Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally

Modern Science taking their first feeble steps out of the Dark Ages of Disconnected Specialization?

".........Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA......."
Explore the Potential of the Possible Human and Michael Murphy's Future of the Body. Understand that to trash and ignore thousands upon thousands of years of mastered wisdom on human nature is dangerous to survival. Highly specialized, yet narrow and shallow vision, breed and fertilize skewed and stale views of our expanding window to reality, which in turn create the trouble with foundational physics, perpetuating stagnant energy evolution, fostering global warming and the coming nuclear resource wars

NYT June 26, 2007
Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally
By NICHOLAS WADE
Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.
People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.
A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others. These genes so far make up a small fraction of all human genes.
A notable instance of recent natural selection is the emergence of lactose tolerance — the ability to digest lactose in adulthood — among the cattle-herding people of northern Europe some 5,000 years ago. Lactase, the enzyme that digests the principal sugar of milk, is usually switched off after weaning. But because of the great nutritional benefit for cattle herders of being able to digest lactose in adulthood, a genetic change that keeps the lactase gene switched on spread through the population.
Lactose tolerance is not confined to Europeans. Last year, Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and colleagues tested 43 ethnic groups in East Africa and found three separate mutations, all different from the European one, that keep the lactase gene switched on in adulthood. One of the mutations, found in peoples of Kenya and Tanzania, may have arisen as recently as 3,000 years ago.
That lactose tolerance has evolved independently four times is an instance of convergent evolution. Natural selection has used the different mutations available in European and East African populations to make each develop lactose tolerance. In Africa, those who carried the mutation were able to leave 10 times more progeny, creating a strong selective advantage.
Researchers studying other single genes have found evidence for recent evolutionary change in the genes that mediate conditions like skin color, resistance to malaria and salt retention.
The most striking instances of recent human evolution have emerged from a new kind of study, one in which the genome is scanned for evidence of selective pressures by looking at a few hundred thousand specific sites where variation is common.
Last year Benjamin Voight, Jonathan Pritchard and colleagues at the University of Chicago searched for genes under natural selection in Africans, Europeans and East Asians. In each race, some 200 genes showed signals of selection, but without much overlap, suggesting that the populations on each continent were adapting to local challenges.
Another study, by Scott Williamson of Cornell University and colleagues, published in PLoS Genetics this month, found 100 genes under selection in Chinese, African-Americans and European-Americans.
In most cases, the source of selective pressure is unknown. But many genes associated with resistance to disease emerge from the scans, confirming that disease is a powerful selective force. Another category of genes under selective pressure covers those involved in metabolism, suggesting that people were responding to changes in diet, perhaps associated with the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture.
Several genes involved in determining skin color have been under selective pressure in Europeans and East Asians. But Dr. Pritchard’s study detected skin color genes only in Europeans, and Dr. Williamson found mostly genes selected in Chinese.
The reason for the difference is that Dr. Pritchard’s statistical screen detects genetic variants that have become very common in a population but are not yet universal. Dr. Williamson’s picks up variants that have already swept through a population and are possessed by almost everyone.
The findings suggest that Europeans and East Asians acquired their pale skin through different genetic routes and, in the case of Europeans, perhaps as recently as around 7,000 years ago.
Another puzzle is presented by selected genes involved in brain function, which occur in different populations and could presumably be responses to behavioral challenges encountered since people left the ancestral homeland in Africa.
But some genes have more than one role, and some of these brain-related genes could have been selected for other properties.
Two years ago, Bruce Lahn, a geneticist at the University of Chicago, reported finding signatures of selection in two brain-related genes of a type known as microcephalins, because when mutated, people are born with very small brains. Two of the microcephalins had come under selection in Europeans and one in Chinese, Dr. Lahn reported.
He suggested that the selected forms of the gene had helped improved cognitive capacity and that many other genes, yet to be identified, would turn out to have done the same in these and other populations.
Neither microcephalin gene turned up in Dr. Pritchard’s or Dr. Williamson’s list of selected genes, and other researchers have disputed Dr. Lahn’s claims. Dr. Pritchard found that two other microcephalin genes were under selection, one in Africans and the other in Europeans and East Asians.
Even more strikingly, Dr. Williamson’s group reported that a version of a gene called DAB1 had become universal in Chinese but not in other populations. DAB1 is involved in organizing the layers of cells in the cerebral cortex, the site of higher cognitive functions.
Variants of two genes involved in hearing have become universal, one in Chinese, the other in Europeans.
The emerging lists of selected human genes may open new insights into the interactions between history and genetics. “If we ask what are the most important evolutionary events of the last 5,000 years, they are cultural, like the spread of agriculture, or extinctions of populations through war or disease,” said Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford. These cultural events are likely to have left deep marks in the human genome.
A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians, a group that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent. The clusterings reflect “serial founder effects,” Dr. Feldman said, meaning that as people migrated around the world, each new population carried away just part of the genetic variation in the one it was derived from.
The new scans for selection show so far that the populations on each continent have evolved independently in some ways as they responded to local climates, diseases and, perhaps, behavioral situations.
The concept of race as having a biological basis is controversial, and most geneticists are reluctant to describe it that way. But some say the genetic clustering into continent-based groups does correspond roughly to the popular conception of racial groups.
“There are difficulties in where you put boundaries on the globe, but we know now there are enough genetic differences between people from different parts of the world that you can classify people in groups that correspond to popular notions of race,” Dr. Pritchard said.
David Reich, a population geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, said that the term “race” was scientifically inexact and that he preferred “ancestry.” Genetic tests of ancestry are now so precise, he said, that they can identify not just Europeans but can distinguish between northern and southern Europeans. Ancestry tests are used in trying to identify genes for disease risk by comparing patients with healthy people. People of different races are excluded in such studies. Their genetic differences would obscure the genetic difference between patients and unaffected people.
No one yet knows to what extent natural selection for local conditions may have forced the populations on each continent down different evolutionary tracks. But those tracks could turn out to be somewhat parallel. At least some of the evolutionary changes now emerging have clearly been convergent, meaning that natural selection has made use of the different mutations available in each population to accomplish the same adaptation.
This is the case with lactose tolerance in European and African peoples and with pale skin in East Asians and Europeans.

Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation

Explore the Possibilities of the Possible Human and Michael Murphy's Future of the Body. Understand that to trash and ignore thousands upon thousands of years of mastered wisdom on human nature is dangerous to survival. Highly specialized, yet narrow and shallow vision, breed and fertilize skewed and stale views of our expanding window to reality, which in turn create the trouble with foundational physics, perpetuating stagnant energy evolution, fostering global warming and the coming nuclear resource wars ...........as our vaunted scientific institutions spearhead our progress with extremely, very extremely, elementary human nature trivia in the article below

NYT August 23, 2007
Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.
The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.
The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.
The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.
The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.
The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.
In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.
When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.
The illusion shows that body parts can be separated from the whole body by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. That is, when a person’s brain sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.
The new experiments were designed to create a whole body illusion with similar manipulations.
In Switzerland, Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, asked people to don virtual reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera projected an image of each person taken from the back and displayed 6 feet away. The subjects thus saw an illusory image of themselves standing in the distance.
Then Dr. Blanke stroked each person’s back for one minute with a stick while simultaneously projecting the image of the stick onto the illusory image of the person’s body.
When the strokes were synchronous, people reported the sensation of being momentarily within the illusory body. When the strokes were not synchronous, the illusion did not occur.
In another variation, Dr. Blanke projected a “rubber body” — a cheap mannequin bought on eBay and dressed in the same clothes as the subject — into the virtual reality goggles. With synchronous strokes of the stick, people’s sense of self drifted into the mannequin.
A separate set of experiments were carried out by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Helsinki.
Last year, when Dr. Ehrsson was, as he says, “a bored medical student at University College London”, he wondered, he said, “what would happen if you ‘took’ your eyes and moved them to a different part of a room? Would you see yourself where you eyes were placed? Or from where your body was placed?”
To find out, Dr. Ehrsson asked people to sit on a chair and wear goggles connected to two video cameras placed 6 feet behind them. The left camera projected to the left eye. The right camera projected to the right eye. As a result, people saw their own backs from the perspective of a virtual person sitting behind them.
Using two sticks, Dr. Ehrsson stroked each person’s chest for two minutes with one stick while moving a second stick just under the camera lenses — as if it were touching the virtual body.
Again, when the stroking was synchronous people reported the sense of being outside their own bodies — in this case looking at themselves from a distance where their “eyes” were located.
Then Dr. Ehrsson grabbed a hammer. While people were experiencing the illusion, he pretended to smash the virtual body by waving the hammer just below the cameras. Immediately, the subjects registered a threat response as measured by sensors on their skin. They sweated and their pulses raced.
They also reacted emotionally, as if they were watching themselves get hurt, Dr. Ehrsson said.
People who participated in the experiments said that they felt a sense of drifting out of their bodies but not a strong sense of floating or rotating, as is common in full-blown out of body experiences, the researchers said.
The next set of experiments will involve decoupling not just touch and vision but other aspects of sensory embodiment, including the felt sense of the body position in space and balance, they said.

