Tag Archives: experiment

Dangers of Factory Farming

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Factory Farming Is Manufacturing Superbugs — and Endangering Us All

Posted: 06/17/11 09:06 AM ET
by Johann Hari, Columnist The London Independent
Here is a news story that could determine whether you live or die. Many of the world’s scientists are warning that one of the mightiest weapons doctors have against sickness is being rendered useless — so a few people can get richer, for a while. If they aren’t stopped soon, the World Health Organization warns we are facing “a doomsday scenario of a world without antibiotics”. It will be a world wheretransplant surgery is impossible. It will be a world where a simple appendix operation will be as routinely lethal as it was in 1927, before the discovery of penicillin. It will be a world where pneumonia and TB and gonorrhea are far harder to deal with, and claim many more of us. But it’s a world that you and I don’t have to see – if we act on this warning now.

 

Talk on Time

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It’s All Relative

Back to Episode

Both physicist Brian Greene and neurologist Oliver Sacks explain the very strange, very subjective nature of time.

The elasticity of experience is expressed by sound artist Ben Rubin in a piece he produced for The Next Big Thing. We include an excerpt on being in “the zone.” His story features track stars: Shawn Crawford, Amy Acuff, Brendon Couts, Jason Pyrah, Derrek Atkins, Jon Drummond, and Larry Wade.

to read more, see more, hear more, go to:   http://www.radiolab.org/2007/may/29/its-all-relative/

The Look of Fear

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Scientists find out what fear looks like from space

June 16, 2011

Scientists find out what fear looks like from spaceEnlarge

Heron Island lagoon. Image downloaded from Google Earth 13 Oct. 2010. Image date 2 Aug. 2006. Credit: 2011 DigitalGlobe

(PhysOrg.com) — While most of us could find no better use for Google Earth than checking out a holiday destination, scientists in Sydney have shown it can reveal a lot about the behaviour of marine life on the Great Barrier Reef.

In what is believed to be the first research of its kind, University of Technology, Sydney  Dr Elizabeth Madin and colleagues – including Dr. Joshua Madin of Macquarie University and Professor David Booth from UTS – have used satellite images to observe the indirect effects of behavioural interactions between predators and prey in the lagoon habitat at Heron Island.

The results, published in the paper “Landscape of fear visible from space” in the first issue of the journal Nature Scientific Reports, have revealed distinct patterns of grazing halos – rings of bare sand devoid of seaweed – within the algal beds surrounding isolated groups of coral.

to read more go to:   http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-06-scientists-space.html

 

Take A Breather

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Things are hectic and crazy these days.  There seems little prospect of this changing.  Our job is to deal, to cope, perhaps even to overcome.  In order to do this, we need to be in contact with WHO we are as much as possible.

The good thing about being in contact with our WHO is that we have a sense of our own worth and our own power. What we choose to so with that is our own stuff.

Under any circumstances, there is no judgement here. Rather, I am offering a suggestion for a way to make through the day with a little less stress.  It is an easy method, but as we learn from reading Taoism, the small stuff is generally the hardest.  We are conditioned to complicate.  To find reasons, to find motives to make observations.  What if you just needed one.  Hmm, not very… democratic?

Well, enough of that.  I have a small exercise (no huffing and puffing required) that, if used on a daily basis, can bring a bit of peace into the day.

Take a minute out of every hour of the day to center.  (If you are awake fourteen hours, that is fourteen minutes.  Not bad.) Just put everything down.  Close your eyes or perhaps focus your eyes on a peaceful picture.  Take two deep breaths.  See all the stuff just rolling off of you.  It can puddle at your feet.  You can send down into whatever is below you.  Feel how great it is to let things go for a bit. Watch it as it goes.  Then see a great white, shining light come down and flow through your body.  Renewing your energy.  Re-establishing WHO you are in your core self.  When it has fully engulfed you, go to your heart center, take two deep breaths. Add a bit of gratitude, a Namaste, whatever, and come back to where you were.

The end.  A one minute vacation to the center of it all.

Correlation-Roundup & Birth Defects

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by Lucia Graves

Roundup Birth Defects: Regulators Knew World’s Best-Selling Herbicide Causes Problems, New Report Finds

Roundup Ready

WASHINGTON — Industry regulators have known for years that Roundup, the world’s best-selling herbicide produced by U.S. company Monsanto, causes birth defects, according to a new reportreleased Tuesday.

The report, “Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?” found regulators knew as long ago as 1980 that glyphosate, the chemical on which Roundup is based, can cause birth defects in laboratory animals.

But despite such warnings, and although the European Commission has known that glyphosate causes malformations since at least 2002, the information was not made public

to read more go to:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/07/roundup-birth-defects-herbicide-regulators_n_872862.html

 

A New NIMBY

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A New Kind of NIMBY: Nature in My Backyard

by David Suzuki, founder David Suzuki Foundation

On reading about the growing resistance to a mega-quarry being proposed for southern Ontario, I had an epiphany about the media’s use of the term NIMBY, for “not in my backyard.” It’s normally used to describe grassroots efforts to block everything from landfills and windmills to big box stores and bike lanes. NIMBYism has taken on a negative association, often implying naive or parochial resistance to projects that challenge the status quo in a community.

But NIMBYism isn’t always bad. Although it can arise out of fear of something new or different in a community, it can also be the result of genuine concern for the local environment. I’d like to propose a new kind of NIMBY, one that is positive and reflects a true sense of caring for our communities. Let’s go green and say yes to Nature in My Backyard.

To read more, go to:  http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/david-suzuki/environment-canada_b_872869.html

Quantum Measurement Without Distortion

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Quantum Physics First: Physicists Measure Without Distorting

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2011) — Quantum mechanics is famous for saying that a tree falling in a forest when there’s no one there doesn’t make a sound. Quantum mechanics also says that if anyone is listening, it interferes with and changes the tree. And so the famous paradox: how can we know reality if we cannot measure it without distorting it?

An international team of researchers, led by University of Toronto physicist Aephraim Steinberg of the Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, has found a way to do just that by applying a modern measurement technique to the historic two-slit interferometer experiment in which a beam of light shone through two slits results in an interference pattern on a screen behind.

In a new experiment, researchers have succeeded for the first time in experimentally reconstructing full trajectories which provide a description of how light particles move through the two slits and form an interference pattern. (Credit: iStockphoto/Karl Dolenc)

That famous experiment, and the 1927 Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein debates, seemed to establish that you could not watch a particle go through one of two slits without destroying the interference effect: you had to choose which phenomenon to look for.

“Quantum measurement has been the philosophical elephant in the room of quantum mechanics for the past century,” says Steinberg, who is lead author of Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer, to be published in Science on June 2. “However, in the past 10 to 15 years, technology has reached the point where detailed experiments on individual quantum systems really can be done, with potential applications such as quantum cryptography and computation”

to read more go to:   http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602143159.htm