Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon that is clearly not understood, but been able to at least trigger it would be a great start.  Meditation is very much trying to do just this and although the goals there are generally spiritual, the existence of a clear physical phenomenon strongly suggests that it needs to be rethought and applied to a range of separate ends.

Using it as a learning tool that obviously leaps to mind.  Exploring astral plains under controlled conditions also appeals.  Just what else may we attempt if it can be controlled?  What is most important is developing the ability to induce it easily for everyone.  That does not seem to have happened as yet although the promise is there and it needs to become a cost effective system.

I have experienced what is best described as a lucid dream in which completely uncalled for and unusual information was shared with me that both confirmed certain things and opened the door to additional considerations.  It would have been a perfect mode in which to absorb the contents of a substantial text and perhaps even be able to recall it after.  It would be well worth trying if one could manage the process.

It struck me that revelation was possible in this mode which is very interesting for a prepared mind.

Lucid Dreaming could be used for learning new skills and improved decision making

DECEMBER 23, 2011

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/lucid-dreaming-could-be-used-for.html

New Scientist - A slew of recent studies have shown that people can use dreams to improve decision-making and physical skills. They could even help people regain mobility following a stroke.

Lucid dreaming is an unusual phenomenon in which some people are able to "wake up" while still in a dream. Though the dreamer is technically asleep, they are aware of their situation and are able to control the content of their dreams. In this state, people are also able to signal to researchers that they have entered a lucid dream through a series of prearranged eye movements; no other movement is possible during REM sleep.

Being in command of dreams opens up opportunities to manipulate them for learning and training that have an impact once the dreamer wakes up. Peter Morgan at Yale University and colleagues have shown that lucid dreamers perform better in a gambling task designed to test the functioning of the brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to be involved in emotional decision-making and social interactions (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2010.08.001).  +By training this region through lucid dreams, Morgan hopes to be able to improve a person's social control and decision-making abilities.

Lucid dreaming and ventromedial versus dorsolateral prefrontal task performance

Activity in the prefrontal cortex may distinguish the meta-awareness experienced during lucid dreams from its absence in normal dreams. To examine a possible relationship between dream lucidity and prefrontal task performance, we carried out a prospective study in 28 high school students. Participants performed the Wisconsin Card Sort and Iowa Gambling tasks, then for 1 week kept dream journals and reported sleep quality and lucidity-related dream characteristics. Participants who exhibited a greater degree of lucidity performed significantly better on the task that engages the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (the Iowa Gambling Task), but degree of lucidity achieved did not distinguish performance on the task that engages the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the Wisconsin Card Sort Task), nor did it distinguish self-reported sleep quality or baseline characteristics. The association between performance on the Iowa Gambling Task and lucidity suggests a connection between lucid dreaming and ventromedial prefrontal function.

The lucid dreamers were more likely to report that they were free from mental health problems. They also scored more highly on questions relating to self-confidence, tended to be more assertive, and showed a greater satisfaction with life.

Research has already shown that people who practise tasks in their lucid dreams are better at performing them the following day.

Genome Sequence for Seed Plants

This work has nicely sorted out the genome tree for plants and resolved a number of issues and provides confidence in the sequence established.  It will now be easier to go after targets worth chasing.

There is still much that needs to be done to decode the genome and this will keep folks busy for a long time.  When we are finished though, it is clear that we will be able to synthesize just about anything we want to see.

Those who read my blog regularly are aware that I have been developing the working conjecture that humanity originally arose to modernism some 40,000 thousand years ago and chose to vacate Earth temporarily around 15,000 years ago.  During this time they accomplished every thing we imagine to accomplish today.  This means that it is plausible that they created a range of new animals and plants that were then introduced into appropriate habitats.  An obvious example is the cheetah with its coincidental 40,000 bottleneck and its combined dog and cat DNA package.  There must be many  others to be winkled out if this conjecture holds true.

Beyond that our agricultural crop kit from 10,000 years ago were all nicely engineered with doubled up genes to provide large grains in virtually all six initial centers of agriculture.  This is all more plausible (the facts themselves can not be evaded and beg any simple explanation) if one has active support from scientific man.

Once again we are on the verge of repeating all the necessary mythology needed to accomplish what was already done for us and once we do this it will become obvious that this is what did happen, or at the least we will be able to test the conjecture to death.

Genome tree of life is largest yet for seed plants

by Staff Writers

New York NY (SPX) Dec 21, 2011

This is a phylogenomic reconstruction of the evolutionary diversification of seed plants. Credit: E.K. Lee et al. 

