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A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat – Part 2

Part 1 of "A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat" can be found here:

(Note: I do not use the real names of people, nor do I identify the specific Ashram. I changed a few details. The purpose is to protect the privacy of the individuals. Readers who are familiar with this Ashram will probably recognize it.)

I Make Contact

My first few days at the Ashram were filled with a good deal of uncertainty. Where do I sit in the dining hall? Will I violate some standard of etiquette among people pursuing a serious religious practice? What if I say hello to someone who is spending time in silence? I know I'm going to get a stern look if I upset someone's spiritual practice. My predilection is to do nothing, say nothing, and hope I do not trip over my own feet with a monastic faux pas.

The first evening I walked up to the building that housed the dining hall to make sure I was there at the start of the dinner period. The building is like a visitor center, with a small shop selling books, CDs, DVDs, gifts, and items of religious significance. It also houses the media center. I looked in through the door to the dining area and into a large common area. It's very much like a multipurpose room in a small high school: auditorium, lecture stage, gym, and dining. There was a decent size commercial kitchen , off to one side. Tables were set up for a buffet service. Tables and chairs were arranged around the auditorium. There was a sound proof control room in a corner opposite the stage, and was part of the media center. I could see an access to a patio for eating outside. This is January, so we stay inside. I walked over to the food and toured around the two buffet tables. I was alone and didn't know if I should begin eating or not. I returned to the hall outside the dining area. There were a few people there but no one seemed to organizing themselves for dinner. I went back into the dining room and saw a lone gentleman filling up a plate. I started doing the same. Then it happened. I made my first breach of monastic etiquette. The gentleman politely told me I had to wait for the gong to be sounded, enter with the others, and wait again for a communal prayer to begin the mealtime. He had to be elsewhere and was taking a plate of food so he could make his other appointment.

OK, that wasn't too embarrassing. After a few more minutes about a dozen or two people gathered. An aproned cook opened the door, and sounded a small hand held gong. We filed in and stood together around the food. Someone started a Sanskrit prayer that was sung by everyone. The feeling they projected was communal, happy, relaxed. and enjoying their prayer as a prelude to eating. I was feeling more comfortable. With the end of the singing, the group recited a prayer, in English, the words being in a large framed poster on the wall. Eventually, I learned to follow and recite the prayer, along with a shout of “Ji!” in response to another incantation. It was like an affirmation, an “Amen” if you will, that ended the prayers and gave everyone permission to “dig in.” I was pleasantly surprised at the variety and presentation of the vegan food. In addition to recognizable salad items like greens, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, there were all sorts of middle eastern and Indian dishes. Of course there was lots of tofu cooked this way and that way. It all looked very good and it was great tasting, as well.

Not knowing where to sit, I went to a table further out from the food, facing back toward the food and the other diners, and started to enjoy my dinner. I was recognized for what I was, a brand new visitor who didn't know up from down. A woman monastic, Swami Learananda, came over and invited me to sit with her and several others. I met a couple of monastics and visitors like myself. The visitors tended to be friends of the Ashram who come periodically for the spiritual practice and experience. A few were newbies like myself who were referred by others. Swami Learananda said I looked familiar and that we met here before. I told her she looked familiar, and that I met her more than fifteen years before when visiting Giri and Yukteswar. “Of course,” she said. Learananda was wonderful to talk to and made me feel comfortable, relaxed, and very much at ease. She was raving about the homemade bread and organic homemade jam, so I had to try it. It was wonderful. For a few moments I was considering applying for life long study as a Swami-in-training just for daily access to that homemade bread and jam. Although I enjoyed every bit of the plentiful food, I was afraid I would be very hungry between meals. At home I'm frequently hungry between meals, and tend to nosh a lot. Never, not once, did I feel hungry between meals at the Ashram.

Settling In

I went back to my room and studied the schedule for the week. There was guided meditation at 5:30 AM and 'open' meditation at 6:30 AM. Guided meditation didn't appeal to me for two reasons. It was too early in the morning, and I was sure I would be a distraction to the 'guide' and the more serious participants. I didn't want to make another monastic faux pas. Besides, a whole hour of meditation might be more than I can handle. So, 6:30 it is. I didn't have any trouble getting to sleep. I was exhausted from the trip. My room was large, with a small kitchenette, and the bed very, very comfortable. For the entire week I never made any early morning meditation. I must have been in need of a lot of sleep because I slept late every single morning. That was OK, though, because one of my reasons for coming here was to get some rest and quiet. I wasn't hassled by anyone to adhere to a schedule. I was treated like the guest I was and I could set my own schedule. Usually, a visitor will ask for a spiritual guide and be assigned to one of the senior staff. I didn't ask. Instead I chose to follow my nose and spend time with different members of the Ashram.

On the second day I went to the visitors office to announce my presence and pick up information about activities, schedules, a few rules, and a map of the property. The head of the visitors office is an 80 year old woman monastic, Swami Mataji. Mataji is not her Sanskrit name. It is an honorific, a term of respect and affection, and reserved for older women. As the senior woman monastic, everyone calls her Mataji. I recognized Mataji from my earlier visit and she recognized me. I can understand that I would remember some of them , but how they would recognize me is incredible. Mataji is a former Catholic nun who found her spiritual center at this Ashram, many years ago. She was smiling, energetic, and nice to be around when I first met her. More than 15 years later, nothing has changed. Mataji was also a reader during the silent period of lunch, each day. The first 45 minutes of lunch was the only compulsory time of silence for visitors at the Ashram. She would read from varied texts, and from writings of the founder. This is not unlike practices at Christian monasteries, to this day. She had a wonderful voice that I could listed to, all day.

Two Lessons in Humility

On my second after noon, I ran into Amarananda outside the media center where she worked. I thanked her again for the drive from the Amtrak station. Then I told her that I had 3 CDs of Tibetan ritual chants on my laptop. I had the .mp3 files and would like to give them to her. I told her I knew she would love them. We made arrangements for me to transfer the files to her home computer after the workday. Later, she drove me to her house, less than a mile away, and let me at her computer. I build and maintain my own computers and my own network. For friends and family I am the de facto 24/7 in-home IT service technician. For the record, Linux rules and Windows (especially Vista) sucks. As usual, nothing goes right the first time and I had to return to my room to download other software, drivers, codecs, etc. I think I finished the next day and manage to debug and fix a couple of problems with her computer. Some people fly remote control helicopters. I play with computers. She loved the Tibetan Buddhist ritual chants, just as I knew she would. Amarananda was very appreciative, I was happy, and we settled down to some tea and resumed our conversation about Buddhism, the Ashram, and a host of other related topics.

At one point she asked me if I believed in reincarnation. I said no, but that I am always open to listen to views of other people and traditions. I won't go into the details, but it was a very central belief for her, and gave a great deal of meaning to her life. This is true for all Buddhists. Then I thought I would be very clever and ask her a question that would demonstrate how much I understood about Buddhism. I asked, “How does belief in reincarnation inform you as to what constitutes a good life?” “What does reincarnation tell you about why you should lead a good life?” Of course, I knew the correct answer. Scientists are oriented to finding the correct answer. Within the span of about 20 seconds, the time she took to give me an answer, I realized I didn't know diddly squat about Buddhism, and I wasn't that clever, after all. My correct answer about being good in this life so you don't come back in the next life as a 3-toed sloth, was totally irrelevant. I decided I had to drop all pretenses, do a lot of listening, and take the opportunity to learn as much as I could.

