NEWS IN BRIEF ANIMALS, NEUROSCIENCE Male fruit flies enjoy ejaculation A probe of the brain’s reward system looks at Drosophila sex (or lack thereof) and drinking BY SUSAN MILIUS 12:00PM, APRIL 19, 2018 please log in to view this image RED-LIGHT DISTRICT Levels of a brain reward compound increased in male fruit flies genetically engineered to ejaculate when exposed to red light when the insects were bathed in the rosy hue. AVI JACOB/BIU MICROSCOPY UNIT Moody red lighting in a lab is helping researchers figure out what fruit flies like best about sex. The question has arisen as scientists try to tease out the neurobiological steps in how the brain’s natural reward system can get hijacked in alcoholism, says neuroscientist Galit Shohat-Ophir of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. Male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) were genetically engineered to ejaculate when exposed to a red light. Ejaculation increased signs in the insects’ brains of a rewarding experience and decreased the lure of alcohol, researchers found. After several days in this red-light district, the flies tended to prefer a plain sugary beverage over one spiked with ethanol. Males not exposed to the red light went for the boozier drink, Shohat-Ophir and colleagues report April 19 in Current Biology. Earlier lab research has shown that male flies repeatedly rejected by females are more likely to get drunk. Those with happy fly sex lives don’t show much interest in alcohol. Shohat-Ophir wondered what aspect of sex, or lack thereof, had such a profound effect on the brain’s reward system. The answer wasn’t that obvious. In rats, for instance, the brains of first-timer males light up with intense biochemical signs of reward just from rodent intercourse, regardless of whether ejaculation occurs. In female rats, copulation needs the right circumstances to evoke reward chemistry. The red-light system let researchers remove the possibly confounding factor of female presence and see that male flies find ejaculation itself rewarding. (Among the evidence: pairing the red light with an odor cue, which males eagerly sought out afterward.) The red light triggers what are called Crz nerve cells in the abdomen, which cause sperm release and a surge of neuropeptide F, a cousin of a human brain reward compound called neuropeptide Y. Male flies’ bedazzlement with the right light or drinking binges after rejection may be easy for humans to understand. Shohat-Ophir says that’s because brain reward chemistry is so ancient that parts of it have been inherited by creatures with six legs as well as two.
‘Weird Math’ aims to connect numbers and equations to the real world A new book tackles the mysteries of chaos theory, higher dimensions and more BY DIANA STEELE 7:00AM, APRIL 16, 2018 please log in to view this image MATH GETS REAL Chaos theory explains why it’s so difficult to predict weather — a small change in conditions at any point in time can have a large effect on future conditions in, for example, a hurricane’s trajectory (Tropical Storm Harvey shown). please log in to view this image Weird Math David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee Basic Books, $27 Weird Math sets out to “reveal the strange connections between math and everyday life.” The book fulfills that laudable goal, in part. At times, teenage math prodigy Agnijo Banerjee and his tutor, science writer David Darling, find ways to make complex math relatable, like linking chaos theory to weather forecasting and virtual reality. But there’s a tension between precision and accessibility, and the authors don’t always find the sweet spot. The book offers an in-depth exploration of the history of a number of mathematical concepts that Banerjee and Darling find intriguing. Some of their choices — including the mathematics of music, higher dimensions and chaos theory — are written in clear, accessible language that many science-interested readers will connect with. The chapter on higher dimensions, for example, illustrates the utility of math for “seeing” dimensions beyond the three familiar ones. Because most people can’t visualize dimensions beyond height, width and depth, other dimensions may seem “mysterious or alien to anything we know,” the two write. Yet, ordinary math like algebra and calculus let researchers probe the properties of extra dimensions without first having to imagine what they might look like. But a few of the topics — such as large numbers and infinity — get bogged down in the type of mathematical notation that the authors promise to minimize. Even with these hurdles, readers will still come away with a greater appreciation of how mathematics, as the authors write, “permeates every aspect of the reality in which we’re embedded.” Although only 13 chapters, the book is wide-ranging, and readers can dip in and out without having to read from front to back. Many math newbies will probably find something to whet their appetites, with, say, the history of computation, the future of quantum computing or the role of prime numbers in cryptography. And serious math aficionados might find Banerjee and Darling’s meditations on unsolved problems in mathematics intriguing. But check the table of contents before reading. Anyone looking for a more comprehensive popular mathematics book might instead want to turn to The Joy of Mathematics by Alfred Posamentier and colleagues or The Mathematics Lover’s Companion by Edward Scheinerman.
