Indian woman breastfeeds orphaned calf

This is an important story because it is an opportunity to point out the differences between human and cow milk. Did you notice how thin the calf is? Here is why this woman’s gift will not really be a blessing for the calf:

The milk we find so readily available at the market, is created by a mother cow for the sole purpose of feeding its own offspring. This milk is formulated to help the calf grow into a 1,000-2,000 pound adult cow.  The saying, “Milk builds strong bones” is true in the respect that, at birth, milk is the main (and only) source of nutrition their body receives.

“Cow’s milk is intended to double the weight of the calf in 6 to 8 weeks, whereas a child requires 6 to 7 months to double its weight.” –Dr. N.W. Walker

… A mother’s milk is specifically designed to nourish it’s own offspring. … A cow’s milk contains 300% more casein than a human mother’s milk, making it unfit for human consumption. – diaryofanutritionist

And if you turn the next bit around, this calf will be getting too much vitamin E, too much iron, and too many fatty acids.  The calf will also not be getting enough protein, sodium and potassium.

All mammal species produce milk, but the composition of milk for each species varies widely and other kinds of milk are often very different from human breast milk. As a rule, the milk of mammals that nurse frequently (including human babies) is less rich, or more watery, than the milk of mammals whose young nurse less often. Human milk is noticeably thinner and sweeter than cow’s milk.

Whole cow’s milk does not contain sufficient vitamin E, iron, or essential fatty acids, which can make infants fed on cow’s milk anemic. Whole cow’s milk also contains excessive amounts of protein, sodium, and potassium which may put a strain on an infant’s immature kidneys. In addition, the proteins and fats in whole cow’s milk are more difficult for an infant to digest and absorb than the ones in breast milk. – wiki

Are we living in a designer universe?

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored – the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.

However, to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC – and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way.

This is possible for two reasons. First, black holes may – as science fiction aficionados will be well aware – act as gateways to other regions of space and time. Second, because of the curious fact that gravity has negative energy, it takes no energy to make a universe. Despite the colossal amount of energy contained in every atom of matter, it is precisely balanced by the negativity of gravity.

Black holes, moreover, are relatively easy to make. For any object, there is a critical radius, called the Schwarzschild radius, at which its mass will form a black hole. The Schwarzschild radius for the Sun is about two miles, 1/200,000th of its current width; for the Earth to become a black hole, it would have to be squeezed into a ball with a radius of one centimetre.

The black holes that could be created in a particle accelerator would be far smaller: tiny masses squeezed into incredibly tiny volumes. But because of gravity’s negative energy, it doesn’t matter how small such holes are: they still have the potential to inflate and expand in their own dimensions (rather than gobbling up our own). Such expansion was precisely what our universe did in the Big Bang, when it suddenly exploded from a tiny clump of matter into a fully-fledged cosmos.

Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first proposed the now widely accepted idea of cosmic inflation – that the starting point of the Big Bang was far smaller, and its expansion far more rapid, than had been assumed. He has investigated the technicalities of “the creation of universes in the laboratory”, and concluded that the laws of physics do, in principle, make it possible. …

via Are we living in a designer universe? – Telegraph.

That would make us part of a universe which is a self organizing system.

Judge: Man Can’t Sue Over LHC’s Potential “Destruction of the Earth”

Back in 2008, a Hawaiian fellow named Walter Wagner claimed the Large Hadron Collider’s hunt for the Higgs boson would end in apocalypse, and sued to stop the collider from going online. His suit was soon dismissed by a federal judge, but with the fate of the world on the line, Wagner kept trying.

Now an appellate judge for the United States District Court in Hawaii has foiled Wagner again by knocking down his appeal, as Symmetry reports. The judge found that Wagner failed to show “credible threat of harm” and also noted that the United States doesn’t control the collider, which spans the border of Switzerland and France:

The European Center for Nuclear Research (“CERN”) proposed and constructed the Collider, albeit with some U.S. government support. The U.S. government enjoys only observer status on the CERN council, and has no control over CERN or its operations. Accordingly, the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement.

This isn’t Wagner’s first run-in with particle physics. In 1999 he got worried about the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) that was then under construction, and wrote a letter to Scientific American regarding the chance that the machine could create a black hole that would swallow up Long Island–followed by the planet. Although Nobel Laureate Franck Wilcek published a response in the magazine declaring that scenario unlikely, he just happened to mention world-devouring particles called strangelets as a more likely but still very unlikely possibility, adding to Wagner’s panic and fueling a worldwide fiasco (pdf) of misrepresented science and ignorance.

