Political Conservatives and the Larger Amygdala

New research linking conservative political views with an enlarged part of the brain called the amygdala ~ responsible for reflexive impulses such as fear ~ still lacks sufficient data to say which came first: Does a fear-provoking enlarged amygdala encourage political conservatism, or does conservative thinking actually change the brain to create a larger amygdala?

Conservatives also display a smaller anterior cingulated, which is the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.

"We were very surprised to find that there was an area of the brain that we could predict political attitude,” according to Professor Geraint Rees of the University College of London, who lead the study. "It is very surprising because it does suggest there is something about political attitude that is encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that there is something in our brain structure that determines or results in political attitude."

The new research ~ to be published this year ~ supports an earlier study showing that some people were born with a "Liberal Gene" that makes people more likely to seek out less conventional political views. That gene, a neurotransmitter in the brain called DRD4, could even be stimulated by the novelty value of radical opinions, according to the London Telegraph.

Click here for the London Telegraph article.

Large Hadron Collider May Be a Time Machine

Concept of H.G. Wells' time machine by artist Danny Cardle.

The Large Hadron Collider ~ the world's largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year ~ could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.

One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.

According to Science Daily:

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Tom Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, "but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”

According to the theory Weiler and Chui Man Ho have developed, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

"One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes," Weiler said. "Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future."

Weiler began looking at time travel six years ago to explain anomalies that had been observed in several experiments with neutrinos, says Science Daily. Weiler and Ho's theory is based on M-theory, a "theory of everything." A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity.

Click here for the article.

Detecting Future Criminal Behavior in Children?

The demon Krampus marching naughty children to Hell.

Some criminologists are suggesting that children be screened with brain-imaging technology to identify violent tendencies. If the tendencies are present, the children would be treated … in some fashion.

They claim abnormal brain make-up could be a cause of criminality ~ psychopaths and criminals have smaller amygdala and prefrontal cortex, both of which regulate and control emotion and behavior. They also argue that children as young as four exhibit “callous unemotional traits” such as lack of guilt and empathy that suggest future bad behavior.

Linking these features with “conduct problems” such as throwing tantrums could be a strong way to predict who could be anti-social in later life.

Nathalie Fontaine of Indiana University used data from more than 9,000 twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996. Assessments of callous unemotional traits and conduct problems were based on teacher questionnaires when the children were seven, nine and 12. Information was taken from parents when the children were as young as four.

She found there was a correlation between risk factors at a young age and bad behavior at an older age.

A British criminologist, Adrian Raine, told the Telegraph he acknowledged the ethical implications of treating children before they had done anything wrong, but argued that “biological” causes of crime could not be ignored. “We could be ostriches and stick our heads in the sand but I believe we have to pursue the causes of crime at a biological and genetic level as well as at a social,” he said.

Click here for the Telegraph article.

Evidence Points to Probable Site of Atlantis

Artist's conception of Atlantis's multiple rings.

Researchers using satellite views of an ancient city submerged in southern Spain’s marshlands are claiming they may have located Atlantis. The site is 60 miles inland, just north of Cadiz. Following the researchers' scenario, a giant tsunami would have destroyed Atlantis millennia ago.

They believe the site may be Atlantis because it fits the age-old description of a multi-ringed metropolis, according to Richard Freund of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, the professor leading an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities” ~ built in Atlantis's image by its refugees after the city's destruction ~ gave researchers added proof, they say. Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled farther inland and built new cities there.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast. “We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense,” he says.

Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as “an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules,” as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity.

Click here for the Reuters article.

Is Magnetic Pole Shift a Cause for Alarm?

A recent Wall Street Journal article cited the movement of the earth’s magnetic field as a cause for potential alarm ~ but still posed the question, “Should we be alarmed?”

The earth's magnetic field is weakening at an accelerating rate. It is 15% weaker than it was at the time the north magnetic pole was "discovered"—and claimed for King William IV—by a British explorer in 1831. Should we be worried?

