The Collider is Back Online!

(CNN) — “The LHC is back,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research announced triumphantly Friday, as the world’s largest particle accelerator resumed operation more than a year after an electrical failure shut it down.

Restarting the Large Hadron Collider — the $10 billion research tool’s full name — has been “a herculean effort,” CERN’s director for accelerators, Steve Myers, said in a statement announcing the success.
Experiments at the LHC may help answer fundamental questions such as why Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the world on a large scale — doesn’t jibe with quantum mechanics, which deals with matter far too small to see. Physicists established a circulating proton beam in the LHC’s 17-mile tunnel at 10 p.m. (4 p.m. ET) Friday, CERN said, a critical step towards getting results from the accelerator.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”
Located underground on the border of Switzerland and France, the LHC has been inching towards operation since the summer.

It reached its operating temperature — 271 degrees below zero Celsius — on October 8 and particles were injected on October 23. Now that a beam is circulating, the next step is low-energy collisions, which should begin in about a week, CERN said. High-energy collisions will follow next year. The collider has been dogged by problems. It made headlines early this month when a bird apparently dropped a “bit of baguette” into the accelerator, making the machine shut down.

The incident was similar in effect to a standard power cut, said spokeswoman Katie Yurkewicz. Had the machine been going, there would have been no damage, but beams would have been stopped until the machine could be cooled back down to operating temperatures, she said.
The collider achieved its first full-circle beam last year on September 10 amid much celebration. But just nine days later, the operation was set back when one of the 25,000 joints that connect magnets in the LHC came loose and the resulting current melted or burned some important components of the machine, Myers said.
The faulty joint has a cross-section of a mere two-thirds of an inch by two-thirds of an inch.

“There was certainly frustration and almost sorrow when we had the accident,” he said. Now, “people are feeling a lot better because we know we’ve done so much work in the last year.”
Mark Wise, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, said he’s just as excited about the results that will come out of the LHC as he was last year and views the September 2008 accident as a delay rather than a devastating event.

Wise noted that Tevatron, the collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has also had its share of failures but is generally considered to work just fine.
“It’s a horribly complicated piece of equipment, it’s not like there’s not going to be problems along the way,” he said. “They will surmount those problems.”

The LHC will probably be in operation more than 20 years, Myers said. But it won’t be that long before scientists could potentially discover new properties of nature. The as-yet theoretical Higgs boson, also called “the God particle” in popular parlance, could emerge within two or three years, Myers said.
Evidence of supersymmetry — the idea that every particle has a “super partner” with similar properties in a quantum dimension (according to some physics theories, there are hidden dimensions in the universe) — could crop up as early as 2010. For some theoretical physicists such as Wise, finding the Higgs boson and verifying every prediction of the Standard Model of physics would be the worst outcome. He wants the LHC to deliver surprises, even if that means no Higgs.

“When push comes to shove, the name of the game is ‘what is nature,’ and we’re not going to know until our experimental colleagues tell us,” Wise said. ATLAS and CMS are the general-purpose experiments designed to find the Higgs boson and other rare particles that have never been detected before. ALICE, another experiment, will explore the matter that existed some 10 microseconds after the Big Bang, said John Harris, professor of physics at Yale University and national coordinator of ALICE-USA. At that time, there was a “hot soup” of particles called quarks and gluons at a temperature of around 2 trillion degrees above absolute zero, he said.

Although they have never been directly seen, these particles are theoretically the building blocks of the bigger particles — protons, neutrons and electrons — that form the universe as we know it.

Close Call but all is well….

by Kathy Parks (Tribune)

Members of the community are reaching out in a show of support for Humble Mayor Donnie McMannes, who suffered a heart attack on Wednesday, Nov. 4, while on the golf course.
McMannes, in his early 70s, was taken to Memorial Hermann Northeast, in Humble, for surgery. He was given a stent and remained in the hospital for a several days, under close supervision.

“His condition after surgery was stable, and his prognosis for recovery is good,” said Assistant City Manager Mark Martin.

McMannes was with Humble Police Chief Gary Warman at the time of the incident. Martin said the mayor was feeling bad, but conscious, when the decision was made to go to the hospital.

“The mayor is in the office every day conducting city business and his absence, even for a couple days, is felt.”

McMannes, serving a third term as mayor of Humble, continues to see that Humble is a great place to live, work and play through the city’s Beautification Committee. Committee projects include the Adopt a City Street program, the erection of various welcome signs, restoration of the artesian well, restoration of the old cemetery, a new pocket park, the annual Christmas parade and coordination of the city’s annual spring cleanup effort.

McMannes grew up in the Humble area. He and his wife, Georgia, graduated from Humble High School. McMannes worked as an apprentice brick layer before establishing his career in law enforcement. He retired from the Harris County Precinct 1 in 1995. McMannes has one son, Michael, who is a teacher in Cy-Fair ISD. McMannes’ hobbies include cooking and playing golf.

© 2008 Ourtribune.com

“Hold that door! Can you punch floor 23,115, please?”

‘Space elevator’ wins $900,000 NASA prize – space – 06 November 2009 – New Scientist.

A laser-powered robotic climber has won $900,000 in a competition designed to spur technology for a future elevator to space.

 

 

Building a space elevator would require anchoring a cable on the ground near Earth’s equator and deploying the other end thousands of kilometres into space. The centrifugal force due to Earth’s spin would keep the cable taut so that a robot could climb it and release payloads into orbit.

Though building a space elevator might require an initial investment of billions of dollars, proponents say once constructed, it would make for cheaper trips into space than is possible using rockets. But huge technological hurdles must first be overcome, including how to supply power to the robotic climber.

To that end, NASA offered $2 million in prize money in a competition called the Power Beaming Challenge, in which robotic climbers, powered wirelessly from the ground, attempt to ascend a cable as fast as possible.

Now, a robotic climber has made a prize-winning ascent worth $900,000, making it the first to win money in the competition, which has occurred annually since 2005.

Ted Semon, a volunteer with the Spaceward Foundation, a non-profit that organised the competition, and author of the Space Elevator Blog, says the feat shows space elevators are one step closer to getting off the ground. “We’ve done a lot here to demonstrate that this technology is possible,” he told New Scientist. “This is just enormously exciting.”

The winning climber was built by a team called LaserMotive, based in Seattle, Washington. Like the other two vehicles in the competition, it used solar cells to absorb energy from a ground-based infrared laser.

Unclaimed pot

On Wednesday, LaserMotive fired up its laser, powering the climber to ascend 900 metres up a cable suspended from a helicopter at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave, California.

The climber reached the top in just over 4 minutes, for an average speed of 3.7 metres per second. The team’s climber repeated the feat at a slightly higher speed of 3.9 metres per second on Thursday.

On Friday, two other teams failed in their final attempted climbs. That means LaserMotive will receive the entire $900,000 NASA set aside for climbers that could make the climb faster than 2 metres per second.

The remaining $1.1 million in NASA prize money was reserved for climbs faster than 5 metres per second, which none of the competitors was able to achieve.

Lunar rovers

A climber entered by a team from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, stalled just a few metres up the cable in its final attempt on Friday and was unable to continue its climb.

A climber from a third team, called the Kansas City Space Pirates, also achieved only partial climbs.

NASA was expected to officially recognise LaserMotive as the winner of the $900,000 prize in an award ceremony later on Friday.

Though a space elevator remains a distant prospect, NASA is interested in wireless power transmission for other applications, like beaming power to lunar rovers travelling in shadowed craters, where solar energy is unavailable.

My Life Explained? No Reward for the ADHD!

ScienceDaily (Sep. 10, 2009) — A brain-imaging study conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory provides the first definitive evidence that patients suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have lower-than-normal levels of certain proteins essential for experiencing reward and motivation.

“These deficits in the brain’s reward system may help explain clinical symptoms of ADHD, including inattention and reduced motivation, as well as the propensity for complications such as drug abuse and obesity among ADHD patients,” said lead author Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a long-time collaborator on neuroimaging research at Brookhaven Lab.

The study, published in the September 9, 2009, issue of theJournal of the American Medical Association, also has important implications for treatment. “Finding ways to address the underlying reward-system deficit could improve the direct clinical outcome of ADHD, and potentially reduce the likelihood of other negative consequences of this condition,” said study co-author Gene-Jack Wang, chair of Brookhaven’s medical department.

Prior to this study, it was not clear whether people with ADHD had abnormalities in the brain’s dopamine-mediated motivation/reward system. Previous studies were relatively small and may have been complicated by the fact that some ADHD patients had undergone treatments, or had a history of drug abuse or other conditions that can affect the dopamine system.

To strengthen the statistics and control for these factors, the current study looked at 53 adult ADHD patients who had never received treatment and 44 healthy control subjects — all of whom had been carefully screened to eliminate potentially confounding variables.

The scientists used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure two markers of the dopamine system — dopamine receptors, to which the chemical messenger binds to propagate the “reward” signal, and dopamine transporters, which take up and recycle excess dopamine after the signal is sent. Lying in a PET scanner, each patient was injected with a minute amount of a “radiotracer” compound — a chemical labeled with a radioactive form of carbon and designed to bind specifically to one of the targets. Different tracers were used for each target, and patients were scanned for each at separate times. By detecting the signal from the radiotracers, the PET machine can measure the receptor and transporter locations and concentrations in various parts of the brain.

The results clearly showed that, relative to the healthy control subjects, the ADHD patients had lower levels of dopamine receptors and transporters in the accumbens and midbrain — two key regions of the brain directly involved in processing motivation and reward. In addition, the measurements of dopamine markers correlated with measures of behavior and clinical observations of ADHD symptoms, such as reduced levels of attention as measured by standard psychological tests.

“Our findings imply that these deficits in the dopamine reward pathway play a role in the symptoms of inattention in ADHD and could underlie these patients’ abnormal responses to reward,” Volkow said.

“This pathway plays a key role in reinforcement, motivation, and in learning how to associate various stimuli with rewards,” she continued. “Its involvement in ADHD supports the use of interventions to enhance the appeal and relevance of school and work tasks to improve performance.

“Our results also support the continued use of stimulant medications — the most common pharmacological treatment for ADHD — which have been shown to increase attention to cognitive tasks by elevating brain dopamine,” she said.

The findings may also help explain why ADHD patients are more likely than control subjects to develop drug-abuse disorders and conditions such as obesity.

Said Wang: “Other studies from our group suggest that patients who abuse drugs or overeat may be unconsciously attempting to compensate for a deficient reward system by boosting their dopamine levels. Understanding how deficits in the dopamine system contribute to ADHD and finding ways to improve the functioning of the reward system could help mitigate these troubling consequences in the ADHD patient population.”

This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Intramural Research Program and by the National Institute on Mental Health. The Office of Biological and Environmental Research within DOE’s Office of Science provides infrastructure support for the radiotracer chemistry and imaging facilities at Brookhaven Lab. Brain-imaging techniques such as PET are a direct outgrowth of DOE’s long-standing investment in basic research in chemistry, physics, and nuclear medicine.

Creating Quantum Creatures in the Lab? Flu Monster? – Physics – New Scientist

Could we create quantum creatures in the lab? – physics-math – 15 September 2009 – New Scientist.

Quantum weirdness could soon invade the living world, if a scheme to give a flu virus a strange double life comes off.

In quantum theory, a single object can be doing two different things at once. This so-called “superposition” is a delicate state, destroyed by any contact with the outside world. The largest objects that have been superposed so far are molecules. It is hard to put a much larger object such as a cat or human into a superposition because air molecules and photons are always bouncing off it. But it might be possible with a small life form, according to Oriol Romero-Isartof the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and his colleagues. They hope to prove the concept with the flu virus, which exhibits some properties of life, because it can survive in a vacuum – solving the problem of pesky air molecules.

Laser hold

Their scheme would use two laser beams, whose light exerts a gentle force on matter. Where the two beams cross they form an “optical cavity” holding the virus in place. By adjusting the frequency of the beams, the laser photons can be made to absorb the vibration energy of the trapped virus about its centre of mass until it is slowed to its lowest possible energy state. In this “ground state” the virus is ready to go into a superposition. Sending a laser photon towards the trap should do the trick. Since a photon is a quantum entity it has more than one option open to it. Thus it will be both reflected and transmitted at the trap, putting it into a superposition.

By impinging on the virus, it forces it into a superposition of both its ground state and next vibrational energy state. Now the virus should be doing two different things at once – the equivalent of you simultaneously mowing the lawn and doing the shopping. “They have come up with a really neat experiment – inventive and I think feasible,” says Peter Knight of Imperial College London.

Romero-Isart and his colleagues speculate that they could pull off the same feat with a tardigrade, or water bear, an animal less than a millimetre in size that can survive extreme temperatures and a vacuum for several days.

Big questions

Making a living thing do two things at once is more than a physicist’s tour de force. It could answer fundamental questions about the nature of quantum theory. Most physicists believe that the reason quantum behaviour manifests itself only in small things is that objects are difficult to isolate from their surroundings. But the prominent physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford believes instead that there is a critical size, or mass, at which bodies cease to become quantum.

According to Knight, experiments of the kind proposed by Romero-Isart’s team could finally offer a way to distinguish between the mainstream view and Penrose’s.

 

Multiplying Universes: How Many Is The Multiverse? – New Scientist

Multiplying universes: How many is the multiverse? – space – 28 October 2009 – New Scientist.

HOW many universes are there? Cosmologists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California calculate that the number dwarfs the 10⁵⁰⁰ universes postulated in string theory, and raise the provocative notion that the answer may depend on the human brain.

The idea that there is more than one universe, each with its own laws of physics, arises out of several different theories, including string theory and cosmic inflation. This concept of a “multiverse” could explain a puzzling mystery – why dark energy, the furtive force that is accelerating the expansion of space, appears improbably fine-tuned for life. With a large number of universes, there is bound to be one that has a dark energy value like ours.

Calculating the probability of observing this value – and other features of the cosmos – depends on how many universes of various kinds populate the multiverse. String theory describes 10⁵⁰⁰ universes, but that just counts different vacuum states, which are like the blank canvases upon which universes are painted. The features of each canvas determine what the overall painting will look like – such as the laws of physics in that universe – but not the details.

Thanks to the randomness of quantum mechanics, two identical vacuum states can end up as very different universes. Small quantum fluctuations in the very early universe are stretched to astronomical scales by inflation, the period of faster-than-light expansion just after the big bang. These fluctuations lay down a gravitational blueprint that eventually determines the placement of stars and galaxies across the sky. Small differences in the form of these fluctuations can produce a universe in which the Milky Way is slightly bigger, or closer to its neighbours.

