"Enzymes are the workhorses of life. They speed up chemical reactions so that processes that would otherwise take thousands of years proceed in seconds inside living cells. Life would be impossible without them. But how they accelerate chemical reactions by such enormous factors, often more than a trillion-fold, has been an enigma. Experiments over the past few decades, however, have shown that enzymes make use of a remarkable trick called quantum tunnelling to accelerate biochemical reactions. Essentially, the enzyme encourages electrons and protons to vanish from one position in a biomolecule and instantly rematerialise in another, without passing through the gap in between – a kind of quantum teleportation.

And before you throw your hands up in incredulity, it should be stressed that quantum tunnelling is a very familiar process in the subatomic world and is responsible for such processes as radioactive decay of atoms and even the reason the sun shines (by turning hydrogen into helium through the process of nuclear fusion). Enzymes have made every single biomolecule in your cells and every cell of every living creature on the planet, so they are essential ingredients of life. And they dip into the quantum world to help keep us alive."===http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/...cs-biology

UFO, 15th-century painting, and Vlad's birthplace

http://www.inquisitr.com/1564936/ufo-see...this-mean/

EXCERPT: A UFO appears to hover over a building that may be connected to the real-life Dracula in a recently uncovered painting from the town of Sighisoara, Romania. A photo of the mysterious painting that appears on the wall of a 700-year-old monastery was snapped this summer by tourist Catalina Borta, who sent it to a prominent UFO research group for evaluation.

The bizarre painting shows what appears to be a church — perhaps the same one where the painting was found — seemingly engulfed in flames. Over the church, a large, floating disc hovers, sending a column of smoke billowing toward the sky above.

The town of Sighisoara is believed to be where Vlad Tepes, the notorious “Vlad the Impaler,” also known as Vlad III Dracula, was born in 1431 — not long after the monastery where the painting appears was constructed....

http://plus.maths.org/content/omega-and-...as-no-toes

EXCERPT: Over the millennia, many mathematicians have hoped that mathematics would one day produce a Theory of Everything (TOE); a finite set of axioms and rules from which every mathematical truth could be derived. But in 1931 this hope received a serious blow: Kurt Gödel published his famous Incompleteness Theorem, which states that in every mathematical theory, no matter how extensive, there will always be statements which can't be proven to be true or false.

Gregory Chaitin has been fascinated by this theorem ever since he was a child, and now, in time for the centenary of Gödel's birth in 2006, he has published his own book, called Meta Math! on the subject. It describes his journey, which, from the work of Gödel via that of Leibniz and Turing, led him to the number Omega, which is so complex that no mathematical theory can ever describe it. In this article he explains what Omega is all about, why maths can have no Theory of Everything, and what this means for mathematicians....

http://plus.maths.org/content/string-the...and-beyond

EXCERPT: ...Mathematics and physics have always influenced each other, with new mathematics being invented to describe nature, and old mathematics turning out to lend perfect descriptions for newly-discovered physical phenomena. String theory is no different and many mathematicians work on ideas inspired by it. These include the possible geometries of the hidden dimensions, the basic ideas of geometry when there is a minimum distance, the ways in which strings can split and come together, and the question of how we can relate strings to the particles in the world that we see.

String theory gives us an exciting vision of nature as miniscule bits of vibrating string in a space with hidden curled-up dimensions. All the implications of these ideas are yet to be understood. String theory is an active area of research with hundreds of people working to see how the theory fits together and produces the world we see around us....

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physic...cturalism/

EXCERPT: Under the heading of “structuralism in physics” there are three different but closely related research programs in philosophy of science and, in particular, in philosophy of physics. These programs were initiated by the work of Joseph Sneed, Günther Ludwig, and Erhard Scheibe, respectively, since the beginning of the 1970s. For the sake of simplicity we will use these names in order to refer to the three programs, without the intention of ignoring or minimizing the contributions of other scholars. [...] The activities of the structuralists have been mainly confined to Europe, especially Germany, and, for whatever reasons, largely ignored in the Anglo-American discussion.