What's more, the north magnetic pole, after meandering through Canadian islands for half a millennium, is heading off across the Arctic Ocean toward Russia at the breakneck speed of 37 miles a year. It will pass close to the geographical North Pole in a few years. With the dastardly Russians about to pinch this British heirloom, should we be doubly worried?

While the WSJ admits we don’t know the answer, it contends there is no concrete evidence pointing to reasons for undue concern:

Though odds are strongly against it, it is just possible that this is the beginning of a polar reversal, when the North and South magnetic poles swap places. This used to happen quite often—by which I mean every hundred thousand years or so—but it's now 780,000 years since it last occurred, an unusually long interval.

During such a reversal there is probably a very brief interval (oops, there I go again; by "very brief" I mean a thousand years or so) when the earth has no stable magnetic field. This does not seem to have bothered our ancestors: There is no evidence of biological extinctions peaking during magnetic-pole reversals.

Click here for the complete article.

Extraterrestrials? What Would Jesus Do?

"Baptism of Christ," Aert de Gelder, 1710 (with saucer overhead)

In a far-reaching analysis of the potential impact on humans of learning that extraterrestrials exists, Christians likely would be scrambling to reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ with life on other planets.

“It's been argued for a couple of centuries now whether one incarnation of God as Jesus Christ for the entirety of creation is sufficient,” says theologian Ted Peters of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. For instance, aliens might lead religions to question whether a second genesis of life elsewhere belongs within the biblical understanding of creation. Might Jesus Christ have appeared more than once in the universe?

According to Space.com:

To see what effects the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might have on religion, Peters and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,300 individuals worldwide from multiple religious traditions ~ including Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and non-religious groups. 

They found the vast majority of religious believers ~ regardless of religion ~ were overwhelmingly confident that they wouldn’t suffer a collapse in faith in the face of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In addition, roughly one-third of religious people thought that the faith of other religions would be threatened, while two-thirds of nonreligious people thought that aliens would sway the faith of the religious as a whole. 

There are many open questions as to how people on Earth might view beliefs from space. Could advances that alien civilizations could bring be perceived much like a secular form of salvation? Might advanced civilizations and their perhaps equally advanced philosophies make our religions feel primitive?

Alien religions could draw converts, and if there are many points of agreement between religions on Earth and from space, one might see communication of ideas across species as well, Peters believes. “Greek philosophers never met the God of Moses, but there were people who said, ‘Doggone, there seems to be much that coheres,’” he added.

Click here for the Space.com article.

Music's Popularity Resides in Dopamine

Music causes the brain to release the chemical dopamine, creating a pleasurable rush and even helping listeners to anticipate a particularly thrilling moment. Previous research suggested a role for dopamine~ a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other ~ but new data shows it affects the brain directly.

Scientists for years have known dopamine creates pleasurable sensations when people eat, have sex, or take drugs. According to the Associated Press:

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience. 

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.

The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also experiencing dopamine's effects, Zatorre said.

PET scans showed the participants' brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces.

Click here for the article.

Is the Future Leaking into the Present? Maybe So.

Alice and the White Queen.

Ordinary people may be altered by experiences they haven't had yet, indicating the future can leak into the present. At least that’s the conclusion of a respected psychology professor, Daryl Bem of Cornell.

According to NPR:

Already critics are jumping up and down, saying this can't be, time is not porous, the experiments are flawed. But because this is the Professor Daryl Bem (he's in your high school textbook for his work on self perception) and because the journal publishing his article is top-of-the-line rigorous, all over the world psychologists are trying to duplicate what Dr. Bem has done. If serious scientists can repeat his results, this story is going to be big. 

The NPR article describes two experiments Bem conducted at Cornell that seem to prove his hypothesis. The article concludes:

So who knows? Maybe psychologists, like quantum physicists, will have to deal with the deep strangeness of our universe. Maybe time doesn't behave properly. Maybe it makes little leaps, suddenly appears uninvited when porn is in the air. Or maybe not.

