Evolution

When we posted about the shark pup with cyclopia, we mentioned that a mutation in the Sonic Hedgehog gene can be the cause. But what is Sonic Hedgehog?

The original hedgehog gene was discovered using fruit flies. Rather than the usual smooth cuticle they should have had, the fruit fly embryos defective for hedgehog had spiky bristles - earning the gene its name. The search for corresponding genes (or homologues) in vertebrates revealed 3: Indian Hedgehog (IHH), Desert Hedgehog (DHH) and Sonic Hedgehog (SHH), named for the Sega character. These genes all encode signalling proteins, which bear the same names, and of these 3 sonic hedgehog is the most researched and best understood.

So what does SHH do? It has key roles in embryonic development, affecting limb and organ creation. The shh protein guides cell growth, cell differentiation and the "patterning" of the embryo. It is also extremely important in creating the facial geometry. Different concentrations of shh in different parts of the embryo guide formation of different cells.

Sometimes the best way to understand what something does is to look at what happens when it's not working. Many defects are associated with mutations to SHH: we've already discussed how it can cause a type of holoprosencephaly (where the forebrain does not split into two hemispheres). Cyclopia accompanies severe holoprosencephaly: like the forebrain, the eyes start out as one and are split into two by shh. Some mutations leave one large eye; others create the two eyes but leave them together in a single middle socket.

The effects on organ development can be seen in mice with both copies of SHH disabled (see image). Their hearts, lungs, kidneys and guts are malformed. The face does not have its usual shape and instead forms a strange trunk, absent of eyes, ears or mouth. They have no paws and are always stillborn.

As hinted at with eye development, shh is key in creating the symmetry of the face. It controls the growth of the what will become the jaws and features. Shh has a lot of control over the width of the face; creatures with too much shh develop very wide faces. Increase the amount of shh even more and the face starts doubling, resulting in a condition known as diprosopus - "two faced". The organism can have two distorted faces, typically united by an eye in the middle. Among others, you can see the facial duplication in Frank and Louie the cat, recently posted by IFLS (http://on.fb.me/VJ8vAB).

Photo: Mice embryos, showing normal development (left) and sonic-defective development (right). Credit to Michno et al, 2003.

http://www.bio.davidson.edu/Courses/Molbio/MolStudents/spring2003/Watson/Sonichedgehog.htm

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/SHH

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10043/#A1063

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/6469

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/6469

Leroi, A.M. (2003) Mutants: On the form, varieties and errors of the human body. Hammersmith: HarperCollins.

A Commentary by Barry Le Roux
Exactly what is faith?
Erich Fromm says there are two kinds of faith: One is blind faith (religious faith) which is an irrational faith and the other faith, a rational one, and which is based on productive experience and knowledge. For example; if you live in a flood plain you will sooner or later discover that you are going to experience a flood destroying your house. You will then acquire productive (working) knowledge resulting in faith, based on experience, to avoid similar future mishaps. Religious faith is acquired from external influences which are destined to make you believe in the impossible (and at times the possible). You may for example pray to god that a family member, suffering an illness, be cured. The outcome may be positive or may be negative. But if you consider the odds you will discover that praying to a god has no advantage above statistical tendencies. But by now your believe has become second nature and you simply do not want to see or come to realize that your faith is a false, unreliable, and ineffective. And then there is always the apology being offered that it is god's will, or that god works in mysterious ways = theodicy.
Religious experiences, in contrast to productive experiences, are irrational emotional experiences which have very little practical application but could be of therapeutical value. Similar experiences could also be obtained by other means such as from certain psychological procedures and non-god religions' meditations.
So, to summarize: yes, faith in yourself is very important! This faith should be based on fact, such as your productive experience, and the productive experience of others, knowledge, your potential and abilities, and importantly also your limitations.

The Monroe Institute

 

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The Global Awakening of Humanity

 

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To enhance worldwide cooperative efforts in furthering the exploration of consciousness, expanded awareness, and discovery of self.

http://www.monroeinstitute.org/

Evolution

The bizarre circles dotting the dry landscapes of southwestern Africa have long posed a mystery, and there's still no accepted explanation for them. Now Norbert Juergens (University of Hamburg) has put forward a new explanation: the architects of these circles are termites, and they're making water traps.

The circles (known as fairy circles) are barren patches of sandy earth situated amid grassy terrain, each circle surrounded by a ring of taller grass. They grow and shrink over 30-60 year periods. Local stories say the circles have supernatural causes, and while scientists have offered a host of natural explanations (toxic gases, poisonous plants, ants etc) none are well supported by the evidence.

While working on conservation projects, Jeurgens found that only one creature was present at all fairy circle sites - the sand termite Psammotermes allocerus. These termites don't build huge mounds like others do, living mostly under the surface and "swimming" through fine tunnels in the sand.

According to Juergens, the termites make the traps by eating plant roots, increasing the size of the circle as they push out from the centre. When rain falls it stays in the soil instead of being sucked up by plants, giving the termites access to water even when there hasn't been rainfall for a long time. Analysis has confirmed that fairy circle soil has a much higher water content than the surrounding soil.

