Science news...

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Gene causes retardation in Down syndrome: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gene mutation that shrivels brain cells may be responsible for the mental retardation seen in Down syndrome, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The finding suggests there may be a way to interfere with or even reverse the mental decline often seen as people with Down syndrome get older. The finding, published in the journal Neuron, also may apply to Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said.

"If we can decrease the expression of this gene we may be able to provide something more than supportive care to people with Down syndrome," said neurologist Dr. William Mobley of the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in California.

Reducing gene expression turns down the activity of a gene.

Down syndrome is the most frequent genetic cause of mental retardation and affects one out of 800 babies born. It is caused when people have an extra copy of chromosome 21, making three instead of two.

It causes early learning difficulties, sometimes causes childhood heart disease and leukemia. Most people with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's disease by the age of 40.

The researchers worked with genetically engineered mice to find the gene, which is called App -- short for amyloid precursor protein. Mutations are known to cause early-onset Alzheimer's disease in otherwise healthy people.

Like people with Down, the mice had three abnormal copies of the App gene. When the researchers deleted the third copy of App in the mice, the animals became more normal.

"We're now investigating ways in which we might be able to turn down App expression," Mobley said in a statement.

"It's not even necessary to turn it off completely. All we need to do is to reduce it by one-third, from 150 percent of normal back down to 100 percent," said Dr.Ahmad Salehi, who led the study.

The researchers stressed that deleting the third copy of App did not restore the mice to normal, so other genes must also affect the brain decline.

"First we need to figure out at a molecular level how App works in Down syndrome," Mobley said. "Then we need to examine other genes that might be involved and test possible compounds in mouse and human cells. If we are able to do all that, we might begin to think of helping children and adults with Down syndrome to develop and age more normally."

 

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Good to know.

Bird droppings survive space launch



HOUSTON - NASA's rocket scientists have a new appreciation for the out-of-this-world power of bird droppings. The orbiting space shuttle Discovery sported some whitish splotches on its black right wing edge that NASA officials said appeared to be bird droppings.

Shuttle lead flight director Tony Ceccacci said he saw the same splotches on the identical part of the shuttle about three weeks ago when Discovery was on the launch pad and laughed when pictures beamed back from space Wednesday showed they were still there.

That means these bird droppings withstood regular Florida thunderstorms, a mighty Fourth of July launch during which 300,000 gallons of water is sprayed at the shuttle's main engines, and a burst upward through Earth's atmosphere. During that launch Discovery went from zero to 17,500 mph in just under 9 minutes.

And still the bird droppings remained in place. Mostly.

Some of the droppings may have shaken off during liftoff, Ceccacci guessed. He figures the rest will burn up during landing, when the shuttle's edges get as hot as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rob Fergus, science coordinator for Audubon At Home, a division of the National Audubon Society, sometimes gets calls from people asking how to remove bird excrement from their cars.

"Usually they can hose it off," he said. "Apparently that doesn't work with the space shuttle. Maybe they need a bigger hose."

 

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The Bizarre Sex Life of an Orchid


Scientists have discovered an orchid that never needs to get a date—it can fertilize itself by performing a sexual act never before seen in flowers.

The hermaphroditic orchid shuns the sexual practices of other flowers and completes the deed without the help of sticky liquids, birds or even a breath of wind, a new study reveals.


Many flowers rely on insects or birds, which they attract with sweet scent or tasty nectar, to help with fertilization. The hungry animals brush against the pollen-producing male bits (anther) of one plant and transfer it to the opening of a neighboring flower's female reproductive organs (stigma). Wind can also help this process along, although it's not as direct.


The orchid, Holcoglossum amesianum, performs a tricky, 360-degree, gravity-defying dance to pollinate itself. Here's how it works [Images]:


First, the cap covering the male anther pops off, uncovering two pollen-holding pollinia attached to a flexible rod called a stipe. The stipe rises up before curving forward and downwards past the edge of the rostellum, a structure that separates the male and female parts of the orchid. Finally, the stipe curves back up and around the rostellum and inserts the pollinia into the stigma cavity.


While most flowers spread their pollen to other plants, the new orchid is extremely exclusive and only mates with itself. The self-pollination act was also successful in flower terms, producing fruit about 50 percent of the time.


Of the 1,911 H. amesianum orchids the scientists observed growing on tree trunks in Simao, Yunnan, China, all used the same self-pollination strategy. This method of self-pollination, which comes in handy when winds are gentle or insects are lacking, adds to the variety of mechanisms flowering plants have evolved to ensure success.

