Woodstock CT Café

From John

From National Geographic News: “An instrument near the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii has recorded a long-awaited climate milestone: the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere there has exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in 55 years of measurement—and probably more than 3 million years of Earth history.”

The graphics below suggest that we are about 10,000 years into a warm spell on planet Earth. Prior to the last ice age we had about 17,000 years of relative warmth before things started to go down hill. If 17,000 years is about right for our current warm spell, then we have only 7,000 years left in our Garden of Eden. But we are clearly polluting our environment. The big difference now is that in the warm spell that took place between 132,000 and 115,000 years ago there were only a million or so homo sapiens around and no polluting industry. Now we have almost 8 billion modern humans and an industrial society.

It’s clear that whomever coined the term “Global Warming” coined a misnomer because it looks as though our atmosphere was warmer 130,000 years ago. The popular phrase should be “Global Polluting” shouldn’t it? Then the nay-sayers might accept the problem and take some responsibility for it. Otherwise human beings may not be around to have the next ice age.

I’ve added some benchmarks to the graph below which shows the patterns of warming and cooling of the Earth for the last 400,000+ years. The warming and cooling of the Earth is caused by a very subtle movements closer and farther from the Sun in our eliptical orbit. This is not man-made. The last ice age took longer than the three previous ice ages shown in the graph which is based on chemical analysis of core samples from the Vostok ice sheet in Antarctica.  Two benchmarks are the demise of H. erectus and Neanderthals based upon the fossel record. These two species of Homos died off near the ends of two ice ages. Imagine what it would be like for us if the biosphere was 13 degrees colder on average than it is today. Back then their only refuge was a chilly cave or to head south. No wonder humans got their start in Africa.

Our current understanding of human history only came about since 1970 when nucleic acid hybridization became a tool for understanding the divergence of genes among all lifeforms. The rate of hybridization of two strands of DNA is a function of complimentarity of the Watson-Crick double helix.

From the last full cycle it appears that warm spells last about 18,000 years whereas the last ice age lasted about 97,000 years. It looks like archaic Homo sapiens survived two ice ages whereas Neanderthals only survived one. But our human male Y chromosome was passed on from H. erectus while the earliest date of discovery of mitochodrial DNA was during the time that archaic H. sapiens roamed sub-Saharan Africa. The mitochondrial DNA genome is inherited from mothers, not fathers; likewise in plants, chloroplasts are not carried in pollen when the female part of the plant is fertilized.

This is all very mind-boggling to consider. Will scientists have the answers for how to deal with the next ice age? Yup! Will politicians cooperate? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Graph of CO2 (Green graph), temperature (Blue graph), and dust concentration (Red graph) measured from the Vostok, Antarctica ice core. The shifts between hot and cold periods is thought to be controlled by the the Milankovich cycles:
1. The earth’s orbit changes from being nearly circular to slightly elliptical (eccentricity). This cycle is affected by other planets in the solar system and has a period of around 100,000 years.
2. The angle of tilt of the earth’s axis changes from 22.1° to 24.5° (obliquity). This cycle has a period of 41,000 years.
3. The direction of the tilt of the axis changes (precession) on a cycle of 26,000 years.

CO2 followed temperature change “with a lag of some hundreds of years” amplifies temperature change. Among other factors, CO2 is more soluble in colder than in warmer water. Higher dust levels are believed to be caused by cold, dry periods.

From John

I first published the article “Gene Doping in Athletics – Prospects for the 21st Century” prior to the 2008 Summer Olympics and then reposted it at the Cafe prior to the 2012 Summer Olympics. This turns out to be the most accessed article at the Cafe. In the last six days, this article is still the most directly accessed with the exception of Cafe visitors that come directly to woodstockctcafe.com. As a part of my work, this article was also passed on to the head of the US anti-doping agency before the 2012 Olympics, the fellow in the news who was dealing with Lance Armstrong. In our conversation I mentioned that my cousin’s daughter was 15th in the US Marathon Olympic trials in Houston in January 2012. His quick response was ‘Did she cheat?’ He was kidding of course and we had a good chuckle about that.

