This is awesome... Fermilab is Building a 'Holometer' to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion

From popsci.com

Researchers at Fermilab are building a “holometer” so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram. To do so, they are building themost precise clock ever created.

The universe-as-hologram theory is predicated on the idea that spacetime is not perfectly smooth, but becomes discrete and pixelated as you zoom in further and further, like a low-res digital image. This idea isn’t novel; recent experiments in black-hole physics have offered evidence that this may be the case, and prominent physicists have proposed similar ideas. Under this theory, the universe actually exists in two dimensions and the third is an illusion produced by the intertwining of time and depth. But the false third dimension can’t be perceived as such, because nothing travels faster than light, so instruments can’t find its limits.

This is theoretical physics at its finest, drowning in complex mathematics but short on hard data. So Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan and his team are building a “holometer” to magnify spacetime and see if it is indeed as noisy as the math suggests it might be at higher resolution. In Fermilab’s largest laser lab, Hogan and company are putting together what they call a “holographic interferometer,” which – like a classic interferometer – will split laser beams and measure the difference in frequencies between the two identical beams.

But unlike conventional interferometers, the holometer will measure for noise or interference in spacetime itself. It’s actually composed of two interferometers – built one atop the other – that produce data on the amount of interference or “holographic noise.” Since they are measuring the same volume of spacetime, they should show the same amount of correlated jitter in the fabric of the universe. It will produce the first direct experimental insight into the fundamental nature of space and time, and there’s no telling what researchers delving into that data might find out about the holographic nature of the universe.

So enjoy the third dimension while you still can. Construction on the first instrument is already underway, and Hogan thinks they will begin collecting data on the very nature of spacetime itself by next year.

Build Your Own Spacetime-Measuring 'Holometer' at Home: Just kidding. Don't.  Sam Waldman, MIT/Craig Hogan, Fermilab PAC

Nobel Prize Winning Biologist Paul Nurse Finds That Immortality Might Lie in the DNA of Yeast

Paul Nurse on Charlie Rose extended interview

brain implants: Delgado's stimoceiver

Dr. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado (b. 1915) was a Spanish professor of physiology at Yale University, famed for his research into electrical stimulation of regions in the brain.

Delgado was born in Ronda, Spain in 1915. He received an Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Madrid just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in which he served as a medical corpsman on the Republican side. After the war he had to repeat his M.D. degree, and then took a Ph.D. at the Cajal Institute in Madrid.

In 1946 he began a fellowship at Yale, and was invited by the noted physiologist John Fulton to join the department of physiology in 1950.

Delgado's research interests centered on the use of electrical signals to evoke responses in the brain. His earliest work was with cats, but later did experiments with monkeys and humans.

Much of Delgado's work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment.

hemi-sync and the out of the body experiences

HEMI-SYNC

Hemi-Sync is a trademarked brand name for a process developed at the Monroe Institute, used to create audio patterns containing binaural beats, which are commercialized in the form of audio CDs. Other companies have also created and marketed products based on the concept of binaural beats such as Holosync by the Centerpointe Institute.


Hemi-sync is a technology developed by Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute. Hemi-sync is short for Hemispheric Synchronization aka Brainwave synchronization. Monroe claimed that the technique synchronizes the two hemispheres of one's brain, thereby creating a 'frequency-following response' designed to evoke certain effects. Hemi-sync can allegedly be used for many purposes, including relaxation and sleep induction, learning and memory aids, helping those with physical and mental difficulties, and reaching altered states of consciousness through the use of sound.

The technique involves using sound waves to entrain brain waves. Wearing headphones, Monroe claimed that brains respond by producing a third sound (called binaural beats) that he believed to encourage various brainwave activity.


THE MONROE INSTITUTE

The Monroe Institute (TMI) is a nonprofit education and research organization devoted to the exploration of human consciousness, based in Faber, Virginia, United States. Over the last three decades, many people have attended TMI’s residential programs, and/or used their trademarked Hemi-Sync audio technology for various purposes, including meditation, lucid dreaming, and remote viewing.

TMI’s methodology does not contain bias towards any particular belief system, religion, or political or social stance.
TMI was founded by Robert Monroe after he started having what he called "out of body experiences." It is comprised of several buildings on land owned by the Monroe family in Virginia, USA. One of its activities includes teaching various techniques, based on Hemi-Sync, in order to expand consciousness and explore areas of consciousness not normally available in the waking state.

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A reporter for The Hook, weekly newspaper for Charlottesville, Virginia, who visited the Monroe Institute said, "...with a few exceptions, the only "normal" people with whom I could fully identify were the trainers, who seemed remarkably well-grounded for people whose day-to-day experiences include astral projection and disembodied spirits."

The reporter also concluded that "there is something significant being developed at the Institute. Whether it's just a brilliant guided meditation (complete with trance-inducing stereoscopic sound) or a doorway to a world of spirit entities, I cannot say."




ROBERT MONROE


According to his own account, while experimenting with sleep-learning in 1958 Monroe experienced an unusual phenomenon which he described as sensations of paralysis and vibration accompanied by a bright light that appeared to be shining on him from a shallow angle. Monroe goes on to say that this occurred another 9 times over the next six weeks, culminating in an out-of-body experience. Monroe recorded his account in his 1971 book Journeys Out Of The Body and went on to become a prominent researcher in the field of human consciousness.

Monroe later authored two more books Far Journeys and Ultimate Journey and in 1978 he founded the Monroe Institute. A non-profit education and research foundation that described itself as being "devoted to the exploration of human consciousness".

Hemi-Sync

In 1975, Monroe registered a patent for an audio-visual device designed to stimulate brain functions until the left and right hemispheres became synchronized. Monroe held that this state, dubbed Hemi-Sync (hemispherical synchronization), could be used to promote mental well being or to trigger an altered state of consciousness. Monroe's concept was based on an earlier hypothesis known as binaural beats and has since been expanded on a commercial basis by the self help industry.


An example of hemi-sync
listen with headphones, with eyes closed in a relaxed environment

DO NOT LISTEN UNLESS YOU ARE IN A SAFE PLACE


hemi-sync freeflow 12 extended edit

quantum teleportation article from cal tech

Quantum Optics Group
Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics
California Institute of Technology



A great article explaining this experiment can be found at ABC news. See the October 23, 1998 issue of Science magazine for the article in full, or read the Caltech press release for a summary.

In quantum teleportation, an unknown quantum state is faithfully transferred from a sender (Alice) to a receiver (Bob). To perform the teleportation, Alice and Bob must have a classical communication channel and must also share quantum entanglement -- in the protocol we employ*, each possesses one half of a two-particle entangled state. Alice makes an appropriate projective measurement (Bell measurement) of the unknown state together with her component of the shared entangled state. The result of this measurement is a random piece of classical information which Alice sends to Bob over their classical communication channel. Bob uses this information to choose a unitary transformation which he performs on his component of the shared entangled state, thus transforming it into an output state identical to the original (unknown) input. Notice that the input state is destroyed by Alice's projective measurement, so that teleportation does not result in "cloning" of a quantum state.
(*Teleportation protocol of C. H. Bennett et al., PRL 70, 1895 (1993).)

Teleportation with Squeezed Light

We have implemented quantum teleportation with light beams serving as both the entangled pair and the input (and output) state. Squeezed light is used to generate the entangled (EPR) beams which are sent to Alice and Bob. A third beam, the input, is a coherent state of unknown complex amplitude. This state is teleported to Bob with a high fidelity only achievable via the use of quantum entanglement.