 

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16 Organic Apples and a Gallon of Gas

Do you like the taste of juicy organic apples from Washington? They're not bad, but they could taste sweeter if each one didn't involve a cup of gasoline.

In your quest to eat healthier food and do better by the environment, you might want to place more value on local food products than on organic foods.

It might seem sacrilegious to pooh-pooh organic food—that is, food grown in pooh-pooh as opposed to synthesized fertilizers and pesticides. But as revealed in the June issue of Sierra magazine, the environmental price for organic foods is sometimes hidden.

Simply put, one must consider transportation costs. Apples grown in the state of Washington are trucked, on average, more than 1,700 miles. That adds up to a cup of gasoline used to ship each apple. California grapes require up to 4 cups of gasoline per bunch when shipped across the country. And so on.

These calculations were originally published in 2004 in a book chapter in "Environment Development and Sustainability 6," by David Pimentel of Cornell University and his colleagues.

Go local

Also, mass-produced foods, either grown by organic or conventional methods, are usually picked well before ripening to prevent rotting during shipping. They are less tasty and contain fewer vitamins and minerals compared to local varieties. In fact, this summer is a good time to visit a local farmers' market and talk to the sellers about these issues.

I'm not anti-organic. I need to state that up front considering the angry email I received after I suggested that visiting untrained, unlicensed naturopaths practicing medicine based on medieval superstition could harm your health. I am, after all, reading Sierra, the pro-environmental magazine of the Sierra Club.

I merely hope to point out that blindly buying organically can be foolhardy.

Consider that unless you are eating rocks, all food is organic. Technically, organic refers to anything with a chain of hydrogen and carbon atoms. All living organisms are organic. So is gasoline. So is dry-cleaning fluid, which I now see advertised as "organic" by unscrupulous merchants capitalizing on the public perception that "organic" equals "safe."

What's in a word

The word "organic" has come to mean plant-based food grown without synthetic fertilizers, as well as animals fed organic food during the few months to few years they were alive. It doesn't inherently mean healthy or fair.

Organic manure could contain lead and cadmium, naturally. Organic junk foods can be just as unhealthy as conventional junk food, albeit with organic fat and sugar. The organic label says nothing about the rights of Central American workers growing organic bananas in squalid conditions, nor is it concerned with the similarly disgusting conditions in which organic meat, eggs and dairy products are often manufactured.

After all, organic is big business these days—nearly $14 billion in 2005, according to the Organic Trade Association—and big business is often business as usual.

Not so with local farming.

Local almost always means small-scale and thus more environmentally benign, fresher, healthier and cruelty-free. Talk to the farmer at the farmers' market. He might use a little pesticide but likely not much because the food product is well-suited to the environment.

Less gas

The apples I buy at a farmers' market in Baltimore are grown less than 50 miles away, and each apple "consumes" less than a teaspoon of gas on its journey to the market. Unlike the strangely happy cow on a carton of Horizon organic milk, the cows producing the (non-organic but hormone-free) milk sold locally walk freely and feed on grass and hay; they're not pen-raised and fed organic grains they cannot digest, as can be the case with some organic milks.

With support of local farms, fewer farms get turned into asphalt-covered shopping malls and housing complexes, which in turn means fewer natural wetlands, forests and deserts are turned into mass-commercial farms. Supporting local farms, organic or not, also fights our perverse global food market in which $20 million in U.S.-grown lettuce is exported to Mexico while $20 million Mexican-grown lettuce is imported to the United States each year, as reported in the May-June issue of Mother Jones.

Some of the food at my farmers' market is organic; other food is not. I don't worry so much, as long as it is local. I can trust the food because I'm buying it from the person who produced it.

 

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Women's Brains React Surprisingly Fast to Erotic Images


Erotic images elicit faster and stronger electrical responses in a woman's brain than other images ranging from pleasant to disturbing.

The finding might not sound surprising, but researches did not expect responses to erotic images to emerge so quickly, apparently involving different circuits than the processing of other images.

"That surprised us," said study leader Andrey Anokhin of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. "We believed both pleasant and disturbing images would evoke a rapid response, but erotic scenes always elicited the strongest response."

The test involved 264 women who were shown 55 images of water skiers, snarling dogs, partially clad couples in sensual poses, and other scenes.

Electrodes on the subjects' scalps measured brain activity.

The signals begin firing long before a subject was conscious of what she was seeing, the researchers reported recently in the journal Brain Research.