Out-Of-Body Experiences Put To The Test
CBS Aug. 23, 2007
(WebMD) Ever had an out-of-body experience, where you were wide awake and "saw" your body as if you were a bystander? Scientists may have figured out how out-of-body experiences happen. Turns out, it's all about the eyes. Two new studies — both published in tomorrow's edition of the journal Science — put a state-of-the-art spin on out-of-body research. In one experiment, 14 healthy, young adults wore virtual-reality goggles as they stood in the researchers' lab. A few feet behind them, a video camera filmed their backs and projected that image, in real time, into a hologram a few feet in front of the participants. The researchers stroked the participants' real and virtual back at the same time. Afterward, they only stroked the participants' virtual back — but even so, participants said they had the sensation that their real backs were being touched. Participants didn't lose all sense of themselves. They didn't report feeling like they had left their bodies. But they did describe the sensation as weird or strange, according to Olaf Blanke, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues. Blanke directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. Blanke's team did similar tests on 14 other participants to confirm the findings. The other study also used virtual reality and video cameras to simulate out-of-body experiences. But neuroscientist H. Henrik Ehrsson, M.D., Ph.D., pushed the envelope a little farther. Ehrsson works at University College London and the Karolinksa Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. In a series of experiments, Ehrsson found that participants "felt" touch applied to virtual-reality versions of their bodies. What's more, when Ehrsson pretended to strike participants' virtual bodies — not their true selves — with a hammer, participants were scared for their actual flesh and blood, though they had been promised that they weren't in any danger whatsoever. "This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience," Ehrsson says in a news release. "In other words, we feel that our self is located where the eyes are."


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I hope more people who have had near death experiences post here. This is a very interesting subject. This study proves nothing...I would like to hear about actual experiences.
Posted by GrammaWhamma at 07:12 PM : Aug 23, 2007+ report abuse
Posted by luvcomments at 06:41 PM : Aug 23, 2007+ report abuse--------------------------------------------------------------------------------****I will not fight science, because I know its futile. However, the experience gave me new energy to go on with life with desire. I cherish every morsel of life. Personally, it did not convert me to a more relgious person (I was catholic turned atheist turned..??) but a more spiritial human being. I know that there is a prupose for everything. I am sorry to be too corney...but I believe in a grand design for each and everyone of us. Most important, now I understand that it is not who you believe but how you lead your life.
Posted by xzavierbrown at 07:05 PM : Aug 23, 2007+ report abuse
xzavierbrownI agree with you. My experience was similar. I experienced total lack of fear, knew I would exist forever (although not as who I was/still am in the flesh, of course), and knew I might or might not get back into my human form I had temporarily left. I saw the doctor, the nurses, everything around me and also in other rooms, as well as saw my own human body. As a result I am not at all afraid of death (maybe afraid of how I die, though). I did see a massive light / energy source and knew even the sun receives its energy from that. They can run all the experiments they want to; I don''t see what difference it makes. The experience left me aware that people are all running around in circles, intent on so many things that really don''t matter one tinker''s cuss in the grand scheme of things.
Posted by luvcomments at 06:41 PM : Aug 23, 2007+ report abuse
does that work for blind people, too?
Posted by luvcomments at 06:31 PM : Aug 23, 2007+ report abuse
"In one experiment, 14 healthy, young adults wore virtual-reality goggles as they stood in the researchers'' lab. A few feet behind them, a video camera filmed their backs and projected that image, in real time, into a hologram a few feet in front of the participants."I dont think anybody would have that as they are dying in an operating table. I had an NDE and what I felt is..*no words can describe it* I am NOT leaning toward a more religious aspect but more or on a spiritual. There is a sense of peace and delight. I did not see jesus nor did I see allah or whatever franchised religion is selling these days, but I sense an entity of power. The most important thing that I learned from it????....LIFE IS TOO PRECIOUS TO WASTE. LIVE IT LIKE YOU ARE GOING TO DIE IN AN HOUR. I can go ahead with this but I am afraid I am going to open myself to the preceeding post to taunts and hollers from both religious and athiest zealots.
Posted by xzavierbrown at 06:30 PM : Aug 23, 2007

Mind Over Matter, With a Machine’s Help

Explore the Possibilities of the Possible Human and Michael Murphy's Future of the Body. Understand that to trash and ignore thousands upon thousands of years of mastered wisdom on human nature is dangerous to survival. Highly specialized, yet narrow and shallow vision, breed and fertilize skewed and stale views of our expanding window to reality, which in turn create the trouble with foundational physics, perpetuating stagnant energy evolution, fostering global warming and the coming nuclear resource wars ...............as our vaunted scientific institutions spearhead our progress with extremely, very extremely, elementary human nature trivia in the article below

August 26, 2007
NYT Slipstream
Mind Over Matter, With a Machine’s Help
By JASON PONTIN
WOULD that thinking made it so, people sometimes wistfully say. But Christopher deCharms, the chief executive of Omneuron, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., believes the adage.
The company he founded has created technologies that teach sufferers to think away their pain, and plans to similarly treat addiction, depression and other intractable neurological and psychological conditions.
Omneuron is one of a number of new companies that are commercializing a brain-scanning technology called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Using large scanners to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain, the technology makes the brain’s activity visible by revealing which of its parts are busiest when we perform different tasks.
While fMRI dates back to the early 1990s, hitherto it has been used mainly by doctors in hospitals to make diagnoses. The commercialization of brain scanning is a recent development, spurred by the refinement of the technology. Omneuron, which Dr. deCharms founded in 2001 and whose research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, uses fMRI to teach people how to play with their own heads. Other entrepreneurs are working on ways to deploy fMRI as a lie detector, a tool for conducting marketing research or an instrument to make brain surgeries safer and more precise.
Here’s how Omneuron uses fMRI to treat chronic pain: A patient slides into the coffin-like scanner and watches a computer-generated flame projected on the screen of virtual-reality goggles; the flame’s intensity reflects the neural activity of regions of the brain involved in the perception of pain. Using a variety of mental techniques — for instance, imagining that a painful area is being flooded with soothing chemicals — most people can, with a little concentration, make the flame wax or wane. As the flame wanes, the patient feels better. Superficially similar to an older technology, electroencephalogram biofeedback, which measures electrical feedback across multiple areas of the brain, fMRI feedback measures the blood flow in precise areas of the brain.
“We believe that people will use real-time fMRI feedback to hone cognitive strategies that will increase activation of brain regions,” Dr. deCharms said. With practice and repetition, he said, this could lead to “long-term changes in the brain.”
In time, he hopes, a patient could evoke the effect without the machine.
In a 2005 study, Dr. deCharms and Sean Mackey, associate director of the pain management division at Stanford, showed that eight patients with recalcitrant pain felt their discomfort reduced by as much as 64 percent by using Omneuron’s technology.
If fMRI proves effective in treating pain, it could be big business. According to the American Chronic Pain Association, one in three Americans will experience chronic pain at some point in life. At any one time, more than 50 million Americans complain of pain. And Dr. deCharms contends that fully one-third find their pain resistant to traditional treatments like narcotics. Omneuron’s technologies could offer such patients some relief, and without side effects.
The pain-relief industry is huge: the average American spends as much as $900 a year on pain medications, whose effects are generally short-lived.
But Dr. deCharms says that controlling pain is just one of many possible uses for fMRI feedback. Today, Omneuron is also researching treatments for addiction, depression and other psychological illnesses. In addition, he said. the company has contemplated “several dozen applications,” including the treatment of stroke and epilepsy. Brain scanning could even be used to improve athletic performance, he speculated.
Doctors and drug-abuse experts are particularly excited about the idea of treating addiction using fMRI. While scientists have talked about such an application since the technology was invented, Omneuron is the first to work on a real therapy. “We might have a tool to help control the inner sensation of craving,” said Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped fund Omneuron’s research into addiction.
A growing number of ventures hope to turn fMRI into a business. The most well-publicized is No Lie MRI, which wants to sell brain scanning to law firms and governmental bodies like police departments or security and intelligence agencies as a replacement for the notoriously unreliable polygraph test. No Lie MRI has already begun selling what it calls its truth verification technology for about $10,000 to individuals keen to prove their innocence.
Joel Huizenga, the chief executive of No Lie MRI, said: “A technology gets known by its first product. For fMRI, that application is going to be truth verification.”
Mr. Huizenga says he would also like to sell fMRI to marketers who wish to determine whether consumers are responding to advertising, a commercial application of an emerging field of research called neuro-economics.
Other brain-scanning ventures include Cephos, another lie-detection company, and Imagilys, which sells fMRI to surgeons who want to map the brains of patients before operations.
For its part, Omneuron would make money not by building fMRI centers — which are expensive and fairly common in larger hospitals — but by selling clinical skills, software and equipment.
“I imagine the business model would be akin to Lasik eye surgery,” Dr. deCharms says. “We’d provide the technology to outpatient treatment centers.”
There are challenges to the commercialization of brain scanning, and the most important may be regulatory. Clinical trials can take many years, and federal approval is famously unpredictable. But until clinical data and federal approval are forthcoming, Dr. deCharms says, Omneuron cannot sell its technology as a clinical treatment.
Ed Boyden, an assistant professor at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher in neuroengineering, distinguishes sharply among different brain-scanning ventures. “If you want to commercialize this technology,” he said, “then the use has to approximate real-world situations.”
In his view, tests of fMRI truth verification don’t meet that criterion. For instance, in studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 and 2005, subjects were told to conceal the identity of a card under questioning. FMRI was able to distinguish falsification 77 percent of the time.
Mr. Huizenga was so inspired by this research that he decided to start his company, confident that fMRI would soon identify lies 90 percent of the time.
But Dr. Boyden says he believes that being asked to tell a falsehood that everyone knows is a falsehood is not the same thing as lying to deceive someone. Thus, whatever brain patterns fMRI detects when a person constructs such a requested fiction may be different from whatever happens when we lie.
By contrast, Dr. Boyden says: “What I like about Omneuron is that it’s working with real-world situations. They gave people visualization strategies which they could monitor — and which produced real, measurable results.”
If Dr. deCharms and Omneuron are successful, and can teach us to train our brains to manage neurological and psychological conditions, they will have given us something that has challenged philosophers, psychologists and yogis alike: gaining some reliable control over our own thoughts.
Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E

