From Snake to Swan

“The tongue is like a snake and the mouth like a snake hole for the person who does not chant the holy names of the Lord. Those who have no love for Shri Rama are understood to be bereft of the creator’s favor, says Tulsi.” (Dohavali, 40) rasanā sam̐āpini badana bila je na japahiṃ harināma | tulasī prema na rāma soṃ tāhi bidhātā bāma || A sincere lover will always think of new ways to properly describe their intense and pure emotions to others. It’s not easy to put what you feel into words, especially if you are presenting your thoughts through poems that can also be sung. Because of the constraints accompanying poetry, the writer must use brevity, which Shakespeare referred to as the soul of wit. In this nice verse from the Dohavali, the poet Tulsidas  very succinctly and emphatically declares his love for Shri Rama, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and at the same time provides valuable insight into the purpose of human life. Our bodies were crafted through nature’s influence, which works under the direction of the creator. Just as a machine is the result of fine craftsmanship on the part of one or more intelligent human beings, the form adopted by the spirit soul is due solely to the work of a higher power, the creator who is in charge of distributing the results of karma, or fruitive work. When a particular individual has no love for the Supreme Lord, who is a loving God through and through, then the creator obviously has not been favorable to them. In the verse above, Tulsidas first says that anyone who doesn’t chant the names of Hari essentially has a tongue which is like a serpent and a mouth which is like a serpent hole. The comparison is so extreme that it is even a bit humorous, as it conveys the deep love and affection held by the poet not only for the person addressed in harinama-japa, or the silent chanting  of a devotional mantra, but also the recitation process itself. The tongue reveals the thoughts of the mind; through our speech our ideas and feelings are communicated to others. When time is spent chanting the Lord’s holy names, such as those found in the maha-mantra, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare ”, the tongue is put to good use. Hari is another word for God that means “one who removes distresses”. The Supreme Lord’s position is not to facilitate desires for personal sense gratification or advancement in some material endeavor. These aspects of life essentially take care of themselves through the workings of nature, which are managed by elevated living entities that are godly but not equal to the Supreme Lord. The distresses that Hari removes relate todevotional service , or bhakti-yoga. In the absence of God consciousness, the living entity, in any form he accepts, takes part in activities driven only by animal instincts. Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired, have sexual relations when you are stimulated, and defend your property from foreign attack. But consciousness is the real gift given to the soul, which is the essence of life. Therefore the true aim in any form of body is to develop this consciousness fully and purify it by connecting it with God. Yoga is meant only for this purpose. The root meaning of yoga is “plus”, or “addition”. The two operands in the equation are the individual spiritual entity and the fountainhead of all things matter and spirit, God. Since the Supreme Lord is superior, if He sees someone steadily determined in yoga, trying very hard to connect with Him, He removes their fears. In this sense the tongue is one of the greatest blessings bestowed upon the living entity. Through the medium of the tongue, one can regularly chant the names of Hari, or harinama, of which there are too many to count. Rama is the favorite name for Tulsidas, as it represents the Supreme Lord’s divine incarnation of Shri Ramachandra  who appeared on earth in the guise of a warrior prince many thousands of years ago. Tulsidas dedicated his whole life to chanting the glories of Rama and persuading others to take to pure bhakti, wherein one’s life and soul would be surrendered to the interests of Hari. Aside from its ability to purify, chanting the names of Hari is a very pleasurable experience, especially for one who is able to steadily develop their God consciousness. In every other endeavor the instigating factor is the desire for happiness or enjoyment. When engagement or dedication in an activity ceases, it is to be understood that the enjoyment has withered away. If we suck the juice out of sugarcane, we really have no use for the plant anymore. Therefore once one activity gets boring, we will jump to another and try to squeeze the sweetness out of it. With bhakti, however, it is seen that the dedication to chanting and devotional service in general only increases with further practice. This property of spiritual science can never be understood by blunt measurements or deductive reasoning. In the spiritual land, one minus one can equal one, as the Supreme Lord is not limited by any rules of a temporary land governed by matter. Just as Hari knows no exhaustion, defeat, fear or loss, the devotees who regularly chant His names grow increasingly attached to bhakti-yoga and the happiness it brings. One who develops a taste for harinamawill naturally compare their new situation to the way they felt before. Since everyone starts off at the same position, as unintelligent human beings needing guidance, even the advanced yogi can remember a time when he wasn’t wholly dedicated to connecting with the divine consciousness. Looking back on his previous life he will think of how uneventful and painful it was. He now loves chanting the names of the Lord so much that he will wonder how any person gifted with a tongue could ever refrain from such an activity. The tongue is a very powerful instrument, as it can not only bring about a purification in consciousness, it can also lead the conditioned soul astray. When the tongue is used to chant the names of Hari and eat the remnants of foodstuff offered to Him [prasadam ], the true benefit of the wonderful tongue included with the human body is realized. In the absence of God consciousness, the tongue talks about all sorts of nonsense, curses others, can’t be controlled in speech, and takes to eating varieties of impure foods. As the aim of human life is to realize God through yoga, any engagement which prohibits this connection can be considered impure and a waste of time. Since eating is a necessity for any life form, it cannot be neglected by the aspiring transcendentalist. Fortunately, every angle is covered by bhakti. For eating, the devotee is advised to eat the remnants of sacrifice, or yajna-shishta. A sacrifice is typically a formal ritual aimed at pleasing the enjoyer of all sacrifice, Yajneshvara, which is another name for Hari. “If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water, I will accept it.” (Lord Krishna, Bhagavad-gita , 9.26) In the Bhagavad-gita, the same Hari, in His original form of Lord Krishna , states that if someone offers Him a flower, a fruit, a leaf or some water with love and devotion, He gladly accepts it. This doesn’t apply just to Krishna the original person, but to His deity  representation as well. God is Absolute, so the sound vibration