That evening I sent a email to a few friends and told them about my trip, some of the people I met, the food, uploading my Buddhist chants for Amarananda, and my Karma Yoga. Karma Yoga is the notion of doing good as a consistent practice, so as to help you 'earn' successive steps in the cycles of death and rebirth as your strive for ultimate enlightenment. My Karma Yoga was volunteering for kitchen clean up after dinner that night. The last time I did kitchen duty was in a monastery when I was much younger. I hated every minute of it. The worst job was scrubbing pots and pans. At the Ashram, however, I enjoyed every minute of it. Once I finished inside the kitchen, I cleaned all the tables and chairs. The food service manager came out to tell me the tables and chairs had never been this clean. In my email to my friends I was trying to be clever, again, telling them that on the great Karma scorecard in the universe, I added three points to my plus column. The next morning I got near identical responses from two friends. They went something like this: “Norm, we know you better than you know yourself. Stop adding up points on your score and LET GO!” They were right. Two lessons in humility in two days was sufficient. I decided to let go. This is not a place for a quantitative scientist who is trying to impress people with cleverness, and wit. I thanked my friends for telling me what I needed to know. I thanked Amarananda, as well.

The next day I met Swami Raneananda, another woman monastic, outside the dining hall. We struck up a conversation and she said she recognized me from before. I didn't remember her. This is really uncanny. Raneananda has an incredible sense of humor. We hit it off the first day. We would tell each other real life humorous stories. It got to where we agreed to take turns. I couldn't get another story out of her until I told her one of my own. Here's one of Raneananda's stories. Some time ago, she met another woman visiting the Ashram who was an avid skier. The other woman was an active practicing Catholic who went to Montreal to see the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, later to be Pope John Paul II, at a conference. The woman approached the Cardinal, while everyone else was standing back and reserved. She introduced herself and said that she and the Cardinal had something in common. “What's that?” he asked. She said that both of them loved skiing. She asked, “How many Polish Cardinals like to ski?” He replied, “Half. The other one doesn't ski.”

My Visits to the Shrines

One afternoon Raneananda and I were talking about the religious meaning of the concept of Baptism. For her, the meaning was very simple as it was very clear. It was a complete cleansing of the past, and a new beginning to try to lead a good life. This was quite different from some traditions, like Christianity, in which it is a one-time event to remove an otherwise indelible scar, and initiate someone into a faith community. For her, the idea of Baptism could be a recurring ritual. Leading a good life may have many setbacks. Putting everything about a hurtful, unkind, and damaging life behind with a single ritual of cleansing, with a commitment to start anew, is a very powerful idea. In my view, it does not require a belief in a personal God, nor an expectation of reward in an afterlife. For many people and traditions it does require these. Raneananda loaned me a copy of a Hindu commentary on the teachings of Jesus, as written in the Christian testament. There was a discourse on the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. After arriving home, I bought the entire two-volume commentary. For believer or nonbeliever, for anyone who is interested in comparative religions, or the study of religion as a natural phenomenon, it's a fascinating one-of-a-kind source. Raneananda's comments sounded a lot like the experiences of people who have multiple attempts at sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous.

That afternoon Raneananda had trash pickup duty for the monastic residence buildings. Then she had to staff the gift shop at the Shrine, about a mile away. I offered to help her with garbage pick up and disposal. So we hopped into the Jeep Cherokee and I helped bag the garbage and then throw it on top of the roof rack, and she drove a short way to the dumpsters. I accepted an offer to drive with her to the Shrines. Her duties included opening and closing the gift shop, the founder's shrine and burial vault, and the main gates and entrance to the main temple. I could also ride back with her, when she closed, on a road that is all uphill for a mile and a half. The main temple is on a plain that borders a river. The rear of the temple looks out over the river. The temple faces a steep hill. The temple has a long entrance promenade and is set back from the main gate. It looks a little like the approach to the Taj Mahal, on a smaller scale. Outside the front gate and promenade entrance is the gift shop and an exhibit/education hall. Looking up from the temple front, the founder's shrine is about one third the way up the steep hill. At the very top of the hill, and not accessible from the temple, is a shrine to Siva. His dance of the spheres keeps our universe working the way it ought to be working. In the western tradition it was the clockwork music of the spheres.

Raneananda dropped me off at the founder's shrine. It was about the size of a deep three-car garage. There was a floor level area in front of an altar-like structure. As seen in many Chtistian churches, there are a few steps up to the altar level. On the altar was a full size wax statue of the founder. He is adorned with silks and sashes, and flowers. On the altar level is a gentleman, probably in his fifties, in deep meditation. He is sitting cross legged and his spine is bent forward. My initial reaction was disappointment in looking at a realistic image of the founder. Personally, I don't like the idea of, or the hint at, any kind of idolatry. My view is that words, and teachings, and meanings, and the spirit of the message should be the focus of meditation and contemplation. I didn't want to go up to the altar so I took a couple of cushions and sat on the floor. After a short time my back was killing me. I got up at sat on one the chairs against the wall and window that was opposite the altar. Thank God I never went to the early morning meditations because I never would have made it all the way through. After a short while I found myself in a very relaxed, deep, meditative state. I was present, I was conscious, I was not asleep, but I was in a state of … (There is so description of the state). This was not a 'religious experience', nor was it transcendent. I was in NOW. I was in PEACE. I stayed in this state for at least half an hour or more.

Eventually, I got up, returned the pillow cushions, put on my shoes, and walked down to the mail temple. I waved to Raneananda as I walked through the main gate and proceeded down the tree-lined promenade. I entered on the bottom level of the temple. The bottom level is a 360 degree exhibit of the major religions of the world. The exhibits are behind glass, against the outer wall of this large circular space. There are ten major, named religions with their own informative exhibit: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Sikh, Native American, Shinto, Buddhism, African, and Taoism. There are two other exhibits: One for all other named and unnamed religions; and, One for all secular religions. These include science, humanism, capitalism, atheism, etc. The place has a definite ecumenical and inclusive spirit. The upper level is a place of meditation, with subdued lighting and a silence that is deafening. When I left the shrine I thought I would demonstrate some sign of respect. I don't like the idea of bowing to anyone. If I were to meet the Queen of England I would not bow or kneel or whatever. Not a small part of that is being a U.S. citizen, and we don't bow or kneel before anyone, especially a throne we cast off. Then I thought, what would I do if I were a guest in someone's home and it was time to leave? What might be an appropriate way to show respect to your host? I know. I would shake hands. So I decided to shake hands. The form of the respectful handshaking was putting my two hands together, holding them close to my chest, fingers pointed up, and give a bow. I did this when traveling in Thailand. Raneananda closed up the Shrines and the main gates, we got in the Jeep, and she drove us back to the main complex and to dinner.

What Am I Doing Here, and What Does This All Mean?

How does all of this validate the views of someone who does not believe in a personal God, but who has a strong sense of being one with the universe and possibly losing a sense of self in the experience. The transcendent and the numinous can be accessible to the most materialistic of scientists, without positing the supernatural. At the same time, there is no reason to mistrust the same experiences in believers simply because they posit a supernatural source. The question is not, “Does God exist?” It's irrelevant. The question is whether believers and nonbelievers can rejoice in the same experiences and not denigrate the other's explanation as to the origins of very powerful human responses.

Bringing all of this into a coherent, complete narrative will take one more, final part to the story.

Understanding Arthur Alexander

Nothing kills the enjoyment of music for some people faster than trying to analyze it.  But I’m obsessed with solving the mystery of Arthur Alexander.  His body of work is small.  His songs are musically and lyrically simple, even simplistic.  Almost nobody but the most dedicated music lovers remember his name today.  Yet he was the only songwriter to win pop music’s Triple Crown:  His songs have been covered by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, arguably the three most respected songwriting acts in rock and roll history.   Dusty Springfield, Ry Cooder, Roger McGuinn, and dozens of others¹sang them too.

I’ve been wondering about these tunes for 45 years now, since I was ten years old.  Maybe I’m getting closer to understanding them, But I’m not there yet.  After all, his chord progressions were basic.  His lyrics seem banal on paper:  “Every day I have to cry some/wipe the water from my eyes some.”  “Oh my name is Johnny Heartbreak …”  “Me and Frank were the best of friends …”  But by at least one objective measure – the artists who covered him – he was the greatest rock songwriter who ever lived.  Subjectively, his best songs are impossible for me to resist as a listener and indescribably rewarding to sing. 

So who the hell was this guy, and what made him so good?

