American Buddhist Net

A new mathematical model indicates that dust devils, water spouts, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones are all born of the same mechanism and will intensify as climate change warms the Earth's surface.

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By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer 17 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains.

When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.

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Meanwhile: Summit that's hard to swallow - world leaders enjoy 18-course banquet as they discuss how to solve global food crisis

George Washington
Friday, July 06, 2007

I can debunk NIST's new report - which claims that fires alone brought down WTC 7 - in one sentence. I'll do so by linking to a New York Times article :

Partly EVAPORATED Steel Beams Were Found At WTC 7; But Normal Office and Diesel Fires are Not NEARLY Hot Enough to Evaporate Steel.

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Consider how these findings may say something about meditation, and how experienced meditators benefit from a generally more stable system. ABN
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July 02, 2008

A fantastic new study which looked at the 'connectedness' of the human brain has identified which aspects of the underlying network are the most important routes of communication.

The research was led by neuroscientist Patric Hagmann and combines brain imaging with network mathematics to not only visualise the brain's network but also to understand which are the most important hubs and connections.

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Thu Jul 3, 2008

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.

The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

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03 July 2008
By Heather Whipps

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

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jakeogh, 2 July 2008

Important notes:

1. Molten metal produced on 9/11 would cool quickly and not stay molten for weeks (as is reported by the witnesses below) without a continuing chemical reaction adding heat to the debris piles.
2. The WTC debris pile fire was oxygen-poor.
3. The images below represent surface temperatures, the "optical depth" is at the most a few millimeters. (source)
4. Thermal Data was Used to Direct Firefighting Efforts.
5. This page is updated frequently.

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Survey shows that profound mental changes induced by psilocybin have lasted for more than a year

By David Biello
July 1, 2008

People who took magic mushrooms were still feeling the love more than a year later, and one might say they were on cloud nine about it, scientists report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."

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A new approach to the decades-old problem of quantum gravity goes back to basics and shows how the building blocks of space and time pull themselves together

By Jerzy Jurkiewicz, Renate Loll and Jan Ambjorn
June, 2008

* Quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity are famously at loggerheads. Physicists have long tried to reconcile them in a theory of quantum gravity—with only limited success.

* A new approach introduces no exotic components but rather provides a novel way to apply existing laws to individual motes of spacetime. The motes fall into place of their own accord, like molecules in a crystal.

* This approach shows how four-dimensional spacetime as we know it can emerge dynamically from more basic ingredients. It also suggests that spacetime shades from a smooth arena to a funky fractal on small scales.

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June 30, 2008 10:20 AM, by Chris Chatham

Attention training through meditation can reduce the duration of the "attentional blink" - in which detection of a first rare target causes people to be unaware of a second target presented soon after the first - according to research by Slagter et al from PLoSBiology.

The attention blink effect is "attentional" because it only occurs when subjects actually detect the first target, and therefore reflects some kind of a refractory period for attentional orienting: consider it the duration of the "blink" of the mind's eye. You can try it here.

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Sun Jun 29, 2008
Julie Watson

Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.

But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.

If death had a sound, this was it.

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28 June 2008 - 5:27pm. Applied Science

Homosexual behavior is largely shaped by genetics and random environmental factors, according to findings from the world's largest study of twins.

Researchers from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm report in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that genetics and environmental factors (which are specific to an individual, and may include biological processes such as different hormone exposure in the womb), are important determinants of homosexual behavior.

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Suggestion: Two areas researchers might want to take studies on meditation are lucid sleep and hypnotic states. Then compare the three. I would be interested to know what, if any, differences there are between the deep meditative states of an experienced meditator and the deep lucid sleep states of someone experienced in that. Same for hypnotic states, though experience with them would not be necessary. ABN
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June 27, 2008 12:44 PM, by Chris Chatham

As discussed earlier this week, meditation may be an alternative form of brain training - or "brain untraining" - that shows transfer to tasks requiring cognitive control. There have been a few updates to this fascinating line of research, not least of which is a fascinating paper by Amishi Jha and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania. They showed that relative to a control group, meditation influences particular components of attention in ways that are compatible with beliefs long held in the meditation community.

