“Time and space are not conditions in which we live,
but modes by which we think.”
Albert Einstein
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New images of a possible lost city hidden by Honduran rain forests show what might be the building foundations and mounds of Ciudad Blanca, a never-confirmed legendary metropolis.
Archaeologists and filmmakers Steven Elkins and Bill Benenson announced last year that they had discovered possible ruins in Honduras’ Mosquitia region using lidar, or light detection and ranging. Essentially, slow-flying planes send constant laser pulses groundward as they pass over the rain forest, imaging the topography below the thick forest canopy.
What the archaeologists found — and what the new images reveal — are features that could be ancient ruins, including canals, roads, building foundations and terraced agricultural land. The University of Houston archaeologists who led the expedition will reveal their new images and discuss them at the American Geophysical Union Meeting of the Americas in Cancun.
Ciudad Blanca, or “The White City,” has been a legend since the days of the conquistadors, who believed the Mosquitia rain forests hid a metropolis full of gold and searched for it in the 1500s. Throughout the 1900s, archaeologists documented mounds and other signs of ancient civilization in the Mosquitias region, but the shining golden city of legend has yet to make an appearance.
An international team of scientists announced today that for the first time ever, they were able to create new human stem cells by cloning older, fully mature human cells. The process cannot be used to create full human clones, as the scientists involved were quick to point out, but it does allow for cells to be grown to fit specific functions within an individual’s body — resulting in new, patient-specific liver cells or heart cells that actually pulse on their own, for example.
Eventually, scientists hope to refine the process to the point it could be used to help treat disease and even create whole custom organs, but that is likely to be several years away at the earliest. “While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine,” said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the leader of the research team and a senior scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), in a news release.
“Life is infinitely more than your or my obtuse theory about it.”
Mindwalk (1990)
Art by: Dunno. You know? Lemme know!
D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first commercial quantum computing company, today announced that its new 512-qubit quantum computer, the D-Wave Two, will be installed at the new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, a collaboration among NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). The purpose of this effort is to use quantum computing to advance machine learning in order to solve some of the most challenging computer science problems. Installation has already begun at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and the system is expected to be available to researchers during Q3.
Researchers at Google, NASA and USRA expect to use the D-Wave system to develop applications for a broad range of complex problems such as machine learning, web search, speech recognition, planning and scheduling, search for exoplanets, and support operations in mission control centers. Via USRA, the system will also be available to the broader U.S. academic community.
“D-Wave has made significant strides in the technology, application and now commercialization of quantum computing,” said said Steve Conway, IDC research vice president for high performance computing. “The order for a D-Wave Two system for the initiative launched by NASA, Google and USRA attests to the revolutionary potential of this fundamentally different approach to computing for both industry and government. HPC buyers and users are looking for ways to speed up their applications beyond what contemporary technologies can deliver. IDC believes organizations that depend on leading-edge technology would do well to begin exploring the possibilities for quantum computing.”
Scientists have discovered water that has been trapped in rock for more than a billion years. The water might contain microbes that evolved independently from the surface world, and it’s a finding that gives new hope to the search for life on other planets.
The water samples came from holes drilled by gold miners near the small town of Timmins, Ontario, about 350 miles north of Toronto. Deep in the Canadian bedrock, miners drill holes and collect samples. Sometimes they hit pay dirt; sometimes they hit water, which seeps out from tiny crevices in the rock.
Recently, a team of scientists (who had been investigating water samples from other mines) approached the miners and asked them for fluid from newly drilled boreholes.
Greg Holland, a geochemist at Lancaster University in England, and his colleagues wanted to know just how long that fluid had been trapped in the rock. So they looked at the decay of radioactive atoms found in the water and calculated that it had been bottled up for a long time — at least 1.5 billion years.
“That is the lower limit for the age,” Holland says. It could be a billion years older. That means the water was sealed in the rock before humans evolved, before pterosaurs flew and before multicellular life.