Erotic images elicited neuron firing within 160 milliseconds—about 20 percent faster than occurred with any of the other pictures. The stimulation then branched out to different brain regions for erotic images compared to the others.

Previous research indicated men are more aroused by erotic images than women, so Anokhin and his colleagues expected women to respond with lower levels of brain activity compared to men.

"But that was not the case," Anokhin said. "Women have responses as strong as those seen in men."

The monitoring method, called electroencephalogram (EEG), was used because it could distinguish tiny time differences. But it can't pinpoint specific brain locations where the activity occurs. Such accuracy would require similar studies using MRI and PET scans.

The next question on Anokhin's mind: Whether or not the human prefrontal cortex contains special neurons tuned for sex.

 

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Scientists Aim to Duplicate Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak


WASHINGTON (AP)—Imagine an invisibility cloak that works just like the one Harry Potter inherited from his father.
Researchers in England and the United States think they know how to do that. They are laying out the blueprint and calling for help in developing the exotic materials needed to build a cloak.

The keys are special manmade materials, unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These materials are intended to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around an object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

"Is it science fiction? Well, it's theory and that already is not science fiction. It's theoretically possible to do all these Harry Potter things, but what's standing in the way is our engineering capabilities,'' said John Pendry, a physicist at the Imperial College London.

Details of the study, which Pendry co-wrote, appear in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

Scientists not involved in the work said it presents a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.

"This is very interesting science and a very interesting idea and it is supported on a great mathematical and physical basis,'' said Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Engheta has done his own work on invisibility using novel materials called metamaterials.

Pendry and his co-authors also propose using metamaterials because they can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation—radio waves and visible light, for example—in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

"Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as someone wears a cloak made of this material,'' said Patanjali Parimi, a Northeastern University physicist and design engineer at Chelton Microwave Corp. in Bolton, Mass. Parimi was not involved in the research.

Such a cloak does not exist, but early versions that could mask microwaves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation could be as close as 18 months away, Pendry said. He said the study was "an invitation to come and play with these new ideas.''

"We will have a cloak after not too long,'' he said.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supported the research, given the obvious military applications of such stealthy technology.

While Harry Potter could wear his cloak to skulk around Hogwarts, a real-world version probably would not be something just to be thrown on, Pendry said.

"To be realistic, it's going to be fairly thick. Cloak is a misnomer. 'Shield' might be more appropriate,'' he said.

 

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Long-Distance Pen Devised by Author Margaret Atwood


Margaret Atwood has fans on five continents; those book signing tours must be exhausting. Not content to merely write science fiction, she has created a device she calls a LongPen, which allows her to meet and sign books for her fans all over the world from her own home. And in doing so, she has brought into being the telautograph/telephot combination, about which Hugo Gernsback dreamed almost one hundred years ago.
The fan sits down at a desk at a bookstore near his home, and presents his book. He can greet the author via the Internet video chat setup. The author sits in the comfort of her home and greets her fans, signing the book via the Internet-connected LongPen. Once the author has decided what to write, she writes it out on a touchpad.

The LongPen makes use of an old-fashioned pen for the signing; it faithfully reproduces the author's comments and signature on the fan's book.

I wonder if Margaret Atwood knows that she has fully realized not just her own dream, but Hugo Gernsback's as well. In his 1911 classic Ralph 124c 41 +, he writes about a telautograph with a video connection (the Telephot):

She hesitated, and then, impulsively, "I wonder if it would be too much to ask you for your autograph?"
Ralph then attached the Telautograph to his Telephot while the girl did the same. When both instruments were connected he signed his name and he saw his signature appear simultaneously on the machine in Switzerland.
(Read more about Hugo Gernsback's telautograph)

Atwood, a Canadian writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, plans to unveil the device at the London Book Fair in two weeks. She remarks:

"You don't have to be in the same room as someone to have a meaningful exchange," she said. "As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this.'"
(From Booker winner's robot brainwave)
You might be surprised to know that the idea of sending a signature by wire to a remote location was actually realized in the 19th century; click to read more about pantelegraph and Gray's telautograph. Read more about this story at Booker winner's robot brainwave may spell the end of the book tour; see the device video at the Unotchit website.

 

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Everyone on Earth Has Royal Roots

Actress Brooke Shields has a pretty impressive pedigree—hanging from her family tree are Catherine de Medici and Lucrezia Borgia, Charlemagne and El Cid, William the Conquerer and King Harold, vanquished by William at the Battle of Hastings.
Shields also descends from five popes, a whole mess of early New England settlers, and the royal houses of virtually every European country. She counts renaissance pundit Niccolo Machiavelli and conquistador Hernando Cortes as ancestors.