The focus of the story was on use of an RNAi drug to silence the myostatin gene in athletes in order to build muscle. I have been surprised that there has been rare attention to myostatin genetics since 2004 when the New England Journal of Medicine published a case study of a muscular child born without a functional myostatin gene (see my gene doping article). There are breeds of cattle, sheep, race horses, and racing dogs that have been selected for muscle hypertrophy. Take the whippet, for example, shown in the picture. The dog is a top breed for racing and is myostatin -/-. Myostatin regulates muscle homostasis to keep the balance of muscle formation in relation to skeletal stature; so its primary role is to break down muscle fibers.

Yesterday I found the time to look for more studies of myostatin genotyping among humans and I found something new and very interesting. This is a paper published in 2006 entitled “Human Adaptive Evolution at Myostatin (GDF8), a Regulator of Muscle Growth” by Matthew Saunders, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, with co-authors at the Department of Human Genetics, University of Pittsburgh, and the Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago. Apparently Saunders has now moved to the University of Chicago. The genetic language of this paper makes it difficult to read, but I think I have extracted the main points correctly.

In their study, the authors examined a panel of genomic DNAs of African American (recruited in Pittsburgh) and European peoples and sequenced their myostatin genes. They found a prevalence of amino acid changing mutations at the following coding sites in the myostatin gene in their examination of 76 African Americans and 70 Europeans:

1. alanine to threonine at amino acid 55 resulting from a change in the DNA sequence of the gene in a change GCC (coding for alanine) to ACC (coding for threonine), and
2. lysine to arginine at amino acid 153 resulting from a change in the DNA sequence of the gene in a change AAG (coding for lysine) to AGG (coding for arginine).  

The two gene polymorphisms causing changes in amino acids position 55 and 153 in the myostatin protein were found at relatively high frequency among African Americans at 12% and 20%, respectively, and among Nigerians at these sites at a frequency of 22% (for each of the two amino acid replacements). Read the rest of this entry »

From John

Yesterday we read in the NYTimes of a successful cloning of human embryonic stem cells by Oregon Health and Sciences University researchers led by Professor Shoukhrat Mitalipov. This accomplishment was also published yesterday in the acclaimed journal Cell. The synchronous timing of the news release and Cell article hints that a patent may have been filed a day earlier on this method of cloning.

This is the third time since 2005 that this achievement has been announced through a news release. This latest claim sounds more credible because a somatic skin cell nucleus was taken from an 8-month old infant with defined genetic markers; so the proof of this cloning will be in observing these markers as in the embryonic stem cells that are expanded in culture. My caution stems from the two previous announcements in 2005 and 2008.

In May of 2005 a Korean scientist reported a false claim of his cloning accomplishment, a claim that was later disproved as other scientists attempted to verify the Korean result.

On January 18, 2008, we learned in a news release of the successful cloning of human embryonic stem cells representing a unique human individual by scientists at the small private company, Stemagen in La Jolla California. We have not heard from Stemagen since except for a statement at the company’s website stating that it has refrained from publishing its results.

Professor Mitalipov assured readers that embryos containing a transplanted somatic nuclei would not be implanted in the uterus of a woman to grow cloned human beings but, of course, someone will eventually try this and a cloned human being will be born.

At this stage we really know nothing about the quality of life of a clone. Thousands of cloned animals have been produced but we have yet to be able to interview them. The cloned sheep, Dolly, would not speak to the press either.

In considering the prospect of cloning a human being, I believe that it is important to go beyond philosophical and religious arguments. One must build their case for or against cloning of human beings based upon science. While the odds appear to be extremely low for the near future that a human being will be born from the transfer of a somatic nucleus into a human oocyte — it is imperative that we consider the risks not only to prepare ourselves but to warn the perpetrators of the inherent dangers. Regardless of our feelings about human cloning, if a clone is born, we must treat any clone as a human being. We must greet this individual with support and empathy.

