Strange but True: Turning a Wobbly Table Will Make It Steady

January 25, 2007 Strange but True: Turning a Wobbly Table Will Make It Steady For every table—turn, turn, turn... there is a proof By JR Minkel

reposted from: http://www.sciam.com
my highlights / edits

It's a problem as old as civilization: the wobbly table. You may have thought your only recourse against this scourge is a hastily folded cocktail napkin stuffed under the offending leg. If so, take heart, because mathematicians have recently proved a more elegant solution. Just rotate the table.

The intuitive argument, which dates back at least to a 1973 Scientific American column by Martin Gardner, is straightforward. Consider a square table with four equally long legs. Any three of the legs must be able to rest on the floor simultaneously, as a tripod does. Assume the floor undulates smoothly and the fourth leg hovers above it

Image: BURKARD POLSTER TURN THE TABLES on a wobbly table simply by rotating it. Mathematicians have proven the procedure will work. Click on this link for a video demonstrating the proof

Now imagine turning the table about its center while keeping the first three legs grounded, or balanced. Once the table has rotated by 90 degrees, the wobbly leg must lie below the floor. (If you do not see why, imagine pushing down equally on the wobbly leg and a neighboring leg until the neighbor sinks below the floor and the wobbly leg touches down.) And so, at some point along the wobbly leg's arc, it has to hit a spot on which it can rest. As simple as this argument may sound, however, proof was a long time coming.

The first serious mathematical inroad against table wobbling seems to have occurred in the late 1960s with Roger Fenn, a PhD student at the University of London. One day Fenn and his graduate adviser ended up at a coffee shop faced with—you guessed it—an unsteady table. "The table wouldn't stop wobbling and we fiddled it around until we got it to stop," recalls Fenn, who is now at the University of Sussex.

At his adviser's suggestion, Fenn wrote out a proof that for any smoothly curving floor that bulges upward like a hill, there is at least one way to position the table so that it is balanced and horizontal. But he did not reveal how exactly to find that sweet spot, and he quickly tabled the subject. "I didn't think people were going to take this very seriously," he admits. "You say to somebody you've met, 'Well I'm trying to put a table on the floor so it doesn't wobble'; they'll say, 'Oh yeah?'"

The season for proving the table turning hypothesis would not arrive for another 35 years. By then, the idea had become such a part of mathematical lore that two years ago mathematician Burkard Polster of Monash University in Australia included it in an article on neat math tricks for teachers. He promptly received a letter pointing out that the idea would not work if a floor was too uneven or possessed sheer cliffs, such as between tiles.

Polster rose to the challenge. "It's never been really pinpointed exactly what the ground should be like," he says. So he and some of his colleagues ran through the appropriate trigonometry and satisfied themselves that if a floor has no spots that slope by more than 35 degrees, then turning will indeed balance a square or rectangular table. They detail the proof in a paper accepted for publication by the Mathematical Intelligencer. (In one of those odd cases of co-discovery, a retired CERN physicist named André Martin published a similar result a few months before the Australians did.)

Polster's group even spells out a procedure for balancing the table [see video above]. First lift up the leg of the table diagonal from the wobbly leg. Make sure both legs are roughly equal distances off the ground and then begin rotating. "In practice," the researchers write, "it does not seem to matter how exactly you turn your table on the spot, as long as you turn roughly around the center of the table."

So, next time you feel a table start to tilt, put that napkin down and don't be shy about turning the tables on a wobbly dining experience. Rest assured, mathematics is on your side.

RELATED LINKS:
The proof by Polster and his colleagues Martin's proof "Mathsnacks," a column by Polster and Marty Ross for Vinculum magazine A Quarter-Century of Recreational Mathematics Profile: Martin Gardner Profile: Not Just Fun and Games

Mr. Deity - Allmightiness one day at a time

four short films produced, written, and starring Brian Dalton in which he explores the lighter side of religion through these humorous short films. Launched only last Monday, January 17, within a few days there were over 200,000 downloads of them from YouTube, iTunes, and at his own webpage, mrdeity.com. Everyone who watches them — whether religious, nonreligious, or antireligious — enjoys the wit and humor.

Brian is an ex-Mormon who came to skepticism in the late 1990s through the Skeptics Society, because he liked our nonconfrontational approach that allowed him to explore the many options available to believers who harbor doubts. In time he gave up his religion, but remains utterly fascinated by religion in general, and he has written a pilot for a television series based on his character, Mr. Deity. Enjoy!

reposted from: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-01-24.html
my highlights / edits

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris - review

In this week’s eSkeptic Kenneth W. Krause reviews Sam Harris’ book Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006, ISBN 0307265773). Krause lives in Wisconsin, along the Mississippi River. He is a former prosecutor and criminal defense attorney with degrees in law, history, literature, and fine art. Books editor for Secular Nation, Kenneth has recently contributed as well to Free Inquiry, Skeptic, and The Humanist.

reposted from: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-01-24.html
my highlights / edits

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Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation (photograph by Sara Allan)

The End of Faith Revisited: a Good Start

a book review by Kenneth W. Krause

Reason is to morality what design is to construction, and monotheism is a collective intellectual disaster that necessarily implies an international moral emergency. So says Sam Harris in his predictably candid, derisive and hyper-focused Letter to a Christian Nation, as he lectures an audience of agitated religionists who protested similar and, in some instances, identical scolds dispensed through his first book, The End of Faith.

