NASA has news from 1689

In 1689 the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens wrote a book in Latin called “Cosmostheoros”.



This translates into “The theory of the Cosmos” and contains his speculations on the construction of the universe and the habitability of the planets as deduced from his own observations and those of other astronomers in his days.
This book, the “Cosmostheoros” was an immediate success: shortly after the Latin edition of the Cosmotheoros was published by the The Hague publisher Adriaan Moetjens, translations appeared in English (1698) and in Dutch (1699).
In the following years, translations also appeared in French (1702), German (1703), Russian (1717) and in Swedish (1774).

“Cosmostheoros” is an amazing book because Huygens explained in 1689 that water could be found on other planets.
And life as well.

He even explained how we should imagine plants and animals on other planets:

Plants and Animals on the Surface of the Planets, that deserve as well to be provided for by their Creator as ours do: but why must they be of the same nature with ours?
Nature seems to court variety in her Works, and may have made them widely different from ours either in their matter or manner of Growth, in their outward Shape, or their inward Contexture; she may have made them such as neither our Understanding nor Imagination can conceive.

And Huygens goes on to prove that this theory is correct.

It is a good idea to keep the “Cosmostheory” in mind when tomorrow NASA holds a press conference promising exciting news.
It will be about life on other planets but if we realize that this is known as of 1689, over 300 years, the excitement NASA is trying to create around the news conference is totally unjustified.
But NASA depends on money from the US-Government and the more relevant NASA seems, the better are their chances for funding.
So, tomorrow, NASA’s new discovery is about whipping cream.





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Food and water we need

In Primary School was a smart boy who asked his friends:
“How far can you see? And a margin of error of one kilometer is tolerated.”

Many boys would think hard and harder and eventually come up with an answer like: 10 kilometers on a clear day.
The smart boy would then laugh and say:
“Can you see the moon and the stars?
They are much more far away than 10 kilometers!!”

There is always a smart boy who misuses his intelligence to make other boys feel stupid.
But next time the smart boy can be more precise.
Because a new galaxy has been discovered that is the most far away object we humans have ever seen.
Seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, the galaxy called UDFy-38135539 is some 13 billion light years away.

According to Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) though, God created the universe on October 23, 4004 BC.
That would make the universe 6023 years old in 2010 AD.
James Ussher was an Irish Archbishop whose chronology of Biblical history was widely accepted throughout Christianity.

But this time we are not fooled.
It is a scientific discovery made with hardware and no God of any Church has been involved.

By itself, the discovery of galaxy UDFy-38135539 is of no extraordinary significance.
There are over 100 million galaxies in the cosmos.
It is just that this one is the most far away we have ever seen.

And this makes us speculate about another thing.
The majority of the scientists believe that the “Big Bang”, the point in time when the universe was coming into existence, is roughly 13,6 billion years ago.
Now we are able to see the light of a galaxy that was shining 13,1 billion years ago.
(Distance is time, remember)
If we can improve our telescopes we may manage to look back in time to the moment of 13,6 billion years ago and see our own moment of creation!

This is not absurd or impossible.
These days scientists and engineers are building the “European Extremely Large Telescope” that will be ready the end of this decade.
This revolutionary new ground-based telescope will be 42 meters in diameter and will be the world's biggest eye on the sky.

But Dutch ex-astronaut Wubbo Ockels says it will be impossible to see the Big Bang, no matter how big we make our telescopes.
He claims that there are different realities.
One is a reality we have in our thinking that is created by being based on earth.
But according to Mr. Ockels, in space a totally different reality exists.
Where questions we have now do not have answers.

This is in line with the own attitude in life.
For a long time it is accepted that there are fundamental questions we humans have but that one can also learn to be satisfied with accepting there are no answers.
To let things are simply the way they are.
And to not get lost in a search for answers.

This way of thinking makes those telescopes of course a waste of money.
And they are.
The money could better be spend on improving the life on earth.
Let that become the big bang.

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To learn more about the discovery of the most far away galaxy ever, click on:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/hubble-glimpses-most-distant-object-ever-seen-galaxy-13-billion-light-years-away?page=

To learn more about the new European telescope, click on:

http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt.html




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SF come true

It has been predicted in science fiction stories long ago.
A machine that can audibly and instantly translate.

