Crescit Eundo

• How many people are in space right now?  When I first clicked on the link, there were 3 — but a few days ago, that number changed to 6: a Russian Soyuz capsule with a 3-man international crew docked without a hitch to the International Space Station.  I hope I live long enough to see that number change multiple times a day.
• Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 (£310,000) a trip.  In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement programme would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.  Accompanying the founders of the new Mars colony would be large amounts of equipment, including machines to produce fertiliser, methane, and oxygen from Mars’ atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide and the planet’s subsurface water ice.  The Red Planet pioneers would also take construction materials to build transparent domes, which, when pressurised with Mars’ atmospheric CO₂ could grow earth crops in Martian soil.  As the Mars colony becomes more self-sufficient, the big rocket will begin transporting more people and fewer supplies and equipment.  Musk reckons the oxygen concentration inside should be 30-40% and envisions using the spacecraft’s liquid water store as a barrier between Mars pioneers and the sun.  “The ticket price needs to be low enough that most people in advanced countries in their mid-40s or thereabouts could put together enough money to make the trip,” he said, comparing the purchase to buying a house in California.  He also estimated that of the 8 billion humans living on Earth by that time, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go.  That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.  He figures the programme will end up costing about $36 billion and says that only fully reusable rockets and spacecraft would keep the ticket price for Mars migration as low as $500,000 while still leaving enough for necessary supplies.
• Unlike missions to Earth orbit, where a return trip home is only a day away, long-duration manned flights to the moon, Mars or points beyond will put astronauts far beyond reach of their native planet.  To survive, explorers must haul vital supplies with them, and when they arrive, build greenhouses, develop solar power farms, and drill for ice, among major hurdles.

• A gas pipe in the US state of West Virginia exploded, destroying 4 homes, damaging 5 others, and cooking a section of an interstate highway.  The inferno melted guardrails and left a huge swath of the interstate in Sissonville impassible.  A roughly 800-foot section in both directions on the road was baked by the heat.  Crews had to remove asphalt and grind the roadway down to the original concrete before repaving.  Federal and state officials are investigating the cause.
• People run for cover as smoke rises from the site of a fire at a fireworks factory about 500 kilometres (310 miles) southwest of Chennai, India, September 2012.  Police in southern India said they arrested 6 employees of the fireworks factory for a massive blaze that killed 40 workers and injured 60 others.
• Fire from the Waldo Canyon wildfire burns as it moves into subdivisions and destroys homes in June 2012.

• A light shines behind US president Barack Obama as he speaks during a campaign event at Bayliss Park in Council Bluffs, Iowa, August 2012, during a 3-day campaign bus tour through the state.
• A man walks inside the crumbling oval skeleton of the House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on mount Buzludzha in central Bulgaria, March 2012.  Over two decades after the toppling of the regime they glorified, the megalomaniac monuments of the communist era are still standing, setting a quandary for Bulgarian authorities, who can neither maintain nor dismantle them.
• NASA’s Cassini spacecraft looks down on Saturn’s north pole at roiling storm clouds and a swirling vortex at the centre of Saturn’s famed northern polar hexagon.  This image was taken November 2012.

• These mechanical arthropods and insects are made from watch parts and light bulbs.
• The sun shining through a fabric barrier gives a rippled effect to a horse’s coat at Plumpton racecourse in Plumpton, England, January 2012.
• A 50-foot whale shark dwarfs a 34-foot luxury yacht off the coast of the Yucatán peninsula.

• Text book rental company Chegg aims to solve every pain point college students have.  Chegg wants to help students pick their schools, rent textbooks to them cheap and easy, and supply homework help.  Cloud computing allows individuals to pick the software they want to use.  But they stay in the transaction; they don’t ship the software and let consultants worry about the rest.  Consumer software has had a similar revolution: less of it appears shrink wrapped on a shelf at BestBuy.  The focus is 100% on whether someone wants to play a game, not on the shelf space it may get.  In a world where the computer knows who we are, what we need, and makes charging us seamless, the world may get more expensive — but probably less annoying.  Chegg is headquartered in Santa Clara, California with 75 full-time employees, a horde of temporary workers that pitch in during the “return rush,” 1.6 million titles in its online catalog, a 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Louisville, Kentucky, and hundreds of thousands of students from more than 4,000 campuses across the country renting books and getting homework help.
• Devotees attempt a human pyramid in order to break a clay pot containing curd during celebrations to mark the Hindu festival of Janmashtami, August 2012.  Janmashtami marks the birthday of the Hindu god Krishna, celebrated across the country.
• Homes crowd the Rocinha shantytown, photographed May 2012.  Local officials and human rights groups are working to give legal title to tens of thousands of residents of shantytowns like Rocinha, a process that increases their wealth and gives them greater access to both credit and of mind.  The programmes so far are just a start at tackling a widespread problem: 1/3 of the people in Rio state, nearly 5 million people, don’t have title to their homes, an uncertainty shared by most of the approximately 1 billion people who live in slums globally.