Not everyone agrees with Jeurgens' conclusions. He's been accused of confusing correlation with causation - just because the termites are in the circles doesn't mean they make them. Others propose the circles are the result of natural vegetation patterns. For now, there's still no definite answer on what's causing fairy circles.

Photo credit: Norbert Juergens.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/28/africas-weird-fairy-circles-are-termite-built-water-traps/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21970408

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/fairy-circle-termites/

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/03/fairy-circle-mystery-solved.html?ref=hp

Evolution

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place”
These were the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (The sequel to Alice in Wonderland). Alice found that no matter how fast she chased after the Red Queen, both of them stayed in exactly the same position.

In evolutionary context, this is analogous to the arms race that occurs between predator and prey, parasite and host. Both participants in this uneasy relationship compete against each other to try to gain the upper hand. As the predator, parasite or pathogen evolve new methods to kill or infect, the prey or host will evolve new defences to counter this. The end result is a stalemate. This is known as antagonistic co-evolution

This theory was first put forward by a scientist named Leigh Van Valen in 1973. He noted that taxa of organisms did not have improved survival over geological time. He theorized that this could be because as the predator refines its weapons, the prey responds with a better defence. The system effectively reaches dynamic equilibrium, which is known as an Evolutionary Stable System.

Evolutionary arms race can also result in the extinction of a species. If one side of the arms race evolves an adaptation that the other side cannot cope with quickly enough, the other side will eventually collapse.

The Red Queen Hypothesis can also help explain why sex is important. Although it is quite a large waste of resources (i.e finding a mate, impressing the mate, gestation etc.), the payoff is large enough to make it worthwhile. Asexual reproduction results in populations that are all genetically identical. Barring random mutation, it would only take one lethal strain of bacteria to wipe them all out. Sexual reproduction gives genetic diversity to a population, ensuring that at least a few individuals can survive such an attack.

To illustrate this better, imagine a lottery, where a random number is selected. A participant is more likely to win if he has 10 tickets with different numbers on them than if he has 10 tickets with the same number on all of them. Similarly, in an environment with high rates of predation and parasitism, sexual reproduction ensures that a species can survive the evolutionary arms race.

Read all about it: http://bit.ly/YjwlSO

Also see: http://bit.ly/172kJqy

Read Van Valen’s original article: http://bit.ly/ZsePYd

Recommended: http://leighvanvalen.com/

“Leigh Van Valen was a polymath whose unique insights impacted disciplines as diverse as mathematics, philosophy, and gender studies.” The above website contains articles from his journals and even some witty, yet scientifically accurate songs that he wrote.

Image URL: http://thepalaeopad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2a.jpg

Science Is Awesome

Gastric brooding frogs went extinct thirty years ago - but scientists announced mid-March that they have taken a massive step forward in bringing this extinct creature back to life. A team of Australian scientists succeeded in cloning one of these frogs and taking it to the stage of an embryo, and they have now announced that they plan to go all the way and resurrect the gastric brooding frog using cloning technology.

More information: http://bit.ly/13Xi8y2

over New Kind of Supernova

Mar. 26, 2013 — Supernovae were always thought to occur in two main varieties. But a team of astronomers including Carnegie's Wendy Freedman, Mark Phillips and Eric Persson is reporting the discovery of a new type of supernova called Type Iax.
This research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Previously, supernovae were divided into either core-collapse or Type Ia categories. Core-collapse supernovae are the explosion of a star about 10 to 100 times as massive as our sun. Type Ia supernovae are the complete disruption of a tiny white dwarf.
This new type, Iax, is fainter and less energetic than Type Ia. Although both types come from exploding white dwarfs, Type Iax supernovas may not completely destroy the white dwarf. "A Type Iax supernova is essentially a mini supernova," says lead author Ryan Foley, Clay Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "It's the runt of the supernova litter."
The research team--which also included Max Stritzinger, formerly of Carnegie--identified 25 examples of the new type of supernova. None of them appeared in elliptical galaxies, which are filled with old stars. This suggests that Type Iax supernovas come from young star systems.
Based on a variety of observational data, the team concluded that a Type Iax supernova comes from a binary star system containing a white dwarf and a companion star that has lost its outer hydrogen, leaving it helium dominated. The white dwarf collects helium from the normal star.
Researchers aren't sure what triggers a Type Iax. It's possible that the outer helium layer ignites first, sending a shock wave into the white dwarf. Alternatively, the white dwarf might ignite first due to the influence of the overlying helium shell.
Either way, it appears that in many cases the white dwarf survives the explosion, unlike in a Type Ia supernova where the white dwarf is completely destroyed.
The team calculates that Type Iax supernovae are about a third as common as Type Ia supernovae. The reason so few have been detected is that the faintest are only one-hundredth as bright as a Type Ia supernova.
"The closer we look, the more ways we find for stars to explode," Phillips said.
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope could discover thousands of Type Iax supernovas over its lifetime.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130326133337.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily

If Science Teachers Want to Help Students, They Won’t Teach the Controversy When It Doesn’t Exist

If Science Teachers Want to Help Students, They Won’t Teach the Controversy When It Doesn’t Exist

Physicists Debate the Many Varieties of Nothingness

 Physicists Debate the Many Varieties of Nothingness | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

By Michael Moyer | March 22, 2013

What is nothing? Sounds like a simple question—nothing is simply the absence of something, of course—until you begin to think about it. The other night the American Museum of Natural History hosted its 14^th annual Asimov Memorial Debate, which featured five leading thinkers opining (and sparring, sometimes testily, but more on that later) about the nature of nothing.
“Nothing is the most important part of the universe,” said Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University and author of the recent “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing.” Of course we can imagine the (mostly) empty space between galaxies as being a sort of nothing. But we should also remember that most of the space around us is empty—even an atom is mostly empty space between the nucleus and electrons.
This sort of nothing—the absence of matter—we might consider to be the first level of nothing, clarified  J. Richard Gott, a physicist and cosmologist at Princeton University and the author of “Sizing Up the Universe: The Cosmos in Perspective.” It’s what scientists call a quantum vacuum state. It’s a box with everything taken out of it—all the stuff, all the air, all the light. “It even has a color—it’s black,” deadpanned Gott, who frequently demonstrated the best comedic timing of the bunch. Yet even in this nothing, something remains. Virtual quantum particles pop in and out of being, and the empty box still contains the basic scaffolding of existence: space, time and quantum fields.
But where did these come from? Was this something always there? We can trace the history of the universe back to the first instant after the Big Bang, when the cosmos was unimaginably hot and dense and expanding rapidly. But here the laws of physics break down, and with them our ability to reconstruct what came before—indeed, if its even proper to speak of a “before.” This space outside of the universe (though it is certainly misleading to call it a “space”) is the second kind of nothing—the complete lack of space and time and quantum fields. The absence not just of matter and energy, but of the conditions necessary for being.
Much of the evening was consumed with debate over how the cosmos went from this state—the state of complete nothingness—to the universe we know today. The physicists seemed to be of two minds. Gott argued that it’s possible that there was no beginning. Just as we can continuously travel east without reaching Earth’s easternmost point, the universe may have a loop of time at its origin, a place where you can forever travel into the past but always loop back upon yourself as you do. (The idea springs from his decades-old work showing how cosmic strings can allow for time travel into the past, which Paul Davies discussed in his 2002 Scientific American article “How to Build a Time Machine” [subscription required].)
The other, more popular idea was that of the multiverse. Rather than ask how the universe came to exist from nothing, the multiversers assert that being is the natural state. Perhaps a near-infinite number of universes exist, each with slightly different sets of physical laws. We find ourselves in the universe that has physical laws conducive to advanced life-forms for one simple reason: in order for us to exist, the laws of the universe must allow it.
Krauss presented these anthropic arguments as “cosmic natural selection,” and a solution to the problem of where the universe comes from. But Jim Holt, author of “Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story,” pointed out that this line of thinking has a long and not-so illustrious history. What physicists today call the multiverse is known by philosophers as the “principle of plentitude” or “principle of fecundity”: every possible universe exists, and of all these possible worlds, the one we happen to live in is the known world.
This is something of a magic trick, said Gott—an explanation without explanatory power. It appears to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing, but instead it shifts the blame down the line. It answers the question why are we here? with a tautology: because we are.
Here Krauss and Holt showed their sharpest differences. Krauss claims that we know exactly why the universe exists—indeed, much of his book is given over to the argument that there’s no mystery to existence at all. The universe exists because the laws of physics demand it. Once we have quantum fields, and a Big Bang, the universe had to take the shape that it now has. “What would be the characteristics of the universe built from natural law and nothing else?” he asked. “It would be our universe.”
Holt certainly agrees that quantum field theory is the best available description of our known universe, but he thinks that Krauss’s explanation is incomplete. It answers the question: why does the universe look the way it does? with another equally mysterious explanation: because quantum fields make it so. To Holt, the obvious next question is: so where do these quantum fields come from?
This line of inquiry exasperated Krauss. “The endless why? question is stupid—anyone with kids knows that. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? The only answer is: go to bed,” he said. “The real question is: how?” Later in the program, he tried to explain the creation of the universe from nothing as being like a photon shooting out of a light bulb—it didn’t exist a second ago, but now here it is. (At which point the night’s moderator, Neil Degrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, interrupted him with “but that was energy, it wasn’t just nothing.”)
To Krauss, the endless cycles of why? are beside the point. “Science doesn’t need a first cause, religion does,” said Krauss, a vocal atheist who made his distaste for both religion and philosophy known from the get-go. Krauss’s evasions didn’t quite ring true to Holt. “You’re still in thrall to Christian metaphysics,” he charged. “You see the laws of quantum field theory as divine commands. It used to be that nothing plus God equals universe. You replaced God with the laws of nature. You are insufficiently enlightened.”
Holt later clarified that he considers laws of nature to be “effective descriptions of what’s out there,” not pre-existing entities, and so somewhat useless if we’re seeking enlightenment about why things are they way they are. But he also offered hope to those of us trying to experience the concept of nothing: just go to sleep. Every night we all enter into a brief period of dreamless sleep, with our minds free of all thought. “A little taste of nothing,” he called it. Until death or the end of the universe—whichever comes first—this is as close as we can get to truly understanding nothing.