Light Fantastic: Flirting With Invisibility

The enormity of exploding complexity stalling progress when dealing with disconnected points of view devoid of a viewing point in Science (downsize complexity advance science boundaries and Understanding with StarSteps) : HOW A STEEL DOOR MIGHT BECOME INVISIBLE, OR BETTER YET, A SEE THROUGH WINDOW - We are accustomed to thinking of metals as being completely opaque. However, ordinary glass is just a dense a many metals and harder than most, yet transmits light quite readily. Most matter is opaque to light because the photons of light are captured and absorbed in the electron orbits of the atoms through which they pass. This capture will occur whenever the frequency of the photon matches one of the frequencies of the atom. The energy thus stored is soon re-emitted, but usually in the infra-red portion of the spectrum, which is below the range of visibility, and so cannot be seen as light. There are several ways in which almost any matter can be made transparent, or at least translucent. One method is to create a field matrix between the atoms which will tend to prevent the photon from being absorbed. Such a matrix develops in many substances during crystallization. Another is to raise the frequency of the photon above the highest absorption frequency of the atoms. A beam of energy through a frequency multiplier penetrates the metal on one side and acts upon any light that reaches it in such a way that the resulting frequency is raised to the X-ray and cosmic ray spectrum. At these frequencies, the waves pass through the metal readily. As the waves leave the metal on the inner side, they again interact with the viewing beam, producing beat frequencies which are identical with the original frequencies of the light (a rough analogy this system could be compared to the carrier waves of a radio broadcasting station, except that the modulation is applied 'upstream', instead of at the source of the carrier.

June 12, 2007
Light Fantastic: Flirting With Invisibility
By KENNETH CHANG













Increasingly, physicists are constructing materials that bend light the “wrong” way, an optical trick that could lead to sharper-than-ever lenses or maybe even make objects disappear.
Last October, scientists at Duke demonstrated a working cloaking device, hiding whatever was placed inside, although it worked only for microwaves.
In the experiment, a beam of microwave light split in two as it flowed around a specially designed cylinder and then almost seamlessly merged back together on the other side. That meant that an object placed inside the cylinder was effectively invisible. No light waves bounced off the object, and someone looking at it would have seen only what was behind it.
The cloak was not perfect. An alien with microwave vision would not have seen the object, but might have noticed something odd. “You’d see a darkened spot,” said David R. Smith, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. “You’d see some distortion, and you’d see some shadowing, and you would see some reflection.”
A much greater limitation was that this particular cloak worked for just one particular “color,” or wavelength, of microwave light, limiting its usefulness as a hiding place. Making a cloak that works at the much shorter wavelengths of visible light or one that works over a wide range of colors is an even harder, perhaps impossible, task.
Nonetheless, the demonstration showed the newfound ability of scientists to manipulate light through structures they call “metamaterials.”
Obviously the military would be interested in any material that could be used to hide vehicles or other equipment. But such materials could also be useful in new types of microscopes and antennae. So far, scientists have written down the underlying equations, performed computer simulations and conducted some proof-of-principle experiments like the one at Duke. They still need to determine the practical limitations of how far they can bend light to their will.
The method is not magic, nor are the materials novel. Physicists are taking ordinary substances like fiberglass and copper to build metamaterials that look like mosaics of repeating tiles. The metamaterials interact with the electric and magnetic fields in light waves, manipulating a quantity known as the index of refraction to bend the light in a way that no natural material does.
“There are some things that chemistry can’t do on its own,” said John B. Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College London. “The additional design flexibility with introducing structure as well as chemistry into the equation enables you to reach properties that just haven’t been accessible before.”
When a ray of light crosses a boundary from air to water, glass or other transparent material, it bends, and the degree of bending is determined by the index of refraction.
Air has an index of 1. Water’s index of refraction is about 1.3. That is why rippling water waves distort the view of a pond bottom, for instance. It is refraction that makes a straw in a glass of water look as if it is bending toward the surface, and fish swimming in a pond look closer to the surface than they really are.
Diamonds have a refractive index of 2.4, giving them their sparkling beauty.
For visible light, transparent materials like glass, water and diamonds all have an index of 1 or higher, meaning that when the light enters, its path bends inward, closer to the perpendicular. Because the index is uniform throughout a material, the bending occurs only as the light crosses a boundary.
But with metamaterials, scientists can now also create indexes of refraction from 0 to 1. In the Duke cloaking device, the index actually varies smoothly from 0, at the inside surface of the cylinder, to 1, at the outside surface. That causes the path of light to curve not just at the boundaries, but also as it passes through the metamaterial.
Metamaterials first took center stage in a scientific spat a few years ago over a startling claim that the index of refraction could be not just less than 1, but also negative, less than 0. Light entering such a material would take a sharp turn, almost as if it had bounced off an invisible mirror as it crossed the boundary.
The refractive index depends on the response of a material to electric and magnetic fields. Typically within a material, electrons flow in a way to minimize the effects of an external electric field, producing an internal electrical field in the opposite direction. But that is not universally true. For some metals like silver, an oscillating electric field induces a field in the same, not opposite, direction.
Victor G. Veselago, a Russian physicist, realized in the 1960s that if it were possible to find a material that responded in a contrarian way not just to electric fields and but also magnetic fields, a result would be a negative index of refraction.
Dr. Pendry was among the first to start making metamaterials in the late ’90s, building a structure of thin wires that responded to electrical fields in a way opposite most materials. He also designed one that reacted similarly to magnetic fields.
Dr. Smith, then at the University of California, San Diego, attended a talk by Dr. Pendry at a conference in 1999. He and his colleagues built the first metamaterial to combine electric and magnetic behavior.
The journal Physical Review Letters rejected his scientific paper describing the experiment, considering it simplistic and uninteresting. Only then did Dr. Smith come upon Dr. Veselago’s work on negative refraction and the larger implications of the experiment. “We had it, but we didn’t realize it,” said Dr. Smith, who is now at Duke. “Then I rewrote the abstract, and it was accepted.”
That set off a contentious back and forth that lasted several years between researchers who made and measured negative-refraction metamaterials and those who said that the experiments showed nothing of the sort, that negative refraction was at best an illusion and violated the laws of physics.
Part of the difficulty in resolving the controversy was that the negative refraction experiments were at microwave wavelengths. Designing metamaterials for shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies like visible light is more difficult, because fewer materials are transparent at the higher frequencies.
“Just look around the room,” Dr. Pendry said. “How many things can you see through? Not many. You’re running out of road.”
This year, researchers at the Ames Laboratory in Iowa and Karlsruhe University in Germany reported making a metamaterial that had a negative index of refraction for a visible wavelength.
Some critics remain unmollified. Nicolás García of the Spanish National Research Council still calls Dr. Pendry’s statements on negative refraction “propaganda.” But today, most physicists accept the negative refraction interpretation.
The debate did highlight limits of metamaterials. They are dispersive, meaning the angle of refraction depends very sensitively on the frequency of light, and they are lossy, meaning that they absorb energy from the light as it passes through.
Nonetheless, Dr. Pendry has proposed that negative refraction materials can be used to make a “superlens” because they sidestep a process called diffraction that blurs images taken via conventional optics.
Researchers led by Xiang Zhang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, have demonstrated that a thin, flat piece of silver can indeed produce such images, able to resolve two thin lines separated by 70 billionths of a meter.
“You put your object on one side and your image will be projected on the other side,” Dr. Zhang said.
The superlens can also preserve detail lost in conventional optics. Light is usually thought of as having undulating waves. But much closer up, light is a much more jumbled mess, with the waves mixed in with more complicated “evanescent waves.”
The evanescent waves quickly dissipate as they travel, and thus are usually not seen. A negative refraction lens actually amplified the evanescent waves, Dr. Pendry calculated, and that effect was demonstrated by Dr. Zhang’s experiment. A negative refraction could someday lead to an optical microscope that could make out tiny biological structures like individual viruses.
The main limit now is that an object has to be placed very close to the lens, within a fraction of a wavelength of light.
Another possible use would be for a DVD-type recorder. The finer focus could allow more data like high-definition movies to be packed in the same space, perhaps the entire Library of Congress on a platter the size of today’s DVD, Dr. Zhang said.
The metamaterials researchers also look for new problems to solve. “Now it’s sort of fired up our imaginations to do this cloaking thing,” Dr. Pendry said, “because we realized we could actually make one using these materials.”
In May 2006, Dr. Pendry and Dr. Smith proposed a design that would cloak a single microwave frequency. By October, Dr. Smith’s group at Duke demonstrated a working version, although simplified and imperfect. Dr. Smith’s microwave design cannot be adapted to visible light, because the energy absorption problem becomes too great.
This year, Vladimir M. Shalaev of Purdue displayed a different design, avoiding the absorption problem. He said it would cloak visible light, albeit just a single wavelength at a time. “We can make our cloak for any of these colors but not for all of them simultaneously,” Dr. Shalaev said. “At least, it starts looking like it’s doable.”
He said he hoped to build the design, which requires tiny rods arrayed around a cylinder, in a few years. Metamaterials could also be used for other novel devices. Dr. Shalaev suggested an “anticloak” that would trap light of a certain wavelength. “That could be used as a sensing device,” he said.
Whether the cloak could be made big enough to cover a teenage wizard or an alien spaceship is another question. “I’m fairly pessimistic knowing what I know now,” Dr. Smith said.
Dr. Shalaev said it would be a challenge. “I don’t know,” he said. “We hope it is possible.”

