Cosmologist Sean Carroll gave a TED talk Distant time and the hint of a multiverse. He said “The universe is really big. We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Every one of these (little blobs) is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. . .”
“What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, and a hundred billion stars each. At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big – (literally a pinpoint) — at early times.
Tag: TheX-Press
Ads and Myths About Quick Alzheimer Cures
Prevention, of course, is vital early in life. In my book SECRETS OF ETERNAL YOUTH, we study the newest information about brain plasticity. In 1995 it was discovered that our brains, contrary to previous beliefs, can grow new neurons all of our lives. The major factors that keep are brains young and even make them younger are diet, exercise, curiosity, learning and attitude. (Editor’s Note: SECRETS OF ETERNAL YOUTH will be available in the summer of 2016)
Healthcare Patents and Hot-Dog Vendors
While patents on medical devices seem normal, patents on drugs and chemical entities may seem like a stretch. I am not sure that the law makers in Venice in 1474, who invented the legal concept of a patent, envisioned the need to patent molecules. In fact, molecules were not even envisioned at that time. We all know that a patent allows an inventor time to commercialize his or her product, but are patents really needed for the economic viability of healthcare? Shouldn’t healthcare be all about saving lives and promoting health and not about making money on people who desperately need healthcare? Do patents have a benefit to patients, not just the patent holders? I think the answer to this question is “perhaps.” Patents promote diversity of products in the healthcare market place by forcing inventors to develop drugs outside the domain of currently patented products.
Approaching X-Event in the Forest Industry
by Wilenius Markku
Rancho de Taos Church
This immense block of church masonry and metaphysical undercurrents stands like a monolith at the approach to Taos, a guardian angel strangely looming out of the road, Ayers rock in miniature, but not in any way inferior to the gigantic red monolith in the Australian desert. A titan’s block, immoveable and immeasurable, an omniscient god looks out from the windowless adobe pueblo inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, the Anasazi who vanished around eleven hundred A.D., long before the Rancho de Taos church was built.
Musings of a Curious Atheist: What does the Bible say about life after death?
Election season is the time that the crazies come out. We have seen the serial adulterer and Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, thumb her nose at the law of the land by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She says she wants to uphold the sanctity of marriage as specified by her religion. There is the ironic case of the mistake of a 14 year-old Muslim geek for a bomb-making terrorist in Irving, Texas. The mayor of Irving is the woman who is trying to protect the U.S. from Sharia law. In older news, Joe Barton (R-Texas), says that man had no effect on climate change because the Great Flood was climate change and man-made hydrocarbons were not involved in that extreme event. The 2012 Republican Party of Texas platform declared that critical thinking should be discouraged in Texas schools—they threaten long-held beliefs. (If it looks like I am picking on Texas, it is just because they are such an easy target.)
Traces: Ants and Urban Design
An individual ant is not very interesting. Its level of intelligence is minimal; its problem solving skills miniscule. But even these limitations allow for rule based behavior. Paired with asynchronous forms of communication such as pheromones in scent markers or trails, or the ability to categorize and count other ants, complex behaviors emerge. Those behaviors either contribute to the survival of the colony or they don’t, so environmental pressures help select for what works.
Goats, Cars, and Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine will change the way physicians diagnose. With every person able to map his or her own gene, the complication in personalized diagnosis will increase beyond normal human mental capabilities. How will physicians of the future cope? The solution to the problem may start with something as incongruous as goats, cars, and game shows.
A Tutorial on the Regulation of the Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical market place is not entirely a free market. The extreme demand for lifesaving products can make standard economic assumptions inoperable. Therefore, regulatory mechanisms have emerged to protect patients and to provide patients access to affordable medications. There are three aspects of pharmaceutical operations in the U.S. that are regulated by the government:
HARVEY LLOYD’S “BREAKING THE LIGHT”
It has been remarked that with the invention of photography by Niepce and others almost two hundred years ago, painting was finally freed from the bonds of realism. Painters set out on the path to modernist abstraction, which became one of the medium’s finest achievements. Because the photographer could produce an image that more closely resembled reality than painting, the painter was allowed, indeed compelled, to travel down different creative paths. Photographers would preserve an accurate transcription of reality in sharp contrast to the abstraction embraced by painters.
Quantum Entanglement
“European robins may maintain quantum entanglement in their eyes a full 20 microseconds longer than the best laboratory systems, say physicists investigating how birds may use quantum effects to “see” Earth’s magnetic field. “Quantum entanglement is a state where electrons are spatially separated, but able to affect one another. It’s been proposed that birds’ eyes contain entanglement-based compasses. “Conclusive proof doesn’t yet exist, but multiple lines of evidence suggest it. Findings like this one underscore just how sophisticated those compasses may be. “’How can a living system have evolved to protect a quantum state as well — no, better — than we can do in the lab with these exotic molecules?’” asked quantum physicist Simon Benjamin of Oxford University and the National University of Singapore, a co-author of the new study. “That really is an amazing thing.’”
Population Explosion and the Demographic Transition
A mathematical model (Core Model) is presented that describes the gross dynamic behavior of the demographic transition—falling death rates lead to population increase, temporarily rising birth rates,
temporarily increased population growth, decreased fertility, aging of the population, and finally a steady
population size higher than the initial population. Core Model captures these features. The model is based on three fundamental observations 1) people are born, 2) people die, some at a young age, the
rest at an old age, and 3) people give birth more often when conditions are favorable than not favorable.
In addition to boundary conditions, Core Model has one free parameter, which is associated with the rate at which fertility adapts to changing conditions. Core Model predicts that aging populations are a
natural consequence of the dynamics and the speed at which the population fertility adapts to changing
death rates. The model captures the qualitative features of actual country demographic dynamics with
European countries making up most of the post-transition populations and Sub-Saharan Africa making
up those countries just entering the transition.