Image of the Helix nebula courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Evolution

Preserving wild spaces is important for a variety of reasons, but so is making sure that everyone has access to food and water.

Uganda has unpredictable and often unreliable rainfall, making agriculture difficult. People in Uganda have been moving into wetlands to grow crops, where a steady supply of water means a stable supply of food. A 2009 study found that about one third of Uganda's wetlands have been converted to crops and grazing land. People also use wetlands to get water, fish, bushmeat, and wild fruits and vegetables. The people who use the wetlands are usually poor, and have no other way to get food.

If the wetlands are used in an unsustainable way, the wetlands won't be there for future generations to use (not to mention the loss of wildlife). Finding a balance between wild spaces for plants and animals, and reducing the number of people who suffer from hunger and starvation, can be difficult.

Dr Nelson Turyahabwe said, "In designing sustainable use policies for wetlands the needs of humans also needs to be considered."

Photo courtesy of:

http://thetimecrunchedtraveler.com/2012/03/27/7-super-shots-from-around-the-world/

Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130324201817.htm

http://www.agricultureandfoodsecurity.com/content/2/1/5/abstract

The Use of Mysticism to Manipulate People 

 Neothink

 In  South Africa religion and superstition are rife.Superstition (for example) is being used by the Pres. to coerce supporters and non-supporters by threatening them that they would be haunted by their ancestors if they did not vote for his political party in the elections. In another instance, one particular MEC wanted a commission of enquiry to investigate the puzzling phenomenon as to why more black people are being hit and killed by lightning than whites. Keep in mind that the ratio of the ethnic population distribution  is something like 8:2 :: black: white in South Africa. Furthermore, more black people than white people live in rural areas in traditional huts (non-Faraday shielded) in areas where fierce lightning storms generally occur in the summer. More. Witch doctors (traditional African Shamans) are involved during formal ceremonies, such as during the commencement of a new parliamentary session, party political meetings, etc. More manipulation. The educational system is being downgraded which allows for students (Grade 1 to 12) to pass at a low 30% mark. This gives SA a very good statistical pass rate. But then the problem arises when these (low pass) students want entrance to Universities where the educational standard is not being set by the Central Government. I hope this has provided you with food for thought as to how the outside "authorities" religion and governments manipulate people by means of "mysticism" for their ulterior motives. Religion (of the totalitarian type = Christianity and Muslim) and Governments want and desire a general population with a sheep mentality which makes them exploitable.

Faith, Doubt and Buddhism - How Buddhism Understands Faith and Doubt

Faith, Doubt and Buddhism - How Buddhism Understands Faith and Doubt

The Universe Is 13.82 Billion Years Old

By Phil Plait

 | 

Posted Thursday, March 21, 2013, at 2:46 PM

2.1k

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Baby picture of the Universe. Click to expand.
Image credit: ESA–Planck Collaboration

The Universe is a wee bit older than we thought. Not only that, but turns out the ingredients are a little bit different, too. And not only that, but the way they’re mixed isn’t quite what we expected, either. And not only that, but there are hints and whispers of something much grander going on as well.

So what’s going on?

The European Space Agency’s Planck mission is what’s going on. Planck has been scanning the entire sky, over and over, peering at the radio and microwaves pouring out of the Universe. Some of this light comes from stars, some from cold clumps of dust, some from exploding stars and galaxies. But a portion of it comes from farther away…much farther away. Billions of light years, in fact, all the way from the edge of the observable Universe.

This light was first emitted when the Universe was very young, about 380,000 years old. It was blindingly bright, but in its eons-long travel to us has dimmed and reddened. Fighting the expansion of the Universe itself, the light has had its wavelength stretched out until it gets to us in the form of microwaves. Planck gathered that light for over 15 months, using instruments far more sensitive than ever before.

Drawing of the Planck spacecraft.
Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

The light from the early Universe shows it’s not smooth. If you crank the contrast way up you see slightly brighter and slightly dimmer spots. These correspond to changes in temperature of the Universe on a scale of 1 part in 100,000. That’s incredibly small, but has profound implications. We think those fluctuations were imprinted on the Universe when it was only a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, and they grew with the Universe as it expanded. They were also the seeds of the galaxies and the clusters and galaxies we see today.

What started out as quantum fluctuations when the Universe was smaller than a proton have now grown to be the largest structures in the cosmos, hundreds of millions of light years across. Let that settle in your brain a moment.

And those fluctuations are the key to Planck’s observations. By looking at those small changes in light we can find out a lot about the Universe. Scientists spent years looking at the Planck data, analyzing it. And what they found is pretty amazing:

• The Universe is 13.82 billion years old.
• The Universe is expanding a bit slower than we expected.
• The Universe is 4.9 percent normal matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, and 68.3 percent dark energy.
• The Universe is lopsided. Just a bit, just a hint, but that has profound implications.