The ability of cells to move and change shape is significant in many biological processes. White blood corpuscles gather at “hotspots” like infections and inflammations. Stem cells in the embryo move off in different directions to make the organs of the body. One unwanted movement is the movement of tumour cells, which lead to cancer metastasis.
Cells have a clear leading and trailing edge and move by a broad, thin membrane protrusion shooting out in front while the rest of the cell follows it. Small, finger-like filopodia (the green parts of the human renal cell pictured at left) can also project out from the protrusion, probably a type of cellular antenna that senses the chemical environment – bacterial secretions, for example.
But what governs this ability to move? Water, say the Linköping research team, who set out their hypothesis in the scientific journal PLOS One.
For a cell to be able to initiate a movement there needs to be a complex interaction between the outer cell membrane and the cytoskeleton on the inside. One of the most important components is the protein actin, which has the ability to create dynamic fibres that can grow at one end and recede at the other. The current thinking is that, in this way, the membrane can push out and create the protrusions. But experiments and modelling have led the LiU researchers to another picture of the mechanism.
“We looked at how cells create the membrane protrusions they need in order to be able to move. We showed that the water flow out of and into the cells through water channels, or aquaporins, in the cell membrane is important,” says Thommie Karlsson, researcher in medical microbiology and principal author of the article.
The human body consists of fifty trillion cells, and each cell has 46 chromosomes which are the structures in the nucleus containing our hereditary material, the DNA. The ends of all chromosomes are protected by so-called telomeres.
The telomeres serve to protect the chromosomes in much the same way as the plastic sheath on the end of a shoelace. But each time a cell divides, the telomeres become a little bit shorter and eventually end up being too short to protect the chromosomes.
Each cell has a ‘multi-ride ticket,’ and each time the cell divides, telomeres will use up one ride. Once there are no more rides left, the cell will not divide any more, and will ‘retire.’ But some special cells in the body can activate telomerase, which again can elongate the telomeres.
Sex cells, or other stem cells, which must be able to divide more than normal cells, have this feature. Unfortunately, cancer cells have discovered the trick, and it is known that they also produce telomerase and thus keep themselves artificially young. The telomerase gene therefore plays an important role in cancer biology, and it is precisely by identifying cancer genes that the researchers imagine that you can improve the identification rate and the treatment.
“We have discovered that differences in the telomeric gene are associated both with the risk of various cancers and with the length of the telomeres. The surprising finding was that the variants that caused the diseases were not the same as the ones which changed the length of the telomeres. This suggests that telomerase plays a far more complex role than previously assumed,” said Dr Stig Bojesen from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, first author of a paper published in Nature Genetics.
“You get so good at using your space suit that you can’t differentiate yourself from your space suit anymore.
You think you’re your space suit.”
Ram Dass
Art by: Dunno. You know? Lemme know!
Adam Martinakis computer-generated artworks employ aspects of photorealism and surrealism to explore the human condition which he says results in a “mixture of post-fantasy futurism and abstract symbolism”.
On “probably the most exciting day” of David Keays’ life, his research team found microscopic iron balls in the thinly sliced neurons of a pigeon’s inner ear. For four years, Keays’ team had been searching for the cellular receptor that allows birds to sense magnetic fields. This ability allows some birds to migrate thousands of miles, but no scientist has definitively found the anatomical structure responsible.
In May of last year, however, a study published in the journal Science suggested that pigeons sense magnetic fields with neurons in their inner ears. So Keays, of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, and his colleagues looked in this region, and all of the sudden, they struck iron. (Keays’ team was looking for this metal since it’s one of the few substances in the body that is magnetic.)
“As far as we know, they are the only iron-rich sensory neurons that have been described … and this is why it’s such an exciting discovery,” Keays told LiveScience.
These iron-containing membranes were found inside so-called “hair cells,” which play a role in hearing and sensing movement and acceleration. So far, it’s unclear exactly what they do, although Keays said the iron-imbued neurons are the most promising candidates for explaining birds’ ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field.