So just how many of these different universes can inflation’s quantum fluctuations produce? According to Linde and Vanchurin, the total is about 10^1010,000,000 – that’s a 10 raised to a number ending with 10 million zeros (arxiv.org/abs/0910.1589). Suddenly string theory’s multiverse of 10⁵⁰⁰universes is looking rather claustrophobic.

It might be, however, that this number is irrelevant, and that in a world ruled by quantum physics what matters is how many universes a single observer can distinguish. “Before quantum mechanics,” says Linde, “we thought that ‘reality’ was a well-defined word.” In classical physics, observers are irrelevant – we simply want to know how many universes exist.

It may not matter how many universes exist – just how many a single observer can tell apart

According to quantum physics, observers affect the systems they measure(see “Restricted view”). If observers are an integral part of the cosmic formula, then it may not matter how many universes exist – just how many a single observer can tell apart. If the observer is a person, that depends on how many bits of information the brain can process. “Based on the number of synapses in a typical brain, a human observer can register 10¹⁶,” says Linde. That means humans can differentiate 10¹⁰¹⁶ universes, which is much more manageable than the 10^1010,000,000 Linde and Vanchurin found to start with.

But does the human brain really play a role in making predictions in the multiverse? “This goes deep into philosophy,” Linde says. “It’s a slippery slope.”

Cosmologist Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston is equally ambivalent. “It could be right that what is important is what an observer sees,” he says. “But there might be things an observer doesn’t see that are still there.”

Restricted view

Quantum theory splits the world into two parts: the system under study and the rest of the world, which contains the observer. The system hovers in a ghostly state of near-existence made up of a host of possibilities until the observer makes a measurement – and so reduces this to a single reality.

Cosmology suffers from the paradox that no observer can be outside the universe – so the universe is doomed to spend eternity as nothing more than a vague possibility. The lesson of quantum cosmology is that we can’t talk about the universe as a whole, but only what a given observer inside it might measure. Applying that lesson to the multiverse, Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin suggest that what matters is not the total number of possible universes, but the number of universes a single observer could distinguish.

If that observer is a human, the brain limits the amount of information they can register. But any observer – even an inanimate one such as a galaxy – is limited in the information it can store. These limitations in what observers can measure whittle down the number of universes that come into play in cosmological predictions. That means an observer might make a difference in explaining the value of things like dark energy.

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? – space – 21 October 2009 – New Scientist

EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation?

Everything from the concept of the black hole to GPS timing owes a debt to the theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity arises from the geometry of space and time. The sun’s gravitational field, for instance, bends starlight passing nearby because its mass is warping the surrounding space-time. This theory has held up to precision tests in the solar system and beyond, and has explained everything from the odd orbit of Mercury to the way pairs of neutron stars perform their pas de deux.

Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence is far from watertight, if confirmed by bigger surveys, it may indicate either that Einstein’s theory is incomplete, or else that dark energy, the stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, is much weirder than we thought(see “Not dark energy, dark fluid”).

The analysis of starlight data by cosmologist Rachel Bean of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has generated quite a stir. Shortly after the paper waspublished on the pre-print physics archive, prominent physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena praised Bean’s research. “This is serious work by a respected cosmologist,” he wrote on his blog Cosmic Variance. “Either the result is wrong, and we should be working hard to find out why, or it’s right, and we’re on the cusp of a revolution.”

If it is wrong, we should be working hard to find out why, but if it’s right, we are on the cusp of a revolution

“It has caused quite a furore in astronomy circles,” says Richard Massey of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh in the UK. “This paper has generated a lot of interest.”

Bean found her evidence lurking in existing data collected by the Cosmic Evolution Survey, a multi-telescope imaging project that includes the longest survey yet by the Hubble Space Telescope. COSMOS, which detected more than 2 million galaxies over a small patch of sky, takes advantage of gravity’s ability to bend light. Massive objects like galaxy clusters bend the light of more distant objects so that it is directed towards or away from Earth. This effect, called gravitational lensing, is at its most dramatic when it creates kaleidoscopic effects like luminous rings or the appearance of multiple copies of a galaxy.

The sky is also dominated by the distorting effects of “weak lensing”, in which intervening matter bends light to subtly alter the shapes and orientations of more distant galaxies, creating an effect similar to that of looking through old window glass. Since galaxies come in all shapes and sizes, it is difficult to know whether the light from an individual galaxy has been distorted, because there is nothing to compare it with. But by looking for common factors in the distortion of many galaxies, it is possible to build up a map of both the visible and even unseen matter that bend their light.

The weak lensing technique can also be used to measure two different effects of gravity. General relativity calls for gravity’s curvature of space to be equivalent to its curvature of time. Light should be influenced in equal amounts by both.

When the COSMOS data was released in 2007, the team – led by Massey – assumed these two factors were equivalent. Their analysis revealed that gravitational tugs on light were stronger than anticipated, but they put this down to a slightly higher concentration of ordinary and dark matter in the survey’s patch of sky than had been predicted.

To look for potential deviations from general relativity, Bean reanalysed the data and dropped the requirement that these two components of gravity had to be equal. Instead the ratio of the two was allowed to change in value. She found that between 8 and 11 billion years ago gravity’s distortion of time appeared to be three times as strong as its ability to curve space. An observer around at the time wouldn’t have noticed the effect because it only applies over large distances. Nonetheless, “there is a preference for a significant deviation from general relativity”, says Bean (www.arxiv.org/abs/0909.3853).

Gravity’s distortion of time appeared to be three times as strong as its ability to curve space

At this stage, it’s hard to say what would happen if the deviation from general relativity was confirmed. Cosmologists have already considered some modifications to general relativity that could explain the universe’s acceleration(see “Not dark energy, dark fluid”).

Yet finding a deviation when the universe was less than half its current age is odd – if general relativity had broken down at some level, the signs should be most dramatic more recently, long after the repulsive effect of dark energy overwhelmed the attractive powers of gravity some 6 billion years ago.

Most astronomers, including Bean, are cautious about the results. “Nobody is yet betting money that the effect is real,” says cosmologist Dragan Huterer of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Various other explanations, like a bias in the technique used to estimate the distances to galaxies, now need to be ruled out.

Although COSMOS photographed a deep patch of sky, it was fairly small by the standards of modern surveys. This opens up the possibility that this region might be anomalous, notes Asantha Cooray, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine. “You could have a massive galaxy cluster that could boost your weak lensing signal up. Or by random chance you could have more dark matter,” says Cooray, part of a team that analysed other survey data taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and found no hint of a departure from general relativity. “The only way to take that into account is to look at data in a larger field.”

Future projects will scan the sky over much wider areas and collect images of many more lensed galaxies. For example, the Dark Energy Survey is poised to start surveying the sky from 2011 and will build up an even more precise picture of how light has been bent over the course of the universe’s history.

Whether these surveys find the effect or not, Bean hopes that her paper will generate more interest in the idea of using weak lensing to test general relativity. “I’m not putting my flag out there and saying this is a real thing,” Bean says. “We need to look at more data sets. This is really just the first stage for trying to test gravity in this way.”

Massey agrees: “At the moment we’re in the mode of just trying to hack into general relativity to find the chinks in its armour, to find any places where it might not be working.” n

Not dark energy, dark fluid

Dark energy could be weirder than we thought. Evidence that over large distances gravity exerts a greater pull on time than on space (see main story) might not necessarily suggest that the theory of general relativity is wrong. It could instead be a sign that the universe’s acceleration may require a more exotic explanation.

The simplest way of explaining the universe’s acceleration is to invoke a cosmological constant, originally proposed by Einstein to allow the universe to remain the same size in the presence of matter. This describes a universe filled with uniform, outward-pushing energy. But there are other possible explanations for acceleration.

One idea is that the entire universe exists on a membrane, or brane, floating inside an extra dimension. While matter will be confined to three dimensions, gravity could be leaking into this extra dimension. When the universe becomes large enough, this gravity could interact with matter in the brane, to produce acceleration on large scales.

A deviation could also be a sign that dark energy is a more complex “fluid” that exerts varying pressures in different directions. The snag is that telling the difference between a more exotic form of dark energy and a modification to our understanding of gravity could be tricky.

“If we were to detect a departure,” says cosmologist Alessandra Silvestriof the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we might not be able to tell whether there is a flaw in general relativity or just evidence that dark energy is “some sort of fancy fluid”.

Lynne McTaggart: Why Dan Brown’s Science Fiction Is Mostly Fact

Written by: Lynne McTaggart: Why Dan Brown’s Science Fiction Is Mostly Fact

“One of the main characters in Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol , is a scientist particularly interested in ‘mind over matter’: the power of thought–or intention–to affect and change the world. The ‘big idea’ in Dan Brown’s book is that science is only now providing evidence of what ancient traditions have traditionally espoused: that thought has a tangible power, enabling human beings to be creators of their own world.

I’m in a unique position to comment on this as I have extensively studied all the science Brown includes in his book, written two bestselling books on the subject and I facilitate these kinds of experiments all over the world. In fact, Brown prominently singled out me, my book, The Intention Experiment, my research and my website www.theintentionexperiment.com for special mention in the blockbuster, claiming that one of his main characters was ‘fascinated’ by my work and my web-based global laboratory, testing the power of thought.

Although Solomon is solidly fiction, the vast majority of her work is based on solid fact.
In a sizeable body of research exploring the nature of consciousness, carried on for more than 30 years in prestigious scientific institutions around the world — Princeton and Stanford Universities, the Universities of Arizona and California, and, in Europe, the Universities of Freiberg and Edinburgh –thoughts directed at targets in the laboratory have been shown capable of altering machines, cells and even complex organisms like human beings. This mind-over-matter power even seems to traverse time and space.

In my own web-based experiments, we involve thousands of participants in 90 countries around the world, sending thoughts to targets created in rigorous laboratory settings at the University of Arizona, Pennsylvania State University, University of California at Davis, and other prestigious universities in Europe. Of our 19 experiments to date, 16 have shown significant positive results, six of which have been published in a scientific paper.

These studies go well beyond spoonbending tricks. This central idea, that consciousness affects matter, lies at the very heart of an irreconcilable difference between the world view offered by classical physics – the science of the big, visible world – and that of quantum physics – the science of the world’s most diminutive components. These discoveries offer convincing evidence that all matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence, which often overrides many of the laws of the universe that we used to believe held ultimate sovereignty.

At least 40 top scientists in academic centres of research around the world have demonstrated that an information transfer constantly carries on between living things, and that thought forms are simply another aspect of transmitted energy. Hundreds of others have offered plausible theories embracing even the most counter-intuitive effects, such as time-displaced influence, as now consistent with the laws of physics.

Ideas about the power of thought are no longer the ruminations of a few eccentric individuals. They now underpin many well-accepted disciplines in every reach of life, from orthodox and alternative medicine to competitive sport. Medical scientists often speak of the ‘placebo effect’ as an annoying impediment to the proof of the efficacy of a chemical agent. It is time that we understood and made full use of the power of the placebo. Repeatedly, the mind has proved to be a far more powerful healer than the greatest of breakthrough drugs.

Frontier science is the art of inquiring about the impossible. All of our major achievements in history have resulted from asking an outrageous question. What if stones fall from the sky? What if giant metal objects could overcome gravity? What if there is no end of the earth to sail off of? All of the discoveries about the power of thought and remote influence have similarly proceeded from asking a seemingly absurd question: what if our thoughts could affect the things around us?

True science always begins with an unpopular question, even if there is no prospect of an immediate answer – even if the answer threatens to overturn every last one of our cherished beliefs. The scientists engaged in consciousness research must constantly put forward unpopular questions about the nature of the mind and the extent of its reach. In our group Intention Experiments, we have asked the most impossible question of all: what if a group thought could heal a remote target? It is a little like asking, what if a thought could heal the world?

It is an outlandish question, but the most important part of scientific investigation is just the simple willingness to ask the question. Mainstream science has grown ever more fundamentalist, dominated by a few highly vocal scientists who believe that our scientific story has largely been written. Nevertheless, a small body of resistance carries on in defiance of this restricted view. With every unorthodox question asked, with every unlikely answer, frontier sciences such as those featured in my books – and now Dan Brown’s — remake our world. May they and their ilk light our way.”
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lynne-mctaggart/why-dan-browns-science-fi_b_325906.html

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I….Can….C….U!

Radio Waves ‘See’ Through Walls
ScienceDaily (2009-10-12) — Engineers have shown that a wireless network of radio transmitters can track people moving behind solid walls. The system could help police, firefighters and others nab intruders, and rescue hostages, fire victims and elderly people who fall in their homes. It also might help retail marketing and border control. … > read full article

Classical Chaos Occurs In The Quantum World, Scientists Find

Classical Chaos Occurs In The Quantum World, Scientists Find

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Even tiny, easily overlooked events can completely change the behavior of a complex system, to the point where there is no apparent order to most natural systems we deal with in everyday life.

The weather is one familiar case, but other well-studied examples can be found in chemical reactions, population dynamics, neural networks and even the stock market. Scientists who study “chaos” — which they define as extreme sensitivity to infinitesimally small tweaks in the initial conditions — have observed this kind of behavior only in the deterministic world described by classical physics.

Until now, no one has produced experimental evidence that chaos occurs in the quantum world, the world of photons, atoms, molecules and their building blocks.

This is a world ruled by uncertainty: An atom is both a particle and a wave, and it’s impossible to determine its position and velocity simultaneously. And that presents a major problem. If the starting point for a quantum particle cannot be precisely known, then there is no way to construct a theory that is sensitive to initial conditions in the way of classical chaos. Yet quantum mechanics is the most complete theory of the physical world, and therefore should be able to account for all naturally occurring phenomena.

The problem is that people don’t see [classical] chaos in quantum systems,” said Professor Poul Jessen of the University of Arizona. “And we believe quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory, the theory that describes everything, and that we should be able to understand how classical physics follows as a limiting case of quantum physics.”

Experiments Reveal Classical Chaos In Quantum World

Now, however, Jessen and his group in UA’s College of Optical Sciences have performed a series of experiments that show just how classical chaos spills over into the quantum world. The scientists report their research in the Oct. 8 issue of the journal Nature in an article titled, “Quantum signatures of chaos in a kicked top.” Their experiments show clear fingerprints of classical-world chaos in a quantum system designed to mimic a textbook example of chaos known as the “kicked top.”

