A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

awesome a fresh view of the tech singularity -- AI as the birth of third generation replicators -- R3 as T1 or piggy backing on humans and dawn of the post-human and climate change etc seen from new perspective -- I find it interesting that Susan Blackmore sees a choke point ahead --- I know I do and have done for some time but she weaves it into a larger narrative

TED | Talks | Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes" (video)

Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air.

They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand.

That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus.

A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

After Years of Effort, Dark Energy Still Puzzles Scientists - NYTimes.com

The tendency of 'uneducated' people to compress the number scale for big numbers is actually an admirable way of measuring the world, says Philip Ball.

Why we should love logarithms

Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory.

Written in the skies: why quantum mechanics might be wrong

Hydrogen could be a clean, abundant energy source, but it's difficult to store in bulk. In new research, materials scientists at Rice University have made the surprising discovery that tiny carbon capsules called buckyballs are so strong they can hold volumes of hydrogen nearly as dense as those at the center of Jupiter.

Rice University | News & Media

ast week the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate announced the creation of a strategic relationship with Google Inc. and IBM.

The Cluster Exploratory (CluE) relationship will enable the academic research community to conduct experiments and test new theories and ideas using a large-scale, massively distributed computing cluster.

“Access to the Google-IBM academic cluster via the CluE program will provide the academic community with the opportunity to do research in data-intensive computing and to explore powerful new applications,” said Jeannette Wing, assistant director at NSF for CISE. “It can also serve as a tool for educating the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

“Google is proud to partner with the National Science Foundation to provide computing resources to the academic research community,” said Stuart Feldman, vice president of engineering at Google Inc. “It is our hope that research conducted using this cluster will allow researchers across many fields to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by large-scale, distributed computing.”

“Extending the Google/IBM academic program with the National Science Foundation should accelerate research on Internet-scale computing and drive innovation to fuel the applications of the future,” said Willy Chiu, vice president of IBM Software Strategy and High Performance On Demand Solutions. “IBM is pleased to be collaborating with the NSF on this project.”

Google and IBM created the cluster of approximately 1600 processors in October of last year to give the academic community access to otherwise prohibitively expensive resources.

While the timeline for releasing the formal request for proposals to the academic community is still being developed, NSF anticipates being able to support 10 to 15 research projects in the first year of the program, and will likely expand the number of projects in the future.

NSF partners with Google and IBM

possibly noteworthy wrote:
Now out in paperback:

The strange history of auditory hallucination throughout the ages, and its power to shed light on the mysterious inner source of pure faith and unadulterated inspiration.

From Booklist:

Daniel B. Smith's father and grandfather both heard voices, and thereby hangs the tale Smith tells at the outset, and also his interest in the phenomenon of hearing people speak when no one else can and without otherwise sensing them. Research indicates that hearing voices isn't all that rare; that many cope well with it, belying its association with madness; and that so many parts of the brain are involved in audition that finding those responsible for hearing voices may be impossible. Smith proceeds from present-day science to the nineteenth-century labeling of hearing voices as hallucinatory, and then to famous cases of it, most of them preceding but one during its pathologization. Socrates (Smith posits that the voices the philosopher heard affected his sentencing to death), Joan of Arc, and a German jurist who largely recovered from schizophrenic voice hearing are the three figures about whom Smith writes so intelligently and absorbingly that one wishes he had covered others he notes, especially William Blake, as fully. One also wants to read more of him, on any subject he chooses.

Watch his Colbert interview from last year.

Consider this in light of The New Autism, in the latest Wired:

Traditional science holds that people with severe autism are prisoners in their own minds, severely disabled, and probably mentally retarded. Don't tell that to Amanda Baggs, an autistic woman who achieved viral fame with her YouTube video "In My Language," which has so far received more than 350,000 hits. Wired contributor David Wolman gets inside the life that Baggs has created for herself, which includes blogging, hanging out in Second Life, corresponding with her friends, and a "constant conversation" with the world around her. Wolman's conclusion: Much of past research about autism and intelligence is catastrophically flawed.

From the NYT review of "Muses":

Smith sets (but does not explore) a provocative challenge: Had antipsychotic medication been available, would Moses have dismissed Yahweh’s demands at the burning bush “as his dopamine system playing tricks on him?”

the autism pdf is excellent

however on the subject of hearing voices i can't help but wonder if there is an element of romantisization going on. My own experience of hearing voices has been entwined with acute stress, delusions and schiziphreniform psychotic episodes and generally not much fun and i'd have a tough time deciding whether waterboarding is more fun. The 2mg of stelazine I take daily plus exercise to boast naturally my seratonin levels plus avoiding stress is something I live with -- so I react with caution to narratives which challenge the disease model of hearing voices however debate is good and obviously my personal experience is not the sum of the phenomena but merely one example

RE: Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity

Seventeen piconewtons: that's the force required to move a cobalt atom over a copper surface.

It takes 210 piconewtons to move a cobalt atom over a smooth platinum surface, according to a new research paper from IBM's Almaden Research Center and the University of Regensberg.

A piconewton is a trillionth of a newton. A newton is the amount of force required to accelerate a kilogram one meter per second squared. Lifting a penny weighing 3 grams takes about 30 billion piconewtons. The atoms in IBM's experiments are moved with atomic force microscopes. (Andreas Heinrich, lead scientist in the scanning tunneling microscopy lab at IBM Almaden and the lead author of the paper, recently let us move some atoms with a scanning tunneling/atomic force microscope in his lab.)

The breakthrough marks the first time anyone has been able to measure the force required to move individual atoms around, according to IBM, and helps the company move toward its goal of molecular computing.

IBM calculates the force it takes to move atoms

Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells | Science | Reuters