"But a few of the topics — such as large numbers and infinity" I'd add "zero" and "near infinity" to that collection. Recognition that infinity is not a number and cannot be used in mathematical solutions to produce a mathematical result, take note singularities and black hole proponents, no infinity, no black hole or singularity theory, and so no standard solar model, as they are all part of the same theory. 0 is also not a number, it is a digit, not a number, 0 means nothing, it has no value to use in any calculations, Hawking seems to have missed that point in his theory of everything. Near infinity is infinity, because a near infinity value must constantly follow infinity in order to be near it. So I shake my head when Astrophysicists like Larry Kraus, and clowns like de Grasse Tyson use near infinity, simply because they have realised after 3 decades that infinity is not a value, but don't realise near infinity is exactly the same as infinity, in the context of a mathematical value. Mathematics are a tool to understand things in a way we can factor them, not a tool to explain things we can't observe. As for chaos, it's a misnomer, there is no such thing as chaos in the natural world. You must identify all variables and then discover their values, and if you can, you can predict exactly what will happen in a natural system. and its "Maths"
You cant divide something that has no numerical value by something with no numercal value, to produce a numerical value in a mathematical solution You divided a concept by a concept to get a numerical output. That is not mathematics, it's gibberish. What you did mathematically was divide 1 by 1 and got 1
Climate claims of doom proven horseshit, and the resulting reaction by the purveyors of doom is included therein. They called the identification of a flaw in climate model physics, "a catastrophe" for them.. Now why would academics do that? call truth a catastrophe? In this series, we have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, that after correction of the giant error of physics by which official climatology defined feedbacks in such a way as to exclude or misallocate the large feedback response to emission temperature, global warming in response to doubled CO2 will not be 2-4.5 K with a mid-range estimate of 3.3 K, as the modelers would have us believe, but not much more than 1.2 K. The question arises: did They know of Their grave error? They were and are utterly unable to provide a convincing answer to the following question: How do the inanimate water vapor, albedo and other feedback processes in the climate know that they must respond little, if at all, to the 255 K emission temperature, but that they must suddenly respond with as much as 22-24 K of feedback-driven warming triggered by the extra 9-11 K of temperature directly forced by the presence of the non-condensing greenhouse gases? Will official climatology now climb down and fess up? Will the IPCC, the UNFCCC, and the alphabet-soup of national, international and global profiteers of doom be shut up, shut out and shut down? Will the Paris climate treaty be torn up? Will the war on coal cease? Will the countryside no longer be trashed by bird-blending, bat-blatting windmills? Windmills, for heaven’s sake – 14th-century technology to solve a 21st-century non-problem. Will the subsidies stop and power prices fall by two-thirds, as they should? The answer, of course, is No. For They are in denial. They are the denialists now. please log in to view this image University of Untruthfulness Some months ago, an outline of our result was sent – behind our backs – to a university long known for its unswerving adherence to the totalitarian Party Line on the climate question, and, indeed, on all questions. There is no Conservative Association on campus, not because there are no supporters of HM Government there, but because the “societies officer” at the students’ union has the right to decide what political societies may and may not be represented on campus, and he has deemed the nation’s governing party to be insufficiently totalitarian to provide a “safe space” for snowflake students. He has banned its supporters at the university from forming any association, holding meetings on or off campus or distributing party materials. Freedom of speech, thought and political association, once guaranteed by Magna Carta, have been silently, stealthily taken away. How the snowflakes will blub when they learn of our result. The vice-chancellor, on hearing of our result and on realizing that, when it is eventually published, it will cost the university hundreds of millions a year, summoned a meeting of the entire environmental-sciences faculty and yelled at them: “This paper is a catastrophe for us.” He hollered at them that they should drop everything else they were doing and work full-time on trying to refute our result. Some weeks later, postgraduate students went on strike because the faculty were so busy trying to please the vice-chancellor by refuting the irrefutable that they were no longer providing the personal supervision that the postgrads were contractually entitled to expect. One of those who heard the vice-chancellor feared that the university would expose itself to fraud charges if it failed to admit that the Party Line had been wrong all along and instead went on applying for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxpayer funding for research on global warming that its senior members knew was not and is not going to happen at anything like the predicted rate. He broke ranks. There is goodness even in the grim, concrete camps of the Forces of Darkness. That is how we learned of the vice-chancellor’s meeting. We were also told that one of the faculty, furious that we had rather easily and rather completely demolished the nonsense he and his colleagues had been peddling for decades, decided to respond to our scientific argument in the fashion of totalitarian extremists everywhere. He stood outside his lecture-hall and handed out copies of a personal attack on me that had been published some years previously in a totalitarian daily propaganda-sheet in London. There was not a single scientific statement in the entire article. It was pure hate speech of the sort we are all used to. Its educational value to students of environmental sciences was nil. On obtaining irrefutable evidence of the vice-chancellor’s remarks to the faculty, and of the lecturer’s consequent circulation of childish libels against me as though they constituted scientific evidence of anything, an overseas journalist telephoned the university’s head of publicity and asked for a comment. The head of publicity unwisely denied that the meeting of which we had received a direct report had taken place, and also denied that any lecturer had handed out propaganda to my detriment to his students. However, the university’s website is notoriously insecure. We were able to download an image of the hate-speech document in question. We got it from the lecturer’s own area of the website, where he had prominently (if unwisely) displayed it. The university’s head of publicity had lied, and we were and are in a position to prove it, definitively. The university