What are the actual risks faced by the cloned child due to birth by this procedure? One area that most embryologists are concerned about is the concept of reprogramming of the foreign somatic nucleus used to “fertilize” a human egg. “Somatic” refers to the terminally differentiated state of a cell in contrast to the reproductive potential of a germ cell. “Reprogramming” is a concept that I first learned during a seminar by John Gurdon, an esteemed embryologist from Oxford and recent Nobel Prize winner, at Johns Hopkins University in 1975. At the time Gurdon was conducting research on “nuclear transfer” except that he was using frog oocytes and thus his work was not considered controversial. Much of his work was dedicated to understanding how an enucleated egg could reprogram a foreign nucleus such as a skin cell or a tumor cell nucleus to produce, in his case, tadpoles. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

Today, May 16 2013, The NYTimes published the contents of a note left by Jahar: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev scrawled a note inside the hull of the boat where he was hiding that said ‘the attack was retribution for wars the United States waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to two law enforcement officials.’ It was my conclusion in writing this article that radicalization of Muslims stemmed primarily from the protracted wars in Iraq and Afganistan.

An article today in the NYTimes attempts to tell the story of the Tsarnaev brothers sudden radicalization to jihadism, in particular younger brother Jahar’s (nickname) unobvious secret radicalization. I read this article with great interest because since the Boston Marathon bombing I have wondered how the brothers could have given up the promise of the successful life their parents were looking for – the life their kids were offered in America. We learned that they came to our country in 2002 when Jahar was only nine years old to escape Chechen turmoil in central Asia. The brothers seemed fully assimilated into Bostonian life excepting their subliminal inheritance of Islam. The parents, on the other hand, divorced and returned separately to Dagestan.

Recently Jahar is purported to have said that ‘God is all that matters. It doesn’t matter about school and engineering … When it comes to school and being an engineer, you can cheat easily. But when it comes to going to heaven, you can’t cheat.’ Obviously there are Christians, Jews, and people in other religions who agree with the importance of God. But why would one shirk the responsibility of building a career and supporting a family because God is so important. Perhaps this is a clue. Some Muslims choose a fast track to heaven rather than living a responsible life. Isn’t there anything else that the Koran teaches besides promoting ‘death to infidels?’ Jahar’s stated philosophy came a year or two after Jahar was purported to have said ‘I’m not into that.’ It is also telling that the all-American Rhode Island girl who became Tamerlan’s wife also embraced Islam. It will be interesting to follow how her religious views evolve as she recovers from this whole affair. Her faith and the secret faith of Jahar underscores the blinding impact of religious fundamentalism that infects all of our lives today. Contrary to Rush Limbaugh, we need to be much more aware of this part of our diverse society in the future.

How does a person acquire the jihadist mindset?

My understanding is that jihadism has been an Islamic terrorist movement directed primarily against both Russian and American efforts (including our allies, the British) to install a more westernized form of rule over Muslim societies and their many Islamic sects. Perhaps our schizophrenic Middle Eastern policies of the last 60 years is the cause of this radicalization. There can be no doubt that the United States is the primary enemy of jihadism for whatever reason.

Take Afghanistan, for example. The emergence of jihadism is a relatively recent development traced in part to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians were defeated in Afghanistan when the US supported the Afghan rebels with guns, ammunition, and advisors to help defeat the Russian invaders. But no lessons were learned from the demise of the Russians and any good will that we gave out was negated by the Afghan war of this last decade. Besides going after Bin Laden, the US wanted to help those who would come under the oppression of fundamentalist Islam, mainly the women of Afghanistan. I was all for this as a secondary benefit of our being there. But that wasn’t our stated reason for invading Afghanistan. Worse yet, rather than completing the job in Afghanistan swiftly, the Bush administration embarked on a more expensive and unjustified war in Iraq dividing our resources and at expense to the American public for years to come.