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Teleportation Apparatus
Entangled EPR beams are generated by combining two beams of squeezed light at a 50/50 beamsplitter. EPR beam 1 propagates to Alice's sending station, where it is combined at a 50/50 beamsplitter with the unknown input state, in this case a coherent state of unknown complex amplitude. Alice uses two sets of balanced homodyne detectors to make a Bell-state measurement on the amplitudes of the combined state. Because of the entanglement between the EPR beams, Alice's detection collapses Bob's field (EPR beam 2) into a state conditioned on Alice's measurement outcome. After receiving the classical result from Alice, Bob is able to construct the teleported state via a simple phase-space displacement of the EPR field 2.
Fidelity (Quantum vs. Classical?)
Quantum teleportation is theoretically perfect, yielding an output state which equals the input with a fidelity F=1. In practice, fidelities less than one are realized due to imperfections in the EPR pair, Alice's Bell measurement, and Bob's unitary transformation. By contrast, a sender and receiver who share only a classical communication channel cannot hope to transfer an arbitrary quantum state with a fidelity of one. For coherent states, the classical teleportation limit is F=0.5, while for light polarization states it is F=0.67. The quantum nature of the teleportation achieved in this case is demonstrated by the experimentally determined fidelity of F=0.58, greater than the classical limit of 0.5 for coherent states. Note that the fidelity is an average over all input states and so measures the ability to transfer an arbitrary, unknown superposition from Alice to Bob.

how to build a dream machine

The plan below is for a 78 rmp dreamachine. See below the drawings of the plan

for the explainations for a 45 rpm dreamachine.

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EQUIPMENT

- 1 record player working at the speed of 78 tours/minute,

- 1 big cardboard sheet, rigid enough for the future cylinder to stand up, and soft enough to be easily cut and worked; you can get sheets of different thickness and dimensions in an office stationery. Choose the darkest colour you can find as the cardboard must be opaque to the light of a 100 watts bulb.

1 graduate rule of 30 or 40 cm long,

1 set square,

1 thin lead pencil,

1 rubber,

cardboard glue,

1 cutter,

1 100 watts bulb,

1 lamp socket,

1 male plug,

electric lead (5 to 6 meters long),

1 multiplug,

1 tape measure to measure the circumference of the turn table of the record-player,

clothes pegs.

PRINCIPLE OF THE DREAMACHINE

To build a dreamachine, you need a cylinder with holes in it, fixed uppon the turntable of a record player turning at the speed of 78 tours/minute.

In the middle of the machine, one 100 watts bulb. When you seat in front of the machine, the light of the bulb must come in front of your closed eyes intermittently, according to a rythm from 7 to 13 light-flashes per second, which is the rythm of alpha waves of the brain.

For the effects, refer to "Colloque de Tanger", vol. 1, Christian Bourgois éditeur, or "Here to Go - Planer R 101", Brion Gysin - Terry Wilson.

BASIC CALCULUS

- The rythm of the light flashes is from 7 to 13 flashes/second.

- The turntable of the record-player turns at the speed of 78 tours/minute = 78 tours/60 seconds.

- In one second, the turntable makes : 78/60 = 1,3 tour.

- 1 flash correspons to a hole in the cylinder.

- 1 row of 6 holes (6 flashes) will give for every tour a rythm of 6x1,3 = 7,8 flashes/second

- 1 row of 7 holes : 7x1,3 = 9,1 fl/s

- 1 " " 8 " : 8x1,3 = 10,4 fl/s

- 1 " " 9 " : 9x1,3 = 11,7 fl/s

- 1 " " 10 " : 10x1,3 = 13 fl/s

The length of the cartdbord sheet must be equal to the circumference of the turntable. The dimensions of the plan are the ones of a Dual 1010 record player; the circumference of its turntable is 85,5 cm.

PROCEDURE

1. Measure the circumference of the turntable with the tape measure.

2. Transfer this dimension on the length of the cardboard sheet from the left side at the top and at the bottom of the sheet. Draw a line joining the 2 points, parallel to the width of the sheet.

3. Once the line is drawn, draw another one, parallel to the first one, 4,5 cm on the right far from it; this is to delimit a little band which, at the end of the operations, will be stuck to the left width to make the cylinder. With the cutter, cut the sheet along the second line. So the final length of the cardboard is : 85,5 cm + 4,5 cm = 90 cm.

4. At the top of the cardboard, on the right and left widths, measure 2,5 cm. Draw a line joining the 2 points. You get a band of 85,5 cm x 2,5 cm. Do the same at he bottom of the cardboard in drawing a band of 3 cm wide (see the drawing). The width between the 2 bands is 65,5 - (2,5+3) = 60 cm.

5. Now divide this width of 60 cm in 5 equal parts of 12 cm. Measure 5 times 12 cm on the right and left widths. Draw the lines joining those new points. You get 4 new lines, parallel to the length.

6. Now calculate the dimensions of the holes in every row. The upper row will contain the most numerous holes (10) and the row of the bottom, the less numerous holes (6), so the base of the cylinder is as solid as possible (see the plan of the cardboard of the cylinder).

a) Upper row :

* Divide this row in 10 equal parts : 85,5/10 = 8,55 cm

* Measure 10 times this dimension at the top and at the bottom of the upper row, in beguinning by the left.

* Draw the lines joining the new points : you get 9 parallel lines 8,55 cm far from one another (these lines will be in the middle of the holes) delimiting 10 rectangles of 12x8,55 cm.

* Take the plan of every hole : the line IJ represents the new lines you have just drawn. On this line IJ, measure 2 times 1,5 cm, from I and from J, so you get the points K and L. From these points, perpendicularly to IJ, measure the points A, B, C and D, 2 cm far from K and L. raw the lines joining A and B, B and D, D and C, C and A. The rectangle you get is the hole.

* Proceed the same way to get all the holes of the row. On the left width of this row, you only get half a hole. On the right side, at the end of the row, the last hole encroaches upon the band to stick; the second half of this hole will fit to the half hole on the left when you stick the cylinder, and this for every row. In other words, the left half hole and the hole at the right end of the row will make the same hole.

b) Second row :

It will contain 9 holes. Proceed as you did for the upper row, but divide the length of the cardboard by 9 : 85,5 / 9 = 9,44 cm. Proceed as before with this new demension and so for the other rows :

c) Third row :

8 holes : 85,5 / 8 = 10,62 cm

d) Forth row :

7 holes : 85,5 / 7 = 12,14 cm

e) Fifth row :

6 holes : 85,5 / 6 = 14,16 cm

Every hole has the same dimensions, whatever the row may be.

7. Once you have delimited all the holes, cut them with the cutter. Put the cut pieces of cardboard aside, you will need them later on.

8. Put the cardboard sheet upon the turntable in giving a cylindric shape to it. Temporarily fix the 2 widths the one on the other with clothes pegs. Make sure the base of the cylinder fits with the dimensions of the turntable and that the left half holes fit with the holes of the right width. Do not stick the edges yet.

9. If the turntable is covered with a rubber surface, delicately unstick the edges of this surface; you are going to use it to maintain the cylinder in position. If there is no rubber surface, take a thick piece of rigid cardboard and cut it according to the exact dimensions of the turntable. Make a hole in the middle, like a LP record, in introducing it in the axis of the turntable.