It's not like we've never thought about this before. In his paper Bem recalls that in Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen casually mentions to Alice that in her realm, "memory works both ways."

Not only does the Queen remember past events, she can also remember "things that happened the week after next."

Alice, always puzzled, says, "I'm sure mine only works one way... I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen seems a little sorry for Alice. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," she says.

In a year or so, Bem suggests, we may have to agree with the Queen.

Click here for the article. 

More Research: Yes, Meditation Changes Brain

A new study on meditation confirms what several previous studies have shown ~ that the practice actually results in physical changes to the brain. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

Many people like myself who have meditated to some extent over the years and who’ve followed the scientific research have heard these reports before. Now, it seems, the findings are at last moving even farther into the realm of mainstream medicine.

According to the New York Times:

M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes. 

Previous studies have also shown that there are structural differences between the brains of meditators and those who don’t meditate, although this new study is the first to document changes in gray matter over time through meditation.

Britta Hölzel, psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s.

Click here for the complete article.

For more articles, click on the “Meditation” label below in the footer.

String Theory Points to Parallel Universe

String theory likely holds the secret to the magnitude of our universe ~ which is probably actually a “multiverse,” according to physicist Brian Greene.

“You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe,” Greene tells NPR. “There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.”

Greene believes the key to understanding these multiverses comes from string theory, the area of physics he's studied for the past 25 years.

According to NPR:

In a nutshell, string theory attempts to reconcile a mathematical conflict between two already accepted ideas in physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. 

“Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things,” Greene says. “Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum ~ for small things. The big problem is that each theory is great for each realm, but when they confront each other, they are ferocious antagonists and the mathematics falls apart.” 

String theory smoothes out the mathematical inconsistencies that currently exist between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. It posits that the entire universe can be explained in terms of really, really small strings that vibrate in 10 or 11 dimensions ~ meaning dimensions we can't see. If it exists, it could explain literally everything in the universe ~ from subatomic particles to the laws of speed and gravity. 

Greene, the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, tackles the existence of multiple universes in his latest book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Law of the Cosmos.

Click here for the NPR article and “Fresh Air” interview.

Magnetic North Pole Continues To Slip

Earth’s magnetic north pole is continuing to shift toward Siberia, a situation of concern to those who link a “Pole Shift” with End Times.  In its most dramatic form, a shift would result in reversal of the north and south magnetic poles ~ something that happens about every 250,000 years ~ with resulting cataclysmic havoc.

The situation was highlighted this week when two large airports in Florida renumbered runways to reflect new compass readings to match the new pole location.

Earth’s magnetic poles are governed by forces deep inside the planet. According to space.com:

An inner core of solid iron is surrounded by an outer core of molten iron. They rotate at different rates, and the interaction between the regions creates what scientists call a "hydromagnetic dynamo." It's something like an electric motor, and it generates a magnetic field akin to a giant bar magnet. The process is not completely understood. 

In the past 15 million years, there have been four reversals every 1 million years, or about one shift each 250,000 years, says Brad Clement of Florida International University, who has lead a recent study on pole reversals. The last one, however, was 790,000 years ago. That might suggest we're overdue for a big change. 

Not necessarily so, Clement says. The flips are not periodic, meaning they don't adhere to a schedule of even intervals. Yet the intensity of the magnetic field has been dropping for the last 2,000 years, and "it has dropped significantly" during the past two decades, Clement said.

Some scientists speculate a reversal is underway. Clement said that's like forecasting that the bottom will drop out of the stock market because it's gone down the past few days. "We just don't know," he said.

Click here for LiveScience article on recent developments.

Click here for Space.com background article quoted above.

Click here for 2012 Pole Shift predictions.

UFOs from Middle Ages to Modern Times

I remember the thrill I felt from the 1960s well into the 1990s at the prospect of UFO sightings and alien abductions. To me they suggested something unknown, enchanting, and perhaps miraculous about the world we inhabit. They were proof that we couldn’t understand ~ couldn’t “prove” ~ everything that happened around us.

