PART 1: Socrates on Self Confidence PART 2: Epicurus on Happiness PART 3: Seneca on Anger PART 4: Montaigne on Self-Esteem PART 5: Schopenhauer on Love PART 6: Nietzche on Hardship...
January 31, 2010
January 30, 2010
January 25, 2010
Exolanguage: do you speak alien?
2:36 PM
Beena
THE cosmos is quiet. Eerily quiet. After decades of straining our radio ears for a whisper of civilisations beyond Earth, we have heard nothing. No reassuring message of universal peace. No helpful recipe for building faster-than-light spacecraft or for averting global catastrophes. Not even a stray interstellar advertisement. Perhaps there's nobody out there after all. Or perhaps it's just early days in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and we're listening to the wrong star systems or at the wrong wavelengths. There is another possibility, says Douglas...
Hidden asteroids are stalking the Earth
2:20 PM
Beena
TINY asteroid that buzzed Earth last week highlighted our planet's vulnerability to objects whose peculiar orbits put them in a game of hide-and-seek with us. An Earth-based telescope spotted the 10-metre space rock hurtling our way just three days before a near miss on 13 January, when it flew by at just one-third of the distance to the moon (see Object headed towards Earth an asteroid, not junk). The asteroid is never expected to hit Earth and would burn up before hitting the ground in any case. But its unusual orbit (see diagram) seems ingeniously designed to evade our surveys. It is likely that a handful of objects large enough to cause harm are hiding...
The viruses that kill tumours
2:10 PM
Beena
The idea of using viruses to kill cancers goes back nearly a century. In 1912, an Italian gynaecology journal reported the case of a woman with advanced cervical cancer who, after being bitten by a dog, was vaccinated with a live but weakened strain of the rabies virus. To the doctors' surprise, her tumour shrank.After more reports of patients' tumours regressing after viral infections or vaccinations, doctors began to take the idea seriously. From the late 1940s onwards, several trials took place in which cancer patients were injected with live viruses. A few individuals showed striking improvements, but the results were mixed overall. Doctors pinned their hopes on chemotherapy and radiotherapy instead, and by the end of 1970s the approach...
January 24, 2010
Guitarists' Brains Swing Together
4:27 PM
Beena
When musicians play along together it isn't just their instruments that are in time – their brain waves are too. New research shows how EEG readouts from pairs of guitarists become more synchronized, a finding with wider potential implications for how our brains interact when we do. Ulman Lindenberger, Viktor Müller, and Shu-Chen Li from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin along with Walter Gruber from the University of Salzburg used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain electrical activity in eight pairs of guitarists. Each of the pairs played a short jazz-fusion melody together up to 60 times while the EEG picked up their brain waves via electrodes on their scalps. The similarities among the...
January 21, 2010
Trilobis 65 Floating Home
9:48 PM
Antoine
Trilobis 65 is a semi-submerged
dwelling environment. Reaching 20 metres in length designed by Giancarlo Zema for habitation by six people at sea. It is ideal for living in bays, atolls and maritime parks. The main aim of the project is to allow anyone to live in a unique environment through a self sufficient, non-polluting dwelling cell in unison with their ocean surroundings.
Trilobis 65 has been designed on four separate levels connected by a spiraling staircase.
The top level is 3.5 metres above
sea level. The next level is at 1.4 metres above sea level and ...
January 16, 2010
Global Warming: Can Earth EXPLODE ?
9:27 PM
Beena
The real danger for our entire civilization comes not from slow climate changes, but from overheating the planetary interior. Galileo discovered that Earth moves. Copernicus discovered that Earth moves around the Sun. In 2000 Tom Chalko, inspired by Desmarquet's report, discovered that the solid nucleus of our planet is in principle a nuclear reactor, it is eccentric, and that our collective ignorance may cause it to overheat and explode. The discovery has been published in June 2001 by the new scientific journal NUJournal.net.Polar ice caps melt not because the air there is warmer than 0 deg Celsius, but because they are overheated from underneath. Volcanoes become...
January 14, 2010
UFO files released by MoD, UK
11:06 AM
Beena
The MoD recently made the decision to release previously unseen files from their UFO investigations.The files were released on the National Archives Website.Link for files released in 2009 hereFor previously released files h...
THE IMMORTALITY ENZYME
9:31 AM
Beena
As the human body ages, it loses bone. Individual cells lose something equally vital. Every time one divides, it sheds tiny snippets of DNA known as telomeres, which serve as protective caps on the ends of chromosomes. After perhaps a hundred divisions, a cell's telomeres become so truncated that its chromosomes--site of the cell's genes--begin to fray, rather like shoelaces that have lost their plastic tips. Eventually, such aged cells die--unless, like "immortal" cancer cells, they produce telomerase, an enzyme that protects and even rebuilds telomeres. Scientists have long dreamed of drugs that would inhibit the immortalizing enzyme because, observes M.I.T. biochemist Robert Weinberg, "then maybe cancer cells would run out of telomeres and just poop out." Wishful thinking? Maybe not. In...
January 4, 2010
Science news highlights of 2009
9:12 AM
Antoine
It was the year we learned of a spectacular smash-up in space, and scientists working on the world's biggest physics experiment delighted at collisions of an entirely different sort.
There were shockwaves, too, in Copenhagen, as the summit failed to reach a consensus on tackling climate change, instead merely noting a deal struck by major powers including the US and China.
The BBC's science reporter Paul Rincon looks back at the twists and turns of a year in science and the environment.
Source here...
World's tallest building in Dubai
5:04 AM
Antoine
By Malcolm Borthwick
Editor, Middle East Business Report, BBC World, Dubai
In recent years Dubai has grabbed the headlines with audacious offshore islands, rotating buildings and a seven star hotel. On Monday it opens the world's tallest building, Burj Dubai.
It's about twice the height of the Empire State Building, you can see its spire from 95km away and the exterior is covered in about 26,000 glass panels, which glisten in the midday desert sun.
The design of the building posed unprecedented technical and logistical challenges, not just because of its height, but also because Dubai is susceptible to high winds and is close to a geological fault line.
"You have the solutions for it but you always wonder how it will really...
Search for universe's hidden 'dark' objects
4:29 AM
Antoine
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff Staff Writer / December 13, 2009
Early Monday morning, after two delays, NASA is scheduled to launch an unmanned orbiting observatory that promises to greatly enhance, and significantly change, humanity's understanding of the heavens.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is expected to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara, Calif., between 9:09 and 9:23 a.m. Eastern time. From its eventual orbit 325 miles above earth, it will begin a blitz of picture-taking with equipment of unprecedented sensitivity. WISE will map the heavens on four infrared channels, frequencies of long-wave radiation that are invisible to the human eye and many telescopes.
The end-product of the 10-month mission...