10. Go back to the cardboard sheet. Take the cut rectangles ABCD you had previously put aside, and solidly stick them at the bottom of the sheet on the width so you get little tongues to be fold and slipped perpendicularly under the rubber surface, to keep the cylinder upon the turntable. Put as many tongues as needed.

11. Your cylinder is ready. Stick the 2 widths one upon the other, maintaining the stuck band with the clothes pegs, in adapting them in the holes. Leave the pegs untill the cardboard and the glue are dry.

If the upper row is not perfectly circular, in cases the cardboard would fold over the holes, make the cardboard more solid in sticking the remaining little triangles ABCD inside the cylinder.

12. Then you adapt the cylinder on the turntable in slipping the little tongues under the rubber surface or the cardboard disc. The body of the dreamachine is ready now. If you turn the record player on, the cylinder must turn on the turntable in remaining solidly fixed.

13. Then you take the bulb, the lamp socket, the electric lead and the male plug. Fix the whole lot together.

14. Put the dreamachine on a stool, near a power point, let the bulb hang in the middle of the cylinder without it to touch the edges. Adjust the length of the lead over the dreamachine in the most adapted way to the room where you are (you can pass the lead in a hook screwed in the ceiling, make a bracket system, etc...). The length of the lead must be adjustable, so the bulb can be put in front of every row.

15. Plug the bulb, plug the record player, turn it on in setting it on the 78 tours speed. Sit comfortably in front of the machine and approach your face the closest you can. Close your eyes and watch : you get inside your head mlulticoloured geometric and stereoscopic 360° images, and lights, the colors, shapes and designs of which constantly changes. You can vary the images in increasing or lessening the pressure of your eyelids andd the distance between your face and the machine and in experimenting the different rows.

A record has been specially made to be listened to while watching the dreamachine, its rythm is the same as the light flashes: "Heathen Earth", Throbbing Gristle (International Records), best in stereo with a headphone.


Brion Gysin

DREAMACHINE 2 Extract from BRION GYSIN INTERVIEW RE Search William Burroughs - Brion Gysin - Throbbing Gristle

R/S: What's happening with the Dreamachine ? At one point ... you said it could have been the drugless turn-on of the 60s. Why didn't it happen ?

BRION : One of the reasons is that ... I think it scares people... Because of the cact that it deals with this area of interior vision which has never been tapped before. Except in history, one knows of cases - in French history, Catherine de Medicis for example, had Nostradamus sitting up on the top of a tower (which is now just being restored, at the present time, over there). And there was no pollution in those days... one didn't have any screen between the man on top of the tower and the sun. And he used to sit up there and with the fingers of his hands spread like this would flicker his fingers over his closed eyes, and would interpret his visions in a way which were of infuence to her in regard to her political powers.

R/S: But they wee good visions -Byron Gysin

Brion : They could also foretell bad things too. Peter the Great also had somebody who sat on the top of a tower and flickered his fingers like that in front of his closed eyelids... And any of us today can go and look out the window or lie on a field and do it, and you get a great deal of the type of visions - in fact, it's the same area of the alpha bands of excitation of the brain - within the alpha band between eight and thirteen flickers a second. And the Dreamachine produces this continuously, without interruption, unless you yourself interrupt it by opening your eyes like that.

So the experience can be pushed a great deal further - into an area which is like real dreams. For example very often people compare it to films. Well, who can say who is projecting these films - where do these films come from ? If you look at it as I am rather inclined to now - like being the source of all vision - inasmuch as within my experience of many hundreds of hours of looking at the Dreamachine, I have seen in it practically everything that I have ever seen - that is, all imagery. All the images of established religions, for example, appear - crosses appear, to begin with; eyes of Isis float by, and many of the other symbols like that appear as if they were the Jungian symbols that he considered were common to whole mankind.

And then one goes very much further - one gets flashes of memory, one gets these little films that are apparently being projected in one's head ... one then gets into an area where all vision is as in a complete circle of 360 degrees, and one is plunged into a dream situation that's occuring all around one. And it may be true that this is all one can see... that indeed the alpha rythm contains the whole human program of vision. Well - that is a big package to deal with - and I don't think anybody particularly wants ... amateurs sitting in front of Dreamachines fiddling with it , perhaps...

teleportation between light and matter

First quantum teleportation between light and matter



Physics / Physics
The concept of quantum teleportation - the disembodied complete transfer of the state of a quantum system to any other place - was first experimentally realised between two different light beams. Later it became also possible to transfer the properties of a stored ion to another object of the same kind. A team of scientist headed by Prof. Ignacio Cirac at MPQ and by Prof. Eugene Polzik at Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen has now shown that the quantum states of a light pulse can also be transferred to a macroscopic object, an ensemble of 10 to the power of 12 atoms (Nature, 4 October 2006).
This is the first case of successful teleportation between objects of a different nature - the ones representing a "flying" medium (light), the other a "stationary" medium (atoms). The result presented here is of interest not only for fundamental research, but also primarily for practical application in realising quantum computers or transmitting coded data (quantum cryptography).

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Since the beginning of the nineties research into quantum teleportation has been booming with theoretical and experimental physicists. Transmission of quantum information involves a fundamental problem: According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle two complementary properties of a quantum particle, e.g. location and momentum cannot be precisely measured simultaneously. The entire information of the system thus has to be transmitted without being completely known. But the nature of the particles also carries with it the solution to this problem: the possibility of "entangling" two particles in such a way that their properties become perfectly correlated. If a certain property is measured in one of the "twin" particles, this determines the corresponding property of the other automatically and with immediate effect.

With the help of entangled particles, successful teleportation can be achieved roughly as follows: An auxiliary pair of entangled particles is created, the one being transmitted to "Alice" and the other to "Bob". (The names "Alice" and "Bob" have been adopted to describe the transmission of quantum information from A to B.) Alice now entangles the object of teleportation with her auxiliary particle and then measures the joint state (Bell measurement). She sends the result to Bob in the classical manner. He applies it to his auxiliary particle and "conjures up" the teleportation object from it.

Are "such "instructions for use" merely mental games? The great challenge to theoretical physicists is to devise concepts which can also be put into practice. The experiment described here has been conducted by a research team headed by Prof. Eugene Polzik at Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It follows a proposal made by Prof. Ignacio Cirac, Managing Director at MPQ, and his collaborator Dr. Klemens Hammerer (also at MPQ at that time, now at University of Innsbruck, Austria).

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First the twin pair is produced by sending a strong light pulse to a glass tube filled with caesium gas (about 1012 atoms). The magnetic moments of the gas atoms are aligned in a homogenous magnetic field. The light also has a preferential direction: It is polarised, i.e. the electric field oscillates in just one direction. Under theses conditions the light and the atoms are made to interact with one another so that the light pulse emerging from the gas that is sent to Alice is "entangled" with the ensemble of 10 to the power of 12 caesium atoms located at Bob's site.

Alice mixes the arriving pulse by means of a beam splitter with the object that she wants to teleport: a weak light pulse containing very few photons. The light pulses issuing at the two outputs of the beam splitter are measured with photo-detectors and the results are sent to Bob.

The measured results tell Bob what has to be done to complete teleportation and transfer the selected quantum states of the light pulse, amplitude and phase, onto the atomic ensemble. For this purpose he applies a low-frequency magnetic field that makes the collective spin (angular momentum) of the system oscillate. This process can be compared with the precession of a spinning top about its major axis: the deflection of the spinning top corresponds to the amplitude of the light, while the zero passage corresponds to the phase.

