I have been studying electromagnetism lately, as in the practical application of Maxwell's equations to realistic physical systems. I find it an amazing fact, that even if we assume that point charges send out their electric fields instantaneously as in deliberately ignoring the postulates of special relativity, we none the less can find the wave equation inside of Maxwell's equations, which of course equates the speed of propagation of electromagnetic waves to c, the speed of light. I must mention now that before you read further, that I would appreciate any feed back on the soundness of my logic in what you are about to read. I must preempt you now with a message, that these are the products of my musings and are prone to contain mistakes.

For 100 million rodents a year: what are we getting?

According to two recent studies (Carbone 2004, Balcombe, 2005), the United States now leads the world in the consumption of yet one more thing: Rodents. Specifically, for our purposes, mice--the usage of which now tallies near 80 million per annum in the US. In fact, our usage has been soaring while consumption by the other big mouse user, the EU, has actually been shrinking, partly because of new EU regulations, and partly because of growing doubts about at least some of the mus's worthiness as a test animal for toxicity and carcinogenicity.

Computer simulated reality will soon be on par with the amount of social dedication traditoinally given to physical reality. Synthetic realities are fathomable only as a continuation of the complexity in the universe. If we were to take the postulate that consciousness arises from complexity to its fullest implications, the next step in the chain of reasoning would be to deduce that we are forming higher levels of complexity in nature by our own interactions with each other. Therefore these complexities formed by the entire collective efforts of individual humans, must be producing consciousness. The question is where is that consciousness? Can it be physically located as being in some exact position in space?

Based on the comments to me first post I realized that many of you may be unfamilar with podcasting. First of all, you don't need an iPod™ or even an mp3 player. Podcasts are basically audio or video recordings that are placed on the internet so that others can listen to them later. Most podcasters try to put out their shows on a regular basis and their listeners can subscribe via RSS feeds, so that they get each episode when it is available. So podcasting is based on the same RSS feed system that makes monitoring multiple blogs easy. In fact, if you are using a RSS aggregator to read this blog, you can also use it to get most podcasts.

What is the ultimate fate of the universe? The big crunch and the big freeze aside, what is the fate of intelligent beings in the universe? It is reasonable to assume that even if it is the case that humanity and its spawn become destroyed, then other intelligent species across the universe will nonetheless go on existing. If not all intelligent life is destroyed by the time the big freeze would render the cosmos uninhabitable, or the big crunch would obliviate all life as we know it in the universe, then hopefully at least one species in the cosmos would advance to a high enough profile of intellgience to make these occurrences avoidable.

It is the most common thing to hear people to refer to philosophy as uesless. There is even a joke about it. What's the difference between a pizza and a philosopher? A pizza can feed a family of four. Apparently the joke would suggest that society seems to have no need for philsophy, and perhaps you might hear this answer for why: most of the questions philosophy asks can't be proven one way or the other anyway, so why even bother?  But we are quickly approaching an age where we are acquring the technological means to answer that biggest question of all, which we have been putting off for so many years of human history. What is consciousness?

I base my beliefs and any predictions of off two assumptions:

Frog skin and human lungs hold secrets to developing new antibiotics, and a technique called solid-state NMR spectroscopy is a key to unlocking those secrets.

That's the view of University of Michigan researcher Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, who will discuss his group's progress toward that goal March 3 at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, Md.

Ramamoorthy's research group is using solid-state NMR to explore the germ-killing properties of natural antibiotics called antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which are produced by virtually all animals, from insects to frogs to humans. AMPs are the immune system's early line of defense, battling microbes at the first places they try to penetrate: skin, mucous membranes and other surfaces.

TOKYO 02/03/2007

Japan's advanced humanoids can now serve tea and wash the cup afterwards, but they still need to learn from their mistakes if they are to become real household helpers.

A Tokyo University team this week showed their latest robots which can perform more complicated daily tasks, but the machines still have a learning curve.

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] has developed a new computational tool that makes images obtained with cutting-edge microscopes even sharper. The technological advance and its applications are published in this week's online issue of the journal Nature Methods.

Since the Single Plane Illumination Microscope [SPIM] was developed at EMBL in the early 2000s it turned into one of the most powerful tools in cell biology. SPIM allows scientists to study large, living specimen along many different angles, under real conditions and with minimal harm to the specimen.

Brain damage that was thought to be caused by hypoglycemic coma actually occurs when glucose is administered to treat the coma, according to a study in rodents led by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.

The results are surprising, say the authors, and may be of clinical significance for the treatment of diabetics in hypoglycemic coma, though they caution that the results cannot be immediately extrapolated to humans.