The quantum version of the top is the “spin” of individual laser-cooled cesium atoms that Jessen’s team manipulate with magnetic fields and laser light, using tools and techniques developed over a decade of painstaking laboratory work.

“Think of an atom as a microscopic top that spins on its axis at a constant rate of speed,” Jessen said. He and his students repeatedly changed the direction of the axis of spin, in a series of cycles that each consisted of a “kick” and a “twist”.

Because spinning atoms are tiny magnets, the “kicks” were delivered by a pulsed magnetic field. The “twists” were more challenging, and were achieved by subjecting the atom to an optical-frequency electric field in a precisely tuned laser beam. They imaged the quantum mechanical state of the atomic spin at the end of each kick-and-twist cycle with a tomographic technique that is conceptually similar to the methods used in medical ultrasound and CAT scans. The end results were pictures and stop-motion movies of the evolving quantum state, showing that it behaves like the equivalent classical system in some significant ways.

One of the most dramatic quantum signatures the team saw in their experiments was directly visible in their images: They saw that the quantum spinning top observes the same boundaries between stability and chaos that characterize the motion of the classical spinning top. That is, both quantum and classical systems were dynamically stable in the same areas, and dynamically erratic outside those areas.

A New Signature Of Chaos Called ‘Entanglement’

Jessen’s experiment revealed a new signature of chaos for the first time. It is related to the uniquely quantum mechanical property known as “entanglement.”

Entanglement is best known from a famous thought experiment proposed by Albert Einstein, in which two light particles, or photons, are emitted with polarizations that are fundamentally undefined but nevertheless perfectly correlated. Later, when the photons have traveled far apart in space, their polarizations are both measured at the same instant in time and found to be completely random but always at right angles to each other.

“It’s as though one photon instantly knows the result for the other and adjusts its own polarization accordingly,” Jessen said.

By itself, Einstein’s thought experiment is not directly related to quantum chaos, but the idea of entanglement has proven useful, Jessen added.

“Entanglement is an important phenomenon of the quantum world that has no classical counterpart. It can occur in any quantum system that consists of at least two independent parts,” he said.

Theorists have speculated that the onset of chaos will greatly increase the degree to which different parts of a quantum system become entangled. Jessen took advantage of atomic physics to test this hypothesis in his laboratory experiments. The total spin of a cesium atom is the sum of the spin of its valence electron and the spin of its nucleus, and those spins can become quantum correlated exactly as the photon polarizations in Einstein’s example.

In Jessen’s experiment, the electron and nuclear spins remained unentangled as a result of stable quantum dynamics, but rapidly became entangled if the dynamics were chaotic. Entanglement is a buzzword in the science community because it is the foundation for quantum cryptography and quantum computing.

“Our work is not directly related to quantum computing and communications,” Jessen said. “It just shows that this concept of entanglement has tendrils in all sorts of areas of quantum physics because entanglement is actually common as soon as the system gets complicated enough.”

How Photon Echoes Can Be Used To Create A Quantum Memory Device

How Photon Echoes Can Be Used To Create A Quantum Memory Device

Technologies like quantum cryptography are being developed to send secure information coded onto light beams from one point to another. Yet at present these systems are unable to extend beyond a distance of 50 to 100 kilometres because, beyond that range, too much of the information is lost.

But a team based at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Quantum-Atom Optics at ANU has demonstrated how photon echoes can be used to create a quantum memory device – meaning that pulses of light can be captured, stored and then released on demand. Such a device would be an important part of a quantum repeater, which could extend the range of secure quantum communication.

“Light can be a fantastic medium for transferring lots of information very quickly, but it doesn’t like to stay in one place for long,” explains team member Dr Ben Buchler. “This is the problem of optical memory – how to keep the information coded on light in one place so you can access it again later. One method is to slow the light down so it’s as good as frozen in place for a while. The way we’ve explored is to absorb the light in a cloud of atoms, which you can then manipulate to release the light at will.”

In experiments performed by PhD candidate Mahdi Hosseini, the ANU research team developed a method where pulses of laser light are absorbed into a cloud of atoms surrounded by a coil of wire. The coil creates a magnetic field that shifts the frequency of the atoms. After absorbing the laser pulses, the atoms all begin to spin at different speeds, depending on their frequency. If the magnetic field is reversed, the atoms all change direction and spin the other way. When the spinning atoms return to the state they were in when they absorbed the light, the laser pulses are released as a photon echo.

“But we take it a few steps further,” explains Dr Buchler. “We can also stretch, compress and split the pulses when we let them out. Best of all, we can recall the pulses in any order, just like a random access memory in a computer can recall electronic information in any order. To do this we use a second control laser beam that can turn the photon echo on and off. In a regular photon echo system, once the atoms all re-align the stored light just comes out – you can’t stop it. In our system, the combination of control beam and magnetic field switching makes it possible to choose exactly when to recall any one of the stored pulses, how much of it to recall and how fast to recall it.”

The research, published in Nature, outlines how the team have managed to store laser pulses with efficiencies above 40 per cent using its technique. The team includes Dr Ben Buchler, Ben Sparkes, Gabriel Hetet, Mahdi Hosseini, Dr Jevon Longdell (now at the University of Otago) and Professor Ping Koy Lam from ANU.

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@ Church today…

In a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, Victor Frankl, Jewish psychologist said, “They stripped me naked. They took everything- wedding ring, my watch- I stood there naked and all of a sudden realized that moment that although they could take everything from me- my wife, my family, my possessions- they could not take away my freedom to choose HOW I was going to respond.”

Viktor Emil Frankl M.D., Ph.D. (March 26, 1905 – September 2, 1997) was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaustsurvivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of Existential Analysis, the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy“. His best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living. Frankl was one of the key figures in existential therapy.

Viktor Frankl often said that even within the narrow boundaries of the concentration camps he found only two races of men to exist: decent and unprincipled ones. These were to be found in all classes, ethnicities, and groups.^[6] He once recommended that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast of the US be complemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast, and there are plans to construct such a statue by 2010.^[7] Frankl is thought to have coined the term Sunday Neurosis referring to a form of depression resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over. ^[8]

Evil Incarnate

This is the story of a dog named Oreo. Technically, it IS a sad story. It also contains my opinions on both dog and master. I hate this story and yet…

First off, let me start by saying that as a human being, I know precisely what evil is. God, too, knows exactly what evil is. However, when my view of evil is contrasted with God’s view of the ‘exact’ same wickedness, there is a huge difference: God allows for NO scope, no range, no degree, no rank, no level, no spectrum, no grade, no status, no nothing. God sees evil as an absolute, whereas, my perspective is influenced by a myriad of outside forces: Is it family member? A friend? Surroundings? Culture? Upbringing? On any given day, I may let a killer off the hook depending on the circumstances. I mean, would anyone truly convict a man who stood before them who admitted to brutally and hideously killing Adolf Hitler? No. Arguably not a single soul would convict that man of murder. However, in God’s eyes, he committed murder. And that was evil. Just as a teenager might lie to his parents, steal some money to go buy alcohol, lie about their age to get into an adult club, and then take an illegal drug AND….AND drive past the speed limit on the way home before falling face first into a plush bed, drifting away to sleep under the quiet umbrella of night. No harm? No foul? Perhaps a small degree of evil? (After reflecting back on our own lives–perhaps we’d like to assign it even a SMALLER degree of evil?

The fact is, as human beings who operate under the authority of a judicial system, we assign degrees to our definition of evil based on how it plays out in court. We are becoming more and more callous to what we do, see, feel, hear, taste, and touch. September 11, 2001 was a horrible day. If you remember, it was unlike anything you’d ever understood in your life before that point. However, if 9/11 were to happen again, it would be bad, yes, but it would not be 9/11/2001 because as humans, we have the ability to adapt to our surroundings and circumstances. It aids our recovery after the devastating loss of  a family member, as well suppressing our feelings of outrage and anger while allowing a once devastating evil act to become commonplace. If these things are allowed to ferment and grow below the surface of our moral skin, they will bubble up and destroy someone at some point, many times bringing great sorrow and pain as it burns a path through whatever stands in its way.

So, what’s the big deal about evil? Perhaps nothing—-perhaps everything. Are we willing to let our perception of evil deteriorate over time to the point where our very soul can tune out an act of evil so hideous that just the thought of it can make the skin on your arms and legs crawl from head to toe.

—story—

If a young man, a child of nineteen, were to walk up to the top story of a housing project, look over the side, contemplate his life and all of the numerous failings to which he’d been subjected, look down at the street, pick a vehicular-point of landing and then jump off of that building landing head-first onto the roof of that very car, most of us would look inward and say, “What a shame? Nineteen? He had his whole life ahead of him.” But within seconds, virtually seconds, that child would be nothing but a memory.

Now, suppose that same boy walked up to the top of that building and followed the exact same steps, except this time, after reaching the edge and choosing the destination, he walked back about 20 feet, picked up a bat and started hitting his family dog, a kind terrier mix who chased balls and panted heavily when she would play, who he brought with him to the roof of his building which stood six-stories high.

Suppose he took that bat and started plowing into her, his dog, hitting her firmly across the side of the head and solidly down across the back spine. Then, after seeing that she was broken and without fight, her fear being the only thing she had left, outside of the ‘not-knowing’ why her master was beating her so terribly, he takes this little dog into his arms and begins to cradle it like a small baby. This act, no doubt, alleviated some fear from the dog as she was now in the arms of her master. It was only seconds later though when the boy released the dog from his arms, hurling her smashed, crying body over the side of the building at a speed designated by gravity itself. Did the dog realize then that she was now plunging toward her death?

I don’t know if dogs are like us but perhaps this dog thought of where she was littered, perhaps her thoughts were of her brothers and sisters or if her mom was still alive…somewhere out there. How sad to think that such a pretty little dog might have wondered her last few seconds away in despair and anguish, “What did I do? Why? What did I do? Please, take me back, daddy. Whatever it was – I’ll never….do it…..aga—–”

However, I’d like to think that the dog did something else. I’d like to think that the little dog who was thrown over a roof after being beaten and beaten, I’d like to think that the young dog turned to her creator in her last seconds. With God, all things are possible? I don’t know how or even if, but something in my soul says ‘it’s possible’…actually, my SOUL tells ME it’s ‘probable!’

…and on July 31st, 2009 — as the young dog fell past each floor toward her final resting spot — God was watching.
The pup, named Oreo for her coloring, underwent surgery at the ASPCA hospital, where vets repaired all of her limbs “with plates and screws. She also suffered internal bruising and damage to her lungs,” according to the Post.

But, somehow, someway….she survived the evil that was inflicted upon her.

Evil is not only relegated to rapists, killers, and child molesters nor is it only exclusive to adult men. Our nature, arguably our entire species, protects women and children instinctively, and that’s not a bad thing, but in recent years, seemingly more often than not, we seem to be able to ignore obvious signs of a lurking evil within people, especially if it resides in a young child, a hopeful teenager, or a beautiful woman. I remember when I was nineteen, I was a child and acted as such.

I had two dogs who I loved as much as anything that I ever HAVE loved – period! I thought of them as I read this story. If that guy would’ve done that to either of my girls, Roxy or Baby, I would’ve wanted to kill him. I would’ve wanted to kill him! But, that would’ve been evil and I would not have acted on that particular evil…but the thought and the desire would’ve been there. Is there a difference between acting on something and thinking something? I don’t know…that’s a debate for another day. But still…this story: a guy throws his dog off of a building? It just makes you close your eyes and cringe. What this kid did was evil and so, too, might he be at his very core – kid or not!

http://gothamist.com/2009/08/01/dog_survives_being_thrown_six_stori.php

–R.I.P. Loves of My Life–

ROXY AND BABY

Leaked Title for New KISS Album: “Sonic Boom”

Rumored to be entitled “Sonic Boom”, KISS‘ much-anticipated new album has a tentative release date of October 6. In addition, an update onMelodicRock.com’s Twitter account states that the effort will be issued as a triple-disc set through Wal-Mart featuring the new album, a CD of re-recorded KISS hits (which was recently released in Japan), and a DVD.

However, it should be noted that none of this information has yet been corroborated by an official source and should be treated as a rumor only.

The editor of Guitar Player magazine, who had a chance to preview five songs off the LP last month, wrote about the new KISS material, “Paul[Stanley, KISS guitarist/vocalist] sings his ass off. Eric [Singer] plays some amazingly powerful drums. Gene [Simmons] was finally made to play all of his bass parts (apparently, in the past, if someone had a cool bass idea, he let them play it), and he DOES have a pretty driving sound. Finally, Paul and Tommy’s [Thayer] guitars sound HUGE — with some fab riffs and ’70s-style solos.”

Thayer wrote and sang his first song on the album, while Singer also got his first opportunity to sing a lead vocal on an original song. Simmons recently told The Canadian Press that there were no outside writers working on the Paul Stanley-produced disc. He also described the album’s sound as “no strings, no keyboards, no synths, no tambourines, no nothing — just meat and potatoes.”

Simmons confirmed during a recent radio appearance that a deal is in the works with Wal-Mart that will result in an “entire section” of the giant retailer’s stores across the country (apparently dubbed “Kiss Korner”) being dedicated to KISS. There has been no official announcement of a KISS deal with Wal-Martfor the band’s next CD, although artists such as THE EAGLES andAC/DC have both issued recent albums exclusively through the giant retailer. In addition, AEROSMITH guitarist Joe Perry may have inadvertently let it slip that the band’s next studio album will come out exclusively through Wal-Mart.

Latest stem-cell advance proves no need to kill embryos.