To prove that quantum teleportation has been successfully performed, a second intense pulse of polarised light is sent to the atomic ensemble after 0.1 milliseconds and, so to speak, "reads out" its state. From these measured values theoretical physicists can calculate the so-called fidelity, a quality-factor specifying how well the state of the teleported object agrees with the original. (A fidelity of 1 is equivalent to a perfect agreement, while the value zero indicates that there has been no transfer at all.) In the present experiment the fidelity is 0.6, this being well above the value of 0.5 that would at best be achieved by classical means, e.g. by communicating measured values by telephone, without the help of entangled particle-pairs.

Unlike the customary conception of "beaming", it is not a matter here of a particle disappearing from one place and re-appearing in another. "Quantum teleportation constitutes methods of communication for application in quantum cryptography, the decoding of data, and not new kinds of transportation", as Dr. Klemens Hammerer emphasizes. "The importance of the experiment is that it is now possible for the first time to achieve teleportation between stationary atoms, which can store quantum states, and light, which is needed to transmit information over great distances. This marks an important step towards accomplishing quantum cryptography, i.e. absolutely safe communication over long distances, such as between Munich and Copenhagen."

Citation: Jacob F. Sherson, Hanna Krauter, Rasmus K. Olsson, Brian Julsgaard, Klemens Hammerer, Ignacio Cirac and Eugene S. Polzik Quantum teleportation between light and matter Nature 443, 557-560(5 October 2006).

Source: Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics

Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney

Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney

on view June 26 - September 21, 2008


One of the great American visionaries of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) endeavored to see what he, a single individual, might do to benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the minimum of the earth's resources. Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.
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Fuller's innovative theories and designs addressed fields ranging from architecture, the visual arts, and literature to mathematics, engineering, and sustainability. He refused to treat these diverse spheres as specialized areas of investigation because it inhibited his ability to think intuitively, independently, and, in his words, "comprehensively."

Although Fuller believed in utilizing the latest technology, much of his work developed from his inquiry into "how nature builds." He believed that the tetrahedron was the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature; this shape is an essential part of most of his designs, which range in scale from domestic to global. As the many drawings and models in this exhibition attest, Fuller was committed to the physical exploration and visual presentation of his ideas.



The results of more than five decades of Fuller's integrated approach toward the design and technology of housing, transportation, cartography, and communication are displayed here, much of it for the first time. This exhibition offers a fresh look at Fuller's life's work for everyone who shares his sense of urgency about homelessness, poverty, diminishing natural resources, and the future of our planet. - Jennie Goldstein


http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp

Upton Sinclair's Mental Radio

Mental Radio: Does it work, and how? (1930) was written by the American author Upton Sinclair. This book documents Sinclair's test of psychic abilities of Mary Craig Kimbrough, his second wife, while she was in a state of profound depression with a heightened interest in the occult. She attempted to duplicate 290 pictures which were drawn by her husband. Sinclair estimated Mary successfully duplicated 65 of them, with 155 "partial successes" and 70 failures. These experiments were not done in a controlled scientific environment.

God Helmet

The term God Helmet refers to a controversial experimental apparatus in neurotheology. The apparatus, placed on the head of an experimental subject, stimulates the brain with magnetic fields. Some subjects reported experiences similar to spiritual experiences.[1] The leading researcher in this area is Michael Persinger.




Persinger uses a modified snowmobile helmet or a head-circlet device nicknamed the Octopus that contain solenoids which create a weak but complex magnetic field over the brain's right-hemisphere parietal and temporal lobes. Persinger reports that at least 80 per cent of his participants experience a presence beside them in the room, which they variously say feels like God or someone they knew who had died.

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There is controversy as to whether Persinger measured actual effects or just led his subjects into believing they experienced an electronically-induced epiphany. In December 2004 Nature reported that a group of Swedish researchers, replicating the experiment under double-blind conditions, was not able to verify the effect. Susan Blackmoreexperimental psychologist and experienced researcher of "paranormal" experiences, was reluctant to give up on the theory just yet. She said "When I went to Persinger's lab and underwent his procedures I had the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had....I'll be surprised if it turns out to be a placebo effect." Persinger, however, takes issue with the Swedish attempts to replicate his work. "They didn't replicate it, not even close," he says. He argues that the Swedish group did not expose the subjects to magnetic fields for long enough to produce an effect. He also stresses that some of his studies were double blinded.



A report of an experiment on Richard Dawkins in 2003 said The experiment is based on the recent finding that some sufferers from temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological disorder caused by chaotic electrical discharges in the temporal lobes of the brain, seem to experience devout hallucinations that bear a striking resemblance to the mystical experiences of holy figures such as St Paul and Moses

Dawkins was reported not to have experienced a religious feeling. The report said "Dr Persinger has explained away the failure of this >Transcranial Magnetic Stimulator. Before donning the helmet, Prof Dawkins had scored low on a psychological scale measuring proneness to temporal lobe sensitivity."

Direct link to this Wikipedia article

The following is an article written by Robert Hercz for the October 2002 issue of SATURDAYNIGHT magazine

THE GOD HELMET




By inventing a piece of wired-up headgear that induces "religious" experiences in the people who put it on, Sudbury neurologist Michael Persinger has shaken the foundation of faith and science. "Now remember, these are subtle effects," says Michael Persinger. "Don't try to force anything. Just relax and go with the experience." I feel him adjust the yellow motorcycle helmet, studded with electromagnets, that I'm wearing. I hear him step out of the soundproof chamber and pull the heavy door closed behind him. If all goes well, I am about to have a powerful mystical experience.

The time - a Saturday night in May - certainly feels ripe. Laurentain University in Sudbury, Ontario, is between semesters and eerily deserted. Besides Persinger and Linda St-Pierre, a research associate, the only living creatures I've seen on campus are lab rats preparing to die for science. Now I'm alone in an unnaturally quiet room with wires attached to my head, I'm wearing a blindfold, and someone working a control panel is about to bathe my brain in complex magnetic fields.

Astonishing things have happened in this chamber. One woman believed her dead mother had materialized beside her. Another felt a presence so powerful and benign that she wept when it faded. British journalist Ian Cotton understood that he was, and always had been, a Tibetan monk. Psychologist Susan Blackmore writing in New Scientist said she felt something "get hold of my leg and pull it, distort it, and drag it up the wall... Totally out of the blue, but intensely and vividly, I suddenly felt anger... Later, it was replaced by an equally sudden attack of fear." Over a thousand volunteers have worn the helmet, and 80 percent of them, Persinger says, experienced a "sesed presence - the feeling that someone's standing near you, the feelings there must be something greater, the feeling of infinite possibilities."

I want some of that.

For the first half of my 60-minute session, though, nothing happenes. When something does, it is - alas - a subtle effect indeed. The field of swirls and blotches on the inside of my eyelids - the ordinary optical noise tat your brain generates when your eyes are closed - begins to brighten. The usual dull reds and browns give way to glowing purple streaks and zigzags with sharp, well-defined edges. It's a silent, vivid little light show that pleases me greatly, but it is over in a minute or two. More silence, more nothing. Then suddenly I feel my head being lifted, expanding, filling the chamber. It's a brief, distorting, yet enjoyable sensation - but it's not the Meaning of Life.