of His name and the picture depicting His transcendental features are non-different from Him. When food items are sacrificed in this way, Hari accepts them and then returns the remnants to the person doing the offering. By eating prasadam the tongue gets purified and remains immune to the effects of the material world, which act at every moment to attack the vulnerable senses. Impure actions by the tongue indicate that the material forces have a strong influence on the individual. When the tongue eats animal flesh, especially that of a cow  mercilessly killed in a slaughterhouse, the individual’s lack of God consciousness is revealed. All forms of life are Brahman, or pure spirit. Therefore even the animals are in the same boat as the human beings. They may not have the potential for high intelligence and the ability to fully develop consciousness, but this doesn’t mean that we should unnaturally stop their progression through the various forms of body. A small infant is very unintelligent, as are many innocent human beings, but this doesn’t give us license to kill them. When the tongue engages in unauthorized meat eating, the love for the Supreme Lord that naturally exists within the heart is understood to still be in a dormant state. When the tongue talks about Hari, His forms, names and activities, the true benefit of speech is achieved. Accompanying japa is kirtana, which means “to glorify”. Kirtana usually takes the form of songs sung that describe the glories of the Supreme Lord. Japa is usually performed quietly and alone, while kirtana typically involves groups of people. The tongue that regularly takes part in these two activities obviously lives in the mouth of a wise person. Such a tongue belongs to the body of an individual who is very fortunate; to whom the creator was favorable. The opinion that those who don’t chant the names of Hari have tongues like snakes and mouths like serpent holes seems a bit harsh. After all, we may know many people who are kind, pious, sweet and caring but don’t take part in bhakti. Should we consider their tongues to be like snakes? Let’s think of it this way. If we see a student in a classroom who is nice and polite but does not do any of their homework nor pass their exams, will we say that they are a good student? If we work with someone at the office who never tells a lie and never says a mean word but at the same time fails to complete the tasks assigned to them, would we say that they are a valuable asset to the company? As the aim of human life is to become God conscious, for as long as that mission is not furthered, the body parts granted by the creator are not taken full advantage of. When the tongue doesn’t chant the names of Hari and glorify Him through speech and song, it must glorify and praise other living entities and things. Since these objects are not God, the tongue cannot be said to be properly utilized. A snake is a cold-blooded reptile, and a snake hole is not something we prefer to see, as it probably scares us more than anything. If someone speaks regularly about the glories of material life, which is fueled by illicit sex  and unhealthy desires, their influence must be considered poisonous, as it will do nothing to further awareness of life’s real mission. The news media serves as the most notable culprit in this regard. Every day they have another new lead story, which either blasts a person they don’t like or praises someone they view as worthy of adulation and fame at the time. Obviously the attention paid does nothing tangible for anyone, as news from a few days ago is rarely revisited. If you give someone a newspaper that is more than a day old, they will not have any desire to read it. As a newspaper’s worthiness comes from its content, it is to be understood that the stories themselves become worthless after a few days. While it may be harsh to say that the tongue of the materially conscious individual is like a snake, it should be remembered that the snake in this instance can be turned into a swan very quickly. Those who have made the best use of their tongues through chanting the names of Hari can distribute the nectar of the holy names to others, inducing them to take up their constitutional engagement. The soul is meant to serve in a loving mood, so when there is no information about Hari available, the individual will take to serving its own interests or the desires of other materially conscious individuals. Through distribution of the names of God, which is the primary aim of the bona fide spiritual preachers and the Vaishnava poets, thousands of snakelike entities can turn into wonderful swans that always remain amidst the lotus flowers represented by the sweet, transcendental vibrations that glorify the Supreme Lord. “From the highest planet in the material world down to the lowest, all are places of misery wherein repeated birth and death take place. But one who attains to My abode, O son of Kunti, never takes birth again.” (Lord Krishna, Bg. 8.16) Tulsidas states that the creator has been unfavorable to those who don’t have love for Lord Rama . In the absence of bhakti, how can any situation gained in any form of body be considered favorable? As death takes away all accumulated gains, nothing remains for the conditioned soul at the time of quitting their body other than a return ticket to the same cycle of acceptance and rejection, which repeats perpetually until consciousness is purified. Bhakti’s benefits, on the other hand, are always increasing, as is evidenced by the increase in fervor and attachment that results from continuous practice in devotional efforts. The materially conscious individual was not shown favor by the creator, but the spiritually attached liberated soul has the full blessings of the Supreme Lord, who is the creator of even the creator. These benedictions can be received at any time, even if the creator was not originally favorable to us. God’s mercy is open to everyone, just as the sun’s rays hit every corner of the earth. One who knows how to take advantage of the divine mercy will make the most of their human form of life. Even if the creator grants us birth in an aristocratic family, a home full of spiritually conscious individuals, or the most pleasant circumstances, unless and until we tap into the divine consciousness, we cannot validly claim to have been favored by him. But when pure love for Shri Rama, the same God that everyone naturally believes in, is established, every body part and every condition of life becomes favorable, as they only further increase one’s God consciousness. In Closing: Those who attention to chanting Hari’s names do not give, Their tongue like a snake in its hole of the mouth does live. Seems like a harsh comparison for poet to make, But from it great lesson we can take. Tongue indicates what the mind is thinking of, Whether it wants material enjoyment or divine love. Purify eating by using tongue for prasadam tasting, No more on unclean foods senses indulging. Purify speech by talking of God, whose glories are broad, No more wasting time on entities who are flawed. Those without love for Rama by creator are not favored, With the pains of material life are they beleaguered. But within a second the snake can turn into a swan, By on holy names and form of Rama concentrating on.