now finds itself in a difficult position entirely of its own making. It now knows with a chilling certainty that manmade global warming will be small, slow, harmless and beneficial. Yet despite that knowledge – knowledge that we can prove the entire faculty of environmental sciences now possesses – it is continuing to preach the Party Line to its students. And that constitutes fraud. It is fraud against the Government, which heavily subsidizes the university and expects it to produce sound science, not totalitarian propaganda. It is fraud against the students, who pay good money to be taught what is true and are now being lied to. It is fraud against every taxpayer and user of gasoline or electricity, for all of us pay through the nose to subsidize the deeply unpleasant coalition of canting vested interests profiteering from the climate scam at great and damaging expense to the general public. It is, as Professor Nils-Axel Mörner has rightly said, the greatest lie ever told. When I recover from a recent illness, reports of the university’s frauds will be sent to the public authorities, which will at first try to get away with doing what they do best: nothing. However, Britain is still in one or two respects a free country. It is open to us, if we wish, to institute a private prosecution. In due course, not only the university but any public authority that should have acted upon being given evidence of its fraud but did not act will face prosecution. How long has official climatology known of its grave error? In truth, the vast majority of the pietistic preachers of doom and gloom have never had the slightest idea what they were talking about. They can – and, in due course, will – plead ignorance. And they will find to their horror, as the cell door slams behind them, that, in English criminal law, to intend to profit by proclaiming that something false is true when one does not know whether it is true or false is no less a deception than to proclaim that something one knows to be false is true. But the university, which, being unspeakable, shall be nameless (though you can have fun trying to work out which it is from the not particularly informative illustrations) can no longer plead ignorance. It knows the truth, and it knows we know it knows the truth. I wrote to the vice-chancellor, on hearing of the meeting at which he had summoned the entire faculty and had yelled at them, and suggested that he should let me present our scientific results at a faculty lecture. He was unwise enough not to reply. The extraordinary reactions of the vice-chancellor and of the lecturer are evidence in themselves that those driving the global warming scam, as opposed to the army of useful idiots who unthinkingly and rebarbatively regurgitate the Party pabulum, have known for some time that the very high climate sensitivities they have been luridly predicting cannot and will not occur, and that the true rate of manmade warming will be far too small to matter. There is plenty more evidence that the Forces of Darkness knew They were making stuff up. I shall now rather breathlessly summarize this series. It will become apparent to anyone with an open mind that the debate is now indeed over, and that the result is not at all what the usual suspects had expected, and that our result is so obvious that They – or the brighter ones among Them, at any rate – must have known the truth. IPCC’s official definition of a “climate feedback” is as follows (with my italics): “Climate feedback An interaction in which a perturbation in one climate quantity causes a change in a second, and the change in the second quantity ultimately leads to an additional change in the first. A negative feedback is one in which the initial perturbationis weakened by the changes it causes; a positive feedback is one in which the initial perturbation is enhanced. In this Assessment Report, a somewhat narrower definition is often used in which the climate quantity that is perturbed is the global mean surface temperature, which in turn causes changes in the global radiation budget. In either case, the initial perturbation can either be externally forced or arise as part of internal variability.” This definition very deliberately excludes the feedback response to the input signal. I say “very deliberately” because the word “perturbation” or its variants appears five times. Whoever drafted it knew perfectly well that the large feedback response to the large emission temperature must be taken no less into account than the small feedback response to any small perturbation of it driven by a radiative forcing. But IPCC’s author was most energetic in trying to mislead readers into overlooking the feedback response to emission temperature and concentrating only on the perturbation. The corrected definition is as follows: “Climate feedback, external or inherent, modifies an output signal by returning part of it to the input. Negative feedback attenuates the output; positive feedback amplifies it. A temperature feedback, in W m–2 K–1 of the output (equilibrium temperature), induces a feedback response in Kelvin that modifies the output even where the input (emission temperature) was unamplified.” IPCC’s definition is 114 words: mine is half that length. Unlike IPCC, I am not ducking and diving and circumnavigating the truth without ever landing upon it. The standard, textbook feedback loop diagram makes it quite clear that even an unamplified input signal, which in the absence of amplification is also the output signal before accounting for feedback, must induce a feedback response if a nonzero feedback process is present: please log in to view this image The feedback loop diagram for the standard zero-dimensional-model equation Teq = Tref μ / (1 – μβ) In this standard feedback loop (see Bode 1945, ch. 3), the reference system that will operate whether or not a feedback is present comprises the input signal Tref and the μ gain block. The β feedback loop returns some fraction of the output signal from node P2to the input node P1. The mathematics of feedback applies to every dynamical system (i.e., a system that changes its state over time) in which feedback processes are present. It is not optional. Therefore, it is blindingly obvious – once it is pointed out, at any rate – that IPCC’s official definition of a “climate feedback” is plumb wrong, and that even with a unit μ direct-gain or open-loop-gain factor, indicating no amplification at all from any forcing, any nonzero value of the feedback fraction β must induce a feedback response that modifies the output signal. A remarkable benefit of using the correct definition of a “temperature feedback” is that it becomes possible, for the first time, to solve the biggest problem in climate-sensitivity studies, which is to discover how big (or, as we shall see, how small) the feedback fraction is. This matters, because at present the official feedback fraction is little better than guesswork, and IPCC et hoc genus omne use feedbacks as the excuse to triple – and, in several extreme papers, to multiply up to tenfold – the small direct warming from doubled CO2. Without big feedbacks, there is no big warming. We know that at today’s insolation