The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding

(StarSteps) The Curvature of All Natural Law: If it is space that is expanding, it is difficult to understand why we have never detected the increasing distance between the earth and the moon or the sun. No attempt is made to explain why the space which exists between the individual atoms, and between the component parts of those atoms, should not expand also.
None of these difficulties, of course, invalidate any of the mathematical laws from which the concepts have been derived, but they do emphasize the great need for explanations which are more compatible with reason and understanding. For instance, in the above case would it not be simpler to assume that the degree of separation which exists between the galaxies, when considered as individual bodies, is apparently increasing because they occupy opposite portions of the sine curve of natural law?
If we exchange our postulate of linear laws and a "curved space" for a concept which incorporates the curvature of natural law, we find that we have not thereby destroyed or invalidated any of our present mathematics, but we have achieved a position from which the operation of the natural laws can be pictured by the mind and can be charted upon paper. Thus we have taken a great stride in the direction of understanding.

NYT June 5, 2007
Essay
The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding
By DENNIS OVERBYE
When Albert Einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. Common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the Milky Way surrounded by infinite darkness.
We like to think we’re smarter than that now. We know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the Big Bang.
Bask in your knowledge while you can. Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.
If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.
Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ‘island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.”
It is hard to count all the ways in which this is sad. Forget the implied mortality of our species and everything it has or has not accomplished. If you are of a certain science fiction age, like me, you might have grown up with a vague notion of the evolution of the universe as a form of growing self-awareness: the universe coming to know itself, getting smarter and smarter, culminating in some grand understanding, commanding the power to engineer galaxies and redesign local spacetime.
Instead, we have the prospect of a million separate Sisyphean efforts with one species after another pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down and be forgotten.
Worse, it makes you wonder just how smug we should feel about our own knowledge.
“There may be fundamentally important things that determine the universe that we can’t see,” Dr. Krauss said in an interview. “You can have right physics, but the evidence at hand could lead to the wrong conclusion. The same thing could be happening today.”
The proximate culprit here is dark energy, which has been responsible for much of the bad news in physics over the last 10 years. This is the mysterious force, discovered in 1998, that is accelerating the cosmic expansion that is causing the galaxies to rush away faster and faster. The leading candidate to explain that acceleration is a repulsion embedded in space itself, known as the cosmological constant. Einstein postulated the existence of such a force back in 1917 to explain why the universe didn’t collapse into a black hole, and then dropped it when Edwin Hubble discovered that distant galaxies were flying away — the universe was expanding.
If this is Einstein’s constant at work — and some astronomers despair of ever being able to say definitively whether it is or is not — the future is clear and dark. In their paper, Dr. Krauss and Dr. Scherrer extrapolated forward in time what has become a sort of standard model of the universe, 14 billion years old, and composed of a trace of ordinary matter, a lot of dark matter and Einstein’s cosmological constant.
As this universe expands and there is more space, there is more force pushing the galaxies outward faster and faster. As they approach the speed of light, the galaxies will approach a sort of horizon and simply vanish from view, as if they were falling into a black hole, their light shifted to infinitely long wavelengths and dimmed by their great speed. The most distant galaxies disappear first as the horizon slowly shrinks around us like a noose.
A similar cloak of invisibility will befall the afterglow of the Big Bang, an already faint bath of cosmic microwaves, whose wavelengths will be shifted so that they are buried by radio noise in our own galaxy. Another vital clue, the abundance of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen manufactured in the Big Bang, in deep space, will become unobservable because to be seen it needs to be backlit from distant quasars, and those quasars, of course, will have disappeared.
Eventually, in the far far future, this runaway dark energy will suck all the energy and life out of the universe. A few years ago, Edward Witten, a prominent theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, called a universe that is accelerating forever “not very appealing.” Dr. Krauss has called it simply “the worst possible universe.”
But our future cosmologists will be spared this vision, according to the calculations. Instead they will puzzle about why the visible universe seems to consist of six galaxies, Dr. Krauss said. “What is the significance of six? Hundreds of papers will be written on that,” he said.
Those cosmologists may worry instead that their galaxy cloud will collapse into a black hole one day and, like Einstein, propose a cosmic repulsion to prevent it. But they will have no way of knowing if they were right.
Although by then the universe will be mostly dark energy, Dr. Krauss said, it will be undetectable unless astronomers want to follow the course of the occasional star that gets thrown out of the galaxy and is caught up in the dark cosmic current. But it would have to be followed for 10 billion years, he said — an experiment the National Science Foundation would be unlikely to finance.
“This is even weirder,” Dr. Krauss said. “Five billion years ago dark energy was unobservable; 100 billion years from now it will become invisible again.”
It turns out that you don’t actually need dark energy to be this pessimistic about the future, as Dr. Krauss and Dr. Scherrer point out. In 1987, George Ellis, a mathematician and astronomer at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, and Tony Rothman, currently lecturing at Princeton, wrote a paper showing how even ordinary expansion would gradually carry most galaxies too far away to be seen, setting the stage for cosmic ignorance.
Dark energy speeds up the picture, Dr. Ellis said in an e-mail message, adding that he was glad to see the new paper, which adds many astrophysical details. “It’s an interesting gloss on the far future,” he said.
James Peebles, a Princeton cosmologist, said there were more pressing worries. We might be headed toward a universe that is “asymptotically empty,” he said, “But I have the uneasy feeling that the U.S.A. is headed into asymptotic futility well before that.”
You might object that the inhabitants of the far future will be far more advanced than we are. Maybe they will be able to detect dark energy — or the extra dimensions of string theory, for that matter — in the laboratory. Maybe they will even be us, in some form or other, if the human race manages to get out of the solar system before the Sun blows up in five billion years. But if relativity is right, they won’t be able to build telescopes that can see past the edge of the universe.
It’s not too late to start thinking about sending out the robot probes that could drift down through alien skies eons from now with, if not us or our DNA, at least a few nuggets of wisdom — that the world is made of atoms and that it started with a bang.
The lesson in the meantime is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and we never will — a lesson that extends beyond astronomy.
Einstein once said, “The Lord God is subtle but malicious he is not.”
I wondered in light of this new report whether it might be time to revise that quotation. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me the problem was not malice but human arrogance — a necessary but unfortunate condition for scientific progress.
“We have a tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe,” he said. “We assume all we see is all there is.”
But, as Dr. Tegmark noted, Big Bang theorists already suppose that basic aspects of the universe are out of sight.
The reason we believe we live in a smooth, orderly universe instead of the chaotic one that is more likely, they say, is that the chaos has been hidden. According to the dominant theory of the Big Bang, known as inflation, an extremely violent version of dark energy blew it up a fraction of a second after time began, stretching and smoothing space and pushing all the wildness and chaos and even perhaps other universes out of the sky, where they will never be seen.
“Inflation tells us we live in a messy universe,” Dr. Tegmark said. Luckily we never have to confront it.
Ignorance is us, or is it bliss?