What does all this mean? Let’s take a quick look, one at a time, at these results.

The Universe is 13.82 billion years old.

The age of the Universe is a little bit higher than we expected. A few years ago, the WMAP spacecraft looked at the Universe much as Planck has, and for the time got the best determination of the cosmic age: 13.73 +/- 0.12 billion years old.

Planck has found that the Universe is nearly 100 million years older than that: 13.82 billion years.

At first glance you might think this is a really different number. But look again. The uncertainty in the WMAP age is 120 million years. That means the best estimate is 13.73 billion years, but it could easily be 13.85 or 13.61. Anything in that range is essentially indistinguishable in the WMAP data, and 13.73 is just in the middle of that range.

And that range includes 13.82 billion years. It’s at the high end, but that’s not a big deal. It’s completely consistent with the older estimate, but Planck’s measurements are considered to be more accurate. It will become the new benchmark for astronomers.

The Universe is expanding a bit slower than we expected.

The Universe is expanding, and has been ever since the moment it was born. We can measure the speed of this expansion in various ways; for example, looking at distant exploding stars. We can measure how fast they are moving away from us, swept along with the expansion of space, by seeing how much their light is redshifted (I have details about how this works in an earlier post on redshifts and the expansion of the Universe). We can measure their distance, too, using various methods including how bright they appear to be, and with both their speed and distance we can calculate how fast the Universe is expanding.

The farther away you go, the faster the Universe expands, and what Planck found is that the Universe is getting bigger at a rate of 67.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec. A megaparsec is a unit of distance equal to 3.26 million light years (which is convenient to astronomers). That means that if you look at a galaxy one megaparsec away, it appears to be moving away from you at 67.3 km/sec. A galaxy two megaparsecs away would recede at twice that speed, 134.6 km/sec, and so on.

This is called the Hubble constant. Various methods have been used to measure it for the past century, and some of the best found it to be about 74.2 km/s/Mpc. Planck’s measurement is smaller, so the Universe appears to be expanding a little more slowly than we thought, which is why the age is a bit higher than measured before, too.

Part of the reason the number is smaller from Planck is that it’s looking at light that is very old, and came from very far away, so they extrapolate forward in time to see how fast the Universe is growing. Other measurements use light from objects that are closer, and scientists extrapolated backwards.

Since the two numbers are different, this may mean the Hubble constant has changed over time, though that’s way too preliminary to tell. I’ll just note it here as an interesting development. The Hubble constant is notoriously difficult to measure, and I imagine astronomers will be arguing about it for some time yet to come.

The Universe is 4.9 percent normal matter, 26.8 percent dark matter, and 68.3 percent dark energy.

I love this bit. The amount of the fluctuations in the light from the early Universe as well as how they are distributed can be used to figure out what the Universe is made of. The ingredients and amounts of the universal constituents are:

• 4.9 percent normal matter
• 26.8 percent dark matter
• 68.3 percent dark energy

Planck's map of the location of all the matter in the Universe. The strip across the middle is due to bright light from our galaxy which interfered with the much fainter background, and had to be subtracted away. Click to ensaganate.
Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Normal matter is what we call protons, neutrons, electrons; basically everything you see when you look around. Stars, cashews, dryer lint, and books are all made of normal matter. So are you.

Dark matter is a substance we know exists, but it’s invisible. We see its effects through its gravity, which profoundly alters how galaxies rotate and clusters of galaxies behave. There’s more than five times as much of it as there is normal matter.

Dark energy was only discovered in 1998. It’s very mysterious, but acts like a pressure, increasing the expansion rate of the Universe. We know very little about it other than the fact that it exists, and it’s a bigger component of the universal budget than normal and dark matter combined.

The best estimates for these numbers before Planck were a bit different: 4.6, 24, and 71.4 percent, respectively. That’s neat: there’s less dark energy than we thought, so the Universe is made up a little bit less of that weird stuff, if that makes you feel better. But there’s still a lot of it!

The good news is that having better numbers for all these means astronomers can tune their models a little bit better, and we can understand things a little better. Different models of how the Universe behaves predict different ratios for these ingredients, so getting them focused a bit better means we can see which models work better. We’re learning!

The Universe is lopsided. Just a bit, just a hint, but that has profound implications.

Of all the results announced so far, this may be the most provocative. We expect the Universe to be pretty smooth on large scales. Those early fluctuations should be random, so when you look around at this ancient light, the pattern should be pretty random.

And it is! The distribution of the fluctuations is quite random. It may look to your eye to have patterns, but our brains are miserable at seeing true randomness; we impose order on it. You have to use computers, math, and statistics to measure the distribution to test for true randomness, and the Universe passes the test.