and albedo the emission temperature that would obtain at the Earth’s surface in the absence of any forcing and before accounting for feedback is about 255 K. Actually it is probably 10-20 K higher than that, but that is a story for another time. We know that the radiative forcing from the presence of the naturally-occurring CO2 in the air in 1850 was about 30 Watts per square meter, which, when multiplied by 0.3 to allow for the Planck parameter at that time, was 9 K of CO2-driven warming. We know that IPCC currently imagines that the CO2-driven warming should be increased by 35% to allow for all other anthropogenic forcings, so that the directly-forced warming from all natural sources was about 12 K. We know that the temperature in 1850, at the beginning of the global temperature record and before any appreciable anthropogenic influence, was about 287 K. And we know that that 287 K was an equilibrium, for we had not yet noticeably perturbed the climate. Armed with just these three generally accepted round numbers – emission temperature 255 K, directly-forced natural greenhouse-gas warming 12 K and equilibrium temperature 287 K in 1850 – we can obtain the feedback fraction without further ado. It is 1 – (255 + 12) / 287, or 0.07. James Bond would be delighted. We know that the CMIP5 models predict 1.1 K directly-forced warming from doubled CO2, and that their mid-range estimate of equilibrium sensitivity after accounting for feedback is 3.3 K. So official climatology imagines that the feedback fraction is 1 – 1.1 / 3.3, or 0.67. But our feedback fraction is a proven result. Official climatology’s feedback fraction is ten times too big. Corrected Charney sensitivity, which is equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 with all else held fixed, is then 1.1 / (1 – 0.07), which is not 3.3 K. It is 1.2 K. End of climate problem. So, how much global warming do we say should have happened since 1850? IPCC says net anthropogenic forcing in the industrial era to 2011 was 2.3 Watts per square meter (IPCC 2013, fig. SMP.5, lower panel). Divide that by 3.2, today’s value of the Planck parameter, to get the equivalent directly-forced warming before accounting for feedback. It is 0.7 K. So, using our feedback fraction 0.07, equilibrium warming since 1850 should have been 0.7 / (1 – 0.07), which is 0.75 K. And how much warming was measured, according to the HadCRUT4 dataset for 1850-2011? It was (wait for it) 0.75 K. Our result matches observed reality. Official climatology’s result, not so much: 0.7 / (1 – 0.67) = 2.1 K, almost three times observation. But wait, say the naysayers. What about the Earth’s radiative imbalance of 0.6 Watts per square meter? This implies that anthropogenic warming has radiated 2.3 – 0.6 = 1.7 W m–2 to space. Accordingly, equilibrium warming attributable to the period from 1850-2011 may eventually prove to be 0.75 K x 2.3 / 1.7 = 1.0 K. Right. Even after allowing for the energy imbalance, official climatology’s grossly excessive feedback fraction still gives a mid-range prediction more than twice the 1 K that may eventually be observed, whereas our result remains close to reality, Indeed, if just a quarter of the 1 K equilibrium warming from 1850- 2011 was natural, as it may well have been, for the official “consensus” proposition says no more than that recent warming was mostly manmade (and only 0.3% of published papers say even that much: Legates et al., 2013), our result remains bang on target. But wait, say the naysayers. What about nonlinearity in feedbacks? The atmospheric burden of water vapor increases exponentially at around 7% per Kelvin of warming. Yes, it does, but the radiative feedback response to that additional water vapor is logarithmic, just like the direct forcing from CO2, so the overall effect of the water vapor feedback is linear. Other feedbacks are not as nonlinear as column water vapor, and are too small to make much difference. Besides, the models assume only 1-2% growth in column water vapor per Kelvin, because the evaporative cooling from 7%-per-Kelvin exponential growth in water vapor would reduce Charney sensitivity to below 1 K per CO2 doubling (Kininmonth 2010). The formidable Professor Lindzen has made the same point. Nevertheless, let us assume, just for the sake of accommodating the New Denialists, that the linear growth in the feedback fraction would give a value double the 0.07 we have calculated. Then Charney sensitivity would rise from 1.1 / (1 – 0.07) = 1.2 K to 1.1 / (1 – 0.14) = 1.3 K. At triple the real value, Charney sensitivity would be 1.1 / (1 – 0.21) = 1.4 K. So let us near-quadruple it to 1 – 0.75 / 1.00 = 0.25, the value that would obtain if one believed that the energy imbalance is as big as 0.6 W m–2 and if one believed that the net anthropogenic forcing (greatly diminished by the aerosol fudge-factor hastily introduced some years ago by IPCC when it realized that without the fudge-factor equilibrium sensitivity would necessarily be very low: you should just hear Dick Lindzen on that subject) is as little as 2.3 W m–2. Let’s pretend. In that event, Charney sensitivity would still be less than 1.5 K and, therefore, below the lower bound of IPCC’s official 1.5-4.5 K range, and half a Kelvin below the CMIP3 and CMIP5 models’ 2 K minimum. To get to the models’ minimum, one would have to assume a feedback fraction almost seven times the 0.07 we have calculated. Nonlinear? Schmoninear. But, say the naysayers (now desperate), how do you know that the models don’t take the feedback response to emission temperature fully into account when deriving their value of the feedback fraction? It is questions like this that reveal that there are plenty of climate fanatics who know perfectly well that official climatology is fatally in error. Look at it this way. The directly-forced warming from the presence of the naturally-occurring, non-condensing greenhouse gases is about 12 K. The difference between equilibrium temperature in 1850 and emission temperature is 32 K. So, using official climatology’s method, carefully omitting the feedback response to emission temperature, its feedback fraction is 1 – 12 / 32, or 0.63. Actually, the CMIP5 models, like the CMIP3 models, assume 0.67, and Lacis (2010) assumes 0.75. So we know They are getting it wrong, and we know where and why They are getting it wrong, even without reading Their cheesily dishonest definition of a “climate feedback”. What is more, Lacis says the pre-industrial and current values of the feedback fraction are the same: 0.75. Not much nonlinearity there, then. If official climatology were using our method, it would have had to include the emission temperature in the calculation, thus: 1 – (255 + 12) / 287 = 0.07, or something pretty close to that. Now you know why that hapless, red-faced, sweating vice-chancellor yelled at his faculty that our result is “a catastrophe” for the profiteers of doom. So it is. So, when faced with scientific truth that could cost you millions in funding, what do you do? well, you can see what they are doing, ****ing disgraceful. So next time someone says well ugh scientists said it, maybe think on that, I have been saying this for years. Queue the cognitive dissonance..