While we all can appreciate getting some peace and quiet every now and then, you might be surprised to learn that there’s only so much of it the brain can take.
That’s what scientists have discovered based on the reported experiences of those who have spent some quality alone time in Orfield Laboratory’s anechoic chamber, a room that’s so soundproof, it’s officially listed as the “Quietest place on earth,” according to Guinness World Records.
Located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the acoustic chamber is comprised of 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges, double walls of insulated steel and foot-thick concrete, which enables it to be 99.99 per cent sound absorbent with a decibal rating of −9.4 dBA. Any sounds below the threshold of 0 dBA is undetectable by the human ear. And at such a low decibal level, the environment becomes so disconcerting that people have actually started to hallucinate.
“When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly, Steven Orfield, the lab’s President and founder, told The Daily Mail. “In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.”
“With this body, you have the experience of time, taste, smell, touch — the taste of otherness, of beauty.
But I want you to come deeper in, beyond the field of phenomena. Your attention was going out through the senses.
Now we press the reverse button.
Make a U-turn and come inside as far as you can go but carry nothing with you.
Now, behind the facade of the body, go past emotions, feelings, thoughts.
Dive deeper and deeper inside, bypassing everything …
family, education, culture, conditioning, self-image.
Very good. Now come even more inside…
Silence.
Still, come past silence, come in more.
Bring your attention back to confirm the place beyond which you cannot go. Be here.
And now what happens….
Don’t just look with eyes, look with heart also.
Look with the fullness of yourself.
‘Here there is Nothing,’ you say!
And I ask: Is there anything behind nothing?
What perceives nothing itself?
Not easy questions, but they are our questions.
The human being must go through one door after another, and each and every door closes behind him until he comes here.
Now you are here… Inside the inside itself.
You are this nothingness itself experiencing itself beyond duality.
Rare is a human being who allows himself to come so purely back to base.
Not base camp … Just Base…”
Mooji
“How did I get to here?
A random chain of events
Or chemical and elements
Conspiring, divining”
Fullscreen view recommended!
'Blown Minded' is from the album SHAPESHIFTING by YOUNG GALAXY. Produced, directed, animated and editited by Carine Khalife.
We all know that the Earth rotates beneath our feet, but new research from ANU has revealed that the center of the Earth is out of sync with the rest of the planet, frequently speeding up and slowing down. Associate Professor Hrvoje Tkalcic from the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and his team used earthquake doublets to measure the rotation speed of Earth’s inner core over the last 50 years. They discovered that not only did the inner core rotate at a different rate to the mantle– the layer between the core and the crust that makes up most of the planet’s interior – but its rotation speed was variable.
“This is the first experimental evidence that the inner core has rotated at a variety of different speeds,” Associate Professor Tkalcic said. ”We found that, compared with the mantle, the inner core was rotating more quickly in the 1970s and 1990s, but slowed down in the 80s. The most dramatic acceleration has possibly occurred in the last few years, although further tests are needed to confirm that observation. ”Interestingly, Edmund Halley, namesake of Halley’s Comet, speculated that the inner shells of the Earth rotate with a different speed back in 1692.”
The word in the garden is that basil is good to have around. Plants are known to communicate with each other via shade, aromatic chemicals, and physical touch, promoting processes such as growth and defense against disease, as well as attraction of bees and other pollinators.
In BMC Ecology, researchers report a new type of mechanism that some plants use to communicate. The team planted common chili pepper seeds (Capsicum annuum, pictured) near a basil plant, with barriers that prevented the basil from deploying its usual growth-promoting tricks.
Despite the separation, chili seeds germinated faster when basil was a neighbor, suggesting that a message was getting through. Because light, touch, and chemical “smell” were ruled out, the team proposes that the finding points to a new type of communication between plants, possibly involving nanoscale sound waves, traveling through the dirt to bring encouraging “words” to the growing seeds.
Understanding this novel communication could help growers boost crop yields and increase global food supplies. How neighborly.
