Category Archives: Of Interest

Cloning Mammoths

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Mammoth cloning project given boost by bone marrrow find

05 December 11

After a well preserved mammoth thigh bone was found in Siberia this summer, a joint research group from Japan and Russia has made plans to start cloning the long-extinct mammal from next year, Japan’s Kyodo News has reported.

The gigantic leg bone was discovered in permafrost soil in Siberia this August.Kyodo News‘ report suggests that climate change has led to frozen ground in eastern Russia thawing out, potentially heralding a coming boom in mammoth discoveries.

The thigh bone is special because it contains bone marrow that has been preserved in the ice. The nuclei of the marrow cells could potentially be extracted and put inside egg cells from an elephant — which are close genetic cousins of the mammoth — to create embryos with mammoth DNA.

The researchers — from the Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University — would then plant the embryos into elephant wombs and then deliver a baby mammoth.

The iconic woolly mammoth, which went extinct some five to ten thousand years ago, has been a candidate for cloning for many years and researchers have worked tirelessly to find DNA that’s preserved well-enough to clone.

The complete body of a one-month-old female woolly mammoth calf was discovered in 2007, and seemed promising. However, Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Zoological Institute dismissed suggestions that the mammoth could be cloned and used to breed a live mammoth.

If this joint Japanese and Russian team is successful, it won’t be the first time that an extinct animal has been resurrected by cloning. In January 2009, the recently extinct Pyrenean ibex was brought back to life. DNA from the ibex’s skin samples were used to replace genetic material in eggs from domestic goats. Sadly, the newborn cloned ibex died within minutes of its birth due to breathing difficulties

from:    http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-12/05/mammoth-clone

The Benefits of Wine Swirling

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Mechanism of Wine Swirling Explained

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2011) — Wine drinkers know that swirling a good vintage around in a glass aerates the wine and releases its bouquet. Just how the process — known as “orbital shaking” — works, however, has been something of a mystery.

Wine swirling. (Credit: © Patricia Hofmeester / Fotolia)

Fluid dynamicists have long observed that orbital shaking generates a wave that propagates around the inner edge of the glass, churning the liquid as it travels. “The formation of this wave has probably been known since the introduction of glass or any other kind of cylindrical bowl, but what has been lacking is a description of the physics related to the mixing and oxygenation,” says Mohamed Farhat, senior scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

To figure out how the mixing occurs, Farhat and his colleagues generated such waves in clear cylinders and used state-of-the-art instrumentation to track the motion of traveling waves and measure the liquid velocity.

The researchers found that “as the wave propagates along the glass wall, the liquid is displaced back and forth from bottom to top and from the center to the periphery,” Farhat explains. “This pumping mechanism, induced by the wave, is more pronounced near the free surface and close to the wall, which enhances the mixing.” The research team also discovered that, “for a given glass shape, the mixing and oxygenation may be optimized with an appropriate choice of shaking diameter and rotation speed,” he says.

“The intuitive and efficient motion of wine swirling has inspired engineers in the field of biopharmaceuticals,” Farhat says, where cell cultures can be placed in large cylindrical containers — or bioreactors — and “shaken” in a manner similar to the aeration of a glass of wine. The new work, he says, demonstrates that “such bioreactors offer better mixing and oxygenation over existing stirred tanks, provided that operating parameters are carefully optimized. Moreover, the gentle nature of orbital shaking also ensures a better viability and growth rate of the cells at reduced cost.”

Martino Reclari, a Ph.D. student and a member of the Swiss team, presented the findings in a talk at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, which takes place Nov. 20-22, 2011, at the Baltimore Convention Center in the historic waterfront district of Baltimore, Maryland

from:   http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111121104142.htm

Corporate Personhood Challenged in L.A.

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LOS ANGELES POISED TO BE THE FIRST MAJOR U.S. CITY TO CALL FOR END TO CORPORATE PERSONHOOD by David Swanson  

Corporate-Logos-2-1

Grassroots Momentum Builds Toward Passage of a Constitutional Amendment

LOS ANGELES, CA – Next week the Los Angeles City Council will vote on a resolution that calls on Congress to amend the Constitution to clearly establish that only living persons — not corporations — are endowed with constitutional rights and that money is not the same as free speech. If this resolution is passed, Los Angeles will be the first major city in the U.S. to call for an end to all corporate constitutional rights.