Then there is Chechnya, for example. It was the Chechen rebellion and Chechen acts of terror in Moscow that helped define jihadism. To my knowledge we stayed out of the Chechen rebellion but may have paid a price for that war in the Boston Marathon bombing. Because of this bombing we have discovered the phenomenon of ‘self radicalization.’ It seems likely that self-radicalization of the Tsarnaev brothers stemmed directly from the Chechen situation and indirectly from involving ourselves in Middle Eastern Muslim affairs during their parents’ generation.

As I have said before, our involvement in Iraq and earlier events created a battlefield in Iraq for radicalized Muslims that didn’t exist before. This was the merit of the protracted Iraq war according to Tony Blair when he attended the opening of the G. W. Bush library a week ago. I don’t see the merit that Blair talked about in his justification of his alignment with Bush. Now, apparently, the turmoil in Syria is drawing radicalized Eastern European Muslims into the conflict. I think it is correct to say that our hesitation to entering the Syrian conflict is that we would be joining forces with the enemy rather than carrying out a humanitarian mission. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

Our environment, e.g. the biosphere, is the limiting factor (Fig. 1). GMO salmon developed by AquaBio (Fig. 2), and a recombinant algae farm for biofuel production a la Synthetic Genomics/Exxon (Fig. 3).

From John: I don’t normally publish something published somewhere else but I am making an exception here because of the article’s timeliness. You can read the origninal article HERE.

Ronald Kleinman, M.D., is chief of the Department of Pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital and physician-in-chief at MassGeneral Hospital for Children. He is a consultant for profit and not-for-profit organizations in the food industry.

“The recent call for labeling of foods containing genetically engineered ingredients — especially on a state-by-state basis as in Connecticut — is unnecessary, unrealistic and uninformed.

As someone who grew up and attended college in Connecticut, I particularly appreciate the state’s farmland preservation program and the thriving local agriculture, which is being encouraged and protected. And as a pediatrician I know the weight new parents place on every decision affecting their children — from infancy to young adult. I have made it my life’s work to help guide parents through these challenges. This work, however, has been made even more complicated by the barrage of messages, information and misinformation that we all encounter daily. What is most important is to help parents separate myth from fact, and recognize when emotion has trumped hard science.

That is exactly what is at the core of a debate currently playing out in Connecticut over foods produced through biotechnology, also known as genetic engineering or genetic modification. A bill before the General Assembly would require labeling of genetically engineered food.

For more than 15 years, the majority of packaged foods and beverages consumed in the U.S. and dozens of other countries has contained some ingredient that was developed through the use of biotechnology. Biotechnological advances have included improved resistance to plant diseases and reduced reliance on pesticides, resulting in safer, more nutritious food that is able to sustain the growing demands of our world and has helped to protect the environment at the same time. Biotech ingredients are grown by Connecticut farmers, and foods containing biotech ingredients are sold in local stores for local consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

From Formerly A Student

We’ve had a couple somewhat brief discussions of GMOs (genetically modififed organisms) here at the Cafe, but they haven’t really gone anywhere. As you all probably know, companies such as Monsanto, Dow, and AquaBounty are genetically engineering seeds and, in AquaBounty’s case, salmon, with promises of increased yield, more profit to farmers, less environmental impact due to less fertilizers used, etc. However, watching documentaries such as Food Inc. and The Future of Food reveal the less-than-flattering side of GMOs and the companies that produce them. Monsanto’s prosecuting farmers who dare to save and reuse their seeds (that they are supposed to purchase annually) or whose fields get contaminated by GMO seeds blowing off trucks driving by fields, the weeds developing immunity to RoundUp (which Monsanto’s GMOs resist) requiring increased use of the chemicals, threats to the bee population, and human health issues (including cancer, indigestion, allergies, etc.), the idea of greedy corporations patenting life and potentially putting natural lifeforms to extinction and developing an empire of food supply domination (perhaps this is somewhat more cynical than the rest), etc. lead me personally to be opposed to GMOs. I encourage you to do more research on GMOs and those companies to fully understand what I’m talking about.