He had a brush with R&B stardom as a singer, but really made his name as a songwriter in the 60’s.  Yet even after the Beatles and Stones covered him he had trouble collecting royalties.  He lived out the next 25 years as a bus driver, interrupted only by one small hit in the 70’s.  Then he then enjoyed a brief comeback in 1993² before dying suddenly.

I was first introduced to Alexander, like many of my generation, by the Beatles’ cover of "Anna." That track is a great reminder that, before he went on his odyssey from musician to activist to martyr to Apple icon, John Lennon was one of the great rock and roll singers.  Alexander’s songs lean to melodrama, and Lennon milks this one for all it’s got.  Alexander’s simple vocal patterns leave singers a lot of room to fill the space, and Lennon's able to pull out tricks Alexander hinted at in his original recording, like the Buddy Holly-ish pseudo-yodels that punctuate the bridge (“oh-oh-oh-oh …”)

That’s one of Arthur Alexander’s secrets:  His lean song structures make them a pleasure to sing.  And his recordings provide suggestions rather than instructions. Where other writers fill every measure with musical and lyrical acrobatics, Alexander’s are spare frames singers can hang their hearts on. 

Emotionally, each song has a story arc.  If you wrote songs using the Syd Field screenwriting method they’d turn out a lot like Alexander’s.  They’re three-minute mini-operas full of conflict and resolution.  Take “You Better Move On,” which the Rolling Stones covered in 1964:  A poor boy’s talking to his wealthier rival, and he humbly admits he can never give his love the good things he wants her to have.  But then he turns on his competitor  … “I’ll never let her go,” he says, "I love so."  Then the air fills with tension.  “I think you better go now,” he says quietly, “I’m getting mighty mad.”  Soft-spokenness can be more menacing than a raised voice, and Arthur Alexander knew that.

Sound corny?  Lame?  Yeah, maybe.  But listen to this cover by Mr. Ironic Distance himself, Randy Newman (before Newman launches into his own “It’s Money That Matters” ):

There’s no distancing in Newman’s performance or Mark Knopfler's accompaniment, no sense of anything but the drama in each moment.  That’s the best thing about Arthur Alexander’s songs:  They’re irony-proof.

The best AA songs underscore their emotional shifts by staying in a pretty narrow melodic range on the verses to build tension, then going much higher on the bridge to increase emotion, and finally going back to the original melody but in a resolved emotional state.  Alexander probably picked up some of these tricks by singing country music.  Singing open-hearted C&W tunes like “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” probably gave him a feel for these techniques.

But that’s still not the whole story.  What’s missing?

Manfred Clynes might have a clue, but his research is controversial.  Clynes, a classical pianist turned research scientist, believes that musicians who play a composer’s music – even in their heads – reproduce a distinct biological pattern for each composer.  Not for each piece - for each composer.  He goes so far as to say of Rudolf Serkin, one of his test subjects:  “We asked him to think Beethoven, and he would think Mozart.  But we could tell by looking at the printout. So he cooperated, and we got the same shapes. That was probably the most exciting moment of my life."

Is that it?  Is there a neurological “Arthur Alexander signature,” common to all of his work?  Or is it something else?  But Alexander has his share of weak tunes, too, ones that don’t convey the same power.  Where is his signature in songs like “Genie in the Jug”?  (As an aside, I went to school with Manfred Clynes’ kids.  I performed in San Francisco's Coffee Gallery in North Beach with his son Darius in 1971 or so - along with past and future luminaries like Wavy Gravy, Peter Case, and the notorious and flirtatious drag queen who called herself “George.”)

Daniel Levitan’s book The World In Six Songs suggests that one evolutionary role music has played is to convey emotion more accurately than speech.  That could be useful, for example, in convincing a competing tribe that you’re sincere about peace.  Says researcher Ian Cross:  “… let’s imagine the possibility of access to a parallel system of affiliation, unity, bonding.  And … one that conveys an honest signal - a window into the true emotional and motivational state of the communicator.”

Whew.  That’s a lot of academic-sounding verbiage to quote about the guy who wrote “the rain falls around me/loneliness has finally found me/and I’m in the middle of it all.”  But we might be on to something now: sincerity.  Arthur Alexander’s songs come, open-handed and seeking peace, like an emissary from the other side.  I trust their emotion. I have since I was a little boy, and I will until I die.  He couldn’t structure a melody like Stevie Wonder, or write a lyric like Bob Dylan.  But his songs made me trust him.   They made me trust the person singing.  They made me trust the song.

Forget all the analysis:  They made me want to sing.

 _____________________

¹The Internet’s filled with claims that Elvis Presley and the Who also covered Alexander, but that’s wrong.  As far as I can tell they covered songs that Alexander sang but didn’t write.  You just can't trust that Internet ...

²A collection of Arthur Alexander tracks recorded around this time, Lonely Just Like Me (Halftone), is one of the best introductions to his work. 

Good Sleep, Good Friends, Good Health

From Science:

Seniors don't need to do everything the health magazines recommend to stay fit. A new study with older women shows that either snoozing right or maintaining a good social network is enough to reduce levels of an inflammatory compound linked to bad health.

It's well known that lifestyle characteristics such as sleep and relationships can affect health. For example, seniors who sleep badly or have few close friends and relations generally have more health problems and die younger than their peers. But what's behind the trend? Previous research indicates than an inflammatory molecule in the body called IL-6 is present at high levels in people who sleep badly. Just as high cholesterol puts one at risk for heart disease, high IL-6 increases the risk of a variety of ailments associated with age, such as heart disease, Alzheimer's, and arthritis.

More here.

Lack of "Mirror Neurons" May Help Explain Autism

From Scientific American:

More than one in 500 children have some form of autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All autistic children suffer from an impaired ability to communicate and relate to others, but some of them are able to socially interact to a greater degree than their peers. A recent study of a group of these so-called high functioning autistics suggests the neurological basis for their social impairment.

Neuroscientist Mirella Dapretto of the University of California Los Angeles and her colleagues surveyed the brains of 10 autistic children and an equal number of nonautistic children as they watched and imitated 80 different faces displaying either anger, fear, happiness, sadness or no emotion. By measuring the amount of blood flowing to certain regions of the children's brains with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, the researchers could determine what parts of the brain were being used as the subjects completed the tasks. The autistic children differed from their peers in only one respect: each showed reduced activity in the pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus--a brain region located near the temple.

More here.

Better Bananas, Nicer Mosquitoes

From The New York Times:

SEATTLE - Addressing 275 of the world's most brilliant scientists, Bill Gates cracked a joke: "I've been applying my imagination to the synergies of this," he said. "We could have sorghum that cures latent tuberculosis. We could have mosquitoes that spread vitamin A. And most important, we could have bananas that never need to be kept cold." They laughed. Perhaps that was to be expected when the world's richest man, who had just promised them $450 million, was delivering a punchline. But it was also germane, because they were gathered to celebrate some of the oddest-sounding projects in the history of science.

More here.

Bees Recognize Human Faces

From Science:

Think all bees look alike? Well we don't all look alike to them, according to a new study that shows honeybees, who have 0.01% of the neurons that humans do, can recognize and remember individual human faces. For humans, identifying faces is critical to functioning in everyday life. But can animals also tell one face from another? Knowing honeybees' unusual propensity for distinguishing between different flowers, visual scientist Adrian Dyer of Cambridge University in Cambridge, England, wondered whether that talent stretched to other contexts. So he and his colleagues pinned photographs of four different people's faces onto a board. By rewarding the bees with a sucrose solution, the team repeatedly coaxed the insects to buzz up to a target face, sometimes varying its location.

Even when the reward was taken away, the bees continued to approach the target face accurately up to 90% of the time, the team reports in the 2 December Journal of Experimental Biology. And in the bees' brains, the memories stuck: The insects could pick out the target face even two days after being trained.

More here.

Can science survive George Bush?