Faith, by some accounts, is conviction to a belief despite facts and reason. When overwhelming majorities accept lesser standards of intellectual integrity, faith becomes institutionalized and potentially dangerous. Faith in omnipotence only exacerbates the problem. Christianity and Islam, especially, because they define in- and out-groups in terms of perpetual rewards and punishments, are inherently dangerous. Monotheists define morality according to no objective standard outside the Bible. Instead, religious affiliation necessarily depends upon the foundational texts that attempt in vain to identify both ethical and non-ethical behavior. Hence, for the faithful, any conceivable act may be defined as moral so long as the relevant god’s text can be interpreted to support it. Humans may piously slaughter other humans in any number, in any imaginable way, simply because their faith allows them to trust in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent creator who desires or all too regularly demands that they do so.

The Christian faithful, Harris contends, have inherited some of the most unethical standards imaginable. Consistent with Proverbs, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Exodus, Mark and Matthew, pious parents are obliged to thrash or kill their disobedient children. The Abrahamic texts insist that followers stone not only the adulterer, but also those who labor on the Sabbath. Although some Christians will argue that New Testament morals have superseded those of the Old, Harris counters that, according to the former, Jesus instructed his followers to remain true to the ancient laws. The Church incinerated heretics for more than 500 years as it cited allegedly validating chapter and verse. Augustine supposed that dissenters should be tortured; Aquinas directed that they be murdered. Both Luther and Calvin encouraged the slaughter of innocent apostates and Jews. In no Christian text was Jesus said to have objected to slavery; in many was the practice condoned.

The first four of the Ten Commandments, Harris observes, had nothing to do with morality. The rest clearly did, but were hardly original. Virtually every culture edified similar principles in its annals, laws, and myths. Regardless, morality predates recorded history and, perhaps, humanity itself. Our closest primate relatives demonstrate some degree of kin altruism and broader social concern. The point, of course, is that religious ethics represent only one phase of our moral evolution, a phase that humanity can and must transcend.

Hopelessly antiquated religions have grown increasingly counterproductive as sources of moral guidance. Christians delight in imagining themselves supremely ethical in their opposition to embryonic stem cell research and abortion. But neither stem cell use nor legal abortions harm anything capable of either experiencing loss or inspiring a reasonable sense of loss in others. Insisting that human “souls” can inhabit the microscopic recesses of a Petri dish is not a moral argument. Rather, it is the imposition of both intellectual and moral primitivism.

Indeed, religious ethics often seem impervious to empathy. Many Christian conservatives oppose vaccination for the human papillomavirus, now the most common sexually transmitted disease in America, largely because they consider HPV an obstacle to premarital sex. The Vatican contests condom use even to thwart the spread of HIV. Christopher Hitchens summarized the crisis well when he pointed out that Mother Teresa “was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.” Teresa might have performed admirable deeds for humanity as an individual, but it should be clear that she brought such goodness despite, rather than because of, her religion. That so much suffering can be directly attributed to religion, Harris concludes, should inform us that honest and thorough criticism of religious faith is both our intellectual and our moral responsibility.

To religious moderates, Harris offers neither sanctuary nor convenient alliance. Temperance and tolerance are not solutions to this deadly predicament. To the contrary, religious liberalism’s demand for respect only lends ostensible though certainly not actual credibility to religious dogma and fanaticism. Moderates simply cannot continue to have it both ways, the author demands. Either human beings created the Bible, or they did not. Either Christ was a man, or he was not. If so, the fundamental and necessary tenets of Christianity are and have always been false. At some point, Harris persists, one side will win and the other will lose.

Speaking truth to both religious and secular power, however redundantly, has become Sam Harris’s claim to fame, perhaps even his raison d’être. Although the underlying problem is a bit more complex than the author appears to recognize, his assessment of faith’s threat to human survival is sound. Arguably, much of the developed world seems well on its way to begetting the end of faith, or, more precisely, faith of the licensed, monotheistic variety. In America, of course, the crisis is more severe; a mere letter to a Christian nation will never suffice. But if such letters are read and rejoined by the right Christians, perhaps history might prove them to have been a very good start indeed.

Large Hadron Collider - the basics

The Large Hadron Collider: Bring it on!

• 27 January 2007
• Davide Castelvecchi

reposted from: New Scientist
my highlights / edits

IT'S official: 2007 is the year of the LHC. In case you haven't heard, the initials stand for the Large Hadron Collider, which is nearing completion at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Just a snowball's throw from Mont Blanc, it is not only the hottest thing in physics but also the largest, most elaborate scientific instrument of all time.

After 20 years of anticipation, the LHC is set to switch on this November, and soon thereafter CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, will become the proud operator of the world's most powerful particle accelerator. It will smash protons together with seven times the energy and at 100 times the rate of the top collider to date, the Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago. That will allow it to probe the interactions of particles down to the unprecedented scale of 10^-17 centimetres, roughly the size of the universe a trillionth of a second after the big bang, when the known fundamental forces of nature were born. The LHC is widely expected to usher in a new era of particle physics, perhaps even pointing the way to the fabled "theory of everything".

Not surprisingly, what lies ahead is making physicists positively giddy. "We are like children waiting for Christmas," says JoAnne Hewett, a theorist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. "You can't imagine the excitement." Immense technical hurdles remain, however, not least the problem of handling the amount of raw data the LHC will produce over its projected 20-year lifetime, which could exceed that in all the words spoken in human history.

Help might be on the way in the form of a controversial method for automating the data analysis. Some researchers, including Bruce Knuteson of Fermilab and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say their software is the fastest way to reveal hints of new physics. Others see it as a recipe for confusion and wild goose chases. The way future experiments are done and analysed may hinge on who is right.