What does New Energy promise the future?

WHAT PART OF FREEDOM INEXTRICABLY INTERWOVEN WITH EVOLUTION, SURVIVAL, WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING AND QUALITY OF LIFE, IS STILL NOT UNDERSTOOD ON THE ENERGY FRONT?
Another physicist speaks out

Physicist Brian O’Leary: a former astronaut, Cornell professor, physics faculty member at Princeton University and visiting faculty member in technology assessment at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, Mo Udall's energy advisor and speechwriter during his 1975 Presidential campaign, author, AAAS Fellow, World Innovation Foundation Fellow, NASA group achievement award recipient, and founder of the New Energy Movement.

SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
http://www.brianoleary.com/









What does New Energy promise the future?

The restoration of balance to the Ecology. Humanity will no longer have to source its basic energy supplies from the limited deposits found in the body of Gaia. In turn, burning of fuel will no longer foul the atmosphere and the Greenhouse Effect may be steadily reversed. Local sustainability will become the cornerstone of economics, as opposed to global commerce. Preservation of natural systems can be given central focus in this new era, where ensuring quality of life is paramount. This ethic of sustainability will encourage cultivation of renewable and biodegradable resources for use in construction of homes, automobiles, and all other areas of industry. Where toxic waste has spoiled the environment, comprehensive bioremediation will be undertaken to restore its formerly pristine condition. Indeed, it is only once humanity has ceased the consumption of hydro-carbon and nuclear fuels to generate societal momentum that true planetary renewal may begin.

The freedom to pursue expansive economic development without marginalizing people or denuding culture. As regional economic independence is facilitated by de-centralized sources of New Energy, the insidious trend toward a globalized mono-culture will lose thrust. Simultaneously, the autonomy and self-determination that may arise in these areas will afford their populations a renewed sense of common purpose beyond mere industrialization. Creative endeavor, characterized by aesthetic and even philosophical advancement, may replace the society's former emphasis on economic gain through trading their natural resource base. A purely knowledge-oriented economy could emerge as the rebirth of business. This form of economic development would elevate human potential and guard against the exploitation of the labor force for the emancipation of the few. Just as the greatest wealth of biodiversity is preferable to a continued extinction of species, cultural diversity is an equally critical barometer of sustainability. New Energy promises to ensure a world of multifarious varieties and infinite shades of culture, rather than one homogenized by enforced slavery to artificial limitation.

Political stability and the hope of true world peace. Heretofore, most of the world's political strife has arisen from the perception of lack and the resulting competitive mindset that dominates human relations. With the advent of abundant, non-consumptive energy resources, sociological tensions will steadily dissipate as economies are thereby bolstered. Heralding unprecedented prosperity, a New Energy infrastructure promises a resurgence of egalitarian principles, humanitarian philanthropy, and the establishment of a holistic, wisdom-centered culture. The inevitable result this portends is surely a widespread, peaceful co-existence among all peoples. The re-direction of military assets and expenditures toward meeting the essential needs of every human person will symbolize the transition from a fear-based order to one of social uplift. What need is there for a policy of tyrannical violence when life can be equally enjoyed by all?

Radical clarification of theoretical physics leading to a new era of innovation and social advancement. Once the existence of space as the repository of all potential energy is embraced and this primordial reservoir is productively harnessed to the wheelwork of human endeavor, many prevailing scientific theories will have to be re-examined. Rather than disputing the relative merits of cosmological conceptualizations, the thrust of science may be turned to pure innovation. A stream of creative insights will be unleashed as effects formerly considered anomalies are integrated into an ever more simplified understanding of phenomena. Fundamental physical truths and natural philosophy will supplant the sophistry and intellectual debate of the past. And these will inform a paradigmatic shift in our approach to scientific research, igniting a revolution in the design and magnitude of technical developments. For, it is envisioned that a proper perception of space (primordial energy) contains the nascent seeds of every possibility ever conceived by science fiction: anti-gravity & directed force-fields, super-luminal space travel & communication, teleportation, time-travel, fusion & the creation of new materials. The radical reformulation of scientific knowledge that boundless, free energy brings us to contemplate is likely to involve dispensing with the classical laws of Thermodynamics. Yet, in the wake of this, perhaps the bizarre notion that the Universe is a slowly grinding to a halt (the result of its purported entropy) will be decidedly out of fashion.
Psychological and spiritual renaissance. The pre-occupation of humanity with ego-centric motives blinds us to our common birthright. With the popular acceptance of New Energy, what were the formerly unseen, numinal underpinnings of reality will have been manifestly revealed. The ready availability of life-affirming choices that proceed from this realization will rekindle the spirit of altruism necessary to dispel fear and greed. Suddenly, the collective consciousness shall have been initiated into the transpersonal desire to promote the common good above all relative moral concerns. Caring for the welfare of all our relations, down to the least dominant species and most infinitesimal element of Creation, honors the perfect symmetry of what is an implicitly unified whole. While the strict adherents of science may eschew such language as purely poetical and without practical significance to their chosen discipline, a rigorous social ethic is an inalienable concomitant of New Energy. One cannot be merely concerned with eliciting effects in pursuit of mechanistic ends. But, rather, devoting oneself to be of the greatest benefit to humanity must take overarching precedence. It is with this noble bearing that scientists might adopt a Hippocratic Oath, like their physician cousins. More importantly, the self-evident purpose for which life is geared, i.e. the awakening of cosmic consciousness, must be deeply integrated into the scientific mind. This is what has already begun to occur with the subtle melding of mysticism and the emerging consensus of Quantum Theory. May the perfection of our knowledge be occasioned by its convergence with the gnosis (direct perception) of the heart.

How Did the Universe Survive the Big Bang?

A theory has failed to make any predictions by which it can be tested, and some proponents are seeking to change the rules of science so the theory will not need to pass the usual tests imposed on scientific ideas (Trouble with Physics)









I suggest revisiting relativity, fundamentals and their totally interdependent relationships, recognizing common denominators, and the expanded role of the constant C. (StarSteps)

*The conversion factor between matter and energy is precisely equal to the quantity C, velocity of light.
*The quantity C is the pivotal point about which the natural laws become manifest
*An energy differential equal to C between two reference points suspends the natural laws,
*An energy differential in excess of C between two reference points, the laws appear to operate in reverse.
The natural laws are Relative: that is, the value of one can be altered between any two reference points by altering the value or relationship of the other.