NEWS HEALTH The first penis-scrotum transplant is the latest to go beyond lifesaving Advances that give patients new faces, hands and more aim to improve quality of life BY AIMEE CUNNINGHAM 6:13PM, APRIL 24, 2018 please log in to view this image SCRUBBED IN A team of nine plastic surgeons and two urologic surgeons transplanted a full penis, scrotum and part of the abdominal wall to a U.S. veteran in late March. JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE In a transplant first, a U.S. veteran severely injured by an explosive device in Afghanistan has received a penis and scrotum from a deceased donor. During the 14-hour surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, doctors removed the patient’s damaged tissues and connected three arteries, four veins, two nerves and the urethra to the donated tissues. The patient is doing well and the first test — whether the surgery restored urinary function — is expected any day now. It will likely take another six months for the patient to regain sexual function. The hope, said surgical team member and plastic surgeon Richard Redett at a news conference on April 23, is that the patient will have a chance to “lead a more normal life.” The milestone is the latest in a series of medical advances that have pushed transplant science beyond simply lifesaving. Since the first successful organ transplant — a kidney in 1954 — surgeons have gone from replacing such vital organs as hearts, lungs and livers to, in the last two decades, transplanting hands, arms, uteruses, penises and even faces. Called vascularized composite allotransplantation, these surgeries transplant multiple tissues at once. The goal: enhancing recipients’ quality of life. The surgical team hopes this procedure paves the way to help other veterans disabled by bomb blasts to the pelvic area. “It’s a real mind-boggling injury to suffer,” the patient, who asked to remain anonymous, said in a statement released by Johns Hopkins. After receiving a full penis, scrotum and part of the abdominal wall during surgery in March, “when I first woke up, I felt finally more normal.” Here's a closer look at the challenges, scientific advances and ethical issues involved in such a transplant. What was the biggest challenge? The amount of tissue being transplanted. The patient had been referred to Redett in 2012 for conventional reconstruction surgery, which would use the veteran’s own tissues, but “his defect was just too large,” Redett says. To date, there have been three penis-only transplants, two of which have been successful. To prepare for the surgery, the Johns Hopkins team spent about five years in the lab, working on cadavers and “figuring out the blood supply to this very large piece of tissue,” Redett says. The researchers used dye to map out which blood vessels were crucial to the tissues involved and conducted mock surgeries. “We don’t have a lot of previous transplants to go on,” Redett says, “so we had many, many rehearsals with a donor and recipient cadaver, actually doing the surgery.” Why didn’t the team also transplant the testicles? That raises ethical issues. The testicles make sperm, so if they had been transplanted, the recipient would have potentially been able to father children that would have had the donor’s genetic material. The Johns Hopkins team decided early on not to include tissue that generates sperm in a transplant, feeling that there were too many unanswered ethical questions. Since the explosion destroyed the recipient’s testicles, he won’t be able to father biological children. Were there other ethical considerations? Yes. Since the mission is to improve the quality of life rather than save it, the tally of the surgery’s risks and benefits is altered. As with any transplant, there’s the possibility of rejection, so the patient must take immunosuppressant drugs for life. A tamped-down immune system raises the risk of infection, diabetes, hypertension and other illnesses. Psychological evaluation is crucial to the screening process, too. Being able to see the donated body part may challenge a recipient’s sense of self, or one may have unrealistic expectations for recovery. But one of the reasons the Johns Hopkins team became serious about the transplant, Redett says, is that the patient was an extremely motivated person. “He really wanted to do this.” What is being done to prevent rejection? Two weeks after the surgery, the patient received an infusion of the donor’s bone marrow cells. This transfer makes the body more tolerant of the donor tissue. With the bone marrow treatment, the patient has been able to take just one immunosuppressant drug rather than the three that are typically needed after transplantation. The Johns Hopkins team first used their bone marrow technique successfully on five patients who received hand transplants from 2009 to 2010. Other researchers have used bone marrow therapies with organ transplantation (SN Online: 3/7/12). What’s next? The immediate goal is to help other veterans with similar injuries. From 2001 to 2013, 1,367 U.S. servicemen serving in Afghanistan and Iraq suffered one or more genital and urinary region injuries, primarily in the scrotum, testes or penis, according to a study in the Journal of Urology in 2017. But the team also has its eye on those born with defects to the same area. “This is about the biggest transplant you can do for this region, certainly the most complex,” Redett says. “We spent a lot of time as a team trying to figure this out so we’re comfortable doing other types of penile transplants as well.” #luvgonzo