For example, a German person and an American person meet.
One speaks German, the other speaks English.
In between them they have this machine that instantly translates what every person says in the other language.
The German says something in German and the machine instantly translates it into English.
The American says something in English and instantly the machine translates this in German.

This is a great invention very useful for people who travel.
No need anymore to learn languages.

This fabulous machine has been developed in Germany.
At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
It is called "Silent sounds" and was presented today at the CeBIT-congress in Hannover, Germany.



For the moment they stick electrodes on the skin of the person talking.
These electrodes determine the slightest movements of the facial muscles and the position of the lips.
To translate them into audible text.
However, in the near future the electrodes will be placed for example in mobile phones.

One way of using this machine is for persons who have lost their voice.
Another application is to talk soundlessly in public places in the mobile phone without disturbing anyone else.
The third way of using it is to have it translate.
Already the "Silent Sounds"-system makes on average only one mistake every one hundred words.

It is expected, according to Michael Wand of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology that in about five to ten years this invention will be a common gadget.

Will be fun to see what happens when two of these machines will be made to talk to each other.

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To learn more about the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology click on:
http://www.kit.edu/english/index.php

For the whole story on "Silent Sounds", click on:
http://www.kit.edu/english/pi_2010_767.php?PHPSESSID=6adeea1b6aeac5f84560a9604975da80




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Yesterday is today is tomorrow

One of the favorite genres of books to read has been science fiction.
Serious science fiction like "Shikasta" by Doris Lessing and "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem.
And of course the books by H.G. Wells like "The Time Machine".

Good science fiction gives a surprising vision of the future.
It describes in an innovative way how our world may look in some time to come.
Expanding consciousness and the imagination.

In 1895 the author H.G. Wells published the novel "The Time Machine".
It is the story of an English inventor who has made a machine with which he is able to travel in time.
The book is much more about politics and social aspects of society than it is science fiction.
But many people will never learn that fascinating and major part of the story simply for the fact that the book is classified as science fiction.
Unable to accept the concept of being able to travel in time and therefore not taking this important book seriously.

Good science fiction writers are visionaries.
They have an imagination of concepts that seem alien, strange and sometimes absurd, but in time sometimes it turns out they were not exactly idiots.

Take this concept of traveling in time like H.G. Wells came up with.
To travel to a future time or to travel to the past.
Although the way H.G. Wells envisioned time travel is primitive, with a machine invented by one person, the concept in spite of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity is becoming more and more acceptable.

For example, recently scientists of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have pieced together most of the DNA of a man who lived in Greenland about 4,000 years ago.
The DNA was recovered from a tuft of hair that had been excavated in 1986 from permafrost on Greenland's west coast, north of the Arctic Circle.
The thousands of years in a deep freeze was key to preserving the genetic material.
What they found was that the man had type A-positive blood.
Brown eyes.
A dark skin.
Dry earwax.
A boosted chance of going bald and several biological adaptations for weathering a cold climate.

Finding out these things through DNA-research about people over 4,000 years ago, is a way of traveling in time.
Recreating what has been.
Having the reality of that time integrate in our contemporary reality.

Still, according to many Science Fiction writers, this is Mickey Mouse stuff.
Because the real time travel happens through the fourth dimension.
This some people can do.
But it is not accepted or explored in science.
Not yet.




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The speed of nails growing

We all know about speed.
We drive a car and see that it goes for example at a speed of 55 miles per hour.
And we know more or less what this means.

But this knowledge of speed is rather limited.
Our imagination handles speeds up to let’s say 150 miles per hour.
Beyond it, it is only a matter of figures.
A missile flying at the speed of sound?
How fast is that actually?

We only know about speed if we can see it.

This not only goes for high speeds.
It is also a valid rule for low speeds.

We are capable to imagine that the slowest speed must be about one mile per hour.
But we never calculate speed by changing the time in the equation.
We always stick to this one-hour thing because it is within the territory of our visual imagination.
We never say: that snail goes at a speed of one mile per two hours.

This lack of imagination and limitation of visual perception results for example in not having a standard for the speed of the growing of our nails.
Or a standard for the speed of our hair growing.
Is it 0,000000000007 miles per hour maybe?