WALKING WITH THE WOUNDED - FRANK GARDNER REPORT

Crab Pulsar Beams Most Energetic Gamma Rays Ever Detected from a Pulsar

One of the most studied objects in the sky, the Crab Nebula is powered by a pulsar. This composite image of the Crab Nebula uses data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (x-ray image in blue), Hubble Space Telescope (optical image in red and yellow), and Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared image in purple). (Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Seward; Optical: NASA/ESA/ASU/J.Hester & A.Loll; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. Minn./R.Gehrz)

Science Daily  — Astrophysicists have detected pulsed gamma-ray emission from the Crab pulsar at energies far beyond what current theoretical models of pulsars can explain.

"It turns out that being persistent and stubborn helps," Otte said. "These results put new constraints on the mechanism for how the gamma-ray emission is generated."

With energies exceeding 100 billion electron-volts (100 GeV), the surprising gamma-ray pulses were detected by the VERITAS telescope array at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona and reported by an international team of scientists in a paper in the October 7 issue ofScience. Corresponding author Nepomuk Otte, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that some researchers had told him he was crazy to even look for pulsar emission in this energy realm.

Otte, Andrew McCann of McGill University in Montreal, and Martin Schroedter of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory performed most of the analytic work for the study, which involved nearly 100 scientists in the VERITAS collaboration. VERITAS spokesperson Rene Ong, professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, credited Otte as the leading advocate for using the powerful gamma-ray observatory to study the Crab pulsar.

"To me it's a real triumph of the experimental approach, not going along with the flow and making assumptions, but just observing to see what there is. And lo and behold, we see something different than what everybody expected," Ong said.

The Crab pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded in a spectacular supernova in the year 1054, leaving behind the brilliant Crab Nebula, with the pulsar at its heart. It is one of the most intensively studied objects in the sky. Rotating about 30 times a second, the pulsar has an intense, co-rotating magnetic field from which it emits beams of radiation. The beams sweep around like a lighthouse beacon because they are not aligned with the star's rotation axis. So although the beams are steady, they are detected on Earth as rapid pulses of radiation.

Scientists have long agreed on a general picture of what causes pulsar emission. Electromagnetic forces created by the star's rapidly rotating magnetic field accelerate charged particles to near the speed of light, producing radiation over a broad spectrum. But the details remain a mystery.

"After many years of observations and results from the Crab, we thought we had an understanding of how it worked, and the models predicted an exponential decay of the emission spectrum above around 10 GeV. So it came as a real surprise when we found pulsed gamma-ray emission at energies above 100 GeV," said coauthor David Williams, adjunct professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the VERITAS collaboration.

Prior to these new results, a phenomenon known as curvature radiation was the leading explanation for the Crab's pulsed gamma-ray emission. Curvature radiation is produced when a high-energy charged particle moves along a curved magnetic field. But according to Otte, this mechanism cannot account for gamma rays with energies above 100 GeV.

"The conventional wisdom was that the dominant mechanism is curvature radiation. But the VERITAS results have shown that there must be a different mechanism at work," Otte said. "Curvature radiation can explain the lower-energy emission, but we really don't know what causes the very high-energy emission."

One possible scenario may be a process known as inverse Compton scattering, which involves energy transfer from charged particles to photons. "That seems to be a more likely scenario now, but we still don't know the details of how this works," Otte said. It is also not clear whether one mechanism dominates at all gamma-ray energies, or if curvature radiation dominates at lower energies and something like inverse Compton scattering dominates at higher energies.

According to Ong, researchers will need to characterize the very high-energy gamma-ray emission in much greater detail in order to gain more insight into the mechanisms behind it. "We need to take more measurements and get the exact shape of the spectrum at these very high energies," he said.

The VERITAS observations open up a new avenue for testing Einstein's theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a universal constant. One of the predictions of a quantum theory of gravity, which emerges from efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, is that the speed of light actually may have a small dependence on the energy of the photon. This would be a violation of "Lorentz invariance," which is at the core of special relativity, but it might be detectable in the VERITAS data, Otte said. Photons with a range of energies are emitted by the pulsar at the same time. If photons with different energies travel at different speeds, the effect would manifest itself as a slight shift in the position of the pulses at different energies

Ionic Liquid Catalyst Helps Turn Emissions Into Fuel

Biofuel production (left) compared to fuel produced via artificial synthesis. Crops takes in CO2, water and sunlight to create biomass, which then is transferred to a refinery to create fuel. In the artificial photosynthesis route, a solar collector or windmill collects energy that powers an electrolyzer, which converts CO2 to a synthesis gas that is piped to a refinery to create fuel. (Credit: Graphic by Dioxide Materials)

Science Daily  — An Illinois research team has succeeded in overcoming one major obstacle to a promising technology that simultaneously reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide and produces fuel.