Ah, but I wasn't a good subject for the experiment, Persinger explains afterwards: I had come with expectations. Usually, subjects are told only that they're participating in a relaxation exercise, but I knew that my brain - specifically the first-sized regions under my temples, the temporal lobes - would be stimulated with magnetic fields that can evoke unusual experiences. That knowledge broke the spell. If those subtle effects had come unexpectedly (when I was alone on a mountaintop, perhaps) they might have taken on a much greater significance. And people have such experiences, on mountaintops, in deserts and on roads to Damascus, because the yellow helmet is optional. Some people, Persinger says, create those weak, complex fields by themselves. Others are particularly sensitive to the magnetic fields, natural and manufactured, that wax and wane around us. People who experience a presence that feels powerful, invisible and sentient often associate it with the supernatural. Not surprising - but wrong, Persinger believes. Religious experiences, he says, are creations of the brain.

My results aside, Persinger's work has put him at the forefront of a new field called neurotheology, the attempt to understand religion from the brain's point of view, or why, as another neurologist has said, "instead of God creating our brains, our brains created God." Such quests may capture the imagination of the public, but Persinger's efforts are disdained by the general scientific community. He expects no less. "Most scientists follow the wave. That's what drives granting... everybody follows like a herd," he says. "There are very few scientists who have the courage to pursue the essence of human existance."

Michael Persinger didn't build his helmet to find God. He set out to locate (and perhaps summon) the creative state of necessary for scientific discovery. A common type of epileptic seizure without obvious convulsions - an electrical storm in the brain that has long been associated with mystics and visions - is centered for the most part in the temporal lobes. Persinger guessed that by gently tickling those areas with a magnetic pattern programmed to resemble an epileptic seizure, he might induce similar feelings of insight and significance. Sure enough, his first subjects reported meaningful experiences, most commonly the "sensed presence." When asked to describe them, they didn't call the feelings creative or inspirational, but religious.

From these results with ordinary - that is, not epileptic - subjects, Persinger hypothesizes that true temporal-lobe epileptics aren't different from the rest of us in kind, but in degree. On the spectrum of temporal lobe excitibility (or lability), they're the most extreme cases. Plenty of people ("most of your musicians, artists or writers") have sensitive temporal lobes that undergo what Persinger has termed "micro-seizures." These aren't accompanied by outward signs such as convulsions, but they are sometimes accompanied by a mystical experience. The least temporally sensitive among us have microseizures only under extreme conditions such as anxiety, bereavement or prolonged fasting.

My less-than-supernatural experience with the helmet suggests that my temporal lobes aren't very excitable, which disappoints me. I wanted to be in the sensitive artists group. There is an upside, though. "If you're too temporally labile, you tend to self-medicate with booze and things," Persinger says. Maybe he's just trying to make me feel better.

Research into conciousness is in its infancy, so what actually conjures the sentient presence is anyone's guess. Current studies suggest that the sense of self - which maintains the boundary between you and the outside world - is created in the left temporal lobe. When you lose that boundary, you feel integrated with the whole universe; that's one kind of religious experience. Stimulating the right temporal lobe envokes a right-hemispheric equivalent sense of self, which the brain interprets as another entity. The "sensed presence," in other words, is the right hemisphere's sense of self, which we're only aware of when the signalsin the right lobe rise above normal levels. There are reports of such experiences in every culture, Persinger notes. The ancient Greeks called it the Muses. Moses, St. Paul, Joan of Arc and Mohammed - all of whom were probably epileptic, says some scientists - called it the voice of God.

After my session, we negotiated the basement warren of labs and officers that belong to the Neuroscience Research Group (essentially an alias for Persinger and his grad students) and settle into one of them to talk. Over Persinger's left shoulder are shelves of brains - rat, bear, human, whole, sliced, and quartered - sealed in Tupperware. Persinger, immaculate in a three-piece pinstripe suit, crisp white shirt and gold cufflinks, looks a little incongruois in juxtaposition, but no one has ever seen him in any other attire. "He mows the lawn in a three-peice suit," Linda St-Pierre tells me, which makes me laugh. "No, I'm serious," she says. Persinger later confirms this is true.

Michael Persinger was a navy brat, born in Florida to a chief petty officer attached to an atomic bomb delivery squadron (which took him away for six months at a stretch). He grew up in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, and Wisconsin. As a boy he was less academically inclined than "extraordinarily inquisitive," testing electricity's effects on tadpoles and blowing apart bell jars in an attempt to recreate the beginnings of life.

According to his navy father, real men didn't go to college, so Michael was a double disappointment when he entered the University of Wisconsin (on a track and field scholarship) and then became a draft doger. Coming to Canada in 1969 was a serious step; he believed he was leaving the United States for ever. He arrived at the border prepared for a life of exle and conflict, both political and professional.

"I realised that the objectivity and methodology of science often brought you into confrontation with the society of the day," he says. "I knew from the history of science that this was not unusual."

Persinger (who became a Canadian citizen in the early 1970s) has spent his entire career in the psychology and biology departments at Laurentian. While in recent decades science has been sliced into increasingly narrow specialties, Persinger remains a big-picture thinker, as much natural philosopher as scientist. His personality precludes anything else. Ask him a question, and Persinger, talking rapidly, switching from chemistry to biology to psychology, will deliver a riff on the myriad associations your quetsion has triggered. He wishes more scientists thought his way.

"We're frontier researchers, the cutting edge, not necessarily because we're great, but because we do interdisciplinary research," he says. "And interdisciplinary research, unless we change our university system, is going to be gone. Most contemporary scientists are supertechs, the super technicians - and that's not an insult, that's the nature of the technology of our society. But we have to realize that certain problems aren't going to be solved unless you have the integrators. And this problem - the idea of mystical experience, the nature of consciousness, the brain basis to God - isn't going to be solved by any single discipline because it's human experience, which is not a single disipline."

He's an atheist, says religious belief is "a cognitive virus" and proclaims on his web page that his research has been "encouraged by the historical fact that most wars and groups degradations are coupled imlicitly to god beliefs." But he wants to be clear: he is worrid not about religion itself, but about the way it polarizes society. In fact, he says, being religious might be a valuable adaptive strategy, letting us "minimize the fear of death," through "the possibility of immortality." It has to be, or we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for it.

"Suppose you can anticipate your personal demise. Well, that precipitates tremendous anxiety, and anxiety is devastating to cognitive processes. So from a natural selection point of view, you can see why individuals would have been selected if they could minimize that anxiety," he explains. "The minute a person can affiliate themselves with this concept of infinite and forever, there is no personal death, and consequently there is no reason to have anxiety. You can see why people become addicted to it." When Karl Marx wrote that religion is the opiate of the masses, he thought he was being metaphysical. Persinger thinks there's a good chance that Marx was writing the literal neurochemical truth.

This is just the sort of talk that has moved small groups to hold occassional prayer meetings on his office doorstep, but Persinger doesn't see why his helmet should ruffle feathers. He's only claiming that our brains are predisposed to generate religious experiences. He's not saying there is no God, though the way he delivers that message won't gladden the hearts of the faithful. "The way God is defined - infinite, forever - is an empty hypothesis. You can't test it one way or another. Perhaps everything is created by non-physical, invisible pink elephants."

Despite its mystical reverberations, Persinger foresees plenty of practical applications for his work.He's adapting the helmet technology for treating depression and pain; in tests on rats he's found a magnetic pattern that has the effect of morphine. He's also testing it as a means of preventing epileptic seizures. And he thinks the brightly coloured spots I experienced, properly directed, could send visual information directly into the brains of the blind, a kind of "visible braille."