TIME: Many of the difficulties which we encounter in our attempt to understand the operation of the natural laws arise because of our severely restricted concept of the nature of time. Time follows the same curve of natural law which is apparent in the operation of all the basic factors of nature, and again the radius of that curvature is measured by the quantity C. Follow the example in StarSteps which puts us in a unique position from which we can, from a single point in time, observe ourselves occupying three rather widely separated positions in space.

SPACE: The degree of separation which exists between any two bodies is determined by the degree of curvature of the natural laws which exist between them. In making these observations, of course, we must remember that, since the natural laws are relative, the mass of the body itself influences the degree of curvature

April 12, 2007
How Did the Universe Survive the Big Bang?
In This Experiment, Clues Remain Elusive
By KENNETH CHANG
An experiment that some hoped would reveal a new class of subatomic particles, and perhaps even point to clues about why the universe exists at all, has instead produced a first round of results that are mysteriously inconclusive.
“It’s intellectually interesting what we got,” said Janet M. Conrad, professor of physics at Columbia University and a spokeswoman for a collaboration that involves 77 scientists at 17 institutions. “We have to figure out what it is.”
Dr. Conrad and William C. Louis, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, presented their initial findings in a talk yesterday at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, outside Chicago, where the experiment is being performed.
The goal was to confirm or refute observations made in the 1990s in a Los Alamos experiment that observed transformations in the evanescent but bountiful particles known as neutrinos. Neutrinos have no electrical charge and almost no mass, but there are so many of them that they could collectively outweigh all the stars in the universe.
Although many physicists remain skeptical about the Los Alamos findings, the new experiment has attracted wide interest. The Fermilab auditorium was filled with about 800 people, and talks were given at the 16 additional institutions by other collaborating scientists. That reflected in part the hope of finding cracks in the Standard Model, which encapsulates physicists’ current knowledge about fundamental particles and forces.
The Standard Model has proved remarkably effective and accurate, but it cannot answer some fundamental questions, like why the universe did not completely annihilate itself an instant after the Big Bang.
The birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Since matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they come in contact, that would have left nothing to coalesce into stars and galaxies. There must be some imbalance in the laws of physics that led to a slight preponderance of matter over antimatter, and that extra bit of matter formed everything in the visible universe.
The imbalance, some physicists believe, may be hiding in the dynamics of neutrinos.
Neutrinos come in three known types, or flavors. And they can change flavor as they travel, a process that can occur only because of the smidgen of mass they carry. But the neutrino transformations reported in the Los Alamos data do not fit the three-flavor model, suggesting four flavors of neutrinos, if not more. Other data, from experiments elsewhere, have said the additional neutrinos would have to be “sterile” — completely oblivious to the rest of the universe except for gravity.
The new experiment is called MiniBooNE. (BooNE, pronounced boon, is a contraction of Booster Neutrino Experiment. “Booster” refers to a Fermilab booster ring that accelerates protons, and “mini” was added because of plans for a second, larger stage to the research.)
MiniBooNE sought to count the number of times one flavor of neutrino, called a muon, turned into another flavor, an electron neutrino. The experiment slams a beam of protons into a piece of beryllium, and the cascade of particles from the subatomic wreckage includes muon neutrinos that fly about 1,650 feet to a detection chamber, a tank 40 feet in diameter that contains 250,000 gallons of mineral oil.
Most of the neutrinos fly through unscathed, but occasionally a neutrino crashes into a carbon atom in the mineral oil. That sets off another cascade of particles, which is detected by 1,280 light detectors mounted on the inside of the tank.
From the pattern of the cascades, the physicists could distinguish whether the incoming neutrino was of muon flavor or electron. To minimize the chances of fooling themselves, they deliberately did not look at any of the electron neutrino events until they felt they had adequately understood the much more common muon neutrino events. They finally “opened the box” on their electron neutrino data on March 26 and began the analysis leading to their announcement yesterday.
For most of the neutrino energy range they looked at, they did not see any more electron neutrinos than would be predicted by the Standard Model. That ruled out the simplest ways of interpreting the Los Alamos neutrino data, Dr. Conrad and Dr. Louis said.
But at the lower energies, the scientists did see more electron neutrinos than predicted: 369, rather than the predicted 273. That may simply mean that some calculations are off. Or it could point to a subtler interplay of particles, known and unknown.
“It’s tantalizing,” said Boris Kayser, a Fermilab physicist not on the MiniBooNE project. “It could be real. But this remains to be established.”
Dr. Louis said he was surprised by the results. “I was sort of expecting a clear excess or no excess,” he said. “In a sense, we got both.”

X-ray snaps of the Sun yield surprises

"We are used to seeing magnetic fields emerging outwards," says Golub. But this one went in the other direction. "Nobody can explain how this happens," Golub says.

Another reversal of natural law...."if a differential of energy equal to this quantity ("C") exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point...." The Ancient Symbol of the Circle with the Sine Wave running through it - NO WAY COULD ANCIENTS HAVE KNOWN!! StarSteps

Published online: 22 March 2007; doi:10.1038/news070319-11
X-ray snaps of the Sun yield surprises
Stunning video of collapsing magnetic arc baffles scientists.
Katharine Sanderson
The best images of the Sun yet obtained are now streaming in — and are proving both illuminating and baffling for scientists.The Hinode spacecraft, an international mission led by the Japanese space agency JAXA, was launched in September 2006, and is now circling Earth in an orbit that gives it a good view of the Sun. The latest data to be sent back from its three main instruments are showing our star in all its glory as a dynamic, turbulent, mysterious hothouse of magnetic activity (see video).Researchers have long been puzzled by the observation that the Sun's corona — the atmosphere of gas extending out from the Sun at a temperature of millions of degrees Celsius — is about a hundred times hotter than the Sun's surface. One possible explanation is that magnetic fields projecting from the Sun twist about in the turbulent environment until they eventually snap, releasing energy as heat. The data being returned by Hinode's X-Ray Telescope add weight to this theory."We can see the corona structures twisting and shearing," says Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "There are things that look exactly as predicted," he says. But some of the observations are proving more confusing. Astrophysicists have been stunned by a video image of a magnetic arc collapsing in on itself. "We are used to seeing magnetic fields emerging outwards," says Golub. But this one went in the other direction. "Nobody can explain how this happens," Golub says. Golub expects that this too may be related to the corona's high temperature, but as yet there is no theory to predict this kind of activity, he says."Processes that we see on the Sun are not intuitive and not easily explained," says Alan Title of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. Title works on Hinode's third instrument, the Solar Optical Telescope. And it is likely to provide yet more surprises. "Almost every day we see data coming down and we don't know what they mean," says Golub.Story from news@nature.com:http://news.nature.com//news/2007/070319/070319-11.html

The 'new age' of super materials

But 20 years on, the new world does not seem to have arrived. So what happened?


Superconductivity discovered in 1911 was only seen in materials cooled close to absolute zero, which according to theory is the state of zero heat energy. A breakthrough came in 1986 with a new breed of materials known as high temperature superconductors (HTSC). Despite an intensive two-decade search, the underlying mechanism of superconductivity in the ceramics is still disputed. So what part of Zero Point, the point between the positive and negative curve of the sine wave, whose radius of curvature is the quantity C differential, between the measured reference points, is still not understood, incapable of being measured???? What part of the total interdependent relationships between mass, matter, space, time, energy, & gravity along this radius of curvature of all natural law ‘constant’ is still not understood.... as measurements are being made between reference points?????

Indeed, what happened to science (i.e., The Trouble with Physics) as we created bizarre fearful theories of black holes, “rapidly evolving geometry regions ending in a singularity where everything is infinite and time stops, all hidden behind a sheet of standing still light horizon”…”Black holes whose temperatures are inversely proportional to their mass – the opposite of normal - we fuel a fire, put energy into objects to raise temperature, for black holes, putting energy, or mass, in, make the black holes more massive and cools them off”. When we state that the quantity C is the radius of the curvature of natural law, we mean simply that if a differential of energy equal to this quantity exists between the observer and the point which he is observing, the natural laws will be suspended. If the energy differential is in excess of the quantity C, the laws will appear to operate in reverse at that point. I repeat again, what part of the 'sine wave' nature of the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law, specified by the energy differential of the constant 'C', in E=MC2 is still not understood????? The Quantity C: (StarSteps) "

Indeed, what happened to science, specifically within the E=MC2 venue, in the 40's, 50's, 60's and early 70's? A timeline covering 'rumors' from the Tesla's Wardenclyffe Project, the Nazi Bell experiment, the Philadelphia experiment, and the Montauk Project, to the Befield Brown "electrogravitics" phenomena that had major corporations intrigued with excitement, when suddenly everything went dead silent, vanished, and E=MC2 crawled back into its dumb hole of infantile definition and deadly, clublike, radioactive, and secretive applications.

