http://releases.jhu.edu/2014/11/20/deep-...-on-earth/

RELEASE: New findings by a Johns Hopkins University-led team reveal long unknown details about carbon deep beneath the Earth’s surface and suggest ways this subterranean carbon might have influenced the history of life on the planet.

The team also developed a new, related theory about how diamonds form in the Earth’s mantle.

For decades scientists had little understanding of how carbon behaved deep below the Earth’s surface even as they learned more and more about the element’s vital role at the planet’s crust. Using a model created by Johns Hopkins geochemist Dimitri Sverjensky, Sverjensky, Vincenzo Stagno of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Fang Huang, a Johns Hopkins graduate student, became the first to calculate how much carbon and what types of carbon exist in fluids at 100 miles below the Earth’s surface at temperatures up to 2,100 degrees F.

In an article published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, Sverjensky and his team demonstrate that in addition to the carbon dioxide and methane already documented deep in subduction zones, there exists a rich variety of organic carbon species that could spark the formation of diamonds and perhaps even become food for microbial life.

“It is a very exciting possibility that these deep fluids might transport building blocks for life into the shallow Earth,” said Sverjensky, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “This may be a key to the origin of life itself.”

Sverjensky’s theoretical model, called the Deep Earth Water model, allowed the team to determine the chemical makeup of fluids in the Earth’s mantle, expelled from descending tectonic plates. Some of the fluids, those in equilibrium with mantle peridotite minerals, contained the expected carbon dioxide and methane. But others, those in equilibrium with diamonds and eclogitic minerals, contained dissolved organic carbon species including a vinegar-like acetic acid.

These high concentrations of dissolved carbon species, previously unknown at great depth in the Earth, suggest they are helping to ferry large amounts of carbon from the subduction zone into the overlying mantle wedge where they are likely to alter the mantle and affect the cycling of elements back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The team also suggested that these mantle fluids with dissolved organic carbon species could be creating diamonds in a previously unknown way. Scientists have long believed diamond formation resulted through chemical reactions starting with either carbon dioxide or methane. The organic species offer a range of different starting materials, and an entirely new take on the creation of the gemstones.

The research is part of a 10-year global project to further understanding of carbon on Earth called the Deep Carbon Observatory. The work is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The self is moral

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/why-m...-identity/

EXCERPT: [...] Kate has Capgras syndrome, the unshakeable belief that someone – often a loved one, sometimes oneself – has been replaced with an exact replica. She also has Fregoli syndrome, the delusion that the same person is taking on a variety of shapes, like an actor donning an expert disguise. Capgras and Fregoli delusions offer hints about an extraordinary cognitive mechanism active in the healthy mind, a mechanism so exquisitely tuned that we are hardly ever aware of it. This mechanism ascribes to each person a unique identity, and then meticulously tracks and updates it. This mechanism is crucial to virtually every human interaction, from navigating a party to navigating a marriage. Without it, we quickly fall apart.

A classic philosophical thought experiment poses the following paradox. Imagine a ship, let’s call it the Nina, whose planks are replaced, one by one, as they age. Eventually every original part is changed, resulting in a boat made of entirely new materials. Our intuition that this is the same ship becomes problematic when the builders reassemble all the Nina’s original parts into a second ship. The Nina’s identity is tied up inextricably with her physicality.

Personal identity does not work this way. As Nina-the-person ages, almost all the cells of her body get replaced, in some cases many times over. Yet we have no trouble seeing present-day Nina as the same person. Even radical physical transformations – puberty, surgery, infirmity, some future world where her consciousness is preserved on a hard drive – will not obliterate the Nina we know. The personal identity detector is not concerned with continuity of matter, but continuity of mind. As the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett wryly observed in his essay ‘Where Am I?’ (1978), the brain is the only organ where it is preferable to be the donor than the recipient.

This distinction, between mind and body, begins early in development. In a 2012 study by Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol and colleagues, children aged five to six were shown a metal contraption, a ‘duplication device’ that creates perfect replicas of whatever you put inside. When asked to predict what would happen if a hamster were duplicated, the children said the clone would have the same physical traits as the original, but not its memories. In other words, children were locating the unique essence of the hamster in its mind.

For Nina-the-ship, no part of the vessel is especially Nina-like; her identity is distributed evenly across every atom. We might wonder whether the same applies to people – does their continued identity depend only on the total number of cognitive planks replaced? Or are some parts of the mind particularly essential to the self?

