Skinner's experiment on pigeons is famously used to explain the roots of human religious beliefs.

But another way of thinking about the superstitious pigeons can be made by thinking about Spinoza's wonderful cry: what can a body do? From Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy:

The point of view of an ethics is: of what are you capable, what can you do? Hence a return to this sort of cry of Spinoza’s: what can a body do? We never know in advance what a body can do. We never know how we’re organized and how the modes of existence are enveloped in somebody.

Spinoza explains very well such and such a body, it is never whatever body, it is what you can do, you.

An essay, "The Pleasures of Change," at the end of Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature (a book mainly composed of essays by the great biologist Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan—Margulis, who was recently killed by a stroke, was Carl Sagan's first wife) lead me to this passage in a 1995 paper, "Order from Disorder: The Thermodynamics of Complexity in Biology," by Eric D. Schneider and James J. Kay:

Nonliving organized systems (like convection cells, tornados and lasers) and living systems (from cells to ecosystems) are dependent on outside energy fluxes to maintain their organization and dissipate energy gradients to carry out these self-organizing processes. This organization is maintained at the cost of increasing the entropy of the larger "global" system in which the structure is imbedded. In these dissipative systems, the total entropy change in a system is the sum of the internal production of entropy in the system (which is always greater or equal than zero), and the entropy exchange with the environment which may be positive, negative or zero. For the system to maintain itself in a nonequilibrium steady state the entropy exchange must be negative, and larger than the entropy produced by internal processes, such as metabolism.

Dissipative structures which are stable over a finite range of conditions are best represented by autocatalytic positive feedback cycles. Convection cells, hurricanes, autocatalytic chemical reactions and living systems are all examples of far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures which exhibit coherent behavior.

From a paper, "Bioenergetics and Life's Origins," by David Deamer and Arthur L. Weber:

Chemical kinetics defines the rates at which a given reaction occurs, and allows thermodynamically unstable molecular structures to exist far from equilibrium. A protein or nucleic acid in water, for instance, will ultimately hydrolyze to its component amino acids. However, in the absence of a catalyst, this is a slow reaction, so that faster catalyzed reactions of biosynthesis can keep up with the slower degradative rate of hydrolysis. The difference in reaction rates is referred to as a kinetic trap. On the early Earth, if there was a relatively fast process that could produce chemical bonds between monomers, kinetic traps would allow the resulting polymers to have a transient existence even if they were thermodynamically unstable.

The most important thing to understand is that some reactions can be driven energetically uphill very fast, but if the downhill reaction in the other direction is slow, it is possible to make complicated molecules and keep them in a metastable state for extended periods of time. We call this condition a kinetic trap. In one sense, that is what life is all about. Life is thermodynamically far from equilibrium, yet life can exist because the downhill reactions of degradation are slow. In other words, we don’t dissolve when we take a shower...

People wanted more than USA...

That private conversation in your head will one day be open to the public.

Scientists have succeeded in decoding electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobe — the seat of the auditory system — as a person listens to normal conversation. Based on this correlation between sound and brain activity, they then were able to predict the words the person had heard solely from the temporal lobe activity.
"This research is based on sounds a person actually hears, but to use it for reconstructing imagined conversations, these principles would have to apply to someone's internal verbalizations," cautioned first author Brian N. Pasley, a post-doctoral researcher in the center. "There is some evidence that hearing the sound and imagining the sound activate similar areas of the brain. If you can understand the relationship well enough between the brain recordings and sound, you could either synthesize the actual sound a person is thinking, or just write out the words with a type of interface device...

[Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience,] predicts that this success can be extended to imagined, internal verbalizations, because scientific studies have shown that when people are asked to imagine speaking a word, similar brain regions are activated as when the person actually utters the word.

The image. The explanation

Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from background stars. The eerily dark surroundings help make the interiors of molecular clouds some of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe.

This cloud of consciousness has obsessed my imagination since I was a boy. Thought floating about a strange planet. Thought needing company. Disembodied thought as sinister.

When ever I wake up at night and have difficulty returning to the warm and delightful cousin of death, my body often slips into sleep without my consciousness. I become two: my mind is here, my body is gone; I'm up, my body is down. Though I'm thinking, I see and hear nothing. I'm very much alone in the dark. Strangely enough, the darkness doesn't bother me at all. Indeed, it is a calm state to be in—kind of like a sensory deprivation tank. What worries me, what makes me panic is the fear that my body may not return from sleep, that it may finally slip into some dangerous depth I cannot reach. The get my body back is a struggle: I yell, I pull, I shove, I scream. It usually takes three tries for the body to return. I open my eyes and ears—the pillows, the bed, the room, the city, the world, the galaxy, the universe.

My body wanted to go; my mind forced to it to remain close. My mind is the sinister Companion of the astronaut it's imprisoned on this strange planet.

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The Apollo Moon missions of 1969-1972 all share a dirty secret. “The major issue the Apollo astronauts pointed out was dust, dust, dust,” says Professor Larry Taylor, Director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee. Fine as flour and rough as sandpaper, Moon dust caused ‘lunar hay fever,’ problems with space suits, and dust storms in the crew cabin upon returning to space.

It gets worse...

[L]unar dust suffers from a terrible case of static cling. UV rays drive electrons out of lunar dust by day, while the solar wind bombards it with electrons by night. Cleaning the resulting charged particles with wet-wipes only makes them cling harder to camera lenses and helmet visors.

According to a new study:

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

Also, according to this study: "Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies."

The image is of sand ripples on Mars...

• NASA

As the world turns:

• NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

The one where she asked which band was worst? Well Dave Segal, ever the contrarian, has come out in defense of the Doors, citing their non-hits. Consider it here.