In contrast, this last decade has been a drought of UFO excitement. Most of the UFO information we encounter is recycled from past decades, and anyone who openly accepts the idea of UFOs or aliens is greeted with heaps of scorn and ridicule, except on the History Channel. That’s why I’m glad to see a new book by Jacques Vallee, a French astronomer and leading commenter on UFO phenomena. Vallee always has taken the broad view ~ including the possibilities of archetypal symbolism or other-dimensional activity ~ to better understand UFOs, and seems to be expanding his perspectives even more with Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times.

Here is a portion of his recent interview on Salon.com about the new book.

Why is the idea of ancient UFO sightings a controversial one?

Most UFO believers believe the phenomenon began in 1947, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw several objects that he described as behaving like saucers skipping on water. And he saw them from his plane flying over Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington. And that was the beginning of the flying saucer era in the media. I came to a point where I wondered when the phenomenon had begun, and I found a lot of material describing objects that seemed to behave the same way [as UFOs] and entities [resembling aliens] that dated back to the Middle Ages. At that time they were called angels or demons or leprechauns or elves or fairies and so on. So I published a book called "Passport to Magonia" that caused something of a scandal with the believers, because I was shaking that idea that UFOs were a recent phenomenon.

Stephen Hawking has discounted reports of UFOs by suggesting they only appear to "cranks and weirdos?" Why don't you think these ancient witnesses were just delusional?

Because delusions have their own pattern, and these don't seem to fit them. A delusion is usually single-witness and there are many multiple-witness cases in the book. You also have authority figures, astronomers and well-known people making claims. You have Michelangelo seeing a triangle with three lights of different colors in the sky and making a painting of it. It's staggering when you hear modern scientists saying only idiots and crazy people report UFOs. The consuls in ancient Rome made a law that they had to have an annual report on any unexplained aerial phenomena. They were not looking for UFOs, they were looking for astrological warnings of famines, or revolutions and wars and death of emperors and that type of thing. Many of them were copied by historians, and they have survived. 

Click here for the complete interview.

Same Birth Chart, Similar Lives

People who question the basis of astrology—and there are plenty of them due to today’s sweeping misrepresentations of all things astrological—frequently raise the question of characteristics bestowed upon individuals at the time and place of birth. They wonder, for example, about two people born at the same time and same place. There are some anecdotal legends regarding the situation, but one of the most famous and well-documented examples I’ve run across is cited by historian Benson Bobrick in his 2005 book The Fated Sky: Astrology in History. And I quote:

One such famous case involved an English subject and his king. On June 4, 1738, in the parish of St. Martins-in-the-Fields, two boys were born less than a minute apart. One was William Frederick, later crowned George III, King of England; the other, James Hemmings, an ironmonger’s son. Widely separated by class, yet bound to a parallel fate, these two men, each in his own social sphere, lived out the edict of his stars. In October 1760, when George III succeeded his father on the throne, thereby fulfilling the purpose to which he was born, Hemmings took over his father’s business. Both men were married on September 8, 1761, fathered the same number of children (even, weirdly, the same number of boys and girls), suffered the same accidents, succumbed to the same diseases, and died within less than an hour of each other on Saturday, January 29, 1820.

Exchanging Vibration for Linear Time

Here the channeled Abraham-Hicks points out the importance of tweaking the way we view the world around us. The emphasis is away from linear time/space matters and focuses instead on emotional and vibrational aspects of our beliefs. 

Research Reveals Clues to Phobia Creation

Scientists experimenting with images of tarantulas have concluded that the human brain responds differently to threats based on proximity, direction and how scary people expect something to be. While those conclusions are totally obvious, the recent experiments are revealing specifically what parts of the brain are involved in identifying and magnifying human fear.

Researchers in Cambridge, England used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track brain activity in 20 volunteers as they watched a tarantula placed near their feet.

