treachery. LaRouche has authored a solution to the sorry years of compromise we as a nation have made with this evil. It is high time we rose to the occasion and adopt it.

Wormholes

This just in:

"Stars Could Have Wormholes At Their Cores, Say Astrophysicists

Far from being links between empty regions of space, wormholes could form shortcuts from one star to another"

I can't really say whether stars might have wormholes in them, but I think that this particular research proves beyond a doubt that we should look for holes in certain astrophysicists' heads. Thanks for your kind consideration.

The Utterly Ineffable Imbecility of Academia on Parade:

Responses to the Assurance game in monkeys, apes, and humans using equivalent procedures

Abstract


There is great interest in the evolution of economic behavior. In typical studies, species are asked to play one of a series of economic games, derived from game theory, and their responses are compared. The advantage of this approach is the relative level of consistency and control that emerges from the games themselves; however, in the typical experiment, procedures and conditions differ widely, particularly between humans and other species. Thus, in the current study, we investigated how three primate species, capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans, played the Assurance (or Stag Hunt) game using procedures that were, to the best of our ability, the same across species, particularly with respect to training and pretesting. Our goal was to determine what, if any, differences existed in the ways in which these species made decisions in this game. We hypothesized differences along phylogenetic lines, which we found. However, the species were more similar than might be expected. In particular, humans who played using “nonhuman primate-friendly” rules did not behave as is typical. Thus, we find evidence for similarity in decision-making processes across the order Primates. These results indicate that such comparative studies are possible and, moreover, that in any comparison rating species’ relative abilities, extreme care must be taken in ensuring that one species does not have an advantage over the others due to methodological procedures.


(Although this seems like a spoof, perhaps from the pages of The Onion, it is verbatim from the horses' mouths. Honest.)

Growing Evidence That "Information" Models of Biophysics Are Dead Wrong

Two recent research papers point our attention toward disproving the assumptions underlying information theory's intrusion upon biophysics, inter alia. Before discussing these recent developments, it must be mentioned that prima facie information theory from its onset has always rankled many, including myself, on the grounds of its dehumanizing ontological implications. The crass mechanistic and reductionist empiricism evident in Wiener's doctrine of "cybernetics" provides a paradigm for this modern revamping of Occam's razor. Humanists in the line from Plato to Leibniz have quite naturally always been viscerally repulsed by such "thinking." 


It is therefore, with great pleasure that we must hail any results that tend to undermine such a hideous and anti-human ideology. Whenever experimental results deviate from these sorts of assumptions, we realize that the original meaning of hypothesis in the Platonic sense of a method of questioning metaphysical assumptions is a universally truthful standard for scientific method in perpetuity. 


The first paper, "Slow integration leads to persistent action potential firing in distal axons of coupled interneurons," released in December on the transmission of action potential current in axons in the opposite direction away from dendrites and back into the neurons is a remarkable take-down of the whole idea of transmission of some imagined computer-like "bits" of information in the circuitry of the brain. The second paper, "Molecular vibration-sensing component in Drosophila melanogaster olfaction," published just this week seriously undermines the lock and key model of chemical signalling in protein recognition. It further further concludes that this model must be replaced by a vibrational wave sensing model. It turns out that fruit flies can distinguish the "smell" of the deuterium isotope, which as far as the chemical lock and key model of sensation should be no different from the protium isotope of hydrogen. This bears upon this author's longstanding preference for a biophysics that highlights persistent, chiral solitonic waveforms that differentiate our living biosphere. It is in certain such unique conformations of the inert and apparently"dead" lithosphere that we find the substrate that life exhibits an immanent capability to choose. These types of investigations are increasingly crucial for the field of astrobiology, the which will predominate as mankind moves out to colonize space if the oligarchical Malthusian, Aristotelean information theory worldview is given a well deserved burial.

Shocking New Global Warming Study: Impact on Genetic Psychology Examined

Public Release: 16-Feb-2011
 Global Change Biology
Global warming may reroute evolution
Rising carbon dioxide levels associated with global warming may affect interactions between plants and the insects that eat them, altering the course of plant evolution, research at the University of Michigan suggests. 
 National Science Foundation

More news on this front  just in:

The University of Grantland has just issued an earth shattering study on global warming. It now appears that global warming has caused a mutation in the human genome. The left side of the orbitofrontal cortex in a range of  human subjects has been impaired by a deletion of a gene that controls the urge to gamble. It turns out that this deletion somehow selectively affects the global warming deniers. They apparently fail to accept proven scientific global warming studies because they have a compulsion to take risks with the future of the earth's climate. Researchers from Grantland are now preparing a course of remedial therapy for those subjects so affected. It appears that an intensive course of deep brain stimulation given over several months cures this neurological aberration. The only drawback seems to be a side effect; the test subjects are prone to excessive grinning, clishmaclaver, and compulsive drawing of happy faces.

Barack Obama, Rand Paul: Useful Idiots

 Both the Republican and Democratic administrations have pandered to and bailed out Wall Street's insane gambling spree to the tune of trillions, and now they want the people to buy this tripe? It is beyond disgusting and revolting. Appropriate words to describe the level of treachery to the nation's future are hard to come by. Dante's Inferno comes to mind...All those who provide cover for the looting of the people by international financial institutions, whether they be "liberal" or "conservative" deserve only opprobrium.  The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report of Angelides has it right, we are making the same mistakes on an even larger scale now by bailing out these thieves, while they go merrily on their way continuing their evil practices. Their is no real substantive difference when you come right down to it between Barack Obama and Rand Paul, except in their rivalry to cater more effectively to Wall Street. They are the equivalent of today's useful idiots.