The past dozen years have been a dry spell for particle physics. Despite all the theorists' fancy ideas, experimenters have found no new particles since 1995 when the top quark - the last in the family of six quarks which are among the building blocks of matter - was discovered at the Tevatron.

Since then, the immense multinational effort to build the LHC has gone into high gear, and the machine will start collecting data just over a year from now. Inside its 27-kilometre underground ring it will turn nanograms of hydrogen into two merry-go-rounds of protons travelling in opposite directions. Each beam will be loaded with 0.3 gigajoules of energy, equivalent to that of a 400-tonne French TGV train running at 140 kilometres per hour. The two beams of protons will crash head-on at several points in the ring where monumental detectors are now nearing completion. The largest of these, called Atlas (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), are where thousands of researchers will be looking for new physics.

How exactly? Inside the detectors, the quantum shrapnel produced by colliding protons will scatter like colours in a Jackson Pollock painting. Courtesy of Einstein's E = mc², much of the protons' energy will mutate into mass, and the particles that come out as debris will often be heavier - even hundreds of times heavier - than the protons that went in. The researchers hope that among those heavy particles will be ones of a kind nobody has seen before. "The most exciting thing the LHC can potentially discover is something we cannot predict," says CERN theorist Alvaro De Rujula.

The LHC could produce particles that turn into ephemeral, mini black holes; particles that solve the mystery of dark matter; particles that spend much of their lives in other dimensions of space; or even particles that explain why the universe seems perfectly tuned for us to exist. No one will catch them directly, though. Rare particles tend to have very short lives and almost instantly decay into more ordinary stuff. So physicists must reconstruct the nature of the rare particles by looking at this debris.

At previous colliders, experimentalists usually knew how to do this. Virtually all the phenomena they observed fit the so-called "standard model" of particle physics developed in the 1970s, in which quarks, electrons, neutrinos, photons and other known particles play the fundamental roles. From its equations, physicists were able to calculate the patterns that should appear in the zillionth of a second after a collision. The main tool for this was invented by Richard Feynman in the 1950s: Feynman diagrams show how old particles can combine into new ones, annihilate into pure energy, procreate, and decay by splitting into other particles. Diagrams can include the cameo appearance of a hypothetical new particle, along with the signature combinations of outgoing stuff that betray its presence. Catch that signature in your detector and you can claim discovery of a particle even if you haven't observed it directly.

Hello Higgs

At the LHC, this time-honoured method should be useful for at least one task: finding the Higgs boson, the only particle in the standard model that has yet to be observed. The Higgs is the crucial link that explains how other particles such as quarks and electrons acquire their masses. Its discovery is expected to confirm the standard model as the ruler over all known forces except gravity. Despite the efforts of researchers at four machines, including ongoing measurements at the Tevatron, the Higgs has remained elusive.

All the predictions point to its mass being no more than 200 times the mass of a proton, which is well within the LHC's reach. If the LHC doesn't find it, that would mean that either Einstein's E = mc² or quantum theory - the two pillars of modern physics on which the standard model is predicated - is wrong. That would lead to a far greater upheaval in physics than the discovery of any new particle, but it's very unlikely. "The Higgs has to be there," says Fermilab theorist Joe Lykken.

So far so good, but the LHC's discoveries are expected to go beyond the standard model and include a zoo of new particles. Theorists have proposed hundreds of models for what such particles would look like, but they are all speculative. The LHC could validate one of these models, or perhaps show that they are all wrong. What is challenging is that some of the most popular models predict very similar signatures, which could give researchers fits when they try to figure out which is correct.

Take supersymmetry, which unites the various forces of nature at high energies. This model says that for each standard-model particle there exists a heavier "superpartner" particle. At the LHC, such superpartners should appear in pairs of identical, electrically charged particles. Seeing such pairs, or the particles they decay into, would be a sure sign of new physics, says Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Trouble is, a similar signature is also predicted by a model called universal extra dimensions, in which each particle we see has more massive counterparts shadowing it in an additional dimension of space that we cannot see. Like superpartners, these would show up by decaying into pairs of identical particles with a net electric charge. The two types of counterparts would differ in a crucial quantum property known as spin, but the LHC does not have a direct way of measuring this.

For now, though, most experimentalists are less concerned about validating theories than they are about discovering new particles, a feat which would likely earn them a Nobel prize. "People always ask me, 'If you discover a new particle, how will you distinguish supersymmetry from extra dimensions?'" says Ian Hinchliffe, who leads one of the Atlas teams. "I'll discover it first, I'll think about it on the way to Stockholm, and I'll tell you on the way back."

That's all well and good, but a legitimate issue remains that could ultimately determine the success of the LHC. Waiting for specific patterns to hit the detectors - which is what most researchers plan to do, with each group specialising in just a few possible outputs - might mean missing the most interesting new physics.

Researchers at the Tevatron were able to discover the top quark because they knew it would tend to decay into one electron or muon (a heavier electron-like particle), one neutrino and hundreds of less interesting particles - and that's precisely what they found in the detectors. This "top-down" approach has worked fine at the energies probed so far, where virtually all observations have been in agreement with the standard model. On the rare occasion that unexplained phenomena have occurred, physicists have erred on the side of caution and put them down to statistical flukes, quantum fluctuations or measurement errors. That is expected to change at the energies produced by the LHC, where brand new phenomena should be plentiful. "The most likely scenario is that we're going to have a ton of weird stuff to explain," says Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University.