"We've shown that it's not just a single structure in the brain, it's a number of different parts of the fear network and they are working together to orchestrate the fear response,” Dean Mobbs, who led the study, tells Reuters News. "It seems that when a spider moves closer to you, you see a switch from the anxiety regions of the brain to the panic regions." 

Volunteers were actually watching an elaborately rigged video of a tarantula which they believed was near their foot, since getting the spider to do the same thing for each volunteer would have been impossible.

The scientists also asked volunteers beforehand how scared they thought they might be of the tarantula. They found that those who thought they would be most scared had a false impression afterwards of how large the spider was. This so-called "expectation error" could be the key to people developing a phobia ~ an irrational, intense and persistent fear of certain things, people, animals or situations.

"This may be one cognitive mechanism by which people acquire phobias," said Mobbs.

Click here for the complete Reuters article.

Click here for a Business Week article on the topic.

Writer Ponders Wiltshire's Crop Circles

Crop circle discovered in August in Wiltshire.

Here are excerpts from an interesting article appearing recently in the London Telegraph, written by Clive Aslet, a skeptic. The article describes his reactions to some of the new scientific findings.

. . . The archaeological features of this part of Britain are unique: only in southern England do you find white horses etched into hillsides, and there is no equivalent elsewhere to mysterious Silbury Hill. Crop circles are found in other parts of the globe, but not many. The 55 that have been spotted so far this year in Britain – mostly in Wessex – are more than half the total number observed throughout the world.

. . . Soil samples from beneath the circles that have been sent off for analysis in the States have apparently revealed traces of silica, suggesting exposure to intense heat – yet for so short a time that the crop does not burn up. Nevertheless, the wheat itself appears to be changed. Plant grain from a crop circle and it will grow taller and stronger than control samples, she insists, as though genetically modified.

It is widely believed in the crop-circle community that the shapes appear fully made, in a flash of light that illuminates the whole valley. “We don’t know where the energy comes from,” says Blake.

. . . Crop circles first appeared – or, as Blake would have it, were first noticed – in the Eighties. After a decade of speculation, during which it seemed that no human agency could be responsible for these miraculous designs, two men in their sixties stepped forward. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed responsibility for a spectacular hoax, perpetrated not with sophisticated or extraterrestrial technology, but homespun equipment such as a plank and a length of rope. A baseball cap with a circle of wire attached to the visor provided a sight that could be aligned with an object on the horizon to keep the design steady. Case closed.

Well, not quite: certainly not to a community supported and reinforced by the internet and dedicated to finding alternative explanations. “We know that there are fakes,” says the study group’s bubbly administrator, Clare Oatley. “But as somebody said: ‘Just because a faker can copy a van Gogh, doesn’t mean that van Gogh didn’t exist.”’

Click here for the complete article.

Isaac Newton Was Secret Alchemist

It turns out Sir Isaac Newton ~ one of the most influential scientists in history ~ was a closet alchemist. In fact, he was a passionate practitioner of alchemy for over three decades, according to Indiana University professor William Newman.

According to Discovery News:

Newton invented calculus, described the law of universal gravitation and built the first reflecting telescope. Just a few resume highlights for someone considered to be the most influential scientist in history.

That's why alchemy is a strange hobby for someone who clearly mastered the scientific method. Alchemy involves transmuting one element into another. Only not so much focusing on chemical reactions, as invoking spiritual and philosophical approaches.

Alchemy is now considered a pseudo-science. But even during its height, critics such as Chaucer characterized alchemists as charlatans, and it was banned by Pope John XXII and King Henry IV.

But before you think less of Newton, consider that most experimental scientists of the 17th century believed in it too. Professor Newman also counters that alchemists of the time were more similar to chemists than wannabe magicians. They helped create new drugs, brighter pigments and improved booze distillation.

Newton's involvement in alchemy was never fully secret, more like neglected, Newman believes. Only recently have science historians fully analyzed Newton's extensive writings on the subject.