What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing—at least genealogically.

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

"Millions of people have provable descents from medieval monarchs,'' said Mark Humphrys, a genealogy enthusiast and professor of computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland. "The number of people with unprovable descents must be massive.''

By the same token, for every king in a person's family tree there are thousands and thousands of nobodies whose births, deaths and lives went completely unrecorded by history. We'll never know about them, because until recently vital records were a rarity for all but the noble classes.

It works the other way, too. Anybody who had children more than a few hundred years ago is likely to have millions of descendants today, and quite a few famous ones.

Take King Edward III, who ruled England during the 14th century and had nine children who survived to adulthood. Among his documented descendants are presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, both Roosevelts), authors (Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), generals (Robert E. Lee), scientists (Charles Darwin) and actors (Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields). Some experts estimate that 80 percent of England's present population descends from Edward III.

A slight twist of fate could have prevented the existence of all of them. In 1312 the close adviser and probable lover of Edward II, Piers Gaveston, was murdered by a group of barons frustrated with their king's ineffectual rule. The next year the beleaguered king produced the son who became Edward III.

Had Edward II been killed along with Gaveston in 1312—a definite possibility at the time—Edward III would never have been born. He wouldn't have produced the lines of descent that ultimately branched out to include all those presidents, writers and Hollywood stars—not to mention everybody else.

Of course, the only reason we're talking about Edward III is that history remembers him. For every medieval monarch there are countless long-dead nobodies whose intrigues, peccadilloes and luck have steered the course of history simply by determining where, when and with whom they reproduced.

The longer ago somebody lived, the more descendants a person is likely to have today. Humphrys estimates that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.

Some people have actually tried to establish a documented line between Muhammad, who was born in the 6th century, and the medieval English monarchs, and thus to most if not all people of European descent. Nobody has succeeded yet, but one proposed lineage comes close. Though it runs through several strongly suspicious individuals, the line illustrates how lines of descent can wander down through the centuries, connecting famous figures of the past to most of the people living today.

The proposed genealogy runs through Muhammad's daughter Fatima. Her husband Ali, also a cousin of Muhammad, is considered by Shiite Muslims the legitimate heir to leadership of Islam.

Ali and Fatima had a son, al-Hasan, who died in 670. About three centuries later, his ninth great-grandson, Ismail, carried the line to Europe when he became Imam of Seville.

Many genealogists dispute the connection between al-Hasan and Ismail, claiming that it includes fictional characters specifically invented by medieval genealogists trying to link the Abbadid dynasty, founded by Ismail's son, to Muhammad.

The Abbadid dynasty was celebrated for making Seville a great cultural center at a time when most of Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. The last emir in that dynasty was supposed to have had a daughter named Zaida, who is said to have changed her name to Isabel upon converting to Christianity and marrying Alfonso VI, king of Castile and Leon.

Yet there is no good evidence demonstrating that Isabel, who bore one son by Alfonso VI, is the same person as Zaida. So the line between Muhammad and the English monarchs probably breaks again at this point.

But if you give the Zaida/Isabel story the benefit of the doubt too, the line eventually leads to Isabel's fifth great-granddaughter Maria de Padilla (though it does encounter yet another potentially fictional character in the process).

Maria married another king of Castile and Leon, Peter the Cruel. Their great-great-granddaughter was Queen Isabel, who funded the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Her daughter Juana married a Hapsburg, and eventually gave rise to a Medici, a Bourbon and long line of Italian princes and dukes, spreading the Mohammedan line of descent all over Europe.

Finally, 43 generations from Mohammed, you reach an Italian princess named Marina Torlonia.

Her granddaughter is Brooke Shields.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Everyone on Earth Has Royal Roots

And everyone in the world is decended from some woman in Africa back in the beginning of time somewhere.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

The Bizarre Sex Life of an Orchid



First, the cap covering the male anther pops off, uncovering two pollen-holding pollinia attached to a flexible rod called a stipe. The stipe rises up before curving forward and downwards past the edge of the rostellum, a structure that separates the male and female parts of the orchid. Finally, the stipe curves back up and around the rostellum and inserts the pollinia into the stigma cavity.

The jade plant on my desk just popped quite a boner.