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Genome_tree_of_life_is_largest_yet_for_seed_plants_999.html

Scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, The New York Botanical Garden, and New York University have created the largest genome-based tree of life for seed plants to date. Their findings, published in the journal PLoS Genetics, plot the evolutionary relationships of 150 different species of plants based on advanced genome-wide analysis of gene structure and function.

This new approach, called "functional phylogenomics," allows scientists to reconstruct the pattern of events that led to the vast number of plant species and could help identify genes used to improve seed quality for agriculture.

"Ever since Darwin first described the 'abominable mystery' behind the rapid explosion of flowering plants in the fossil record, evolutionary biologists have been trying to understand the genetic and genomic basis of the astounding diversity of plant species," said Rob DeSalle, a corresponding author on the paper and a curator in the Museum's Division of Invertebrate Zoology who conducts research at the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.

"Having the architecture of this plant tree of life allows us to start to decipher some of the interesting aspects of evolutionary innovations that have occurred in this group."

The research, performed by members of the New York Plant Genomics Consortium, was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Plant Genome Program to identify the genes that caused the evolution of seeds, a trait of important economic interest.

The group selected 150 representative species from all of the major seedplant groups to include in the study. The species span from the flowering variety-peanuts and dandelions, for example-to non-flowering cone plants like spruce and pine.

The sequences of the plants' genomes-all of the biological information needed to build and maintain an organism, encoded in DNA-were either culled from pre-existing databases or generated, in the field and at The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, from live specimens.

With new algorithms developed at the Museum and NYU and the processing power of supercomputers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and overseas, the sequences-nearly 23,000 sets of genes (specific sections of DNA that code for certain proteins)-were grouped, ordered, and organized in a tree according to their evolutionary relationships.

Algorithms that determine similarities of biological processes were used to identify the genes underlying species diversity.

"Previously, phylogenetic trees were constructed from standard sets of genes and were used to identify the relationships of species," said Gloria Coruzzi, a professor in New York University's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and the principal investigator of the NSF grant.

"In our novel approach, we create the phylogeny based on all the genes in a genome, and then use the phylogeny to identify which genes provide positive support for the divergence of species."

The results support major hypotheses about evolutionary relationships in seed plants.

The most interesting finding is that gnetophytes, a group that consists mostly of shrubs and woody vines, are the most primitive living non-flowering seed plants-present since the late Mesozoic era, the "age of dinosaurs." They are situated at the base of the evolutionary tree of seed plants.

"This study resolves the long-standing problem of producing an unequivocal evolutionary tree of the seed plants," said Dennis Stevenson, vice president for laboratory research at The New York Botanical Garden.

"We can then use this information to determine when and where important adaptations occur and how they relate to plant diversification. We also can examine the evolution of such features as drought tolerance, disease resistance, or crop yields that sustain human life through improved agriculture."

In addition, the researchers were able to make predictions about genes that caused the evolution of important plant characteristics. One such evolutionary signal is RNA interference, a process that cells use to turn down or silence the activity of specific genes.

Based on their new phylogenomic maps, the researchers believe that RNA interference played a large role in the separation of monocots-plants that have a single seed leaf, including orchids, rice, and sugar cane-from other flowering plants. Even more surprising, RNA interference also played a major role in the emergence of flowering plants themselves.

"Genes required for the production of small RNA in seeds were at the very top of the list of genes responsible for the evolution of flowering plants from cone plants," said Rob Martienssen, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

"In collaboration with colleagues from LANGEBIO [Laboratorio Nacional de Genomica para la Biodiversidad] in Mexico last year, we found that these same genes control maternal reproduction, providing remarkable insight into the evolution of reproductive strategy in flowering plants."

The data and software resources generated by the researchers are publicly available and will allow other comparative genomic researchers to exploit plant diversity to identify genes associated with a trait of interest or agronomic value. These studies could have implications for improving the quality of seeds and, in turn, agricultural products ranging from food to clothing.

In addition, the phylogenomic approach used in this study could be applied to other groups of organisms to further explore how species originated, expanded, and diversified.

"The collaboration among the institutions involved here is a great example of how modern science works," said Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, a term assistant professor at Columbia University's Barnard College and a research associate at the Museum's Sackler Institute. "Each of the four institutions involved has its own strengths and these strengths were nicely interwoven to produce a novel vision of plant evolution."

Other authors include Ernest Lee, American Museum of Natural History; Angelica Cibrian-Jaramillo, American Museum of Natural History, The New York Botanical Garden, and New York University - currently at the Laboratorio Nacional de Genomica para la Biodiversidad, Mexico; Manpreet Katari, New York University; Alexandros Stamatakis, Technical University Munich - currently at Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies; Michael Ott, Technical University Munich; Joanna Chiu, University of California, Davis; Damon Little, The New York Botanical Garden; and W. Richard McCombie, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Canadian Wildfire Increase Predicted

Wildfires are in fact a net benefit to the ecosystem and we have learned the hard way that it is best to encourage them to rid the forest of a fuel build up and allow propagation of a wider range of plants.

