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Most people think of water as existing in only one of three phases: Solid ice, liquid water, or gas vapor. But matter can exist in many different phases—ice, for example, has more than ten known phases, or ways that its atoms can be spatially arranged. The widespread use of piezoelectric materials, such as microphones and ultrasound, is possible thanks to a fundamental understanding of how an external force, like pressure, temperature, or electricity, can lead to phase transitions that imbue materials with new properties.

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Exactly how and when the Saturn’s rings formed is an issue that has fascinated astronomers and planetary scientists for centuries.

The rings are made mostly of particles of water ice that range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to as large as mountains.

The ring system extends up to 175,000 miles (282,000km) from the planet, but for all their immense width, they are razor-thin, about 30 feet (10 meters) thick in most places.

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The mission will make India the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, adding its name to a long list of recent achievements in space exploration. In the past 10 years, the Indian space agency has launched multiple missions into space to gain a better understanding of Mars and the Moon.

India’s space agency says it will make the country’s first landing on the surface of the moon in September this year.

The country’s latest lunar mission, Chandrayaan-2, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, is to lift off in mid-July.

The mission will make India the fourth country to land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon, adding its name to a long list of recent achievements in space exploration. In the past 10 years, the Indian space agency has launched multiple missions into space to gain a better understanding of Mars and the moon.

Continue reading “India hopes to become fourth country on the moon in September” | >

The Lunar Polar Gas-Dynamic Mining Outpost (LGMO) (see quad chart graphic) is a breakthrough mission architecture that promises to greatly reduce the cost of human exploration and industrialization of the Moon. LGMO is based on two new innovations that together solve the problem of affordable lunar polar ice mining for propellant production. The first innovation is based on a new insight into lunar topography: our analysis suggests that there are large (hundreds of meters) landing areas in small (0.5−1.5 km) nearpolar craters on which the surface is permafrost in perpetual darkness but with perpetual sunlight available at altitudes of only 10s to 100s of meters. In these prospective landing sites, deployable solar arrays held vertically on masts 100 m or so in length (lightweight and feasible in lunar gravity) can provide nearly continuous power.

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The first time Vayu Maini Rekdal manipulated microbes, he made a decent sourdough bread. At the time, young Maini Rekdal, and most people who head to the kitchen to whip up a salad dressing, pop popcorn, ferment vegetables, or caramelize onions, did not consider the crucial chemical reactions behind these concoctions.

Even more crucial are the reactions that happen after the plates are clean. When a slice of sourdough travels through the digestive system, the trillions of microbes that live in our gut help the body break down that bread to absorb the nutrients. Since the human body cannot digest certain substances — all-important fiber, for example — microbes step up to perform chemistry no human can.

“But this kind of microbial metabolism can also be detrimental,” said Maini Rekdal, a graduate student in the lab of Professor Emily Balskus and first-author on their new study published in Science. According to Maini Rekdal, gut microbes can chew up medications, too, often with hazardous side effects. “Maybe the drug is not going to reach its target in the body, maybe it’s going to be toxic all of a sudden, maybe it’s going to be less helpful,” Maini Rekdal said.

In their study, Balskus, Maini Rekdal, and their collaborators at the University of California San Francisco, describe one of the first concrete examples of how the microbiome can interfere with a drug’s intended path through the body. Focusing on levodopa (L-dopa), the primary treatment for Parkinson’s disease, they identified which bacteria are responsible for degrading the drug and how to stop this microbial interference.

Continue reading “Gut microbes eat our medication” | >

An intriguing experimental result, known as “the phantom leaf effect,” if fully verified, may be an example of some or even all of these biofield processes. In these experiments, coronal discharge or the Kirlian photographic effect reveals a field effect in the morphological form of an intact living leaf even after part of the leaf is severed. This suggests an analogy to the subjective experience of a phantom limb reported by patients after the limb has been amputated. There might be a persisting biofield that represents the amputatedlimb. First described by Adamenko and reported by Tiller and by Ostrander and Schroeder, more recent validating experiments have been performed with detection methods of greater precision; these are summarized in Hubacher. In his most recent publication, Hubacher performed the experiment with highest definition photographic samples using the largest number of samples to date. Of 137 leaves severed and imaged, 96 (70%) demonstrated clear phantoms.

This article briefly reviews the biofield hypothesis and its scientific literature. Evidence for the existence of the biofield now exists, and current theoretical foundations are now being developed. A review of the biofield and related topics from the perspective of physical science is needed to identify a common body of knowledge and evaluate possible underlying principles of origin of the biofield. The properties of such a field could be based on electromagnetic fields, coherent states, biophotons, quantum and quantum-like processes, and ultimately the quantum vacuum. Given this evidence, we intend to inquire and discuss how the existence of the biofield challenges reductionist approaches and presents its own challenges regarding the origin and source of the biofield, the specific evidence for its existence, its relation to biology, and last but not least, how it may inform an integrated understanding of consciousness and the living universe.

Key Words: Biofield, quantum mechanics, physics.

Conventional biology is based on molecular processes—ie, biochemical interactions that ultimately reduce to macromolecules such as DNA and RNA. Even organismal biology, which concerns itself with addressing organisms as wholes, still relies on the reductionist approach of understanding the whole by analyzing how the parts fit together. These approaches, although very successful in specific scientific and medical applications, fail to address phenomena that by their nature are holistic—ie, they may need to be explained from a whole organism context, crossing boundaries of scale, and thereby including quantum and conventional fields, mind, and relationship to environment. It seems that biology, despite the great successes it has achieved and the multitude of applications in theory as well as in practice, has still not undergone the types of revolutions that shook physics over the last 100 years.

Continue reading “Biofield Science: Current Physics Perspectives” | >

Cops would love to have a system that uses DNA from a crime scene to generate a picture of a suspect’s face, but that tech is still restricted to science fiction.

That technology may never exist, but a team of Belgian and American engineers just developed something similar. Using what they know about how DNA shapes the human face, the researchers built an algorithm that scans through a database of images and selects the faces that could be linked to the DNA found at a crime scene, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications — a powerful crime-fighting tool, but also a terrifying new way to subvert privacy.

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