The 17th-century philosopher John Locke thought autobiographical memories were the key to identity, and it’s easy to see why: memories provide a continuous narrative of the self and they serve as a record of a person’s idiosyncratic history. But evidence in favour of the memory criterion is mixed at best. People who have lost large hunks of memory through retrograde amnesia tend to report that, while the reel of their life feels blank, their sense of self remains intact. Nor is memory deterioration from dementia a reliable predictor of feeling like a different person. Caretakers for these patients often say they can still perceive the same person persisting beneath radical memory loss. If people have an essence that lends them their identity, memory might not be the most promising candidate.

One day not too long ago, a friend came to me with a problem. His wife of many years had begun to change. Once mousy, she was now poised and assertive. Her career had been important to her, now her interests had turned inward, domestic. And while the changes were not so dramatic that they fundamentally altered the woman he had fallen in love with, he was apprehensive about the possibility.

The danger of befriending psychologists is they will use you as their test subjects: I inquired what kind of change would render her unrecognisable. My friend responded without hesitation: ‘If she stopped being kind. I would leave her immediately.’ He considered the question a few moments more. ‘And I don’t mean, if she’s in a bad mood or going through a rough time. I’m saying if she turned into a permanent bitch with no explanation. Her soul would be different.’

This encounter is instructive for a few reasons (not least of which is the intriguing term ‘permanent bitch’) but let’s start with my friend’s invocation of the soul. He is not religious and, I suspect, does not endorse the existence of a ghost in the machine. But souls are a useful construct, one we can make sense of in fiction and fantasy, and as a shorthand for describing everyday experience. The soul is an indestructible wisp of ether, present from birth and surviving our bodies after death. And each soul is one of a kind and unreplicable: it bestows upon us our unique identity. Souls are, in short, a placeholder notion for the self.

But the soul is something else, too. The soul describes a person’s moral sensibility. A flourishing soul, according to Aristotle, was one in the habit of virtuous acts. When the soul is sick, we feed it chicken soup in the form of bite-sized inspirational stories. History’s great psychopaths, its serial killers and genocidal maniacs, are seen as soulless. So are the animate creatures in popular lore: the golems, the Frankensteins, the HALs. The sentient computer who runs amok is a trope of the genre – so much so that, in his short story ‘Runaround’ (1942), Isaac Asimov felt it necessary to propose Three Laws of Robotics to specify ethical guidelines for the wayward robot. Why do we assume that a being without a soul will turn against us? On some level, we must endorse the idea that, without a soul, moral action is not possible.

And where does the soul go when we die? In Western religions, either to a place for the morally good (heaven) or the morally bad (hell). There is no afterlife for good or bad bowlers, the sharp and the dull-witted, the glamorous and the frumpy. Eastern traditions that subscribe to a belief in reincarnation specify that the soul is reincarnated according to the person’s moral behaviour (karma). It is our moral selves that survive us in death.

Recent studies by the philosopher Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona and myself support the view that the identity-conferring part of a person is his moral capacities. One of our experiments pays homage to Locke’s thought experiment by asking subjects which of a slew of traits a person would most likely take with him if his soul moved to a new body. Moral traits were considered more likely to survive a body swap than any other type of trait, mental or physical. Interestingly, certain types of memories – those involving people – were deemed fairly likely to survive the trip. But generic episodic memories, such as one’s commute to work, were not. People are not so much concerned with memory as with memory’s ability to connect us to others and our capacity for social action....

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/201...wish-nose/

EXCERPT: [...] This image of the Jew [...] was far from “eternal.” Though anti-Semitism is notoriously “the longest hatred,” until 1000 CE, there were no easily distinguishable Jews of any kind in Western imagery, let alone the stereotypical swarthy, hook-nosed Jew. Earlier monuments and manuscripts did depict Hebrew prophets, Israelite armies, and Judaic kings, but they were identifiable only by context, in no way singled out as different from other sages, soldiers, or kings. Even nefarious Jewish characters, such as the priests (pontifices) who urged Pilate to crucify Christ in the Egbert Codex (circa 980), were visually unremarkable; they required labels to identify them as Jewish.

When Christian artists did begin to single out Jews, it was not through their bodies, features, or even ritual implements, but with hats. Around the year 1100, a time of intensified biblical scholarship and growing interest in the past, as well as great artistic innovation, artists began paying new attention to Old Testament imagery, which had been relatively neglected in favor of New Testament illustration in early medieval art. Hebrew prophets wearing distinctive-looking pointed caps began appearing in the pages of richly illuminated Bibles and on the carved facades of the Romanesque churches that were then rising across western Christendom. [...] The “Jewish pointed cap” is based on the miters of ancient Persian priests and symbolized religious authority. [...] After hat-wearing Hebrew prophets had appeared in Christian artworks for several decades, around 1140, the original Persian association was forgotten. Pointed hats became signs of Jewishness.