The 'new age' of super materials
By Jonathan Fildes Science and technology reporter, BBC News
In 1987, Ronald Reagan declared that the US was about to enter an incredible new era of technology.
Levitating high-speed trains, super-efficient energy generators and ultra-powerful supercomputers would become commonplace thanks to a new breed of materials known as high temperature superconductors (HTSC).
"The breakthroughs in superconductivity bring us to the threshold of a new age," said the president. "It's our task to herald in that new age with a rush."
But 20 years on, the new world does not seem to have arrived. So what happened?
Early promise
Superconductivity was first discovered in 1911 by researchers at the University of Leiden who used solid mercury in their experiments.
Superconductors have no electrical resistance, so unlike conventional conductors they allow an electric current to flow through without any loss.
Drs Mueller and Bednorz were awarded the Nobel prize in 1987
At the start, the phenomenon was only seen in materials cooled close to absolute zero, which according to theory is the state of zero heat energy.
Three-quarters of a century later, the highest temperature achieved for the onset of superconductivity, the so-called transition temperature, was a frigid 23 Kelvin (-250C).
This allowed scientists to exploit the phenomenon in specialist applications such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners and high energy physics particle colliders, cooled by liquid helium.
But more day-to-day applications, such as replacing the electricity grid with superconducting wires, remained impossible without materials able to operate at higher temperatures.
Closer to zero
The breakthrough came in 1986.
Two IBM researchers, George Bednorz and Alex Mueller, discovered a new family of ceramic superconductors, known as the copper oxide perovskites, that operated at 35K (-238C)
The work was rapidly followed up Paul Chu, of the University of Houston, who discovered materials operating at 93K (-182C)
The material was not as simple as we originally thought Paul Chu
The discovery meant that superconductors had entered the temperature range of liquid nitrogen (77K, -196C), an abundant and well understood coolant.
"All of a sudden everything was different," said Professor Chu. "There was a euphoric feeling. People in the field thought nothing was impossible."
The discovery prompted a huge gathering of physicists in New York to discuss the breakthrough, a meeting later called the "Woodstock of Physics".
Precise structure
But large-scale commercialisation of the technology would prove more difficult.
"The material was not as simple as we originally thought," said Professor Chu.
Despite an intensive two-decade search, the underlying mechanism of superconductivity in the ceramics is still disputed.
In addition, their exact structure, requiring ultra-thin layers of different elements stacked on top of each other, means they are very difficult and expensive to manufacture.
"Atomically, you have to line them up very precisely in order for the supercurrent to flow," explained Professor Chu.
This, coupled with the fact that ceramics are brittle and difficult to turn into flexible wires and films, meant that prospects for immediate exploitation were not good.
"I think the expectations were a little unrealistic," said Dr Dennis Newns of IBM.
"The typical time it takes from inventing a new concept to application is 20 years," he said. "And that is exactly what we have seen."
Cool running
Companies in Japan, Europe, China, South Korea and the US are forging ahead with applications.
In the US, American Superconductor has developed a way to "bend the unbendable", creating HTSC wires that can carry 150 times more electricity than the equivalent copper cables.
"Twenty years ago you would see people making ceramic fibres and trying to bend them and it was like a dry stick of spaghetti," said Greg Yurek, CEO and founder of the company.
To get around this brittleness, the company embeds up to 85 tiny filaments of superconducting ceramic in a ribbon of metal 4.4mm (0.17 inches) wide.
"Think of optical fibres," said Dr Yurek. "If you have a rod of glass and you whack it on your desk it will shatter.
"Drop down to a fine optical fibre and it becomes flexible - it's the same principle here."
The company also produces wires with a coating of the ceramic just one micron (millionth of a metre) thick on a metal alloy. Both are cooled by a sheath of liquid nitrogen.
Short sections of the wires have already been installed in Columbus, Ohio, and a further half-mile of cable will soon be laid on Long Island, New York.
In the short term, longer stretches of the supercooled cable will be difficult to install, as it requires an infrastructure to pump liquid nitrogen around the grid.
But Dr Yurek believes that it will not be long before other firms start to offer utility companies these cryogenic services.
"This is the model they have used in the MRI industry to guarantee the cold," he said.
Shrinking motors
The company also promotes its HTSC wires for other advanced applications.
Central Japan Railways uses coils of it for their superconducting experimental magnetic levitation (maglev) train.
American Superconductor has also developed an electric motor using coils of superconducting wire for use in the next generation of US Navy destroyers.
Electric motors are used by most commercial cruise liners, but are typically very bulky.
Using HTSC technology dramatically shrinks their size and also increases their efficiency.
The company is just about to start testing its latest 36.5-megawatt engine that is cooled by off-the-shelf liquid helium refrigerators and weighs 75 tonnes. By comparison, an engine based on copper wires would weigh 300 tonnes.
"That's great for cruise ships and the navy, because they can use that space for other things like passenger cabins or munitions," said Dr Yurek.
"New age"
Experimentally, things have also moved on.
New superconductors have been found. For example, a new mercury-based compound has a transition temperature of 134K (-139C)
"When we applied pressure we raised it up to 164K (-109C) - that's a record," said Professor Chu.
"Of course from an application point of view, it's hopeless."
I think we're on a launching pad here and we're now ready to take off Greg Yurek
However, other experimental work raises the possibility of discovering room temperature superconductors that would require no exotic cooling equipment.
A new theory, outlined in a paper in the journal Nature Physics by Dr Newns and his IBM colleague Dr Chang Tsuei, seeks to explain the elusive mechanism of superconductivity in the class of ceramics discovered in 1986.
"We don't see any fundamental limits," said Dr Tsuei.
"If someone discovered a room-temperature superconductor tomorrow that fits with what is outlined by our theory, we wouldn't be surprised at all," added Dr Newns.
This kind of optimism, seen for the first time in the mid-1980s, now seems to be deserved.
There has been a crescendo of research, while at the same time the first commercial HTSC products are rolling out of factories.
According to Dr Yurek, this is a sign that the new age promised by Ronald Reagan is finally here.
"I think we're on a launching pad here and we're now ready to take off," he said.
Story from BBC NEWS

Practical Fusion, or Just a Bubble?

Evolution Survival & Sustainable Parameters require Fundamental Science progress toward Unity. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative biologists who has revolutionised scientific thinking with his vision of a living, developing universe with its own inherent memory discusses Science policy and funding Science Funding and Policy One per cent for Fringe Scientists , a major obstacle perpetuating the Trouble with Physics. Professor Ph. M. Kanarev recites "In the middle ages, the Inquisition tried to preserve a dogma that the Sun orbits the Earth and burned the opponents of this dogma. But the time passed, and the burnt turned out to be right. In 2005, 100 years had passed since Albert Einstein worked out Special Relativity Theory (SRT). Within this period, the fundamental sciences progressed under the banner of this theory. But it failed to earn jubilee festivities; on the contrary, it split the world scientific community into its adherents and opponents. The quantity of the latter increased so quickly that the adherents of this theory have lost self-righteousness and avoid a discussion of the essence of the fundamental contradictions of this theory. Are we ready for progress in a new direction? Present stereotypes are so strong that the current generation of scientists cannot change it. Only the coming generation of young scientists, free of stereotypical notions, has it within their power to cope with this task."

NYT February 27, 2007
Practical Fusion, or Just a Bubble?