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The Five Skandhas (Five Aggregates) taught by the Buddha are: form, feeling, perception, activity, consciousness. They go in order. First is "form," which is anything that arouses "feeling"; it can be a memory, a thought, or a sensory stimulus. "Feeling" indicates attraction, aversion, or a neutral response to "form." "Perception" indicates our first coherent sense of what the form "is"; note that this is still not a conscious state. "Activity" indicates our first mental or physical activities following "perception." These include both mental and physical activities; flinching is a clear example of a pre-conscious physical "activity." Lastly, there is "consciousness." Consciousness is described as being like a banana tree, which has a "trunk" that is made of leaves curled together. When you peel apart these leaves (the first four skandhas), nothing else is there. There is no solid trunk and thus, consciousness itself--our conscious sense of having an intrinsic "own being"--is an illusion. This is basically what is meant when it is said that the Five Skandhas and all that is built upon them (the conscious "self") are "empty."

The article linked here is the latest confirmation of the Buddha's teachings from the field of neuroscience. We believe the Buddha's take on these "latest" findings about how the mind works is better than the one suggested in the article and recommend reading it from a Buddhist point of view. ABN
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June 27, 2008; Page A9

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.

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by Keith Wakelam

Over the past twenty years Valerie Hunt, a Physical Therapist and Professor of Kinesiology at U.C.L.A. California, has developed a method of detecting certain peaks of high frequency electrical impulses within the human body, which she believes relate to a non-physical energy field surrounding the body. It corresponds to ancient teachings regarding the human aura and the system of vortices known as the Chakras.

Medical science has shown that all living creatures maintain electro-chemical processes in their bodies - human beings more so, because of the electrical activity of their brains. Complicated signal pulses are constantly being passed along nerve fibres throughout the body. Valerie's work involved the study of human muscle movement by means of Electromyographs. This instrument picks up the electro-chemical pulses sent along the nerves to activate the muscles. The strength of the muscle reaction depends solely upon the frequency of such pulses. The highest pulse frequency in the motor nerves is around 250 Hz.

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* 25 June 2008
* NewScientist.com news service
* Amanda Gefter

Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. One key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. If there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe.

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Finding sheds light on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods

June. 25, 2008

WASHINGTON - Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

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By Alexis Madrigal EmailJune 25, 2008 | 11:46:45 AMCategories: Mars

Martian_soil Drizzle once fell on Martian soil, according to a new geochemical analysis by Berkeley scientists, though the rain probably stopped several billion years ago.

Drawing on soil data from the five missions to Mars before the current Phoenix Lander and comparing it to information collected in Earth's driest places, the scientists concluded that water must have fallen from above, not welled up from below, as has been thought.

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“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” -The Buddha
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Book Review of "The Secret History of the World", by Jonathan Black
June 24th, 2008
John Evans

...The simplest way to explain his subject is to state that science has become a militant materialist philosophy that believes matter precedes mind. Some scientists have even called consciousness “a disease of matter,” as if it were an interloper in a senseless universe.

This view is the complete opposite of what a majority of the greatest minds throughout history have believed — or better, known.

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By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

WASHINGTON (AP) — Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

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I am not worried about this experiment, but one thing is certain--if the people who filed the suit against CERN are right, we will never know. ABN
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David Pescovitz, June 24, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider slated to be fired up in September isn't likely to accidentally generate any Earth-devouring black holes. That's according two new reports, including a safety review by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The world's most powerful particle accelerator may crank out black holes, but they'll be so tiny and vanish so quickly that we shouldn't worry. I wonder if these reports will appease those who filed a lawsuit against CERN fearing that the machine might suck Earth into a parallel universe.

I like the concept, but the wording below could be improved. The following is just a suggestion that draws on Buddhist traditions. I am sure it can be improved on:

ABN
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I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.

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Well-worth reading. ABN
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By Chris Anderson

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

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By KENNETH CHANG
Published: June 20, 2008

After a decade of shouting, “Follow the water!” in its exploration of Mars, NASA can finally say that one of its spacecraft has reached out, touched water ice and scooped it up.

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Nine percent said they have seen misbehavior. Now add to that all the misbehavior that was not seen or admitted to in the survey. ABN
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Jun 18, 2008
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Research misconduct at U.S. institutions may be more common than previously suspected, with 9 percent of scientists saying in a new survey that they personally had seen fabrication, falsification or plagiarism.

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