• Mountaintop-removal mines in Appalachia have demolished an estimated 1.4 million acres of forested hills, buried an estimated 2,000 miles of streams, poisoned drinking water, and wiped whole towns from the map.  Mining firms must maintain a 100-foot protective zone around burial grounds.  Shown here, the Jarrell Cemetery is a tree-studded atoll rising from a moonscape sea.
• A rainbow in mist taken in West Flores, Indonesia, in 2010.
• A team of researchers at Arecibo Observatory have captured video evidence from the ground of a lightning phenomenon known as a blue jet.  The discovery is the first ground-based evidence linking the ionosphere with cloud tops in blue jet events.  Blue jets develop on the tops of cloud formations at altitudes of 12 to about 26 miles.  They appear blue to the naked eye, can last for up to several hundreds of milliseconds and are cone-shaped.  The electrical contact may represent an important component of the global electrical circuit.

Fulgurite (or fulgarite) is named after the Latin word fulgur which means thunderbolt.  The reason?  Fulgurite is created when lightning strikes sand.  What is the temperature of lightning?  Air-temperatures over 30,000°C have been measured — and this is far higher than the sand melting point of 1800°C.  Silica, which makes up the sand, fuses together at this extreme heat, creating so-called lightning glass or lightning sand.  Glass that is formed in this way is called lechatelierite, which also forms when meteorites hit sand or silica-rich rocks.  The colour of the fulgurite depends on the type of sand struck by lightning and the size depends on the penetration of the lightning in the ground.  The size usually ranges from just a few centimetres to several decimetres.  However far larger fulgurites have been found, most notably one in the state of Florida in the US that was 4.9 metres long.  Fulgurites that are formed by intense bolts of lightning usually have a branch-like structure as lightning follows the path of least resistance when it strikes the ground.  Most fulgurites are made in sand, however they can also be formed when silica-rich rocks are struck by lightning.  Usually these are smaller in size, because lightning has more difficulty penetrating harder rock.  When excavating fulgurites, scientists use techniques developed by palæontologists for removing dinosaur fossils — appropriate for something that might be considered fossilised lightning.  Fulgurites are inevitably excavated in pieces, as the glass is fragile.

• One is the social ability to recognise the emotion someone is feeling by following social cues, subtle vocal fluctuations, and other nonverbal communications.  Psychopaths, for example, might be quite good at reading people, at applying this cognitive empathy and then possibly exploiting it.  Autistic people, on the other hand, generally tend not to be that great at this kind of recognition in non-autistic people.  After all, the hallmark of autism is difficulty navigating this territory and registering the meaning of a nonverbal language that is unfamiliar to them.  Worth noting: non-autistic people seem to struggle with reading the nonverbal communication of autistic people. 
• It can also be difficult for autistic people to automatically place themselves situationally in the other person’s shoes and intuit the emotion the other person feels (although again, non-autistic people seem to struggle to do this for autistics).  Autism does not, however, preclude a person from understanding a clear communication about emotion.
• The other form of empathy follows on the recognition of the emotion, whether the message comes through verbally or nonverbally, intuitively or not.  That’s the form in which you not only can intellectualise the person’s emotion but also can internalise and feel what they are feeling, known as emotional empathy.  The gap for psychopaths comes in here: they seem to lack this emotional empathy.  But whatever deficits autism might carry in terms of recognition, it makes up for here, in terms of shared feeling.  Once an autistic becomes aware of the other person’s emotion, the feeling comes without a social construct, naked and in full, unmodulated.  Certainly, the expression of their feeling can be more intense.

Research shows that people with Asperger’s are not that great at cognitive empathy but that their emotional empathy does not differ from people without Asperger’s, whereas children with conduct disorder show the reverse pattern.

• The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analysing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house.  He stacked them in order and noticed the height of the stacks fit an exponential curve.  Price’s subsequent analysis concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge has been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7% (compounded to about 7%) annually since the 17th century — in other words, doubling every 15 years, growing by a factor of 10 every half century, and by something like a factor of a million in the 300 years which separate us from the 17th-century invention of the scientific paper when the process began.  A 2010 study concurred — so it shouldn’t surprise people that facts they learned in school and university have been overturned.  But at what rate do former facts just disappear?  Half-life is the time required for half the atoms of a given amount of a radioactive substance to disintegrate — for example, the half-life of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 is just over 29 years.  Applying this concept to facts, it appears that the half-life of truth is somewhere on the order of 45 years.  In other words, half of what you think you know today will be obsolete in 45 years.  Simply knowing that our factual knowledge bases have a half-life should keep us always seeking new information.  So stop memorising things and outsource to the cloud.  Search online for facts you need.  The borderline between science and other endeavours in the modern, global society is becoming more and more blurred.
• How much information is there? In 2010, Eric Schmitt, former CEO of Google said: “Every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003.” [Information is not the same as knowledge.] In the year 2011, information was doubling roughly every 11 hours.  It’s faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before to create.  Software and devices produce a lot automatically.  Faster, cheaper and easier often leads to lower quality.  Use a lifecycle approach to information: decide when it’s come to the end of its life and either archive it or delete it permanently.  Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90% of the world’s data today has been created in the last two years alone.
• Evolving organisms and ecosystems embody increasing amounts of information.  A dark view of the information-dominated universe was described in a story, “The Library of Babel,” by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.  Borges imagines his library, with an infinite array of books, shelves, and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe.  In James Gleick’s book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, he writes in the epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning” his concerns for people who feel alienated from prevailing scientific culture, saying that the enormous success of information theory came from Claude Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning.  Shannon’s central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declares that information can be handled with greater freedom if it’s treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning.  The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we drown.  The immense size of modern databases imparts a meaninglessness.  Information in such quantities is reminiscent of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions.  As humans, we must create islands of meaning in the ocean of information.  Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: “We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognise creatures of the information.”  [So information’s of little good unless it means something?  Gee.  Who would’ve thought?]