Seriously, this is weird, because the reason we have sex is to mix our genes and increase the possibility of variation and increase our chances of survival, and this orchid seems headed in the opposite direction.

We didn't always have sex. Asexual reproduction by budding or celluar fission was the norm for hundreds of millions of years. It's a lot easier than sexual reproduction and more reliable. The problem is, the children are always identical to the parents, generation after generation.

Sex first developed in one-celled organisms in the ocean something like 2.5 billion years ago as best we can tell, and once it did, there was an absolute explosion of new life forms and new species. That's when life really took off and started to take over the planet.

There's some algae that does sex by bringing two regular cells together, making a little tunnel between them, and injecting the entire contents of one cell into the other where their genetic material and cytoplasm can all tangle around and mix together. When they're done, the material separates and they both go back to their own cells and start budding off children. That's about as intimate as you can get, and there've been times when I've been so in love that I wished I could do something like that.

I always get off on the fact that flowers are actually sex organs. Suddenly you see how roses are teases and lilies are whores and daises lie there with their legs open. When you give flowers to a girl what you're really doing is waving a bunch of sex organs iin her face. Could you be any more blatant?

 

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Voice of Reason: Research Debunks 'Barbie Ideal
Once again, Barbie was one of the best-selling toys this past holiday season. Mattel’s world-famous fashion doll has become a cash cow, selling nearly $2 billion of merchandise each year. Barbie has also become part of many a girl’s childhood.

Just before Christmas, however, a team of British researchers announced that many young girls mutilate and torture their Barbie dolls. According to University of Bath researcher Agnes Nairn, “the girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity….The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking, and even microwaving.” The reason, Nairn said, was that girls saw Barbie as childish, an inanimate object instead of a treasured toy.

What’s this? Aggression against the beloved Barbie, the beaming plastic icon of (allegedy) idealized beauty? Could it be that society has misinterpreted how young girls view Barbie? For decades, journalists and social critics have assumed that young girls idolize Barbie dolls, but little actual research has been done on the topic. In the absence of evidence, assumption and speculation ran rampant.

Barbie has been blamed for a variety of social ills. Time magazine columnist Amy Dickinson claimed in 2000 that “Women my age know whom to blame for our own self-loathing, eating disorders and distorted body image: Barbie.” In her feminist best-seller The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf bashes Barbie, and views the doll as an imaginary “ideal” woman. Boston College sociology professor Sharlene Hesse-Biber also believes that Barbie “is the perfect figure presented to little girls as ‘ideal.’” The claim is echoed in hundreds of books, Web sites, magazine articles, and television programs.

Yet recent evidence, including the University of Bath study, suggests that the “Barbie ideal” may be a myth. Just because a girl plays with a Barbie doll does not mean she idolizes it or views it as a physical role model. Critics cite statistics such as that if Barbie were real, she couldn’t walk upright, or bear children.

But of course Barbie is not real, and was never intended to represent a healthy body or physical ideal. While Barbie has long been badgered about her “unhealthy” shape, no one complains that Mr. Potato Head’s tubby physique is even less healthy. Girls are far more intelligent than Barbie critics give them credit for; they know their dolls are just that: dolls.

The girls in the British study are not alone. One adult woman in an informal survey reminisced, “Mostly I helped my brother decapitate Barbies and threw limbs in neighbors’ yards. No one told me I should look like Barbie and I never felt like I should look like her.” Said another, “I never regarded Barbie as a model for a real person. I actually hated her shape because it made it hard to put clothes on her.”

The claim that Barbie can cause eating disorders also rests on shaky assumptions. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are serious diseases that cannot be “caught” from playing with dolls. Research has shown that the disorders are strongly influenced by genetic factors, not thin dolls or media images.

It seems that not a single survey, poll, or study has shown that girls actually want to look like Barbie dolls. In the rush to criticize Barbie and thin images, the assumptions got ahead of the scientific evidence. Eating disorders and self-esteem are important issues, but have little to do with Barbie dolls. So parents can relax: the kids are alright—even if they torture Barbie now and then.

 

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Jesus Could Have Walked on Ice, Scientist Says

Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.

The study, which examines a combination of favorable water and environmental conditions, proposes that Jesus could have walked on an isolated patch of floating ice on what is now known as Lake Kinneret in northern Israel.

Looking at temperature records of the Mediterranean Sea surface and using analytical ice and statistical models, scientists considered a small section of the cold freshwater surface of the lake. The area studied, about 10,000 square feet, was near salty springs that empty into it.