Artificial photosynthesis is the process of converting carbon dioxide gas into useful carbon-based chemicals, most notably fuel or other compounds usually derived from petroleum, as an alternative to extracting them from biomass.

University of Illinois chemical and biological engineering professor Paul Kenis and his research group joined forces with researchers at Dioxide Materials, a startup company, to produce a catalyst that improves artificial photosynthesis. The company, in the university Research Park, was founded by retired chemical engineering professor Richard Masel. The team reported their results in the journal Science.

In plants, photosynthesis uses solar energy to convert carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water to sugars and other hydrocarbons. Biofuels are refined from sugars extracted from crops such as corn. However, in artificial photosynthesis, an electrochemical cell uses energy from a solar collector or a wind turbine to convert CO₂ to simple carbon fuels such as formic acid or methanol, which are further refined to make ethanol and other fuels.

"The key advantage is that there is no competition with the food supply," said Masel, a co-principal investigator of the paper and CEO of Dioxide Materials, "and it is a lot cheaper to transmit electricity than it is to ship biomass to a refinery."

However, one big hurdle has kept artificial photosynthesis from vaulting into the mainstream: The first step to making fuel, turning carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, is too energy intensive. It requires so much electricity to drive this first reaction that more energy is used to produce the fuel than can be stored in the fuel.

The Illinois group used a novel approach involving an ionic liquid to catalyze the reaction, greatly reducing the energy required to drive the process. The ionic liquids stabilize the intermediates in the reaction so that less electricity is needed to complete the conversion.

The researchers used an electrochemical cell as a flow reactor, separating the gaseous CO₂ input and oxygen output from the liquid electrolyte catalyst with gas-diffusion electrodes. The cell design allowed the researchers to fine-tune the composition of the electrolyte stream to improve reaction kinetics, including adding ionic liquids as a co-catalyst.

"It lowers the overpotential for CO₂ reduction tremendously," said Kenis, who is also a professor of mechanical science and engineering and affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "Therefore, a much lower potential has to be applied. Applying a much lower potential corresponds to consuming less energy to drive the process."

Next, the researchers hope to tackle the problem of throughput. To make their technology useful for commercial applications, they need to speed up the reaction and maximize conversion.

"More work is needed, but this research brings us a significant step closer to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels while simultaneously reducing CO₂ emissions that are linked to unwanted climate change," Kenis said.

Graduate students Brian Rosen, Michael Thorson, Wei Zhu and Devin Whipple and postdoctoral researcher Amin Salehi-Khojin were co-authors of the paper. The U.S. Department of Energy supported this work.

Ancient Supernovas Discovered: 10-Billion-Year-Old Exploding Stars Were a Source of Earth's Iron, Researchers Say

One of ten supernovas in the Subaru Deep Field, which exploded 10 billion years ago. (Credit: Tel Aviv University.)

Science Daily — Supernovas -- stars in the process of exploding -- open a window onto the history of the elements of Earth's periodic table as well as the history of the universe. All of those heavier than oxygen were formed in nuclear reactions that occurred during these explosions.

The discovery sharpens our understanding of the nature of supernovas and their role in element formation, say study leaders Prof. Dan Maoz, Dr. Dovi Poznanski and Or Graur of TAU's Department of Astrophysics at the Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy. These "thermonuclear" supernovas in particular are a major source of iron in the universe.

The most ancient explosions, far enough away that their light is reaching us only now, can be difficult to spot. A project spearheaded by Tel Aviv University researchers has uncovered a record-breaking number of supernovas in the Subaru Deep Field, a patch of sky the size of a full moon. Out of the 150 supernovas observed, 12 were among the most distant and ancient ever seen.

The research, which appears in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this month, was done in collaboration with teams from a number of Japanese and American institutions, including the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A key element of the universe

Supernovas are nature's "element factories." During these explosions, elements are both formed and flung into interstellar space, where they serve as raw materials for new generations of stars and planets. Closer to home, says Prof. Maoz, "these elements are the atoms that form the ground we stand on, our bodies, and the iron in the blood that flows through our veins." By tracking the frequency and types of supernova explosions back through cosmic time, astronomers can reconstruct the universe's history of element creation.

In order to observe the 150,000 galaxies of the Subaru Deep Field, the team used the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, on the 14,000-foot summit of the extinct Mauna Kea volcano. The telescope's light-collecting power, sharp images, and wide field of view allowed the researchers to overcome the challenge of viewing such distant supernovas.

By "staring" with the telescope at the Subaru Deep Field, the faint light of the most distant galaxies and supernovas accumulated over several nights at a time, forming a long and deep exposure of the field. Over the course of observations, the team "caught" the supernovas in the act of exploding, identifying 150 supernovas in all.

Sourcing man's life-blood

According to the team's analysis, thermonuclear type supernovas, also called Type-la, were exploding about five times more frequently 10 billion years ago than they are today. These supernovas are a major source of iron in the universe, the main component of Earth's core and an essential ingredient of the blood in our bodies.