Modeling here is been touted as a predictor of a pending rapid increased in wildfire activity. I am not that optimistic and find that wildfire behavior is almost random depending on local drought conditions and wind in particular.

We continue to get a wide variety of behaviors that are readily observed in past records anyway and I suspect that past researchers polished data by cleaning off outliers that were too far off their averages.  This would cause present outliers to look excessive.  This course is often used to prevent an exaggerated conclusion, but can distort later indirect uses of the same data.  After all, scientists are expected to be conservative.

Rapid rise in wildfires in large parts of Canada

by Staff Writers

Chicago IL (SPX) Dec 21, 2011

Fires are an important factor in many terrestrial ecosystems. They are a result of the interaction of the weather, vegetation and land use, which makes them very sensitive to global change. 

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Rapid_rise_in_wildfires_in_large_parts_of_Canada_999.html

Large forest regions in Canada are apparently about to experience rapid change. Based on models, scientists can now show that there are threshold values for wildfires just like there are for epidemics. Large areas of Canada are apparently approaching this threshold value and may in future exceed it due to climate change.

As a result both the area burnt down annually and the average size of the fires would increase, write the researchers of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Michigan in the December issue of the journal The American Naturalist. The strategies for combating wildfires in large parts of Canada should therefore be reconsidered.

According to media reports, after weeks of drought around 1,000 hectares of forest and scrubland were burnt down in the West Canadian province British Columbia in the summer of 2009 alone. 11,000 people had to be evacuated. Are such events on the rise as a result of climate change?

This question is being hotly debated by ecologists all over the world. In July a group of US researchers led by Anthony Westerling of the University of California forecasted similar changes in the journal PNAS. They believe that climate change might result in a dramatic increase in the threat of wildfires in Yellowstone National Park and that the forests might disappear here in the 21st century.

Fires are an important factor in many terrestrial ecosystems. They are a result of the interaction of the weather, vegetation and land use, which makes them very sensitive to global change.

"Changes in the wildfire regime have a significant impact on a local and global scale and therefore on the climate as well. It is therefore important to understand how the mechanisms which shape these wildfires work in order to be able to make predictions on what will change in future," explains PD Dr. Volker Grimm of the UFZ.

For their model, the scientists evaluated data from the Canadian Forest Service, which had recorded fires greater than 200 hectares between 1959 and 1999, and sorted these by ecozone. This showed that three of these ecozones in Canada are close to a turning point: the Hudson Plains south of the Hudson Bay, the Boreale Plains in the Mid-West the Boreale Shield, which stretches from the Mid-West to the East coast and is therefore the largest ecozone in Canada.

The closest to a turning point is apparently the Boreale Shield. In order to check their model and the theory of a threshold value for wildfires, the scientists looked at the fires in this region more closely. Around 1980 the average size of the fires in this part of the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba tripled rapidly.

"In our opinion this is a sign that there are also threshold values for forests above which the wildfire regime drastically changes," reports Volker Grimm. "It is likely that the Boreale Plains have in recent decades, particularly around 1980, experienced a change to a system characterised by wildfires.

This has fundamental repercussions for the environment and the combating of wildfires. Small changes in the fire propagation parameters have a great impact on the size of the fires." Gradual changes, such as those which can be expected due to climate change, can therefore result in an abrupt and sharp increase in the size of the fires.

The scientists were also interested in the parallels with disease propagation. Prevention strategies, which reduce combustible material, are in a way similar to the vaccinations which are used against the spread of diseases such as the measles. Here too there is a threshold value above which a disease spreads and below which it falls.

Other modellers from the UFZ were therefore able to turn this theoretical threshold value into a practical value. With foxes it was shown that only 60 per cent had to be vaccinated against rabies in order to successfully combat the disease. The scientists therefore hope to find out more in future studies which cover both disciplines.

Richard D. Zinck, Mercedes Pascual and Volker Grimm (2011); Understanding Shifts in Wildfire Regimes as Emergent Threshold Phenomena. The American Naturalist. Vol. 178, No. 6, December 2011

The Great Stagnation

Somewhere out there someone always wants to make the argument that we are going to slow down now.  It is my position that this will plausibly occur upon the human economy at the least been optimized.  That still leaves the issue of optimizing the human.