BY NANCY FRAZIER O’BRIEN – CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE

TUESDAY, 28 JULY 2009

The work of two teams of Chinese scientists who created live mice from induced pluripotent stem cells is “another demonstration that researchers don’t need to destroy embryos” to achieve stem-cell advances, according to a pro-life official at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.The research done by separate teams in Shanghai and Beijing and published July 23 in the scientific journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell showed that the so-called iPS cells have “the full range of uses that embryonic stem cells are proposed for,” said Richard M. Doerflinger, associate director of the USCCB Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. “The immediate finding is that induced pluripotent stem cells, created without harming any embryos, really are as versatile as embryonic stem cells,” he said. But Doerflinger also warned in a July 27 interview with Catholic News Service that this latest breakthrough in stem-cell research shows that iPS cells are “so powerful” that researchers “might be able to put them in a human embryo and change the genetic makeup of that child and all the future generations” related to the child. ”It’s an ominous thing, that they could be remaking people’s genetic traits,” he added. “It’s a powerful technology and it could be misused.” The two Chinese teams had varying degrees of success in creating genetic duplicates of mice by reprogramming skin cells from adult mice into iPS cells and then implanting the embryos created into a surrogate mother. The first team, led by Qi Zhou of the Institute of Zoology in Beijing and Fanyi Zeng of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, reported 27 live births, starting with a mouse named Xiao Xiao or “Tiny.” All 12 of the genetic duplicates that were mated produced offspring without abnormalities; the team reported hundreds of second-generation and more than 100 third-generation mice. The second team, headed by Shaorong Gao of the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, produced only two live births using the same technique, with one of those dying in infancy. The team is currently trying to mate the surviving mouse. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health recently issued final guidelines for federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, requiring that such research use only embryos created for reproductive purposes at in vitro fertilization clinics and no longer needed for that purpose. The draft guidelines set standards for voluntary informed consent by those donating the embryos, and said no NIH funds would be given for research that did not meet the standards. The final guidelines, however, set up an “alternative pathway” for the approval of funding of research involving embryos donated before the new guidelines took effect or involving stem-cell lines developed in foreign countries. A working group made up of about 10 scientists and ethicists is to look at each such application on a case-by-case basis to determine whether it meets the core principles of voluntary informed consent. Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, strongly criticized the final guidelines and said the debate over embryonic stem-cell research “now shifts to Congress, where some members have said even this policy does not go far enough in treating some human beings as objects to be created, manipulated and destroyed for others’ use.” Some had predicted that President Barack Obama’s decision to reverse the limits on funding of embryonic stem-cell research established under President George W. Bush would lead to the rapid expansion of such research, particularly at the university level. But the results of a survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education, published July 21, found that only 6 percent of major research universities — those with $100 million or more in federal grants — planned to increase research on human embryonic stem cells “by a large amount.” The survey also found that most of the universities said they had increased their contribution to the indirect costs of scientific research on campus by 50 percent or more over the past five years. A federal policy established in 1991 limits the indirect costs that a university may collect on each federal research grant for expenses like photocopying, accounting and electricity.

Testing Relativity and Black Holes In The Laboratory

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2009) — Even Albert Einstein might have been impressed. His theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object, such as a star, can curve space and time, has been successfully used to predict such astronomical observations as the bending of starlight by the sun, small shifts in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Now, however, it may soon be possible to study the effects of general relativity in bench-top laboratory experiments.

Physicists have determined that the interactions of light and matter with spacetime, as predicted by general relativity, can be studied using the new breed of artificial optical materials that feature extraordinary abilities to bend light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

To read the entire story:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720134239.htm

‘Star Trek’ Warp Speed?

‘Physicists Have New Idea That Could Make It So.’

ScienceDaily (May 8, 2009) — With the new movie ‘Star Trek’ opening in theaters across the nation, one thing movie goers will undoubtedly see is the Starship Enterprise racing across the galaxy at the speed of light. But can traveling at warp speed ever become a reality? Two Baylor University physicists believe they have an idea that can turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to science, and their idea does not break any laws of physics.

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Dr. Richard Obousy, a Baylor post-doctoral student, theorize that by manipulating the space-time dimensions around the spaceship with a massive amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could push the ship faster than the speed of light. To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 11-dimension would create dark energy. Cleaver said positive dark energy is responsible for speeding up the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver, who co-authored the paper with Obousy about the new method. “The ship would be pushed by the bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light.”

The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object faster than the speed of light.

String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. Scientists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we can not yet identify. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the “strings” actually vibrate in an 11-dimensional space. It is this 11th dimension that the Baylor researchers believe could help propel a ship faster than the speed of light.

The Baylor physicists estimate that the amount of energy needed to influence the extra dimensions is equivalent to the entire mass of Jupiter being converted into energy.

“That is an enormous amount of energy,” Cleaver said. “We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy.”

The paper appeared recently in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

Enzyme Important In Aging Identified

ScienceDaily (July 13, 2009) — The secret to longevity may lie in an enzyme with the ability to promote a robust immune system into old age by maintaining the function of the thymus throughout life, according to researchers studying an “anti-aging” mouse model that lives longer than a typical mouse. The study, led by Abbe de Vallejo, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and immunology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and immunologist at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, reports that the novel mouse model has a thymus that remains intact throughout its life. In all mammals, the thymus―the organ that produces cells to fight disease and infection―degenerates with age.

Results of the study are published in the July 7 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These findings give us hope that we may one day have the ability to restore the function of the thymus in old age, or perhaps by intervening at an early age, we may be able to delay or even prevent the degeneration of the thymus in order to maintain our immune defenses throughout life,” said Dr. de Vallejo.

The mouse model that Dr. de Vallejo’s team studied was developed by his colleague Cheryl Conover, Ph.D., an endocrinology researcher at Mayo Clinic. In this “knockout” mouse model, researchers deleted an enzyme known as pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPPA). PAPPA-knockout mice live at least 30 percent longer and have significantly lower occurrence of spontaneous tumors than typical mice.

PAPPA controls the availability in tissues of a hormone known as insulin-like growth factor (IGF) that is a promoter of cell division. Hence, IGF is required for normal embryonic and postnatal growth. But IGF also is associated with tumor growth, inflammation and cardiovascular disease in adults. By deleting PAPPA, the researchers were able to control the availability of IGF in tissues and dampen its many ill effects. In the thymus, deletion of PAPPA maintained just enough IGF to sustain production of T cells without consuming precursor cells, thereby preventing the degeneration of the thymus.

Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

The boy who never grew up: Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

by Roger Ebert

Michael Jackson was so gifted, so lonely, so confused, so sad. He lost happiness somewhere in his childhood, and spent his life trying to go back there and find it. When he played the Scarecrow in “The Wiz” (1978), I think that is how he felt, and Oz was where he wanted to live. It was his most truly autobiographical role. He could understand a character who felt stuffed with straw, but could wonderfully sing and dance, and could cheer up the little girl Dorothy.

We have all spent years in the morbid psychoanalysis of this strange man-child. Now that he has died we will hear it all repeated again: The great fame from an early age, the gold records, the world tours, the needy friendships, the painful childhood, Neverland, the eccentric behavior, plastic surgery, charges of child molestation, the fortunes won and lost, the generosity, the secrecy, the inexplicable marriage to Elvis’s daughter, the disguises, the puzzling sexuality, the jokes, and on and on.

I never met him. My wife Chaz did, a long time ago when she was part of a dance troupe that opened some shows for the Jackson Five. What she remembers is that he was — a kid. Talented, hard-working, but not like other kids. That’s what he was, and that’s what he remained. His father Joseph was known even then as a hard-driving taskmaster, and was later described by family members as physically and mentally abusive, beating the child, once holding him by a leg and banging his head on the floor. Michael confided to Oprah that sometimes he would vomit at the sight of the man.

Families are important to everyone, and to African-Americans they are the center of the universe. A census is maintained that radiates out to great-nieces and nephews, distant cousins, former spouses, honorary relatives, all the generations. Communication is maintained, birthdays remembered, occasions celebrated. Important above all are parents and grandparents. Family was a support system from a time when slave-owning America refused to recognize black families. Family was the rock.

Michael Jackson doesn’t seem to have had that rock. His father seems to have driven him to create an alternate universe for himself, in which somewhere, over the rainbow, he could have another childhood. He named his ranch Neverland, after the magical land where Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, enacted his fantasies with the Lost Boys. I wonder if we ever really understood how central that vision was to Jackson, or how literally he tried to create it. I have no idea whether Michael abused the children he “adopted.” It is possible those relationships were without sex; he seemed frozen at a time before puberty. Whether he touched them criminally or not, it is easy to see what he sought: To create, with and for these Lost Boys, a Neverland where they could imagine together the childhood he never had. Mixed with that was perhaps a lifelong feeling of inadequacy, burned in by the cruelty of his father. That might help explain the compulsive plastic surgery, the relentless rehearsal, the exhausting tours, the purchase of expensive toys, the giving of gifts.

The scene everyone remembers from “The Wiz” is Dorothy and the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion dancing and singing down the Yellow Brick Road. They were off to see the Wizard, and a wonderful Wizard he was, because of the wonderful things he does. In the story, the Wizard is a lonely little man hiding behind a curtain, using his power to create a wonderland. Now Michael Jackson will never be able to tell us what he was hiding behind his curtain. But because of his music, we danced and sang.

This Changes the Neighborhood

Plant Communication: Sagebrush Engage In Self-recognition And Warn Of Danger

ScienceDaily (June 20, 2009) — To thine own self be true” may take on a new meaning—not with people or animal behavior but with plant behavior. Plants engage in self-recognition and can communicate danger to their “clones” or genetically identical cuttings planted nearby, says professor Richard Karban of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, in groundbreaking research published in the current edition of Ecology Letters.

Karban and fellow scientist Kaori Shiojiri of the Center for Ecological Research, Kyoto University, Japan, found that sagebrush responded to cues of self and non-self without physical contact. The sagebrush communicated and cooperated with other branches of themselves to avoid being eaten by grasshoppers, Karban said. Although the research is in its early stages, the scientists suspect that the plants warn their own kind of impending danger by emitting volatile cues. This may involve secreting chemicals that deter herbivores or make the plant less profitable for herbivores to eat, he said.

 

Read the Entire Article Here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090619171244.htm

Duncan Faces Political Battle Over Education Reform – ABC News

Duncan Has Ear of Basketball Buddy President

Once a professional basketball player, the 6-foot-5-inch cabinet secretary also has the ear of President Barack Obama, a personal friend and long-time pick-up basketball buddy.

“We’ve played a few times since we’ve been here, haven’t played a ton,” Duncan said of the president. “We’ve both been a little bit busy.”

Since arriving in Washington, Duncan has been on the road one or two days a week, visiting schools and colleges and meeting with students, principals and teachers.

“The solutions are never going to come from Washington,” Duncan said. “So when I go out, I’m not just listening to the problems; I’m really challenging folks to come up and tell us the answers.”

This fall, Duncan, former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Rev. Al Sharpton will embark on a five-city tour to raise awareness of the achievement gap between white and minority students.

“The gap is absolutely, morally unacceptable,” Duncan said. Planning is in the early stages and no dates or places have been decided, he said.

Watered Down State Proficiency Standards

Making an end run around the Bush administration’s controversial No Child Left Behind law, Duncan has argued many states and districts aren’t using data to reward good teachers and some states have watered down their proficiency standards so students and parents believe they are doing much better than they are.

Despite the problems, Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, insists the states are ready for education reform.

Read the Entire Article: Duncan Faces Political Battle Over Education Reform – ABC News

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Zooped.com – 3134 Unbelievable Facts

Zooped.com – 3134 Unbelievable Facts

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THE OPHELIA SYNDROME

By Thomas G. Plummer

BYU TODAY September 1989

(Excerpt…)

“S.I. Hayakawa describes symptoms of the Ophelia Syndrome in his essay, “What Does It Mean to Be Creative?”:

Most people don’t know the answer to the question, “How are you? How do you feel?” The reason why they don’t know is that they are so busy feeling what they are supposed feel, thinking what they are supposed to think, that they never get down to examining their own deepest feelings. “How did you like the play?” “0h, it was a fine play. It was well reviewed in The New Yorker.” With authority figures like drama critics and book reviewers and teachers and professors telling us what to think and how to feel, many of us are busy playing roles, fulfilling other people’s expectations. As Republicans, we think what other Republicans think. As Catholics, we think what other Catholics think. And so on. Not many of us ask ourselves, “How do I feel? What do I think?” – and wait for an answer. (S.I. Hayakawa, “What Does It Mean to Be Creative?,” Through the Communication Barrier. ed. Arthur Chandler [New York: Harper & Row, 1979], 104-105)

Charles Schulz characterized the Ophelia Syndrome more succinctly in this “Peanuts” cartoon: (Charlie Brown’s little sister says: “We’ve been reading poems in school, but I never understand any of them.. How am I supposed to know which poems to like?” Charlie Brown answers: “Somebody tells you.”)

Psychologist Carl Jung describes this dependence on others for one’s thoughts in the context of his discussion of “individuation.” Individuation is the process of learning to differentiate oneself from others. It is a psychological “growing up.” It means to discover those aspects of the self that distinguish one person from another. Failure to achieve individuation leaves people dependent on other, stronger personalities for their identity. They fail to understand their uniqueness. (Carl G. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [New York: Pantheon Books, 1959])

I have a friend who is fond of saying, “If we both think the same way, one of us is unnecessary…”

For the entire article, go here:
http://www.usu.edu/account/faculty/nelson/ophelia.htm

McMannes has plans for third mayoral term!

Humble voters returned incumbent Mayor Donald McMannes to office in the city’s municipal election held May 9 to a count of 300-211 over challenger Rick Dickson. This will be McMannes’ third term as mayor of Humble. He summarized this year’s mayoral race as one of those small town political contests that can and do sometimes divide communities.

“This was a tough race,” he said. “There were a lot of people working in this that wanted me back in and I have to thank all of them.”

McMannes is proud of the city’s accomplishments during his first two terms as mayor including the construction of a new court facility, improved pay and parity for city police officers and firefighters, street and paving improvements and a top-notch public works department. He said he wants to build on those accomplishments in his next term. With the race now behind him, McMannes has several priorities in mind for the coming term. One major priority is addressing drainage issues in the city.

“The main thing now is drainage,” he said. “Drainage is going to be in the forefront. We’re looking at places for retention ponds. We’ve already started seeking out some grant money that we would have to match.”

McMannes noted that Humble cannot solve all drainage issues alone though. Harris County must also take steps to improve drainage. While the city has made a number of improvements to reduce flooding problems, it cannot solve all such problems on its own. The areas surrounding the city also influence flooding events within the city itself, he said.

“It’s the same thing for Harris County,” he said. “Not only do we have to do our part in Humble for our people, but as a whole, Harris County needs to get busy on drainage.”

Drainage work is costly and time-consuming for communities, but McMannes said his intent is that the city will accomplish this work while keeping the same tax rate and senior discount programs that have remained in place for many years, even as the city has completed street improvements and other capital projects over the previous four years. Humble offers senior citizen discounts on water and sewer fees along with a senior exemption on property taxes.