Having said that, as I’ve said before, whether or not you’re a fan of GMOs, I hope that you believe in at least labeling the GMO-containing products until, hopefully, the US catches up with the 63(?) countries that have already banned GMOs themselves entirely. It comes down to knowing what’s in your food — foods are already labeled with nutrition and ingredients information, and sometimes allergy information, so why shouldn’t GMOs be labeled as such? Opponents of GMO labeling think that the labeling will ruin the economy. Someone please explain why this would happen. It only requires a modest modification to existing printing on packaging. If it turns out that a GMO food is inferior to a non-GMO food side-by-side, and that ruins Monsanto’s economy, good. If the opposite is true, and people start purchasing more GMOs and we don’t see a spike in sickness and deaths in the people who eat them, good. If the GMO companies believe that their product is, indeed, superior and safe, they have nothing to worry about, and perhaps GMO labeling will actually be of benefit to them.

Anyway, I digress. There are two bills that are currently in the legislative process: HB 6519 (labeling of genetically engineered food) and HB 6527 (labeling of genetically engineered baby food). Apparently Brendan Sharkey, Speaker of the House, is impeding the bills’ progress by not calling them for a vote. Please contact him to change that.

Furthermore, our local representative Mike Alberts is not on the list of supporters of the bills (but is that a surprise?). Please contact him as well.

http://www.consumersunion.org/research/testimony-on-hb-6519-an-act-concerning-the-labeling-of-genetically-engineered-food-before-the-committee-on-public-health/

http://gmofreect.org/

I would think that the Quiet Corner would provide a considerable amount of support for GMO labeling considering the amount of organic farms and healthy eaters that are around here.

I also believe that there will be GMO labeling somewhere in the country not too far in the future. Once one state breaks the ice, there will probably be many more to follow. How about CT does something right and leads the way with something so important as protecting our food supply and well-being?

From Diane

April 29, 2013
Associated Press

Click to enlarge

This image of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) was photographed on April 10, when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter’s orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the Sun (394 million miles from Earth).NASA, ESA, J.-Y. Li

The operators of the Hubble Space Telescope say the orbiting observatory has snapped photos of an approaching comet dubbed Ison. Scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute say that Ison will be the “comet of the century” because it could be brighter than the full moon when it makes its closest pass around the sun in late November.

The comet was just inside Jupiter’s orbit in early April, 2013, about 386 million miles from the sun. Hubble scientists say preliminary measurements show the nucleus of the comet is about three to four miles across.

From John

I heard a novel justification for the Iraq War this morning. Tony Blair was asked about his relationship with George W. Bush and his alignment of the UK with the USA in entering into and support of the extended conflict in Iraq for almost a decade. The unfunded Iraq War severly damaged our economy as this war was entered into following a large federal tax reduction and continued through two damaging recessions. 

Blair’s position on joining the war was that our two countries should always be aligned together in world changing events especially after the attack on 9-11. He pointed out that Saddam was essentially gone/removed after a few weeks. The war that continued for eight or nine years was essentially a war against terrorism and justifiable for that reason. In other words, by invading Iraq we were able to manufacture a battlefield for confronting radical muslim fundamentalism, i.e. terrorism by Al Qaeda and the likes. Interesting thought which I hadn’t heard articulated quite like that before.

After thinking about this rationale for the Iraq War, I recall that it was never articulated before the invasion as reason for initiating this war. If we had not entered this war, we would not have created a battlefront for terrorists and a leadership vacuum for the them to fill. We would not have provided Iran with an opportunity to align themselves with these terrorists which is now playing a dominant role in the evolution of the Iraq government – just look at the sorry situation in Iraq today.