"The most likely scenario is that we're going to have a ton of weird stuff to explain"

That's why some researchers, including Arkani-Hamed, say a revised approach is called for. Instead of trying to check whether a particular model can fit a predetermined signature, they would examine all patterns of debris hitting the detectors that can't be explained by the standard model, and which are frequent enough to not be statistical flukes. They would then work upwards from these observations to make a guess at which model is likely to fit the data. This process, says Arkani-Hamed, needs the participation of theorists who in the past have rarely taken part in analysing data. It would rely on sophisticated software to select which patterns of debris, or "channels", to look at.

Such software has recently been developed by Knuteson, Stephen Mrenna and others at Fermilab, and by Sascha Caron and collaborators at the DESY lab in Hamburg, Germany. Knuteson started working on these methods in the late 1990s, and when he has applied them to Tevatron data the results have matched the speed and accuracy of conventional top-down methods. That much is uncontroversial. Where Knuteson and Mrenna have broken contentious new ground is in creating an algorithm aimed at a more ambitious bottom-up search for new physics (www.arxiv.org/hep-ph/0602101).

Reverse Feynman

For a given channel - an unusual combination of quarks and neutrinos, say - the computer uses quantum theory to reverse-engineer the hundreds of possible Feynman diagrams that could have produced these particles, and suggests ways to tweak the standard model to explain them - perhaps by introducing a new particle at an intermediate stage. This might be a superpartner of a regular particle, or something else entirely. "It begins to automate the building of new models," says Knuteson.

Critics say that this could lead to too many false alarms. "When you look at such immense sets of data, there are always statistical fluctuations," warns Michelangelo Mangano of CERN. "This kind of approach has made people claim false discoveries, slowing down the progress of physics." Knuteson's team insists that the software has safeguards against this, and can discern which hints of new physics are statistically most relevant. One event in an unexpected channel would be dismissed, but hundreds of them - especially if the standard model says they should be rare - would flag up something worth paying attention to.

It is too early to know who is right, and what exactly the bottom-up approach will yield. Knuteson plans to join the CMS experiment, where he says that looking at hundreds of channels simultaneously should accelerate the process of discovery. Caron is already a member of Atlas, where he plans a similarly broad search. If their approach proves successful it could eventually change the way theoretical physics is done. "We will get to the point where developing new theories, something currently in the human domain, will be done by computers," Knuteson says.

However the results from the LHC are interpreted, hopes are high that they will lead us to new and unexpected discoveries about the most basic influences in the universe. That is where the excitement really begins, and Arkani-Hamed is confident that it will be people, not machines, that make the breakthroughs. "Going from the data to a beautiful theory," he says, "is something a computer will never do."

Davide Castelvecchi is a science writer based in Washington DC

From issue 2588 of New Scientist magazine, 27 January 2007, page 36-39

Scientific American presents Sci-Doku puzzle

SCI-DOKU is a sudoku puzzle that uses letters instead of numbers, with an added twist: a science-related clue accompanies each puzzle and the answer is spelled out in one row or column of the puzzle.

Try it!

(I took 33minutes 49secs to do my first Sci-Doku)

Fibre 'lowers breast cancer risk'

Wholemeal bread should be part of a high-fibre diet

Pre-menopausal women who eat large amounts of fibre could halve their breast cancer risk, a UK study has suggested.

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6287915.stm
my highlights / edits

The University of Leeds researchers, who studied 35,000 women, found those who ate 30g of fibre a day had half the risk of those who ate less than 20g.

They said women should try to increase their fibre intake.

Experts said the International Journal of Epidemiology study was more evidence of the benefits of a healthy diet.

The average person in the UK eats 12g of fibre a day.

To eat 30g, a person would need to eat a high-fibre cereal for breakfast, switch from white or brown bread to wholemeal and ensure they have five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

A team from the University of Leeds Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics have been monitoring the eating habits and health of more than 35,000 women for seven years.

It further highlights the importance of eating a healthy diet for reducing the risk of cancer Ed Yong, Cancer Research UK

They were aged 35 to 69 at the beginning of the study.

Diet was assessed using a 217-item food questionnaire.

Processing

Unlike other studies looking at fibre intake and breast cancer risk, the women studied had a range of diets including groups who were wholly vegetarian or who did not eat red meat.

Just under 16,000 women were pre-menopausal when they entered the study, with 18,000 post-menopausal.

257 pre-menopausal women developed breast cancer during the study, which was initially funded by the World Cancer Research Fund.

They were found to be women who had a greater percentage of energy derived from protein, and lower intakes of dietary fibre and vitamin C, compared to women who did not develop cancer.

However, the effect was not seen in the post-menopausal group, in which 350 developed breast cancer.

The researchers say this may be because fibre affects the way the body processes and regulates the female hormone oestrogen.

Levels of the hormone are higher in pre-menopausal women.

Early exposure

Professor Janet Cade, who led the research, said: "Our study found no protective effect in the older group, but significant evidence of a link in the pre-menopausal women.

"The relevant exposure may be earlier in life, explaining why the protective effect was not shown in the post-menopausal group."

She added: "In addition, post-menopausal women with high body mass indexes [who are overweight or obese] have an increased risk of breast cancer.

"Their weight may over-ride any other effects such as benefits from fibre."

Professor Cade added: "It goes along with the general healthy eating advice to make sure that you are getting plenty of fibre in your diet through breakfast cereals, bread, pasta, fruit and vegetables."

Ed Yong, cancer information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "We already advise eating a diet rich in fibre to reduce the risk of bowel cancer. "This study suggests that it could help protect against breast cancer in younger women too."

He added: "Until now, the evidence that fibre could reduce the risk of breast cancer has been inconsistent.

"This study suggests that this is because any protective effects are limited to women before their menopause.

"It further highlights the importance of eating a healthy diet for reducing the risk of cancer."