Kindof. The distribution is random, but the amplitudes of the fluctuations are not. Amplitude is how bright they are; like the height of a wave. It’s hard to see by eye, but in the big map made by Planck, the fluctuations are a wee bit brighter than they should be on one side, and a wee bit dimmer on the other. It’s an incredibly small effect, but appears to be real. It was seen in WMAP data and confirmed by Planck.

A simple model of the Universe says that shouldn’t happen. The Universe is lopsided on a vast scale! What can this mean?

A map of the lopsided Universe. This shows the difference between a smooth mathematical fit to the background light of the cosmos versus what is actually seen - these leftover fluctuations are just a hair bigger than we expected, but that makes all the difference in the Universe. Click to anomalate.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Right now, we don’t know, and there are far more ideas for why this would happen than we have data to test for. It could mean dark energy is changing over time, for example. Another idea, and one that is terribly exciting, is that we’re seeing some pattern imprinted on the Universe from before the Big Bang. I know, that sounds crazy, but it’s not completely crazy. My friend and cosmologist Sean Carroll has some detail on this.

We may be seeing something so big in extent it’s happening over scales we literally cannot see. It’s like having a house built on a slight incline. Standing in one room you might not notice it, but measuring the elevation in a room on one side of the house versus one all the way on the other side might show the discrepancy. And even then, it only gives you a taste of how big that hill might be.

We’re seeing that on a cosmic scale. The Universe itself appears to be slightly canted, and we only get a hint of it when we take the measure the entire Universe.

Everything

I am entirely and thoroughly delighted by these new results.

As a scientist, of course, I like it when we get better measurements, more detail, refined numbers. That’s how we test models, and it helps us understand our ideas better.

But I’m human, and a big part of my brain is still reeling from the fact that we can accurately measure the age of the Universe at all. We can figure out what’s in it, even when most of it is something we cannot see. We can determine not only that it’s expanding, but how quickly.

And best of all, we see that the Universe is doing things we still don’t understand. It’s showing us that there is still more out there, things occurring on so vast a canvas that it both crushes utterly our sense of scale and expands ferociously our imagination.

Every day, we get better at learning what the Universe is doing. And the work continues to find out how. It may even lead us to the answer of the ultimate question of all: why?

If that answer exists (if the question even makes sense), and we can understand it, then we are making our first steps toward it right now.

I still hear some people say that science takes the wonder out of life. Those people are utterly and completely wrong.

Science takes us to the wonder.

Evolution

A new study reveals how some sea snakes came to have "shrunken heads".

The slender-necked sea snake (Hydrophis melanocephalus) and the blue-banded sea snake (Hydrophis cyanocinctus) are pretty different in terms of looks. Adult slender-necked sea snakes are only half the size of their blue-banded cousins and possess a much smaller head. But these differences are only skin-deep - if you were to look at the genes of both species, you'd struggle to tell them apart.

The high genetic similarity between the two species is a good indicator that they diverged from a common ancestor very recently, and the researchers believe differences in food and hunting techniques caused the split. While blue-banded sea snakes hunt spiny fish and gobies, the small head of the slender-necked snake allows it to invade eel burrows.

"[The genetic similarity] suggested they separated very recently from a common ancestral species and had rapidly evolved their different appearances," said Mike Lee (of the South Australian Museum and involved in the study). "One way this could have happened is if the ancestral species was large-headed, and a population rapidly evolved small heads to probe eel burrows - and subsequently stopped interbreeding with the large-headed forms."

The international team believe that their results have wider implications than just sea snake biology - they also highlight the valuable role sea snakes could have in helping us understand marine speciation and adaptive radiation.

Photo: A slender-necked sea snake. Credit to Yoshitaka Tahara.

http://www.livescience.com/28094-sea-snakes-shrunken-heads.html

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news60142.html

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/20/small-headed-sea-snakes

What Science Really Says About the Soul

by Stephen Cave
Nathalie was hemorrhaging badly. She felt weak, cold, and the pain in her abdomen was excruciating. A nurse ran out to fetch the doctor, but by the time they arrived she knew she was slipping away. The doctor was shouting instructions when quite suddenly the pain stopped. She felt free—and found herself floating above the drama, looking down at the bustle of activity around her now still body.
“We’ve lost her,” she heard the doctor say, but Nathalie was already moving on and upwards, into a tunnel of light. She first felt a pang of anxiety at leaving her husband and children, but it was soon overwhelmed by a feeling of profound peace; a feeling that it would all be okay. At the end of the tunnel, a figure of pure radiance was waiting with arms wide open.

Book Description

Release date: April 3, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0307884910 | ISBN-13: 978-0307884916 | Edition: 1

A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave’s Immortality investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to.  But it also makes a powerful argument, which is that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization.

Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals.  Since the dawn of humanity, everyone – whether they know it or not – has been trying to climb that mountain.  But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope, and there have only ever been four paths.  Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice of the correct path, and fought wars against those who’ve chosen differently.

While Immortality takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from the beginnings of civilization to the present day, the structure is not chronological.  Rather it is path driven.  As each path is revealed to us, an historical figure serves as our guide. 

