Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).
Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
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Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
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Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
The above linked article by Roger Highfield appeared in 2007 and since has been viewed over a million times as Highfield follows up in the Surfer dude's theory of everything: the magic of Garrett Lisi
There is no way I can grasp what he is doing but the video that purports to explain it is stunningly beautiful and ordered, so I conclude he's on to something.
The dazzling image combining reds, yellows, blues and purples, was created by layering stunningly detailed pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory on top of each other.
The Milky Way is at the centre of our own galaxy and this image shows its core. The image was created to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first demonstration of his telescope.
Each telescope's contribution has been presented in a different colour. Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble, which is better known for its astonishing visible-light pictures.These infrared observations outline the most active regions where stars are being born and reveal hundreds of thousands of stars.
Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that form complex structures from compact spheres to long, stringy filaments.
Blue and violet represent the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and outflows from the super-massive black hole in the galaxy's centre.
The bright blue blob on the left side is an emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole. A supermassive black hole - some four million times more massive than the Sun - resides within the bright region in the lower right.
When these views are brought together, the composite image provides one of the most detailed views ever of our galaxy's mysterious core.
DNA Nebula
Seven questions that keep physicists up at night. Among them:
Why this universe?
What is everything made of?
How does complexity happen?
What is reality really?
"We still don't know how ordinary window glass works and keeps it shape," said Professor Leo Kandanoff from the University of Chicago, one of the physicists interviewed.
Is it a liquid, a solid or some "distinctly different structure with properties of both liquids and solids?
Look at this amazing demonstration of Cell Size and Scale from the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah.
Use the slider to zoom into the nanoworld from coffee bean on down to the carbon atom, passing egg, sperm, influenza virus and water molecule along the way.
Via Kottke, The long zoom of cells
Aspirin crystals
The Most Amazing Medical Images of 2009_
From the National Geographic comes a photo gallery by Charlie Hamilton James, featuring the Eurasian kingfisher, a Blaze of Blue
Mother Nature has provided a rich source of raw materials for a host of important drugs: aspirin comes from willow tree bark; the blood pressure drug captopril from the venom of a pit viper; warfarin, the widely used blood thinner, was derived from moldy sweet clover.
Now researchers think that desperately ill heart failure patients may find relief with the help of the eastern green mamba snake.
That's the hope, at least, of John Burnett, a heart failure expert at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. He and his colleagues have fashioned an experimental drug based in part on the venom of the snake, a tree-dwelling relative of the cobra that is found in eastern Africa.
The Deadly Mamba as a Lifesaver
Marvelous.
I found this fascinating.
Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life
Deep down, we are all cannibals. Our cells are perpetually devouring themselves, shredding their own complex molecules to pieces and recycling them for new parts. Many of the details of our endless self-destruction have come to light only in the past few years. And to the surprise of many scientists, links are now emerging between this inner cannibalism and diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.
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In fact, as Dr. Klionsky wrote in a paper published online in Trends in Cell Biology, this cannibalism may extend our lifespan. Increasing our body’s ability to self-destruct may, paradoxically, let us live longer.
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A cell uses the material to build new molecules, gradually recreating itself from old parts. “Every three days, you basically have a new heart,” said Dr. Ana Maria Cuervo, a molecular biologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
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Unfortunately, as we get older, our cells lose their cannibalistic prowess. The decline of autophagy may be an important factor in the rise of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders that become common in old age. Unable to clear away the cellular garbage, our bodies start to fail.
Scientific American has a most interesting article, Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?
why is love such a stimulating emotion? Why does the act of falling in love – or at least thinking about love – lead to such a spur of creative productivity?
One possibility is that when we’re in love we actually think differently. This romantic hypothesis was recently tested by the psychologists Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel at the University of Amsterdam. The researchers found that love really does alter our thoughts, and that this profound emotion affects us in a way that is different than simply thinking about sex.
The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.
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The takeaway lesson is that thinking about love, or anything that promotes a distal perspective or global processing, can make us more creative. Perhaps love is an especially potent way to induce in us a sense of transcendence – being in the here and now yet also contemplating the distant future and maybe even eternity.
I love these Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.
I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.
Part of the Unseen Harmony can also be heard in the Sound of Your Cells that make music way down at the molecular level.
Just how much better is the "New' Hubble?
Much better. Compare the earlier image of the Betterfly Nebula with the later one above.
Click on the thumbnail image of the entire Butterfly Nebula below to see it in its full glory.
Unfathomable beauty.
Who knew that recycling fat could have such astounding effects?
Fat sucked out of chunky thighs or flabby bellies might provide an easy source of stem cells made using new and promising technology, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found immature fat cells in the material removed during liposuction were easy to transform into cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.
They were easier to work with than the skin cells usually used to make iPS cells, the team at Stanford University's School of Medicine in California reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Liposuction leftovers make easy stem cells: study
Who knew that Yosemite was a hotspot for lunar rainbows also known as moonbows
Here's what the pioneering naturalist John Muir wrote about seeing such a sight in his 1912 book, The Yosemite.