[...] The three programs share the following characteristics and convictions:

• A metatheory of science requires a kind of formalization different from that already employed by scientific theories themselves.

• The structuralistic program yields a framework for the rational reconstruction of particular theories.

• A central tool of formalization is Bourbaki's concept of “species of structures”, as described in Bourbaki (1986).


Among the significant features of theories to be described are:

• Mathematical structure

• Empirical claims of a theory

• Function of theoretical terms

• Rôle of approximation

• Evolution of theories

• Intertheoretic relations

Medbots, Autodocs & Telemedicine

EXCERPT: ...One of the main and morally commendable reasons to create medical robots and telemedicine capabilities is to provide treatment to people in areas that do not have enough human medical professionals. For example, a medical specialist who lives in the United States could diagnose and treat patients in a remote part of the world using a suitable machine. With such machines, a patient could (in theory) have access to any medical professional in the world and this would certainly change medicine. True medical robots would obviously change medicine—after all, a medical robot would never get tired and such robots could, in theory, be sent all over the world to provide medical care. There is, of course, the usual concern about the impact of technology on jobs—if a robot can replace medical personnel and do so in a way that increases profits, that will certainly happen. While robots would certainly excel at programmable surgery and similar tasks, it will certainly be quite some time before robots are advanced enough to replace human medical professionals on a large scale

Another excellent reason to create medical robots and telemedicine capabilities has been made clear by the Ebola outbreak: medical personnel, paramedics and body handlers can be infected. While protective gear and protocols do exist, the gear is cumbersome, flawed and hot and people often fail to properly follow the protocols. While many people are moral heroes and put themselves at risk to treat the ill and bury the dead, there are no doubt people who are deterred by the very real possibility of a horrible death. Medical robots and telemedicine seem ideal for handling such cases....

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...pitalists/

EXCERPT: ...That humans live simultaneously real, physical lives and symbolic, meaningful existences means that they must die not once, but twice. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote, it is possible in the human imagination for these two deaths, one symbolic and one real, to not entirely coincide. In such cases we enter a peculiar state, one he called “entre deux morts” — or between two deaths.

Those whose symbolic selves die while their bodies still live attain a kind of extra-worldly beauty. Lacan identified Sophocles’ great character Antigone with this state — condemned to death by Creon for having defied the state’s law by burying her treasonous brother, she burns with a righteous splendor that puts to shame Creon’s pathetic attachment to the state’s laws.

Those whose bodies die while their symbolic selves linger constitute an entirely different breed. Chained by a law or obligation to an animate state their bodies can no longer support, such beings become monstrous specters, condemned to walk the earth as embodiments of some insatiable hunger.

It is not too difficult to see in these two archetypes our modern vampires and zombies, the former “radiating a sublime beauty,” in Lacan’s words, the latter monstrous excrescences driven on by a fundamental imbalance in the world of men....

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/oct...-john-gray

EXCERPT: [...] A radically dualistic view of the world, in which good and evil are separate forces that have coexisted since the beginning of time, was held by the ancient Zoroastrians and Manicheans. These religions did not face the problem with which Christian apologists have struggled so painfully and for so long – how to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful and wholly good God with the fact of evil in the world. The worldview of George W Bush and Tony Blair is commonly described as Manichean, but this is unfair to the ancient religion. Mani, the third-century prophet who founded the faith, appears to have believed the outcome of the struggle was uncertain, whereas for Bush and Blair there could never be any doubt as to the ultimate triumph of good. In refusing to accept the permanency of evil they are no different from most western leaders.

[...] In its official forms, secular liberalism rejects the idea of evil. Many liberals would like to see the idea of evil replaced by a discourse of harm: we should talk instead about how people do damage to each other and themselves. But this view poses a problem of evil remarkably similar to that which has troubled Christian believers. If every human being is born a liberal – as these latter-day disciples of Pelagius appear to believe – why have so many, seemingly of their own free will, given their lives to regimes and movements that are essentially repressive, cruel and violent? Why do human beings knowingly harm others and themselves? Unable to account for these facts, liberals have resorted to a language of dark and evil forces much like that of dualistic religions....