http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2014/014452/jou...nter-earth

SNIP: "A UC Santa Barbara geochemist studying Samoan volcanoes has found evidence of the planet’s early formation still trapped inside the Earth. Known as hotspots, volcanic island chains such as Samoa can be ancient primordial signatures from the early solar system that have somehow survived billions of years...."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...101614.php

Parasitic bacteria were the first cousins of the mitochondria that power cells in animals and plants – and first acted as energy parasites in those cells before becoming beneficial, according to a new University of Virginia study that used next-generation DNA sequencing technologies to decode the genomes of 18 bacteria that are close relatives of mitochondria.

The study appears this week in the online journal PLOS One, published by the Public Library of Science. It provides an alternative theory to two current theories of how simple bacterial cells were swallowed up by host cells and ultimately became mitochondria, the "powerhouse" organelles within virtually all eukaryotic cells – animal and plant cells that contain a nucleus and other features. Mitochondria power the cells by providing them with adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, considered by biologists to be the energy currency of life.

The origin of mitochondria began about 2 billion years ago and is one of the seminal events in the evolutionary history of life. However, little is known about the circumstances surrounding its origin, and that question is considered an enigma in modern biology.

"We believe this study has the potential to change the way we think about the event that led to mitochondria," said U.Va. biologist Martin Wu, the study's lead author. "We are saying that the current theories – all claiming that the relationship between the bacteria and the host cell at the very beginning of the symbiosis was mutually beneficial – are likely wrong.

"Instead, we believe the relationship likely was antagonistic – that the bacteria were parasitic and only later became beneficial to the host cell by switching the direction of the ATP transport."

The finding, Wu said, is a new insight into an event in the early history of life on Earth that ultimately led to the diverse eukaryotic life we see today. Without mitochondria to provide energy to the rest of a cell, there could not have evolved such amazing biodiversity, he said.

"We reconstructed the gene content of mitochondrial ancestors, by sequencing DNAs of its close relatives, and we predict it to be a parasite that actually stole energy in the form of ATP from its host – completely opposite to the current role of mitochondria," Wu said.

In his study, Wu also identified many human genes that are derived from mitochondria – identification of which has the potential to help understand the genetic basis of human mitochondrial dysfunction that may contribute to several diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and diabetes, as well as aging-related diseases.

In addition to the basic essential role of mitochondria in the functioning of cells, the DNA of mitochondria is used by scientists for DNA forensics, genealogy and tracing human evolutionary history.

http://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/uninew...n_leads_us

"We assume that we can see the world around us in sharp detail. In fact, our eyes can only process a fraction of our surroundings precisely. In a series of experiments, psychologists at Bielefeld University have been investigating how the brain fools us into believing that we see in sharp detail. The results have been published in the scientific magazine 'Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.' Its central finding is that our nervous system uses past visual experiences to predict how blurred objects would look in sharp detail...."

TRANSCRIPT SOURCE WAS ONCE HERE: http://members.fortunecity.com/templarser/flowtime.html

Roger Penrose : I think there's always something paradoxical about the way we seem to perceive time to pass and the way physics describes time.

Roger Penrose : Space-time is certainly different stuff from space because its 4 dimensional instead of 3-D (RP larfs!) which is a big diff. Time really has to be brought into the picture; this one thing which is space/time.

Physicist : Just imagine what this might be like: 3-D space implies a volume, and you can move any where in that volume. Once you add time as a 4th dimension, another axis, then this block of space/time would contain within it past, present and future, all at once. Time is frozen, all times exist together; so just as you can say "over here, over there" in 3-D space, you can talk about "over then", in 4-D space/time.

Roger Penrose : It's a way of looking at things if you like which physically we seem to be forced into. I say physically from the point of view of what the theory of rel. tells us. And Relativity is remarkably well tested, I mean, 14 places of decimal, it's just incredible. So we know that this theory does describe the universe to an extraordinarily precise degree, so we have to take it seriously. And that theory tells us that we have to regard space and time as one thing, it's all out there, it's one thing. In the same sense that space is out there, time is out there.

Narrator : Like the Medieval God's-view of time, Einstein's physics says that the future is already out there. The moments of our lives are just waiting for us to step into them.

Roger Penrose : But there's no more problem about the future being out there than saying that space is out there. You say, "Mars is out there", but why is that more comprehensible than saying "next week is out there"? It's just as far away in a certain sense.