From War is a Crime.org
Posted on 01 December 2011
http://warisacrime.org/content/los-angeles-poised-be-first-major-us-city-call-end-corporate-personhoodThe campaign in Los Angeles is the latest grassroots effort by Move to Amend, a national coalition working to abolish corporate personhood. “Local resolution campaigns are an opportunity for citizens to speak up and let it be known that we won’t accept the corporate takeover of our government lying down,” said Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, a national spokesperson for Move to Amend. “We urge communities across the country to join the Move to Amend campaign and raise your voices.”

Earlier this year voters in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin overwhelmingly approved ballot measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. In November voters in Boulder, Colorado and Missoula, Montana both passed similar initiatives with 75% support.

“We are experiencing overwhelming support for what may be a historic turning point in restoring a voice to the voters and setting an example for the rest of the country,” stated Mary Beth Fielder, Coordinator of Move To Amend LA. “This action would provide the basis for overturning the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”

Move to Amend volunteers in dozens of communities across the country are working to place similar measures on local ballots next year, including West Allis, WI, a conservative suburb of Milwaukee where last week local residents successfully qualified a measure for their spring ballot.

Move to Amend’s strategy is to pass community resolutions across the nation through city councils and through direct vote by ballot initiative. “Our plan is build a movement that will drive this issue into Congress from the grassroots. The American people are behind us on this and these campaigns help our federal representatives see that we mean business. Our very democracy is at stake,” stated Sopoci-Belknap.

The campaign in Los Angeles is endorsed by a growing list of organizations including Common Cause, Occupy LA, LA County Federation of Labor, Physicians for Social Responsibility, The Environmental Caucus of the CA Democratic Party, Southern California Americans for Democratic Action, MoveOn LA, Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains, Democracy for America, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, AFSCME 36, LA Green Machine and California Clean Money Campaign.

For a complete list of all resolutions passed to date see: http://movetoamend.org/resolutions-map. Read Move to Amend’s proposed amendment here: http://movetoamend.org/amendment.

from:    http://www.newrealities.com/index.php/articles-on-politicseconomy/item/1830-los-angeles-poised-to-be-the-first-major-us-city-to-call-for-end-to-corporate-personhood-by-david-swanson

Wolves and Adaptation

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Yellowstone Wolves Show How Animals Change With Nature

Jennifer Welsh, LiveScience Staff Writer
Date: 01 December 2011 Time: 02:00 PM ET
animals, Yellowstone wolves, wolf reintroduction, environmental changes and survival, evolution in action, Yellowstone population changes, population modeling, response to climate change, evolutionary changes, population characteristics,
Sibling members of Yellowstone National Park’s Druid Peak Pack engaged in play.
CREDIT: Daniel Stahler/NPS

Environmental changes have a profound effect not only on animal populations but on traits of the animals themselves, in ways that are difficult to understand and predict, new research suggests.

By studying the wolves of Yellowstone National Park, a group of researchers has developed a new model for understanding how both ecological and evolutionary traits of an animal population change as the environment does.

The researchers recorded and studied data from Yellowstone for more than 15 years, including the body size and coat color of wolves as well as their sharply fluctuating population, which last year stood at 97.

“The conclusions that we have been able to draw is that biologists should stop treating population size independently of population characteristics. As  changes, it invariably changes the ecology and evolution of species,” study researcher Tim Coulson, of Imperial College London, told LiveScience.

The study appears in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Science.

Yellowstone wolves

An international group of wolf experts, geneticists and statisticians began collecting data from Yellowstone when, absent from the park for 70 years, wolves were reintroduced in 1995 and 1996. The reintroduced population of 40 grew to nearly 180 wolves within seven years. Then the population fluctuated before sharply declining starting in 2008.

Researchers put this data together with genetic information and other characteristics about the wolves.

“Biologists and people who study wild populations in animals have been noticing over the last decade or so [of studies] that when you change the environment around a species — climate change, introduction of new species, disease epidemics, etc. — you don’t just change the size of the population, the number of individuals living there, you often change the characteristics of the animals,” Coulson said.

“It’s a fairly general phenomenon, but they haven’t had an ability to understand how and why it’s occurred.”

The researchers used statistics to determine whether years were “good” and “bad” in terms of the wolves’ survival, growth and fertility rates. These were driven by environmental changes, including food availability, competition, disease and weather, Coulson said.

They used these survival rates to understand how these environmental conditions impact the various characteristics of the wolves. The researchers say they learned several big things, including that the population did worse when bad years came in series than when bad years were interspersed with good years.