From The London Times:

SCIENTISTS ARE, by and large, left-wing creatures. They opposed the Bomb. They generally oppose the destruction of habitats, which aligns them with the green movement. They have, broadly, chosen not to look at whether we are born geniuses or dunces, hippies or murderers; the spectre of genetic determinism conflicts with the cherished liberal notion that we, with the help of parents and society, shape our talents, opportunities and destinies. They believe that scientific research should be conducted for the sake of truth and the benefit of society, rather than to line the pockets of shareholders; this makes them enemies of big business. They tend to believe in evolution, which puts them at odds with the pious. They aspire above all else to objectivity, impartiality and accuracy, and they respect the power of science to overturn old orthodoxies.

Now consider this: public policy on such topics as climate change and stem-cell research requires a scientific input. In America, public policy is moulded by a conservative, industry-friendly, Christian-sympathising Republican Government. The result, Chris Mooney documents in The Republican War on Science, has been an almighty intellectual clash between scientists and politicians. Despite the sometimes crudely partisan line, he weaves a pretty convincing tapestry.

More here.

Mental illness link to art and sex

From The Guardian:

From Lord Byron to Dylan Thomas and beyond, the famous philanderers of the art world may have had a touch of mental illness to thank for their behaviour, psychologists report today. A survey comparing mental health and the number of sexual partners among the general population, artists and schizophrenics found that artists are more likely to share key behavioural traits with schizophrenics, and that they have on average twice as many sexual partners as the rest of the population.

Schizophrenia is so debilitating that those with the condition are often socially isolated, have trouble maintaining relationships and so reproduce at a much lower rate than the general population. But cases of schizophrenia remain high, at around 1% of the population. "On the face of it, Darwinism would suggest that the genes predisposing to schizophrenia would eventually disappear from the gene pool," said Dr Nettle.

More here.

Einstein-a-thon on the Web

From MSNBC:

The World Year of Physics goes into its final month with a Big Bang — a 12-hour marathon Webcast on Thursday that hops from Geneva to Egypt, from Jerusalem to Venice, from London to the South Pole. From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, physicists and educators will hold forth on time travel and neutrinos, the legacy of Albert Einstein's theories and the puzzles yet to be solved. And along the way, even MSNBC.com will come in for a little of relativity's reflected glory. Our interactive presentation on "Putting Einstein to the Test" is one of the winners in the Pirelli Relativity Challenge for the best multimedia presentations explaining special relativity. The contest, which is presenting its awards at the Telecom Future Center in Venice on Thursday, drew about 250 entries from 40 countries.

More here.

Cell & Membrane Biology

From Nature:

Sealed membrane systems are a defining feature of cellular life. They provide a barrier between the cell and its external environment and, in eukaryotes, divide the interior of the cell into functionally distinct compartments. Membrane proteins comprise around a third of gene products in most organisms and research is being revolutionised by the structural analysis of increasingly complex macromolecular systems.

A flavour of the current excitement in cell and membrane biology can be obtained in the research articles and reviews presented in this Nature web focus.

More here.

Ganging Up on the Girls

From Science:

It seems that 9-year-old boys aren't the only male creatures who will join together to torment their female counterparts. When male lizards largely outnumber females, they direct their aggressiveness toward mating partners, population biologists report. Such belligerence, they say, could put lizard populations at risk of extinction.

Lizards were separated into two populations, each with about 70 members. In one population the adults were three-quarter males, and in the other they were three-quarter females. Lizards were allowed to emigrate to another population of the same bias in sex ratio. The mortality and emigration rates of male lizards were unaffected by sex ratio imbalances, the team reports online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But females were 2 to 3 times more likely to die or be wounded by males when their environment was male-dominated than when it was female-dominated. The team concluded that rather than fighting off male competitors, the too-numerous male lizards forced the females into mating.

More here.

Everyone’s eyes are wired differently

From MSNBC:

The first images ever made of retinas in living people reveal surprising variation from one person to the next. Yet somehow our perceptions don't vary as might be expected. As they took pictures of the thousands of cells responsible for detecting color in the deepest layer of the eye, scientists found that our eyes are wired differently. Yet we all — with the exception of the colorblind — identify colors similarly.

The results suggest that the brain plays an even more significant role than thought in deciding what we see.

More here.

Does Stress Cause Cancer?

From The New York Times:

Christina Koenig found out she had breast cancer on a Friday afternoon. She was just 39 years old. On Monday, she thought she knew why the cancer had struck. "I went in and talked to a team of medical professionals who ultimately performed a lumpectomy, and I said, 'How long has this been there?' They said, 'Five to ten years.' And immediately, my mind jumped to: 'Well, I did go through a divorce. I did have stress.' " Ms. Koenig, who lives in Chicago, was divorced four years before her cancer was diagnosed. Was it just a coincidence, she wondered? Now, four years later, she still wonders. So do many other women who get breast cancer. Ms. Koenig now works for Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization, which gets 40,000 calls a year on its hot line. Over and over, she says, women ask, Did stress cause their cancer by weakening their immune system and allowing a tumor to grow? "It's a widespread belief," Ms. Koenig said.

And it is not restricted to women with breast cancer.

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Waking up to how we sleep and dream

From Harvard Gazette:

We spend about a third of our lives asleep. What really goes on during this time? The answer: more than anyone ever dreamed. This research is based on well-established findings that the brain doesn't stop working when we sleep. During as much as 20 percent of our sleeping time, we exhibit rapid bursts of eye movements, and our brains are almost as active as when we are awake. Called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, these are periods of vivid dreaming. During the rest of our sleep, even though consciousness is greatly diminished, our brain cells remain surprisingly active.

"Studies show that hallucinatory mental content is lowest during active waking and highest during REM sleep," says Allan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "The incidence of thinking is highest during quiet waking and lowest during REM sleep. The implication of these findings is that the sleeping brain can either generate its own perceptions or it can think about them. It cannot do both at the same time. Therefore, dreaming is as hallucinatory and thoughtless (delusional) as so-called mental illness."

Think of that next time you try to make sense out of your dreams.

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the evolution of venom

Carl Zimmer writes about venom and the origin of snakes:

"Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry , who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an evolutionary tree of the venom genes, Fry showed that the common ancestor of living snakes had several kinds of venom, which had evolved through accidental "borrowing" of proteins produced in other parts of the body. Later, these genes duplicated to create a sophisticated cocktail of venoms--a cocktail that varied from one lineage of snakes to another."

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Supernovae Back Einstein's "Blunder"

From Scientific American:

When Albert Einstein was working on his equations for the theory of general relativity, he threw in a cosmological constant to bring the universe into harmonious equilibrium. But subsequent observations by Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was not static. Rather, galaxies were flying apart at varying speeds. Einstein abandoned the concept, calling it the biggest blunder of his life's work. Observations in the 1990s, however, proved that the universe was not only flying apart, it was doing so faster and faster. This seemed to point to a dark energy filling space that actually repelled ordinary matter with its gravity, in contrast to all other known stuff, including dark matter. A number of theories have been developed to explain what this dark energy might be, including Einstein's long discarded cosmological constant.

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How a virus can morph into a killer

From MSNBC:

The 1918 Spanish flu killed at least 20 million people around the globe. Fears of a similar pandemic have health officials concerned the death toll could be much higher in a modern outbreak, which researchers say is very likely if the current deadly bird flu morphs into a strain that can be transmitted by humans. Travel between countries has become vastly more frequent and quicker, which would hasten the spread of a highly contagious and lethal virus. In the last of a three-part series, LiveScience examines how a virus jumps from birds to humans and reaches pandemic proportions.

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This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

From The New York Times:

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized.

More here.

The Trials of Life: Intelligent Design

From Scientific American:

On September 13, the New York Times ran an article that discussed how the documentary March of the Penguins was a big hit among some groups because of the lessons it imparted. A reviewer in World Magazine thought that the fact that any fragile penguin egg survived the Antarctic climate made a "strong case for intelligent design." Conservative commentator Michael Medved thought the movie "passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing."