Nothing tangible was accomplished for the Iraq people as the result of this war and >100,000 Iraqi’s were killed in the process. Instead the Bush-Cheney war created a venue for terrorists that helped radicalize the entire Arab world. This radicalization could have been the psychological catalyst for the Arab Spring revolts and perhaps the catalyst for the many gains for the terrorists in other Arab countries from Pakistan to Libya. In particular, this includes the situation in Syria today that has resulted in close to 100,000 deaths of innocent Syrian people, not to mention the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Syrian people.

As the CIA and FBI investigate the motives for the Boston Marathon bombings, might they be able to trace these motivations to radicalization of middle eastern muslims. Has our leadership helped to build the enemy we face today. I wouldn’t be surprised if this link to the marathon bombers was eventually uncovered. But then the question remains: Would this new twist ever come to light? We may have to leave the events of this era to future historians to explain.

From John

There’s a reason why we don’t put our IQs on our Resumes (see the post below). First of all it would be difficult to verify; but more importantly, the number doesn’t tell if you are up to the task or whether you care about the task. This is why I like the movie Forest Gu’ump so much. Forest apparently had a low IQ but throughout the story I never saw him do something stupid. His mother pointed out to him repeatedly that “stupid is as stupid does” and Forest often repeated this to others who were on the verge of doing something stupid. So Forest’s life was full of acheivement and he was fulfilled. I know someone who is a lot like Forest Gump. I know some who have genius intellect without much to show for their lives – one got 1600 on her SAT tests and another who is a member of Mensa (requiring an IQ of 132). Perhaps they both are not to blame for their less than sterling contributions. He was arrested for DUI driving onto the Uconn campus – a three time loser. He spent six months in the pen down the road years ago and is unemployed. The other had great difficulty in childhood that contributed to unfulfilled promises.

This is an ackward subject to talk about because we are most likely born with the traits that govern our IQs. I never thought of my mother as being of above average intellect. Once in the late 50s I was sitting in the livingroom down in Rowayton and she was at her desk writing a letter. The silence was interupted when she asked me if “cat” was spelled with a “k” or a “c”. I said “It’s k”. I’m not a good speller as most Café-ers know. By the way, I am willing to stipulate that all Café-ers are brilliant. Over the last eight years, I’ve been very impressed with your writings.

As for spelling of words, I avoided memorizing that kind of stuff. I look at a word that I have written and if it looks like it is spelled right then I am happy with it. It rarely occurs to me that I could look it up to be sure. But why would I do that if it looks right?

I credit my mother with the gift she gave me of being a visual thinker. She was a gifted artist throughout her life and, now, our walls are covered with her artistry. I think her gift to me was the only reason I was able to establish myself in a career as a molecular biologist with some useful discoveries.

As a kid I was always competing with my best friend Paul who was a straight A student (he’s not the one at the Café ). Paul was also a very good athlete and musician and he was smart enough to keep his Playboy magazines in his sax case. So when he only scored 90th percentile in “abstract reasoning” in a standard test in 8th grade, I felt a great victory because I was at the 99th percentile. But let’s not talk about the other scores. It’s helpful though to know that you are good at something even if it is very abstract.

I have been fortunate to have collaborated with some very smart people. I learned through these gifted people to recognize and appreciate their intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

From John (Presidential IQs have been corrected)

According to the respected Multiple Intelligences Theory pioneered by Harvard professor Howard Gardner, there are a variety of intrinsic approaches and skills we use to perceive, understand, and shape our world – in other words, several different kinds of intelligence. We each possess different intelligences, or different combinations of them, that affect how we learn.

1. Linguistic Intelligence – the gift of words. Linguistically intelligent people best understand the world through the spoken and written word.

2. Visual/Spatial Intelligence – the gift of pictures. Visually intelligent people best understand the world through visualization and spatial orientation.

3. Musical — The gift of music. Musically intelligent people best understand the world through rhythm and melody.

4. Bodily Kinesthetic Intelligence – the gift of body. Physically intelligent people best understand the world through physicality

5. Logical/Mathematical – the gift of logic and numbers. Mathematically and Logically intelligent people best understand the world through cause and effect.