• Nootropics, also referred to as smart drugs, memory enhancers, neuro-enhancers, cognitive enhancers, and intelligence enhancers, are drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional foods that purportedly improve mental functions such as cognition, memory, intelligence, motivation, attention, and concentration.  The word nootropic was coined in 1972, derived from the Greek words νους nous, or “mind,” and τρέπειν trepein meaning “to bend/turn”.  Nootropics are thought to work by altering the availability of the brain’s supply of neurochemicals (neurotransmitters, enzymes, and hormones), by improving the brain’s oxygen supply, or by stimulating nerve growth.  Nootropics are cognitive enhancers that are neuroprotective or extremely nontoxic.  Nootropics are by definition cognitive enhancers, but a cognitive enhancer is not necessarily a nootropic.  Oddly, tobacco is listed.  “Tobacco – Contains nicotine, and harman and norharman which are MAOIs.  Smokers have been shown to have 30% lower MAO-A activity and 40% less MAO-B activity than non-smokers.  A meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking has significant positive effects on fine motor, alerting attention-accuracy and response time (RT), orienting attention-RT, short-term episodic memory-accuracy, and working memory-RT.”
• Things are about to get a little weird according to the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a US-based coalition of spy agencies that has predicted what’s in store for the earth in 2030 in a new report.  “With shale gas, the US will have sufficient natural gas to meet domestic needs and generate potential global exports for decades to come,” the report suggests in one possible outcome.  As inequalities explode across the world though, they predict China and the US become strong allies to tackle global issues.  The “most plausible worst-case scenario,” the report adds, involves the risks of interstate conflict increasing to the point that “the US draws inward and globalisation stalls.”  From there, “megacities [will] flourish and take the lead in confronting global challenges.”  [Not megacompanies?]  Another possibility, the writers suggest, is that “inequalities explode as some countries become big winners and others fail.  Without completely disengaging, the US is no longer global policeman.”  Also, “People may choose to enhance their physical selves as they do with cosmetic surgery today.”  In 2030, they predict good replacement-limb technology.  “Future retinal eye implants could enable night vision, and neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought.  Brain-machine interfaces could provide superhuman abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”  [I wonder which things NIC thinks are weird.  This seems only what anyone might expect.]
• We like to think our intelligence is self-made; it happens inside our heads, the product of our inner thoughts alone.  But the rise of Google, Wikipedia and other online tools has made many people question the impact of these technologies on our brains.  Is typing in the search term, “Who has played James Bond in the movies?” the same as knowing that the answer is Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig (… plus David Niven in Casino Royale )?  Can we say we know the answer to this question when what we actually know is how to rapidly access the information?  Much of our intelligence comes from how we coordinate ourselves with other people and our environment.  Philosophers suggest a mind is designed to spread itself out over the environment — so much so that “thinking” happens in our environment as much as in our brains.  Philosopher Andy Clark calls humans “natural born cyborgs”, beings with minds that naturally incorporate new tools, ideas, and abilities.  From Clark’s perspective, the route to a solution is not the issue — having the right tools really does mean you know the answers, just as much as already knowing the answer.  A memory study by Daniel Wegner of Harvard provides a neat example: couples were asked to come into the lab to take a memorisation test.  Half the couples were kept together, half were reassigned to pair up with someone they didn’t know.  Both groups studied a list of words in silence and were then tested individually.  The pairs that were made up of a couple in a relationship remembered more items, both overall and as individuals.  What happened, according to Wegner, was that couples in a relationship had a good understanding of their partners and automatically divided up the work between them, so that, say, one partner remembered words to do with technology and assumed the other would remember words to do with sports.  In this way, each partner concentrated on their strengths [thus they had a comparative advantage], and individually outperformed people in couples where no mental division of labour was possible.  Just as you rely on a search engine for answers, so you rely on people you deal with regularly to think about certain things, developing a shared system for committing items to memory and bringing them out again, what Wegner calls “transactive memory”.  Minds that work this way are one of the great strengths of the human species.  Our minds are made up just as much by the people and tools around us as they are by the brain cells inside our skulls.  Rather than being forced to rely on our own resources for everything, we share our knowledge and so pool understanding.  Technology keeps track of things for individuals so we don’t have to, while large systems of knowledge serve the needs of society as a whole.  [Okay, students — this means you should be able to bring all your notes and your smart phone or tablet to the exam.]