Scientists have long been aware of the "universal expansion," the fact that galaxies are receding from one another. Observations using Type-Ia supernovas as beacons have shown that the expansion is accelerating, apparently under the influence of a mysterious "dark energy" -- the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded to three astronomers for this work. However, the nature of the supernovas themselves is poorly understood. This study improves our understanding by revealing the range of the ages of the stars that explode as Type-Ia supernovas. Eventually, this will enhance their usefulness for studying dark energy and the universal expansion, the researchers explain.

Natural Compound Helps Reverse Diabetes in Mice

Researchers (from left) Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, Jun Yoshino, MD, PhD, and Kathryn Mills showed that a natural compound, NMN, helps to treat symptoms of diabetes in mice. (Credit: Julia Evangelou Strait)

Science Daily  — Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have restored normal blood sugar metabolism in diabetic mice using a compound the body makes naturally. The finding suggests that it may one day be possible for people to take the compound much like a daily vitamin as a way to treat or even prevent type 2 diabetes.

"After giving NMN, glucose tolerance goes completely back to normal in female diabetic mice," says Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. "In males, we see a milder effect compared to females, but we still see an effect. These are really remarkable results. NMN improves diabetic symptoms, at least in mice."

This naturally occurring compound is called nicotinamide mononucleotide, or NMN, and it plays a vital role in how cells use energy.

The research appears online Oct. 4 in Cell Metabolism.

Imai says this discovery holds promise for people because the mechanisms that NMN influences are largely the same in mice and humans.

"But whether this mechanism is equally compromised in human patients with type 2 diabetes is something we have to check," Imai says. "We have plans to do this in the very near future."

All cells in the body make NMN in a chain of reactions leading to production of NAD, a vital molecule that harvests energy from nutrients and puts it into a form cells can use. Among other things, NAD activates a protein called SIRT1 that has been shown to promote healthy metabolism throughout the body, from the pancreas to the liver to muscle and fat tissue.

According to the study, aging and eating a high-fat diet reduce production of NMN, slowing the body's production of NAD and leading to abnormal metabolic conditions such as diabetes. NAD cannot be given to the mice directly because of toxic effects. But after administering NMN, levels of NAD rise and the diabetic mice show dramatically improved responses to glucose. In some cases, they return to normal.

"I'm very excited to see these results because the effect of NMN is much bigger than other known compounds or chemicals," says first author Jun Yoshino, MD, PhD, postdoctoral research associate. "Plus, the fact that the body naturally makes NMN is promising for translating these findings into humans."

Imai and his colleagues found that young, healthy mice on a high-fat diet developed diabetes in six months or less. In these mice, they found that NAD levels were reduced. But after administering NMN, levels of NAD increased and the female mice had normal results in glucose tolerance tests -- a measure of how well the body moves glucose from the blood to the organs and tissues for use. Glucose tolerance was also improved after male diabetic mice received NMN but did not quite return to normal. The researchers are interested in learning more about these differences between male and female mice.

"We don't have a clear answer, but we are speculating that sex hormones, such as estrogen, may be important downstream for NAD synthesis," Yoshino says.

In older mice, they observed that about 15 percent of healthy males fed a normal diet developed diabetes.

"When we injected these older diabetic mice with NMN, they had improved glucose tolerance, even after one injection," says Kathryn F. Mills, research lab supervisor and an equally contributing first author of the study. "We also injected older healthy mice and found that they weren't adversely affected. It's good to know that even if the mice are not diabetic, giving NMN is not going to hurt them."

Imai says few studies have examined normal mice that naturally develop diabetes as a simple result of aging because the experiments take so long. In an interesting twist, few elderly female mice developed diabetes at all. But after switching to a high fat diet, older female mice quickly developed severe diabetes.

"Again, when we injected these females with NMN, we came up with a completely normal glucose tolerance curve," Mills says. "We can also see that the NMN has completely reversed and normalized the levels of cholesterol, triglycerides and free fatty acids."

Though the mice received NMN by injection in this study, Imai's group is now conducting a long-term study of diabetic mice that get NMN dissolved in their drinking water. Imai calls this work a first step toward a possible "nutriceutical" that people could take almost like a vitamin to treat or even prevent type 2 diabetes.

"Once we can get a grade of NMN that humans can take, we would really like to launch a pilot human study," Imai says.

Astrophysics and Extinctions: News About Planet-Threatening Events

Science Daily  — Space is a violent place. If a star explodes or black holes collide anywhere in our part of the Milky Way, they'd give off colossal blasts of lethal gamma-rays, X-rays and cosmic rays and it's perfectly reasonable to expect Earth to be bathed in them. A new study of such events has yielded some new information about the potential effects of what are called "short-hard" interstellar radiation events.

"We find that a kind of gamma-ray burst -- a short gamma-ray burst -- is probably more significant than a longer gamma-ray burst," said astrophysicist Brian Thomas of Washburn University. Improved and accumulated data collected by the SWIFT satellite, which catches gamma-ray bursts in action in other galaxies, is providing a better case for the power and threat of the short bursts to life on Earth.