Dr Sarah Cant, of the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer said separating out the individual effects of different food was difficult.

Carl Sagan explains Evolution of Life (7 minute video)

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe - Podcasts

• Podcast
  
• Website

Great science & pseudoscience chat from these guys

Recommended!

Lego - Periodic Table

Richard Dawkins Multimedia Resource Pages

Chris Street took the photo, with Richard Dawkins permission, March 2005. (see Wikipedia). Below are two great pages with loads of multimedia links.

links from: http://richarddawkins.net/links
my highlights / edits

1. Dave's Richard Dawkins Resource Page maintained by David J. Grossman
2. Freethought Multimedia Index - Richard Dawkins

'Altruistic' brain region found

The brain area was more active among the altruistic group

Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist.

Altruism - the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself - appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus.

Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour.

The Duke University Medical Center study on 45 volunteers is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Selfless tendencies

The participants were asked to disclose how often they engaged in different helping behaviours, such as doing charity work, and were also asked to play a computer game designed to measure altruism.

The study authors say their work could have important implications.

They are now exploring ways to study the development of this brain region in early life and believe such information may help determine how altruistic tendencies are established.

Researcher Dr Scott Huettel explained: "Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviours like altruism."

Reciprocal helping

Dr George Fieldman, member of the British Psychological Society and principal lecturer in psychology at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, said it was conceivable that there would be a region of the brain involved with altruism.

He added: "If you can educate from an early stage to be more altruistic that would be good for the community, and if you could also show that had an impact on brain development that would be very interesting."

He said true altruism was a rare or even intangible thing.

"Altruism is usually reciprocal - you do something for someone and you expect something back ultimately.

"The other types are kin altruism, giving to ones relatives, and being cheated or cuckolded."

He said it would be interesting to study people at the extremes of altruism and selfishness and see if their brains differed significantly.

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6278907.stm
my highlights / edits

original source: Nature Neuroscience

Abstract: Although the neural mechanisms underlying altruism remain unknown, empathy and its component abilities, such as the perception of the actions and intentions of others, have been proposed as key contributors. Tasks requiring the perception of agency activate the posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC), particularly in the right hemisphere. Here, we demonstrate that differential activation of the human pSTC during action perception versus action performance predicts self-reported altruism.

Introduction to Science Topics

Seed Magazine has some high quality free cribsheets on science topics:

• Cribsheet #1: Stem Cells
• Cribsheet #2: Climate Change
• Cribsheet #3: Avian Flu
• Cribsheet #4: Hybrid Cars
• Cribsheet #5: Nuclear Power
• Cribsheet #6: Hurricanes
• Cribsheet #7: Extinction
• Cribsheet #8: The Elements

reposted from: Seed Magazine.

The Elements - Formation in Big Bang & Stars

Carl Sagan famously said, "We are made of star stuff," and how right he was. While hydrogen and helium formed shortly after the big bang, the heavier elements—the stuff that makes up the Earth and its inhabitants—come from stars. This cribsheet covers the formation of the elements: how they were created, when they first came into existence, and what we can learn about our early universe from the matter that is here today. In addition, we tell you which elements are most abundant and how a star's luminosity and temperature determine what it produces.

Download the Crib Sheet

reposted from: http://www.seedmagazine.com

The Inexorable Rise of Spam can be Halted .. if ..

Short Cuts by John Lanchester

Some good news from the airy summits of Davos: ‘Spam,’ Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum, ‘will be solved within two years.’ Great!

reposted from: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n02/lanc01_.html
my highlights / edits

The problem will be fixed by the creation of a challenge-and-response system to slow down, then block, and finally – and this is the killer – charge money for unauthenticated emails. At the moment, an email can be from anybody: you can fill in the ‘from’ section of an email to claim that it is from anyone in the world, up to and including billg@microsoft.com. (This is one reason why it is a bad idea to bounce spam back to the sender – the sender is quite likely not to have sent it.) Those fake emails are free to send. So the two-step solution to spam is, first, to make sure that it is from whom it says it is from, and then to stop making it free to send in anonymous bulk. This will make spamming uneconomic, and presto, email will go back to being as straightforwardly useful as it once was.

The trouble is, Gates made his prediction/promise about spam on 23 January 2004. Judging by my inbox this morning, three years later – more than a hundred spam emails, with an emphasis on pump-and-dump financial ‘tips’, phishing or fake security announcements, and phoney pharmacies – he was talking total bollocks. (By the way, the subjects of those emails are not random, but are the topics professional spammers find have the highest rate of response. There seems to be less porn, or as wags dub it ‘pr0n’, than there once was – which may reflect the fact that there is now so much free pr0n on the internet that fewer mugs will pay for it.) Gates’s prediction was not just wrong, it is steadily getting wronger, as rates of spam have gone up sharply in the last few months. If you have the impression you have been getting significantly more spam lately, you are right.

The problem is botnets. A ‘bot’ is a piece of software which does a job automatically; most bots are benign, but a botnet is a collection of computers that have been infected with a piece of software which lets someone take over the machine via the internet, without its owner’s knowledge or consent. The controller of the botnet, known as the ‘herder’, can then use the infected computers to do whatever he wants. Almost all affected machines run some version or other of Microsoft’s Windows, the herders’ preferred target and a system known to be critically flawed from the security point of view. Unfortunately, it’s also the most ubiquitous computer operating system in the world. The largest botnet so far discovered was busted by the Dutch police in October 2005: it consisted of 1.5 million infected machines. Your computer could be part of a botnet and you would not know; you could be reading this online while your computer acts as part of a botnet, and you would not know. It is a statistical certainty that many people reading this piece will have a computer that belongs to a botnet.