• American freethinker Robert Ingersoll in On the Life Cycle, 1887, says: “There is something tenderly appropriate in the serene death of the old.  When eyes are dim and memory fails to keep a record of events; when ears are dull and muscles fail to obey the will; when the pulse is low and the tired heart is weak, and the poor brain has hardly power to think, then comes the dream, the hope of rest, the longing for the peace of dreamless sleep.”  But it is also true that the “natural” ageing described here is being steadily minimised by advances in science and technology.  Consider how sanitation, public health, and medicine have greatly extended our healthspan (the healthy period of our lives) improving average American lifespan from 47 to 77 years over the 20th century.  More recently, longevity research and regenerative medicine are beginning to shorten our frailspan (the physically and mentally frail and enfeebled period of our lives), by slowing the basic processes of ageing.  For example, a 2011 study discovered that much of the physiological degeneration that occurs in adulthood may be due to a small population of senescent cells that produce inflammatory proteins.  When these cells are removed in middle age or earlier, as in the mice in the study, the body doesn’t age “naturally”, but retains physical and mental vigour well into old age, with a much more abrupt decline much later in life — a process called “squaring the curve” of ageing.  If therapies to remove or block those cells or their inflammatory proteins can be developed for humans (as is now being explored), those who use them will feel like death is a sudden collapse and loss of function at the end of an even longer and more vibrant life than we typically have today.  As our social acceptance of natural ageing falls, our acceptance of natural death will also be challenged, at least by some.
• Preserving the self for later emulation: What brain features do we need? asks John Smart: “Chemical brain preservation is a technology that may soon be validated to inexpensively preserve the key features of our memories and identity at our biological death.  If either chemical or cryogenic brain preservation can be validated to reliably store retrievable and useful individual mental information, these medical procedures should be made available in all societies as an option at biological death.  If computational neuroscience, microscopy, scanning, and robotics technologies continue to improve at their historical rates, preserved memories and identity may be affordably reanimated by being “uploaded“ into computer simulations, beginning well before the end of this century.  We can distinguish three distinct information processing layers in the brain:
  • Electrical Activity (“Sensation, Thought, and Consciousness”): These brain features are stored from milliseconds to seconds, in electrical circuits.
  • Short-term Chemical Activity (Short-and Intermediate-term Learning — “Synapse I”): These brain features are stored from seconds to a few days in our neural synapses (synaptome), by temporary molecular changes made to preexisting neural signalling proteins and synapses.
  • Long-term Molecular Changes (Long-term Learning — “Nucleus and Synapse II”): These are stored from years to a lifetime in our neuron’s connectome, nucleus (epigenome) and synaptome, by permanent molecular changes to neural DNA, the synthesis of new neural proteins and receptors in existing synapses, and the creation of new synapses.

At present, it is a reasonable assumption that only the 3rd layer, where long-term durable molecular changes occur, must be preserved for later memory and identity reanimation.  [What assurance is there that consciousness could be rekindled?  None.  Keep a diary instead — it’s cheaper.]

• If information technologies continue to improve at historical rates, a person whose brain is chemically preserved in 2020 might have his memories read or even fully return to the world in computer form not centuries but just a few decades from now, while his children and loved ones are still alive.  Given progress in electron microscopy and connectomics research to date, it is forseen that this could be done as a fully automated and inexpensive process.  Smart is particularly excited by chemical brain preservation’s ability to improve the social contract: the benefits reasonably expected from the universe and society when we choose to live a good and moral life.  [The universe offers benefits to people who are moral?  Really?]  He believes that having the option of chemical brain preservation at death, if the science is validated, may help make all our societies significantly more science-, future-, progress-, preservation-, sustainability-, truth-, justice-, and community-oriented in coming years.  Would you choose chemical brain preservation at death if it was widely available, validated, and inexpensive?  If not, why not?  Would you do it to donate your brain to science?  Your memories to your children or others who might want them?  [Just leave them your Facebook account.]

There are many different ways to classify neurotransmitters (a chemical released by a nerve cell to send a signal to another nerve cell).  Dividing them into amino acids, peptides, and monoamines is sufficient for some classification purposes.

