Sun's Three Years in Three Minutes

In this unusual video, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captures an image of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths, two images per day, for the past three years.

According to NASA:

"There are several noteworthy events that appear briefly in this video. They include the two partial eclipses of the sun by the moon, two roll maneuvers [by the observatory, as it changes position], the largest flare of this solar cycle, comet Lovejoy, and the transit of Venus. The specific time for each event is listed below, but a sharp-eyed observer may see some while the video is playing.” 

They appear at:

00:30:24 Partial eclipse by the moon

00:31:16 Roll maneuver

01:11:02 August 9, 2011 X6.9 Flare, the largest of this solar cycle

01:28:07 Comet Lovejoy, December 15, 2011

01:42:29 Roll Maneuver

01:51:07 Transit of Venus, June 5, 2012

02:28:13 Partial eclipse by the moon"

The music is violinist Martin Lass playing “Our Lady’s Errand of Love.”

Depersonalization Getting More Common

Depersonalization disorder may not be as rare as we think, affecting perhaps one percent of the population, according to recent research. It’s normally associated with an “unreal, spaced-out feeling you might get while severely jet-lagged or hung-over,” according to New Scientist magazine.

The sense of self has much to do with our awareness of our physicality and how we interact with the outside world. The brain integrates all the information coming in from the external world and from internal sensations and forms a default setting of "this is me here and now", says Nick Medford, who studies depersonalization at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK. "If that setting changes somehow, then you feel 'not right', in a way that might be very hard to put into words."

There are probably several ways that change can occur, but Medford's work is looking at the emotional detachment characteristic of depersonalization. In people who have the disorder, areas of the brain that are key to emotion are much less active than normal, he says.

Click here for thearticle.

"A Seamless, Intimate Totality"

"There is no separate, inside self and no separate outside object, other or world. Rather, there is one seamless, intimate totality, always changing when viewed from the perspective of objects, never changing when viewed from the perspective of the totality." ~ Rupert Spira

From the Science & Nonduality website.

Light Speed May Not Be Constant

Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, as was definitively stated in 1983 and has believed to have been a constant since that time. But that may not be the case.

Now, according to the Christian Science Monitor: 

A pair of studies suggest that this universal constant might not be so constant after all. In the first study, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud and his team found that the speed of light in a vacuum varies ever so slightly. 

This happens because what we think of as nothing isn't really nothing. Even if you were to create a perfect vacuum, at the quantum level it would still be populated with pairs of tiny "virtual" particles that flash in and out of existence and whose energy values fluctuate. As a consequence of these fluctuations, the speed of a photon passing through a vacuum varies, about 50 quintillionths of a second per square meter. 

That may not sound like much, but it's enough to point the way toward a new underlying physics.

Click here for the article.

Playing with Perception

About 10 years ago, psychologists in Pennsylvania discovered an amazing illusion. They found that they could convince people that a rubber hand was their own by putting it on a table in front of them while stroking it in the same way as their real hand. 

The now-famous "rubber hand illusion" was not only a mind-blowing party trick, it was also hugely important in understanding how sight, touch and "proprioception" - the sense of body position - combine to create a convincing feeling of body ownership, one of the foundations of self-consciousness. 

In recent years that understanding has been explored further using increasingly freaky illusions. "The rubber hand illusion really inspired people," says Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. 

He is one of many researchers who have taken the illusion and run with it, creating a whole new set of "bodily illusions" that mess with our sense of self in strange and disturbing ways. "We're doing all kinds of crazy stuff," he says.

From NewScientist.com. Click here for the full article. 

Higgs Boson Discovery Has Consequences

Now confirming the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, physicists are wrestling with implications of actually finding it ~ the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the so-called Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

LiveScience is listing what it sees as the six largest consequences of the discovery, listed here in abbreviated form:

1. The origin of mass

"The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how the particles acquire mass," said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, a physicist at Harvard. "If there was no such mechanism, then everything would be massless."

2. The Standard Model

The reigning theory of particle physics describes the universe's very small constituents. Every particle predicted by the Standard Model had been discovered ~ except one: the Higgs boson. "It's the missing piece in the Standard Model," Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN said last year of the particle announcement. "So it would definitely be a confirmation that the theories we have now are right."

3. The electroweak force

The confirmation of the Higgs also helps to explain how two of the fundamental forces of the universe ~ the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles, and the weak force that's responsible for radioactive decay ~ can be unified.

4. Supersymmetry

This idea posits that every known particle has a "superpartner" particle with slightly different characteristics. Supersymmetry is attractive because it could help unify some of the other forces of nature, and even offers a candidate for the particle that makes up dark matter.

5. Validation of LHC

The newly announced finding offers major validation for the Large Hadron Collider and for the scientists who've worked on the search for many years.

6. Is the universe doomed?

The Higgs boson discovery opens the door to new calculations that weren't previously possible, scientists say, including one that suggests the universe is in for a cataclysm billions of years from now. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

Click here for the article.

Skeleton Saint Gaining Popularity in U.S.

Long popular in Mexico, the skeleton saint La Santa Muerte is gaining a robust following north of the border among many non-Latinos, many of them shunning organized religion.

Wearing a black nun's robe and holding a scythe in one hand, Santa Muerte appeals to people seeking all manner of otherworldly help: from fending off wrongdoing and carrying out vengeance to stopping lovers from cheating and landing better jobs. 

According to the Associated Press:

"Her growth in the United States has been extraordinary," said Andrew Chesnut, author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint and the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Because you can ask her for anything, she has mass appeal and is now gaining a diverse group of followers throughout the country. She's the ultimate multi-tasker." 

The saint is especially popular among Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests, even as the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic, experts say. 

The origins of La Santa Muerte are unclear. Some followers say she is an incarnation of an Aztec goddess of death who ruled the underworld. Some scholars say she originated in medieval Spain through the image of La Parca, a female Grim Reaper, who was used by friars for the later evangelization of indigenous populations in the Americas.

 For decades, though, La Santa Muerte remained an underground figure in isolated regions of Mexico and served largely as an unofficial Catholic saint that women called upon to help with cheating spouses.

Click here for the article and more photos.