Penguins are not people, despite their natty appearance and upright ambulation. Their traditional norms include waddling around naked and regurgitating the kids' lunch. But it would be as absurd to castigate them for those activities as it is to congratulate them for their monogamy. Besides, the movie clearly notes that the penguins are seasonally monogamous--like other movie stars usually reviled by moralists, the penguins take a different mate each year. And there are problems with them as evidence of intelligent design. While caring for the egg, the penguins balance it on their feet against their warm bodies; if the egg slips to the ground for even a few seconds, it freezes and cracks open. A truly intelligent design might have included internal development, or thicker eggshells, or Miami. Finally, penguin parents take turns walking 70 miles to the sea for takeout meals. The birds have to walk.

From tribulations to trials. On September 26, I sat in a federal courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa., where a lawyer said for almost certainly the first time ever, "Can we have the bacterial flagellum, please?"

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How singing unlocks the brain

Jane Elliot writes for the BBC:

"As Bill Bundock's Alzheimer's progressed he became more and more locked into his own world.

He withdrew into himself and stopped communicating with his wife, Jean.

Jean said Bill lost his motivation, and his desire and ability to hold conversations, but all this changed when the couple started attending a local sing-song group, aimed especially for people with dementia.

Jean said Singing for the Brain had unlocked Bill's communication block. "

What made us human?

From Science:

Humans and chimpanzees share at least 98% of their DNA, yet chimps are an endangered species while people have used their superior cognition to transform the face of the Earth. What makes the difference? A new study suggests that evolutionary changes in the regulation of a gene implicated in perception, behavior, and memory may be partly responsible.

Thirty years ago, geneticist Mary-Claire King and biochemist Allan Wilson proposed that changes in how genes are regulated, rather than in the proteins they code for, could explain important differences between chimps and humans (Science, 11 April 1975, p. 107). To test this hypothesis, an international team led by evolutionary biologist Gregory Wray of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, focused on the gene that codes for the protein prodynorphin (PDYN), a precursor to a number of endorphins, opiatelike molecules involved in learning, the experience of pain, and social attachment and bonding. Humans carry one to four copies of a region of DNA that controls the expression of this gene. Human copies had five DNA mutations not seen in the other primates. The team concludes that the pattern is a solid example of natural selection acting on the human lineage after it split from the chimp line from 5 million to 7 million years ago.

More here.

The show goes on for Stephen Hawking

From MSNBC News:

Wednesday's appearance at the Paramount Theatre — presented by the Oregon-based Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, or ISEPP — was the last of three scheduled stops on the Cambridge professor's U.S. lecture tour. Hawking, who suffers from a progressive neurodegenerative disease that has almost completely paralyzed him, was due to travel to Seattle from San Francisco. But when he was taken off his respirator Monday morning, "he basically flat-lined," said Terry Bristol, ISEPP's president and executive director. "They had to resuscitate, and that panicked a few people," Bristol told the audience. "But he's been there before." Once the crisis had passed, Hawking wanted to go ahead with the Seattle leg of the trip, but his medical caretakers — including his wife, Elaine — thought he should stay put awhile longer, Bristol said. So Hawking and his aides worked with Intel, ISEPP and the Paramount to set up a Web-based teleconferencing link from a Bay Area hotel.

"Many scientists were still unhappy with the universe having a beginning, because it seemed to imply that physics broke down," Hawking said. "One would have to invoke an outside agency, which for convenience one can call God, to determine how the universe began." Hawking traced how scientists have tried to address that conundrum using quantum theory, inflationary Big Bang theory and observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation — sometimes known as the Big Bang's "afterglow."

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Ants let their stomachs guide them

From MSNBC News:

Many insects go back and forth between their nests and a food source multiple times. But if the route to the food is very similar to the route away from it, then the foragers might get confused and not know which way to go. Different insects have different ways of dealing with this problem. Bees use the sun as their compass. But ants use visual landmarks and let their stomachs guide their way, a new study finds. Wood ants were trained to walk in a straight line alongside a black wall to reach a sugar reward at the other end. In this way, the ants learned that the wall would be on their left side when walking towards the sugar but on their right side when walking away from it back home.

More here.

Horse cloning hits full stride

From MSNBC:

The more than 30 healthy-looking horses in a pasture here are all shapes and sizes and include an Appaloosa, a couple of bays, chestnuts, a paint and a Palomino. One thing that these mares have in common is that they are pregnant — and not naturally. Each has been impregnated with a cloned embryo produced by ViaGen Inc., an Austin, Texas, company that specializes in cloning horses, cattle and pigs. The mares are due to deliver in February.

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A Self-Effacing Scholar Is Psychiatry's Gadfly

From The New York Times:

His mother in Ireland is entirely unaware of his international reputation, as far as he can tell. His neighbors in the hamlet of Porthaethwy, on an island off the coast of Wales, are equally oblivious, or indifferent. His wife, who knows too well the furor he has caused, says simply, "How could you be right and everyone else wrong?" Dr. David Healy, a psychiatrist at the University of Cardiff and a vocal critic of his profession's overselling of psychiatric drugs, has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as both a scholar and a pariah.

In 1997 he established himself as a leading historian of modern psychiatry with the book "The Antidepressant Era." Around the same time, he became more prominent for insisting in news media interviews and scientific papers that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide, an unpopular position among his psychiatric colleagues, most of whom denied any link.

But Dr. Healy went still further, accusing academic psychiatry of being complicit, wittingly or not, with the pharmaceutical industry in portraying many drugs as more effective and safer than the data showed.

More here.

Archaeologists Uncover Evidence of Female Brewers in Ancient Peru

From Scientific American: The remains of a brewery in the southernmost settlement of an ancient Peruvian empire appears to provide proof that women of high rank crafted the beer-like beverage made from corn and spicy berries--chicha--treasured by the Wari people of old and their modern day descendants. Decorative shawl pins, worn exclusively by high caste women, littered the floor of the brewery, which was capable of producing more than 475 gallons of the potent brew a week. "The brewers were not only women, but elite women," says Donna Nash of the Field Museum in Chicago, a member of the archaeology team studying the Cerro Baúl site where the ruins were found. "They weren't slaves and they weren't people of low status. So the fact that they made the beer probably made it even more special." More here.

Exhibit brings Darwin’s theory to life

From MSNBC:

In 1837, Charles Darwin sketched a stick-figure tree in a page of Notebook B, one of many private notebooks in which he worked out the details of a new theory he was developing. The tree had spindly branches and a single root labeled with the number "1." Scrawled at the top of the page, in Darwin's cursive handwriting, are the words "I think." Notebook B is one of many items going on display in "Darwin," a new exhibit opening on Nov. 19 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The exhibit opens at a time when the country is once again embroiled in a debate over evolution and its place in public education.

With "Darwin," the American Museum of Natural History is coming down squarely on the side of science and evolution. The exhibit presents ID not as the scientific theory that it claims to be, but as just another form of creationism.

More here.

Telescope sees birth of stars

From BBC News:

Using its infra-red "eyes", the Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a spectacular view of stars forming inside the dark depths of interstellar clouds. Visible-light images of the same region show dark towers fringed by halos of light. The stars inside are hidden by dust. But infrared light coming from the stars can escape through the dust, giving astronomers a new view of our galaxy. "We believe that the star clusters lighting up the tips of the pillars are essentially the offspring of the region's single, massive star," said Dr Lori Allen from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, US.

"It appears that radiation and winds from the massive star triggered new stars to form."

More here.

Wine Compound Attacks Alzheimer's Agent

From Scientific American:

A chemical compound in wine reduces levels of a harmful molecule linked to Alzheimer's disease. In a recent study, resveratrol--one of several antioxidants found in wine--helped human cells break down the molecule, which contributes to the lesions found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Fortunately for teetotalers, the compound is also found elsewhere. "Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol occurring in abundance in several plants, including grapes, berries and peanuts," says author Philippe Marambaud of the Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study of Alzheimer's Disease and Memory Disorders in Manhasset, N.Y. "The polyphenol is found in high concentrations in red wines."

