Under the Radar: November 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

8 percent of your DNA is made of...

retroviruses!

Yep.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070227213714.htm

Friday, November 23, 2007

Future history of the world, 2015

Get over the first minute... the rest is fascinating... and I have read these ideas in various places... Here, all these ideas are summarized and extrapolated in a few minutes...

Most people have no idea what is coming...

http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/new-masterfs1.html

This is an updated version. The original was for 2014. This one is for 2015.

Here is the cover of Reason Magazine from June 2004... the one with a picture of "your own house" on the cover.

And here is the Reason Magazine article from that issue.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29148.html

Thursday, November 22, 2007

One of the best sites I have seen...

I read about this site in an article by Rhodri Marsden in The Independent.

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3177183.ece

How stumbleupon.com works is not obvious from the samples on the front page. You really need to sign up and then pick say 5 to 10 categories.

I spent the first few hours saying wow to 80% of what I saw. I had never seen 95% of the sites before, even in categories in which I am very interested. I can see why it was voted one of the top 100 sites.

Basically, what it does is show you websites that are highly rated by other people with an interest in the category. You will see really surprising things. Try to resist bookmarking everything... but if you see things at the beginning that interest you, it might be a good idea to bookmark them because they will show you the most highly rated sites first. If your browser has a history, all the sites will be there.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

New Opening for The Age of Biology

Nova used to open with, well, a nova... But the 21st century will be the century of biology, and so the opening has been substantially changed...

In fact, there doesn't seem to be a nova in it... The opening starts with a spiral galaxy, and ends with a spiral galaxy...

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Fabulous Five

To anyone who was living in Hawaii in the early '70s, just say the magic words:

HIC, Al Davis, Bob Nash, Dwight Holiday, John Penebacker, Jerome Freeman, "Red" Rocha, Chuck Lehey, the Fabulous Five...

and you will get a grin from ear to ear... The HIC never rocked like that! Everyone was glued to their TVs and radios... Probably the most fun I have ever seen... and they kept winning and winning...

http://starbulletin.com/1999/10/26/news/story8.html

http://starbulletin.com/2004/02/22/business/story1.html

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Comet Holmes a few days after its discovery in 1892

Here is a picture of Comet Holmes a few days after its discovery almost exactly a hundred and fifteen years ago in 1892!

It is the round bright object in the lower left corner.

Holmes was given a medal by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes

And here is the page announcing the award!
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?journal=PASP.&year=%3F%3F%3F%3F&volume=...5&letter=.&db_key=PRE&page_ind=54&plate_select=NO&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_GIF&classic=YES

Comet Holmes

--William Hood Photography

The above photograph was taken near Los Angeles International Airport!
It has also just been published online by Sky & Telescope at
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/gallery/skyevents/11088956.html

Click on the link below to see some amazing framed prints! Take a look at the Sierra Sunsets and the astrophotos! Jawdropping!

http://members.aol.com/wmhoodphoto/index.htm

Monday, November 12, 2007

The Blog Turns One!

This blog is a year old... and what a year it's been!

Looking forward to little and big things... 3D movies, mobile computing, genetic therapy, first contact...

Streaming radio is everywhere

If you haven't poked around iTunes or at the webpages of radio stations, you may not be aware that you can usually listen to streaming radio online... it works nearly flawlessly nowadays...

Here is Hawaii public radio... I listened to A Prairie Home Companion on this station the other day... amazing... being in Japan and listening to HPR broadcast a program from National Public Radio... for free... in real time...

http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/hpr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=30

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Totally charming video

Video of the Hayabusa Mission to Asteroid Itokawa... totally charming and very intensely sweet Japanese anime sensibility... in a video about robotic probes!

I love the little robot jumping around on the surface like a Mexican jumping bean...

And it almost made it... only the sample return at the end failed... and so it remains, for a little while longer, in the realm of dreams...

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Comet Holmes

Waaay out in the asteroid belt, there are a lot of icy cometlike asteroids. They are so far from the Sun that they hardly give off any gas and dust, and so they are often indistinguishable from asteroids.

One of these is Comet Holmes, which was observed only once a century ago when it suddenly started giving off a lot of dust and gas.