Actually nails grow at an average rate of 0.004 inches (0.1 mm) each day, or 1.5 inches (36.5 mm) in a year.
This is for the nails of the hands.
Nails from the toes grow four times slower.

As is the matter with high speeds, also slow speeds we cannot imagine.
Because we cannot see it.

What is 0.004 inches per day?
Like the speed of sound: 340 meters per second.
Totally abstract entities.

In other words: what do we exactly really know?
Not very much, ladies and gentleman.
Most we know is abstract information that has no concrete meaning.
And that this posting contains 327 words.

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To learn more about the speed of growing of our nails, click on:
http://www.wonderquest.com/petal-nails-light.htm#nails






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Shooting stars around the full moon

When it was very late in the evening, the Fuso Szulc was left to step under the night sky that had something extraordinary to show.

It had the biggest and brightest full moon in 15 years.


The reason for this is simple:

Each month the Moon makes a full orbit around the Earth in a slightly oval-shaped path and last night it was swinging by the Earth at its closest distance, or perigee.
It passed by 356,613km (221,595 miles) away, which is about 28,000km ( 17,000 miles ) closer than average.

The unusual feature of last night was that the perigee also coincided with a full moon, which made it appear 14 per cent bigger and some 30 per cent brighter than most full moons this year .

The next closest encounter with a full moon this large will not be until November 14, 2016.
So the opportunity was gladly taken and as a bonus another phenomenon could be seen.

The annual Geminid meteor shower: one of the year’s best displays of shooting stars.
Up to 100 meteors an hour can fly across the sky.
Some meteors were seen that were burning red with a white tail.

Lots of opportunity to make wishes.
But there was only one.
A happy birthday for the only brother today.

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To learn more about last night's event, click on:

http://living.oneindia.in/insync/2008/brightest-full-moon-2008-121208.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article5327206.ece







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“Hermaphroditism” and “Parthenogenesis”.

It must have been on the last and 6th day.
That these three men realized they had forgotten one thing while creating human beings.
They made them as they looked themselves.
And for the female they had the dubious idea to make her from the rib of the male.
But how were they supposed to reproduce themselves?
It was obviously forgotten.

No surprise because what kind of designing team wants to gain time by not sculpturing two different persons but make a second one quickly from a part of the first one?
That is not very professional.

Why did they force themselves to work with such a tight time limit of 6 days to begin with?
Was it all not so important to them maybe?
Were they creating another world with other beings for somewhere else the next week?

Anyway, we are stuck now with a clumsy job.
This whole idea to have creatures reproduce themselves using the genital organs is simply a very bad idea.
Exactly like a designer who forgets something and at the last moment comes up with a quick and easy solution.

How more simple it all could have been.
Even when completely forgotten, why not come up with the idea that putting a pink in an ear could do the fertilizing?
But no, they had a look at the newly created bodies and thought that the male and female genitals could very well serve a second purpose.

We have to live with it but we must not forget that we are free to use our bodies in a different way as was foreseen by its creators.
We can walk, but we can also decide to crawl.
We can sit down, but we can also decide to lie on our backs.

We can decide to use the genitals for what is their main purpose only.
And refuse to get them involved in other activities.
And plenty of people have made that choice.
Monks, single people, nuns, hermits, priests, saints and prisoners among them.

In a way they are right.
What a crazy idea it is that organs where awful smelling liquid passes through frequently, are supposed to be available for visits of other people.
It is like two persons having dinner in the toilet.

Now some may argue that the creators had no other options.
That it was the only and ideal solution.

But then we should look what evolution has done to certain kinds of fish.
There are fish in the ocean that fertilize in a much more sophisticated way than human beings are forced to do.
These fish swim calmly and quietly next to each other and gently rub the sides.
This rubbing of sides results in the female fish being fertilized.
Isn’t that romantic and sweet?
And hygienic as well?

Another way the fish have come up with is that the male releases his sperm into the water and these sperms look for the eggs themselves to fertilize them.
Clean, easy, dignified and no condoms needed.

In nature we find what would be the best for human beings as an improvement for the current unfortunate situation.
Rubbing sides is not really an option to research to see if this would be an effective method for humans.
After each trip by underground at peak hours, plenty of women will be pregnant.
And releasing sperm and eggs in the water would need a heated swimming pool each time.
Great for California, but what about Maine?