The results suggest temperatures dropped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius) during one of the two cold periods 2,500 –1,500 years ago for up to two days, the same decades during which Jesus lived.

With such conditions, a floating patch of ice could develop above the plumes resulting from the salty springs along the lake's western shore in Tabgha. Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found.

"We simply explain that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region only a handful of times during the last 12,000 years," said Doron Nof, a Florida State University Professor of Oceanography. "We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account."

Nof figures that in the last 120 centuries, the odds of such conditions on the low latitude Lake Kinneret are most likely 1-in-1,000. But during the time period when Jesus lived, such “spring ice” may have formed once every 30 to 60 years.

Such floating ice in the unfrozen waters of the lake would be hard to spot, especially if rain had smoothed its surface.

"In today's climate, the chance of springs ice forming in northern Israel is effectively zero, or about once in more than 10,000 years," Nof said.

 

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Voice of Reason: Exposing the Da Vinci Hoax


The record bestseller, Dan Brown’s 2004 The Da Vinci Code, has renewed interest in the quest for the Holy Grail, restyling the medieval legend for a public that often gorges itself on a diet of pseudoscience, pseudo-history, and fantasy.

Unfortunately, the book is largely based on obscure, forged documents that have now deceived millions.

The adventure tale begins with Paris police summoning Robert Langdon, an Indiana Jones type, to the Louvre to view the corpse of curator Jacques Saunier. Saunier has been murdered in bizarre circumstances. Soon Langdon and beautiful cryptanalyst Sophie Neveau lead readers on a page-turning treasure hunt across France and England, propelled by a series of puzzles and clues. Along the way, the pair search for a hidden "truth" that challenges mainstream Christianity. Brown drew heavily on the 1982 bestseller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1996), with Lincoln as the conceptual author.

Brown’s novel is predicated on a conspiracy theory involving Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Supposedly the old French word sangreal is explained not as san greal ("holy grail") but as sang real ("royal blood"). Although that concept was not current before the late Middle Ages, Holy Blood, Holy Grail argues that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, with whom he had a child, and even that he may have survived the Crucifixion. Jesus’ child, so the "non-fiction" book claims, thus began a bloodline that led to the Merovingian dynasty, a succession of kings who ruled what is today France from 481 to 751.

Evidence of the holy bloodline was supposedly found in a trove of parchment documents, discovered by Bérenger Saunière, the priest of Rennes-le-Château in the Pyrenees. The secret had been kept by a shadowy society known as the Priory of Sion which harked back to the era of the Knights Templar and claimed among its past "Grand Masters" Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Victor Hugo.

Brown seizes on Leonardo—borrowing from "The Secret Code of Leonardo Da Vinci," chapter one of another work of pseudo-history titled "The Templar Revelation." This was co-authored by "researchers" Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, whose previous foray into nonsense was their claim that Leonardo had created the Shroud of Turin—even though that forgery appeared nearly a century before the great artist and inventive genius was born!

Among the "revelations" of Picknett and Prince, adopted by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, is the claim that Leonardo’s fresco, Last Supper, contains hidden symbolism relating to the sang real secret. They claim, for instance, that St. John in the picture (seated at the right of Jesus) is actually a woman—Mary Magdalene!—and that the shape made by "Mary" and Jesus is "a giant, spreadeagled ‘M,’" supposedly confirming the interpretation. By repeating this silliness, Brown provokes critics to note that his characterizations reveal ignorance about his subject.

Alas, the whole basis of The Da Vinci Code—the "discovered" parchments of Rennes-le-Château, relating to the alleged Priory of Sion—were part of a hoax perpetrated by a man named Pierre Plantard. Plantard commissioned a friend to create fake parchments which he then used to concoct the bogus priory story in 1956. (See Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel, The Da Vinci Hoax, 2004.)

Of course, Dan Brown—with the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation—was also duped by the Priory of Sion hoax, which he in turn foisted onto his readers. But he is apparently unrepentant, and his apologists point out that The Da Vinci Code is, after all, fiction, although at the beginning of the novel, Brown claimed it was based on fact. Meanwhile, despite the devastatingly negative evidence, The Da Vinci Code mania continues. Perhaps Brown should go on his own quest—for the truth.

 

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Study: Sexy Attire Works Against Businesswomen


Attractive people may sometimes have a leg up in climbing corporate ladders. But sexy presentation on its own can work against women who are already well up the ladder.