Study links night exposure to blue light with breast and prostate cancer Researchers used images taken by astronauts to evaluate outdoor lighting in Madrid and Barcelona please log in to view this image LED street lighting with a strong blue tint. A study performed by an international team led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the “la Caixa” Foundation, reports a link between exposure to blue light at night and higher risk of developing breast and prostate cancer. Blue light is a range of the visible light spectrum emitted by most white LEDs and many tablet and phone screens. The results have been published in Environmental Health Perspectives. “WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified night shift work as probably carcinogenic to humans. There is evidence pointing to an association between exposure to artificial light at night, disruption of the circadian rhythm, and breast and prostate cancers. With this study we sought to determine whether night exposure to light in cities can affect the development of these two types of cancer”, explains Manolis Kogevinas, ISGlobal researcher and coordinator of the study. “We know that depending on its intensity and wave length, artificial light, particularly in the blue spectrum, can decrease melatonin production and secretion”, says Martin Aubé, physics professor at CÉGEP in Sherbrooke, Canada and study co-author. The study was conducted within the framework of the MCC-Spain project cofunded by the ‘Consorcio de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Epidemiología y Salud Pública’ (CIBERESP), and includes medical and epidemiological data of more than 4,000 people between 20 and 85 years of age in 11 Spanish regions. Indoor exposure to artificial light was determined through personal questionnaires, while outdoor levels of artificial light were evaluated for Madrid and Barcelona, based on nocturnal images taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station. please log in to view this image Aerial image of the city of Barcelona (Spain) taken by astronauts of the International Space Station. many sections of the city use mercury vapor lamps (orangish) but note the sections that are blue-whitish. CREDIT Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center. http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov Results obtained for both cities show that participants exposed to higher levels of blue light had a 1.5 and 2-fold higher risk of developing breast and prostate cancer, respectively, as compared to the less-exposed population. Ariadna García, ISGlobal researcher and first author of the study, says: “Given the ubiquity of artificial light at night, determining whether it increases or not the risk of cancer is a public health issue”. At this point, further studies should include more individual data using for instance light sensors that allow measuring indoor light levels. It would also be important to do this kind of research in young people that extensively use blue light emitting screens”. “Currently, the images taken by the astronauts on the Space Station are our only way of determining the colour of outdoor lighting at a large scale, and the spread of blue light-emitting white LEDs in our cities”, comments Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel, scientist at the Astrophysics Institute in Andalucía-CSIC and Exeter University. ### Reference Garcia-Saenz A., Sánchez de Miguel A., Espinosa A., Valentín A., Aragonés N., Llorca J., Amiano P., Martín Sánchez V., Guevara M., Capelo R., Tardón A., Peiró-Pérez R., Jiménez-Moleón JJ., Roca-Barceló A., Pérez-Gómez B., Dierssen-Sotos T., Fernández-Villa T., Moreno-Iribas C., Moreno V., García-Pérez J., Castaño-Vinyals G., Pollán M., Aubé M., Kogevinas M. Evaluating the association between artificial light-at-night exposure and breast and prostate cancer risk in Spain (MCC-Spain study). April 2018. DOI:10.1289/EHP1837. Environmental Health Perspectives The full study is here: https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/EHP1837/ I did some research into this. There’s a Harvard study on night light, and in particular blue light. But we may be paying a price for basking in all that light. At night, light throws the body’s biological clock—the circadian rhythm—out of whack. Sleep suffers. Worse, research shows that it may contribute to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. … While light of any kind can suppress the secretion of melatonin, blue light at night does so more powerfully. Harvard researchers and their colleagues conducted an experiment comparing the effects of 6.5 hours of exposure to blue light to exposure to green light of comparable brightness. The blue light suppressed melatonin for about twice as long as the green light and shifted circadian rhythms by twice as much (3 hours vs. 1.5 hours). In another study of blue light, researchers at the University of Toronto compared the melatonin levels of people exposed to bright indoor light who were wearing blue-light–blocking goggles to people exposed to regular dim light without wearing goggles. The fact that the levels of the hormone were about the same in the two groups strengthens the hypothesis that blue light is a potent suppressor of melatonin. … If blue light does have adverse health effects, then environmental concerns, and the quest for energy-efficient lighting, could be at odds with personal health. Those curlicue compact fluorescent lightbulbs and LED lights are much more energy-efficient than the old-fashioned incandescent lightbulbs we grew up with. But they also tend to produce more blue light. See: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/blue-light-has-a-dark-side So it appears that a nighttime blue light component equals less sleep and therefore more stress on the body. With more stress, then susceptibility to cancer increases. I don’t know how accurate the methodologies in these studies are, but one thing is for sure, many white LED’s tend to have a larger blue light component: please log in to view this image Comparison of “cool white” and “warm white” LED color spectrums. Source: EE stack Exchange Have a look at the CREE guide to LED color mixing. please log in to view this image In cool white LED’s, the two colors (blue and yellow) mix to create a white. This is shown below on the CIE 1931 color space: please log in to view this image The mixed color (white) will be on a line between the two components (blue and yellow). The ratio of the intensities of blue:yellow determines the final color. Working the night shift gives you cancer, possibly