The first is approximately three generations out including a reasonable amount of time for completion.  To put this in perspective, suppose we decided to completely reengineer and redeploy the entire population contained in the water shed of the Hudson River (reasonably one of the most completely modernized place on Earth) the accomplishment thereof would properly demand around twenty years, much of that to reshape forest and land to best effect.

At the completion of that transformation, we might imagine every human being working at his best capacity also through targeted education and support.

It is when we have been able to do this for every living human being on Earth that we may consider actually slowing down.  I think that it may be achieved inside of three generations or inside of sixty years.

At the same time our knowledge base will have also reached its maximum depth inside of about two generations allowing full completion of our modern world inside of about two generations.

Anything approaching stagnation will not be upon us until three generations have passed.

Planning to breakthrough the Great Stagnation and enable the next layers of the Future

Economist Tyler Cowen makes the case that the pace of innovation has slowed, and that we are now on a "technological plateau" that makes further growth challenging. There is a detailed review by Chuck Crane. 

DECEMBER 22, 2011

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/planning-to-breakthrough-great.html

The USA has eaten low hanging economic fruit since the 1700s.

1. Free land (Homestead Act, etc.)

2. Technological breakthroughs (electricity, motor vehicles, telephone, radio, television, computers etc.)

3. Smart, uneducated kids (who were made productive through excellent public education).

4. Cheap fossil fuels. 

In his book The Great Stagnation Cowen says Tyler says his grandmother saw greater changes. She lived during the birth of airplanes, skyscrapers, suspension bridges, radio and television, antibiotics, atomic bombs and energy, interstate highways, jet travel and a moon landing.

In contrast, a child born in 1970, a year after the first moon landing and the Boeing 747’s first flight, has seen the personal computer, biotechnology, cellphones, Web browsers, search engines and nanotechnology (the current weak version of nanotechnology and not full blown molecular nanotechnology).

I would note that we have layers of technology (civilizations technology and solution stacks) that exist from different times which make up the stack of technology that we use today. This can be thought of the way archeologists will dig through layers of history, except this is the layers of living technology. This can also be related to the stack of hardware and software that exists in a computer solution (an example is LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP).

We have the bodies and minds from evolution that have existed for tens of thousands of years.

We have clothes, agriculture and language that have been around for many thousands of years.

We have electricity, engines, cars, planes, television and highrises from the time of our grandparents.

We have computers and the internet and biotechnology. 

Usually when new technology comes along there is some shift from old technologies and some other technologies are adapted. We collectively will resist changing technologies and structures that are deeper in the stack. Many older ways and processes have been perfectly adapted into how people live. There is no desire to change. This can be seen in the regulations in France or in Palo Alto, California to changing buildings and landscape. The owner may want to change something but the neighbors or the workers resist change. There is also the resistance to changing anything that is "good enough" with anything different.

So progress should not just be measured by how powerful is the next layer of technology that we add on top. We also need to look at how well we can innovate and upgrade the heck out of the older layers. Also, the best versions of the older technology may not be distributed to everyone to enable maximum productivity.

Some examples are:

the creation of $40 android smartphones that should enable everyone to have a very powerful computational device.

South Korea and Hong Kong have affordable (about $40/month) gigabit per second internet and there is technology to get to tens of gigabits per second and even terabits per second

Factory mass produced deep burn nuclear fission reactors with 100 year lifespans could bring the cost of energy to less than one cent per kwh. It would not be energy too cheap to meter but we can work and coordinate and enable energy to be five times cheaper even without a "super breakthrough". We also need to work towards super-breakthroughs.

Policies and planning to achieve faster economic growth

Accelerating the economy while maintaining or improving safety will require coordination and effort. Just like being able to have trains move faster and with fewer delays requires planning, coordination and effort.

Each of the levels of faster speed would require consideration.

10 times faster construction would mean - less time for various checks from weeks to days.

100 times faster means minutes for turnarounds or everything pre-checked and approved.

1000 times means all interested parties must have their issues pre-thought out for work in the pipeline up to one year in advance. A pre-planned city wide wiki of intersection projects. New software and new project planning may be required to enable each level.

Plans would be going into a queue for simulation, software-agent first pass comments and validations.

How modularized and disconnected can things safely be? The more compartmentalized things can be then the more simplicity and speed can be retained. There is value to higher safe development speeds.

20% growth - 1997-98 Internet time across the whole economy

There are a lot of inefficient processes that are making things relatively stagnant.

Capturing higher GDP from Megacities - better planning

Computer driving technology is basically within reach of doubling (or more) the capacity of a road lane to pass cars. Pundits don’t seem to realize just how big a deal this is – it could let cities be roughly twice as big, all else equal. Doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations. This systematic 15% savings happens because, in general, creating and operating the same infrastructure at higher densities is more efficient, more economically viable, and often leads to higher-quality services and solutions that are impossible in smaller places.