The scientists found that 40 micromoles (a measure of the amount of resveratrol in a liter of solution) cut levels of the Alzheimer's-associated molecules--amyloid-beta peptides--by more than half. Treatment with proteasome-inhibitors nullified the benefit. The team thinks therefore that the substance works by boosting the effectiveness of the proteasome--a multi-protein complex that breaks down other proteins inside a cell. These findings will be published in the November 11 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

More here.

Evolution suffers Kansas setback

From BBC News:

The US state of Kansas has approved science standards for public schools that cast doubt on evolution. The Board of Education's vote, expected for months, approved the new language criticising evolution by 6-4. Proponents of the change argue they are trying to expose students to legitimate scientific questions about evolution. Critics say it is an attempt to inject creationism into schools, in violation of the constitutional separation between church and state. The decision is part of an ongoing national debate over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The theory of intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Tuesday's vote was the third time in six years that the Kansas board has rewritten standards with evolution as the central issue.

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Gender divide in getting the joke

From BBC:

The latest study used sophisticated scans to monitor the brains of 10 men and 10 women as they watched 70 black-and-white cartoons. The researchers found similarities between the way that male and female brains respond to humour. But some brain regions were activated more in women, including both the left prefrontal cortex and the mesolimbic reward centre. The researchers say their findings suggest women place a greater emphasis on the language of humour, possibly employing a more analytical approach. They also believe that the women in the study were less likely to expect the cartoons to be funny - so when they were, their pleasure centre lit up with greater intensity than their male counterparts.

More here.

Down for the Count

From The New York Times:

Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than 2. Sleep was once considered unique to vertebrates, but in recent years scientists have found that invertebrates likes honeybees and crayfish sleep, as well. The most extensive work has been carried out on fruit flies. "They rest for 10 hours a night, and if you keep them awake longer, they need to sleep more," said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin. Discovering sleep in vertebrates and invertebrates alike has led scientists to conclude that it emerged very early in animal evolution - perhaps 600 million years ago.

Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. "When you're awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not," he said. Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. "That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy," Dr. Tononi said. "That's where sleep would kick in."

More here.

Handheld may help revolutionize AIDS fight

From Wired News:

A new HIV test the size of a credit card promises to diagnose the disease in minutes rather than weeks, and could be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa as early as next year.

The device could solve one of the vexing problems of AIDS treatment in underdeveloped countries, where patients are not within easy reach of medical facilities. By providing an on-the-spot diagnosis, doctors hope to close the gap between test and treatment, and prevent known cases from slipping through the cracks.

The technology is similar to "blending digital camera technology with the brains of a Palm Pilot," says Dr. Bruce Walker, director of AIDS research at Harvard Medical School. Walker is part of a team of scientists at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin who developed the sensor system. In tests, it has detected the amount of CD4 cells in the blood in as little as 10 minutes. The CD4 count indicates the stage of HIV in a patient, and helps doctors determine the best treatment and how much of it to administer.

More here.

Glow from first stars revealed

From BBC News:

Astronomers have detected a faint glow from the first stars to form in the Universe, Nature journal reports. This earliest group of stars, called Population III, probably formed from primordial dust and gas less than 200 million years after the Big Bang. These objects cannot be seen by any present or planned telescopes. Nasa scientists detected the stars from the imprint they have left on the general glow of infrared radiation dispersed throughout the cosmos.

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Potential Taste Receptor for Fat Identified

From The National Geographic:

French scientists have identified a protein receptor that resides in the taste buds and may be responsible for sensing fat. As such, this so-called fatty acid transporter, known as CD36, could be to blame for our love of high-fat foods--and could thus serve as a possible target for treatment of obesity. If the link bears out, CD36 would allow fat to join the five previously identified tastes that govern the experience of food: bitter, salty, sweet, sour and "umami," or savoriness (like the meaty goodness of soup stock).

More here.

Honda tests first fuel-cell car

From The New York Times:

You would never guess that Jon Spallino drives what is probably the most expensive car in this city, known for its automotive excess. Or that he is the world's most technologically advanced commuter.

"When the cars pull up to me, the Porsches and the Bentleys and all that, I just sort of say, well, that's nice, but for what this costs I could buy 10 of those," said Spallino, while driving up the Route 405 freeway from his office in Irvine, California, toward his home in Redondo Beach.

Spallino was at the wheel of his silver Honda FCX, a car worth about $1 million that looks like a cross between a compact - say, a Volkswagen Golf - and a cinder block.

The FCX is powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the futuristic technology that many automakers see as an eventual solution to the world's energy woes, though the viability of the technology is a subject of vigorous debate inside and outside the auto industry.

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Is science driven by inspired guesswork?

From The Edge:

History abounds with examples of how instinct, not data, led to discoveries. Even Einstein's theory of relativity had to wait decades for verification, says Ian McEwan. Some science appears true because it is elegant - it is economically formulated, while seeming to explain a great deal. Despite fulmination against it from the pulpit, Darwin's theory of natural selection gained rapid acceptance, at least by the standards of Victorian intellectual life. His proof was really an overwhelming set of examples, laid out with exacting care. A relatively simple idea made sense across a huge variety of cases and circumstances, a fact not lost on an army of Anglican vicars in country livings, who devoted their copious free time to natural history.

Steven Weinberg describes how, from 1919 onwards, various expeditions by astronomers set out to test the theory by measuring the deflection of starlight by the sun during an eclipse. Not until the availability of radio telescopy in the early Fifties were the measurements accurate enough to provide verification. For 40 years, despite a paucity of evidence, the theory was generally accepted because, in Weinberg's phrase, it was "compellingly beautiful".

In James Watson's account, when Rosalind Franklin stood before the final model of the DNA molecule, she "accepted the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true". Nevertheless, the idea still holds firm among us laypeople that scientists do not believe what they cannot prove. At the very least, we demand of them higher standards of evidence than we expect from literary critics, journalists or priests.

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Hormone levels predict attractiveness of women

From New Scientist:

Feminine beauty, the subject of philosophical and artistic musings for millennia, can be predicted by something as basic as hormones – in women, but not men. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, have found that women’s facial attractiveness is directly related to their oestrogen levels. Miriam Law Smith and colleagues photographed 59 women, aged between 18 and 25, every week for six weeks. On each occasion, they provided a urine sample for hormone analysis and gave information on where they were in their menstrual cycle. None of the women wore make-up, nor were they taking the contraceptive pill. The researchers then selected the photograph of each woman that had been taken at the time of her highest urine-oestrogen level. As expected, this correlated to the point of ovulation in the women’s menstrual cycles. These photographs were rated by 14 men and 15 women, also aged 18 to 25, for attractiveness, health and femininity.

The group also rated two composite face images. One composite was an amalgamation of the 10 women with the lowest peak-oestrogen levels, while the other image was a combination of the 10 women with the highest levels (see image). “There was a very strong and direct correlation between the level of each woman's oestrogen and how attractive, healthy and feminine they were found to be, showing that fertility is related to attractiveness,” Law Smith told New Scientist. The faces considered most healthy and feminine were also deemed the most attractive.

More here.

Intelligent Evolution

E.O. Wilson in The Harvard Magazine:

The adventure that Darwin launched on all our behalf, and which continues into the twenty-first century, is driven by a deceptively simple idea, of which Darwin’s friend and staunch supporter Thomas Henry Huxley said, and spoke for many to follow, “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!” Evolution by natural selection is perhaps the only one true law unique to biological systems, as opposed to nonliving physical systems, and in recent decades it has taken on the solidity of a mathematical theorem. It states simply that if a population of organisms contains multiple hereditary variants in some trait (say, red versus blue eyes in a bird population), and if one of these variants succeeds in contributing more offspring to the next generation than the other variants, the overall composition of the population changes, and evolution has occurred.

More here.

From the Tail: Big Fat Regret

With the recent indictment and resignation  of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby over the Valerie Plame affair there have been repeated calls from the obvious quarters  for the President to apologize over the CIA leak. Whether Mr. Bush feels any regret over the incident or not, it seems unlikely that he will express any, at least until he absolutely has to.