The herders sell the use of their botnet to anyone who wants to use it – in practice, professional criminals and spammers. (That, most of the time, is a distinction without a difference.) Botnets are sometimes used by blackmailers or saboteurs to perform ‘denial of service’ attacks, bombarding a targeted internet server with so much traffic that it collapses: a tactic which is very hard to defend against, since the machines doing the attacking are scattered all over the world, and have no connection to each other. But the main things botnets do, at the moment, is send spam. Formerly they sent a huge amount from each infected computer, but that would slow down a machine so much that its user might notice, and could also attract the attention of the Internet Service Provider who was forwarding the traffic; so the herders got wise and now are more likely to send smaller amounts of mail from a larger number of ‘nodes’. You can judge the effectiveness of this tactic by the state of your inbox.

All of this makes botnets hard to police and, consequently, makes spam hard to control, since so much of it comes from the computers of respectable citizens who have no idea what’s going on inside their own hardware. The next generation of Microsoft Windows, Vista, just now bursting on a not-all-that-eager world, has technical changes designed to improve the security of Microsoft’s computing out of all recognition. The trouble is that the already-infected machines aren’t magically going to go away; so even if Vista is totally secure, the problem of spam will be a long time in passing. And that is a big, big ‘if’. Hackers who regard Microsoft as evil, and professional criminals who make their living from unsecure computers, were already working flat-out to crack the security of Vista, even before Microsoft started selling it to consumers.

Spam is illegal in the EU – or rather, it is banned by an EU directive, which is not quite the same thing. Not that it matters, since the directive manifestly had no effect. The thing which would make spam go away is if people never, ever, not under any circumstances, clicked on the links in a spam email; and never, ever, ever sent any money to any of the people offering anything for sale via spam. Unless and until people have learned not to reply to spam, as surely as they know not to hand over their credit cards to a stranger in the street, spam will be a fact of life. The risk is that if people don’t, email will become gradually less useful; younger people already show a marked preference for technologies such as instant messaging and texting. If Vista is not secure, and if spam continues to grow, we might arrive at a time when the heroic period of email is as much a subject of nostalgia as carrier pigeons, or those pneumatic tubes which used to whizz messages around central Paris, or the old days when you could rely on the Royal Mail.

What do the people like - science or controversy?

John Lynch was wondering what posts of his over the past year have received the most hits; What do people link to and what do they comment on? The "top twenty" posts can be characterized into three major categories: "anti-science" had 10 posts whilst posts about religion, atheism and/or Dawkins' had 8 posts.

This really boils down to issues relating to science and religion, with only two other topics (the backscatter x-ray being used at airports ["airport porn"] and a strange beastie in Maine) appearing in the top 20 list.

John found that controversy, it appears, is popular, certainly more so than scientific stories.

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2007/01/what_do_the_people_like_scienc.php

In UK 70% say Evolution is True - in USA 40%

Science published a short comparative study of international acceptance of evolution. Thirty-four countries were polled.

United Kingdom scored 70% (6th) whilst USA scored 40% (33rd) - edging out Turkey - for last place!

99% of the Turkish population are muslims. Why is Turkey is so anti-evolution?

reposted from: http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2006/08/go_usa_were_2_kind_of.php

Reference: Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, and Shinji Okamoto (2006) "Public Acceptance of Evolution" Science Aug 11 2006: 765-766.

Google Reader - automatically advises you when a webpage has been updated using a "Feed"

Google Reader is brilliant and its Free!

A webpage has a feed - which sends you notification automatically if a webpage has been altered - if you see these symbols:

• Google Reader FAQ

1. What is a feed? What does it mean to subscribe?

Websites publish lists of updates—called "feeds"—that indicate when new content has been posted. When you subscribe to a feed, Google Reader starts monitoring that feed for updates. You don't have to give any personal information, it doesn't cost a dime, and it's easy to unsubscribe.

2. How can I subscribe to feeds?

If you know the address of the feed you want to subscribe to, you can just click on the "Add Subscriptions" link and paste the address in the text field that appears. Otherwise, our directory offers an easy way to find and add feeds. Finally, you can find your own feeds.

• Getting Started

Dyadic pairing - a two conversation with a chosen friend

Francis Crick (wikipedia) intellectual technique, thoughout his life, was a dyadic pairing, a long running two way conversation with a chosen friend somewhere between an interrogation and a Socratic dialogue (wikipedia). In the periods when he had no such sounding board, he was visibly at a loss. Georg Krissel was the first to take the part, later filled in turn by Jim Watson, Sydney Brenner and Christof Koch. (source: Francis Crick by Matt Ridley, Chapter 2, pg 17).

Has Internet Chat largely replaced dyadic pairing today?

Videos: Human Genome Collection by Nature journal

• 5 Videos
• Introduction, How it Started, How it was paid for, Practical Implications, Ethics
  

Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley

• Podcast - Matt Ridley talking to New Scientist (8 mins).
• BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2007 Monday February 12th, 2007 - Tickets available. Speakers: Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley
  
• Review by New Scientist:-

FRANCIS CRICK did not fit the stereotype of a scientific genius. He was not eccentric, shy or even absent-minded. Rather, he was extrovert, loud (his braying laugh often annoyed), gregarious and fond of pretty girls. He was striking-looking, too: tall, with blue eyes.

Worse still for purveyors of cliché, some of his best thoughts came to him in pubs rather than labs, and were developed through endless conversations, especially with a series of close intellectual partners. Among them were Jim Watson (who described him as "the brightest person I have ever known"), Sydney Brenner, who shared a lab and visits to the Eagle pub with Crick for 20 years, and the young neuroscientist Christof Koch, with whom Crick worked for the last 18 years of his life. Special partner or not, the rules were always the same: "there was no shame in floating a stupid idea, but no umbrage was to be taken if the other person said it was stupid".