No, definitely the best new way for us is called “parthenogenesis”.
Not only fish can do this trick, but reptiles, water fleas, birds, sharks, bees and scorpions as well.
What is “parthenogenesis”?
It is an asexual form of reproduction.
Similar to how Maria got pregnant of her son Jesus.
The female is able to become pregnant by herself.
It doesn’t need a male at all.
Not even a white dove.

Great advantage of “parthenogenesis” is that all offspring is female.
If we would manage to engineer ourselves that the females of this world can get pregnant by themselves giving birth to girls only, we will eventually become like the island Lesbos in the ancient times of the Greeks.
A world of women only.

Some men might oppose this.
No problem.
Nature has a second ideal solution for human’s current way of fertilizing.
This solution is called “Hermaphroditism”.
The animal is having both male and female reproductive organs.
And simply does the job during a quiet moment by itself.
It can get pregnant without a friend and deliver a healthy baby.

For us it would mean to accept and develop the opposite side within ourselves.
Every man should become more of a woman.
And every woman should become more of a man.

This will take more than 6 days.

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To learn more about “Hermaphroditism”, click on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite

To learn more about “parthenogenesis” click on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis









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Become orgasmic

A few days ago the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, made an important decision.
It gave the green light for milk and meat coming from cloned animals to be marketed to the consumers.
Without the obligation for the marketing and distributing producers to label their products as such.
This means that an innocent consumer buying cheese in the supermarket or a hamburger in a hamburger joint will not know if the milk or the meat are from cloned animals.

It is very unlikely though that soon products will be marketed from cloned animals.
To clone an animal is a very expensive procedure.
Many animals cloned die shortly after birth.
There are worldwide not more than 600 cloned animals that survived.
Only a few companies are involved in this technique of reproducing artificial animals.

The idea of those companies is not to grow cloned animals in great numbers.
What they want is for example to copy a bull with excellent sperm or copy a high milk-producing cow.

Nevertheless, in spite of this situation, the FDA has been busy testing meat, milk and milk products coming from cloned animals to find out if it is OK for us.
One way of doing this was to have animals eat cloned food for 3 months.
The animals were tested and nothing unusual was found.
Any intelligent person would never eat cloned food if it was tested in that amateurish way.

But it is officially approved now.
And we have no idea if the food we buy is from cloned animals or not.
It will not be indicated on the label.

There was a voluntary moratorium agreed by the companies that clone not to introduce products from cloned animals into the food chain.
But as of the FDA’s decision, they can forget about that moratorium.
This in case that voluntary moratorium had any value to begin with.

This blog also has readers in Europe.
They might be laughing now for the decision of the FDA.
However, better stop laughing.
Last week, the European Food Safety Authority also OK’ed products from cloned animals.

No information on the label of a food product also goes for genetically manipulated and herbicide treated products.
Difference with products from cloned animals is that products like soy, corn, potato and dairy products are in most cases all genetically manipulated and treated with herbicides.
This can have serious consequences for a person’s health.
Especially children.

Each person must bring oneself to a moment of reflection.
To seriously ask oneself what is the food bought and eaten.
To contemplate if one really wants to eat food that is genetically manipulated.
Food that has been treated with herbicides that remain in the products and come into the body.
Or food that is coming from cloned animals.

If the answer is that a person thinking in a balanced and intelligent way does not want to consume that kind of food products, immediately a next question pops up.
If it is not indicated on the label of the food product, what can we do?

First of all one must understand why the Government allows companies the freedom to genetically manipulate and spray insecticides and herbicides without letting the consumers know.
The Government is more pro business than pro consumers.
The Government prefers to defend the interests of companies, not the interests of the people.
The Government justifies the donations they got from companies during elections and ignore the votes they got from the people.
That is the hard and uncomfortable truth.

What can we do?
Are we victims?
Do we need to suffer?
Are we helpless and hopeless?

Dear fervent and loyal blog readers, we are not.
There is something we can do that has two tremendous benefits.

This is what we can do:

always and only buy organic products.

They are widely available.

The first benefit of only buying and consuming organic products is that it is the best for the health.
Second benefit is that companies will remark the shift in consumer preference.
If too few people want a hamburger from a cloned animal, genetically manipulated and sprayed with herbicides, they will stop making them.
More and more organic food will become available and prices will go down.