Regret (the  feeling of disappointment or distress about something that one wishes could be different) is a strange beast. It is, of course quite possible to feel regret without guilt, or even without any acknowledgement of personal responsibility. Also, regret is sometimes the inevitable biproduct of actually making a choice (I'll take the granola bar over the chocolate cake). Regret is not a rare commodity.  During any given day there are dozens of moments when one expresses some inconsequential level of regret to oneself. So what exactly do people mean when they say (often with a flourish) that they "have no regrets"? Perhaps what they mean to say is that they don't really regret anything enough, i.e. it all comes down to the degree of regret experienced.  The question about regret that I find interesting is: How is the degree of regret distributed? Is it a Bell Curve? That would be nice. A Bell Curve is conveniently symmetric around its mean (average), that is to say, its median value is the same same as its average. Let's do the following thought experiment to find out!

1. Try to remember the things that you have regretted over the past day and count those which rise to the level worthy of reflection in bed tonight. Chances are you will only be able to come up with a couple.
2. Go back a week and do the same thing. What regretful things have stuck in your craw? Strangely, there are likely to still be a similar number, maybe two or three. How did that happen? Surely, it should be more like seven times your daily regret count. Your threshold for craw stickiness has gone up.
3. Now do the retrospective on your life and try to catalog your regrets. Again, the number is about the same.

To be more quantitative, if your could go back in time and correctly catalog the list of your regretful incidents over a day, week and month, and graph the degree of regret versus the sequence of incidents, you would probably come up with something like this for the daily , weekly and monthly lists. (The "Real Regret" Zone is is the threshold of regret degree above which you would count it while doing the three step experiment I outlined above.)

The week graph is a blown up version of the month one, and the day graph is a blown up version of the week one, but they all have the same structure. Each graph has  many tiny incidents with a few much bigger ones, and only those incidents above the threshold register as being truly regretful.  A strange "self similarity" or scale invariance is observed.

Now if your regret were distributed like a bell curve it would not look like this. The big events would not be so big, and the scale invariance would not be present. So what is this kind of distribution?

This kind of distribution is Fat Tailed. The reason is that the infrequent events are huge. Most of us are trained to think in terms of Bell Curves, but this is a very different animal. A Bell Curve has the same median and mean. In the Fat Tailed distributions the median is extremely small relative to the mean  since the rare events are so huge.  This skew in the distribution leads to various odd properties, for example, that the variance is infinite!

It turns out that a very large number of things are fat tailed:

1. The frequency of words in a book. This is what captured the imagination of a Harvard Lingusitics lecturer by the name of George Zipf who discovered that if the most frequently mentioned word in a book was used N times, the Kth most frequent word in that book would be used about N/K times. This relationship holds (with some minor fudge factors) for most books written in the English Language and is known as the Zipfian distribution.
2. The distribution of population in a city: Remarkably this turns out to be Zipfian as well. Take any developed or developing country and rank the cities. A terrific source of data for a bunch of different countries is here. You will find that the distribution is very close to being Zipfian. The number of people who have scratched their heads about why this happens reads like a who's who of economics: Herb Simon, Paul Krugman, Benoit Mandelbrot (who isn't regarded by economists as an economist but actually is), and most recently Xavier Gabaix among lots of others. Even those who don't think the distribution is Zipfian agree that it is fat tailed.
3. The number of web links pointing to a web page. Various popular books have been written on this and since it has been covered extensively elsewhere I'll resist the temptation to expound. 
4. The number of subscribers to a blog feed. Most blogs are barely read, but a few blogs get a huge amount of subscribers. An interesting set of graphs relating to this has been provided from the folks at Ask Jeeves.
5. The distribution of income. Ever since Pareto, it has been observed that the rich are few and much richer than the rest. The scale invariance of the distribution results in very rich people actually feeling quite poor! If you think that you'd feel rich with $10 million in the bank, think again!

Fat tailed distributions are more frequently called Long Tailed. (The term "The Long Tail" yields 1.57 million google results as opposed to a paltry 12,700 for the "The Fat Tail".) In statistics, the rare events of a distribution are said to be in the tail. When these rare events are large, we say that the tail is FAT. Even a bell curve, can have a very long tail, so why the terminology Long Tail? Well, if  you arrange the values in descending order and graph them, i.e. the big ones on the left, and the smallest values to the extreme right, the picture looks like a long tailed beast. Of course, the head of this beast is the tail of the distribution! Also, it seems more natural to say, for example, that the distribution of blog readership has a big fat head and a long tail, but that isn't really accurate from a statistical point of view. So take your pick of terminology.

Now the question of WHY things are fat/long tailed is still somewhat unclear, but of course,  a multitude of theories abound. Zipf believed it all stems from the tendency of human beings to follow the path of least resistance, so that the inertia in the system tends to make the big bigger. There are various "winner takes all" theories which are commonly spouted in business circles. Economists espouse phenomena of "increasing returns" and "switching costs", which are appealing in certain contexts. It is all very fascinating and intellectually rich.

But what explains the degree of regret --- why is IT fat tailed? I wish I had an explanation, but all I have is more speculation: perhaps circumstances are responsible, i.e. things happen in a "fat tailed" manner so that we react to them that way. Or perhaps it is our reactions which are more responsible, i.e. after an accumulation of little things reaches some limit  (a camel-back breaking limit, so to speak) we react in an extreme fashion.

Finally, it would seem that other emotions, e.g. happiness work the same way. Repeat the experiment and see for yourself.

The mystery of it all! If only  I knew more. And yes, regret has struck again!

Poison in the Ink: Gaia Theory

In the 1960’s, a chemist named James Lovelock was invited by NASA to help develop instruments that could detect signs of life on Mars. Lovelock came up with the idea of screening the gases in Mar’s atmosphere for signs that their concentrations were being affected in ways consistent with life.

On Earth, for example, the atmosphere is composed of about 77 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and trace amounts of other gases, most notably carbon dioxide and methane. These gases are used and absorbed by plants and animals and then remade and recirculated back into the atmosphere. Mars, on the other hand, has an atmosphere that is almost 95 percent carbon dioxide.

The stark contrasts between the two planets suggested to Lovelock that Mars couldn’t possibly harbor any type of life or that if it did, it was in the very distant past. Chemically, Mars was a dead planet, and to Lovelock, this meant that it had to be biologically dead as well.

If there was life on Mars, it would leave a chemical signature that could be detected from Earth, Lovelock reasoned. The cumulative actions of countless organisms would over time change the composition of gases in the atmosphere and these changes would be visible from space. This kind of thinking lead Lovelock to a sudden realization. Recalling it years later, Lovelock wrote:

"I was in a small room on the top floor of a building at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California…An awesome thought came to me. The Earth's atmosphere was an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it - keeping it at a constant composition, and at a level favorable for organisms?"

Lovelock discussed his idea with his neighbor, the novelist William Golding, and it was Golding who suggested Lovelock’s new theory be named “Gaia,” after the Greek goddess of the Earth.

When it was first proposed, Gaia theory appealed to environmentalist but was largely dismissed by the scientific community. Critics said the theory was unscientific and that it was teleological, that it was proposing that there be some kind of planet-wide consciousness at work.

Other critics, like Richard Dawkins and Ford Doolittle, argued that Gaia theory was at odds with Darwinian evolution. Instead of having organisms simply adapt to their environment, Gaia theory was saying that organisms could actually change it or even control it. In 1982, Dawkins claimed that “there was no way for evolution by natural selection to lead to altruism on a Global scale.”

Gaia theory was also at odds with one of Dawkins’ own theories. In 1976, Dawkins published a book entitled “The Selfish Gene” in which he argued that evolution acts not on individual organisms, but on their genes. Organisms were mere vehicles that genes used to replicate themselves. Those genes that helped an organism survive and reproduce also improved their own chances of being passed on and so most of the time successful genes also benefited the organism. For Dawkins, life was a constant war: individuals within a species were competing with one another as well as with the members of other species. What they definitely were not doing, in Dawkins’ view, was working together for the common good of the planet.