There are more exotic applications. The technology's apparition conjuring ability has already been used for ghost-busting. In 1993 Don Hill, a broadcaster who hosted the CBC radio program Tapestry, bought a house in Canmore, Alberta, which he became convinced was haunted. He had such disturbing experiences that he sold the house in 1994 and began a four-year investigation, which led him to Michael Persinger's lab. In the soundproof chamber Hill re-experienced the ghost that had terrified him in Canmore. Persinger, monitoring Hill's brain activity from outside the chamber, stopped the experiment when Hill panicked. But Hill had seen enough, and the experience liberated him: knowing the ghost was a creation of his own brain extinguished his fear.

Persinger thinks that same sort of demonstration might have a salutry effect on the sorts of people who fly airplanes into buildings. "If we understand more about how the God experience occurs, the idea that it's truly true, without doubt, will at least be challenged. If I can imitate these experiences with a very simple technology, then we know it's coming from the brain, so when someone hears a voice saying, 'Hello, this is Allah, God, Buddha, whoever, go and smash your neighbour's head in,' then maybe there's another way of looking at it." Persinger's surveys show that an astonishing 40 percent of Canadian male university students who have temporal lobe lability, go to church once a week and had a religious experience before their teen years agree with the statement "If God told me to kill, I would do it in his name."

Finally, we come to Persinger's greatest hope for the helmet technology. "Can we use it to decrease the anxiety in an increasingly secular world?" he asks. "People dying of cancer, who don't believe in God - we could use that stimulation to allow the feeling of wholeness, to allow the feeling of personal development. In the future, you may find a space in the average home, much like in the Eastern tradition, which is basically your God centre, where you sit down, 'expose' yourself - it may not be a helmet by then - where you would be able to pursue your own personal development. Do we have a technology here that will allow us to purse the last greatest mystery, which is your own introspection?"

A consummation devoutly to be wished. Also a fine irony: the technology replacing the God it helps unseat.

Persinger's work on religious experiences has attracted a good deal of attention - he's been featured in stories in Wired and New Scientist and in a neurotheology cover story in Newsweek,among many others. But his God-in-the-head work is only a small fraction of his output. In 30 years, he has published more than 300 papers and seven books, and, except for the neurotheology material, the mainstream press doesn't even mention them in passing. Why? Because neurotheology is a safe, and the rest is not. (If neurotheology weren't safe, it wouldn't have made the cover of Newsweek. The new discipline's findings are absolutely consistent, after all, with what science has been doing to religion for 500 years. No one should be shocked. Titillated, maybe, but not shocked.) But Persinger's other interests? The world may not be ready.

The minute I met him, Persinger mentioned that Sean Harribance, a famous psychic, had come to Sudbury to be studied. He sat in the soundproof chamber while handling photographs in sealed envelopes, describing what he couldn't see. "His brain is quite different." After September 11, the Pentagon sequestered Harribance with some photos of its own, Persinger says. "I have a hunch who the pictures were of," he adds.

Persinger has also studied UFO sightings, and here too he occupies a unique spot on the skepticle divide. He believes UFOs aren't alien spacecraft, but electromagnetic discharges created by stresses in the tectonic plates that form the earth's crust. According to Persinger's Tectonic Strain Theory, these discharges can create real, luminous shapes in the air, or generate the inside-the-brain lightening I enjoyed under the helmet. He's found that UFO sightings are correlated with earthquake activity: as the tectonic strain that precedes an earthquake increases, so do the number of reported sightings. (Calling these phenomena spaceships, ironically, is merely a marker of our secular, science-oriented times, Persinger notes. He has published a paper pointing out that in 1968 and 1969, thousands witnessed luminous phenomena over a church in Egypt as seismic activity increased tenfold in the region. They were sure they'd seen the Virgin Mary. in the other eras, they would have seen a spirte or demon.)

There's more, much more, almost all of it built on the belief that we are influenced, in ways we have only recently been able to measure, by the magnetic fields around us. Those fields are thickening. "We're living more and more in a complex electromagnetic environment where the experiences of the effects may not be obvious," he says. Will he use a cellphone? "If I ever had to because of an emergency, yes."

Persinger has written dozens of papers illustrating these effects, describing everything from a young woman who slept with an electric clock 20 cm from her head and claimed to have been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, to geomagnetic storms - high solar activity that creates a worldwide disturbance of the earth's magnetic field - that apparently makes epileptic rats more aggressive and increase the rate of sudden cardiac death. But can these investigations (in truth, more speculations than investigations, most showing correlation, not causion) be called science? Other scientists don't think so, Peringer admits.

"Generally the response from scientists is two-sided - and two-faced," he says. "Under the anonymity of grant reviews, it's always, 'nonsense,' 'Why do it?' When they're in front of you, however, it's always, 'This is fantastic,' 'This is what science is, the pursuit of the unknown.' Initiatory research has never been accepted."

I've experienced that reaction myself, on Persinger's behalf. A few weeks ago, a retired scientist I know asked me what I was working on. I got as far as "There's this researcher who's built a helmet that lets you experience God -" when he interrupted: "In other words, a kook."

When they're on the record, as Persinger notes, scientists are much more generous, offering only mild or no criticism. Andrew Newberg, an assistant professor in the department of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, has used brain imaging to study people in meditation and prayer. He, like Persinger, has concluded that the brain is pre-wired to experience spiritual states. Newberg is willing to quibble with some of Persinger's theories, for example that temporal lobe seizures cause all religious experiences (if they did, then most temporal-lobe epileptics should have such experiences; in fact only a small fraction actually do), but overall, he says, Peringer's brain research is sound. Still, as far as Persinger knows, not a single researcher has been intigrated enough by his magnetic stimulation to start experimenting with it, which is not an encouraging index of its impact. It also exacerbates Peringer's isolation, since in science there is no credibility without replication.

Funding agencies, where grant applications are peer reviewed under the protection of anonymity, offer another index of Persinger's status in the research community. For 30 years, Persinger has applied to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for a research grant, and 30 times he's been turned down (he's planning to apply again this year). Laurentian provides the space, but almost all of his research has been financed out of his own pocket from the money he makes as a clinical psychologist (which explains why his equipment looks more Canadian Tire than NASA). Last year, he got a small grant, his first in decades, from the Bial Foundation in Portugal, which funds the "scientific study of both physical and spiritual Man."

"The real cutting edge individuals never are funded because funding is a social decision, not a scientific one," Persinger says without a trace of bitterness. "The minute you refer to a peer group to see if they like it, you're asking for social consensus."

Speaking of peers, I'd like to talk to some. Who at Laurentian knows him best? "Actually very few people know me here at Laurentian. This may sound sad, or maybe arrogant, but there really isn't anyone that I interact with," he answers. Anyone? Not even at other universities? "That is correct. I interact more with my wife on these topics than any other peers." In fact, Persinger considers his wife, who has a master's degree in biology, to be his closest peer.

I'm sure his wife thinks he's a real scientist, and for what it's worth, I do, too - an indie scientist. As is the case with indie filmakers, being an outsider leaves him underfunded and ignored, but it gives him the freedom to do what he wants. Unlike them, however, being an "indie" scientist is not yet cool. That makes it all the more admirable.

