Mining For Molecules In The Milky Way

Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to go prospecting in a rich molecular cloud in our Milky Way Galaxy. They seek to discover new, complex molecules in interstellar space that may be precursors to life. "Clouds like this one are the raw material for new stars and planets. We know that complex chemistry builds prebiotic molecules in such clouds long before the stars and planets are formed. There is a good chance that some of these interstellar molecules may find their way to the surface of young planets such as the early Earth, and provide a head start for the chemistry of life. For the first time, we now have the capability to make a very thorough and methodical search to find all the chemicals in the clouds," said Anthony Remijan, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

Scientists Identify the Brain’s Activity Hub

The outer layer of the brain, the reasoning, planning and self-aware region known as the cerebral cortex, has a central clearinghouse of activity below the crown of the head that is widely connected to more-specialized regions in a large network similar to a subway map, scientists reported Monday. The new report, published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology, provides the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior. The paper also provides a striking demonstration of how new imaging techniques focused on the brain’s white matter — the connections between cells, rather than the neurons themselves — are filling in a dimension of human brain function that has been all but dark. In previous studies, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to identify peaks and valleys of neural activity when people are doing various things, like making decisions, reacting to frightening images or reliving painful memories. But these studies, while provocative, revealed virtually nothing about the underlying neural networks involved — about which brain regions speak to one another and when. Previous estimates of network structure, based on such imaging, have been sketchy.The new findings, while not conclusive, give scientists what is essentially a wiring diagram that they can test and refine. Dr. Sporns said continued research should help produce a complete and detailed neural wiring diagram, what he called the “connectome” of the brain. “We hope we can get to a place where we have, in effect, a brain simulator, in the same way we have computer models that can simulate the climate,” he said, “so we can simulate activation patterns we see in clinical cases,” like psychiatric problems and brain injuries.

Deep Down, We Can’t Fool Even Ourselves

In voting against the Bush tax cut in 2001, Senator John McCain said he “cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate.” Today he campaigns in favor of extending that same tax cut beyond its expiration date. Senator Barack Obama last year called himself a “longtime advocate” of public financing of election campaigns. This month, he reiterated his “support” for such financing while becoming the first major party presidential nominee ever to reject it for his own campaign.Do you think either of these men is a hypocrite?If so, does this hypocrite really believe, in his heart, what he is saying? Fortunately, we don’t need to get into the fine points of taxes or campaign finances to take a stab at these questions. We can probably get further by looking at some experiments in what psychologists call moral hypocrisy. This is a more devious form of hypocrisy than what was exhibited by, say, the governor of New York when he got caught patronizing a prostitute. It was obviously hypocritical behavior for a public official who had formerly prosecuted prostitutes and increased penalties for their customers, but at least Eliot Spitzer acknowledged his actions were wrong by anyone’s standards. The moral hypocrite, by contrast, has convinced himself that he is acting virtuously even when he does something he would condemn in others. You can understand this “self-halo” effect — and perhaps discover it in someone very close to you— by considering what happened when two psychologists, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, tested people’s reactions to the following situation.

You show up for an experiment and are told that you and a person arriving later will each have to do a different task on a computer. One job involves a fairly easy hunt through photos that will take just 10 minutes. The other task is a more tedious exercise in mental geometry that takes 45 minutes.

You get to decide how to divvy up the chores: either let a computer assign the tasks randomly, or make the assignments yourself. Either way, the other person will not know you had anything to do with the assignments.

Now, what is the fair way to divvy up the chores?

When the researchers posed this question in the abstract to people who were not involved in the tasks, everyone gave the same answer: It would be unfair to give yourself the easy job.
But when the researchers actually put another group of people in this situation, more than three-quarters of them took the easy job. Then, under subsequent questioning, they gave themselves high marks for acting fairly. The researchers call this moral hypocrisy because the people were absolving themselves of violating a widely held standard of fairness (even though they themselves hadn’t explicitly endorsed that standard beforehand).
The more interesting question is how presidential candidates, and their supporters, turn into hypocrites. It has been demonstrated repeatedly in experiments that humans are remarkably sensitive to unfairness. We’ve survived as social animals because we are so good at spotting selfishness and punishing antisocial behavior.
So how we do violate our own moral code? Does our gut instinct for self-preservation override our moral reasoning? Do we use our powers of rationality to override our moral instinct?
“The question here,” Dr. DeSteno said, “is whether we’re designed at heart to be fair or selfish.”