China has noticed one-city GDP growth effects from high speed rail linking cities. According to initial research and estimations, upon the completion of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway, the "dumbbell effect" will lift the GDP growth rates of the regions along the railway by about 19 to 21 percentage points. 

China is building the enhanced infrastructure to more effectively integrate cities into megacities and regions to capture 20-50% more GDP.

Upgrading Infrastructure can be done faster than upgrading people

Until we get major transhumanist technology it will be faster to upgrade infrastructure to make people more productive and to enable greater wealth and welfare. However, there should be DARPA like efforts to revamp education and to find ways to enable people to rapidly get new and improved skills.

Is it possible to instantly load complex skills training ?

Boston University post-doctoral fellow Kazuhisa Shibata designed and implemented a method using decoded fMRI neurofeedback to induce a particular activation pattern in targeted early visual areas that corresponded to a pattern evoked by a specific visual feature in a brain region of interest. The researchers then tested whether repetitions of the activation pattern caused visual performance improvement on that visual feature.

The result, say researchers, is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance.

Is hypnosis or a type of automated learning a potential outcome of the research?

"In theory, hypnosis or a type of automated learning is a potential outcome," said Kawato. "However, in this study we confirmed the validity of our method only in visual perceptual learning. So we have to test if the method works in other types of learning in the future. At the same time, we have to be careful so that this method is not used in an unethical way."

At present, the decoded neurofeedback method might be used for various types of learning, including memory, motor and rehabilitation.

DARPA has explored the development of immersive holodeck like rapid training.

More Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel Videos

DECEMBER 21, 2011

World Bank Projects 883 million living on less than $1.25 a day in 2015 which is a big improvement from 1.4 billion in 2005

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/world-bank-projects-883-million-living.html

WorldBank - The number of people living on less than $1.25 (PPP 2005) a day is projected to be 883 million in 2015, compared with 1.4 billion in 2005 and 1.8 billion in 1990. Much of this progress reflects rapid growth in China and India, while many African countries are lagging behind: 17 countries are far from halving extreme poverty, even as the aggregate goals will be reached.

Some anti-poverty and children under 5 death reduction factors -
Each year of a mothers education reduces by 10% the chance of her children dying before the age of 5.

884 million people lack safe drinking water. 80% in rural areas

Access to clean sanitation goals appear out of reach for 2015.

Other have analyzed the poverty and have an even better picture where there will be fewer than 600 million living on less than $1.25 per day in 2015. In 2009, there were World Bank projections that there would be 1 billion living on less than $1.25 per day in 2015 and 800 million in 2020. Therefore, poverty statistics are catching up to the reality of an improved situation.

The projections put annual global growth at about 4.5 percent in 2011 and 2012 and have decent growth through 2014

Gargoyles and Cattle Mutilation

Yesterdays post on the gargoyles in Chile has given us an excellent eye witness report that has been missing in other similar reports which were often glimpses or over ridden by the initial shock of observation.  This report lasted for many minutes because it appears that two pairs of gargoyles were actually playing with the moving vehicle just as we might.

They tested their own flying speed against the car running at sixty miles per hour and a pair even hit the ground running to see how they fared in their bounding along side.  This was playful and exhibited curiosity but was not an overt threat.  Of course the occupants were scared and soon hit the pedal and were in fact able to out run them and speed away.

We can characterize the gargoyle as follows:

1                    The excellent carvings on cathedrals from the Middle Ages were modeled from real bodies of these creatures.

2                    The creatures feed on blood and have been caught draining blood from a large number of chickens in a chicken coop and can obviously be blamed for the many cases of blood drained downers found on the Great Plains.  They are thus clearly able to exploit a wide range of prey and like a weasel will tackle a cage full of chickens.

3                    They do hunt in social groups and this readily explains the occurrence of more than one victim at a given site of so called cattle mutilation.  Chile showed us two pair working together.

4                    Their flying speed is easily sixty miles per hour and they certainly have soaring capacity.  Put that together and we have a creature that can travel in a two hundred mile radius from its den on a given night when it is tied to the den for raising young and also able to travel five hundred miles every night if it is looking for a new range.

5                    This range of movement allows the creature to easily establish dens throughout the world and the existence of examples in Europe from the medieval period pretty well assures us that this has happened.

6                    They are obviously nocturnal and may be members of the bat family which has a sequence of vampires.  This then suggests they use caves where they can go to den up.  This may also serve to restrict the number of locales in which they operate.