“Everything we’ve been able to do since I’ve been there, we’ve done it while keeping the tax rate at the same 20 cents (per $100 in taxable value),” McMannes said.

Two other priority issues for the returning mayor are the completion of improvements to Will Clayton Parkway and dealing with the Houston Airport System as decisions are made regarding new runways and other improvements at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The Will Clayton Parkway project is set to go to bid in August, he said. This is a county project, but the city is participating as a partner in it and will oversee much of the work. Airport planners have begun a 30-month environmental impact study on the proposed improvement projects at the airport which is one of the first steps in the process.

“They haven’t made up their minds about the runways they are going to build and we will be dealing with that,” said McMannes.

The mayoral race was the election’s only contested race out of three positions. Position 1 incumbent Councilman Bill Conner received 405 votes and Position 2 incumbent Councilman Andy Curry received 424 votes in their unopposed bids for re-election.

Mayor McMannes: 2009 RE-ELECTION DAY

My father’s running for re-election this year and has an opponent (And that is a great compliment in itself for this guy!). Now, this is not an opponent that’s saying things which are fair or right, it’s an opponent that feels the need to take personal shots, make blatantly provocative remarks sprinkled with veiled insults. For another man to say that he’ll beat my father “…60-40 in any election” is just not a man in their right mind…and I’m not even talking about his personal psychiatric treatment from his past. I’m talking about a man who walks up to a Mexican man in Kroger and decides to make a joke about how he has a picture of his naked wife with him and did that guy want it? And this man is running for City Mayor? Wow!

The two were interviewed last week about their vision for the future of Humble. If you know my dad, can vote for my dad, or just have an opinion about this interview, I’d love to hear it and pass it along to him. I’m pretty sure the election will turn out in his favor because he told me he has some really great people working hard on his campaign. I guess it’s kind of weird though if you think about it from a national standpoint. I couldn’t imagine having someone say so many negative things about a family member on that scale. Wow!

Also, many of you know that my mouth can run a little wild at times…no, it’s true…no really, it’s true….. but I’m really hoping that this man’s campaign, and I’ve known this guy and his family my entire life, well…I just hope he doesn’t make his way to our tent. I don’t want the ‘dark mood’ to show up – it can be a little much at times. Anyway, here’s the short interview from each candidate:

Humble mayoral candidates set to square off

Monday, April 27, 2009

Robert Kleeman

– Early voting begins this week –

Humble Mayor Donnie McMannes will face a confident challenger in his bid for a third term, to say the least. Opponent Rick Dickson told a group of 15 supporters at the Humble City Cafe Thursday night he would win the election “60/40.”

“I can say emphatically, ‘it’s a 60/40 election,’” Dickson said. “I realize that I will be in city hall because of the citizens.”

Early voting for the May 9 election began Monday morning and continues all week. Voters can cast ballots from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Humble’s City Hall, 114 West Higgins. Early voting on May 4-5 and on Election Day will be from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. McMannes spent 30 years as a narcotics officer and seeks his third term as mayor. Dickson has worked as a Houston government liaison, and a real estate and insurance agent. To help voters make a decision, The Tribune asked both candidates a series of questions about their platforms, philosophies and inspirations for public service. Here are their responses.

DONNIE McMANNES

1. What inspired your interest in public service?
I’m not so sure there was a single moment where I actually decided to pursue public service. I don’t like people being treated unfairly, I know that. So, for 37 years as a police officer and deputy constable, I was able to really entrench myself in understanding what public service is. Working with high-ranking, elected officials, as well as being elected to the board of directors for the Houston Police Officers Associations were all wonderful things in my life. But my city, my home has always been Humble, Texas and that’s where I wanted to get involved and make a difference. And so I did.

2. Why do you want to be the City of Humble’s mayor again?
If you look back over the last several years, the leaders of this city have come together to do some fantastic things. We all put Humble first. Again, as a public servant, I do this for the city not for myself. The city council, city workers, police, fire, EMS – we all work very well together. They love this city as much as I do, and that’s why we’re able to get so many things done that benefit the people who live here. Plus, there are several fantastic projects that we just started that I’m excited to see finished.

3. Is there a particular quality you feel has best suited you for the job?
I’m a problem solver. My job for most of my life has been to listen to people and help them find solutions. I’ve always been good at understanding people, but what I do best is solve problems. It’s a basic approach – identify the problem and then use the best resources and as much common sense as possible to fix that problem.

4. What is the greatest life lesson you have learned?
I could give you some philosophical answer, but the first answer that came to my mind was “trust the lord God with all your heart, soul and mind.” I think when you do that, along with treating other people the way that you would like to be treated, I believe that you’ll have made a difference in someone’s day. Just being kind to other people does a lot more than you think.

5. If you had to describe your platform/philosophy in one paragraph, how would you do it?
The city employees are the backbone of the city – period. Without these people, a city can crumble. I’m going to tell you that Humble, Texas, is blessed to have the finest quality of city personnel that you’re going to find anywhere. Our city workers know their job and how to do it right. They’re experts in what they do and they love this city. My number one concern, along with the city council, is to see that their pay and benefits are always kept at a level where they can maintain a good quality of life, not only now but in retirement, as well.

6. If re-elected, what would be your first three priorities?
(1) After re-election, I’ll be back working on some of our top projects. First up is obtaining several millions dollars to improve the drainage citywide so the water will move out of the city faster.
(2) Secondly, if crime increases, I’ll be dealing with issues regarding the number of arrests made by our officers, as well as ways to add to and improve our city jail.
(3) Another important item I’ll be addressing after I’m re-elected is to continue seeking an extension to our Metro agreement regarding the sales tax rebate. This is a huge and complex deal that will benefit our city in great ways. Also, I’ll be meeting with the FAA to discuss issues at hand and then working with them to do what is best for the entire City of Humble.

Doing it ‘immorally!’

April 28, 2009

How to Write an Immoral Character

The best novels and short stories are not made up of a cast of saints and heroes. And the best modern novels and stories don’t have black-and-white villains and knights in shining armor. In fact, the characters we love best and that stay with us are almost always a shade of grey, with some good impulses but many bad ones, with both light and dark in their psyches. Increasingly, good writers are expected to make even decidedly immoral characters sympathetic to readers. But how do you portray an immoral character without losing the reader?

First, it’s important to remember that even bad guys (or girls) don’t behave randomly. For the vast majority of people, evil isn’t something to be enjoyed; randomness and chaos for its own sake isn’t the goal. I’m getting really tired of movies nowadays that have random baddies that put a gun to someone’s head without any reason except that the moviemakers want the character to look badass. It doesn’t make sense and it makes the entire world of the story feel false.

After the jump: what to do instead to make your character real.

Instead, you’ve got to respect the complexity of a world that inspires immoral behavior. What situation arose that made the character think it was his only choice to steal, to kill, to lie or deceive? Was he actually doing it because he was thinking he was protecting someone else? Was she really just short-sighted, thinking this was the best course of action for a better future? Was he being selfish, not deliberately cruel? These are real human motivations, and what I find far more poignant than pure human villainy is that so often, simple, honest wants and goals can go awry and have bad outcomes. That’s where the humanity of an immoral character lies.

Second, as a writer it’s important for you to withhold judgment. It’s not up to you to point the condemning finger; instead, you present your character as realistically, as humanistically, as possible, and let your readers decide where his/her behavior is worthy of contempt. Let your character act, speak, and move on the page without being hampered by a haughty narratorial voice, explaining why such-and-such is wrong. Give the reader the benefit of the doubt and let her decide for herself.

Third, how about a little sympathy and compassion? No one is all bad. That doesn’t mean you have to be an apologist for truly heinous actions. Take Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita, for example. The man is the worst kind of person you can find on the planet — an incestuous child rapist. Nabokov doesn’t sugar-coat this terrible, repeated crime, and he doesn’t apologize for Humbert by making him out to be a tortured soul who really wants to do the right thing. No, he lets Humbert stand on the page and speak for himself. He is a human being — a weak, cowardly, shamefully lustful human being who has a desperate need to validate his own desires. This does not lessen the evil of the act, but it makes the character far more complex and interesting than a cartoonish villain. Give your immoral character motivation and psychological complexity. It will make your villains ones that are hard to forget.

Scout.com: NFL Draft Rookie: Connor Barwin

 

NFL Draft Rookie Reaction: Connor Barwin
Ed Thompson ScoutNFLNetwork.com	Apr 26, 2009
The Texans’ second-round draft pick, defensive end Connor Barwin, will be heading to Houston for a press conference at the team’s facilities on Sunday. But on Saturday night, he shared his rookie reaction in this exclusive interview with Scout.com Senior NFL Analyst Ed Thompson.  Ed Thompson: Congratulations on being selected by the Houston Texans in the second round of this year’s draft. Tell me what happened at that moment when the phone rang. Connor Barwin: I was really surprised. I thought I was going to get picked earlier in the draft, so I was sitting there looking at who was up to pick. There was Houston, then a couple of teams and Chicago. We were thinking that Chicago was where the pick was going to be, because we had talked to (Bears GM) Jerry Angelo and really hadn’t heard much from Houston since the Combine. So I was just really surprised when they called. Thompson: I saw on your Twitter feed that you were also a little surprised that Cincinnati had passed on you just a few picks earlier. I know you had a good workout with them. Barwin: Yeah, their Director of Operations, Jim Lippincott, had told me that if I was there at 38, they were probably going to take me. But’s that’s all good, I’m so excited to be going down to Texas to rush the passer. I was just surprised that Cincinnati didn’t pull the card at 38. Thompson: So when you got the call, who was on the call with you and what did they say? Barwin: It was their GM, and he was talking, but I couldn’t really hear anything because my family was screaming and ESPN had a plug in my ear. It was the GM, then the head coach and the D-Line coach. They were all congratulating me and telling me that they were very excited, and that I would be down there tomorrow morning for a press conference. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images   Thompson: The Texans now have a lot of young talent in their front seven with guys likeMario Williams, DeMeco Ryans, Amobi Okoye and now you and Brian Cushing being added to the mix through this draft. That’s going to be a tough group for teams to make some headway against. Barwin: Yeah, I’m excited. It’ll be good to go in there and play with great players and people I can learn from. I think we’re going to be a unit who plays fast all the time and gets after people. Thompson: Did Houston give you an idea of where they see you fitting into their defense? Barwin:  They want me to play defensive end to start. I’ll play behind Mario Williams and I’ll rush the passer. Thompson: Have you been to Texas very often? Barwin: I have never been to Texas, so this will be a new experience for me. But they’re bringing down my three brothers and my parents, so it’ll be fun to have everybody down there tomorrow. Thompson: Anything else you want to pass on to the fans who have been following you during this journey? Barwin: Just thank you to everybody in Cincinnati for all the love that I’ve gotten these last four years and over the last few months. Everybody in Cincinnati has been great. I had a great career here, I’m going to miss it. But now I’m excited to be in Houston. I’m excited to play professional football, and I’m going to do everything I can to help Houston be a better football team.  Thompson: One last question. Has it sunk in yet that one of the guys that you’ll be pass rushing twice a year is Peyton Manning? Barwin: (laughs) No, that hasn’t sunk in yet. But I can’t wait until I sack Peyton Manning. That’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

STAR TREK Trailer w/ McMannes Reboot – 2009 Video

Star Trek and Saliva – The Trek Universe set to ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’ The McMannes version of the new Star Trek trailer!

more about “STAR TREK Trailer w/ McMannes Reboot …“, posted with vodpod

Star Trek on Today Tonight 7/4/09

A story on Trek XI, aired on the night of the film’s world premiere in Sydney. Apologies for the multiple mispronounciations by the journo, I have no idea who ‘Zach Pinto’ or ‘Eric Baaana’ is eith…

more about “Star Trek on Today Tonight 7/4/09“, posted with vodpod

Star Trek Movie Posters Released!

Cold Fusion or sequel to ‘The Saint’?

 

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is “significant” evidence of cold fusion, apotential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.

The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.

“Our finding is very significant,” said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.

“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific report of the production of highly energetic neutrons from a LENR device,” added the study’s co-author in a statement. The study’s results were presented at the annual meeting of theAmerican Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, Utah. The city is also the site of an infamous presentation on cold fusion 20 years ago by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons that sent shockwaves across the world.

Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results. Scientists have been working for years to produce cold fusion reactions, a potentially cheap, limitless and environmentally-clean source of energy.

Paul Padley, a physicist at Rice University who reviewed Mosier-Boss’s published work, said the study did not provide a plausible explanation of how cold fusion could take place in the conditions described.

“It fails to provide a theoretical rationale to explain how fusion could occur at room temperatures. And in its analysis, the research paper fails to exclude other sources for the production of neutrons,” he told the Houston Chronicle.

“The whole point of fusion is, you?re bringing things of like charge together. As we all know, like things repel, and you have to overcome that repulsion somehow.”

But Steven Krivit, editor of the New Energy Times, said the study was “big” and could open a new scientific field. The neutrons produced in the experiments “may not be caused by fusion but perhaps some new, unknown nuclear process,” added Krivit, who has monitored cold fusion studies for the past 20 years.

“We’re talking about a new field of science that’s a hybrid between chemistry and physics.”

First Ever Photos – Liquid Water found on Mars!?

Liquid Saltwater is Likely Present on Mars, New Analysis Shows

Salty, liquid water has been detected on a leg of the Mars Phoenix Lander and therefore could be present at other locations on the planet, according to analysis by a group of mission scientists led by a University of Michigan professor. This is the first time liquid water has been detected and photographed outside the Earth.

“A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars,” said Nilton Renno, a professor in the U-M Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and a co-investigator on the Phoenix mission. “Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars.”

Renno will present these findings on March 23, 2009 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

Droplets on a leg of the Mars Phoenix lander are seen to darken and coalesce. Nilton Renno, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences says this is evidence that they are made of liquid water. Previously, scientists believed that water existed on Mars only as ice or water vapor because of the planet’s low temperature and atmospheric pressure. They thought that ice in the Red Planet’s current climate could sublimate, or vaporize, but they didn’t think it could melt. This analysis shows how that assumption may be incorrect. Temperature fluctuation in the arctic region of Mars where Phoenix landed and salts in the soil could create pockets of water too salty to freeze in the climate of the landing site, Renno says.