All this we learn from Matt Ridley's biography of Francis Crick, the first account of his life to appear since he died in 2004. It is an excellent, fast-paced tale of a long, astonishing life: Crick could serve as exemplar for late starters and for those who refuse to quit.

Born in 1916 in the English east Midlands, into a family of Northamptonshire shoe manufacturers whose business had gone to pot, he managed only a second-class degree in physics before the second world war arrived, and went off to work on anti-ship mines at the Admiralty. He finally gained a research studentship at Cambridge at the age of 31, and, at 35, as Jim Watson put it, "he was almost totally unknown... and most people thought he talked too much". Yet within a couple of years, in 1953, he and Watson had cracked DNA.

Ridley is right to say that elucidating DNA's structure was not Crick's greatest achievement. He showed his real genius over the following decades as the central theorist and driving force of the new science of molecular biology. Along the way there were wonderful eureka moments. Ridley tells the story of Crick, Brenner and others interrogating the leading bacterial geneticist François Jacob when: "Suddenly, Brenner let out a 'yelp'. He began talking fast. Crick began talking back just as fast. Everybody else in the room watched in amazement. Brenner had seen the answer and Crick had seen him see it." This was the moment they solved the problem of how the DNA code was turned into protein: messenger RNA was read at a ribosome like a tape in a tape reader.

Crick's ambitions were always immodest. In 1946, when he decided to re-enter science, he said that he must do something "heroic" and "explode a mystery". The only problem was deciding whether to crack "the secret of the brain or the secret of life" first.

It was not until he was in his early 60s that he began to switch from molecular biology to neurobiology, settling at one of the leading research centres, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. At the late age of 80, Crick wrote with Koch the defining paper on the neural correlate of consciousness; eight years later, on the day he died, Crick was still working on a final, important paper.

So what was it like to work with Crick? Here Ridley's scientific biography cannot match Watson's intensely personal book, The Double Helix, with his up-close sketches of the unbearably quick-minded Crick refusing to hide from his colleagues that they "did not realise the real meaning of their latest experiments". My own recollection of conversation with Crick was his rejoinder to an idea of mine: "Let me explain why I think that is nonsense." This was neither arrogance nor rudeness; he was simply inviting you to join him in argument on his lifelong quest for truth.

“He was totally unknown... and he talked too much”

That last paper of Crick's was typical. He was examining the little-known brain structure called the claustrum, which he thought might be critical in tying together the components of consciousness. Experiments, he felt, were urgently needed. The paper ends: "What could be more important? So why wait?"

As Ridley recounts, on 28 July 2004 Crick was correcting the paper when he "became semi-coherent, imagining that Christof Koch was there and arguing with him". Later that day he died. With a little more time, perhaps he would have cracked his second secret too.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 53

Quotes by Richard Dawkins

over 50 quotes by Richard Dawkins.
source: http://richarddawkins.net/quotes

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out."

"...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."

"With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns."

"...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions."

"Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it."

"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'."

"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child."

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'."

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes."

"Hot on the heels of its magnanimous pardoning of Galileo, the Vatican has now moved with even more lightning speed to recognise the truth of Darwinism."

"Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests""

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

"There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"

"Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain."

"Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye..."

"For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye."

"Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here)."

"Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles."

"Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe."

"If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake."

"The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans."

"You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."

"For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria."

"It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science."

"if you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so."

"It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science."

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."

"There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true."

"I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful."

"Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it."

"Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading."

"...the stereo- type of scientists being scruffy nerds with rows of pens in their top pocket is just about as wicked as racist stereotypes."

"I want science to be taken seriously, because, after all, it's less ephemeral--it has a more eternal aspect than whatever the politics of the day might be, which, of course, gets the lead in the news."

"Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false."

"It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.."

"Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?"

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."

"I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns. "

Firmicute Gut Bacteria make you fatter - Nature magazine

reposted from: Nature Podcast: 21 December 2006
from Nature Podcast / Original audio source
Nature Video: http://www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/gutmicrobes/index.html
my highlights / edits

In "Conclusion" (3rd video) Jeff Gordan says: "The study of the coevolution of microbes with human cells may help to treat obesity. Which human genes are manipulated by microbes? The number of calories in food is determined in the lab but the total caloric yield may differ between individuals depending on the ratio of Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes.

This is a transcript of the 21 December edition of the weekly Nature Podcast. Audio files for the current show and archive episodes can be accessed from the Nature Podcast index page (http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast), which also contains details on how to subscribe to the Nature Podcast for FREE, and has troubleshooting top-tips. Send us your feedback to mailto:podcast@nature.com

Transcript reposted: http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/v444/n7122/nature-2006-12-21.html

Chris Smith: This week, should we think of ourselves as passengers in our own bodies? Well, Jeff Gordon says we should.

Jeff Gordon: A human being is not composed only of human cells. In fact, as adults we contain ten times more microbial cells on our body surfaces than human cells.