Major neurotransmitters: Amino Acids: glutamate, aspartate, D-serine, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glycine.  Monoamines and Other Biogenic Amines: dopamine, norepinephrine (noradrenaline), epinephrine (adrenaline), histamine, serotonin.  Peptides: somatostatin, substance P, opioid peptides.  Others: acetylcholine (ACh), adenosine, anandamide, nitric oxide. 
In addition, over 50 neuroactive peptides have been found, and new ones are discovered regularly.  β-endorphin is a relatively well-known example of a peptide neurotransmitter; it engages in highly specific interactions with opioid receptors in the central nervous system.  Single ions, such as synaptically released zinc, are also considered neurotransmitters by some, as are some gaseous molecules such as nitric oxide (NO), hydrogen sulfide (H₂S, and carbon monoxide (CO).  These aren’t classical neurotransmitters by the strictest definition: although they’ve all been shown experimentally to be released by presynaptic terminals in an activity-dependent way, they are not packaged into vesicles.

By far the most prevalent transmitter is glutamate, which is excitatory at well over 90% of the synapses in the human brain.  The next most prevalent is GABA.  Even though other transmitters are used in far fewer synapses, they may be very important functionally — the great majority of psychoactive drugs exert their effects by altering the actions of some neurotransmitter systems.  Addictive drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine exert their effects primarily on the dopamine system.  The addictive opiate drugs exert their effects primarily by regulating dopamine levels.

• Serotonin receptors influence various biological and neurological processes such as aggression, anxiety, appetite, cognition, learning, memory, mood, nausea, sleep, and thermoregulation.  The serotonin receptors are the target of a variety of pharmaceutical drugs, including many antidepressants, antipsychotics, anorectics, antiemetics, gastroprokinetic agents, antimigraine agents, hallucinogens, and entactogens.  The serotonin receptors are known to regulate longevity and behavioural ageing in the nematode — maybe humans, too?
• Glutamate is important for learning and memory.  Glutamic acid has been implicated in epileptic seizures.  Glutamate transporters are found in neuronal and glial membranes where they rapidly remove glutamate from the extracellular space.  Glutamate also serves as the precursor for the synthesis of GABA.  Glutamic acid, a constituent of protein, is present in every food that contains protein, but it can only be tasted when in an unbound form.  Significant amounts of free glutamic acid are present in cheese and soy sauce; it’s responsible for umami, one of the 5 basic tastes.
• GABA (Gamma AminoButyric Acid) is the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system, playing a role in regulating neuron excitability throughout the nervous system.  In humans, GABA regulates muscle tone.  Stiff-man syndrome is a neurologic disorder leading to a decrease in GABA and, therefore, brings impaired motor function, muscle stiffness, and spasm.  GABA regulates the proliferation of neural progenitor cells, their migration and differentiation, and the elongation of axons and dendrites and the formation of synapses.

• Dopamine plays a major role in the brain system responsible for reward-driven learning.  Every type of reward that has been studied increases the level of dopamine in the brain; stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine act directly on the dopamine system.  People with extroverted (reward-seeking) personalities tend to show higher dopamine levels than introverts.  Parkinson’s disease (tremor and motor impairment) is caused by loss of dopamine-secreting neurons.  Schizophrenia involves elevated dopamine in one part of the brain and decreased levels in another part.  Dopamine has functions in behaviour and cognition, voluntary movement, motivation, punishment and reward, sleep, mood, attention, working memory, and learning.  Aggression may stimulate the release of dopamine; sociability is also closely tied to its levels.  The high-dopamine personality is characterised by high intelligence, a sense of personal destiny, a religious/cosmic preoccupation, obsession with achieving goals, emotional detachment that may lead to ruthlessness, and a risk-taking mentality.
• Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline or adrenalin) regulates heart rate, blood vessel and air passage diameters and manages metabolic shifts; its release is a crucial component of the fight-or-flight response of the sympathetic nervous system.  An adrenaline junkie appears to be addicted to endogenous epinephrine.  The “high” is caused by self-inducing a fight-or-flight response by intentionally engaging in stressful or risky behaviour, causing a release of epinephrine by the adrenal gland.
• Noradrenaline (from Latin) and norepinephrine (from Greek) are interchangeable terms, with noradrenaline being most commonly used.  One of the most important functions of noradrenaline is its influence on the sympathetic nervous system.  As a stress hormone, it affects the amygdala, where attention and responses are controlled.  Along with epinephrine, noradrenaline also underlies the fight-or-flight response, directly increasing heart rate, triggering the release of glucose from energy stores, and increasing blood flow to skeletal muscle.  It increases the brain’s oxygen supply and suppresses neuroinflammation.