Photos of one of the lander’s legs show droplets that grew during the polar summer. Based on the temperature of the leg and the presence of large amounts of “perchlorate” salts detected in the soil, scientists believe the droplets were most likely salty liquid water and mud that splashed on the spacecraft when it touched down. The lander was guided down by rockets whose exhaust melted the top layer of ice below a thin sheet of soil.

These images were acquired by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s Surface Stereo Imager on the 21st and 25th days of the mission, or Sols 20 and 24 (June 15 and 18, 2008). These images show sublimation of ice in the trench informally called “Dodo-Goldilocks” over the course of four days. In the lower left corner, lumps disappear, similar to the process of evaporation. Some of the mud droplets that splashed on the lander’s leg appear to have grown by absorbing water from the atmosphere, Renno says. Images suggest that some of the droplets darkened, then moved and merged — physical evidence that they were liquid.

The wet chemistry lab on Phoenix found evidence of perchlorate salts, which likely include magnesium and calcium perchlorate hydrates. These compounds have freezing temperatures of about -90 and -105 Fahrenheit respectively. The temperature at the landing site ranged from approximately -5 to -140 Fahrenheit, with a median temperature around -75 Fahrenheit. Temperatures at the landing site were mostly warmer than this during the first months of the mission.

Thermodynamic calculations offer additional evidence that salty liquid water can exist where Phoenix landed and elsewhere on Mars. The calculations also predicts a droplet growth rate that is consistent with what was observed. And they show that it is impossible for ice to sublimate from the cold ground just under the strut of the lander’s leg and be deposited on a warmer strut, a hypothesis that has been suggested. Certain bacteria on Earth can exist in extremely salty and cold conditions.

“This discovery is the result of the talent and dedication of the entire Phoenix team and NASA, whose strategy for Mars exploration and the Phoenix mission is ‘follow the water,’” Renno said.

Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, 2008, and transmitted data back to Earth until Nov. 10. Scientists are still analyzing the information Phoenix gathered. The mission was led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Arizona. Among its preliminary findings, Phoenix verified that water ice exists in the just beneath the surface of Mars. It sent back more than 25,000 photos and deployed the first atomic force microscope ever used outside Earth. The lander was the first Martian spacecraft to document a mildly alkaline soil and perchlorate salts. It also observed snow falling from clouds on the Red Planet.

A paper on this research, written by Renno and dozens of his colleagues on the Phoenix mission, including principal investigator Peter Smith, is under review at the Journal of Geophysical Research. 

http://www.astrobio.net/news/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3074&theme=Printer

The Origin of the McMannes!

The Irish surname McManus is an anglicized form of the Gaelic MacMaghnuis. The prefix ‘mac’ means ’son of’ and indicates that the name is of patronymic origin – that is, it is derived from a father or ancestor. The first name Manus is derived from the Latin Magnus and came to Ireland from Northern Europe and simply means ‘great’. Thus the surname denotes the son of Manus. Collins Guide To First Names has this to say about the first name Magnus:

‘This is the Latin adjective meaning ‘great’. The spread of this name was due to the Emperor Charlemagne, Carolus Magnus. Some of his admirers took Magnus for a personal name, and among those who christened their sons after him was St. Olaf of Norway. The name spread from Scandinavia to Shetland and Ireland. From Shetland the name became well established in Scotland. In Ireland it became Manus, hence the common Irish surname McManus.’

So, who was this Charlemagne from whom we seem to have taken our name? The name derives from Charles the Great, King of the Franks (Germanic nation or coalition which conquered France in the 6th. century) from 768-814 and Holy Roman Emperor from 800-814. As ruler of Western Christendom, he introduced legal reforms, standardised coinage and weights and measures; organised and reformed the church; and after his death became the hero of a cycle of medieval romances.

It is a popularly held belief that there are two distinct McManus families – one emanating from the Maguires’ in Fermanagh and the other from the O’Connors of Roscommon. This fact and other facts relating to the antiquity of these families is clearly proved again and again in the text of ‘The Annals of the Four Masters’, held in Dublin Castle and which is full of entries relating to the McManus’. However, it must not be accepted without challenge that members of the McManus Clan only originated from these two areas of Ireland. That the name denotes son of the once popular Norse Christian name Magnus or Manus clearly indicates the name was more widespread than just these two Irish regions.

Looking back along the hard road of our local history in North Roscommon, one is struck by the changes in fortune suffered by the MacManuses, and so many other families who once enjoyed property, power and privilege. Of the Gaelic families still with authenticated lineage, only one, the senior MacDermot branch, is still represented in the area. The MacManuses, and other leading Gaelic families of the region, have not been able to preserve their pedigree beyond the eighteenth century. What follows is a very brief historical insight into the demise of these noble and ancient clans, with particular reference to the MacManuses. But demise is hardly an appropriate word to use in this story – for the word may only be appropriate to describe property, power and privilege. In no way does it portray those other irremovable concepts of family which lie deep and impenetrable in the human soul – honour, dignity and pride.

The McManuses of North Roscommon were descended from Manus Miogharan, the ninth son of Turlough More O’Connor, monarch of all Ireland.(The Book of Lecan: fol 72, b, col.4). Tir-Tuathail gets its name from Tir-Tuathail-Maoilgairbh, i.e. ‘the country of Tuathal Maelgarbh’ who was monarch of Ireland from the year 533 to 544. (O’Faherty’s Ogygia part 3 c93). This territory was later subordinate to MacDermot of Moylurg. The pedigree of the McManuses of Tir-Tuathail has not been preserved beyond the eighteenth century (Southeran, 1871:73) and after their decay the land fell into the possession of MacDermot Roe who held it under MacDermot of Moylurg.

• The Irish are very fair people; they never speak well for one another.
• God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.
• Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat.
• The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts haven’t seen the joke yet.
• The Irish ignore anything they can’t drink or punch.
• When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.
• He is bad that will not take advice, but he is a thousand times worse that takes every advice.
• One of the worst things that can happen in life is to win a bet on a horse at an early age.
• A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.
• Every St. Patrick’s Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.
• An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto one blade of grass to keep from falling off the earth.
• As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point in the wrong direction!
• If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
• Here’s to our wives and girlfriends: May they never meet
• I can resist everything except temptation.
• My mother’s menu consisted of two choices: Take it or leave it.
• The Irish don’t know what they want and are prepared to fight to the death to get it.
• God is good to the Irish, but no one else is; not even the Irish.
• If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
• The Irish forgive their great men once they are safely buried.
• Irish Alzheimer’s: you forget everything except the grudges.
• Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

How do ‘I’ Learn? I shock myself…often!

‘The Unexpected Outcome’ Is A Key To Human Learning
ScienceDaily (2009-03-15) — The human brain’s sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by psychologists and neuroscientists. Using a computer-based card game and microelectrodes to observe neuronal activity of the brain, the Penn study, published March 13 in the journal Science, suggests that neurons in the human substantia nigra, or SN, play a central role in reward-based learning, modulating learning based on the discrepancy between the expected and the realized outcome… > read full article

New Trailer for ‘Star Trek’ Breaks All Existing Records!

LOS ANGELES, March 11 /PRNewswire/ — The new trailer for J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” had more than 1.8 million downloads during its first 24 hours on Apple.com and has gone on to become the most popular HD download ever on the site with more than five million downloads in its first five days. The trailer made its exclusive debut on Apple.com/trailers on March 6th giving fans a sneak peak of this summer’s highly anticipated “Star Trek” for viewing on their Mac or PC, iPhone or iPod with video.

From J.J. Abrams (“Mission: Impossible III,” “Fringe,” “Lost” and “Alias”), producer Damon Lindelof and executive producers Bryan Burk and Jeffrey Chernov and screenwriters and executive producers Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman (“TRANSFORMERS,” “MI: III”) comes a new vision of the greatest adventure of all time, “Star Trek,” featuring a young, new crew venturing boldly where no one has gone before. “Star Trek” opens nationally on May 8, 2009.

Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment Present a Bad Robot Production “Star Trek” starring John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Winona Ryder, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, Eric Bana and Leonard Nimoy. The film is directed by J.J. Abrams (“Mission Impossible III,” “Lost,” “Alias”), written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman (“MI: III,” “Transformers”).

Based upon “Star Trek” Created by Gene Roddenberry. The film is produced by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. The executive producers are Bryan Burk, Jeffrey Chernov, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. The director of photography is Dan Mindel, ASC. The production designer is Scott Chambliss. The film is edited by Maryann Brandon, A.C.E. and Mary Jo Markey, A.C.E. The costume designer is Michael Kaplan. The visual effects & animation are by Industrial Light and Magic. The music is by Michael Giacchino. This film has not yet been rated.

The Thriller Begins…Again!

For days rumors have circulated that Michael Jackson was startin’ somethin’. And Thursday afternoon, before a couple of thousand screaming fans at London’s 02 arena, the King of Pop revealed what has been referred to as “the worst kept secret in the world”….a 10-concert residency beginning July 8 — his first full tour in 12 years.

“I love you so much,” said Jackson, 50, barely audible over the whooping of his loyal supporters who crowded outside of the arena. “This is it. I just want to say that these will be my final show performances in London.” (See pictures of Michael Jackson at 50.) Jackson arrived on stage nearly an hour and a half late (London’s rush hour traffic was reportedly the reason) and spoke for just over three minutes. “I’ll be performing the songs my fans want to hear. This is the final curtain call.”

British media are speculating that Jackson, who has been staying at the $11,000-a-night Royal Suite at the Lanesborough Hotel, is staging the comeback — tickets go on sale on March 13 — to help pay off the debts he has incurred since a court cleared him of sexual abuse charges in June 2005 (he hasn’t performed a full concert since then). In November 2008, the singer reached an undisclosed settlement with Sheik Abdulla bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the prince of Bahrain who was suing Jackson for $7 million over claims he reneged on a contract for a new album, autobiography and a stage play. Jackson has maintained that these were gifts.

At Thursday’s announcement Jackson wore a black, military-style top with silver sequins and looked predictably wan. Despite his rather expressionless face, he seemed sincerely moved by the audience’s warm reception and, during an erratic exit, once again conveyed his affection to his fans. “I love you. I really do,” he said in breathy pants. “You have to know that. I love you so much. Really. From the bottom of my heart.” He then made two peace signs, turned, pumped his fist, turned again, struck a fierce pose and blew a kiss before disappearing. (Watch Jackson at the Grammys.)

Fans and journalists had lined up for hours, clutching memorabilia and wearing t-shirts, and numerous individuals posing as journalists were removed from the media line. “I’m sorry, but you’re not on the list,” the doorman told one blond woman with a slight accent, to which she replied, “But I’ve come all the way from Norway!”

Rebecca Kellner, 17, left school early to attend the event

“It’s like meeting one of your childhood heroes, even if I just got to see him,” she says between gasps. “He was more collected than I thought he was going to be, and that made me more confident that he can do the shows.”Jackson underwent rigorous health checks to prove his fitness ahead of the announcement, and AEG, the group that owns the O2 arena, has reportedly obtained insurance to protect against Jackson falling ill and canceling performances. Last year, photographers captured Jackson in a wheelchair wearing pajamas as his children pushed him. Nevertheless, AEG Live chief Randy Phillips said Jackson had a three-year plan with the company — worth $400 million — that could include concerts and the development of a 3-D movie based on the legendary Thriller.

The O2 is the venue Prince played for 21 nights in 2007, and where Britney Spears is doing eight nights this June. As for Jackson (who hasn’t released an album of original material since 2001), his last substantial series of shows came in 1996-97, when he played 82 concerts in 58 cities as part of the HIStory tour. And, of course, there have been some embarrassing moments that infamously earned him the nickname Wacko Jacko. Stories about personal, health and financial problems have constantly cropped up and he’s currently trying to stop an auction of thousands of his personal possessions. (See pictures of the auction items for sale.)

But Jackson’s music may well prove to be the driving force behind the brand. Gemma Lal, 18, traveled four hours from Northhampton and believes Jackson’s music, particularly Earth Song, is as relevant as ever. “It’s not just a song,” she says. “He talks about the earth and how we can help people.” For a singer who has faced some very public lows, the first person to benefit could be Jackson himself.

White House Plan Would End Subsidies to Student Lenders

By Alejandro Lazo and Maria Glod
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 27, 2009; A08

The Obama administration has proposed a sweeping change in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, one that could fundamentally alter the business of lenders such as Sallie Mae.

The proposal, included in yesterday’s budget outline, would end a program that pays government subsidies to private student loan companies. The administration said the shift, which would mean that all federal loans would come directly through the government, would save $4 billion annually and $47.5 billion over the next decade.

The changes could be a blow to companies such as Sallie Mae of Reston that receive subsidies to originate federally backed student loans. Shares of Sallie Mae, formally known as SLM Corp., plunged 31 percent yesterday on the news. The profitability of the student loan industry has faltered in recent years, first as Congress cut subsidies and then because of turmoil in the credit markets. Last year, dozens of lenders stopped issuing federally guaranteed loans, prompting concerns about whether students would get the money they needed for college. The Bush administration took several steps to shore up student lenders. 

Yesterday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan signaled a shift from that approach, saying the program that subsidizes private lenders is “on life support.”

“Rather than continuing to subsidize banks, we want to help dramatically more students get more access to more aid,” Duncan said in a conference call with reporters. “Big picture . . . We’re going to save about $24 billion dollars over the next five years, and we want to actively invest that money in our students.”

Since the early 1990s, federal student loans have been implemented through two programs. The program that the administration proposes ending, the Federal Family Education Loan Program, uses private-sector lenders such as Sallie Mae and Citigroup to originate and service the education loans, keeping the debt off the government’s books. Under this program, the government pays a subsidy to private lenders. Congress sets the interest rate on loans, and the federal government covers nearly all the losses if a student defaults.

The other program, Direct Loan, is administered by the government and includes student loan debt in the government’s deficit. Under the proposal, this program would handle all federal loans. The approach outlined yesterday echoes one long favored by Democrats. House Education Committee Chairman Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who has been a vocal critic of what he has called “corrupt practices” in the student loan industry, said the proposal was a “a solid plan to make federal student loans more reliable while saving taxpayers billions of dollars.”

The proposal to do away with the Federal Family Education Loan Program stunned investors and Wall Street analysts who follow Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student lender. Loans originated through that program made up about 80 percent of the company’s total student loan portfolio at the end of 2008, with the rest being private loans.