“One bad year, yes, it has a short-term impact, but if you end up with a long string of harsh conditions, it’s worse for the population in the long run,” Coulson said. “We haven’t got enough data to work out exactly what it is that makes one good year or bad year,” he added, although availability of food and prominence of disease play roles.

The researchers also found that these changes can have varying, and even contradictory, effects on the life cycle of the wolves, or other animals being studied. “Survival, reproduction and individual growth are three key characteristics of a population, and they can all respond very differently to environmental change,” study researcher Daniel MacNulty, of Utah State University, told LiveScience. “Depending on how they respond to change, it will influence the dynamics of the population.”

Predicting future changes

The same model for how wolves react to changing environments can be used for other animals, and even insects and plants.

“Environmental change doesn’t affect simply the ecology or the evolution of the population, it affects both of them simultaneously,” MacNulty said. “Both ecological and evolutionary changes can happen rapidly and in a population that’s subject to environmental change.”

For example, researchers could model rodents and other pests over time to determine how they might react to replacing a city green space with a parking lot. “You can’t just assume that environmental change is going to lead a decrease in a population; they can increase as well,” MacNulty said. “They may respond to a particular environmental change by leading to an overabundance of a particular pestspecies.”

from:   http://www.livescience.com/17263-yellowstone-wolf-environment-change.html

Job Discrimination Based on Zodiac Signs

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Scorpios Need Not Apply: Zodiac Signs Inspire Job Bias

Benjamin Radford, Life’s Little Mysteries Contributor
Date: 02 December 2011 Time: 03:33 PM ET
Figure 2. If you were born between March 21 and April 19, your astrological sign is said to be Aries. But this was only true for a while, back when the system was set up in 600 BC. Today, the Sun is no longer within the constellation of Aries during much of that period. From March 11 to April 18, the Sun is actually in the constellation of Pisces!

Everyone knows (or should know) that it’s illegal for businesses to discriminate against people because of their gender, race, religion and other things, at least in the United States. But what about rejecting an applicant based on their astrological sign?

According to a job listing in the Chutian Metropolis Daily newspaper in Wuhan, China, a language training company there is seeking qualified applicants — as along as they’re not Scorpios or Virgos. The Toronto Sun reported that Xia, a spokeswoman for the company, said that in her experience Scorpios and Virgos are often “feisty and critical.” Xia said, “I hired people with those two star signs before, and they either liked quarrelling with colleagues or they could not do the job for long.”

She preferred potential applicants who were born under certain constellations, such as Capricorns, Libras and Pisces. To some it may seem like a bad joke, but it’s not funny to qualified applicants desperate for a job who get turned away because of the company’s credence in astrology.

It’s not the first time an employer has come under fire for zodiac sign discrimination. In 2009 an Austrian insurance company advertised, “‘We are looking for people over 20 for part-time jobs in sales and management with the following star signs: Capricorn, Taurus, Aquarius, Aries and Leo.”

That advertisement prompted an investigation by authorities. Remarkably, they concluded that the company’s stated preference for certain astrological signs was not illegal: not because there was any validity to astrology or because the practice was not discriminatory, but because at the time, Austrian laws regulating equal opportunity in hiring only applied to discrimination by gender, age and race. In other words, it was legal because the law was not specifically written to include applicants being denied jobs because of their astrological sign.

There are very strong similarities between astrology and racism. The idea behind astrology is that people born at certain times and places share specific, distinguishing personality characteristics (in the Chinese case, that Scorpios and Virgos are hard to get along with and that Libras and Pisces are not). The idea behind racism is that people who were born with a certain skin color or with certain racial features share specific, distinguishing personality characteristics (for example that African-Americans are lazy, or that Chinese are bad drivers).

Astrology and racism are rooted in the same basic worldview: That people can be categorized and judged based not on their individual merits, talents or abilities but instead by their skin color or when they were born. One other similarity between the two: Neither should disqualify a person from getting a job.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/17291-astrology-job-discrimination-china.html

Dark Sun — April 2011

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12/1/2011 — “Dark sun” from April 2011 — hypothesis = sun was outshined (plasma over-powered) by another object

Posted on December 1, 2011

When this happened, NASA claimed it was EARTH passing in front of the Sun .. obscuring the sun from our view…

Well.. now in review… the SDO (solar dynamics observatory) from April 1st and 2nd 2011http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/

The camera views through the HMI, 1700, and 1600 (and several others) clearly show .. that the Earth DID NOT PASS in front of the sun.. because we can STILL SEE through the “darkness” in several of these shots !!!  ONLY VISIBLE SPECTRUM appeared to “turn dark”.