New Data Contradicts Mayan Calendar End Date

The Mayan Long Count calendar likely doesn’t end on December 21, 2012  ~ the date hyped by many apocalyptic thinkers ~ according to new research into the technique for translating the ancient calendar into Gregorian calendar years.

The research also contends that the actual end date of the Mayan calendar is essentially unknown within at least a 100-year span. In fact, the Mayan calendar may have already ended.

According to LiveScience:

A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.) 

The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California.

Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.

"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct." But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.

Click here for the complete article.

Astronomers Find 800 Trillion More Suns

Galaxy cluster, with older galaxies circled in yellow and younger in blue.

Astronomers have discovered the most massive galaxy cluster ever found, containing several hundred galaxies and a mind-boggling 800 trillion suns. Scientists at the South Pole can view the cluster as it appeared 7 billion years ago, when the universe was half its current age and before our solar system existed.

Despite its enormous size, the galaxy cluster ~ named SPT-CL J0546-5345 ~ was unseen until astronomers looked for distortions in the cosmic microwave background.

Click here for the complete article.

An Adventure in Magnitudes ~ The Power of Ten

I’d been thinking lately about the enormity of our universe, especially the concept that our universe is only one of many. Today I learned about this 10-minute film called “The Power of Ten.” Called an adventure in magnitudes, it begins on a picnic blanket near Chicago’s shore of Lake Michigan, then takes us to the farthest realm of our universe, moving 10 times farther out every 10 seconds. Then, in an interesting turnabout, it moves inward, back to the picnic blanket and into the atomic structure of a cell in the man’s hand.

As the Hermetic adage goes … “As above, so below.”

Far From Brutes, Neanderthals Had Compassion

Neanderthal reconstruction in Prehistoric Museum of Halle, Germany.

New research indicates Neanderthals displayed “a deep seated sense of compassion” and were not the dumb brutes often depicted in archaeological lore.

“Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion,” researcher Penny Spikins of the University of York tells Discovery News. “It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive. This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell about the prehistory of compassion."

Based on fossils, artifacts and other evidence, the scientists propose a four-stage model for the development of human compassion:

The first stage began six million years ago, according to the scientists, when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees experienced the initial awakenings of an empathy for others and motivation to help them, perhaps with a gesture of comfort, or moving a branch to allow them to pass.

The second stage from 1.8 million years ago sees compassion in Homo erectus beginning to be regulated as an emotion integrated with rational thought. Care of sick individuals represented an extensive compassionate investment while the emergence of special treatment of the dead suggested grief at the loss of a loved one and a desire to soothe others feelings, the researchers conclude.

The third stage, based on findings from Europe between around 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, sees humans such as Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals developing deep-seated commitments to the welfare of others illustrated by a long adolescence and a dependence on hunting together. There is also archaeological evidence of the routine care of the injured or infirm over extended periods. These include the remains of a child with a congenital brain abnormality who was not abandoned, but lived until five or six years old. The researchers also note that there was a Neanderthal with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye who must have been cared for, perhaps for as long as twenty years.

In the fourth stage, the scientists say modern humans starting 120,000 years ago extended compassion to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts. 

“We have traditionally paid a lot of attention to how early humans thought about each other,” Spikins adds, “but it may well be time to pay rather more attention to whether or not they ‘cared.’”

Click here for the complete Discovery News article.

Research Discovers Pathways for Neurotransmitters

Depiction of a neurotransmitter.

New research showing that the neurotransmitter serotonin uses a special pathway to regulate biological functions could greatly affect future therapies for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

The Scripps Research Institute study published in the October 6, 2010 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience contends serotonin has significant influence over control of perception, cognition, sleep, appetite, pain, and mood.