6. Interpersonal Intelligence – the gift of people. Socially intelligent people best understand the world through the eyes of others.

7. Intrapersonal — the gift of self. Intrapersonally intelligent people best understand the world from their unique point of view.

8. Naturalist Intelligence — the gift of nature. Environmentally intelligent people best understand the world through their own environment.

The Presidents’ IQs from the Simonton study (I didn’t work hard enough. Thanks TPOV). Click to enlarge. These IQs are listed by President in descending order from left to right:

From John

The Kepler space explorer has mapped 62 solar systems as it heads away from our solar system. The most recent solar system, Kepler 62, was found to have two planets, 62e and 62f, that are revolving around this yellow star which is slightly smaller and dimmer than our Sun. The two lower diagrams are relative scale illustrations of the two solar systems. If we had a spaceship that could travel 100,000 miles per hour through space, I estimate that it would take 35,000 days or 93 years (check my math) for astronauts to reach Kepler 62f. The shuttle travels at about 17,500 – 18,000 miles per hour when in orbit. It would be interesting to know if life evolved on these two planets and how it differs from life on Earth.

Size matters in determining the possibility of life as we know it. If the planet with an atmosphere is too large, then the atmospheric pressure will crush membranous life forms – Jupiter with an atmosphere is too large. The size of the planet has to be large enough so that its gravity can hold its atmosphere and water – Mars is too small. The planet has to be close enough to its star to be within the Goldilocks zone of the star so that the temperature is compatible with life as we know it – zero to 100 degrees Farenheit. Kepler 62e and 62f appear to fit these requirements in that they are 1.6 and 1.4 times the size of Earth, respectively, and close enough to their star. The outer 62f planet revolves around its star in a 267 day year because it is closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun.

See the article in the NYTimes.

From Mariah

Danny died August 28th 2008. His family and mine are very close. When he died it was very unexpected. A week or so after he died, I found this passage that he had written, and it truely speaks to the heart. This is copied exactly how it was written. Thinking about the entire Whitehead family today.

“Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they are meant to be there. They serve some sort of purpose, or help figure out who you are and who you want to become. You never know who these people may be - your neighbor, child, long lost friend, lover, or even a complete stranger who, when you lock eyes with them you know at that very moment that they will affect your life in some profound way. And sometimes things happen to you and at the time they seem painful and unfair, but in reflection you realize that without overcoming those obstacles, you would have never realized your potential strength, will power, or heart. Everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by chance or by means of good or bad luck illness, injury, love, lost moments of true greatness and sheer stupidity. All occur to test the limits of your soul. Without these small tests, whether they be events, illnesses, or relationships life would be like a smoothly paved straight flat road to nowhere, safe and comfortable, but dull and utterly pointless. The people you meet who affect your life, and the successes and downfalls you experience create who you are and even the bad experiences can be learned from. In fact, they are probably the most poignant and important ones. If someone hurts you, betrays you or breaks your heart, forgive them for they have helped you learn about trust and the importance of being cautious to whom you open your heart. If someone loves you love them back unconditionally, not only because they love you, but because they are teaching you to love and opening up your heart and eyes to things you would have never seen or felt without them. Make every day count. Appreciate every moment and take from it everything that you possibly can for you may never be able to experience it again. Talk to people you have never talked to before and actually listen. Let yourself fall in love. Break free and set your sights high. Hold your head up because you have every right to. Tell yourself you are a great individual and believe in yourself. For if you don’t believe in yourself, no one will believe in you either. You can make of your life anything you wish. Create your own life. And then go out and live in it live each day as if it were your last. Tomorrow is not promised.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where is God in this picture? Go to the podcasts at The Gathering and page down to the February 10th sermon. This is my Christina’s husband, Brad, talking about this very question between minutes 21 and 23 into the sermon. Brad is in the family portrait four posts down from this post.

From John

Inspired by this NYTimes article.