• Oxytocin is released in large amounts after distension of the cervix and uterus during labour, facilitating birth, maternal bonding, and, after stimulation of the nipples, breastfeeding.  Recent studies show a role in orgasm, social recognition, pair bonding, anxiety, and maternal behavior.  The inability to secrete oxytocin and feel empathy is linked to sociopathy, psychopathy, narcissism, and general manipulativeness.  There is some evidence that oxytocin promotes tribal behaviour, incorporating trust and empathy of in-groups coupled with suspicion and rejection of outsiders.  It modulates inflammation; its increase following positive social interactions has the potential to improve wound healing [so visit that friend in the hospital].  It evokes feelings of contentment, reduces anxiety and fear, increases trust, and increases calm and secure feelings around mates.  It protects against stress.  Autism may be correlated with genomic deletion of the gene containing the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) or an aberrant methylation of it.
• Prolactin is a peptide hormone known for its role in lactation.  (In fish it controls water and salt balance.)  It regulates the immune system and functions as a growth-, differentiating- and anti-apoptotic factor.  It has also profound influence on hematopoiesis, angiogenesis, and is involved in the regulation of blood clotting through several pathways.  Prolactin has over 300 known effects; it causes enlargement of mammary glands during pregnancy and stimulates mammary glands to produce milk.  It provides the body with sexual gratification after sexual acts by counteracting the effect of dopamine (responsible for sexual arousal).  Unusually high amounts are suspected to be responsible for impotence and loss of libido.  Prolactin also stimulates the cells responsible for formation of myelin coatings on axons in the central nervous system and promotes neurogenesis in maternal and fœtal brains.  It peaks during REM sleep; levels rise after exercise, meals, sexual intercourse, minor surgical procedures, or following epileptic seizures.
• Arginine Vasopressin (AVP) is responsible for regulating the body’s retention of water by acting to increase water absorption in the collecting ducts of the kidney.  It plays a key role in homeostasis by regulating water, glucose, and salts in blood.  It’s implicated in memory formation, including delayed reflexes, image, and short- and long-term memory (though the mechanism remains unknown).  It’s involved in aggression, blood pressure regulation, temperature regulation, and it may have analgesic effects.  Differences in the AVP receptor gene between individual members of a species appear predictive of differences in social behaviour; in male humans it affects pair-bonding behaviour.  The brains of males use vasopressin as a reward for forming lasting bonds with a mate; men with certain variations are more likely to experience marital discord due to disappointing levels of satisfaction, affection, and cohesion.  Ethanol (alcohol) reduces vasopressin.  Increasing vasopressin helps control bedwetting by children.

• Cortisol, also known as hydrocortisone, is a steroid produced by the adrenal gland in response to stress and low levels of blood glucocorticoids.  During human pregnancy, increased fœtal production of cortisol initiates production of fœtal lung surfactant to promote maturation of the lungs.  Cortisol released in response to stress spares glucose for the brain, generates new energy from stored reserves, and diverts energy away from low-priority activities in order to survive immediate threat.  However, prolonged secretion (from chronic stress or Cushing’s syndrome) counteracts insulin and inhibits peripheral utilisation of glucose.  In laboratory rats, cortisol induces collagen loss in skin.  It stimulates gastric-acid secretion, weakens the immune system, and reduces bone formation (by reducing calcium absorption in the intestine).  Elevated levels of cortisol, if prolonged, can lead to muscle wasting.  It works with epinephrine (adrenaline) to create memories of short-term emotional events; this is the proposed mechanism for storage of flashbulb memories, and may originate as a means to remember what to avoid in the future.  However, long-term exposure damages cells in the hippocampus resulting in impaired learning.  It inhibits memory retrieval of already stored information and shuts down the reproductive system.  It reduces histamine secretion, serotonin levels, glutamate levels, ammonia levels, and heavy metals in the body.
• Substance P (SP) binds to the neurokinin 1 receptor (NK-1).  Binding of SP to NK-1 results in SP being degraded.  SP and the NK-1 receptors are widely distributed in the brain in regions that regulate emotion (hypothalamus, amygdala, and the periaqueductal gray), in close association with serotonin and neurons containing noradrenaline targeted by current antidepressant drugs.  SP is important in pain perception — it transmits pain information into the central nervous system.  It coexists with glutamate in response to painful stimulation.  SP regulates mood disorders, anxiety, stress, reinforcement, neurogenesis, respiratory rhythm, neurotoxicity, nausea/emesis, pain and nociception.  It’s involved in neurogenic inflammation responses to infection or injury.  SP antagonists may function as analgesics.  SP may play a part in fibromyalgia.  Capsaicin reduces levels of SP, so it is used as an analgesic and anti-inflammatory to reduce pain associated with arthritis and neuralgia.  SP promotes wound-healing and, injected into pancreatic nerves, reverses diabetes in mice.  It’s involved in the axon reflex-mediated vasodilatation to create local heating, and wheal and flare reactions.  Naked mole rats lack SP and are insensitive to pain when painful stimuli are administered to the skin.
• Adrenocorticotropic Hormone (ACTH) is produced in response to biological stress.  It increases production and release of corticosteroids.  A deficiency causes adrenal insufficiency; an excess causes Cushing’s syndrome.  It stimulates cholesterol delivery to mitochondria and lipoprotein uptake into cortical cells, thus increasing the bio-availability of cholesterol.  Long-term actions include stimulating production of steroids for mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation systems.  These actions supply enhanced energy to stimulated adrenocortical cells.  ACTH was first synthesized as a replacement for Acthar Gel, a long-lasting animal product used to treat infantile spasms.  Once relatively inexpensive, Acthar Gel is currently an extremely expensive pharmaceutical product with prices per vial as high as US$60,000.