“It could precipitate a collapse of the . . . industry because a lot of the lenders were holding on and hoping to survive until the end of the credit crisis,” said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the Web site FinAid.org. “But they could pull out completely because if there is no future, then there is no reason to stay.” Under the administration’s proposal, the private sector wouldn’t be completely cut out of the equation. The Education Department would contract with companies to service loans and collect payments. Officials yesterday said they expected some companies that now participate in the loan program to take part in a competitive process to service the loans. Sallie Mae made clear yesterday that it intended to bid for such contracts.

“We also note that the budget proposal looks to obtain ‘high-quality services for students by using competitive, private providers to service loans,’ ” the company said in a statement. “Sallie Mae is the largest and lowest-cost provider of student loan services, and we deliver the highest quality for students, schools and families.

The New Captain – USS ENTERPRISE!

GoAnimate.com: Mike and Shayne fly the Enterprise!

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

Wilson Archer Remembered…

Former Humble Mayor Wilson Archer, 73, died Jan. 28 after suffering from leukemia for several years. Those close to him said the past four years had been particularly difficult. 

“Wilson and I went to high school together,” said Humble Mayor Donnie McMannes. “He was a grade behind me, but we were friends. He was a life-long, pure ‘Humble man.’ He loved the city and he spent 25 years serving its residents.”

Archer was elected mayor on May 9, 1995 and retired on May 17, 2005. He had served as city councilman for 15 years prior to that.

“He was tough, but always honest in his political positions,” said McMannes. 

Prior to Humble City Council, Archer owned five convenience stores. He sold the last “Wilson Superette” in 1984. The stores provided jobs in the community and were able to support local Little League baseball teams, football teams and the Humble ISD Livestock Show and Rodeo. Archer made numerous charitable contributions to area organizations and individuals.Archer based his business on loyalty and trust. He often extended credit to his neighbors, something unheard of from a convenience store.

“I worked with Wilson for 25 years,” said James Baker, former Humble city manager. “Wilson was in office before Deerbrook Mall opened. He knew Humble would grow and was a big part of building the infrastructure to support the growth. He was born, served and died in Humble. ”

McMannes said it was Archer’s vision to build the Humble Civic Center and he was one of the first to see the need for the conference facility and community center. Today, the center is used by businesses for meetings, conferences and seminars and has become a showpiece for the Humble area. It has become the home of the annual Humble ISD Livestock Show and Rodeo and other community events.

McMannes also gave credit to Archer for his role in negotiating with the Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority to bring dollars back to Humble.

It is estimated that the 10-year agreement with METRO brought approximately $50,000,000 in rebate dollars into the city. The funds are based on a portion of sales tax revenue and are used for roadway improvement, infrastructure and other transportation expenses.

Many of Archer’s pet projects involved practical items, such as providing adequate utilities, drainage, roadways, emergency services, improvements to public parks, a library, and police and criminal justice facilities.

Other projects were strictly from the heart. Archer, who was an avid gardener, often said his favorite program was the seniors’ gardening program affectionately known as “Archer’s Acre.”

“He felt seniors needed a place to gather and stay active,” said Baker.

Seniors are allowed to plant and cultivate vegetables for their own use at the Senior Activity Center on South Houston Avenue. The surplus from the garden is donated to local food banks. After the addition of a greenhouse, seniors began to grow flowers to sell at Humble’s Good Oil Days and poinsettias to sell during the holidays. Archer’s seniors’ gardening program was spotlighted twice on Channel 11 News.

Archer also provided leadership and assistance to the Boy Scouts of America, the Northeast Medical Center Hospital, the Humble Area Assistance Ministries, the FamilyTime Foundation, the Door, the Humble Lions Club, the Humble Area Chamber of Commerce and Humble ISD. He held leadership positions in many state-wide municipal organizations.

“Wilson Archer was born in Humble. He graduated from Charles Bender High School in 1954,” said Nancy Coker, board president of the Humble Museum. “I considered him a good friend. Citizens of Humble were lucky to have him as mayor. I will miss him. We will all miss him.”

Community members gathered for visitation at Rosewood Funeral Home Friday, Jan. 30, and for his funeral Saturday, Jan. 31, at the First United Methodist Church in Humble.

Archer is survived by his sons Curtis and Craig; his daughter-in-law, Regina of Humble; and his granddaughter, Cassie; brother Haden Archer; and sister Jan Lou Bar. He was preceded in death by his parents, Edgar and Alma Archer, and eight brothers and sisters. A reception at Humble Civic Center followed the funeral. The family suggested contributions to the St. Luke’s Blood Bank in lieu of flowers.

© 2008 Ourtribune.com

Soft to Hard; Cells to Bones

Bone Growth Accelerated With Nanotubes And Stem Cells
ScienceDaily (2009-02-01) — Engineers have come up with a way to help accelerate bone growth through the use of nanotubes and stem cells. … > read full article

Transporter Room – - Energize!

Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits: First Between Atoms
ScienceDaily (2009-01-23) — For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing. Teleportation may be nature’s most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. … > read full article

There’s Nothing to See Here!!

Science closing in on cloak of invisibility

WASHINGTON – They can’t match Harry Potter yet, but scientists are moving closer to creating a real cloak of invisibility.

Researchers at Duke University, who developed a material that can “cloak” an item from detection by microwaves, report that they have expanded the number of wavelengths they can block.
In 2006 the team reported they had developed so-called metamaterials that could deflect microwaves around a three-dimensional object, essentially making it invisible to the waves.
The system works like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky.

The researchers report in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science that they have developed a series of mathematical commands to guide the development of more types of metamaterials to cloak objects from an increasing range of electromagnetic waves.
“The new device can cloak a much wider spectrum of waves — nearly limitless — and will scale far more easily to infrared and visible light. The approach we used should help us expand and improve our abilities to cloak different types of waves,” senior researcher David R. Smith said in a statement.

The new cloak is made up of more than 10,000 individual pieces of fiberglass arranged in parallel rows. The mathematical formulas are used to determine the shape and placement of each piece to deflect the electromagnetic waves.

Science.com

Humble’s first lady welcomes 2009

Monday, December 29, 2008
Mary Kelly Bumbaugh

New possibilities ahead every day!

The new year is a beginning, another chance to do better than the year before. I’m always excited about this time of year because it’s kind of like a present. I’m thankful for it…open it up and see what it is,” said Georgia McMannes, Humble’s first lady and wife of Mayor Donnie McMannes. “I’ve always loved Humble and am thankful for living here.”
A friendly, effervescent spirit, she is the original “hometown girl,” who enjoys the quality of life in this small town, is passionate about collecting antique furniture and china, and is dedicated to her Texas family’s roots. Since her Southern hospitality has won her many friends, and being an explorer of all things she can make or fix by hand, her life is often “lights, camera, action.” With her many interests and enduring sense of humor, there’s no shortage of activity in her life.

“If I had longer to live, I would do this or that, but at 72 I don’t branch out quite as much. Except I want to tear down our old garage and replace and decorate it. I drew the house plans when we built our present house in 1999 and now all I want to do is change it!” she said. “I basically want to remain healthy, so I bicycle every day and make sure Donnie feeds us well, since he loves to cook and does all the cooking. I can’t cook.”

The couple met at Humble High School, married in the ‘50s, and moved to Humble in the ‘60s, where they have built and lived in several homes, owing their longevity to working side-by-side on many projects. They turned a weeded lot into a home, doing all the tile work, kitchen cupboards, trim and painting in the house themselves.

As antique dealers, they had many years of fun together going to garage sales, weekly auctions and monthly trade shows to collect and sell furniture treasures. They prospected in Western states and on Texas byways in search of pieces that had withstood the test of time, then Donnie stripped and refinished them into compelling pieces for sale, and use in their homes.

With an eye for detail and beauty, she acquired a taste for Hull pottery, collected 340 pieces, then sold them within 10 months. She collects and uses Port Meirion, gets “carried away” with Moss Rose china and has a very large collection of head vases in a living room showcase; but currently is not as interested in collecting as she is in giving what she already has to their adult child Michael. The McMannes’ have another child who is deceased.

“My eyes light up about my genealogy search and the detailed documentation it requires. I’m continuing to gather it and have tentatively gone back 16 generations on my mother’s side; and nine on Donnie’s mother’s side. I’ll keep looking back farther. It never stops. We have DNA records to use for future discoveries,” she said.

“Since I was born in Houston and am inspired that I’ve found several generations were also native Texan, including several who served in the Texas 13th Calvary, I’ve started taking notes on my own life when something jogs my memory. Like, my mother was born in a log cabin. Growing up we had a pet raccoon, wild as a billy goat, found in a deserted nest, gorgeous. Mother fed him scrambled eggs and potatoes which was more than I was getting when Donnie and I were stationed in Germany in the U. S. Army during the Korean conflict,” McMannes explained.

Along with her travels, collections and writing, McMannes keeps up on her sewing and calligraphy, always finds time to spend with her brother, George, who is housebound, serves on the Thanksgiving feast committee and in her church, and graduated from the Humble Citizen’s Police Academy. An accomplished oil painter, two classic paintings grace her living room. She regrets she sold two of her best pictures.

“My friends of 50 years and I get together monthly to talk all day or take trips. We’re the lady bugs, a ‘sister group,’ of 10 women who went to HHS together. This means a lot to me since I was the only female in my family. We have airtight relationships that I’ve thought may not be as frequent in large communities. I also get together with the council members’ wives, but we stay completely separate from city politics and our husbands’ work,” said McMannes.

“Overall, my life has taught me that you don’t have to have a lot of stuff as long as you’re happy, and I’ve had a sweet family and a wonderful life with memorable years while Donnie has been mayor,” she said. “I get up every day to see what the future may bring, to ‘keep going,’ and find life is always open for new discoveries.”

Photo by Mary Kelly Bumbaugh

© 2008 Ourtribune.com

Back from the Future?

Swiss watch found in 400-year-old tomb

Archeologists in China are baffled after finding a tiny Swiss watch in a 400-year-old tomb.

The watch ring was discovered as archeologists were making a documentary with two journalists from Shangsi town.

“When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, a piece of rock suddenly dropped off and hit the ground with a metallic sound,? said Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Autonomous Region Museum.

“We picked up the object, and found it was a ring. After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch.”

The time was stopped at 10:06am, and on the back was engraved the word “Swiss”, reports the People’s Daily.

Local experts say they are confused as they believe the tomb had been undisturbed since it was created during the Ming dynasty 400 years ago.

They have suspended the dig and are waiting for experts to arrive from Beijing and help them unravel the mystery.

 

FAIRNESS FOR EVERYONE (Even if you can’t afford it!)

The Real Culprits In This Meltdown

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 15, 2008

Big Government: Barack Obama and Democrats blame the historic financial turmoil on the market. But if it’s dysfunctional, Democrats during the Clinton years are a prime reason for it.

 

Obama in a statement yesterday blamed the shocking new round of subprime-related bankruptcies on the free-market system, and specifically the “trickle-down” economics of the Bush administration, which he tried to gig opponent John McCain for wanting to extend.

But it was the Clinton administration, obsessed with multiculturalism, that dictated where mortgage lenders could lend, and originally helped create the market for the high-risk subprime loans now infecting like a retrovirus the balance sheets of many of Wall Street’s most revered institutions.

Tough new regulations forced lenders into high-risk areas where they had no choice but to lower lending standards to make the loans that sound business practices had previously guarded against making. It was either that or face stiff government penalties.

The untold story in this whole national crisis is that President Clinton put on steroids the Community Reinvestment Act*, a well-intended Carter-era law designed to encourage minority homeownership. And in so doing, he helped create the market for the risky subprime loans that he and Democrats now decry as not only greedy but “predatory.”

Yes, the market was fueled by greed and overleveraging in the secondary market for subprimes, vis-a-vis mortgaged-backed securities traded on Wall Street. But the seed was planted in the ’90s by Clinton and his social engineers. They were the political catalyst behind this slow-motion financial train wreck.

And it was the Clinton administration that mismanaged the quasi-governmental agencies that over the decades have come to manage the real estate market in America.

As soon as Clinton crony Franklin Delano Raines took the helm in 1999 at Fannie Mae, for example, he used it as his personal piggy bank, looting it for a total of almost $100 million in compensation by the time he left in early 2005 under an ethical cloud.

Other Clinton cronies, including Janet Reno aide Jamie Gorelick, padded their pockets to the tune of another $75 million.

Raines was accused of overstating earnings and shifting losses so he and other senior executives could earn big bonuses.

In the end, Fannie had to pay a record $400 million civil fine for SEC and other violations, while also agreeing as part of a settlement to make changes in its accounting procedures and ways of managing risk.

But it was too little, too late. Raines had reportedly steered Fannie Mae business to subprime giant Countrywide Financial, which was saved from bankruptcy by Bank of America.

At the same time, the Clinton administration was pushing Fannie and her brother Freddie Mac to buy more mortgages from low-income households.

The Clinton-era corruption, combined with unprecedented catering to affordable-housing lobbyists, resulted in today’s nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie, a move that is expected to cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.

And the worst is far from over. By the time it is, we’ll all be paying for Clinton’s social experiment, one that Obama hopes to trump with a whole new round of meddling in the housing and jobs markets. In fact, the social experiment Obama has planned could dwarf both the Great Society and New Deal in size and scope.

There’s a political root cause to this mess that we ignore at our peril. If we blame the wrong culprits, we’ll learn the wrong lessons. And taxpayers will be on the hook for even larger bailouts down the road.

But the government-can-do-no-wrong crowd just doesn’t get it. They won’t acknowledge the law of unintended consequences from well-meaning, if misguided, acts.

Obama and Democrats on the Hill think even more regulation and more interference in the market will solve the problem their policies helped cause. For now, unarmed by the historic record, conventional wisdom is buying into their blame-business-first rhetoric and bigger-government solutions.

While government arguably has a role in helping low-income folks buy a home, Clinton went overboard by strong-arming lenders with tougher and tougher regulations, which only led to lenders taking on hundreds of billions in subprime bilge.

Market failure? Hardly. Once again, this crisis has government’s fingerprints all over it.

BAILED OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Make no mistake – this is NOT a Republican/Democrat issue. You can go back to Bill Clinton and find where this took hold in 1995, if you’d like. If the banks didn’t offer subprime mortgages to inner city families, poor, and low income families, they would be fined millions of dollars. But the only way these families could afford their ‘$200,000′ home on an income of $25,000 was to take the ARM, the low mortgage, negotiate a way to lower payments, etc… and then the house can’t repay the original loan and thus, the house forecloses and the bank has a house they can’t sell for a price high enough to get their loan back.