The first explorers who reached our continent didn't spend years examining and cataloguing the beach they landed on. They wandered exuberantly over the whole face of the new terrain, noting its most prominent features. They wrote subjective impressions in diaries and drew inaccurate maps. They didn't bring home the gold or spices they were looking for, but oddities like tobacco, coffee and coca, whose future value there was no scale to measure. Persinger is the same. Because of a rare personality defect (or strength), he does not require peer approval or recognition. He's a loner content to explore his terra incognita, the magnetic ether we live in. And religious considerations aside, he has found at least one prominent feature of that landscape: with his helmet he seems to have shown that we can perceive a weak magnetic field not with our eyes, ears, nose, mouth or skin, but directly with our brains. That hints at something quite profound: the brain is a sense organ.

If he's right, paradigms will shift and he'll be celebrated. But even if he's wrong, it's still science.

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J Craig Venter-Brilliantly Inspired, and Changing the World

The J. Craig Venter Institute

J. Craig Venter Interview in Wired
Picture this: You are standing at the edge of a lagoon on a South Pacific island. The nearest village is 20 miles away, reachable only by boat. The water is as clear as air. Overhead, white fairy terns hover and peep among the coconut trees. Perhaps 100 yards away, you see a man strolling in the shallows. He is bald, bearded, and buck naked. He stoops every once in a while to pick up a shell or examine something in the sand...

Wikipedia Biography

Venter is an ex-surfer and a Vietnam war veteran. According to Time, it was not always evident that he would become a transformative figure, particularly when he was a boy; according to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said to be never a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds in his eighth grade report cards.
He enlisted in the United States Navy and served a tour of duty during the Vietnam War. While in Vietnam, he attempted to commit suicide by swimming out to sea, but changed his mind more than a mile out.

Venter began his academic career at a community college, College of San Mateo in California.

More...


He received his bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1972, and his Ph.D. in physiology and pharmacology in 1975 — both from the University of California, San Diego. In San Diego, he married former Ph.D. candidate, Barbara Rae. After working as a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he joined the National Institutes of Health in 1984. In Buffalo, he divorced Dr. Rae-Venter and married his student, Claire M. Fraser,[ and remained married to Ms. Fraser until 2005.
While at NIH, Venter learned of a technique for rapidly identifying all of the mRNAs present in a cell, and began to use it to identify human brain genes. The short cDNA sequence fragments discovered by this method are called expressed sequence tags, or ESTs, a name coined by Anthony Kerlavage at The Institute for Genomic Research. In a controversial court case, Venter tried to patent these gene fragments and lost the case.

Human Genome Project

He was the former president and founder of Celera Genomics, which became famous for running a parallel version of the Human Genome Project of its own for commercial purposes, using shotgun sequencing technology in 1999. The method was blasted by the international genetics community who derided it as unfeasible. The aim of the Celera project was to create a database of genomic data that users could subscribe to for a fee. This proved very unpopular in the genetics community and spurred several groups to redouble their efforts to produce the full sequence and release it as open access. At the same time, the HGP consortium applied political pressure to appropriate the shotgun technology and the collected data from Venter's company. There were also concerns that Venter might shatter what was supposed to be an "international" face on a landmark event in history. DNA from 5 individuals was used by Celera to generate the sequence of the human genome; one of the 5 individuals used in this project was Venter. In the end, Celera Genomics submitted to the pressure and shared its data and the credit for sequencing of the human genome with the international consortium of the Human Genome Project, which was composed of many groups from around the world. After his inability to collect royalties for the Human Genome, Venter was fired by Celera in early 2002.

Venter resisted efforts by the company board to change the strategic direction of the company.
Despite their differing motivations, Venter and rival scientist Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000, along with US President Bill Clinton. Venter and Collins thus shared an award for "Biography of the Year" from A&E Network.

Current work

Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in 1992. He is currently the president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, created and funded by TIGR's board (which Venter chairs). In June of 2005, he co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a firm dedicated to using modified microorganisms to produce ethanol and hydrogen as alternative fuels. He used his sloop, Sorcerer II, in the Global Ocean Sampling Expedition to help assess genetic diversity in marine microbial communities.

On September 4, 2007, a team led by Sam Levy published the first complete (six-billion-letter) genome of an individual human — Venter's own DNA sequence. Some of the sequences in Venter's genome are associated with wet earwax, increased risk of antisocial behavior, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular diseases. This publication was especially interesting since it contained a diploid instead of a haploid genome and shows promise for personalized medicine via genotyping.
The Human Reference (HuRef) Genome Browser is a Web application (http://huref.jcvi.org) for the navigation and analysis of the Venter's recently published genome.

The HuRef database consists of approximately 32 million DNA reads sequenced using Sanger methods, assembled into 4,528 scaffolds and 4.1 million DNA variations identified by genome analysis. These variants include Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), block substitutions, short and large indels, structural variants like insertion, deletions, inversions and copy number changes.

The browser enables scientists to navigate the HuRef genome assembly and sequence variations, and to compare it with the NCBI human build 36 assembly in the context of the NCBI and Ensembl annotations. The browser provides a comparative view between NCBI and HuRef consensus sequences, the sequence multi-alignment of the HuRef assembly, Ensembl and dbSNP annotations, HuRef variants, and the underlying variant evidence and functional analysis. The interface also represents the haplotype blocks from which diploid genome sequence can be inferred and the relation of variants to gene annotations. The display of variants and gene annotations are linked to external public resources including dbSNP, Ensembl , Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) and Gene Ontology (GO).

Users can search the HuRef genome using HUGO gene names, Ensembl and dbSNP identifiers, HuRef contig or scaffold locations, or NCBI chromosome locations. Users can then easily and quickly browse any genomic region via the simple and intuitive pan and zoom controls; furthermore relevant data in specific loci can be exported for further analysis.
[edit]Mycoplasma laboratorium

Venter is seeking to patent the first life-form created by humanity, possibly to be named Mycoplasma laboratorium. There is speculation that this line of research could lead to producing bacteria that have been engineered to perform specific reactions, e.g. produce fuels, make medicines, combat global warming, etc.

In a recent interview with New Scientist when asked "Assuming you can make synthetic bacteria, what will you do with them?", Venter replied

Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it. Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could make.
Furthermore it suggests that one of the main purposes for creating synthetic bacteria would be to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels.

algae biofuel, the future is now

Watch this.  This is profound.

Remote Viewing (on Wikipedia)

Remote Viewing (RV) refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community.

One of the early experiments was lauded as having improved the methodology of remote viewing testing and as raising future experimental standards, but also criticized as leaking information to the participants by inadvertently leaving clues. Some later experiments had negative results when these clues were eliminated.

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Remote viewing, like other forms of extra-sensory perception, is generally considered as pseudoscience due to the need to overcome fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles currently held by the scientific community, and the lack of a positive theory that explains the outcomes.

History

From World War II until the 1970s the US government occasionally funded ESP research. When the US intelligence community learned that the USSR and China were conducting ESP research, it became receptive to the idea of having its own competing psi research program.

Early Stanford Research Institute experiments

In 1972 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) laser physicist Hal Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature, in Proceedings of the IEEE and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, then the head of the Office of Technical Service and later the Agency's Deputy Director, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its "skeletons," and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort.

Sponsorship was picked up by the Air Force, led by analyst Dale E. Graff of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1979, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which had been providing some taskings to the SRI investigators, was ordered to develop its own program by the Army's chief intelligence officer, Gen. Ed Thompson. CIA operations officers, working from McMahon's office and other offices, also continued to provide taskings to SRI's subjects.

The program had three parts. First was the evaluation of psi research performed by the U.S.S.R. and China, which appears to have been better-funded and better-supported than the government research in the U.S.