KENNETH CHANG
LOS ANGELES — Brian Kappus, a physics graduate student at U.C.L.A., tipped the clear cylinder to trap some air bubbles in the clear liquid inside. He clamped the cylinder, upright, on a small turntable and set it spinning. With the flip of another switch, powerful up-and-down vibrations, 50 a second, started shaking the cylinder.
A bubble floating in the liquid — phosphoric acid — started to shine, brightening into an intense ball of light like a miniature star.
The shining bubble did not produce any significant energy, but perhaps someday it might, just like a star. A few small companies and maverick university laboratories, including this one at U.C.L.A. run by Seth Putterman, a professor of physics, are pursuing quixotic solutions for future energy, trying to tap the power of the Sun — hot nuclear fusion — in devices that fit on a tabletop.
Dr. Putterman’s approach is to use sound waves, called sonofusion or bubble fusion, to expand and collapse tiny bubbles, generating ultrahot temperatures. At temperatures hot enough, atoms can literally fuse and release even more energy than when they split in nuclear fission, now used in nuclear power plants and weapons. Furthermore, fusion is clean in that it does not produce long-lived nuclear waste.
Dr. Putterman has not achieved fusion in his experiments. He and other scientists form a small but devoted cadre interested in turning small-scale desktop fusion into usable systems. Although success is far away, the principles seem sound.
Other researchers already have working desktop fusion devices, including ones that are descendants of the Farnsworth Fusor invented four decades ago by Philo T. Farnsworth, the television pioneer.
Achieving nuclear fusion, even in a desktop device, is not particularly difficult. But building a fusion reactor that generates more energy than it consumes is far more challenging.
So far, all fusion reactors, big and small, fall short of this goal. Many fusion scientists are skeptical that small-scale alternatives hold any promise of breaking the break-even barrier.
Impulse Devices, a small company in the small town of Grass Valley, Calif., is exploring the same sound-driven fusion as Dr. Putterman, pushing forward with venture capital financing. Its president, Ross Tessien, concedes that Impulse is a high-risk investment, but the potential payoffs would be many.
“You solve the world’s pollution problems,” Mr. Tessien said. “You eliminate the need for wars. You eliminate scarcity of fuel. And it happens to be a very valuable market. So from a commercial point of view, there’s every incentive. From a moral point of view, there’s every incentive. And it’s fun and it’s exciting work.”
The Sun produces energy by continually pressing together four hydrogen atoms — a hydrogen atom has a single proton in its nucleus — into one helium atom, with a nucleus of two protons and two neutrons. A helium atom weighs less than the four original hydrogen atoms. So by Einstein’s E=mc2 equation, the change in mass is transformed into a burst of energy.
That simplest fusion reaction, four hydrogens into one helium, works for turning a ball of gas like the Sun, 865,000 miles across, into a shining star. But it is far too slow for generating energy on Earth.
Other fusion reactions do occur quickly enough. Most current fusion efforts look to combine two atoms of deuterium, a heavier version of hydrogen with an extra neutron. For reactions that can achieve break even, the researchers look to fusing deuterium with tritium, an even heavier hydrogen with two neutrons.
The appeals of fusion are many: no planet- warming gases, no radioactive-waste headache, plentiful fuel. Even though only 1 out of 6,000 hydrogen atoms in sea water molecules is the heavier deuterium, that is enough to last billions of years.
“One bucket of water out of the ocean or a lake or a river has 200 gallons of gasoline worth of energy in it,” Mr. Tessien said. “It’s the holy grail of energy technologies, and everybody has the fuel for free.”
Tritium, a short-lived radioactive isotope, has to be generated in a nuclear reactor.
The tricky part is heating the atoms to the millions of degrees needed to initiate fusion and keeping the superhot gas confined.
Mainstream science is pursuing fusion along two paths. One is the tokamak design, trapping the charged atoms within a doughnut-shape magnetic field. An international collaboration will build the latest, largest such reactor in southern France in coming years. The $10 billion international project, called ITER, could begin operating around 2025 and is intended to demonstrate that all the scientific and technological challenges have finally been tamed. Commercial tokamak reactors could perhaps follow in 10 years.
The other mainstream approach is blasting a pellet of fuel with lasers, creating conditions hot and dense enough for fusion. The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is to start testing that idea around 2010. The cost of the center, with 192 lasers, has soared to several billion dollars. Harnessing that approach will also take decades.
The recurrent criticism of fusion is that its promise has always been decades away. The task has proved harder and more expensive than what scientists anticipated when they started in the 1950s. Even if lasers and tokamaks prove technologically feasible, giant, expensive fusion reactors could still turn out to be too expensive to be practical.
So the mavericks ask: Why not take a closer look at some alternative approaches?
“It’s really a shame the Department of Energy has such a narrowly focused program,” said Eric J. Lerner, president and sole employee of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in New Jersey, another alternative fusion company. Mr. Lerner has received Air Force and NASA financing to explore whether his dense fusion focus might be good to propel spacecraft, but nothing from the Energy Department.
The department is spending $300 million on fusion research this year, and President Bush has asked for an increase to $428 million for next year’s budget. Almost all the increase would go to ITER.
The department supports research for many approaches, said Thomas Vanek, the department’s acting director for fusion energy sciences, but that has to fit within tight budgets. “Since the mid-’90s, it has been a tough environment for fusion energy.”
Some fusion scientists argue that fundamental physics makes these alternative approaches unlikely to pay off. Some agree that financing some high-risk, high-payoff research could be worthwhile.
“I personally think there should be more of these smaller ideas funded,” said L. John Perkins, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore. “Ninety-nine might fail, but one might pay off.”
Robert W. Bussard, an independent scientist, advocates a return to the Farnsworth Fusor, otherwise known as inertial confinement fusion. Farnsworth and Robert L. Hirsch, who later ran the Office of Fusion Energy for the Atomic Energy Commission, developed a fusor consisting of two electrically charged concentric spherical grids. They accelerated charged atoms, or ions, to the center.
“It’s like the electron guns in your TV tube,” Dr. Bussard said.
In the process, positively charged ions fly through the center, slow down as they approach the positively charged outer grid, then stop and fall back toward the center like a marble rolling back and forth in a bowl. Sometimes two ions collide at the center and fuse. But too often the ions run into the grids before they fuse. Dr. Bussard, a deputy to Dr. Hirsch at the Office of Fusion Energy in the ’70s, said he had a design eliminating the grids.
Most fusion scientists doubt Dr. Bussard’s assertion that he has solved all the underlying physics issues with inertial electrostatic confinement and knows how to build a working fusion power generator.
Dr. Bussard’s Navy grants dried up two years ago, and he is looking for investors. Dr. Bussard said he needed a few million dollars to restart his research, and $150 million to $200 million to build a fusion reactor capable of generating 100 megawatts. One megawatt is enough power for 1,000 houses.
Mr. Lerner hopes to harness a phenomenon known as dense plasma focus, which is also an old idea. Take two cylinders, put a gas between them and set off a big electric spark. The jolt heats the gas and generates extremely strong, unstable magnetic fields that compress and heat the gas to fusion temperatures.
Mr. Lerner has a three-year, $1.5 million collaboration with the Nuclear Energy Commission of Chile to research dense plasma focus. After that, $10 million and another three years would be needed for engineering development, he estimated. A result could be a compact five-megawatt generator.
“The whole device would fit inside anyone’s good-size garage.” Mr. Lerner said. “If all goes well, we hope to have our first prototype within six years.”
Skeptical physicists say too much energy is lost along the way in dense focus fusion to reach the break-even point. Mr. Lerner said his calculations showed that the very strong magnetic fields reduced the energy losses..
Dr. Putterman of U.C.L.A. and Mr. Tessien of Impulse Devices are perhaps furthest from success. They have yet to show fusion occurring. The phenomenon of glowing light as the sound-driven bubbles expand and collapse has been known since the 1930s, leading to speculation, but not proof, that the bubbles would perhaps be compressed so violently that trapped atoms might fuse.
In 2002, researchers led by Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, now a professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue University, claimed to have achieved fusion in such a system. That result has yet to be reproduced outside Dr. Taleyarkhan’s laboratories.
Neither Dr. Putterman nor Mr. Tessien could duplicate that experiment.
Mr. Tessien, who started his quest for sonofusion 12 years ago, said he had abandoned using Dr. Taleyarkhan’s approach and returned to his own designs. Those use steel spheres, allowing high pressures to be exerted on liquids in addition to the forces of the vibrating sound waves. He is confident that he will find fusion.
“There is zero question that fusion is hiding in some system,” he said. “I just need to figure out the right recipe.”
Dr. Putterman’s group experiments with different liquids like the phosphoric acid in the rotating cylinder. Phosphoric acid, it turns out, gives out much brighter light, but so far no fusion.
Dr. Putterman receives most of his financing from the Defense Department, although he has gotten money from novel sources, including $72,000 from the BBC, which was making a program about sonofusion.
He is philosophical about why more money is not flowing, saying the scientists have not given the doubters a reason to stop doubting. “Maybe that’s the brutal answer,” he said. “People are waiting for it to work. Maybe some explanations are simple.”