7                    It also appears that they are now expanding their range, This is likely because the danger from human landholders has hugely abated over the past half century.  They are clever enough to avoid humanity itself as that has surely meant a blast from a shotgun until recently.

Capturing one of these alive is a tall order and locating an active den when the residents only leave at night is equally difficult.  Thus our best hope is that the population will increase enough to make shooting one of them rather likely.

We have now had enough individual observations to nicely describe and confirm individual observations as been other than unique.  What is missing is a mass of observations, although we do have a mass of observations confirming the draining of blood from cattle in particular.  A hunting pack of gargoyles solves that in short order.

Nano-antennas Promise Optical Innovation

Another important innovation in the manipulation of light at the nanometer scale level and adds another tool.  The ability to work with light and metamaterials is continuing to evolve and reminds me of the swift advance in silica and is as important.

Step by step we are on the road to packing everything inside a crystal manufactured to do it all. Remember the gem in Star Wars?  It is well on the way.

It also continues to tell us that capturing an alien artifact is at best a hint to technological development although reverse engineering the UFO is easy in itself with the difficulty in the details which we are now sorting out.

Do you realize that a gem able to project a holograph no longer looks too impossible?

'Nanoantennas' show promise in optical innovations

December 22, 2011

The image in the upper left shows a schematic for an array of gold "plasmonic nanoantennas" able to precisely manipulate light in new ways, a technology that could make possible a range of optical innovations such as more powerful microscopes, telecommunications and computers. At upper right is a scanning electron microscope image of the structures. The figure below shows the experimentally measured refraction angle versus incidence angle for light, demonstrating how the nanoantennas alter the refraction. (Purdue University Birck Nanotechnology Center image)

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2011/111222ShalaevNanoantenna.html

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers have shown how arrays of tiny "plasmonic nanoantennas" are able to precisely manipulate light in new ways that could make possible a range of optical innovations such as more powerful microscopes, telecommunications and computers.

The researchers at Purdue University used the nanoantennas to abruptly change a property of light called its phase. Light is transmitted as waves analogous to waves of water, which have high and low points. The phase defines these high and low points of light.

"By abruptly changing the phase we can dramatically modify how light propagates, and that opens up the possibility of many potential applications," said Vladimir Shalaev, scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center and a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. 

Findings are described in a paper to be published online Thursday (Dec. 22) in the journal Science.

The new work at Purdue extends findings by researchers led by Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In that work, described in an October Science paper, Harvard researchers modified Snell's law, a long-held formula used to describe how light reflects and refracts, or bends, while passing from one material into another.

"What they pointed out was revolutionary," Shalaev said.

Until now, Snell's law has implied that when light passes from one material to another there are no abrupt phase changes along the interface between the materials. Harvard researchers, however, conducted experiments showing that the phase of light and the propagation direction can be changed dramatically by using new types of structures called metamaterials, which in this case were based on an array of antennas.

The Purdue researchers took the work a step further, creating arrays of nanoantennas and changing the phase and propagation direction of light over a broad range of near-infrared light. The paper was written by doctoral students Xingjie Ni and Naresh K. Emani, principal research scientist Alexander V. Kildishev, assistant professor Alexandra Boltasseva, and Shalaev.

The wavelength size manipulated by the antennas in the Purdue experiment ranges from 1 to 1.9 microns.

"The near infrared, specifically a wavelength of 1.5 microns, is essential for telecommunications," Shalaev said. "Information is transmitted across optical fibers using this wavelength, which makes this innovation potentially practical for advances in telecommunications."

The Harvard researchers predicted how to modify Snell's law and demonstrated the principle at one wavelength.

"We have extended the Harvard team's applications to the near infrared, which is important, and we also showed that it's not a single frequency effect, it's a very broadband effect," Shalaev said. "Having a broadband effect potentially offers a range of technological applications."

The innovation could bring technologies for steering and shaping laser beams for military and communications applications, nanocircuits for computers that use light to process information, and new types of powerful lenses for microscopes.

Critical to the advance is the ability to alter light so that it exhibits "anomalous" behavior: notably, it bends in ways not possible using conventional materials by radically altering its refraction, a process that occurs as electromagnetic waves, including light, bend when passing from one material into another.

Scientists measure this bending of radiation by its "index of refraction." Refraction causes the bent-stick-in-water effect, which occurs when a stick placed in a glass of water appears bent when viewed from the outside. Each material has its own refraction index, which describes how much light will bend in that particular material. All natural materials, such as glass, air and water, have positive refractive indices.

However, the nanoantenna arrays can cause light to bend in a wide range of angles including negative angles of refraction.