Several studies in the past have demonstrated how longer high-energy radiation bursts, such as those caused by supernovae, and extreme solar flares can deplete stratospheric ozone, allowing the most powerful and damaging forms of ultraviolet radiation to penetrate to Earth's surface. The probability of an event intense enough to disrupt life on the land or in the oceans becomes large, if considered on geological timescales. So getting a handle on the rates and intensities of such events is important for efforts to connect them to extinctions in the fossil record.

The shorter bursts are really short: less than one second long. They are thought to be caused by the collision of two neutron stars or maybe even colliding black holes. No one is certain which. What is clear is that they are incredibly powerful events.

"The duration is not as important as the amount of radiation," said Thomas. If such a burst were to happen inside the Milky Way, it its effects would be much longer lasting to Earth's surface and oceans.

"What I focused on was the longer term effects," said Thomas. The first effect is to deplete the ozone layer by knocking free oxygen and nitrogen atoms so they can recombine into ozone-destroying nitrous oxides. These long-lived molecules keep destroying ozone until they rain out. "So we see a big impact on the ozone layer."

Those effects are likely to have been devastating for many forms of life on the surface -- including terrestrial and marine plants which are the foundation of the food web.

Based on what is seen among other galaxies, these short bursts, it seems that they occur in any given galaxy at a rate of about once per 100 million years. If that is correct, then it's very likely that Earth has been exposed to such events scores of times over its history. The question is whether they left a calling card in the sky or Earth's geological record.

Astronomical evidence is not likely, said Thomas, because the galaxy spins and mixes pretty thoroughly every million years, so any remnants of blasts are probably long gone from view. There might, however, be evidence in the ground here on Earth, he said. Some researchers are looking at the isotope iron-60, for instance, which has been argued as a possible proxy for radiation events.

If isotopes like iron-60 can reveal the strata of the events, it then becomes a matter of looking for extinction events that correlate and seeing what died and what survived -- which could shed more light on the event itself.

"I work with some paleontologists and we try to look for correlations with extinctions, but they are skeptical," said Thomas. "So if you go and give a talk to paleontologists, they are not quite into it. But to astrophysicists, it seems pretty plausible."

Thomas will be presenting his work on October 9, 2011, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis. This work was supported by the NASA Astrobiology: Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program.

Electricity from the Nose: Engineers Make Power from Human Respiration

Science Daily  — The same piezoelectric effect that ignites your gas grill with the push of a button could one day power sensors in your body via the respiration in your nose.

In certain materials, such as the polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) used by Wang's team, an electric charge accumulates in response to applied mechanical stress. This is known as the piezoelectric effect. The researchers engineered PVDF to generate sufficient electrical energy from respiration to operate small electronic devices.

Writing in the September issue of the journal Energy and Environmental Science, Materials Science and Engineering Professor Xudong Wang, postdoctoral Researcher Chengliang Sun and graduate student Jian Shi report creating a plastic microbelt that vibrates when passed by low-speed airflow such as human respiration.

"Basically, we are harvesting mechanical energy from biological systems. The airflow of normal human respiration is typically below about two meters per second," says Wang. "We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face."

Researchers are taking advantage of advances in nanotechnology and miniaturized electronics to develop a host of biomedical devices that could monitor blood glucose for diabetics or keep a pacemaker battery charged so that it would not need replacing. What's needed to run these tiny devices is a miniscule power supply. Waste energy in the form or blood flow, motion, heat, or in this case respiration, offers a consistent source of power.

Wang's team used an ion-etching process to carefully thin material while preserving its piezoelectric properties. With improvements, he believes the thickness can be controlled down to the submicron level. Because PVDF is biocompatible, he says the development represents a significant advance toward creating a practical micro-scale device for harvesting energy from respiration.

Laser Light Used to Cool Object to Quantum Ground State

A scanning electron microscope image (a) of the nanoscale silicon mechanical resonator used in the laser cooling experiment. The outer "cross" patterning forms the shield while the central beam region, the SEM image of which is shown in (b), forms an optical cavity where laser light is used to cool the mechanical motion of the beam. Numerical simulations of the localized optical field and mechanical breathing motion of the nanobeam are shown in panels (c) and (d), respectively. (Credit: Caltech/Painter, et al.)

Science Daily — For the first time, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with a team from the University of Vienna, have managed to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest possible energy state using laser light. The achievement paves the way for the development of exquisitely sensitive detectors as well as for quantum experiments that scientists have long dreamed of conducting.

As described in the paper, Painter and his colleagues have engineered a nanoscale object -- a tiny mechanical silicon beam -- such that laser light of a carefully selected frequency can enter the system and, once reflected, can carry thermal energy away, cooling the system.

"We've taken a solid mechanical system -- one made up of billions of atoms -- and used optical light to put it into a state in which it behaves according to the laws of quantum mechanics. In the past, this has only been achieved with trapped single atoms or ions," says Oskar Painter, professor of applied physics and executive officer for applied physics and materials science at Caltech and the principal investigator on a paper describing the work that appears in the October 6 issue of the journalNature.

By carefully designing each element of the beam as well as a patterned silicon shield that isolates it from the environment, Painter and colleagues were able to use the laser cooling technique to bring the system down to the quantum ground state, where mechanical vibrations are at an absolute minimum. Such a cold mechanical object could help detect very small forces or masses, whose presence would normally be masked by the noisy thermal vibrations of the sensor.