Physicist : If you take this block of 4-D space/time literally, it means you have to abandon free will. It means not only is the future pre-ordained, but its already there, its already happened. There's no point in making any decisions, whatever you do has already happened. If I choose to drop this stone into a pond, I think of it being my own free choice, but of course in 4-D space/time I had no choice in dropping the stone ; the splash is already there in the future and so we lose all free will. If time travel was possible, you can imagine people coming back from the future to visit us; its no good us saying, "you cant exist - you haven't happened yet". They've come from a time which they consider to be their 'now' and for them we're in their path.

Roger Penrose : So this means that in a sense, the present past and future are out there, and that also gives us a very deterministic view of the world. We have no control of what happens in the future because its all laid out. I think the trouble that people have with this idea is that you think the future is under your control, to some degree, and so this means that if the future's laid out then in a sense its not under your control.

Physicist : Personally I'm very uncomfortable about the block universe idea. Now this may be just a gut feeling or just irrational, but can't accept the future's already 'out there'. I don't accept that I don't have any free will.

Roger Penrose : I think there is a positive side to this picture of space and time being laid out there as 4 dimensions, because it tells you that all times are there once and it can affect the way one thinks about people who have died. I mean, I remember thinking in this kind of way when my mother died. In some sense she was still there because her existence is still out there in space/time although in our time she is not alive. A colleague of mine had a son who died in tragic circumstances and I presented this idea to him and it helped his understanding also. This was before I heard that Einstein had a colleague died and he wrote to the man's wife that Bessa was still out there, and that somehow this was reassuring. I certainly think this way often, that space/time is laid out and that things in the past and things in the future are out there still.

Narrator : But almost at the same time that Relativity was gaining universal acceptance a radically different picture of the universe was emerging.

Physicist : The way out if you don't want to accept the block universe idea is quantum mechanics. Now, Quantum Mechanics is the second great discovery of the 20th century physics and that states that the future isn't predetermined and preordained.

Narrator : Quantum Mechanics was born out of a series of experiments whose results even today have no satisfactory explanation. Relativity works at the large scale where it provides exact predictions as to what will happen next. But when physicists started looking down at the atomic and sub-atomic level, the familiar laws failed. At this level, there were no certainties, only probabilities. How can the future of the universe be already out there if the future of a single molecule is so utterly unpredictable?

Physicist : Before we look to see what the atom is doing, not only is there a gap in our knowledge, the atom itself has not decided what to do. It had an infinite number of choices to make, it will be doing all those choices all at once, and its only when we look to see what is happening do we force it to make a choice. In Quantum Mechanics the future is not determined, and so Quantum Mechanics in a sense rescues us and rescues free will.

Roger Penrose : In a sense you don't have the future laid out in Quantum Mechanics So Quantum Mechanics. is basically different in the way we look at it. You do have this indeterminacy about the future and a necessary feature of this is its incompatibility with Special Relativity. So we have these 2 great theories, both of which are extremely accurate, tell us something about how the world operates, something very insightful and profound and accurate, but they're incompatible with each other. So there's no doubt there's something missing here. How important it is to how we 'feel' the passage of time is I think very important.

Narrator: The tragedy of modern physics is that it explains so much of the objective universe but at the cost of what we subjectively feel; about our conscious free will and our feeling that time does flow.

Faun Flynn: I very much think there's a flow to time. If you consider what music would be like if there was no flow to time. You couldn't have music if you didn't have memory, or if you didn't have an expectation generated by that memory. You'd have an isolated note in the 'now'. Music unfolds in time in such a way that we have a memory of what we've heard, and this memory conditions to what we expect. This of course is something that everybody is familiar with, because if you hear ( 7 note scale played on piano) you have a very strong expectation that the next note will be (plays final octave note of scale) . Music is a distillation or a side-effect of that mental faculty we employ to perceive time, and things changing in time.

Roger Penrose : The question of the passage of time is something the scientists have rather set aside, and taking the view that its not really physics, it's a subjective issue; and subjective questions are not part of science. Now when you start talking about phenomena like one's own perception of the passage of time, then that is a subjective thing. And that's almost a taboo subject for science because it's subjective. The physical world at least according to Relativity, is out there, and there is no flow of time, it's just there; whereas our feeling (we have this feeling of the passage of time) are intimately connected to our perceptions.

Physicist : We have this subjective feeling, that time goes by, but physicists would argue this is just an illusion.

Roger Penrose : Yes I think physicists would agree that the feeling of time passing is simply an illusion, something that is not real. It has something to do with our perceptions.