"Importantly, such dramatic deviation from the conventional Snell's law governing reflection and refraction occurs when light passes through structures that are actually much thinner than the width of the light's wavelengths, which is not possible using natural materials," Shalaev said. "Also, not only the bending effect, refraction, but also the reflection of light can be dramatically modified by the antenna arrays on the interface, as the experiments showed."

The nanoantennas are V-shaped structures made of gold and formed on top of a silicon layer. They are an example of metamaterials, which typically include so-called plasmonic structures that conduct clouds of electrons called plasmons. The antennas themselves have a width of 40 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, and researchers have demonstrated they are able to transmit light through an ultrathin "plasmonic nanoantenna layer" about 50 times smaller than the wavelength of light it is transmitting.

"This ultrathin layer of plasmonic nanoantennas makes the phase of light change strongly and abruptly, causing light to change its propagation direction, as required by the momentum conservation for light passing through the interface between materials," Shalaev said.

The work has been funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation's Division of Materials Research.

Writer: Emil Venere, 765-494-4709, venere@purdue.edu

Source:  Vladimir Shalaev, 765-494-9855, shalaev@ecn.purdue.edu 

Note to Journalists: A copy of the research paper is available by contacting the Science Press Package team at 202-326-6440, scipak@aaas.org             

  

ABSTRACT

Broadband Light Bending with Plasmonic Nanoantennas    

Xingjie Ni, Naresh K. Emani, Alexander V. Kildishev, Alexandra Boltasseva, and Vladimir M. Shalaev*†

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University

The precise manipulation of a propagating wave using phase control is a fundamental building block of optical systems. The wave front of a light beam propagating across an interface can be modified arbitrarily by introducing abrupt phase changes. We experimentally demonstrate unparalleled wave-front control in a broadband, optical wavelength range from 1.0 �m to 1.9 �m. This is accomplished by using an extremely thin plasmonic layer (~λ/50) consisting of an optical nanoantenna array that provides subwavelength phase manipulation on light propagating across the interface. Anomalous light-bending phenomena, including negative angles of refraction and reflection, are observed in the operational wavelength range.

Evolution of Angels

Yes, it is time someone did it up properly on the subject of angels.  This book appears to do the trick.

So far, I find that the best explanation for the idea of an angel can be derived from the individual soul.  I have posted that the creation of individual souls was a reasonable outcome of the rise of mankind forty thousands of years ago.  It is a reasonable outcome of our present technological advance and will be achieved in fact inside of two generations.  So either way, the human identity will be preserved because it has already become possible or it will become possible in perhaps forty yeas or so.

Once the human identity is preserved past death, its perception of self will influence its ongoing existence.  If that self retains an attachment to the living, then it is plausible that it will monitor and observe such individuals to hold them safe.  Such behavior is certainly easy to represent as a guardian angel.

Other manifestations are much harder to understand.  We have written in all sorts of ideas onto the initial claims and that has not placed us any closer to any obvious truth.  All we know as we know today is that individuals are instructed to go somewhere to witness an event.  I find that it is plausible that the writing of the noted scriptures allowed for the interpolation of traditions into the text that had little to do with events themselves and that this is the one place that this could reasonably be done.  Thus we need to be cautious here.

Yet the actual reality of spiritualism must not be discounted here. It provides enough tangible evidence to encourage followers to develop a personal afterlife concept which supports the idea of angels directly. 

Evolution of Angels: From Disembodied Minds to Winged Guardians

Divine messengers haven't always looked like the familiar Christmas tree toppers.

An angel takes Christmas-y form on a 14th-century Italian chapel wall.

Photograph from SuperStock/Getty Images

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

Published December 23, 2011

'Tis the season for winged humanoids to alight everywhere from store windows to Christmas tree tops to lingerie runways. But it wasn't always so.

Angels, at least the Christian variety, haven't always been flying people in diaphanous gowns. And their various forms—from disembodied minds to feathered guardians—reflect twists and turns of thousands of years of religious thought, according to an upcoming book.

"There is lots of interesting theology about angels, and in some ways we've kind of lost the knack for that," said John Cavadini, chair of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

"We tend to think of angels as things that we'd find in a Hallmark card," Cavadini added. "But many people, especially in antiquity, were very interested in them"—in what they might look like, how they might organize themselves, how they behave.

In the Bible angels served as envoys of God—angelos being Greek for "messenger." Other than that, the scriptures leave a lot of room for interpretation.

"There isn't a lot of detail, and that's the fascinating thing," said Ellen Muehlberger, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan.