"In many ways, the experiment we've done provides a starting point for the really interesting quantum-mechanical experiments one wants to do," Painter says. For example, scientists would like to show that a mechanical system could be coaxed into a quantum superposition -- a bizarre quantum state in which a physical system can exist in more than one position at once. But they need a system at the quantum ground state to begin such experiments.

To reach the ground state, Painter's group had to cool its mechanical beam to a temperature below 100 millikelvin (-273.15°C). That's because the beam is designed to vibrate at gigahertz frequencies (corresponding to a billion cycles per second) -- a range where a large number of phonons are present at room temperature. Phonons are the most basic units of vibration just as the most basic units or packets of light are called photons. All of the phonons in a system have to be removed to cool it to the ground state.

Conventional means of cryogenically cooling to such temperatures exist but require expensive and, in some cases, impractical equipment. There's also the problem of figuring out how to measure such a cold mechanical system. To solve both problems, the Caltech team used a different cooling strategy.

"What we've done is used the photons -- the light field -- to extract phonons from the system," says Jasper Chan, lead author of the new paper and a graduate student in Painter's group. To do so, the researchers drilled tiny holes at precise locations in their mechanical beam so that when they directed laser light of a particular frequency down the length of the beam, the holes acted as mirrors, trapping the light in a cavity and causing it to interact strongly with the mechanical vibrations of the beam.

Because a shift in the frequency of the light is directly related to the thermal motion of the mechanical object, the light -- when it eventually escapes from the cavity -- also carries with it information about the mechanical system, such as the motion and temperature of the beam. Thus, the researchers have created an efficient optical interface to a mechanical element -- or an optomechanical transducer -- that can convert information from the mechanical system into photons of light.

Importantly, since optical light, unlike microwaves or electrons, can be transmitted over large, kilometer-length distances without attenuation, such an optomechanical transducer could be useful for linking different quantum systems -- a microwave system with an optical system, for example. While Painter's system involves an optical interface to a mechanical element, other teams have been developing systems that link a microwave interface to a mechanical element. What if those two mechanical elements were the same? "Then," says Painter, "I could imagine connecting the microwave world to the optical world via this mechanical conduit one photon at a time."

The Caltech team isn't the first to cool a nanomechanical object to the quantum ground state; a group led by former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Andrew Cleland, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, accomplished this in 2010 using more conventional refrigeration techniques, and, earlier this year, a group from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, cooled an object to the ground state using microwave radiation. The new work, however, is the first in which a nanomechanical object has been put into the ground state using optical light.

"This is an exciting development because there are so many established techniques for manipulating and measuring the quantum properties of systems using optics," Painter says.

The other cooling techniques used starting temperatures of approximately 20 millikelvin -- more than a factor of 10,000 times cooler than room temperature. Ideally, to simplify designs, scientists would like to initiate these experiments at room temperature. Using laser cooling, Painter and his colleagues were able to perform their experiment at a much higher temperature -- only about 10 times lower than room temperature.

The work was supported by Caltech's Kavli Nanoscience Institute; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Microsystems Technology Office through a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; the European Commission; the European Research Council; and the Austrian Science Fund.

Venus Has an Ozone Layer Too, Space Probe Discovers

Artist's rendering of Venus Express. (Credit: ESA - D. Ducros)

Science Daily  — The European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft has discovered an ozone layer high in the atmosphere of Venus. Comparing its properties with those of the equivalent layers on Earth and Mars will help astronomers refine their searches for life on other planets.

Venus Express made the discovery while watching stars seen right at the edge of the planet set through its atmosphere. Its SPICAV instrument analysed the starlight, looking for the characteristic fingerprints of gases in the atmosphere as they absorbed light at specific wavelengths.The results are being presented at the Joint Meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.

The ozone was detectable because it absorbed some of the ultraviolet from the starlight. Ozone is a molecule containing three oxygen atoms. According to computer models, the ozone on Venus is formed when sunlight breaks up carbon dioxide molecules, releasing oxygen atoms.

These atoms are then swept around to the nightside of the planet by winds in the atmosphere: they can then combine to form two-atom oxygen molecules, but also sometimes three-atom ozone molecules.

"This detection gives us an important constraint on understanding the chemistry of Venus' atmosphere," says Franck Montmessin, who led the research.

It may also offer a useful comparison for searching for life on other worlds. Ozone has only previously been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars. On Earth, it is of fundamental importance to life because it absorbs much of the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Not only that, it is thought to have been generated by life itself in the first place.

The build-up of oxygen, and consequently ozone, in Earth's atmosphere began 2.4 billion years ago. Although the exact reasons for it are not entirely understood, microbes excreting oxygen as a waste gas must have played an important role.

Along with plant life, they continue to do so, constantly replenishing Earth's oxygen and ozone. As a result, some astrobiologists have suggested that the simultaneous presence of carbon dioxide, oxygen and ozone in an atmosphere could be used to tell whether there could be life on the planet.

This would allow future telescopes to target planets around other stars and assess their habitability. However, as these new results highlight, the amount of ozone is crucial.

The small amount of ozone in Mars' atmosphere has not been generated by life. There, it is the result of sunlight breaking up carbon dioxide molecules. Venus too, now supports this view of a modest ozone build-up by non-biological means. Its ozone layer sits at an altitude of 100 km, about four times higher in the atmosphere than Earth's and is a hundred to a thousand times less dense.

