Branson Opens Spaceport America

Our favorite  billionaire, Richard Branson has opened the world’s first commercial spaceport in the New Mexico desert, the new home for his company Virgin Galactic

Branson inaugurated the building by breaking a champagne bottle against the building, while rappelling down the side of it, hung 20 meters above the ground from the main terminal roof. Described by it’s builder as, the next chapter in space transportation. “Forward-thinking pioneers are developing both vertical and horizontal launch vehicles using the power of free-market enterprise.  As the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, Spaceport America is designed with the needs of the commercial space business in mind. Unique geographic benefits, striking iconic design, and the tradition of New Mexico space leadership are coming together to create a new way to travel into space. When it comes to outer space, New Mexico is bringing it down to earth!” Read the full article »»»»

An Unimaginably Beautiful Life: Optimism and the Private Memory

In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

In a study, published in Current Biology, researchers have confirmed an important role for dopamine in how human expectations are formed and how people make complex decisions. It also contributes to an understanding of how pleasure expectation can go awry. The study has found human beings are hard-wired to be optimistic, even in the face of a darker reality. Scientists led by Dr Tali Sharot at the University College London studied a group of people who were told they were likely to experience something bad. The results found most people stayed highly optimistic. And the researchers say the study shows why people are often foolhardy, naive or overly ambitious. Read the full article »»»»

Humans: Just Fish Out of Water

A study into the muscle development of several different fish has given insights into the genetic leap that set the scene for the evolution of hind legs in terrestrial animals. This innovation gave rise to the tetrapods — four-legged creatures, and our distant ancestors – that made the first small steps on land some 400 million years ago.

The team of Australian researchers led by Professor Peter Currie, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, and Dr Nicolas Cole, of the University of Sydney, reports that Humans are just modified fish.

“The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors.” said Professor Currie.

Scientists have long known that ancient lungfish species are the ancestors of the tetrapods. These fish could survive on land, breathing air and using their pelvic fins to propel themselves. Australia is home to three species of the few remaining lungfish — two marine species and one inhabiting Queensland’s Mary River basin. Read the full article »»»»

OPERA :: Faster Than The Speed of Light

Scientists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, under the experiment banner of OPERA  are reporting that sub-atomic particles known as neutrinos have the ability to travel faster than the speed of light, a discovery that if verified, would completely disassemble Einstein’s theory of special as well as general relativity. Or, at the outside these findings – if correct – may force science to re-calculate the speed of light :: Read the full article »»»»

UC Berkeley Scientists Use Magnetic Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movies In Our Mind

Researchers from the University of California-Berkeley have used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging – fMRI – and computational models to watch clips of movies inside the minds of people who just viewed them . . . researchers were able to decipher and reconstruct movies from peoples minds!

As you move through the world or you watch a movie, a dynamic, ever-changing pattern of activity is evoked in the brain. The goal of movie reconstruction is to use the evoked activity to recreate the movie you observed. To do this, we create encoding models that describe how movies are transformed into brain activity, and now researchers have used those models to decode brain activity and reconstruct the stimulus, they’ve turned our thoughts of moving pictures back into movies . . .

 Human visual encoding is a clever and complex system, it consists of several dozen distinct cortical visual areas and sub-cortical nuclei, all arranged in a network that is both hierarchical and parallel. Visual information comes into the eye and is transduced into nerve impulses, electrified. These impulses are sent on to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then to Primary Visual Cortex :: Read the full article »»»»

Captive Chimpanzees for Endangered List

They have for years been the pinup of animal rights activists, captive chimanzees. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – FWS – has today initiated a review on whether to uplist the status of the chimps from threatened to endangered. In a 144 page petition proposed by the Humane Society and endorsed by 7 other animal rights groups, all captive chimps would be afforded the same rights as their wild kin.

The FWS will initiate a status review to determine whether reclassifying all captive chimpanzees from threatened to endangered under the Endangered Species Act – ESA – is warranted.

Currently, the chimpanzee is not endangered in its entirety. Captive populations are listed as threatened, with a special rule allowing activities otherwise prohibited by the ESA. The finding will publish in the Federal Register on September 1, 2011.

Following an initial review of a petition from The Humane Society of the United States, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, the Jane Goodall Institute, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance, the Fund for Animals, Humane Society International, and the New England Anti-Vivisection Society requesting all chimpanzees, whether found in the wild or in captivity,  be listed as endangered, the Service will undertake a more thorough review to determine if the requested action is warranted :: Read the full article »»»»

Bubble Bubble Toil And . . .

The theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, that multiple alternative universes exist inside their own bubbles, the ‘multiverse’  is  for the first time, being tested by physicists. Two Theories, Two Teams of Researchers. Eternal Cycle vs Bubble Theory!

The inflationary paradigm has been very successful at explaining the initial conditions giving rise to our observable universe. Turning back the clock even further, considering the initial conditions forinflation itself leads to the surprising possibility that ourobservable universe might only be a tiny piece of a vastmultiverse, the majority of which is still undergoing ac-celerated expansion. In this scenario, known as eternal-inflation, our observable universe resides inside a single bubble nucleated out of a false vacuum of space. The rate of bubble formation is outpaced by the accelerated expansion of theinflating false vacuum, and therefore inflation does notend everywhere.

According to inflationary theory, the universe started from a point of infinite density known as the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, expanded extremely rapidly for a fraction of a second and has continued to expand much more slowly ever since, during which time stars, planets and ultimately humans have emerged. That expansion is now believed to be accelerating and is expected to result in a cold, uniform, featureless universe.

OK, WE HEAR YOU! Two points . . .

Firstly English, Got It.

Secondly, lets step back a couple of years to December 2010:

Revered mathmatical physicist Roger Penrose at University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang. Penrose claims that the circular patterns seen in the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe mission data on the Cosmic Microwave Background suggest that space and time perhaps did not originate at the Big Bang but that our universe continually cycles through a series of aeons, and we have an eternal, cyclical cosmos. He also refutes the idea of inflation, a widely accepted theory of a period of very rapid expansion immediately following the Big Bang. An extraordinary discovery, evidence of something that occurred before the Big Bang. Penrose says this is exactly what you’d expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. Each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. Read the full article »»»»