The Odderon?? In a 17-mile circular tunnel underneath the border between France and Switzerland, an international collaboration of scientists runs experiments using the world's most advanced scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). By smashing together protons that travel close to light speed, particle physicists analyze these collisions and learn more about the fundamental makeup of all matter in the universe. In recent years, for instance, these experiments showed data leading to the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Now, a team of high-energy experimental particle physicists, including several from the University of Kansas, has uncovered possible evidence of a subatomic quasiparticle dubbed an "odderon" that -- until now -- had only been theorized to exist. Their results currently are published on the arXiv and CERN preprint servers in two papers that have been submitted to peer-reviewed journals. "We've been looking for this since the 1970s," said Christophe Royon, Foundation Distinguished Professor in the KU Department of Physics & Astronomy. The new findings concern hadrons (the family of particle that includes protons and neutrons), which are composed of quarks "glued" together with gluons. These particular experiments involve "collisions" where the protons remain intact after the collision. In all previous experiments, scientists detected collisions involving only even numbers of gluons exchanged between different protons. "The protons interact like two big semi-trucks that are transporting cars, the kind you see on the highway," said Timothy Raben, a particle theorist at KU who has worked on the odderon. "If those trucks crashed together, after the crash you'd still have the trucks, but the cars would now be outside, no longer aboard the trucks -- and also new cars are produced (energy is transformed into matter)." In the new paper, researchers using more energy and observing collisions with more precision report potential evidence of an odd number of gluons, without any quarks, exchanged in the collisions. "Until now, most models were thinking there was a pair of gluons -- always an even number," said Royon. "Now we measure for the first time the higher number of events and properties and at a new energy. We found measurements that are incompatible with this traditional model of assuming an even number of gluons. It's a kind of discovery that we might have seen for the first time, this odd exchange of the number of gluons. There may be three, five, seven or more gluons." The KU researchers explained the odderon can be seen as the total contribution coming from all types of odd gluon exchange. It represents the involvement of all of three, five, seven or other odd number numbers of gluons. By contrast, the older model assumes a contribution from all even numbers of gluons, so it includes contributions from two, four, six or more even-numbered gluons together. At the LHC, the work was carried out by a team of more than 100 physicists from eight countries using the TOTEM experiment, near one of the four points in the supercollider where proton beams are directed into each other, causing billions of proton pairs to collide every second. KU researchers said the findings give fresh detail to the Standard Model of particle physics, a widely accepted physics theory that explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact. "This doesn't break the Standard Model, but there are very opaque regions of the Standard Model, and this work shines a light on one of those opaque regions," said Raben. Physicists have imagined the existence of the odderon for many decades, but until the LHC began operating at its highest energies in 2015, the odderon remained mere conjecture. The data collected and presented in the new paper was collected at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), the fastest scientists have ever been able to collide protons. "These ideas date back to the '70s, but even at that time it quickly became evident we weren't close technologically to being able to see the odderon, so while there are several decades of predictions, the odderon has not been seen," Raben said. According to the KU researchers, the TOTEM experiment was designed to detect the protons that are not destroyed by the collision but are only slightly deviated. So, the TOTEM particle detectors are placed at a few millimeters from the outgoing beams of protons that did not interact. By comparing current results with measurements made at lower energies using less powerful particle accelerators, TOTEM has been able to make the most precise measurement ever. The co-authors compared the ratio of signatures from collisions at various energies to establish the "rho parameter," one measure that helped build evidence for the possible presence of odderons. "If you go to really high energies, there are signatures of the behavior of beams collided at a high energy that can be measured," said Raben. "But there are different types of high-energy growth signatures. Up until now, we've only had to think about one type of high-energy growth behavior. Essentially these quantities might change as a function of the amount of energy. The rho parameter is essentially measuring the ratio of one signature to another of this high energy growth." Such measurement of the rho parameter is owed to the shared work, collaboration and key contributions, on the detectors' hardware and in particular on the physics analysis, by several postdocs and senior physicists. Aside from Royon, KU personnel involved in the new TOTEM findings include postdoctoral researcher Nicola Minafra, who earned a CMS achievement award this year, and graduate students Cristian Baldenegro Barrera, Justin Williams, Tommaso Isidori and Cole Lindsey. Other KU researchers participating in the work are Laurent Forthomme, a postdoctoral researcher also based at CERN and working on the CMS/TOTEM experiments, and graduate student Federico Deganutti, who works with Raben on theory. "Our students come from many different nations," said Royon. "KU is a working at the frontier of new things, and we expect big results in the coming months or years. Other research efforts include looking for an extra dimension in the universe, but for now we're just looking at the data." Royon said the TOTEM experiment's fast-timing detectors used to measure the time-of-flight of protons in the LHC could see many applications in medicine, space physics with NASA to measure cosmic rays, and desalinization of seawater, a concept that the KU physicist is exploring with Mark Shiflett, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the KU School of Engineering.
yes i can... i just did what you fail to point out is infinity is not "something" its undefinable. ergo one infinity divided by another infinity cannot be said to be that same above and below. thus = undefined. Get it right FFS. I hate when i feed a line to someone and they fail to grasp it properly. I didn't write 1/1 at all so thats just you saying i did.