Theoretical work by astrobiologists suggests that a planet's ozone concentration must be 20%of Earth's value before life should be considered as a cause. These new results support that conclusion because Venus clearly remains below this threshold.

"We can use these new observations to test and refine the scenarios for the detection of life on other worlds," says Dr Montmessin.

Yet, even if there is no life on Venus, the detection of ozone there brings Venus a step closer to Earth and Mars. All three planets have an ozone layer.

"This ozone detection tells us a lot about the circulation and the chemistry of Venus' atmosphere" says Håkan Svedhem, ESA Project Scientist for the Venus Express mission. "Beyond that, it is yet more evidence of the fundamental similarity between the rocky planets, and shows the importance of studying Venus to understand them all."

North Cliffs Failure - Amazing Cliff Collapse caught on Camera!

FIVE MUST HAVE BUDGETING BEST PRACTICES

Budgeting is key to any good business. Despite this fact, many are not well trained to handle this process or would rather not commit the time that it deserves. These best practices explain how important budgeting is and how a tight, successful budget can be maintained!

Alliancetac highlights…

• Budget issue: Budget development should be linked to corporate strategy
  The budget expresses how resources will be allocated and how progress will be measure. When the budget is linked to corporate strategy, all managers and employees have a clearer understanding of strategic goals. This leads to greater support for goals, better coordination of efforts, and, ultimately, to stronger companywide performance.
  Best budgeting practice: Make certain strategic goals are set goals before budgeting begins.  This not only makes it easier for budget developers at all levels, fewer budget revisions are required.  Budget development then becomes not only faster and less costly but also far less frustrating.

• Budget issue: Develop procedures to allocate resources strategically
  Competition for resources is inevitable.  Every business unit needs funding for both capital and operating expenses.  Because needs typically exceed actual resources available, resources must be allocated to support key strategies.
  Best budgeting practice: While it is often said that resource allocation is part science, part art, applying best practices can leads to better results.  One such practice is to give managers insight into the ways in which changes in one budget affect the other.  It is also important to develop measures such as the company’s weighted average cost of capital and the degree of risk involved in competing plans of action, the costs or advantages associated with deferring action, as well as factors such as expected developments in interest rates.  By monitoring the results of allocation efforts, companies can refine and improve their procedures.

• Budget issue: Avoid incentives strictly tied to meeting budget targets
  While is seems logical to evaluate managers primarily on how closely they hit budget targets, this can tempts managers to “win” by playing games with budget targets.  Such game playing isn’t always in the company’s best interest or ethical standards.
  Best budgeting practice: Make meeting budget targets secondary to other performance measures.  Business unit managers should be involved in identifying the measures that are most relevant for their operations. While some measures may be financial, other appropriate nonfinancial measures could include product defect rate, customer satisfaction ratings and others.

• Budget issue:  Understanding the budget process
  Strive to reduce budget complexity and streamline budgeting procedures by making certain all people with budget responsibilities understand the budget process.  This allows management to collect budget information, make allocation decisions, and communicate final targets in less time, at lower cost, and with less disruption to the company’s core activities.
  Best budgeting practice: Leading companies make sure that budget developers and their assistants are thoroughly trained on the process.  This budget training for managers, together with ongoing monitoring of information needs companywide, helps companies deliver the right information to managers.

• Budget issue: Ensure budgets accommodates changeBudgets that accommodate change help companies respond to competitive threats or opportunities more quickly and with greater precision.  Plus, knowing that budgets have some flexibility frees budget developers from the need to “pad” budgets to cover a wide variety of possibilities.  This leads to leaner, more realistic budgets.Best budgeting practice: While it is important that budgets not be revised to cover up for poor performance or poor planning, best practice companies choose to revise budgets rather than adhere to budgets that do not reflect current conditions.

Get more information from Alliancetac!

SIX SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES TO BEAT YOUR COMPETITION

When you run into price competition it may feel like there is no way out. This is not the case. These innovative strategies will rejuvenate your business and enable you to successfully pass up your competition. Get the details here!

Entrepreneur shares…

1. Find new markets. If competition is stiff, consider whether a neighboring city — or country — might offer a better opportunity to sell at a higher price.

2. Develop unique products. It’s best to offer products and services that are unique to your company. The reason is, when competitors hold sales, you won’t be similarly forced to cut prices becuase your offerings can’t be price-compared.

3. Bundle your product with services. Take a look at how Jonathan Fields has bundled his new book, Uncertainty, with his consulting. No discounts here. Bet they’re selling like hotcakes.

4. Repackage and upgrade. Fresh packaging might give you a chance to combine your products in new ways — ways the competition hasn’t thought of yet. Or update products to add new features.

5. Build your reputation. When you’re known as the best in your industry, price isn’t a problem. Clients expect to pay you a premium. Get video testimonials, or at least ones where you can use customers’ pictures next to their endorsement — they’re highly impactful in helping clients envision themselves using your product.

6. Create scarcity. If you’ve had a product or service on the market a while and sales have slumped, put out the word your offering will end soon. This works particularly well if you’re about to introduce something new. Get a sales spike before you retire an older item. Or create scarcity by only offering a limited number of a particular item, promoting that only X number will be sold.

Get more information from Entrepreneur!