In drawing back the curtain on what compels humans to “keep on keeping on,” Cave engages the reader in a number of mind-bending thought experiments.  He teases out the implications of each immortality gambit, asking, for example, how long a person would live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body.  Or what would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them.  Or what our loved ones would really be doing in heaven if it does exist.  Or what part of us actually lives in a work of art, and how long that work of art can survive. 

Toward the the book’s end, we’re confronted with a series of brain-rattling questions: What would happen if tomorrow humanity discovered that there is no life but this one?  Would people continue to care about their favorite sports team, please their boss, vie for the title of Year’s Best Salesman? Would three-hundred-year projects still get started?  If the four paths up the Mount of the Immortals lead nowhere -- if there is no getting up to the summit -- is there still reason to live?  And can civilization survive?

Immortality is a deeply satisfying book, as optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful about the true arc of history.

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This, or something like it, is how millions imagine what it will be like to die. In 2009, over 70 percent of Americans said they believe that they, like Nathalie, have a soul that will survive the end of their body.¹ That figure may well now be higher after the phenomenal success of two recent books describing vivid near death experiences: one from an innocent—the four year old Todd Burpo—the other from the opposite: a Harvard scientist and former skeptic, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander.² Both argue that when their brains stopped working, their souls floated off to experience a better place.
This is an attractive view and a great consolation to those who have lost loved ones or who are contemplating their own mortality. Many also believe this view to be beyond the realm of science, to concern a different dimension into which no microscope can peer. Dr. Alexander, for example, said in an interview with the New York Times, “Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body; it is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn’t.”³
But he is wrong. The evidence of science, when brought together with an ancient argument, provides a very powerful case against the existence of a soul that can carry forward your essence once your body fails. The case runs like this: with modern brain-imaging technology, we can now see how specific, localized brain injuries damage or even destroy aspects of a person’s mental life. These are the sorts of dysfunctions that Oliver Sacks brought to the world in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.⁴ The man of the title story was a lucid, intelligent music teacher, who had lost the ability to recognize faces and other familiar objects due to damage to his visual cortex.
Since then, countless examples of such dysfunction have been documented—to the point that every part of the mind can now be seen to fail when some part of the brain fails. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has studied many such cases.⁵ He records a stroke victim, for example, who had lost any capacity for emotion; patients who lost all creativity following brain surgery; and others who lost the ability to make decisions. One man with a brain tumor lost what we might call his moral character, becoming irresponsible and disregarding of social norms. I saw something similar in my own father, who also had a brain tumor: it caused profound changes in his personality and capacities before it eventually killed him.
The crux of the challenge then is this: those who believe they have a soul that survives bodily death typically believe that this soul will enable them, like Nathalie in the story above, to see, think, feel, love, reason and do many other things fitting for a happy afterlife. But if we each have a soul that enables us to see, think and feel after the total destruction of the body, why, in the cases of dysfunction documented by neuroscientists, do these souls not enable us to see, think and feel when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed?
To make the argument clear, we can take the example of sight. If either your eyes or the optic nerves in your brain are sufficiently badly damaged, you will go blind. This tells us very clearly that the faculty of sight is dependent upon functioning eyes and optic nerves.
Yet curiously, when many people imagine their soul leaving their body, they imagine being able to see—like Nathalie, looking down on her own corpse surrounded by frantic doctors.⁶ They believe, therefore, that their soul can see. But if the soul can see when the entire brain and body have stopped working, why, in the case of people with damaged optic nerves, can’t it see when only part of the brain and body have stopped working? In other words, if blind people have a soul that can see, why are they blind?
So eminent a theologian as Saint Thomas Aquinas, writing 750 years ago, believed this question had no satisfactory answer.⁷ Without its body—without eyes, ears and nose—he thought the soul would be deprived of all senses, waiting blindly for the resurrection of the flesh to make it whole again. Aquinas concluded that the body-less soul would have only those powers that (in his view) were not dependent upon bodily organs: faculties such as reason and understanding.
But now we can see that these faculties are just as dependent upon a bodily organ—the brain—as sight is upon the eyes. Unlike in Aquinas’s day, we can now keep many people with brain damage alive and use neuroimaging to observe the correlations between that damage and their behavior. And what we observe is that the destruction of certain parts of the brain can destroy those cognitive faculties once thought to belong to the soul. So if he had had the evidence of neuroscience in front of him, we can only imagine that Aquinas himself would have concluded that these faculties also stop when the brain stops.
In fact, evidence now shows that everything the soul is supposed to be able to do—think, remember, love—fails when some relevant part of the brain fails. Even consciousness itself—otherwise there would be no general anesthetics. A syringe full of chemicals is sufficient to extinguish all awareness. For anyone who believes something like the Nathalie story—that consciousness can survive bodily death—this is an embarrassing fact. If the soul can sustain our consciousness after death, when the brain has shut down permanently, why can it not do so when the brain has shut down temporarily?

