One thing amongst all others seems to gel the vast majority of human kind regardless of our mental capabilities we are still indecently capable of acts of astounding stupidity and horrendous violence.

It is a matter of common observation that history is riddled with acts of genocide and creeds that bare no footing in reality yet enjoyed roaring success both in the past and now. The well of human stupidity is so deep, that it almost warrants disbelief. One need not look any further than humanities' favourite institution of fairytales and myth, religion.

Despite the blatant fact that thousands of previous belief constructs created by man have fallen by the way side and are today laughed at by our contemporary religious brothers. We still have a multitude of idiotic belief systems that claw incessantly into the human psyche.

From invisible the giant invisible surveillance camera that is watching you every second of every day to see if you should so much as dream of copulating (something that you are hard-wired to no less by the same giant invisible surveillance camera) to be cast into every lasting damnation. Right to mythologies created by people who died not even 100 years ago (scientologists anyone).

Do you honestly believe that there is an invisible man watching you right now? Judging you. One of 6,000,000,000 other people on the planet? Don't you think your creator has better shit to do with his time?

It is symptomatic of our biased world views that leads us into the intellectual doldrums time and time again. Surely the answer can't be this simple, what is the real "meaning" (how does this affect me!). Sorry to break it to you but the likelihood that anything has a deep meaning that relates to your existence is small to say the least.

The influx of pseudoscience and "alternative" therapies is another microcosm of our gullibility to swallow any pill if it makes us feel better or if it feels just "right". Again the difference between "alternative" medicine and "western" medicine is that our stuff works!

Why are you putting stock in a 3000 year old technique? You wouldn't try and surf the internet with a abacus would you? Don't try and play it off as if it is a silly comparison it really is not. Science has provided you with a multitude of progresses undreamed of only 20 years ago.

These shiny gadgets don’t just come with the ability to watch porn on the bus; they come attached to a world view that has repercussions that you may not like. That’s tough shit because they are probably correct.

Its time to take your head out of your ass and smell the roses, your senses have been clogged for long enough.

Marc James Hugh Keys.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...

Interstellar Space Molecules That Help Form Basic Life Structures Identified

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 200 — A team of scientists led by researchers from the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) has succeeded in identifying naphthalene, one of the most complex molecules yet discovered in the interstellar medium. The detection of this molecule suggests that a large number of the key components in prebiotic terrestrial chemistry could have been present in the interstellar matter from which the Solar System was formed.

IAC researchers Susana Iglesias Groth, Arturo Manchado and Aníbal García, in collaboration with Jonay González (Paris Observatory) and David Lambert (University of Texas) have just published these results in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The naphthalene was discovered in a star formation region in the constellation Perseus, in the direction of the star Cernis 52. "We have detected the presence of the naphthalene cation in a cloud of interstellar matter located 700 lightyears from the Earth", says IAC researcher Susana Iglesias Groth. The spectral bands found in this consstellation coincide with laboratory measurements of the naphthalene cation.

Iglesias Groth further adds, "we aim to investigate whether other, more complex, hydrocarbons exist in the same region, including aminoacids". When subjected to ultraviolet radiation and combined with water and ammonium, both very abundant in the interstellar medium, naphthalene reacts and is capable of producing a wide variety of aminoacids and naphthaloquinones, precursor molecules to vitamins.

All these molecules play a fundamental role in the development of life as we know it on Earth. In fact, naphthalene has been found in meteorites that continue to fall to the surface of the Earth, and which fell with much greater intensity in epochs preceding the appearance of life.

The work of these researchers also enables us to understand one of the most intriguing problems in interstellar medium spectroscopy. For the past 80 years, the existence has been known of hundreds of spectroscopic bands (the so-called "diffuse bands") associated with interstellar matter, but the identification of the agent causing them has remained a mystery.

"Our results show that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons such as naphthalene are responsible for the diffuse bands and should be present throughout the interstellar medium", says Iglesias Groth.

Journal reference:

1. Iglesias-Groth et al. Evidence for the Naphthalene Cation in a Region of the Interstellar Medium with Anomalous Microwave Emission. The Astrophysical Journal, 2008; 685 (1): L55 DOI: 10.1086/592349
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by Brian Greene
Reposted from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/op...

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it's one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.

The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.

After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the "on" switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect?

The collider's workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

The raison d'être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein's famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy ("E") and matter or mass ("m") are convertible currencies (with "c" — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles.

It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated.

Here's a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.

Higgs Particles

One of the mysteries that continues to stump physicists is the origin of mass. We can measure with fantastic accuracy the mass of an electron, a quark and most every other particle, but where does mass itself come from?

More than 40 years ago, a number of researchers, including Peter Higgs, an English physicist, suggested an answer: perhaps space is pervaded by a field, much like the electromagnetic fields generated by cellphones and radio broadcasts, that acts like invisible molasses.

When we push something in the effort to make it move faster, the Higgs molasses would exert a drag force — and it's this resistance, as the Higgs theory goes, that we commonly call the object's mass. Scientists have incorporated this idea as a centerpiece of the so-called standard model — a refined mathematical edifice, viewed by many as the crowning achievement of particle physics, that since the 1970s has described the behavior of nature's basic constituents with unprecedented accuracy.

The one component of the standard model that remains stubbornly unconfirmed is the very notion of the Higgs' "molasses" field. However, collisions at the Large Hadron Collider should be able to chip off little chunks of the ubiquitous Higgs field (if it exists), creating what are known as Higgs bosons or Higgs particles. If these particles are found, the standard model, more than a quarter-century after its articulation, will finally be complete.

Supersymmetric Particles

In the early 1970s, mathematical studies of string theory revealed a striking step toward Einstein's unfulfilled dream of a unified theory — a single theory embracing all forces and all matter. Supersymmetry, as the insight is called, is mathematically complex but has a physical implication of central relevance to the Large Hadron Collider