But hey, thanks to the Democrats philosophy of ‘everyone deserves good things and nice lives and college educations, etc….’ we have this conversation:

No money? Fine. No down payment.
No money? Fine. Subprime interest rate.
No money? Fine. No credit check.
You’re a poor family and can’t afford this $200,000 house? You really should only be financing a $100,000 house but YOU REALLY WANT THIS HOUSE? Fine!!!!

Greed! The bankers AS WELL AS THE people of this country, the people who live past their means are to blame for this. You can’t just blame the nearest Republican – that’s silly!

Here it is……
Fannie Mae tells the banks to make whatever loan they want and that they’ll be guaranteed. Home ownership shot up as did home prices. But then interest rates rose, gas prices shot up, so people got laid off and were on a tighter budget. Borrowers couldn’t pay and so then the banks stopped loaning money. The subprime lending created actually BY DEMOCRATS so people could afford the giant houses and beuatiful homes on their $30,000 salary DRIED UP COMPLETELY. Guess what came next, boys and girls, FORECLOSURES!!!! What does that mean? Few buyers and a CRAP LOAD of sellers (Banks and homeowners). Guess what? All the homeprices started to drop through the floor and guess what? People stopped paying their notes EVEN MORE than before and Fannie Mae had a bunch of ‘guarantees’ that were now completely worthless. Banks collapsed because the govt. couldn’t back up the loans anymore and people started losing jobs then we arrive at Sept. 28, 6:45pm and we’re in trouble with no hope in sight……(Anybody here heard of BAILOUT?) Yeah, well this bailout isn’t going to fix it. It’s made to increase confidence – it’s psychological. These banks can request $200,000,000 dollars in less than a month. You say it’s Republicans? The Democrats expanded the ‘Community ReInvestment Act’ instead of letting home prices increase with inflation. Is it their fault completely? No. But this whole ‘IT’S GEORGE BUSH’S FAULT!’ is just silly. Whose fault? HUMANS! WHY? GREED!! And I hate to break it to y’all but Democrats are greedy too.

We all want everyone to own a home. BUT IF YOU MAKE $30,000 – YOU CAN NOT BUY A $250,000 HOME BECAUSE IT’S NO MONEY DOWN–and THAT is Democratic prinicpal. Regulation is shot to hell and NEEDS AN OVERHAUL – that stupidity falls on the Republicans. What does this mean – The taxpayers will flip the bill – as always. Why am I mad? BECAUSE I DONT LIKE THE GOVT. RUNNING ANYTHING! This is what happens when they do.

LESS FED. GOVT—MORE CITY/STATE GOVT – period,

Democrats are getting LAUGHED at!

“Obama… like JESUS!!”

The declaration came straight from the mouth of Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen. He followed it with, AND I QUOTE, “…Pontius Pilate was a governor.” So, let me get this straight – Obama is JESUS and Palin is Pontius Pilate, the man who KILLED JESUS! In a year where the Democratic Party should be walking away with an election, they stumble on their feet yet again (See Howard Dean).

Cohen’s remarks also play into the ideal that Obama fancies himself a celebrity-like or messianic figure in the 2008 race. They also come on the heels of Obama’s comment Tuesday that “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

Obama, the presidential candidate, aka JESUS within Democratic circles, just called Sarah Palin a pig. I would’ve never predicted the Dem. party falling this HARD or this FAST but wow, they are imploding like never before seen in politics.

Obama has never implemented a single change at any level at any time in any aspect of his political career. Obama for change? The race for President gets even funnier. The Republicans are absolutely LAUGHING at the Democrats. I’ve never seen a party handle themselves with any more stupidity than I’m seeing right now. Keep it up, boys – it’s a helluva show!

WOW!!

She blasted Democractic rival Barack Obama, saying he “wants to forfeit” while victory is “finally in sight.”

“It’s easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state Senate,” she said of Obama at the Republican National Convention.

The crowd erupted with chants of “Zero!” and some delegates made zeroes with their fingers.

Palin continued, “This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word ‘victory’ except when he’s talking about his own campaign.

“What exactly is our opponent’s plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make the government bigger and take more of your money.”

She told the jubilant crowd earlier in the speech that she accepts the Republican Party’s nomination for vice president following a lengthy standing ovation. It marked the first time in history that a woman has taken the stage as the GOP vice president pick.

“I accept the challenge of a tough fight,” she said.

She praised McCain as a “true profile in courage.”

“In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change,” she said.

Palin, whose youngest child has Down syndrome, also promised families of special needs children will have “a friend and advocate in the White House.”

As she took the stage, the crowd waved banners reading “Hockey moms for Palin” and shouted, “We love you, Sarah.”

“I love those hockey moms,” she said.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani warmed up the crowd by continuing the barrage on Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama on Wednesday night, calling him a “celebrity senator” with no leadership experience.

“He’s never had to lead people in crisis,” Giuliani told the Republican National Convention. “This is not a personal attack; it’s a statement of fact. Barack Obama has never led anything. Nothing. Nada.

“The choice in this election comes down to substance over style. John McCain has been tested. Barack Obama has not. Tough times require strong leadership, and this is no time for on-the-job training.”

His speech was the third of the evening by former GOP presidential candidates who pumped up the Republican faithful ahead of the evening’s much-anticipated speech by McCain’s vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin.

Many in attendance chanted “USA! USA!” during key passages.

Earlier, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee got the crowd cheering when he ripped Obama for looking to Europe for ways to change America.

“Barack Obama’s excellent adventure to Europe took his campaign for change to hundreds of thousands of people who don’t even vote or pay taxes here,” he said.

“The fact is, most Americans don’t want more government; they want a lot less.”

Actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson led the charge, berating “Washington pundits and media big shots” who have questioned her experience as a first-term governor and former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

“Let’s be clear. … The selection of Gov. Palin has the other side and their friends in the media in a state of panic. She is a courageous, successful reformer who is not afraid to take on the establishment.”

“She’s taken on the special interests and the political power brokers in Alaska and reached across party lines to get things done,” Lieberman said.

Energized!

As I type this, the news media begins it’s all-out assault on Sen. McCain’s pick for VP, Gov. Sarah Palin. The argument that has moved swiftly to the forefront has been the issue of Palin’s experience. Failing mention in their assault is the proper focus on the fact that she IS the Governor of a state, commands the Alaskan guard, has reformed her own party of corruption, denied money from the federal govt. for silly projects, and is an ENERGY EXPERT! Without the slightest question, she has more experience than the Democratic nominee for President.

They chastise her now for her experience yet she has MORE EXPERIENCE THAN BARACK OBAMA in every aspect of government. I like Obama, I really do, but the day he arrived to his Senate office, he began campaigning for the Presidency. He’s been absent from senate office more than he’s been present. In all fairness to Gov. Palin, exactly what experience does Barack have? Foreign Affairs? None. A national economy? None. So, let’s understand that her nomination has reaffirmed John McCain’s status as ‘maverick.’ This is the John McCain that we all liked before he drifted so far right.

Also, the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate has electrified conservative activists, providing a boost of energy to the GOP nominee. By tapping the anti-abortion and pro-gun Alaska governor, McCain hasn’t just won over the skeptical Republican base, he’s ignited a wave of emotion that has led some grass-roots activists ‘to weep with joy.’

“I woke up and my e-mail was just going crazy,” said Charmaine Yoest, head of the legislative arm of Americans United for Life and a former top official in Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign. “And then when it was announced — it was like you couldn’t breathe.” The media elite — as well as elite members of the GOP consulting community — have all but mocked Palin as a former small-town mayor with zero Washington experience. But that view of her totally misses what she brings to the Republican power centers and leaves out the jubilation felt among true believers that one of their own is on the ticket. Palin, say conservative activists, has instantly changed how they feel about McCain’s campaign and spurred them to go to work for the Republican ticket.

First, though, they’re expressing their newfound fondness for McCain with their checkbooks – the campaign has raised nearly $7 million online. Republicans say the primary source for the passion can be found in Palin’s example and authenticity.

Not only is the 44-year-old governor opposed to abortion rights — but she carried and gave birth to a child with Down syndrome earlier this year, a profound and powerful motivating force to both opponents of abortion rights and the parents and relatives of special needs children.

And not only is she a supporter of the right to bear arms — but she’s a lifetime member of the NRA and an avid hunter and fisherman whose gubernatorial office couch is adorned with a massive grizzly bear pelt.

“She’s lived it!” exulted Yoest. “It’s so satisfying as a conservative woman. When she walked out on that stage there was just this moment. It was really emotional for a lot of us.”

After hearing the news, Yoest, who was in St. Paul preparing for the convention, said she and other Republican women here “were grabbing each other and jumping up and down.” Steve Duprey, a former New Hampshire GOP chairman and top McCain backer who hails from the moderate wing of the party, was also in the Twin Cities when the news broke.

“I was in the Rules Committee with about 150 people in the room. They had TVs set up and we took a break to watch the announcement. For a second after she came out, it was silent. Then there was a gasp and everybody stood up and started cheering and clapping. We stayed standing the whole speech.”

After Palin finished, he said, the emotion set in.

“There were 10 or 12 women, party stalwarts, in tears, using napkins and handkerchiefs.”

“There is an electricity going through the social conservative crowd right now; it’s unbelievable,” said James Muffett, head of Michigan’s Citizens for Traditional Values, who had met with McCain in the weeks leading up to his selection of a running mate. “Especially given all the set-ups and head fakes — it’s amazing. A lot of people were sure he was going to show his more moderate colors.”

Muffett said the effect on his conservative comrades in arms has been immediate and visceral.

“My wife and I watched an MSNBC special on her last night,” he said. “My wife knew nothing about this woman. But she was in tears listening to her articulate the views she had.” Since the pick, Muffett said, he’s gotten “dozens of e-mails and the phones have been ringing off the hook” from other social conservatives who had assumed McCain would spurn them.

“They were taunting me, saying ‘McCain’s going to disappoint you,’” he said of the sentiment before the pick.

Sportsmen are also overjoyed at the addition of one of their own, and can’t get enough of video and pictures showing Palin firing a weapon.

“She’s one of us,” wrote Michael Bane, a prominent Colorado-based gun enthusiast who has a show on the Outdoor Channel, on his blog. “FINALLY, we can get 100 percent behind the Republican ticket … change we can believe in!”

“You know I’ve had my problems with McCain, but he has reached out a hand to us both at the NRA Annual Meeting [earlier this year] and with the amazing selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate,” Bane added.

And then there is the contrast: “While [Barack Obama] wants to ban AR-15s, Palin shoots AR-15s, and apparently pretty well.”

“Every shooter, every hunter, every gun owner, every competitor needs to understand that it is time to, in the words of Bruce Willis, ‘cowboy the ‘f…’ up.’ ”

Chris Cox, the top political aide at the NRA, suggested that his job just got a whole lot easier, not just with a pro-gun Republican vice presidential nominee but a Democratic number two — Delaware Sen. Joe Biden — who is anathema to the Second Amendment community

“We’ll be able to have some fun contrasting not just McCain and Obama, but Biden and Palin,” said Cox, whose organization is giving “I’m a Bitter Gun Owner and I Vote!” signs and T-shirts to its members. “She’s great on our issues and [Biden’s] been terrible for 35 years.”

Her image as a pistol-packin’ mama could prove especially key in the hunter-filled Rust Belt, said Paul Erhardt, a longtime political strategist who specializes on gun issues.

“Palin could play strong in the sporting states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, depending on how they use her,” he said. “Most pundits will underestimate her appeal in these key areas because they don’t know her and they are unfamiliar with the sporting scene. But among sportsmen, authenticity counts and Palin’s got that and then some.”

The sense of rejuvenation is not just limited to party activists, though. Conservative elites, among the most disdainful of McCain, are also coming around.

James Dobson, long a McCain skeptic, said after the announcement Friday that he’d support Palin.

And he’s not alone.

“I’ve talked to two prominent social conservative leaders in the past 24 hours who told me they had previously not planned to attend the convention, but were now coming to Minneapolis after the Palin pick,” wrote Ralph Reed, a Christian conservative leader who has tangled with McCain, in an e-mail. “One scrambled to find a hotel room and is coming tomorrow; the other rearranged his schedule and is flying in Wednesday. I got a call this afternoon from an evangelical business leader who told me he was contacting the McCain campaign and offering to host a fundraiser with his friends for McCain (sans the candidate) before the Thursday deadline [when McCain shifts to the public financing system]. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a veep pick energize the grass roots like this.”

“Palin=Guns, Babies, Jesus,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Contrast that to Obama’s bitter clingers. Obama just lost blue-collar, white Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and other states.” And, he said, the line that the pick was aimed at picking off Democratic women who backed Hillary Rodham Clinton doesn’t get it right.

“[The] choice is to shore up the conservative, pro-drilling base,” he said. “This is an aggressive, on-offense pick, not a defensive pick.”

Rush Limbaugh, who exulted on the air this week, summed up the response he’s gotten from his loyal listeners: “Home f***ing run.”

A Baby’s Best Friend

Dog Protected Newborn Baby, Doctors say.

(CNN) – A dog sheltered a newborn baby abandoned by its 14-year-old mother in a field in rural Argentina until the boy was rescued, a doctor said Friday.

The abandoned infant was found in a field with this dog and her newborn puppies. A resident of a rural area outside La Plata called police late Wednesday night to say that he had heard the baby crying in a field behind his house. The man went outside and found the infant lying beside the dog and its six newborn puppies, Daniel Salcedo, chief of police of the Province of Buenos Aires, told CNN. The temperature was a chilly 37 degrees, Salcedo said. The dog had apparently carried the baby some 50 meters from where his mother had abandoned him to where the puppies were huddled, police said.

“She took it like a puppy and rescued it,” Salcedo said. “The doctors told us if she hadn’t done this, he would have died.”

“The dog is a hero to us.”

Dr. Egidio Melia, director of the Melchor Romero Hospital in La Plata, told CNN that police showed up at the hospital at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday with the baby who doctors say was only a few hours old. Though the infant had superficial scratches and bruises and was bleeding from his mouth, he was in good shape, Melia said. The next morning, the child’s mother was driven by a neighbor to the hospital and told authorities the 8 pound, 13 ounce infant is hers, Melia said.

The teenager was immediately given psychological treatment and was hospitalized, he said. She has said little about the incident. The child has been transferred to a children’s hospital in La Plata, 37 miles from Buenos Aires.