Go organic.
Be organic.
To become orgasmic.

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Information about the decisions of the Food and Drug Administration and the European Food and Safety Authority, click on:
http://www.canada.com/topics/bodyandhealth/story.html?id=5720836e-c94f-48ac-a504-a30b7fe65eda

To learn more about how to Avoid Genetically-Manipulated (GMO) Food Ingredients, click on:
http://www.soyinfo.com/haz/gehaz.shtml

To learn more how the United States Department of Agriculture agrees with marketing cloned food:
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?contentidonly=true&contentid=2008/01/0012.xml








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Dr. Moreau is coming!

Stem cells, as many fervent and loyal blog readers will know, are the very early cells that can develop into almost all other types of cell and tissue.
They occur in the early (five-day) embryo when it is a tiny ball of about 100 cells before it implants in the uterus.
They also occur in significant numbers in some tissues in the developing foetus and in umbilical cord blood at birth.
They can also be found in some adult tissue, e.g. bone marrow, but they can be difficult to isolate, being present in very small numbers.

In the United Kingdom last week, Parliament allowed scientists to go ahead with therapeutic cloning.
To use stem cells to generate new human tissues.

This opens the way to clone a human being.
Like has been done with sheep and other animals.
The only way this is stopped is the control of the Government.
In Britain, it is a crime to create a human embryo outside the body without a license from a Government agency, and officials have made it clear they will not issue one for human cloning.

The scientists in the UK already have announced they will use DNA from animals to mix with human stem cells to make human tissue and organs.

One thing is to get for example a new liver that resembles more one like a pig has.
If it works, it works and as long as the person is not starting to act like a pig, what is the problem?


We will see in the future availability of organs, slowing down and maybe healing of diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson, thanks to a combination of animal and human stem cells.

The other thing is that this technique can potentially eventually result in the possibility of the cloning of a human being.
A person identical to one already there.

History has learned that what technique makes possible, people somewhere somehow will actually do.
A Government can make a law that it is not allowed, but if economical, personal or political gains can be made, it will happen never the less.

So, fervent and loyal blog readers, make yourself ready to meet people who are partly animal or identical to someone else.

One of the most beloved writers is H.G.Wells.
He was English and lived from 1866 till 1946.


A visionary man who has been writing amazing stories.
One of them is called “The island of Dr. Moreau”.
Made into a film by John Frankenheimer in 1996 with Marlon Brando playing Dr. Moreau.
It is the story of a man who is rescued from a boat accident and brought to an island.
Where he discovers that a doctor is experimenting with cloning and DNA.
Dr. Moreau has managed to make beings that are half human, and half animal.
The issue is of course how to keep those creatures under control.
Obviously this is the thing that fails and the creatures turn against their makers.

The idea H.G. Wells had for the book is founded on a wisdom many people know for centuries.
They know because they see it happen all around them.
When human beings turn against nature, there are always serious repercussions.
Human beings are supposed to live in harmony with nature.
But they don’t.
They try to become the masters of nature.
And this is simply impossible.
Every effort eventually results in disaster, suffering and defeat.

Always humans have secondary reasons to interfere in nature.
They burn down forests to have more agricultural land.
Until it turns out that the disappeared forests were playing an important role in the CO2 conditions of the planet.
They pump up oil to use it in a way that temporarily improves lives of some of the population devastating the environment leaving but havoc for the future.
Concerning health this is also exactly very much the matter.
People refuse to accept that it is only natural to die.
They try to postpone and avoid it.

However, it makes sense of course to develop medical techniques to halt suffering.
Although one would think that this effort becomes only relevant after diseases like malaria are wiped out first.
After we have improved the following facts:

• Each year, more than 8 million people around the world die because they are too poor to stay alive.
• Over 1 billion people—1 in 6 people around the world—live in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 a day.
• More than 800 million go hungry each day.
• Over 100 million primary school-age children cannot go to school.

But these facts are not stopping the developed countries to pour millions in medical research for the well to do.
With the result that now in the United Kingdom the Government has opened the doors to have cloning get out of control.
As expected, Dr. Moreau will soon be born and busy again.

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To learn more about H.G. Wells, click on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells

To get the facts about poverty, click on:

http://www.netaid.org/global_poverty/global-poverty/