Then, last week, something happened. Comet Holmes suddenly brightened a million times and is now easily visible to the naked eye! Either the outer crust cracked, or something slammed into it, exposing the more volatile gas and dust below.

I saw it last night. Even with a lot of light pollution, it is conspicuous as a fuzzy starlike object. All the stars nearby look sharp, but the comet is obviously fuzzy to the naked eye. In binoculars, it looks just like this!

IT IS NOW BIGGER THAN THE SUN!!!

http://starbulletin.com/2007/11/11/news/story04.html

Here are directions for finding it.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/10912981.html

ISBN-13: 978-0295985350

みなしご元禄津波
The Orphan Tsunami of 1700

One winter's night in the year 1700, a mysterious tsunami flooded fields and washed away houses in Japan. It arrived without the warning that a nearby earthquake usually provides. Samurai, merchants, and villagers recorded the event, but nearly three centuries would pass before discoveries in North America revealed the tsunami's source.

The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 tells this scientific detective story through clues from both sides of the Pacific. The evidence uncovered tells of a [magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest] a century before Lewis and Clark...

You can see a summary at
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1707/

http://www.amazon.com/Orphan-Tsunami-1700-Japanese-Earthquake/dp/0295985356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204357404&sr=1-1

Video simulation of the megaquake.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=72698052150208427&q=pacific+northwest+megaquake&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Map of simulation of the megaquake.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/supercomputer/02-08Virtual90Megaquake.asp

A tsunami is unlike any "wave" you have ever seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jixyBvjJZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl8giZ66j7o

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

Liberal, optimistic, exhilarating. The most spectacular lectures you will ever see.

www.ted.com

Try these to start

The best presentation ever... legendary... your view of the world will change in many ways... and there will be hope...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

The World Now Eats (and Dies) Like Americans
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/10

Extremely graphic... even made me queasy... but you cannot understand the light without knowing the darkness...
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/142

The Law of ACCELERTING Returns

You have probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns: more effort gets you only marginal increase in reward (for example, if you exercise for half an hour a day, you get most of the health benefits; if you exercise for an hour a day, you get almost all of the health benefits; and exercising for two, three, or four hours a day will give very little added health benefits).

However, there are situations in which reward does not diminish (at least for a long while) and actually speeds up over time. People tend to see progress in technology as proceeding in a linear fashion, so they expect the 21st century (barring something truly unfortunate) to progress something like the way the 20th century did. But according to Ray Kurzweil, the technical progress in the 21st century will be more like 1,000 times that of the 20th century.

Here is an example. Cost to read the DNA of one person
in 1990: 3 billion dollars
in 2005: 2 million dollars
in 2006: 200,000 dollars
target for 2010-2015: 1,000 dollars

Being able to read your DNA will allow medical treatments to be tailored specifically for you, vastly improving outcomes.

This BBC Horizon program is, granted, sensational infotainment, but it is probably the most efficient introduction to this topic.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3882715179234602208&q=human+v2.0&hl=en

The article below is very long, and there may be parts that are difficult to follow, but look over the entire article because it is a map of the world we are already living in, and it shows what looms up the road.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Step 1: Slow the ageing process

Something that humans have seen only once is about to happen again: functional lifespan will vastly increase.

This happened the first time in the 20th century with improvements in public health, sanitation, nutrition, vaccination, and pharmaceuticals. Someone from the 19th century would not believe how low our risk of death is, how free of disability and pain we are, and how long we live now. Things are hardly perfect, but to all humans who lived before the early 1900s, the world we live in now would be an unbelievable paradise.

In the next leap, we will not only live even longer, but disease and disability will often be delayed by years if not decades. If we can just make it through the next 15 years or so, the interventions will be unbelievable. It is quite possible that many of us, even those in middle age, will live to see the dawn of the 22nd century, looking and feeling like 40. I am not joking.

So, how do we improve our chances of getting there? Doing basic things to take care of your health is obvious, but there are other things that can be done.