In the second part of the program, SRI managed its own stable of "natural" psychics both for research purposes and to make them available for tasking by a variety of US intelligence agencies. The most famous results from these years were Pat Price's description of a big crane at a Soviet nuclear research facility, a description of a new class of Soviet strategic submarine by a team of three viewers including Joseph McMoneagle and Rosemary Smith's location of a downed Soviet bomber in Africa (which former President Carter later referred to in speeches). By the early 1980s numerous offices throughout the intelligence community were providing taskings to SRI's psychics.

The third branch of the program was a research project intended to find out if ESP – now called "remote viewing" – could be made accurate and reliable. The intelligence community offices that tasked the group seemed to believe that the phenomenon was real. But in the view of these taskers, a remote viewer could be "on" one day and "off" the next, a fact that made it hard for the technique to be officially accepted. Through SRI, individuals were studied for years in a search for physical (e.g., brain-wave) correlates that might reveal when they were "on- or off-target".

At SRI, Ingo Swann and Hal Puthoff also developed a remote-viewing training program meant to enable any individual with a suitable background to produce useful data. As part of this project, a number of military officers and civilians were trained and formed a military remote viewing unit, based at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Decline and termination

A struggle between unbelievers and believers in the sponsor organizations provided much of the program's actual drama. Each side seems to have been utterly convinced that the other's views were wrong.

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith, Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing's validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.

After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated.

AIR evaluation of remote viewing

In 1995, the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research, a perennial intelligence-industry contractor, to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the remote-viewing program, the Stargate Project. Most of the program's results were not seen by the evaluators, with the report focusing on the most recent experiments, and only from government-sponsored research. One of the reviewers was Ray Hyman, a long-time critic of psi research, and another was Jessica Utts who, as a supporter of psi, was chosen to put forward the pro-psi argument. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect, with some subjects scoring 5%-15% above chance. Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, "is premature, to say the least." Hyman said the findings had yet to be replicated independently, and that more investigation would be necessary to "legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning." Based upon the study, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project in 1995. Time magazine stated in 1995 three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be shut down.

According to the official AIR report there was insufficient evidence of the utility of the intelligence data produced. David Goslin, of the American Institute for Research said, "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community."

PEAR's Remote Perception program

Following Utts' emphasis on replication and Hyman's challenge on interlaboratory consistency in the American Institutes for Research report, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab conducted several hundred trials to see if they could replicate the SAIC and SRI experiments. They created an analytical judgment methodology to replace the human judging process that was criticized in past experiments. They felt the results of the experiments were consistent with the SRI experiments.

Distant viewing and Stephan Schwartz

Parallel with the work at SRI, Stephan A. Schwartz, who had just left government as Special Assistant to the US Chief of Naval Operations, developed almost the same protocol which he called Distant Viewing. To study this, he began a research laboratory known as Mobius. A central question in the seminal IEEE paper was whether RV was electromagnetic in nature, or something else. Schwartz had begun to consider how this might be studied in 1973, after reading the work of Soviet Academician Leonid Vasiliev, the tutor for Russian psychic Nina Kulagina. This work had eliminated all of the EM spectrum except for very low frequency ranges, known as ELF.

Testing in the ELF range required a submarine, because the only shield for ELF is hundreds of feet of seawater. In 1976 Schwartz was offered the use of a small submersible, capable of the depth required, by University of Southern California Institute for Marine and Coastal Studies. In 1977, as the experiment was about to go to sea, he invited SRI to assist in the study. The Project, known as Deep Quest, was carried out with logistical support from the USC Institute. It took place off of Santa Catalina Island. Two remote viewings, one by Hella Hammid, and one by Ingo Swann, described where target individuals were hiding in California. Both sessions were conducted while the submarine was at depth, and both were considered successful by the researchers. The targets were, respectively, a tree and a shopping mall. Swann commented his site "could be City Hall."

The experiment also tested a protocol Schwartz had devised involving five multiple viewers. Four were given charts of the Pacific Ocean and were asked to locate an unknown wreck on the seafloor. They chose as their location a 10 mile square area near Santa Catalina. The sunken vessel was determined by the Bureau of Land Management Marine Sites Board to be previously unknown. A documentary was shot as the events took place of the entire project was made. But the riches which Schwartz and his investors have sought in their many undersea expeditions have never been found. The ship Schwartz's team found on the Bahamas Banks was carrying molasses, not the treasure that was their goal.

Schwartz also claims he was involved in the discovery and the first modern mapping of the Eastern Harbor of Alexandria and the discovery of numerous shipwrecks as well as Mark Anthony's palace in Alexandria, the Ptolemaic Palace Complex of Cleopatra, and the remains of the Lighthouse of Pharos. Much of this was discounted by two on-site Egyptian scholars whom Schwartz had listed as research associates, Dr. Shehetta Adam, head of Egypt's Department of Antiquities and Dr. Mostafa El Abbadi.


Scientific analysis

According to psychologist David Marks in experiments conducted in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute, the notes given to the judges contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the page. Dr. Marks concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates.

Marks has also suggested that the participants of remote viewing experiments are influenced by subjective validation, a process through which correspondences are perceived between stimuli that are in fact associated purely randomly. Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unattainable.

Others have said that the information from remote viewing sessions can be vague and include a lot of erroneous data. A 1995 report for the American Institute for Research contains a section of anonymous reports describing how remote viewing was tentatively used in a number of operational situations. The three reports conclude that the data was too vague to be of any use, and in the report that offers the most positive results the writer notes that the viewers "had some knowledge of the target organizations and their operations but not the background of the particular tasking at hand."

According to James Randi, controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has said that he agrees remote viewing has been proven using the normal standards of science, but that the bar of evidence needs to be much higher for outlandish claims that will revolutionise the world, and thus he remains unconvinced:

"I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do. (...) if I said that a UFO had just landed, you'd probably want a lot more evidence. Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don't have that evidence." Richard Wiseman Daily Mail, January 28, 2008, pp 28-29

Wiseman also pointed at several problems with one of the early experiments at SAIC, like information leakage. However, he indicated the importance of its process-oriented approach and of its refining of remote viewing methodology, which meant that researchers replicating their work could avoid these problems. Wiseman later insisted there were multiple opportunities for participants on that experiment to be influenced by inadverted cues and that these cues can inluence the results when they appear.

Psychologist Ray Hyman says that, even if the results were reproduced under specified conditions, they would still not be a conclusive demonstration of the existence of physic functioning. He blames this on the reliance on a negative outcome -- the claims on ESP are based on the results of experiments not being explained by normal means. He says that the experiments lack a positive theory that guides as to what to control on them and what to ignore, and that "Parapsychologists have not come close to (having a positive theory) as yet". Ray Himan also says that the amount and quality of the experiments on RV are way too low to convince the scientific community to "abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles", due to its findings still not having been replicated successfully under careful scrutiny.

Science writer Martin Gardner, and others, describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience. Gardner says that founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist prior to his work at Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that had been written by Puthoff while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system [Scientology] from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it is in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology." Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.

Pseudoscientific Concepts

Claims:
Certain people have the paranormal ability to use their minds to see hidden, distant locations using the psychic powers of extra-sensory perception.
Related scientific disciplines:

Physics, Biology, Psychology
Year proposed: 1974

Original proponents:
Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff

Current proponents:
Ingo Swann, Russell Targ, Joseph McMoneagle, and Courtney Brown

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