The amount of weight you will lose on a diet appears to be related to your genetic makeup.
New gene test may help you pick your diet
Can't lose weight on a low-fat diet? Maybe you need to cut carbs instead, and a new genetic test may point the way, maker Interleukin Genetics Inc reported on Wednesday.
The small study of about 140 overweight or obese women showed that those on diets "appropriate" for their genetic makeup lost more weight than those on less appropriate diets, researchers told an American Heart Association meeting.
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Massachusetts-based Interleukin's $149 test looks for mutations in three genes, known as FABP2, PPARG and ADRB2.
The company says 39 percent of white Americans have the low-fat genotype, 45 percent have the type that responds best to a diet low in processed carbohydrates and an unlucky 16 percent have gene mutations that mean they have to watch both fat and processed carbohydrates.
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Over a year, people on diets appropriate to their genetic makeup, as determined by the test, lost 5.3 percent of body weight. People on mismatched diets lost 2.3 percent, the Stanford researchers told the meeting.
Cholesterol levels improved in line with weight loss, they said.
In Turkey, there is History in the Remaking as archeologists have found a temple complex that predates the Pyramids, called "Potbelly Hill, Göbekli Tepe in Turkish
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a "Rome of the Ice Age," as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island.
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Schmidt's thesis is simple and bold: it was the urge to worship that brought mankind together in the very first urban conglomerations. The need to build and maintain this temple, he says, drove the builders to seek stable food sources, like grains and animals that could be domesticated, and then to settle down to guard their new way of life. The temple begat the city.
While in Jerusalem, new excavations ihave revealed fortifications that date back 3000 years,
Archaeologist sees proof for Bible in ancient wall
An Israeli archaeologist said Monday that ancient fortifications recently excavated in Jerusalem date back 3,000 years to the time of King Solomon and support the biblical narrative about the era.
If the age of the wall is correct, the finding would be an indication that Jerusalem was home to a strong central government that had the resources and manpower needed to build massive fortifications in the 10th century B.C.
That's a key point of dispute among scholars, because it would match the Bible's account that the Hebrew kings David and Solomon ruled from Jerusalem around that time.
For close to 15 years now, I've thought that algae were the ultimate replacement for oil. But then, I've always had a soft spot for fish and vegetables that can be grown in water.
Scientists discuss use of algae as a biofuel
Experts project that algae-based biofuels could displace large volumes of diesel and jet transportation fuels.
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Algae is emerging as an attractive resource because it reproduces quickly, uses large quantities of carbon dioxide and can thrive in non-freshwater, including brackish and marine water, thus avoiding competition with traditional agriculture's freshwater needs. In addition, algae can produce biomass and oils, and is attractive as feedstock for renewable fuels, with potentially greater productivity and significantly less land use requirements than with other commodity crop feedstocks such as corn, soy and canola.
On the more personal side, you can grow fish, tomatoes and winter lettuce in a 250 feet greenhouse in Boulder, Colorado and create The Spotless Garden.
A form of year-round, sustainable agriculture called aquaponics — a combination of hydroponics (or water-based planting) and aquaculture (fish cultivation) — has recently attracted a zealous following of kitchen gardeners, futurists, tinkerers and practical environmentalists. It is either a glimpse into the future of food growing or a very strange hobby — possibly both.
Sylvia Bernstein, who has a blog devoted to aquaponics and who teaches it at the Denver Botanic Gardens, has set up quarters in a 240-square-foot greenhouse in her backyard in Boulder, Colo.
Elastic Water could eventually replace plastic
Bernama, a part of the Malaysian National News Agency, reports that Japanese scientists have created “elastic water." Developed at the Tokyo University, the new material consists mostly of water--95-percent--with an added two grams of clay and organic material. The resulting substance resembles jelly, but is extremely elastic and transparent.
The invention was originally revealed last week in the latest issue of the Nature scientific magazine. According to the article, the new material is quite safe for the environment and humans, and may be a “long-term” tool in medical technology, possibly to help wounded or surgically cut tissue to remain closed.
Bernama also reports that--by increasing its density--the new material could be used to produce "ecologically plastic materials," or could replace plastic altogether.
The sky over Hongdao, China, yesterday
Longest solar eclipse for 1000 years
Millions of people were plunged into darkness today as the longest solar eclipse for 1,000 years turned the Sun into a blazing ring of fire. Such a spectacle will not be seen again until December 23rd, 3043.
Unlike eclipses which block out the Sun entirely this one was annular meaning the Moon blocked most of the Sun's middle, but not its edges, causing it to look like a circular band of light.