Chris Smith: And those very same bugs make a huge difference to whether we're fat or thin;

Hello, Merry Christmas, I'm Chris Smith, welcome to this week's show. First up, who would have thought that bacteria living in your gut could make a big difference to your body weight? Here's Jeff Gordon and his team, Peter Turnbaugh and Ruth Ley who've found that a bulging waistline in mice and humans is associated with a big change in intestinal flora. Nature 444, 1009–1010 (21 December 2006) ; Nature 444, 1022–1023 (28 December 2006) ; Nature 444, 1027–131 (21 December 2006)

Jeff Gordon: We're very interested in the alliances between microbes in humans. A human being is not composed only of human cells. In fact, as adults we contain ten times more microbial cells on our body surfaces than human cells. These partnerships are mutually beneficial. We're very interested in the role of microbes in our gut and one of the attributes that they provide is the capacity to digest otherwise indigestible components of our diet. So the question we had here was do the microbes in our gut influence our energy balance?

Chris Smith: So how did you try and explore that?

Jeff Gordon: We started out with mice and looked at the microbial communities of obese mice. They're obese because they had a genetic mutation that caused them to reliably develop obesity while they were young adults, and compared their community structure to their litter mates who didn't have this mutation and therefore were lean.

Chris Smith: So, Peter Turnbaugh, you're the lead author on this paper, when you actually did this, what did you find?

Peter Turnbaugh: We were able to take advantage of really the revolution that's going on in sequencing technology and so here at Wash U we have the genome sequencing centre, we were able to directly isolate DNA from the mouse gut and take that DNA and use them high throughput shotgun sequencing techniques to try to look at what genes were present in the bacterial community of obese mice and what we found was that there seemed to be more genes in the obese community for harvesting energy from the diet, so breaking down complex sugars that we might eat that the human or the mouse can't normally digest.

Chris Smith: So these guys have got a richer microbial flora effectively?

Peter Turnbaugh: First, originally, when we looked at who's there, we saw that there's two major groups of bacteria, the Firmicutes and the Bacteroidetes, and we saw them in the obese mouse, there was a shift in the relative abundance of these two groups so there were more Firmicutes and less Bacteroidetes.

(From Wikipedia: Researcher Jeffery Gordon and his colleagues found that obese humans and mice had a lower percentage of a family of bacteria called Bacteroidetes and more Firmicutes. But they are not sure if Firmicutes cause obesity or if people who are obese grow more of that type of bacteria.)

Chris Smith: Is the trait transmissible, in other words, can you take that different spectrum and confer it upon another animal and make that animal gain weight because that surely is the way to prove wholeheartedly that this is underlining why they're so fat?

Peter Turnbaugh: Right, exactly, so what we were able to do is harvest the microbial community from an obese mouse, or a lean mouse, and then directly colonize germ-free mice with either the obese flora or the lean flora and what we saw was the mice that were exposed to the microbes from an obese mouse actually gained more fat over the course of the experiment than the mice that were given lean microbial community.

Chris Smith: So that's mice, but actually happens if you look in humans who are too fat, are they, too, carrying an abnormal spectrum of bacteria in their intestines? Ruth Ley is the first author on a second paper which sits next to this one in this week's Nature. Ruth, what did you find in humans?

Ruth Ley: We found that the obese humans did actually have exactly the same shift in their ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes that we'd seen in the mice.

Chris Smith: How did you actually do the study? Can you tell us a bit about that?

Ruth Ley: We had 12 subjects that were randomly assigned to two different diets, one was a fat restricted diet and the other one was a low calorie diet and these people were on a diet for a year and we collected a stool sample from them before they started the diet and then three times over the course of the year, and just using the same techniques we used for the mice, we extracted DNA from their stool and we sequenced the 16 S genes for the bacteria, which was the one that tells you what kinds of bacteria are present. So we generated a very large amount of sequence for this kind of study and from that we were able to see that first of all before the diet the obese people had a skewed ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes compared to lean people so we also had some lean controls and then as they lost weight, the amount of Bacteroidetes increased and began to resemble what you would see in a normal lean person, and the amount of the increase was proportional to the amount of fat that they actually lost over time.

Chris Smith: So what do you think is going on? Why should just losing weight change the bugs that you have growing in your intestine?

Ruth Ley: Well, that's a mystery at the moment. We know that there's some kind of link, some sort of dynamic linkage between the fat that's carried on the body, we know that fat cells produce hormones and there could be some signaling between the adipose tissue in the body and the kinds of bugs that are in the intestine but at this point we don't understand the mechanism.

Chris Smith: Ruth, thanks, very much. Back to Jeffrey Gordon, Jeffrey, what are the implications of what you found?

Jeffrey Gordon: Well, surely a key element that determines the amount of fat that we store in our bodies is the amount of energy that we consume and the amount of energy that we expend through exercise and work. What this study shows is that there's also a microbial component to determining how much adipose tissue you might have and that they microbes in the gut are part of the equation that affects predisposition to, or the patho-physiology of obesity.

Chris Smith: So now you can blame your gut bacteria as well as a slow metabolism for the extra stone or two that you're carrying around your middle. That was Jeff Gordon, Peter Turnbaugh and Ruth Ley. They're all from Washington University in St Louis and they found that being overweight is associated with a big shift in the types of bacteria found living in our intestines.

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,535,n,n
my highlights / edits

Will Kansas schools be teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism & Intelligent Falling?

by The Onion

Thanks to Mark for the link to this classic Onion piece (It's a joke).

Reposted from:
http://theonion.com

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.


Rev. Gabriel Burdett explains Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.

According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.

The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."

"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said.

Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."

Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"

Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.

"Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."

"Doomsday Clock" moves to 5 minutes before midnight.

Scientists have adjusted the "Doomsday Clock" to account for climate change as well as nuclear war. The clock now shows five minutes to midnight - two minutes closer than previously. BBC Video

Climate change is as great a threat to humankind as nuclear annihilation, scientists have warned. Professor Stephen Hawking explained why the world's "Doomsday Clock" was being moved two minutes closer to midnight. BBC Video