Numerology

My cousin, bound for a top liberal arts college in the fall, was amused when I told her I was reviewing a book about big ideas in mathematics, from the classical to the contemporary. “Don’t they already know everything about math?” she asked. “You know, there’s algebra ... and then calculus ... and that’s it, right?”

Andrew Hodges, a fellow at Oxford and the author of the lively new book “One to Nine,” would have been horrified, but not surprised. My cousin, in his view, is a victim of the pedagogical tradition that presents math as an eternally fixed array of computations, to be memorized and repeatedly executed without motivation or explanation. The result, he writes, is a “legacy of fear and anxiety generated by schools, which leaves most of their victims with a lifetime of mumbling apologetically about ‘my worst subject.’”
“One to Nine” offers a different model for teaching math — discursive rather than linear, topical rather than abstract and remote, and, above all, manically energetic rather than repetitive and plodding. The book is composed of nine chapters, each focused — very, very softly focused — on one of the first nine natural numbers. Chapter Four, for instance, starts out with the observation that four is a perfect square, and from there skips along to the construction of Latin squares, the irrationality of the square root of two, the definition of the logarithm (whose relation to “four” never comes entirely clear), complex numbers, and the even more exotic quaternions (a number system in which “numbers” are actually strings of four integers, and the product of two numbers depends on the order in which you multiply them!), the theory of four-dimensional spacetime and Einstein’s equation E=mc2 (squares again) before finishing with a short and speculative account of the theory of twistors, one of many competing candidates for the universe’s underlying geometry. NYTimes-

The Urge to End It

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus wrote, “and that is suicide.” How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin — but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art. Beyond the philosophical paradox are the bewilderingly complex dynamics of the act itself. While a universal phenomenon, the incidence of suicide varies so immensely across different population groups — among nations and cultures, ages and gender, race and religion — that any overarching theory about its root cause is rendered useless. Even identifying those subgroups that are particularly suicide-prone is of very limited help in addressing the issue. In the United States, for example, both elderly men living in Western states and white male adolescents from divorced families are at elevated risk, but since the overwhelming majority in both these groups never attempt suicide, how can we identify the truly at risk among them?.............

Long but interesting article....... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/magazine/06suicide-t.html?ref=science

Keeping an eye out for global killers

THE Earth is pockmarked with the evidence of ancient collisions — huge craters blasted into its surface by asteroids or comets. One such object, striking 65 million years ago in the Yucatán in Mexico, is believed by some experts to be linked to the demise of the dinosaurs. For a decade, NASA has been busy trying to identify what else is headed this way, particularly those potential “civilization killers” of 1 kilometer (.62 miles) or more in diameter that have orbits coming within 30 million miles of the Earth’s — too close for comfort by space standards. But the big ones are, in many ways, the easy part. Smaller rocks matter, too. Perhaps nowhere is that so evident as in central Siberia, where 100 years ago last week, something — presumably a meteoroid, most experts say — streaked across the sky and exploded at an estimated height of 28,000 feet with a force equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs, leveling some 800 square miles of forest. Simulations by the Sandia National Laboratories showed that object could have been just 90 feet across. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has estimated that a Tunguska-size asteroid will enter Earth’s atmosphere once every 300 years and says there may be 375,000 objects of such size out there.Fortunately, the odds are good that the next one will fall over one of our oceans, which take up more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, or the planet’s still-vast stretches of uninhabited lands. How much in taxpayer dollars should be invested to pinpoint such hazards is one of the toughest risk-management exercises around. “In fact, there was a daylight fireball event widely observed near Los Angeles two days ago,” Dr. Yeomans said in an e-mail message last Thursday. “I take these events as Mother Nature’s little reminders that we need to pay attention, find and track the large ones and then deflect the very few that threaten us. Tunguska was another reminder. Until recently, we humans did not pay heed to these shots across the bow but now, I think, there is more of a recognition of this low probability — but high consequence — type of event.”

Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time. The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone. Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase. “This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”