Narrator : Illusion or not, our perceptions emerge somewhere between the cosmic scale of Relativity where the flow of time is frozen and the quantum scale, where flow descends to uncertainty. Our world is on a scale governed by a mixture of chance and necessity.

Roger Penrose : My view is that there is some large scale quantum activity going on in the brain. Physics does not say that Quantum Mechanics takes place in small areas, but also take place over larger areas. I think this has to do with the consciousness. I think we need a new way to look at time, not either Quantum Mechanics or Relativity.

Narrator : If Quantum Mechanics is taking place in the brain then the same randomness of outcome and unpredictability might explain our ability to make sometime random choices. Opening up the future to the possibility of change would provide the first step of restoring to physics the flow of time it currently denies.

Physicist : I don't think time flows, I feel that time flows, but I feel we can only understand this if we have a better understanding of how consciousness works. I think human consciousness probably has the secrets as to how and why we think of time as going by.

Roger Penrose : I don't think we have the tools, I don't think we have the physical picture to accommodate these things yet. We're not very close to it.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-145621

SNIP: ...The June 20th issue of The New York Review of Books contains a devastating portrayal, by the art critic Richard Dorment, of the activities of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and its (now dissolved) sister institution, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. The foundation was established, according to Warhol’s will, to provide for the “advancement of the visual arts,” and was to be funded by the sale of a large number of works the artist left to his estate. The board was assembled for the purpose of deciding whether a given work was an original Warhol. As I’ll explain, that task is hardly straightforward.

Dorment’s fundamental accusation is that members of these overlapping organizations were in a position to profit from the authentication process, and that this affected their decisions. Whether these accusations hold up or not, the Warhol situation epitomizes a curious fact about the art world since the postmodern period.

Postmodernism in the arts repudiated many of the basic teachings of modernism: the myth of individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. Yet arts institutions continued to operate throughout the postmodern period, and do so right up to the present moment, as though that critique never happened. Museums, foundations, government endowments, and university art departments all effortlessly absorbed a movement which was more or less devoted to destroying their conception of the arts. They treated the postmodernists exactly the way they’d treated the modernists.

As the ur-postmodernist, Warhol’s entire artistic practice and persona stood, quite intentionally, in opposition to modernist ideas. He was the very antithesis of a Van Gogh, a Picasso, a Pollock. Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media. He presented himself as a kind of empty mirror for the images that were already all around us in advertising or entertainment or packaging. And his persona was famously cool and withdrawn, or even blank: just the opposite of the outsized, impassioned personalities of Picasso or Pollock.

Nevertheless, like the arts establishment generally, the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board proceeded as if the postmodern era that Warhol crystallized never happened at all. The board stamped, in indelible ink, works it rejected as original Warhols. Their decisions make a substantial difference in the art’s value. [...] Why is that? If modernism died in actual art practice, why did the art market and museum system go on as though nothing had ever happened? [...]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...eus-exist/

GARY GUTTING: "...Further, as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. Socrates and Plato criticized certain poetic treatments, which showed Zeus and the gods in an unworthy light. But they never questioned the very existence of the gods, and Socrates regularly followed the dictates of his daimon, a personal divine guide. There were many questions about the true nature of the divine, but few about its existence.

Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? [...] Most of us do not find our world so filled with the divine, and we may be inclined to dismiss the Greeks’ “experiences” as over-interpretations. But how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do? What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life? If we cannot eliminate this as a real possibility, shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?

Let’s consider some objections...."

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/weird_sc...t_partner/

A.C. LEE: Although H.P. Lovecraft has exerted a towering influence on the development of science fiction and horror, until recently, Brian Kim Stefans argues in an essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, his work hasn’t held much interest for literary critics or philosophers.

Stefans thinks Lovecraft’s “singularly fraught metaphysical universe,” and his refusal of an authoritative “panoptic vision” of the world, spoiled both his own attempts at a novel andthe efforts of literary critics looking for a tidy interpretive framework through which to engage and explain him. But Stefans hears a Lovecraftian echo in the work of a loose grouping of young philosophers, the so-called “speculative realists,” a connection made explicit in “Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy,” by Graham Harman.

Harman sees Lovecraft’s “failures” precisely as “virtues.” Where 20th century philosophy was marked by the “linguistic turn” and various attempts at reductionism, and accordingly mixed results, Lovecraft insisted on and reveled in identifying both the limits of language and the unexplainable gaps in reality. Harman, according to Stefans, hopes to make Lovecraft “a foot soldier” in a war “against bland, realist empiricism” in the vein of Hume and Kant. --The Stone

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2014...ort.com%2F