The moon and Helium-3: A source of power waiting to be used?

… Scientists estimate there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States’ energy needs for a year. …

The harvesting of Helium-3 on the could start by 2025. Our lunar mining could be but a jumping off point for Helium 3 extraction from the atmospheres of our Solar System gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter.

UN Treaties in place state that the moon and its minerals are the common heritage of mankind,  so the quest to use Helium-3 as an energy source would likely demand joint international co-operation. Hopefully, exploitation of the moon’s resources will be viewed as a solution for thw world, rather than an out-moded nation-state solution. – dailygalaxy

Also see:

Race to the Moon for Nuclear Fuel

Researchers and space enthusiasts see helium-3 as the perfect fuel

The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour

This basically says that it is evolutionarily adaptive for humans to have mechanisms of understanding which cause us to believe a number of wrong things.

Superstitious behaviours, which arise through the incorrect assignment of cause and effect, receive considerable attention in psychology and popular culture. Perhaps owing to their seeming irrationality, however, they receive little attention in evolutionary biology. Here we develop a simple model to define the condition under which natural selection will favour assigning causality between two events. This leads to an intuitive inequality–akin to an amalgam of Hamilton’s rule and Pascal’s wager—that shows that natural selection can favour strategies that lead to frequent errors in assessment as long as the occasional correct response carries a large fitness benefit. It follows that incorrect responses are the most common when the probability that two events are really associated is low to moderate: very strong associations are rarely incorrect, while natural selection will rarely favour making very weak associations. Extending the model to include multiple events identifies conditions under which natural selection can favour associating events that are never causally related. Specifically, limitations on assigning causal probabilities to pairs of events can favour strategies that lump non-causal associations with causal ones. We conclude that behaviours which are, or appear, superstitious are an inevitable feature of adaptive behaviour in all organisms, including ourselves. … Although the concept of superstition encompasses a wide range of beliefs and behaviours, most can be united by a single underlying property–the incorrect establishment of cause and effect: ‘ a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation’ (Merriam-Webster online dictionary). In a world increasingly dominated by science, superstitious and indeed religious thinking typically take a back seat in academic affairs. However, superstitions play a central role in many small-scale societies, and indeed remain prevalent in the popular culture of all societies. Why is this? – royalsociety

Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.

It’s not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Szostak’s protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn’t anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn’t wholly autonomous, so it’s not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

“We’ve made more progress on how the membrane of a protocell could grow and divide,” Szostak said in a phone interview. “What we can do now is copy a limited set of simple [genetic] sequences, but we need to be able to copy arbitrary sequences so that sequences could evolve that do something useful.”

By doing “something useful” for the cell, these genes would launch the new form of life down the Darwinian evolutionary path similar to the one that our oldest living ancestors must have traveled. Though where selective pressure will lead the new form of life is impossible to know.

“Once we can get a replicating environment, we’re hoping to experimentally determine what can evolve under those conditions,” said Sheref Mansy, a former member of Szostak’s lab and now a chemist at Denver University. … – wired

What if God’s name is really something like Jack Szostak?

Near Death Experiences May Have Biological Explanation, Say Scientists

For centuries people have been talking about near-death experiences, where the patient has an out-of-body experience and remembers seeing a bright light and feels a great sense of peace. We have linked this experience with knocking on the doors of heaven, to many other spiritual explanations. According to a new study, there might be a biological explanation for this.

According to a team of researchers from University of Kentucky, while a person is undergoing a near death experience the same parts of his/her brain are activated as the brain of a person who is having a dream. The scientists compared 110 people, half had never had a near death experience, while the other half had.

They found that the people who had had a near death experience had less clearly separated boundaries between periods of sleep and wakefulness. The near death experience people reported looking down at themselves in the operating theatre or being bathed in a bright, white light. When a person is in a REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep stage, similar sensations also happen.

… The researchers say they cannot rule out a spiritual explanation for a near death experience. They say that, as scientists, their job is to find out what is going on physically. It is not their job to find out why.  Just like dreams can seem really real, so can near death experiences, say the researchers. – medicalNews

Also note, experiments show that out of body experiences are due to brain functioning.

The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Dr. Blanke and his colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the journal Brain.

There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs, the sensation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena.

“The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence,” Dr. Brugger said. …

Because the presence closely mimicked the patient’s body posture and position, Dr. Blanke concluded that the patient was experiencing an unusual perception of her own body, as a double. But for reasons that scientists have not been able to explain, he said, she did not recognize that it was her own body she was sensing.

The feeling of a shadowy presence can occur without electrical stimulation to the brain, Dr. Brugger said. It has been described by people who undergo sensory deprivation, as in mountaineers trekking at high altitude or sailors crossing the ocean alone, and by people who have suffered minor strokes or other disruptions in blood flow to the brain.

Six years ago, another of Dr. Blanke’s patients underwent brain stimulation to a different multisensory area, the angular gyrus, which blends vision with the body sense. The patient experienced a complete out-of-body experience.

When the current flowed, she said: “I am at the ceiling. I am looking down at my legs.”

When the current ceased, she said: “I’m back on the table now. What happened?”

Further applications of the current returned the woman to the ceiling, causing her to feel as if she were outside of her body, floating, her legs dangling below her. When she closed her eyes, she had the sensation of doing sit-ups, with her upper body approaching her legs.

