Like new and protective parents, engineers watched as the TETWalker robot successfully traveled across the floor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Robots of this type will eventually be miniaturized and joined together to form “autonomous nanotechnology swarms” (ANTS) that alter their shape to flow over rocky terrain or to create useful structures like communications antennae and solar sails. This technology has the potential to directly support NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration.
Monthly Archive for March, 2005
Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance—whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities—is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.
The Gnostic concept of salvation, like other Gnostic concepts, is a subtle one. On the one hand, Gnostic salvation may easily be mistaken for an unmediated individual experience, a sort of spiritual do-it-yourself project. Gnostics hold that the potential for Gnosis, and thus, of salvation is present in every man and woman, and that salvation is not vicarious but individual. At the same time, they also acknowledge that Gnosis and salvation can be, indeed must be, stimulated and facilitated in order to effectively arise within consciousness.
From Gnosis.org via LVX23
We are constantly being reminded that China is an oppressive society with prisons full of political detainees and minimal human rights, but now it has released a report on US human rights abuses that makes it painfully clear that our country has lost the moral high ground because of our own tragic involvement in the use of torture.
Following is the full text of the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2004, released by the Information office of China’s State Council Thursday, March 3, 2005:
from Unknown Country
The cat protein Fel d 1 is what triggers rashes and wheezing in allergy sufferers. While some companies are trying to genetically engineer cats to eliminate the protein, Andrew Saxon’s team at the University of California at Los Angeles may have come up with a less drastic solution. By fusing the feline protein with a human one known to suppress allergic reactions, he has managed to stifle cat allergy in mice.
The feline part of the “chimeric” protein binds to the specific immune cells that generate the allergic reaction to Fel d 1. “We attached to the cat part a human part which says ‘stop’ to the cells,” Saxon says. He likens the cat protein to a “gas pedal” that triggers the release of inflammatory chemicals, and the human half to a brake. Although both parts bind to the cell, the “brake” signal dominates (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm1219).
HERE’S a Zen-like question. If a drop of liquid falls on a flat surface and there is no air around it, does it make a splash?
The answer, which may or may not help you reach nirvana, is no. “This was to us an incredibly surprising result,” says Sidney Nagel of the University of Chicago in Illinois. “If you didn’t have the air, you couldn’t splash. This means you would never get splashing on the moon.”
Nagel and fellow physicists Lei Xu and Wendy Zhang were trying to measure the energy of liquid droplets flying away from splashing drops of alcohol. To eliminate any effects of air, they carried out the experiment in a vacuum chamber, where they could reduce the pressure within the chamber from the standard atmospheric pressure of about 1 bar down to 10 millibars. The team found that the lower the air pressure, the less the liquid splattered. And the splash disappeared when the air pressure reached about 0.2 bar.
FIRST came the Angel of the North. Now motorists using the A1 are to be confronted with the far earthier figure of a giant reclining ?goddess? stretching her curves alongside nearly half a mile of the dual carriageway.
The woman, with breasts and hips up to 100ft high, will be created 10 miles north of Newcastle from the waste material generated by open-cast mining, with each of her enormous curves concealing millions of tons of mining spoil.
By the time the ?Goddess of the North? is finished in two to three years she should be among the world?s largest sculptures and visible from a passing passenger jet.
There’s a hand lying on the blanket on Matt Nagle’s desk and he’s staring at it intently, thinking “Close, close,” as the scientists gathered around him look on. To their delight, the hand twitches and its outstretched fingers close around the open palm, clenching to a fist.
In that moment, Nagle made history. Paralysed from the neck down after a vicious knife attack four years ago, he is the first person to have controlled an artificial limb using a device chronically implanted into his brain.
Mr Nagle’s device, called BrainGate, consists of nearly 100 hair-thin electrodes implanted a millimetre deep into part of the motor cortex of his brain that controls movement.
Wires feed the information from the electrodes into a computer which analyses the brain signals.
The signals are interpreted and translated into cursor movements, offering the user an alternative way to control devices such as a computer with thought.
He can think his TV on and off, change channels and alter the volume thanks to the technology and software linked to devices in his home. And even move prosthetic body parts.
A protein that’s key to determining the developing brain’s size and shape could be used to manipulate stem cells to rebuild the organ in adults.
Researchers from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have discovered that a form of the protein CPG15 protects brain cells from programmed cell death.
From Better Humans
At yesterday afternoon’s keynote conversation on the final day at SXSW, WorldChanging Ally Bruce Sterling and WorldChanging editor Alex Steffen asked: If the world is getting better, is it getting better fast enough? Who’s going to create a sustainable society, and how is it going to be done? Can we redefine, or redesign prosperity? Can we be sustainably prosperous?
Good questions for the crowd at the SXSW conference, which in the last 12 years has been a ringside seat for observing the creation, mass adoption, crash and reorganization of the virtual world.
The result was a great conversation with several awesome ideas and solutions suggested.
From WorldChanging
University of Connecticut Health Center scientist Robert Reenan has uncovered new rules of RNA recoding-a genetic editing method cells use to expand the number of proteins assembled from a single DNA code. According to his work, the shape a particular RNA adopts solely determines how editing enzymes modify the information molecule inside cells. The study may help explain the remarkable adaptability and evolution of animal nervous systems-including the human brain. The work appears in the March 17 issue of Nature.
via SciScoop
OSLO, March 30 (Reuters) – Humans are damaging the planet at an unprecedented rate and raising risks of abrupt collapses in nature that could spur disease, deforestation or “dead zones” in the seas, an international report said on Wednesday.
Light as we know it may be a direct result of small violations of relativity, according to new research scheduled for publication online Tuesday (March 22) in the journal Physical Review.
In discussing the work, physics professor Alan Kostelecky of Indiana University described light as “a shimmering of ever-present vectors in empty space” and compared it to waves propagating across a field of grain. This description is markedly different from existing theories of light, in which scientists believe space is without direction and the properties of light are a result of an underlying symmetry of nature.
Instead the report, co-authored by Kostelecky with physics professor Robert Bluhm of Colby College, discusses the possibility that light arises from the breaking of a symmetry of relativity. “Nature’s beauty is more subtle than perfect symmetry,” Kostelecky said. “The underlying origin of light may be another example of this subtlety.”
SciScoop from a UI press release
BEIJING, March. 29 (Xinhuanet)—Scientists have announced that stem cells from hair follicles can develop into neurons, muscle and more, suggesting that hair is a potent and accessible source of cells for regenerating tissues.
When the American Civil Liberties Union and gun-nut lobbies make common cause, it is time to pay attention. That is exactly the case with the new Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, an improbable coalition of liberal and conservative – nay, arch conservative – organizations cobbled together to contest the thoughtless renewal of the Patriot Act that President Bush has called for.
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