• Cascades of mammoth ferns flourish in humid air trapped between narrow walls in Claustral Canyon located in Australia’s Blue Mountains.  First explored in 1963, the formation was named for its claustrophobia-inducing passages and ranks among the region’s most visited canyons.
• This is the site of a waterfall in Cunca Wulang Canyon, a rainforest setting with many cascading waterfalls and limestone caves located in Flores, Indonesia — a 40-minute walk from Wersawe Village.
• Kaş (pronounced 'Kash’) is a small fishing, diving, yachting and tourist town 168 kilometres west of the city of Antalya, Turkey.  Shipwrecks, dropoffs, caves, underwater canyons, bizarre underwater landscapes, ancient amphoras and more put Kaş in the top 100 global diving spots, with a variety of marine life, and clear warm water (visibility up to 40 metres/130 feet, temperature up to 28° Celsius).

• The University of Otago has said that an adult can live on NZ$7.10 a day, eating foods that meet all nutritional recommendations.  These foods include: wholemeal flour, dried peas (needing sprouting or cooking), peanut butter, sugar, canned sardines, canned tomatoes, canned peaches, canned apricots, canned fruit salad, and tomato sauce.  The research also looked at the cost of a collection of foods which did not require cooking, but could be eaten directly out of a can or after soaking.  The cost of these foods (which meet energy needs but not complete nutritional needs) was NZ$3.67 per day.  The specific foods are: whole grain oats, vegetable oil, dried peas (which need sprouting), breakfast biscuits (like Weetbix), sugar, peanut butter, sultanas, and peanuts.  Overall, researchers were surprised by how little food cost and said emergency stockpiling would be feasible “for nearly all families”.  Meeting the daily energy needs of a grown man could cost as little as NZ$2.22 a day with peanut butter, sugar, flour, rice, pasta, vegetable oil and whole grain oats the cheapest and most calorific items.  “People don’t need perfect nutrition in a disaster, they just need calories and energy,” public health researcher and associate professor Nick Wilson said.  Families, especially the poor, often have meagre stockpiles of food or make no disaster preparations at all.  The study rated foods by price and nutrition to find the lowest cost for a set amount of energy and the lowest meeting general nutritional needs.  Because it may not be possible for people with damaged homes to get to food stores, the study recommends civil defence authorities or the army could store the cheapest rations, supplying them in a disaster with minimal spoilage and waste.  With storms and flooding likely to get more savage because of climate change, researchers said disaster readiness was important in countries prone to a wide range of natural catastrophes.
• Keep your stockpiled food in a dry, cool place.   If storing regular cans of food, make sure to rotate supplies every 6 months — use the old cans while adding new ones.  Remember: salty foods dehydrate and increase thirst.  Unless there is a plentiful (as in: unlimited) safe water supply, always check sodium contents of foods to stockpile.
• Because Alaska is so remote, it depends on an uninterrupted flow of supplies from the lower 48 states.  Alaska Governor Sean Parnell has made disaster readiness a hallmark of his administration.  He says an earthquake or volcanic eruption could leave the state’s 720,000 residents stranded and cut off from food and supply lines.  His answer is to build giant warehouses full of emergency food and supplies, just in case.  The state plans 2 stockpiles in or near Fairbanks, and Anchorage — cities with military bases.  The first food deliveries are targeted for December, with a goal to store enough food to feed 40,000 people for up to a week, including 3 days of ready-to-eat meals and 4 days of bulk food that can be prepared and cooked for large groups.  To put that number into perspective, Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, has about 295,000 people, according to the US Census Bureau; the capital, Juneau (3rd largest city) has about 31,000.  Over the past year, the state acquired or purchased water purification units and generators designed to work in cold climates, including units that power facilities like hospitals.  Officials are currently determining state needs in terms of emergency medical supplies and shelter.