These eclipses, which are considered far less important to astronomers than total eclipses of the Sun, occur about 66 times a century and can only be viewed by people in the narrow band along its path. On this occasion the band was 190 miles wide and passed over half the globe
I spent a good deal of yesterday shoveling snow and I still can appreciate the extraordinary beauty of these fabulous snowflakes. Kudos to David Defranza who put together the slideshow, The Unbelievable World of Snowflakes.
"Snow crystals," Ukichiro Nakaya wrote in 1939, "may be called letters sent from heaven." The Japanese physicist spent his life studying snowflakes, eventually becoming the first to create an artificial snow crystal in the laboratory.
British Novelist Jeanette Winterson commented: "They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"
Though written centuries earlier Francis Bacon has a response: "Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand—and melting like a snowflake..."
An accountant by day, Wally Pacholka is an award-winning photographer of the night skies.
Last month in the Mojave Desert, he was taking photos of the annual Geminid meteor shower when he captured this huge meteor hurtling to earth.
Northern Europeans are uniquely depigmented and it has something to do with solar UV, oceans and vitamin D and grains.
In my mind, the most interesting article I've read this week. Why Are Europeans White?
a satellite map of solar UV
Beer could be the new weapon against cancer
MEN now have another excuse to go down the pub thanks to new research suggesting that a compound in beer may prevent prostate cancer.
Tests showed that the ingredient, xanthohumol, blocked a biological pathway that allows prostate cancer to be fuelled by the male hormone testosterone.
The disease is commonly treated with drugs that act in a similar way.
Xanthohumol is a powerful antioxidant derived from hops. It belongs to a family of chemicals called flavonoids found in fruits and vegetables that are known to have anti-cancer properties.
Previous studies have already suggested that xanthohumol may block the female hormone oestrogen's ability to stimulate breast cancer. Scientists now believe it may have a similar effect in men.
In laboratory tests, the compound blocked the molecular "switch" that allows testosterone to trigger changes in prostate cells that may lead to cancer.
A mysterious light display appearing over Norway last night has left thousands of residents in the north of the country baffled.
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Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre - lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely.
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was flooded with telephone calls after the light storm - which astronomers have said did not appear to have been connected to the aurora, or Northern Lights, so common in that area of the world.
The mystery deepened tonight as Russia denied it had been conducting missile tests in the area.
Planetary nebula NGC 2818
In a repeat of the tradition begun last year, The Boston Globe's Big Picture offers up the Hubble Space Telescope Advent calendar with a new photo each day. The first is above. Below is today's.
The glittering light of some two million stars from the Omega Cenauri globular cluster, 17,000 light years away. About 200 such globular clusters orbit the Milky Way.
How did we ever think that space was empty? There is a fullness and abundance in this vast expanse we can only dimly grasp. To look at these photos is to grasp the awe the psalmist felt, "The heavens declare the glory of God". - Psalm 19.
This awesome airborne Moby Dick is not fictional but a work of nature - comprised of countless starlings moving in formation in the winter breeze.
Safety in numbers: The starlings having a whale of a time
"I should say it is the most complicated photograph I have ever made. It shows position of the Sun on the sky in the same time of a day during one year..."
Analemma is the name given to the trace of the annual movement of the Sun on the sky.
Good news. Sometimes, high-voltage power line corridors can save a species.
The corridors - carefully maintained to prevent trees from growing high enough to touch tension lines - can recreate the meadow and shrubby landscape that once dominated New England. Some scientists are even looking at these corridors as grassy escape routes for animals and plants from the harsher effects of climate change as temperatures rise worldwide.
“It’s hard to explain to conservation groups that [species] are being saved in the most unpopular and disturbed kinds of landscapes,” said Robert Askins, a biology professor at Connecticut College who has studied birds in transmission corridors. “I was shocked originally to be working in them myself.”
What kind of scientists dump their original data on which all their calculations have been based because of lack of space?
Climate change data dumped
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.
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In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”
Mark Steyn comments
Hysterical queens like Gordon Brown are demanding we introduce global taxation, micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, massive multi-trillion dollar transfers from the productive sector to eco-rackets and transnational bureaucracies, bovine flatulence levies and extraterrestrial surveillance of once sovereign states on the basis of fevered speculations for which there is no raw data:
Shannon Loves writes Arguably, these are the most important computer programs in the world. These programs generate the data that is used to create the climate models which purport to show an inevitable catastrophic warming caused by human activity. It is on the basis of these programs that we are supposed to massively reengineer the entire planetary economy and technology base.