In a new study, men and women where shown videos of a businesswoman discussing her backgrounds and hobbies. In different tests, she played the part of either a receptionist or a manager. And in one round she wore flat shoes, slacks, and a turtleneck, all considered typical professional attire. In the other, she donned high-heels, a tight skirt, and a low-cut blouse.

The test subjects rated the businesswoman on competence and guessed at her college GPA and the quality of her Alma Mater.

The sexy outfit didn't affect their assessment of the receptionist. But the sexy manager was viewed as less competent.

"A female manager whose appearance emphasized her sexiness elicited less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and perceptions of less competence on a subjective rating scale and less intelligence on an objective scale," the researchers write in the December issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly. "Although various media directed toward women …encourage women to emphasize their sex appeal, our results suggest that women in high status occupations may have to resist this siren call to obtain the respect of their co-workers."

The research was led by Peter Glick, a professor of Psychology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

I always get off on the fact that flowers are actually sex organs. Suddenly you see how roses are teases and lilies are whores and daises lie there with their legs open. When you give flowers to a girl what you're really doing is waving a bunch of sex organs iin her face. Could you be any more blatant?

I love how you think.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don't Use Them





"It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it."
—Author and researcher Gregg Easterbrook

Psychologists have recently handed the keys to happiness to the public, but many people cling to gloomy ways out of habit, experts say.

Polls show Americans are no happier today than they were 50 years ago despite significant increases in prosperity, decreases in crime, cleaner air, larger living quarters and a better overall quality of life.

So what gives?

Happiness is 50 percent genetic, says University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken. What you do with the other half of the challenge depends largely on determination, psychologists agree. As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be."

What works, and what doesn't

Happiness does not come via prescription drugs, although 10 percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men take antidepressants, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Anti-depressants benefit those with mental illness but are no happiness guarantee, researchers say.

Be Happy
University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman offers questionnaires for assessing your happiness, beating depression and developing insights into how to be happier on his web site.




Nor will money or prosperity buy happiness for many of us. Money that lifts people out of poverty increases happiness, but after that, the better paychecks stop paying off sense-of-well-being dividends, research shows.

One route to more happiness is called "flow," an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you're doing than from how you do it.

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside has discovered that the road toward a more satisfying and meaningful life involves a recipe repeated in schools, churches and synagogues. Make lists of things for which you're grateful in your life, practice random acts of kindness, forgive your enemies, notice life's small pleasures, take care of your health, practice positive thinking, and invest time and energy into friendships and family.

The happiest people have strong friendships, says Ed Diener, a psychologist University of Illinois. Interestingly his research finds that most people are slightly to moderately happy, not unhappy.

On your own

Some Americans are reluctant to make these changes and remain unmotivated even though our freedom to pursue happiness is written into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.

Don't count on the government, for now, Easterbrook says.

Our economy lacks the robustness to sustain policy changes that would bring about more happiness, like reorienting cities to minimize commute times.

The onus is on us.

"There are selfish reasons to behave in altruistic ways," says Gregg Easterbrook, author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" (Random House, 2004).

"Research shows that people who are grateful, optimistic and forgiving have better experiences with their lives, more happiness, fewer strokes, and higher incomes," according to Easterbrook. "If it makes world a better place at same time, this is a real bonus."

Diener has collected specific details on this. People who positively evaluate their well-being on average have stronger immune systems, are better citizens at work, earn more income, have better marriages, are more sociable, and cope better with difficulties.

Unhappy by default

Lethargy holds many people back from doing the things that lead to happiness.

Easterbrook, also a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institute, goes back to Freud, who theorized that unhappiness is a default condition because it takes less effort to be unhappy than to be happy.

"If you are looking for something to complain about, you are absolutely certain to find it," Easterbrook told LiveScience. "It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it. Most people take the path of least resistance. Far too many people today don't make the steps to make their life more fulfilling one."

 

[ABSTRUSE]

The Mysterious Origin and Supply of Oil



It runs modern society and fuels serious political tension. But where does oil really come from, and how much is left? The far-out possibilities might surprise you.


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Nature has been transmuting dead life into black gold for millions of years using little more than heat, pressure and time, scientists tell us.

But with gas prices spiking more than $1 per gallon in the United States this year and some experts predicting that the end of oil is near, scientists still don't know for sure where oil comes from, how long it took to make, or how much there is.

A so-called fossil fuel, petroleum is believed by most scientists to be the transformed remains of long dead organisms. The majority of petroleum is thought to come from the fossils of plants and tiny marine organisms. Larger animals might contribute to the mix as well.