• Over 200 individuals, both men and women, rated women wearing makeup as more competent than women without makeup.  Participants were shown pictures of 25 female models aged 25-50 who self-identified as African American, Hispanic and Caucasian.  4 pictures were taken of each model, 1 with no makeup, and 3 others with increasing amounts of makeup, categorised as, ‘natural’, ‘professional’, or ‘glamorous’.  Researchers presented the photos to two groups of participants, one given 250 milliseconds to evaluate the pictures, the other unlimited time.  Pictures were presented randomly on a computer.  Each picture was ranked on competence, attractiveness, trustworthiness and likeability using a 7-point scale (from “not at all” to “highly/extremely”).  Makeup significantly increased ratings of attractiveness and competence for both groups, but women with the natural makeup look had increased ratings of likeability and trustworthiness compared to women without makeup.  When given limited evaluation time, heavier make up (the “professional” and “glamourous” looks) were rated higher in all categories.  But given unlimited time, these ratings were more negative.  In particular, the glamourous look had significant lower ratings of trustworthiness — perhaps because beauty is correlated with vanity and a higher chance of infidelity.
• Thousand of white balloons are suspended in a billowing wash of sound; an airborne landscape of relationship, distance, humans, emptiness.  Choreographer William Forsythes’ “Scattered Crowd” is a place the viewer alters through stillness or speed, an installation constantly shifting.  The exhibit has been touring for a decade.  (Via ThisIsColossal ).
• In new research known as the Daily Information Needs Study, Google wants to improve its mobile search services by automatically delivering information you may not think to search for online.  For example, contextual information provided by mobile devices — via GPS chips and other sensors — can provide clues about a person and his situation, allowing Google to guess what that person wants.  Google Now offers unsolicited directions, weather forecasts, flight updates, and other information when it thinks you need them.  Google may be heading toward a new kind of search, one very different from the one it started with, says Jonas Michel, a researcher working on similar ideas at the University of Texas at Austin.  “In the future you might want to search very new information from the physical environment — localised to that place, event, and moment.”  It will involve more than just crawling the Web — real-time feeds, for example, from US public transit authorities, allow a user to walk up to a bus stop and pull out his phone to find arrival times already provided.”  Or how long the line currently is at the local grocery store.

• Borussia Dortmund’s Lukasz Piszczek pours beer over his coach (Juergen Klopp) after winning the German Championship following their German first division Bundesliga soccer match against Borussia Moenchengladbach in Dortmund, April 2012.
• A Dutch resident stands in his house as high floodwaters reach up to his window in Dordrecht, Netherlands, in January 2012.  Gale force winds reached up to 110 kilometres per hour (about 70 miles per hour) and heavy rains hit along the coast.  (A quarter of the country sits below sea level.)
• A molotov cocktail was thrown during a clash between student protesters and the government against plans to raise fuel prices in Jakarta, Indonesia, March 2012.  Protesters rallied across Indonesia against a government proposal to increase fuel prices by 1/3 as parliament prepared to vote on a divisive subsidy that cost Southeast Asia’s largest economy some $18 billion last year.

• Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth.  The slight crevice it opened allowed harmless skin bacteria to slip into his body.  At first, the scratch grew pink and tender.  Over the course of several weeks, it slowly swelled.  The bacteria turned from harmless to vicious, proliferating through his flesh.  Alexander eventually had to be admitted to Radcliffe Hospital, the bacteria spreading across his face and into his lungs.  In February 1941, Alexander was injected with an experimental drug: a molecule produced by mould.  The molecule was, of course, penicillin.  Within a day, Alexander’s infections were subsiding.  After a few more days, his fever broke and much of his face cleared up.  Florey could have saved Alexander’s life, if he hadn’t run out of penicillin after a few days.  Nobody but Florey knew how to make the stuff, and his recipe only yielded a tiny amount at a time.  Alexander died, but those after him now had better chances to live.  (Via The New shelton wet/dry)
• Men in their 30s who have inflamed gums caused by severe periodontal disease are 3 times more likely to suffer from erection problems according to a study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.  A group of 80 men aged 30-40 with erectile dysfunction were compared with a control group of 82 men without erection problems.  53% of the men with erectile dysfunction had inflamed gums compared with 23% in the control group.  When the results were adjusted for age, body mass index, household income and education level, the men with severe periodontal disease were 3.29 times more likely to suffer erection problems than men with healthy gums.  This potentially affects the quality of life of some 150 million men and their partners worldwide.  Physical factors such as problems with blood vessels cause nearly 2/3 of cases; psychological issues like emotional stress and depression account for the remainder.  Chronic periodontitis (CP) is a group of infectious diseases caused predominantly by bacteria that usually occur with inflammation of the gums.  CP may induce systemic vascular disease.  The average age of the men in both groups was just under 36.  There were no significant known differences between the groups.  Erectile dysfunction and CP in humans are caused by similar risk factors, such as ageing, smoking, diabetes mellitus and coronary artery disease, so smokers, those with systemic disease and those over 40 were excluded from the study.  [Just to be safe — floss daily.]
• In NZ at least, more than 60% of adult orchestral musicians are breaking their best instrument — their hearing.  In a comprehensive audiological study of orchestral musicians, 60.7% aged 27-66 had hearing loss, as well as 22% aged 18-38, and 16% of child musicians aged 8-12.  Increased years of music exposure cause progressive hearing loss in significant numbers of individual musicians in all age groups but not in all musicians because some people appear to have “stronger/harder ears”; others have marked hearing loss after short-term music exposure.  In a pit, say at the ballet, there’s more risk because sound is more contained.  Female musicians have better hearing thresholds and slower progression of hearing loss than males.  The conclusion?  Musician ear plugs should be used as early as possible, especially within schools.  Rehearsals should be shorter; breaks should be taken in the midst of a session; and rehearsals should be avoided on the same day as performances.  Exposure to stereos, loud concerts, nightclubs, and noisy hobbies like gun shooting, race cars, and mechanical tools should be minimised.  More than 10% of Kiwis have some degree of hearing loss.