I’d like to explain my hypothesis of what actually caused the sun to “appear to turn dark”…

IT DID NOT GO DARK — rather.. an object BRIGHTER passed by — an object that is emitting a field of plasma which is interacting with the sun in such a way as to negate the SDO sensors…

This BRIGHTER, or more powerful object de-luminated or possibly even ILLUMINATED the surface of the sun… thus revealing the true  surface of the star.. which is indeed dark black !

So we still received the light on earth from the sun.. it never physically “went dark”.. rather we must have gotten a double dose of light on that day.. because whatever the SDO picked up was shining  BRIGHTER than our sun.. or was VERY CLOSE TO IT !!!

The shots below tell  the tale.. we would NOT be able to see through the Earth obviously.. yet the HMI and other shots from the SDO do not lie !  Unless earth has become transparent!

In an ironic twist of fate.. if you go check the Magnetogram or Dopplergram from the same time.. the FEED WAS CUT for that hour !!  lol.. they update every few minutes.. then we have that whole hour “missing”… EPIC ! …. NASA = n.ever a. s.traight a.nswer

 

Pooches with PTSD

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PTSD Diagnosed Among Military Dogs

Ptsd Dogs

First Posted: 12/ 2/11 02:31 PM ET Updated: 12/ 2/11 07:57 PM ET

Now that military dogs are taking on a larger role in combat, they’re also taking on more of the risks that come with going to war, including developing post-traumatic stress disorder.

The New York Times reports that more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 deployed military dogs are developing some form of canine PTSD. While the diagnosis is still being debated, some veterinarians are prescribing agressive treatment plans, which can include Xanax or other anti-anxiety drugs.

“It really is difficult, because once the dog experiences these traumatic explosions, it’s the same as the troops,” Army Lt. Col. Richard A. Vargus, chief of the law enforcement branch at CENTCOM told the Military Times in September. “Some dogs move right through it and it doesn’t affect them. Some dogs, it takes some retraining, and some dogs just refuse to work.”

Like humans, military dogs exhibit a range of changes in temperaments when they develop PTSD. Some become aggressive, others retreat. But because dogs can’t express what the problem is, soldiers can be put at risk if their partner simply stops doing his job without warning.

“If the dog is trained to find improvised explosives and it looks like it’s working, but isn’t, it’s not just the dog that’s at risk,” Dr. Walter F. Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine at the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base. told the Times. “This is a human health issue as well.”

And searching for such devices has become a key responsibility for military dogs. Even after spending six years and nearly $19 billion on experimenting with innovative ways to detect bombs, the Pentagon admitted in 2010 that its most sophisticated technology was no match for a dog’s nose, Wired.com reported.

The number of active duty dogs has increased to 2,700, from 1,800 in 2001, according to theTimes.

“Electronic equipment is great in the laboratory, but out on the battlefield, you can’t beat the dogs,” Bill Childress,
manager of the Marine Corps working dog program told the Los Angeles Times.

One such dog, Gina — who searched for explosives in Iraq — appeared to have left the playful part of her personality behind when she came home. Gina developed into a fearful German shepherd who avoided people and hid under furniture, according to theAssociated Press.

“She showed all the symptoms and she had all the signs,” Master Sgt. Eric Haynes, the kennel master at Peterson Air Force Base, told the news outlet. “She was terrified of everybody and it was obviously a condition that led her down that road.”

She gradually improved thanks to a healthy dose of walks with friendly people and a gradual reintroduction to military noises.

Just as physicians have yet to find a surefire way to treat PTSD among humans, so too are veterinarians weighing a wide range of options when it comes to helping their canine patients, according to The New York Times. Some focus on exercise and gentle obedience training, others go the more aggressive route and prescribe medications and counterconditioning.

But offering dogs the same innovative treatments that their human counterparts get, doesn’t guarantee a full recovery, Nicholas Dodman, head of the animal behavior program at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine told the Associated Press.