We have known for 70 years how to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of the diseases of old age: eat less. Or more exactly, reduce the number of calories while maintaining adequate amounts of protein, fats, vitamins, and other nutrients. The difference is shocking, and it has been shown in animals from ameba to monkeys without exception. Basically, when calories are low, cells turn on genes that fix damage, so you age more slowly. Fasting at least once a month seems to produce most of the desired effect.

If you have not seen this New York Times article, take a look at the monkeys.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/health/nutrition/31agin.html?ex=1163480400&en=193a4a4fe169ec69&ei=5070

The monkeys are both about 25 years old. The one on the right ate a normal diet and is old, frail, gray, scruffy, and has the shrunken skull of an old monkey (like a 90 year old human). The one on the left ate a diet with the same nutrients, but with about 30 percent fewer calories. The contrast is shocking. The monkey that ate fewer calories still looks young and healthy (like a 60 year old human).

So, step one is avoid excess calories, especially from sugar, white bread, white rice, and white potatoes.

But the amount by which you have to reduce calories is quite difficult for most people to maintain. Is there another way we can turn on the damage repair genes? The answer seems to be yes.

Throughout human evolution, we have always eaten plants that were far from perfect. They were drought stressed, attacked by fungi, and attacked by insects. Ironically, this seems to have been good for us. When plants are attacked or do not receive enough water, they produce huge numbers of chemicals to defend themselves. In seasons when there were a lot of these chemicals in plants, animals eating the plants used that as a signal that hard times may be coming, so their cells turned on the damage control genes to protect what the cells already had. We also did not have steady supplies of food, so whenever we didn't eat for a day, again the damage control genes turned on. Specifically, unnecessary molecular tags are removed from the DNA, returning gene expression to the way it was when we were younger. In modern life, all the plants we eat are completely protected from fungi and insects and are watered carefully. All the stress response chemicals that they would normally produce are not there. We never go for a day without eating. Therefore, our damage control genes are never turned on, so the molecular tags on our DNA become more and more different from the way they were when we were young, our gene expression becomes more abnormal, and we age at a high rate.

If we consume chemicals that plants make in response to stress, it turns on the damage control genes, and voila, the effect is the same as caloric restriction, although it is unclear what dose is necessary. One chemical that has been shown to turn on damage control genes is resveratrol, which is found in the skin of grapes, especially when the grape plants are stressed by drought or fungus infection, and is found in many other plants as well. Since people who drink red wine made from grapes harvested and processed in the French way seemed to have extremely low levels of heart disease, researchers tried screening red wines from France to find out if there were compounds which produced the effect. Resveratrol is the most potent found so far. When given to laboratory animals, it slows ageing by 20% and even much more, and it decreases risk of cancer by up to 70%. Further evidence comes from numerous studies showing that consumption of 3 glasses of red wine per week is associated with 70% reduction in colon cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and other cancers.

I have been taking resveratrol for two years now, and I think the effects are apparent. When I stopped for 6 months because I ran out, the skin started to look old and wrinkled. Resveratrol is easily destroyed by exposure to air, heat, and light. I take the one from Longevinex at
http://www.longevinex.com
because it seems to be the most biologically active. It costs about a dollar a day, which is much cheaper than a glass of wine, though much less fun, so I do both.

These results are not obscure, but you may not have heard about them. Do a Google search for any of these topics and you will find thousands of hits.

So, step 1, let's at least do simple basic things to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of serious diseases of old age. You may be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. 万歳！

Under the Radar

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

8 percent of your DNA is made of...

Friday, November 23, 2007

Future history of the world, 2015

Thursday, November 22, 2007

One of the best sites I have seen...

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

New Opening for The Age of Biology

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Fabulous Five

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Comet Holmes a few days after its discovery in 1892

Comet Holmes

Monday, November 12, 2007

The Blog Turns One!

Streaming radio is everywhere

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Totally charming video

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Comet Holmes

The shunning of the dollar and the braking for peak oil

ISBN-13: 978-0295985350

Blog Archive

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)

The most spectacular salon ever: Edge

The Law of ACCELERTING Returns

Step 1: Slow the ageing process

Something that humans have seen only once is about to happen again: functional lifespan will vastly increase.

Take a look at my other blog!