Diane explains: “Distant objects, like those near the edge of the Universe are NOT moving away from us in any meaningful way. What is happening is that Space itself is expanding and carrying everything in it along for the ride. So while light continues to obey the 186K miles/sec speed limit, the Space through which that light travels is growing thus it takes the light longer to get to us. Remember, Space has no mass so its rate of expansion is not constrained by the speed of light.”

Some Facts:
• A light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year in a vacuum (space)
• Light travels 5.8786×1012 miles in a year.
• It takes 8.5 seconds for light (photons) to to travel from the sun to the earth.
• Sirius (the Dog Star), is the brightest star of the night sky – twice as massive and 25 times more luminous than the Sun. It’s only 8.6 light years away. So the light we see today was emitted from Sirus 8.6 years ago.
• The center of our own galaxy is 26,000 lightyears away. So light from the center was emitted before our last ice age.
• Our galaxy is 100,000 light-years across. So the light seen at one end was emitted 100,000 years ago.
• The galaxy Andromeda is 2,500,000 light years away. So its light takes 2,500,000 years to get here. It was emitted long before mammals arrived on earth.
• From Earth the edge of the visible universe is 45,700,000,000 lightyears away.
• The Universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old.
• The Earth was formed 4.56 billion years ago, the same age as the solar system.
• The oldest microwaves detected date from 370,000 years after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago – the first 2.57 % of the universe’s life.

from John

I spend a fair amount of my work day scanning scientific (journal) literature on Medical and Life Science issues related to drug development and genetic engineering for my Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, and Agricultural clients. I run across papers published from all countries of the world including papers from Turkey, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries. Virtually all countries have centers of scientific excellence. One of my colleagues at work is a chemical engineer from Iran and another is a food scientist from Pakistan. While at the FDA I work with Chinese from mainland China, and I have employed scientists from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bejing, Korea, and India. I collaborated with Germans, Belgians, Swiss, Japanese, and Australians. When I worked at the Pauling Institute I would receive late night calls from Russians trying to contact Dr. Pauling. The caller would say “Moscow calling!” Some of the best American scientists emigrated to the USA from these countries, and I helped some of them get visas.

Since we have been so heavily invested in the middle east for the last 60 years, I thought it would be interesting to look at the scientific productivity coming out of the middle east compared to countries in the far east, Europe, the south Pacific (Australia, New Zealand), and North and South America.

I haven’t heard of anyone else doing this but it makes sense to measure scientific productivity by determining the number of scientific papers from all areas of science (Medicine, all other Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Engineering, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and others). It’s quite easy to determine the number of papers coming from different countries using the publically available Elsevier database, Scopus. The table below provides these numbers for 2012 along with the population of the country.

I was especially interested in the productivity of Middle Eastern countries where fundamentalist Islamists bear considerable anti-American sentiment and comparing their productivity with other countries in the Eastern and Western Hemisphere.

I measured this productivity in two ways. First, the total number of scientific papers without regard to population (on the left); and second, the number of scientific papers per one million in population (on the right). I was not surprised to see the Middle Eastern countries at the bottom of the totem poll (on the left). I could not find any scientific papers from investigators in Afganistan; nor was I surprised to see most papers coming from the USA. There can be no question that our country is the most productive country in science based upon total scientific papers at over 500,000 in 2012. China was a distant second with 366,501 papers in 2012. The the United Kingdom was third followed by most central and northern European countries.

If we look at scientific productivity per capita, Switzerland is at the top with top universities in Zurich, Basel, and Geneva. Two of my former colleagues are at Zurich and Basel. Then there are the Scandinavian countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. I have had clients in all of these countries except Singapore and a valued former colleague in Australia who was at Stanford when we lived in Palo Alto.

It is clear that the internal disruption in the countries of the Middle East
and northern Africa (except Israel), fueled by their religious fundamentalism, combined with the rift between them and the west has stunted their development and vitality in the modern world. Many of the top countries on the right are at the top because of homogeneity of their cultures. The USA with its diversity in culture has benefited from the brain-drain from the rest of the countries of the world.