“It’s a fact that fears once learned are never unlearned,” he said.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/ptsd-on-the-rise-for-mili_n_1125925.html?ref=impact

Metal Object Crashes Mass. Warehouse

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Mysterious Metal Object Crashes Through Roof of Mass. Warehouse

Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 01 December 2011 Time: 05:48 PM ET


The falling debris drove a hole in the warehouse roof and knocked out ceiling tiles below. Credit: Michael's Wholesale Furniture Distributors
The falling debris drove a hole in the warehouse roof and knocked out ceiling tiles below.
CREDIT: Michael’s Wholesale Furniture Distributors

A three-pound piece of metal was found lying on the floor of a Massachusetts warehouse on Thursday (Dec. 1). What made this remarkable was the gaping hole discovered directly above it in the roof.

“We don’t know when exactly it fell, but we found it at 11 o’clock [a.m.],” Andrew McWilliams, an employee of Michael’s Wholesale Furniture Distributors in Plymouth, Mass., told Life’s Little Mysteries.

The chunk of metal appears about the same size and shape as a tall, skinny soda can, but the silvery cylinder has a tarnished look to it.

The workers reported their find to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which promptly sent an inspector to investigate. All parties initially guessed that the piece of metal may have fallen off a passing plane, but the FAA later ruled out tha tpossibility, according to CBS Boston.

“We have no idea what it is. At this point, we can only speculate. No clue,” said Plymouth police Capt. John Rogers. “This would have had to come through with some significant force or velocity to get through the warehouse roof and cause damage.” [See the damage]

One possibility is that the metal chunk may have fallen from space. There are approximately 20,000 bits of manmade space junk in low-Earth orbit that are as big as or bigger than the chunk that crashed through the warehouse. These usually burn up during re-entry when they fall into Earth’s atmosphere, but sizable pieces occasionally make it to the ground.

McWilliams said the FAA “confiscated” the piece of debris and is continuing to investigate its source.

Broken ceiling tiles on the floor of the warehouse. The FAA confiscated the piece of debris before workers could take a picture of it, one employee said.
Broken ceiling tiles on the floor of the warehouse. The FAA confiscated the piece of debris before workers could take a picture of it, one employee said.
CREDIT: Michaels Wholesale Furniture Distributors

From:    http://www.livescience.com/17268-mysterious-metal-object-crashes-roof-mass-warehouse.html

Body Odor and Personality Traits

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Some Personality Traits Affect How You Smell

Rachael Rettner, MyHealthNewsDaily Staff Writer
Date: 02 December 2011 Time: 09:23 AM ET


friends-social-outside-101008-02

Getting to know someone usually requires at least a little conversation. But a new study suggests you can get a hint of an individual’s personality through his or her scent alone.

Participants in the study assessed, with some degree of accuracy, how outgoing, anxious or dominant people were after only taking a whiff of their clothes. The study is the first to test whether personality traits can be discerned through body odor.

While the match-up between responses by the judges and the judged were not perfect, they do suggest that, when forming a first impression, we take into account a person’s smell, as well as visual and audible cues to their personality traits, the researchers said.

We not only express ourselves through our looks, “we also express ourselves with how we smell,” said study researcher Agnieszka Sorokowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland.

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Personality.

Personality smells

Sorokowska and colleagues asked 30 men and 30 women to don white cotton t-shirts for three consecutive nights. Participants could not use fragrances, deodorants orsoaps, and could not smoke or drink or eat odorous foods during the study. Participants also took a personality test.

Shirts from the “odor donors” were collected and rated by 100 men and 100 women. Raters were asked to smell the shirts (placed in non-transparent plastic bags) and evaluate five personality traits of the donors, on a scale of one to 10. Each rater assessed six shirts, and each shirt was assessed by 20 raters.

The judges’ ratings matched up with the self-assessments of the donors for three personality traits: extroversion (the tendency to be outgoing and sociable) neuroticism (the tendency to feel anxious and moody) and dominance (the urge to be a leader).

The matches were far from perfect. But the raters predicted the donor’s level of extroversion and neuroticism through smell about as accurately as participants in a different study predicted personality traits based on a video depicting a person’s behavior, Sorokowska said.

Judgments of dominance were most accurate in the case where an individual rater was assessing the odor of someone who was the opposite sex, suggesting such judgments are especially important when it comes to choosing a mate, the researchers said.

Odor and emotions

Extroversion, neuroticism and dominance are all traits that may, to some extent, be expressed physiologically, including through our emotions.

For instance, people who are neurotic may sweat more when they experience stress, which would modify the bacteria in their underarms and make them smell different, the researchers said.