In response to his critics, Lovelock teamed up with Andrew Watson and developed a computer model called “Daisyworld.”

Daisyworld was a simulation of an Earth-like planet orbiting a young, Sun-like star. The only form of life on the planet were daisies, of which there were two varieties: black and white. White daisies had white flowers that reflected light and black daisies had black flowers that absorbed light. Thus, a planet covered in white daisies was cooler than one covered in black daisies.

In the beginning, when the young star is just starting to warm up, the planet is covered mostly in black daisies. As the planet continues to warm, however, more white flowers begin to bloom. In this way, the planet’s temperature is kept constant despite fluctuations in the stars temperature.

When it was first introduced in 1983, Daisyworld was roundly criticized by many scientists as being too simplistic. The model did, however, address two important criticisms of Gaia theory. First, it showed that a biologically regulated planet didn’t have to be teleological, that a self-regulating planet could arise without any need for a guiding conscious. Secondly, it showed that Gaia theory and Darwinian evolution were compatible, that indeed, it was natural selection that made Gaia theory work.

Nowadays, there are many different forms of Gaia theory, from “weak” to “strong.” Weak Gaia maintains only that life is important in shaping the Earth. This form of Gaia theory is generally accepted by many scientists today. In contrast, strong Gaia—the form that Lovelock endorses— says that life doesn’t just merely influence the physical processes of the planet, but actually controls them.

Lovelock, now 86-years old, is still working to develop Gaia theory. He believes that if Gaia theory were to become widely accepted, it would fundamentally change how humans view themselves and their environment:

“If we are ‘all creatures great and small,’ from bacteria to whales, part of Gaia then we are all of us potentially important to her well being…No longer can we merely regret the passing of one of the great whales, or the blue butterfly, nor even the smallpox virus. When we eliminate one of these from Earth, we may have destroyed a part of ourselves, for we also are a part of Gaia.

“There are many possibilities for comfort as there are for dismay in contemplating the consequences of our membership in this great commonwealth of living things. It may be that one role we play is as the senses and nervous system for Gaia. Through our eyes she has for the first time seen her very fair face and in our minds become aware of herself. We do indeed belong here. The earth is more than just a home, it's a living system and we are part of it.”

Italian laboratory clones 14 pigs

From BBC News:

The animals were born several weeks ago at the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in Cremona. Research leader Prof Cesare Galli said the pigs would help in understanding animal to human organ transplants. Scientists  have now cloned sheep, mice, cattle, goats, rabbits, cats, pigs, mules and dogs. The first horse clone - a Halflinger mare named Prometea - was born at the research laboratory in the summer of 2003. Cow clones have also been produced there. The latest experiment was carried out as part of a European Union project to study stem cells in cloned animals. Stem cells are the body's master cells, and have the ability to become many different adult tissues.

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The Man Who Would Murder Death: A rogue researcher challenges scientists to reverse human aging

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If you wish to be a prophet, first you must dress the part. No more silk ties or tasseled loafers. Instead, throw on a wrinkled T-shirt, frayed jeans, and dirty sneakers. You should appear somewhat unkempt, as if combs and showers were only for the unenlightened. When you encounter critics, as all prophets do, dismiss them as idiots. Make sure to pepper your conversation with grandiose predictions and remind others of your genius often, lest they forget. Oh, and if possible, grow a very long beard. By these measures, Aubrey de Grey is indeed a prophet. The 42-year-old English biogerontologist has made his name by claiming that some people alive right now could live for 1,000 years or longer. Maybe much longer.

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World Brain

From The Edge:

George Dyson visited Google last week at the invitation of some Google engineers. The occasion was the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer. After the visit, Dyson recalled H.G. Wells' prophecy, written in 1938:

"The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual," wrote H. G. Wells in his 1938 prophecy World Brain. "This new all-human cerebrum need not be concentrated in any one single place. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba." Wells foresaw not only the distributed intelligence of the World Wide Web, but the inevitability that this intelligence would coalesce, and that power, as well as knowledge, would fall under its domain. "In a universal organization and clarification of knowledge and ideas... in the evocation, that is, of what I have here called a World Brain... in that and in that alone, it is maintained, is there any clear hope of a really Competent Receiver for world affairs... We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself."

GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author of Darwin Among the Machines; and Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship.

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‘Cellborg’ merges microbe and machine

From MSNBC:

Fully merging microbe and machine for the first time, scientists have created gold-plated bacteria that can sense humidity. The breakthrough is the first "cellborg," heralding what might become an array of devices that could sense dangerous gases or other hazardous substances. The bioelectronic device swells and contracts in response to how much water vapor is in the air.

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Poor cell memory is key to cancer

From BBC News:

Every time a cell divides, it has to remember which of its genes are switched on or off at the time. If that memory is impaired, this can disrupt the proper development of cells and trigger cancer. Scientists at Cancer Research UK and Cambridge's Babraham Institute have shown certain enzymes can alter this genetic memory. Evidence of this interference was present in a large proportion of tumours - strongly implicating the enzymes in the development of cancer. Retaining the memory of which genes are switched on and which are switched off when a cell divides is called epigenetics. Often genes are switched off by a change to the structure of its component DNA - a process known as methylation. The researchers discovered that AID, an enzyme involved in the formation of the immune system, can also alter methylation in DNA. This could leave cells with inaccurate memories - and lead to cancer.

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Did Life Come from Another World?

From Scientific American:

Most scientists have long assumed that life on Earth is a homegrown phenomenon. According to the conventional hypothesis, the earliest living cells emerged as a result of chemical evolution on our planet billions of years ago in a process called abiogenesis. The alternative possibility--that living cells or their precursors arrived from space--strikes many people as science fiction. Developments over the past decade, however, have given new credibility to the idea that Earth's biosphere could have arisen from an extraterrestrial seed.

New research indicates that microorganisms could have survived a journey from Mars to Earth

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Scientists Complete Map of Genetic Variations

From AP:

Scientists have mapped patterns of tiny DNA differences that distinguish one person from another, an achievement that will help researchers find genes that promote common illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes.

The map represents "a real sea change in how we study the genetics of disease," said Dr. David Altshuler, a leader of the project that included more than 200 researchers from six nations.

Scientists want to find disease-related genes as a means for diagnosis, prediction and developing treatments. Such genes give clues to the biological underpinnings of disease, and so suggest strategies for developing therapies.

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The Science of Hurt

From Harvard Magazine:

Those who suffer the devastating effects of chronic pain may fantasize about a life that is completely pain-free. In fact, such a life is far from idyllic. People who are born with congenital insensitivity to pain, a rare genetic disorder, chew their tongues and lips to pieces, burn their flesh, and fracture their bones without realizing the harm they are doing to their bodies. Lacking a warning system to protect themselves from dangers in the environment, they tend to die young, often in their twenties. Nociceptive or somaticpain — a normal response to noxious stimuli — is essential for life. It tells you to pull your hand away from a flame or withdraw your mouth from a cup of hot coffee. If you break an ankle, the pain keeps you from walking around on it, so the bone can heal. Nociceptors are sensory receptors, or nerve endings, that react to mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli that may damage tissues. They relay nerve impulses — electrical messages from the site of injury in peripheral tissues such as skin, muscles, and joints — to the dorsal horn, an area in the spinal cord that acts as a switchboard. There, different chemicals determine whether these electrical messages reach your brain, where you actually perceive pain.

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Brain Images Reveal Menstrual Cycle Patterns

From Scientific American:

For the first time, scientists have pinpointed an area of the brain involved in a woman's menstrual cycle. The research, reported online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows contrasts in activity over the course of a month and provides a baseline for understanding the emotional and behavioral changes that 75 percent of all women report experiencing before, during and after their period. For any woman who has found herself becoming inexplicably angry or sad during her menstrual cycle, the possibility that her "time of the month" may be responsible is not news. But although a great deal of research has looked at the influence of hormones on nerves, very little work has delved into the role a woman's menstrual cycle can play in the emotions.

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