"Our study shows that while both serotonin and hallucinogens act at the serotonin 2A receptor, serotonin utilizes a very specific pathway and its actions are independent of those produced by hallucinogens," says Laura Bohn, an associate professor on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute. "Future drug discovery efforts to identify lead compounds for treatment of depression may consider focusing upon those that only engage that pathway. This work may also lend insight into the mechanisms that underlie the hallucinations that occur in schizophrenia."

This may be particularly important for the treatment of depression because traditional therapies ~ focusing on elevating serotonin levels ~ can sometimes produce serious side effects such as hallucinations, and is especially serious when antidepressants are mixed with monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

Click here for the complete PhysOrg.com article.

Sea Census Finds Many Species Thought Extinct

The newly discovered Ceratonotus Steiningeri copepod.

The first global picture of life in the oceans was released this week. Some 2,700 scientists spent 9,000 days at sea to compile the Census of Marine Life, and they admit they have only scratched the surface of oceanic diversity.

In all, some 250,000 marine plant and animal species have now been formally described, out of the 1 million thought to exist.

"There are three to four unknown species for every known," says Paul Snelgrove of Memorial University of Newfoundland in St John's, Canada.

The Census has so far added 1,200 new species to the tally, though that is likely to rise as over 5,000 more organisms that were collected have yet to be studied or named. The new species include several that were thought to have disappeared, such as the "Jurassic shrimp” thought to have died out 50 million years ago.

Click here for the complete article.

2012 ~ Epicenter of a Cultural Earthquake

Anyone following my Quantum Spirit blog for any length of time probably knows I have great respect for author and physicist Peter Russell. Here is his take on 2012, entitled "2012: Temporal Epicenter of a Cultural Earthquake."

I encourage you to view it for its profound insights into taking advantage of the changes that may already be entering our lives.

The script for his video appears on his blog "Spirit of Now." Here are the concluding paragraphs.

People sometimes talk about the winds of change. I think we’re heading into a storm of change. The question is how can we prepare ourselves for this, how can we cope with an increasingly unpredictable world?

We can get some clues by looking at what helps a tree survive a storm. 

First, it needs strong roots, so it does not blow over. Similarly, we need to be able to remain stable so that we are not shaken by every unexpected change. If we loose our inner balance, if we react emotionally to everything that happens, we end up getting more stressed and more likely to burn out.

Second, like a tree we also need to be flexible. We need to be able to move with the flow of change. This means letting go of past assumptions. We need to learn to think more clearly, allow new ideas in, let deeper intuitions and feelings come to the surface.

And third, just as a tree is much better off if it is protected by other trees in the forest, so too we will be much better able to withstand change if we have a strong sense of community. We need to care for each, support each other in times of need. We need to develop greater care and compassion, to open our hearts to kindness, and have our vision guide us in these turbulent times.

A longtime advocate of meditation and consciousness studies, Russell is author of several books including From Science to God, Waking Up in Time, The Consciousness Revolution, and The Brain Book, among others.

Study Shows Meditation Improves Attention Span

Ancient mandala with meditation symbols.

Inspired by Buddhist meditation techniques, researchers have determined that meditation improves people’s attention span and in distinguishing small differences in what they are viewing.

The recent study involved selecting 60 participants, then sending half of them to a meditation retreat while the rest waited their turn ~ and essentially functioned as the control group. All 60 were experienced meditators. The retreat for the study lasted about three months.

According to ScienceDaily:

At three points during the retreat, participants took a test on a computer to measure how well they could make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention. They watched a screen intently as lines flashed on it; most were of the same length, but every now and then a shorter one would appear, and the volunteer had to click the mouse in response. 

Participants got better at discriminating the short lines as the training went on. This improvement in perception made it easier to sustain attention, so they also improved their task performance over a long period of time. This improvement persisted five months after the retreat, particularly for people who continued to meditate every day. The task lasted 30 minutes and was very demanding. 

"Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it’s kind of a perfect index of meditation training," Katherine MacLean of the University of California and one of the authors of the study, told ScienceDaily. "People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That's what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted."