"Even some of the dinosaurs may have gotten involved in some of this," says William Thomas, a geologists at the University of Kentucky. "[Although] I think it would be quite rare and a very small and insignificant contribution."

But another theory holds that more oil was in Earth from the beginning than what's been produced by dead animals, but that we've yet to tap it.

How it works

In the leading theory, dead organic material accumulates on the bottom of oceans, riverbeds or swamps, mixing with mud and sand. Over time, more sediment piles on top and the resulting heat and pressure transforms the organic layer into a dark and waxy substance known as kerogen.

Left alone, the kerogen molecules eventually crack, breaking up into shorter and lighter molecules composed almost solely of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Depending on how liquid or gaseous this mixture is, it will turn into either petroleum or natural gas.

So how long does this process take?

Scientists aren't really sure, but they figure it's probably on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

"It's certainly not an instantaneous process," Thomas told LiveScience. "The rate at which petroleum is forming is not going to be the solution to our petroleum supplies."

The United States' latest reminder of its petroleum dependency occurred when hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf of Mexico, where the majority of the country's oil platforms and refineries are located. Many analysts predicted gas prices would surge to $4 and $5 per gallon, but the fears turned out to be overblown. Many of the structures suffered only glancing blows and were operating again soon afterwards.


SPECIAL REPORT
Thinking Beyond Oil

Still, the average price of regular gas nationwide is about $2.94 a gallon now, according to the American Automobile Association. It was $1.77 at the beginning of the year.

Alternative source

The idea that petroleum is formed from dead organic matter is known as the "biogenic theory" of petroleum formation and was first proposed by a Russian scientist almost 250 years ago.

In the 1950's, however, a few Russian scientists began questioning this traditional view and proposed instead that petroleum could form naturally deep inside the Earth.

This so-called "abiogenic" petroleum might seep upward through cracks formed by asteroid impacts to form underground pools, according to one hypothesis. Some geologists have suggested probing ancient impact craters in the search for oil.

Abiogenic sources of oil have been found, but never in commercially profitable amounts. The controversy isn't over whether naturally forming oil reserves exist, said Larry Nation of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. It's over how much they contribute to Earth's overall reserves and how much time and effort geologists should devote to seeking them out.

If abiogenic petroleum sources are indeed found to be abundant, it would mean Earth contains vast reserves of untapped petroleum and, since other rocky objects formed from the same raw material as Earth, that crude oil might exist on other planets or moons in the solar system, scientists say.

Both processes for making petroleum likely require thousands of years. Even if Earth does contain far more oil than currently thought, it's inevitable that reserves will one day run out. Scientists disagree sharply, however, on when that will occur. And, some say, a global crisis could begin as soon as increasing demand is greater than supply, a possibility that might be measured in years rather than decades, some analysts argue.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Brain Areas Shut Off During Female Orgasm

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) -- New research indicates that parts of the brain that govern fear and anxiety are switched off when a woman is having an orgasm.

In the first study to map brain function during orgasm, scientists from the Netherlands also found that as a woman climaxes, an area of the brain that governs emotional control is also heavily deactivated.

“The fact that there is no deactivation in faked orgasms means a basic part of a real orgasm is letting go. Women can imitate orgasm quite well, as we know, but there is nothing really happening in the brain,'' said neuroscientist Gert Holstege, presenting his findings Monday at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

In the study, Holstege and his colleagues at Groningen University recruited 11 men and 13 women, together with their respective partners.

The volunteers laid on a scanning machine bed and were injected with a dye that shows changes in brain function on a scan. For the men, the brain scanner tracked activity during rest, during erection, during manual stimulation by their partner and then during ejaculation, brought on by the partner's hand.

For the women, the scanner measured brain activity during rest, while they faked an orgasm, during manual stimulation by their partner, and while they experienced genuine orgasm.

Holstege said he had trouble getting reliable results from the study on men because the scanning machine needs activities lasting at least two minutes to record an activity. But the men's climaxes didn't last anywhere near that long, meaning he could not reliably compare the scans before climax and during.

However, for women, the results were clear, he said.

When women faked orgasm, the cortex, the part of the brain governing conscious action, lit up. It was not activated during genuine orgasm.

The most striking results, however, were seen in the parts of the brain that shut down, or deactivated.

“During orgasm, there was strong, enormous deactivation in the brain. During fake orgasm, there was no deactivation of the brain at all. None,'' Holstege said. “It looks like to have an orgasm, you need to not be fearful or full of anxiety.''