“This grand arc of color, glowing in mild, shapely beauty in so weird and huge a chamber of night shadows, and amid the rush and roar and tumultuous dashing of this thunder-voiced fall, is one of the most impressive and most cheering of all the blessed mountain evangels.”
Thanks to Environmental Graffiti who has much more on The Elusive Beauty of Lunar Rainbows.
From APOD, what the sun's corona looks like in all its waves and filaments if you digitally process 33 photographs of the solar eclipse in March 2006.
The Big Picture has fine photos of The longest solar eclipse of the century and the people who turned out for it last week.
Stunning video of Aurora Australis: The Southern Lights, time lapse photography by Anthony Powell
Without the doctor she found in Boston who did operate successfully, Meg would not be alive, married and with a new job in publishing and a new charity to give support to other people suffering with brain tumors.
Meg was out of hospital within three days and back home within the month, just in time to celebrate her 2:1 degree result. Soon after she took a job in publishing.
'I can't forget about my brain tumour as I still have annual scans and will need them for the rest of my life,' she says. 'But they show that everything is fine and there are no cancer cells. I'm incredibly lucky.'
Meg didn't hesitate when Josh, an investment consultant, proposed on a trip to Venice last summer.
'Sadly Professor Black wasn't able to come to the wedding,' says Meg. 'But Josh and I thought about him so much that day. I owe my life to him - and to my mum who wouldn't give up until she had found a cure.
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'I've no doubt that, without my operation, I'd now be dead. Britain is gradually catching up with America. But, sadly, we still don't yet have the same high level of technology. I wish everyone could have the same chance I had.'
I have a lot of open tabs and many things to blog about, but this is the strangest, most surprising and wonderful news I've heard this week.
Blind man sees wife for first time after having a TOOTH implanted in his eye
'The doctors took the bandages off and it was like looking through water and then I saw this figure and it was her. She's wonderful and lovely. It was unbelievable to see her for the first time.'
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'I feel fantastic getting my sight back,' he said. 'I can't really describe it - it's beyond words. I was blind for 12 years and when my sight came back everything had changed.
Take 40 seconds and watch as the Milky Way passes over the night sky
Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo. via Neatorama
A lovely piece by Vanderleun reminding me that Miracles and Wonders Continue
And so, while the petty politicians bleat, and the small and not so small wars rage on in fits and starts, almost everyone on the Earth will sleep tonight with someone they don't really mind all that much. And tomorrow the kids in the playground across the street will run and skip and jump at recess. And tomorrow our planet, one of many like it or perhaps alone in the universe, will turn full of much more goodness and grace than hate and suffering.
And tomorrow, somewhere in mid-heaven, floating weightless between the Earth and the Sun, men and women will carefully repair and refurbish a telescope so that we might see ever deeper into the whole of creation, and perhaps even, just a bit, into the mind and purposes of God.
You've heard about circadian cycles but did you know that the thousands of genes in the body switch on and off over the 12-hour cycles governed by light and dark that set our waking an sleeping hours and eating habits.
Now scientists are finding that shorter cycles are also biologically encoded. 8 hour workday biologically wired
New research from the University of Pennsylvania and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies suggests that humans are biologically hard-wired to work only eight hours a day.
The standard work cycle appears to be programmed in the genes.
What is going on in the sky above that is otherwise invisible to your naked eye outside your suburban Boston Home.
As I grew older,...eventually I made some startling discoveries -- three of them -- and they have changed my life forever. The first of these is the amazing revelation that I am made up of stardust, that every part and parcel of who I am materially was once a piece of a star shining in the heavens. The second discovery is that the air I breathe is the air that has circled the globe and been drawn in and out by people, creatures and vegetation in lands and seas far away. But the most astounding discovery that both awakened and affirmed my early childhood awareness is the fact that I am part of a vast and marvelous dance that goes on unceasingly at every moment in the most minute particles of the universe....
Reality is stranger than we can imagine and so odd I can't even understand it.
A new strange particle that may break all known rules for creating matter was discovered in Illinois's Fermilab auto smasher and called the Y(4140). I do hope they get a better name. Maybe, the "dark particle" to join the other dark mysteries of the cosmos
Cosmic Web. Much of the missing "normal" matter from the in the cosmos resulting from the Big Bang has been found clustering around wispy ropes of invisible matter forming part of the "vast weblike superstructure of the universe within which galaxies are embedded like sparkling sequins."
The image from the University of Colorado at Boulder is a computer simulation of the universe showing a region of space
about 1.5. billion light-years a side.
Dark Matter ,an invisible form of matter that does not give off or reflect light yet accounts for the vast majority of mass in the universe, has been mapped in 3D and seems to provide "compelling evidence that the mysterious substance is the scaffolding upon which stars and galaxies are assembled".
Dark Energy, accounting for some 74% of energy in the universe repels gravity and is attributed to be the force behind the expansion of the universe.
It all reminds me of nothing so much as Indra's Net, the Buddhist concept of interpenetration of all phenomena.
"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." --Alan Watts