No idea what you are on about, when you divide infinity by infinity, you are dividing 1 by 1 to get 1, it's the same as dividing 1 person by 1 person, to get 1 person. The "person" bit is irrelevant, the unit of measure is 1, 1 infinity 1 person, neither is a mathematical number, it is a unit, ie 1. #getitright
by Dr. Tony Philips, NASA Spaceweather Sunspots are becoming scarce. Very scarce. So far in 2018 the sun has been blank almost 60% of the time, with whole weeks going by without sunspots. Today’s sun, shown here in an image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, is typical of the featureless solar disk: please log in to view this image The sun today, from the Solar Dynamics Observatory The fact that sunspots are vanishing comes as no surprise. Forecasters have been saying for years that this would happen as the current solar cycle (“solar cycle 24”) comes to an end. The surprise is how fast. “Solar cycle 24 is declining more quickly than forecast,” announced NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center on April 26th. This plot shows observed sunspot numbers in blue vs. the official forecast in red: please log in to view this image “The smoothed, predicted sunspot number for April-May 2018 is about 15,” says NOAA. “However, the actual monthly values have been [significantly] lower.” “Official” forecasts of the solar cycle come from NOAA’s Solar Cycle Prediction Panel–a group of experts from NOAA, NASA, the US Air Force, universities and other research organizations. They have been convening at intervals since 1989 to predict the timing and intensity of Solar Max. The problem is, no one really knows how to predict the solar cycle. The most recent iteration of the panel in 2006-2008 compared 54 different methods ranging from empirical extrapolations of historical data to cutting-edge supercomputer models of the sun’s magnetic dynamo. None fully described what is happening now. It’s important to note that solar minimum is a normal part of the sunspot cycle. Sunspots have been disappearing (or nearly so) every ~11 years since 1843 when German astronomer Samuel Heinrich Schwabe discovered the periodic nature of solar activity. Sometimes they go away for decades, as happened during the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century. We’ve seen it all before. Or have we….? please log in to view this image Researchers are keeping a wary eye on the sun now because of what happened the last time sunspots disappeared. The solar minimum of 2008-2009 was unusually deep. The sun set Space Age records for low sunspot number, weak solar wind, and depressed solar irradiance. When the sun finally woke up a few years later, it seemed to have “solar minimum hangover.” The bounce-back Solar Max of 2012-2015 was the weakest solar maximum of the Space Age, prompting some to wonder if solar activity is entering a phase of sustained quiet. The faster-than-expected decline of the sunspot cycle now may support that idea. Newcomers to the field are often surprised to learn that a lot happens during solar minimum: The sun dims, albeit slightly. NASA recently launched a new sensor (TSIS-1) to the International Space Station to monitor this effect. With less extreme UV radiation coming from the sun, Earth’s upper atmosphere cools and shrinks. This allows space junk to accumulate in low Earth orbit. please log in to view this image Above: A neutron bubble chamber in an airplane 35,000 feet above Greenland. Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus are flying these sensors to measure aviation radiation during solar minimum. [more] The most important change, however, may be the increase in cosmic rays. Flagging solar wind pressure during solar minimum allows cosmic rays from deep space to penetrate the inner solar system. Right now, space weather balloons and NASA spacecraft are measuring an uptick in radiation due to this effect. Cosmic rays may alter the chemistry of Earth’s upper atmosphere, trigger lightning, and seed clouds. Air travelers are affected, too. It is well known that cosmic rays penetrate airplanes. Passengers on long commercial flights receive doses similar to dental X-rays during a single trip, while pilots have been classified as occupational radiation workers by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). Ongoing measurements by Spaceweather.com and Earth to Sky Calculus show that dose rates at cruising altitudes of 35,000 feet are currently ~40 times greater than on the ground below, values which could increase as the solar cycle wanes. Solar minimum is just getting started. Stay tuned for updates. My own addition. The sun + oceans are the primary drivers of climate changes, not the 0000.1 mole-fraction CO2 we added to the atmosphere
Nope. This fossil fuel apologist nonsense has been debunked hundreds of time for decades. It's one step up from "how can there be global warming if we have more snow this winter".
"fossil fuel apologist" he says when he owes his health, edu, standard of living, ease of transport and the very device he uses to post online to fossil fuels #epicmoron So, why are you using fossil fuels you hypocrite? Why have you not gone back to 1850 living standards "It's one step up from "how can there be global warming if we have more snow this winter"." This from the man who said floods in the UK for last year was "global warming" How un-self aware are you #inconsistent #contradictshimself FYI we were told for 30 years snow would be a thing of the past and winters will be milder... forget that did you I also note you have no rebuttal, just a label and nonsense Those that use fossil fuels while complaining about them are ******ed hypocrites