[...] In the second half of the twelfth century, a new devotional trend promoting compassionate contemplation of the mortal, suffering Christ caused artists to turn their attention to Jews’ faces. In an enamel casket dating to about 1170, the central Jew in the group to the left of the crucified Christ has a large, hooked nose, all out of proportion both to his own face and to the noses of the other figures on the casket. Though this grotesque profile resembles modern racialist anti-Semitic caricature, it does not seem—yet—to bear the same meaning.

No Christian texts written up to this point attribute any particular physical characteristics to Jews, much less refer to the existence of a peculiar “Jewish nose.” Instead of signaling ethnic hatred, this Jew’s ugly visage reflects contemporary Christian concerns. In accord with the new devotions, artworks had just begun to portray Christ as humbled and dying. Some Christians struggled with the new imagery, discomfited by the sight of divine suffering. Proponents of the new devotions criticized such resistance. Failure to be properly moved by portrayals of Christ’s affliction was identified with “Jewish” hard-hearted ways of looking. In this and many other images, then, the Jew’s prominent nose serves primarily to draw attention to the angle of his head, turned ostentatiously away from the sight of Christ, and so links the Jew’s misbegotten flesh to his misdirected gaze.

For the rest of the century, and for several decades beyond, the shape of Jews’ noses in art remained too varied to constitute markers of identity. That is, Jews sported many different kinds of “bad” noses—some long and tapering, others snout-like—but the same noses appeared on many “bad” non-Jews as well, and there was no single, identifiable “Jewish” nose. By the later thirteenth century, however, a move toward realism in art and an increased interest in physiognomy spurred artists to devise visual signs of ethnicity. The range of features assigned to Jews consolidated into one fairly narrowly construed, simultaneously grotesque and naturalistic face, and the hook-nosed, pointy-bearded Jewish caricature was born....

http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/when-did-...ative.html

EXCERPT: First and foremost, the art world is a place that says it wants people to be free. This extraordinary openness is what gives art its ever-changing adaptable agency. Or gave.

Flexibility is life, but lately I [Jerry Saltz] keep thinking that the art world has gotten a lot less flexible, and the freedom that I've always thought of as completely foundational — freedom to let our freak flags fly and express ourselves, even bizarrely — has constricted considerably. And it’s happening at such mutated and extreme rates that we must ask if the art world is not now one of the more self-policing areas of contemporary culture. How did we come to live in an insular tribal sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid — are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get so conservative?

Perhaps the art world is just enacting its own micro versions of the kind of flash fires that swirl around mass-cultural figures, politicians, and pop stars, transforming every public gesture, tweet, selfie, or silly picture into a contested act of identity-politics war. (Sex activist Dan Savage calls each of them a “tempest in a privilege pot.”) The weirdest part is that it all feels strangely familiar, very déjà vu. And pervasive. The sad part is that the art world has always been the place I'd run away from all that bullshit to....

"Elusive dark matter around clusters of galaxies often clumps into cigar shapes, new observations show.

The discovery could help scientists finally understand what makes up dark matter, which is the mystifying stuff thought to exist invisibly all around us. Dark matter, which could be more than five times more abundant than visible matter, is only detectable through its gravitational pull on regular material.

According to the new observations, the dark matter around many galaxy clusters is a flattened, cigar-like shape, rather than a rounded sphere.

"There are clear theoretical predictions that we expect dark mater haloes to be flattened like this," said study co-author Graham P. Smith of the U.K.'s University of Birmingham. "It?s a very beautiful, very clean and direct measurement of that."====http://www.space.com/8289-cosmic-dark-ma...hapes.html

Guess this makes our universe one vast humidor.

Life is indeed like a box of chocolates!

http://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/410/A-Man-...round-City

hey, this is krash661 from sciforums.
i need a favor.
can anyone tell me if i am permanently banned from that site ?
on my end it just says,
" You do not have permission to view this page or perform this action. "
usually it would give the time frame of the ban.

http://plus.maths.org/content/world-made-maths

EXCERPT: Mathematics is incredibly good at describing the world we live in. So much so that some people have argued that maths is not just a tool for describing the world, but that the world is itself a mathematical structure. It's a claim that will tempt anyone who loves maths, but does it stand up to scrutiny? We asked philosopher of physics Jermemy Butterfield for his opinion, and here is what he told us....