The dumped files revealed that those critical programs are complete and utter train wrecks.
In the London Telegraph, Christopher Booker writes Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash.
This is a huge scientific scandal and a journalistic one as well. Steyn again.
If you rely on the lavishly remunerated "climate correspondents" of the big newspapers and networks, you'll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals - just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011. Indeed, even when a prominent media warm-monger addresses the issue, the newspaper prefers to reprint a month-old column predating the scandal. If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't. That's the problem.
Richard Fernandez takes a more measured tone.
The main objective criticism of the carbon-based warming model is that it is not proved. That’s different from saying it’s not true. It may or may not be true. However, until it is conclusively shown to be true and the results can be reproduced, it would be unwise public policy to embark on a trillion dollar amelioration program, with far-reaching economic, social and environmental effects. Government normally intervenes when there is a compelling public interest to do so. It should never intervene on the basis of an uncertain bet. Government is not the racetrack where bureaucrats can bet taxpayer money on the horses they fancy.
So what are the 192 countries who are about to converge on Copenhagen to do? Roger L. Simon says
The time would be better spent drinking aquavit in Tivoli Gardens than it would spending a fair portion of the world’s wealth on anthropogenic global warming that could be either an illusion or a very minor contributing factor to a far more complex problem. Let’s postpone.
The UN doubles down Leaked emails won't harm UN climate body. So has President Obama who announced a major commitment to cutting greenhouse gases. On what basis? This is ridiculous, a commitment based on no facts without any scientific grounding.
Let's just note for the record the complete failure of Cap and Trade in Europe which so far is estimated to have cost European taxpayers $140 billion last year alone.
UPDATE. What one climate researcher, Eduardo Zorita says
Research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. .... The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas...
I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'.
Patient trapped in a 23-year 'coma' was conscious all along
A car crash victim diagnosed as being in a coma for the past 23 years has been conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben was paralysed but had no way of letting doctors know that he could hear every word they were saying.
'I dreamed myself away,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state.
He added: 'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.'
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Mr Houben described the moment as 'my second birth'. Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen.
Mr Houben said: 'All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.'
It was a high tech brain scan that revealed that Houben's brain was still functioning almost completely normally.
It's almost to imagine the extraordinary isolation of those aware but unable to communicate.
They are The Undead.
On the Very Edge of Life and Death.
The sensation surrounding the publication of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by the French editor Jean-Dominque Bauby was as much for the revelation of the existence of such a thing as 'locked-in syndrome' as for the courage and humanity of Jean Do, who wrote his memoir in his head and communicated sentence by sentence through the blinking of his eyes.
Later, the artist Julian Schnabel made the quite extraordinary movie of the same name in 2007 which was nominated for four Academy awards.
Philip Jones is a climatologist at the University of East Anglia which maintains the "instrumental temperature record" on which much of global warming theory depends. He is director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU).
A couple of days ago, a hacker broke into that CRU and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet.
James Delingpole calls it Climategate and asks whether it's the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
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But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Delingpole summarizes: they manipulated evidence, had private doubts whether the world really is heating up, suppressed evidence, had fantasies of violence against climate sceptic scientists and discussed how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.
Remember this when people argue the science is settled.
Andrew Bolt excerpts the most damning of Professor Jones's emails.
Nigel Lawson in The London Times, Copenhagen will fail - and quite right too
Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.
It's about time since for years global warming scientists have been unwilling to debate the skeptics. Instead they insisted the science was settled, the consensus was overwhelming and called skeptics the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
When faced with fraud charges, they will be forced to defend their claims, reveal their evidence and submit to cross-examination.
Christopher Booker, The Obsession With 'Climate Change' Turning Out To Be The Most Costly Scientific Blunder In History
the most notorious example of this was the so-called 'hockey stick' graph, which for years was brandished to show that, after flat-lining for 1,000 years, global temperatures had suddenly soared upwards in the late 20th century to levels never known before in recorded history.
The hockey stick was used by the IPCC and Gore as the supreme icon of their cause. Then, two statisticians revealed that the graph had been created by a computer model programmed to produce hockey stick shapes whatever data were fed into it.
Before it is too late, we must insist our politicians re- examine the increasingly shaky scientific case on which all those proposals are based.
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No one has put this better than Professor Lindzen, one of the world's leading climatologists, when he wrote: 'Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st-century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections contemplated a roll-back of the industrial age.'
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