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Some defenders of the soul have, of course, attempted to answer this question. They argue, for example, that the soul needs a functioning body in this world, but not in the next. One view is that the soul is like a broadcaster and the body like a receiver—something akin to a television station and a TV set. (Though as our body is also the source of our sensory input, we have to imagine the TV set also has a camera on top feeding images to the distant station.)
We know that if we damage our TV set, we get a distorted picture. And if we break the set, we get no picture at all. The naive observer would believe the program was therefore gone. But we know that it is really still being transmitted; that the real broadcaster is actually elsewhere. Similarly, the soul could still be sending its signal even though the body is no longer able to receive it.
This response sounds seductive, but helps little. First, it does not really address the main argument at all: Most believers expect their soul to be able to carry forward their mental life with or without the body; this is like saying that the TV signal sometimes needs a TV set to transform it into the picture, but once the set is kaput, can make the picture all by itself. But if it can make the picture all by itself, why does it sometimes act through an unreliable set?
Second, changes to our bodies impact on our minds in ways not at all analogous to how damage to a TV set changes its output, even if we take into account damage to the camera too. The TV analogy claims there is something that remains untouched by such damage, some independent broadcaster preserving the real program even if it is distorted by bad reception. But this is precisely what the evidence of neuroscience undermines. Whereas damage to the TV set or camera might make the signal distorted or fuzzy, damage to our brains much more profoundly alters our minds. As we noted above, such damage can even change our moral views, emotional attachments, and the way we reason.
Which suggests we are nothing like a television; but much more like, for example, a music box: the music is not coming from elsewhere, but from the workings within the box itself. When the box is damaged, the music is impaired; and if the box is entirely destroyed, then the music stops for good.
There is much about consciousness that we still do not understand. We are only beginning to decipher its mysteries, and may never fully succeed. But all the evidence we have suggests that the wonders of the mind—even near-death and out of body experiences—are the effect of neurons firing. Contrary to the beliefs of the vast majority of people on Earth, from Hindus to New Age spiritualists, consciousness depends upon the brain and shares its fate to the end.

References

1. What People Do and Do Not Believe In, The Harris Poll, December 15, 2009
2. Burpo, T and Vincent, L. 2010. Heaven is For Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back. Thomas Nelson Publishers; Alexander, Eben. 2012. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. Simon & Schuster.
3. Kaufman, L. 2012. “Readers Join Doctor’s Journey to the Afterworld’s Gates.” The New York Times, November 25, page C1.
4. Sacks, Oliver. 1985. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. New York: Simon & Schuster.
5. Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam Publishing.
6. Descriptions of heaven also involve being able to see, from Dante to Heaven is For Real, cited above.
7. Aquinas’s views on the soul can be found in his Summa Theologica and elsewhere. Particularly relevant to the question of the soul’s limited faculties are Part 1, question 77, article 8 (“Whether all the powers remain in the soul when separated from the body?”) and supplement to the Third Part, question 70, article 1 (“Whether the sensitive powers remain in the separated soul?”), in which he writes: “Now it is evident that certain operations, whereof the soul’s powers are the principles, do not belong to the soul properly speaking but to the soul as united to the body, because they are not performed except through the medium of the body—such as to see, to hear, and so forth. Hence it follows that such like powers belong to the united soul and body as their subject, but to the soul as their quickening principle, just as the form is the principle of the properties of a composite being. Some operations, however, are performed by the soul without a bodily organ—for instance to understand, to consider, to will: wherefore, since these actions are proper to the soul, the powers that are the principles thereof belong to the soul not only as their principle but also as their subject. Therefore, since so long as the proper subject remains its proper passions must also remain, and when it is corrupted they also must be corrupted, it follows that these powers which use no bodily organ for their actions must needs remain in the separated body, while those which use a bodily organ must needs be corrupted when the body is corrupted: and such are all the powers belonging to the sensitive and the vegetative soul.”

 Genes contribute to religious inclination
  Barry le Roux

The genetic make-up of some people is exactly inclined to make them conducive to the influences of religion. Very similar to the fact that some people are and some are not conducive to succumb to hypnotism. Professor Julian Jaynes has found in his research studies on "the breaking down of the bi-cameral mind" (some 3000 yrs ago) that many people still have vestiges of the tendency to still desire (subconsciously) the guidance of an external authority, be it a god(s) or representatives of him or them. In extreme cases this tendency will be manifested as schizophrenia in varying degrees. Yes this is the influence of genetics. Memetics (from Richard Dawkins) is the cultural influences eg religious upbring, traditions, etc (even artifacts and other utility objects, such as books containing knowledge) being passed on through generations. Fact is that it is all in the mind: Hardware (brain) which is inherited and the software (contents) which is acquired and installed.

 Refer  Dean Hamer's book "The God Gene" - How faith is hardwired into our genes. The point that worries me is like Dr David Eller says in his book "Atheism Advanced" that we generally speak the parlance ("the language of god")  which gives religion recognition which it does not deserve or earn. For example the "god" gene in genetics, the "god" particle in physics (the boson) , etc.  Fact is that these phenomena and attributes have nothing really to do with a god but which are somehow  artificially associated with god (which is the language religious people want to hear). 

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