World's most powerful laser to tear apart the vacuum of space

World's most powerful laser to tear apart the vacuum of space (UK Telegraph 10-30-11)

Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists claim it could allow them boil the very fabric of space—the vacuum.

Contrary to popular belief, a vacuum is not devoid of material but in fact fizzles with tiny mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, but at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove they exist.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility would produce a laser so intense that scientists say it would allow them to reveal these particles for the first time by pulling this vacuum “fabric” apart.

They also believe it could even allow them to prove whether extra-dimensions exist.

Decoding the Brain's Cacophony-Interview with Dr. Michael Gazzaniga

””:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?_r=1&ref=science (NY Times 11-1-11)

Dr. Gazzaniga, 71, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is best known for a dazzling series of studies that revealed the brain's split personality, the division of labor between its left and right hemispheres. But he is perhaps next best known for telling stories, many of them about blown experiments, dumb questions and other blunders during his nearly half-century career at the top of his field.

Now, in lectures and a new book, he is spelling out another kind of cautionary tale—a serious one, about the uses of neuroscience in society, particularly in the courtroom.

Brain science “will eventually begin to influence how the public views justice and responsibility,” Dr. Gazzaniga said at a recent conference here sponsored by the Edge Foundation.

And there is no guarantee, he added, that its influence will be a good one.

Vatican signs deal to collaborate on adult stem cell research

Vatican signs deal to collaborate on adult stem cell research (LA Times 10-20-11)

As chairman and chief executive of her own company, Dr. Robin Smith is a significant player in the world of biopharmaceutical products and research. Self-confident, poised and well traveled, she is used to dealing with movers and shakers.

But when she negotiated an agreement with her company's latest business partner, she didn't deal directly with the top executive.

He is, after all, the pope.

From Telomeres to the Origins of Life

From Telomeres to the Origins of Life (NY Times 10-17-11)

We think that a primitive cell has to have two parts. First, it has to have a cell membrane that can be a boundary between itself and the rest of the earth. And then there has to be some genetic material, which has to perform some function that's useful for the cell and get replicated to be inherited. The part we've come to understand reasonably well is the membrane part. The genetic material is the harder problem; the chemistry is just more complicated. The puzzle has been understanding how a molecule like RNA can get replicated before there were enzymes and all this fancy biological stuff, protein machinery, that we have now in our cells.

Surely by now we've outgrown the soul?

Surely by now we've outgrown the soul? (UK Independent 10-16-11)

Much like the security blanket of a small child, our ideas about 'souls' and 'minds' are old, worn and fraying at the edges. It's become clear we've outgrown them, but we're having a hard time saying goodbye. Human behaviour is alarmingly complex. So much so that many take exception to the idea that they could be explained by the actions of mere meat. I am often accused of attempting to reduce the ineffable beauty of human experience down to 'just' a bunch of chemical reactions.

Internet 'may be changing brains'

Internet 'may be changing brains' (BBC 10-19-11)

Brain scans show a direct link between the number of Facebook friends a person has and the size of certain parts of their brain.

It's not clear whether using social networks boosts grey matter or if those with certain brain structures are good at making friends, say researchers.

The regions involved have roles in social interaction, memory and autism.

Euro judges outlaw life-saving embryo stem cell research as immoral

Euro judges outlaw life-saving embryo stem cell research as immoral (UK Daily Mail 10-19-11)

The decision, made unanimously by 13 judges in Luxembourg, follows a case brought by Greenpeace in Germany against Professor Oliver Brustle at the University of Bonn.

Professor Brustle filed a patent with the German government in 1997 to convert embryonic stem cells into nerve cells to help patients with Parkinson's disease.

Greenpeace challenged it and the case went to the highest court in Germany and then Luxembourg.

The resulting 10-page judgement prohibits patenting any process which involves removing a stem cell from and then destroying a 'human embryo'—defined as anything 'capable of commencing the process of development of a human being.'

It states: 'Patents may not be granted for inventions whose commercial exploitation would be contrary to morality… In particular patents shall not be awarded for uses of human embryos for industrial or commercial purpose.'

In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory

In African Cave, Signs of an Ancient Paint Factory (NY Times 10-13-11)

Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint.

The discovery dials back the date when the modern Homo sapiens population was known to have started using paint. Previously, no workshop older than 60,000 years had come to light, and the earliest cave and rock art began appearing about 40,000 years ago. The exuberant flowering among the Cro-Magnon artists in the caves of Europe would come even later; the parade of animals on the walls of Lascaux in France, for example, was executed 17,000 years ago.

Symmetry: A 'Key to Nature's Secrets' by Steven Weinberg

Symmetry: A 'Key to Nature's Secrets' (New York Review of Books 10-27-11)

There is an attractive theory, called chaotic inflation, according to which the universe began without any special spatial symmetries, in a completely chaotic state. Here and there by accident the fields pervading the universe were more or less uniform, and according to the gravitational field equations it is these patches of space that then underwent an exponentially rapid expansion, known as inflation, leading to something like our present universe, with all nonuniformities in these patches smoothed out by the expansion. In different patches of space the symmetries of the laws of nature would be broken in different ways. Much of the universe is still chaotic, and it is only in the patches that inflated sufficiently (and in which symmetries were broken in the right ways) that life could arise, so any beings who study the universe will find themselves in such patches.

Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gra

Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray (Prospect 9-21-11)

While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence-the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics—his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.” (The italics are Pinker's.)

Yet these are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of “Enlightenment values,” Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs-“aborigines in the heart of Europe”-would be wiped out.