Click here for the complete article.

Earth's Volcanic Sites Reveal Planetary Pulse

Scientists are theorizing that several volcanic hot spots may be Earth’s planetary pulses, beating at a rate of five to 10 million years. Researchers in Norway, Hawaii and Australia suggest that the regular fluctuations originate in the Earth’s core, travel up through the mantle and create eruptions on the planet’s surface.

According to Discovery News:

Among the most famous hot spots are Hawaii, Yellowstone and Iceland. All of these sites have long histories of eruptive pulses that have burned through the slowly moving crust above like a cutting torch -- leaving a long, telltale wake of dead volcanoes made of progressively older rocks.

This is in contrast to other sorts of volcanoes, which are caused by shallower things, like one tectonic plate being shoved under another, then melting.

“Hot spots remain some of the greatest enigmas in earth science,” commented geologist Mike Coffin of the University of Tasmania, Australia. “Plate tectonic theory does not explain them.”

Some of these hot spots have been linked to vast eruptions that, in turn, are suspected of affecting some of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth.

Click here for the Discovery News article.

Robert Walter, Joseph Campbell Foundation

Robert Walter, president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, talks about the consciousness-jarring impact of visions. In an elevated state of consciousness, these events can be spiritual blessings. But when we return to the mundane state, they can be negative. Sublimating them has led, Walter says, to creation of much of our mythology, literature, and religious teachings.

Götterdämmerung & Propaganda

I admit to seriously mixed feelings of fascination and revulsion when I watch this 8-minute 1941 German film entitled Stukas. Richard Wagner is among my Top Five favorite composers and here we see the remarkable curative strength of music, specifically from his 1876 Ring-cycle opera Götterdämmerung.

Trouble is, the miraculously cured patient in the film is a clinically depressed Nazi pilot who is hospitalized and then hears the soaring strains of Wagner’s music. The pilot is miraculously rejuvenated, rejoins his cheering squadron and takes to the air again to continue the Reich’s merciless bombing of Britain.

This clip’s Götterdämmerung music is worthy here, but I offer Stukas more as a clear example of how propaganda is structured and the type of story it tells. We live in an age where the propaganda is subtler, but it’s undeniably present, especially on some cable networks. Beware.

Thanks to Alex Ross, author of the excellent book The Rest is Noise, who earlier posted this film on his blog at www.therestisnoise.com. 

New Evidence Indicates Rapid Pole Shift

Just before we entered the new millennium in 2000, a flurry of books touted the apocalyptic prediction of a “pole shift,” where Earth’s magnetic pole would move from north to south with untold catastrophic damage. Originally discredited by most people as an outlandish scare tactic devised to sell books, the concept of shifting magnetic poles seems now to have much more scientific credence ~ though the pace is different and the effects not necessarily so dire.

Not only do pole shifts actually occur, but they happen rapidly in a geomagnetic sense, as new geological findings near Battle Mountain, Nevada, show. The new discovery reinforces similar findings in 1995 at the Steens Mountains in southeastern Oregon.

Describing the new Nevada find, Science News states:

Magnetic minerals in 15-million-year-old rocks appear to preserve a moment when the magnetic north pole was rapidly on its way to becoming the south pole, and vice versa. Such ‘geomagnetic field reversals’ occur every couple hundred thousand years, normally taking about 4,000 years to make the change. The Nevada rocks suggest that this particular switch happened at a remarkably fast clip.

The Nevada find indicates the magnetic pole shift occurs at about one degree a week, while the Oregon evidence indicates up to six degrees a day.

Researchers aren’t sure why the geomagnetic field reverses itself. Many think it must have something to do with what creates the field in the first place ~ convective motions of liquid iron in the planet’s spinning outer core.

The last stable reversal occurred 780,000 years ago, according to Science News. Some geologists argue Earth is overdue for a reversal and might even be entering one now, as the geomagnetic field has been getting weaker over the past 150 years or more.

Click here for the complete Science News article.