Wagner failed to stop the RHIC, and Brookhaven, with Wilcek’s help, published the charmingly-named report “Review of ‘Speculative Disaster Scenarios’ at RHIC” (pdf) detailing how the collider would not bring about the apocalypse. The LHC has a similar report spelling out why the collider will not kill us with microscopic black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles, or magnetic monopoles.

via Judge: Man Can’t Sue Over LHC’s Potential “Destruction of the Earth” | Discoblog | Discover Magazine.

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday – produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. “It’s the Big One,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

“Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels,” he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

“They were really going after the weapons,” said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. “It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying.” It emits too many high gamma rays.

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. “They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology,” he said. …

via Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium – Telegraph.

New Honeybee Breed Key to Combating Colony Collapse Disorder?

A British beekeeper has been working on creating a new strain of honeybee resistant to the varroa mite, a prime suspect in colony collapse disorder (CCD), and it looks like he’s hit a high note after 18 years of careful observation and selective breeding. Ron Hoskins found that bees in one of his hives figured out what a great idea mutual grooming can be — they learned to clean the mites off one another. Hoping that this learned behavior is hereditary, he spread the genes of bees from this colony to his other hives. It worked. Now, combating CCD could be linked in no small part to how quickly the new strain of bee spreads across the country.

Daily Mail reports that the British Beekeepers Association is excited about the work Hoskins has done, and the hope is the drones from his “grooming” bees will mate with wandering female queens to spread the heartier genes across Britain. It could take quite a long time, and a lot of generations of bees before the behavior becomes normal, but if it’s a way to combat the mites that wipe out entire colonies, then it’s quite an exciting evolution to witness.

Hoskins, who is from Swindon, has named the new strain the “Swindon Honeybee” and all his colonies consist of this new breed. And the behavior might be the only thing that can save honeybees from the verroa mite:

Martin Smith, president of the British Beekeepers’ Association, said: “The varroa mite is probably the single most important factor that has caused the reduction in bee numbers worldwide. It has now become resistant to chemicals we have used in the past so we are being forced to look into other methods.”

The evolution of natural behaviors is certainly a good method to fall back on, with a little nudge from beekeepers. It might not be a silver bullet for CCD — the cause of which is still under hot debate — but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have bees taking care of mite infestations on their own.

via New Honeybee Breed Key to Combating Colony Collapse Disorder : TreeHugger.

Dry weather reveals archaeological ‘cropmarks’ in fields

Hundreds of ancient sites have been discovered by aerial surveys, thanks to a dry start to the summer, English Heritage has said.

The surveys show marks made when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those nearby.

The newly-discovered Roman and prehistoric settlements include a site near Bradford Abbas, Dorset.

The Roman camp was revealed in June after three sides became visible in sun-parched fields of barley.

The lightly-built defensive enclosure would have provided basic protection for Roman soldiers while on manoeuvres in the first century AD and is one of only four discovered in the south west of England, English Heritage said.

The dry conditions also allowed well-known sites to be photographed in greater detail.

via BBC News – Dry weather reveals archaeological ‘cropmarks’ in fields.

Mayan water reservoir in Mexican rainforest: Archaeologists find huge artificial lake with ceramic-lined floor

Archaeologists from the University of Bonn have found a water reservoir the size of a soccer field, whose floor is lined with ceramic shards, in the Mexican rainforest. It seems that in combination with the limestone on top, the shards were supposed to seal the artificial lake. The system was built about 1,500 years ago. It is the first example of this design found for the Maya. It is not yet known whether the reservoir’s entire floor is tiled.

Since 2009, researchers from Bonn and Mexico have been systematically uncovering and mapping the old walls of Uxul, a Mayan city. “In the process, we also came across two, about 100 m square water reservoirs,” explained Iken Paap, who directs the project with Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube and the Mexican archaeologist Antonio Benavides Castillo.

Such monster pools, which are also known from other Mayan cities, are called “aguadas.” Similar to present-day water towers, they served to store drinking water. But the people of Uxul seem to have thought of a particularly smart way to seal their aguada. “We conducted a trial dig in the center of one of the water reservoirs,” explains Nicolaus Seefeld, a young scholar. “We found that the bottom, which is at a depth of two meters, was covered with ceramic shards — probably from plates — practically without any gaps. But we don’t know yet whether it’s like this throughout the entire aguada.”

If so, that would be a minor sensation — merely due to the quantity of ceramics required. The aguadas in Uxul were each as large as ten Olympic-size pools. Maybe there used to be even more artificial lakes. After all, the precious commodity had to be enough to last a population of at least 2,000 through the 3-month dry season.

via Mayan water reservoir in Mexican rainforest: Archaeologists find huge artificial lake with ceramic-lined floor.

Monty Python fans in pilgrimage to Scottish castle

Monty Python fans from around the world are preparing to make a special pilgrimage to a 14th century Scottish castle to mark the 35th anniversary of a cult movie.

Fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, based on the legend of King Arthur, have been visiting historic Doune Castle in Stirling since the movie was filmed at the site.

The cult fans are estimated to account for around a third of the 25,000 visitors to the castle each year.

Historic Scotland’s First Farewell Monty Python Day, on September 12, will be the latest special event staged at Doune Castle for fans since the first in 2004.

Nick Finnigan, Doune Castle events manager, said: “For this year’s Python day, we’re returning to the less structured, more spontaneous format of our early events, and of course, loads of fun and games.

“We’ve got some of the most popular comic sketches being recreated, prizes for the best costumes, a trail, Monty Python and the Holy Trail, highlighting the various filming locations of scenes from the film, a quiz with prizes, singing, and of course, lots of coconut shells.”

Coconut shells have been a fixture at Doune since the Holy Grail film became a cult hit. Visitors use them to mimic horses’ hooves, just as King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and his faithful servant, Patsy (Terry Gilliam) did in the film’s opening scene.

Python team

Gilliam and Chapman starred in the film along with Michael Palin, Eric Idle, John Cleese and Terry Jones.

Jones made a vocal return to Doune last year when he recorded the castle’s new audio guide.

The tape begins: “Welcome to Doune Castle. I’m Terry Jones, and in 1974 some friends and myself made a very silly film here called Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

via Monty Python fans in pilgrimage to Scottish castle | Scotland | STV News.

Older adults experience ‘destination amnesia’

Older adults are more likely to have destination memory failures – forgetting who they’ve shared or not shared information with, according to a new study led by Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute.

It’s the kind of memory faux pas that can lead to awkward or embarrassing social situations and even miscommunication in the doctor’s office. Ironically, after making these memory errors older adults remain highly confident in their false beliefs.

The study appears online, ahead of print publication, in the Online First Section of Psychology and Aging.

“What we’ve found is that older adults tend to experience more destination amnesia than younger adults,” said lead investigator and cognitive scientist Dr. Nigel Gopie, who led the study with internationally-renowned experts in memory and attention, Drs. Fergus Craik and Lynn Hasher.

“Destination amnesia is characterized by falsely believing you’ve told someone something, such as believing you’ve told your daughter about needing a ride to an appointment, when you actually had told a neighbour.”

Why are older adults more prone to destination memory failures? The ability to focus and pay attention declines with age, so older adults use up most of their attentional resources on the telling of information and don’t properly encode the context (ie. who they are speaking to) for later recall.

“Older adults are additionally highly confident, compared to younger adults, that they have never told people particular things when they actually had,” added Dr. Gopie. “This over-confidence presumably causes older adults to repeat information to people.”

A critical finding in the study is that destination memory is more vulnerable to age-related decline than source memory. Source memory is the ability to recall which person told you certain information.

via Older adults experience ‘destination amnesia’.

Survey Says: Genetics Affect Whether We’re Willing To Take Surveys

A new study from North Carolina State University shows that genetics play a key factor in whether someone is willing to take a survey.

“We wanted to know whether people are genetically predisposed to ignore requests for survey participation,” says Dr. Lori Foster Thompson, an associate professor of psychology at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. “We found that there is a pretty strong genetic predisposition to not reply to surveys.”

For the study, the researchers sent out a survey to over 1,000 sets of twins – some fraternal, some identical – and then measured who did and did not respond. The researchers were interested in whether the response behavior of one twin accurately predicted the behavior of the other twin. “We found that the behavior of one identical twin was a good predictor for the other,” Foster Thompson says, “but that the same did not hold true for fraternal twins.

“Because all of the sets of twins were raised in the same household, the only distinguishing variable between identical and fraternal twin sets is the fact that identical twins are genetically identical and fraternal twins are not.”

Understanding survey response behavior is important because managers and people who study organizational behavior rely on survey data to better understand issues ranging from leadership to job stress. “We need to get representative data in order to form accurate conclusions,” Foster Thompson says, “for science and for business practice.

“A lot of research has been done to evaluate how surveys can be written or presented to encourage participation,” Foster Thompson adds. “Much less work has been done to evaluate the personal characteristics of potential respondents – and the role those characteristics play in determining whether someone will actually fill a survey out.”

The research raises a number of additional questions, “but basically we want to know why or how genetics affect people’s predisposition to take surveys,” Foster Thompson says. “Is the linkage between genetics and survey response explained by personality, attitudes toward employers, or something else entirely?”

The paper, “Genetic underpinnings of survey response,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Zhen Zhang of Arizona State University and Dr. Richard Arvey of the National University of Singapore.

via NCSU News :: NC State News and Information » Survey Says: Genetics Affect Whether We’re Willing To Take Surveys.