Because the woman’s felt position in space and her actual position in space did not match, her mind cast about for the best way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, Dr. Blanke said. She concluded that she must be floating up and away while looking downward.

Some schizophrenics, Dr. Blanke said, experience paranoid delusions and the sense that someone is following them. They also sometimes confuse their own actions with the actions of other people. While the cause of these symptoms is not known, he said, multisensory processing areas may be involved. – nytimes

Many things like this that I have read lead to my being not particularly religous.

Fight over UFO photos pits family versus newspaper

Two shots of a flying saucer over McMinnville are some of the most debated pieces of Oregon history.

Paul and Evelyn Trent took the pictures in 1950, and now their children are trying to get the negatives returned. But the negatives are in the hands of the McMinnville News-Register newspaper, who believes they should be part of a permanent historic display in Yamhill County. The story of how this fight developed begins on the Trent Farm more than 50 years ago.

Evelyn Trent was feeding rabbits, saw something strange in the sky and hollered for her husband, who grabbed his camera and started shooting. And then the saucer was gone. The photos were printed in the local newspaper, which sold thousands of copies across the country. Critics have long said that the Trents pulled off one of the most elaborate hoaxes in UFO history -  that they took a pie plate or a hub cap and dangled it from power lines that run in front of the property.

The Trents always maintained they saw something. But the ridicule took a toll on the family. “We were the alien family,” said daughter Tammie Gochenour. “That’s all that was talked about was the alien family.” When her parents died in the mid-1990s, the location of the negatives was a mystery. Daughter Linda Sayler eventually discovered they had been in the hands of navy physicist and UFO investigator Bruce Maccabee since 1974.

He told KATU he had called the Trents and asked to borrow the negatives so many years ago, implying that he would return them in a few weeks. But it took him longer than that – and he ended up keeping them for 25 years. Maccabee agreed to return the negatives, and Sayler thought it would be safer if he sent them to the News-Register newspaper to pass on to her.

That was 2001, and she’s been trying ever since to get the newspaper to give them back. – katu

See Xeno’s UFO timeline.

Abandoned Soviet Ionospheric Research Station

During the 80s this place had the functioning antenna complex the size of a soccer field, plus the “Ural” super-computer presiding over it all… The Ionospheric Research Station is located near Zmiev, close to Kharkov and is still used from time to time by (no doubt desperate) scientists – the area was declassified recently (it used to be a top secret installation, hm… I wonder why). This marvel of Soviet technology seems to be no match for HAARP Research Station in Alaska, but looks can be deceiving – and in the meantime it serves as a good “stomping ground” for all sorts of explorers of creepy and abandoned places. – more on naturespot

Boy, 5 years old, blew 100,000$ at shops

Is five too young to allow a child out shopping on his own? Little Djodja Markovic didn’t think so, as he arranged to meet a gang of friends at a downtown Belgrade shopping mall.

Neither did the shopkeepers, as they gleefully served the five-year-old with clothes, toys, bicycles, sweets, computers and games to the value of £60,000.

Now Djodja is in serious trouble, not only for going out unaccompanied by a responsible adult but also for helping himself to over five-and-a-half million Serbian Dinars (about $104,000 U.S. dollars) from his father’s safe.  – raisingkids

Indian teenage suicide over black hole test: reports

An Indian teenage girl killed herself because she feared that a massive experiment to re-create the birth of the Universe would herald the end of the world, reports said Thursday.

Chayya Lal, 16, from the central state of Madhya Pradesh, committed suicide after watching television reports on how the particle-smashing test in Geneva could bring about doomsday, Indian newspapers reported. She swallowed unidentified tablets on Tuesday and was rushed to hospital, but doctors were unable to save her. Chayya’s parents said she had spoken of her fears about the “Big Bang” experiment.  “Chayya had asked me a number of times whether the world would end as they were saying on television,” her father Bihari told the Hindustan Times.  – physorg

I don’t get it.  She was afraid of dying … so she killed herself? Makes no sense. The point is to make the most of the time we have.

San Francisco hunts for mystery device on city network

With costs related to a rogue network administrator’s hijacking of the city’s network now estimated at $1 million, city officials say they are searching for a mysterious networking device hidden somewhere on the network. The device, referred to as a “terminal server” in court documents, appears to be a router that was installed to provide remote access to the city’s Fiber WAN network, which connects municipal computer and telecommunication systems throughout the city. City officials haven’t been able to log in to the device, however, because they do not have the username and password. In fact, the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) isn’t even certain where the device is located, court filings state.

The router was discovered on Aug. 28. When investigators attempted to log in to the device, they were greeted with what appears to be a router login prompt and a warning message saying “This system is the personal property of Terry S. Childs,” according to a screenshot of the prompt filed by the prosecution.

The disclosure is the latest turn in a bizarre story that has made headlines in San Francisco for the past two months. Childs, a network administrator with DTIS, was arrested June 12 on charges of network tampering after he refused to provide his superiors with administrative access to the city of San Francisco’s network, which he had managed for the past five years.

Initially Childs refused to hand over administrative passwords to the city’s routers, which had been configured to wipe out all configuration information if they were reset.

After a dramatic jailhouse meeting with San Francisco’s mayor one week after his arrest, Childs handed over the data, but DTIS Chief Administrative Officer Ron Vinson said Wednesday that the city now expects to spend more than $1 million to clean up the mess. – infoworld