That Delightfully Naughty Breakfast of Finnish
Champions

tags: travel, Helsinki, Finland, licorice

Image: GrrlScientist, 3 July 2009 [larger view]

While my fellow Americans slept, I was watching birds from my host's balcony, and nibbling on the most delightfully naughty Finnish breakfast consisting of licorice and chocolate. Just thought you all might wish to know what you are missing out on.

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Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage
of Evolution"

Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture,  is about a bit a year.

"By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledgethat we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, andparticularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate totake a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, aswell as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the last ten thousand years the human species has  been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

Casey Kazan

Related Galaxy posts:

The 10,000 Year Explosion: Has Human Civilization Turbo Charged Evolution?
Homo Sapiens -The "Time Travelers" -A Galaxy Classic
?Hyper-Speed? Evolution Discovered
Bringing Ancient Human Viruses Back to Life: A Jurassic Park or Salvation?

Immense Journey

Source: http://www.rationalvedanta.net/node/131

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New Discovery Key to Supermassive Black Holes

A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers 290 million light years from Earth providing a key clue to the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of all known galaxies in the universe.

Until now, identified black holes have been either super-massive (several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun) in the centre of galaxies, or about the size of a typical star (between three and 20 Solar masses).

The new discovery is the first solid evidence of a new class of medium-sized black holes. The team, led by astrophysicists at the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France, detected the new black hole with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.

"While it is widely accepted that stellar mass black holes are created during the death throes of massive stars, it is still unknown how super-massive black holes are formed," says the lead author of the paper, Dr Sean Farrell, now based at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. "One theory is that super-massive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate mass black holes. To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes.

"This is the best detection to date of such long sought after intermediate mass black holes. Such a detection is essential. While it is already known that stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars, the formation mechanisms of supermassive black holes are still unknown."

"The identification of HLX-1 is therefore an important step towards a better understanding of the formation of the super-massive black holes that exist at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies."

This new source, dubbed HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49. It is ultra-luminous in X-rays, with a maximum X-ray brightness of approximately 260 million times that of the Sun. Its position indicates that it is not the central engine of the host galaxy.

Posted by Casey Kazan

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Source: University of Leicester

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Augmented Reality On Your Phone Yes! Soon it Will
Be a World of Everyone, Everything, Everywhere

Your phone might put you in touch with the rest of the world, but you still need to know what part of the world you want to call - and what their number is, and whether they'll want to talk to you.  The latest generation of GPS-enabled phones is fixing that: drawing an invisible layer of data over everything and everywhere, enabling the tech-connected to use the world more effectively than ever before.

It's indestructible information: if a bar sucks, you can't graffiti the walls (at least not for long), but with new geo-tagging services you can leave an indelible message than anyone equipped with the same hardware can access.  And since that hardware is a phone, that's everyone.  The true power of tagging won't engage until after the usual new-tech shakedown, where one service beats or eats all the others and gets a solid service running, but then it'll be impossible for anywhere to work on the business principle of "the suckers won't be coming back anyway."

It's effective use of urban environments:  a long-pondered question is "How can someone be lonely in a city of ten million people?"  The answer is, of course, "Extremely easily" because everyone has developed anti-other-people defense mechanisms.  But social scanning apps like Loopt let you stay aware of where all your friends are, while others can scan the city for people with similar interests and habits to you.  Why wait to bump into someone at the Blues section of the second-hand vinyl store, when Google can tell you about everyone in ten square miles who appreciates the sound?  Why not take control of such chance meetings?

Of course there are massive security risks in advertising your location and interests, and we'll have to learn to defend ourselves from those hazards.  But every step since we first squidged out of a pond has been an arms race against danger, and every single advance has made our lives unequivocally better.  Think about it: we used to struggle against actual no-screwing-around Death By Tiger when we left the cave to hunt food, and now we're worried about credit card fraud when we order custom Guatamalan coffee to be couriered to our door.

Never mind the scaremongers - life is always getting better and information is the method.  Augmented reality is coming.  We can't wait.

Dual Perspectives http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101872

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The Highest Point on the Planet (It's Not Mount
Everest)

We all know that Mount Everest, at 29,035 feet above sea level, is the highest spot on our planet. Sir Edmound Hillary taught us that, right? Well, yes? that is unless we think about the word "highest" in a different way.

Think instead of that point on the planet closest to the moon and the stars, in other words to "out there."

According to Issac Newton, the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin will result in a slight flattening at the poles and bulging at the equator, which would make the planet slightly oblate. Mathematicians call this an "oblate spheroid," which means that anyone on the equator is already standing "higher," or closer to outer space, than people who aren't on the bulge.

The winner of the hightest point of Earth is Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. Mount Chimborazo, in the Andes, is a 20,000-plus-foot peak sitting on top of a bulge on the Earth. Mount Everest is a 29,000-plus-foot peak sitting lower down on that same bulge. Because Chimborazo is a bump on a bigger part of the bulge, it is 1.5 miles higher than Everest!

Link

The Andes Vanishing Glaciers

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The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (7/3)

Take the Walkman 30th Birthday Quiz

How much do you know about the most celebrated personal stereo of all time, one that is today turning the big Three Oh? A lot? OK, hell, let's see what you got...

NASA's Fermi Telescope Probes Dozens of Pulsars

With NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, astronomers now are getting their best look at those whirling stellar cinders known as pulsars. In two studies published in the July 2 edition of Science Express, international teams have analyzed gamma-rays from two dozen pulsars, including 16 discovered by Fermi. Fermi is the first spacecraft able to identify pulsars by their gamma-ray emission alone

Future of the Web: I Want My WebTV

WiFi in Space Coming Soon?

Scientists Find 'Master' Cells For Human Heart

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Filipino scientists developing virus-resistant
kamote

The Philippines hopes to have a genetically modified (GM) kamote (sweet potato) in the next five years.Scientists from the Visayas State University (VSU) and the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Institute of Plant Breeding  (UPLB-IPB) are now[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://rdenews.uplb.edu.ph/index.php/articles-by-the-media/14-internet-articles/1
20-filipino-scientists-developing-virus-resistant-kamote

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