"The Same Substance as God"

In the early days of Christianity, some believers considered Jesus Christ himself to be one of many angels, said Muehlberger, who's working on a book on the shifting theology of angels in ancient times.

"We only know about this because of later, fourth-century authors who penned negative descriptions of this belief" to refute it, she said.

Jesus officially lost his angelhood when the Roman Emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicea in 325. There, bishops were charged with turning the still varied and sometimes conflicting conceptions of God, Christ, and Christianity into a single, unified theology.

"The Council of Nicea defined Christ as totally divine, as of the same substance as God," Muehlberger said.

"Christians who worked to interpret the council's decrees over the next several decades took this to mean that Christ was not an angel. Angels were something else entirely."

A Beautiful Mind

In the early centuries of the church, perceptions of angels may have been as varied as the descriptions of Christ himself—or Judas, for that matter.

A fourth-century Christian monk and ascetic known as Evagrius, for example, developed a theory that explained the human essence in three parts.

"One part is governed by appetites and makes us hungry or sleepy or want to have sex," Muehlberger explained. "That's sort of the lowest part.

"A second is an emotional part that allows us to get angry or makes us prideful.

"Then there is a rational part," she said. "And that is the part, according to Evagrius, that is most like God and the angels too."

Evagrius "thought that something like anger was like a demon that came and attacked you. And if you couldn't fight off those attacks yourself, a totally rational angel, standing beside you, could help you."

Others followed this line, proclaiming that angels were disembodied minds, or intellects, according to Muehlberger.

Angels for Everyone

Around the same time, debate swirled over just who angels served on Earth.

At early Christian monasteries, for instance, many ascetics assumed that really good students would get some kind of divine guide or coach to help them.

"These monks said, Hey, not everybody gets a guardian angel—it's a mark of moral success," said Muehlberger, citing monastic letters from the period explaining the need for monastery inhabitants to cultivate their own angels.

In the towns, though, a more democratic view of angels prevailed.

Bishops and other officials began to assure their congregants that everyone has a guardian angel.

In Egypt, some bishops went on to suggest that some desert-dwelling monks—who had renounced pleasures of flesh and family—might themselves be angels on Earth.

The Egyptian monks rejected this out of hand, saying, in Muehlbergers' words, "We act like animals, not angels."

Eventually this populist view won out: I'm no angel and neither are you, but they watch over all of us.

Celestial Hierarchy

No sooner had believers begun to vaguely agree on what angels were than scholars began to debate how heavenly messengers organize themselves.

The Bible sheds little light on angelic society, but writers have been happy to fill in the gaps, including the unknown author of the circa-A.D. 500 On the Celestial Hierarchy.

Incorporating some earlier ideas, the tome ranks angelic beings into nine orders. From lowest to highest: angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim.

"It was not an official church teaching," said Michael Root, a theologian at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Notre Dame's Cavadini added, "I think it contributed to the beauty of the universe that all these different levels of beings were incredibly diverse but completely interdependent, and that all that multiplicity yielded a harmony instead of a dissidence."

Fallen Angels

Of course not all angels are angelic, according to some Christian traditions. Satan himself, it's been said, was once an angel named Lucifer.

The fact that angels can fall from grace is an important point, Catholic University's Root said—it implies that they have free will.

"You even had some theologians in the medieval and the early modern periods who thought that there was an adversarial angel, a fallen angel, assigned to each person as well as a guardian angel—though this was never an official thought," Root said.

As early as the second and third centuries, Christian scholars such as Origen of Alexandria saw important roles for fallen angels, Notre Dame's Cavadini said.

"For Origen and a lot of church fathers, angels participated in the governance of the universe at God's will," Cavadini said.

"That also meant that the fallen angels were intended to participate in the betterment of the universe, and that you have to take them very seriously, because they still did participate—but in a negative way."

Angels in America

Though modern Americans may spend less time puzzling over angels' forms and ways than the ancients did, Americans do tend to believe heavenly messengers are among us, and actively so.

Some 55 percent of Americans think they've been protected by their guardian angels at some point in their lives, according to a 2008 Baylor University surveyconducted by the Gallup organization.

"I've been looking at over 1,100 stories we collected from people about their experiences with their guardian angels," Baylor sociologist Carson Mencken said.

"People talk about close calls like auto accidents, especially accidents in which someone else was killed. Others were victims of assault or survived near-drownings or had combat-related near-death experiences," Mencken said.

"It's the random death that frightens us—there's nothing that we can do to control it.

"Based on our study, many of the people who survive those close calls attribute their survival to their guardian angels," he said.

In most of these cases, he added, the angels are not seen but only felt. And yet to many Christians, their heavenly guardians are as real as the ones on their Christmas trees.