Personality traits may also be linked with the secretion of hormones that could alter a persons’ scent. People who are high in dominance may have higher levels of testosterone, which in turn may modify their sweat glands, the researchers said.

The findings are preliminary and more studies need to be done to confirm the results, Sorokowska said. It’s not clear whether the same link would be found in other cultures known to have weaker body odors, Sorokowska said.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/17279-personality-traits-affect-smell.html

Life Lessons from “STAR TREK”

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David Borgenicht

President, Quirk Books

7 Life Lessons You Can Learn From ‘Star Trek’

Posted: 11/29/11 08:01 AM ET

Let me start out by coming clean: I am a closet Trekkie.

I went to my first “Star Trek” convention when I was nine. I have owned dozens of “Star Trek” toys, models, props and books over the years (and yes, I used to make my Kirk and Uhura action figures kiss). I even have a communicator app on my iPhone (and I’m eagerly waiting for the tricorder app now that Siri has arrived). I don’t own a uniform, but I wish I did (Hint hint: Channukah’s coming, family. I’ll take the classic Captain’s shirt in M, please, so that it rips easier when I get into fights).

My love of “Star Trek” began at an early age and has lasted to this day. But why? It isn’t just because of the campy sets and costumes that are still iconic. It isn’t because of the terrific performance by Leonard Nimoy (Spock) or Captain Kirk’s Shatnerific overacting. It isn’t even because of the superb sci-fi storytelling and writing or the fact that the toys and accoutrements were (and are) so cool that the culture seems to be obsessed with making them real. Although all of that is true.

No, my love of “Trek” has lasted this long because of what I have learned from my friends on the Enterprise over the years.

From the joys of exploration to the simple pleasures of curling up in your own quarters (often with a hot yeoman and a cold drink), from the value of friendship to the value of calling someone’s bluff, I’ve learned dozens of life skills, lessons and even values from the iconic show that ran only three years in prime time when it originally debuted (before I was born).

I think that’s what ultimately motivated me to create and publish (via my company, Quirk Books) “THE STAR TREK BOOK OF OPPOSITES,” as an attempt to familiarize children today (including my own) with the world of “Trek.”

There are no great life lessons in “THE STAR TREK BOOK OF OPPOSITES” (although learning the difference between BIG and LITTLE, HOT and COLD would certainly serve anyone well). But beyond the basics of opposites, the book is a great way to introduce kids to the world and characters of “Star Trek,” in the hopes that someday they will come back to it and begin to appreciate its power and cultural resonance.

I would say there are seven life lessons I learned from “Star Trek” that I take with me to this day. These are lessons I hope to pass along to my own children someday–but for now, I will share them with the interweb.

  1. The best way to travel is to boldly go where no one has gone before. This is true for vacations, for self-exploration, for life itself. If you want your days filled with adventure, laughter, love, learning and the occasional mind-meld, follow this route.
  1. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few–or the one.Sometimes you must make great sacrifices for the greater good. And, like the Genesis device, it will all come back around.
  1. Expressing your emotions is a healthy thing. Sure, McCoy seemed angry all the time when exclaiming, “Dammit, Jim! I’m a doctor not a mechanic/bricklayer/soothsayer,” but he knew that by expressing his anger and frustration it wouldn’t get the best of him and he could then perform at his peak capacity.
  1. When estimating how long a job will take, overestimate–and when you do better your captain will always be impressed. Replace the word “captain” with “teacher” or “mom/dad” and you’ll see what I mean. Sure, Mr. Scott might have been telling the truth–maybe it would take six hours to get the warp engines back online in the heat of the battle. Or maybe he was padding things so he looked good. Either way, when the engines did come back on line, everyone was happy.
  1. Wearing red makes you a target. This is true of cars, dresses and, most especially, shirts. Red gets you noticed–which is good if you want to be noticed, bad if you don’t want to end up vaporized.
  1. When you don’t know what to say, pause. It will give you the time to figure it out. Or at the very least, you’ll sound like you’re being thoughtful. “But….Spock…..why?”
  1. The most powerful force in the universe is friendship. It’s more powerful than phasers, photon torpedos, even more powerful than the force itself. With friends, you can accomplish any task, escape any perilous situation, defeat any enemy–and you get to laugh together when it’s all over.

I am convinced that these lessons will serve us all, adults and children, well as we seek out new life, new civilizations, new experiences. In short, thanks to “Star Trek,” we may all live long and prosper.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-borgenicht/star-trek_b_1116920.html?ref=mostpopular