I made this argument not too long ago:

So why do human males prefer younger women? Evolutionary psychology always has this dumb answer: Youth equals fertility. But if this is a natural law for us civilized humans, why is it not the law of the jungle? It seems we have completely mistaken a cultural phenomenon for a biological one. It is very likely that the desire for young women has no natural basis but is instead entirely a cultural construction. Indeed, the best sociobiologist in the business, Sarah Hrdy, goes as far as to see this strange kind of desire as emerging from the cultural institution of marriage. (In her brilliant paper "Female Sexuality and the Prehominid Origins of Patriarchy," Hrdy argues that youth has its value in the context of a long-term investment.)

I do not want to get into Pagel's ideas in this post (I will review his book in the near future); I only want to point out something I had to take seriously when I connected the solution of the grandmother hypothesis to this question: Why do males in all human societies tend to prefer younger females, when males in chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla societies do not share this preference. For Hrdy, the fact of this curious distinction pointed in the direction of cultural sources rather than biological ones. I agreed with her. But I've had to adjust this agreement with some thinking about menopause and its social implications.

Comes down to this: It's almost impossible for a human female to safely give birth without assistance (one of the roots of human sociality). Why? Because human babies and their heads are too huge. As Jared Diamond points out in his short book Why Is Sex Fun:

A one-hundred-pound woman typically gives birth to a six-pound infant, while a female gorilla twice that size (two hundred pounds) gives birth to an infant only half as large (three pounds). As a result, human mothers often died in childbirth before the advent of modern medical care, and women are still attended at birth by helpers (obstetricians and nurses in modern first-world societies, midwives or older women in traditional societies), whereas female gorillas give birth unattended and have never been recorded as dying in childbirth..

I want to say more, but I will leave it at that for now.

Last year's earthquake was not enough:

The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude 7 quake would strike the region in the next four years.

The government says the chances of such an event are 70% in the next 30 years.

The warning comes less than a year after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan's north-eastern coast.

The last time Tokyo was hit by a big earthquake was in 1923, when a 7.9 magnitude quake killed more than 100,000 people, many of them in fires

It would look and feel like this...

Traditionally, the music of the future is always beatless. To be futuristic is to jettison rhythm. The beat is the ballast which prevents escape velocity, which stops music breaking beyond the event horizon. The music of the future is weightless, transcendent, neatly converging with online disembodiment. Holst’s Planet Suite as used in Kubrick’s 2001, Eno’s Apollo soundtrack, Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack: all these are good records – but sonically speaking, they’re as futuristic as the Titanic, nothing but updated examples of an 18th C sublime.

Like science fiction films, science programs sometimes suffer from beatlessness or weak beats. The video of the strange octopus (it's taken from the documentary Learning to Sea) is full of great and lusty beats. The beats make the science less metaphysical and airy. We see the octopus living to the rhythm.

Science Daily:

More than 500 million years ago, single-celled organisms on Earth's surface began forming multicellular clusters that ultimately became plants and animals. Just how that happened is a question that has eluded evolutionary biologists.

But scientists in the University of Minnesota's College of Biological Sciences have replicated that key step in the laboratory using natural selection and common brewer's yeast, which are single-celled organisms. The yeast "evolved" into multicellular clusters that work together cooperatively, reproduce and adapt to their environment — in essence, precursors to life on Earth as it is today.

"To understand why the world is full of plants and animals, including humans, we need to know how one-celled organisms made the switch to living as a group, as multicelled organisms," said Sam Scheiner, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology. "This study is the first to experimentally observe that transition, providing a look at an event that took place hundreds of millions of years ago."

Mail Online:

One of the world's most primitive tribes is being humiliated on a daily basis - by tourists who pay to go on human safaris and treat them like animals in a zoo.
Hundreds of visitors to the remote Andaman Islands, north of the Equator in the Indian Ocean, queue up each day at dawn to drive through a jungle reserve set aside for the Jarawa tribe.
They then toss scraps of food to the half-naked natives, who only started making contact with the outside world in the late 1990s, and command them to dance.

One would think this kind of thing got old a long time ago, but apparently it's not old at all. There's no break between the feelings expressed in this passage, which Charles Darwin wrote 170 years ago, and this form of 21st century tourism:

Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian — of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? — men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.

Nature:

By bringing long-dead proteins back to life, researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine. The result, they say, is a challenge to proponents of intelligent design who maintain that complex biological systems can only have been created by a divine force.

Cells rely on ‘machines’ made of multiple different protein components to carry out many vital functions in the cell, and molecular and evolutionary biologists have puzzled about how they evolved. In an effort to find out, Joe Thornton at the University of Oregon in Eugene chose to study a particular machine called the V-ATPase proton pump, which channels protons across membranes and is vital for keeping cell compartments at the right acidity. Part of this machine is a ring of six proteins that threads through the membrane.

In animals and most other eukaryotes, this ring is composed of two types of protein; fungi are alone in having a ring with three. Thornton wanted to know how the machine evolved from the simple to the more complex form. And, because he has built a lab that specializes in resurrecting ancient proteins, he had just the tools to find out at hand.

One other thing, if you want to know more about the proton pump mentioned in the article, read Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. The chapter on chemiosmosis (pumping protons across a membrane) is dazzling.

One of the biggest mysteries (to me) about my past has been why I accepted the truth of Darwinian evolution long before I went to college or even studied O Level biology. Until very recently, my only solution to this mystery was found in a flight I took from London to Lusaka at age 12. At the beginning of this trip, I vividly saw lots of very white people; at the end of it, I vividly saw lots of very black people. Clearly, the dramatic change in location had something to do with this dramatic change in skin color. The two races were different because their environments were different: cold and cloudy regions selected humans with light skin; hot and sunny ones for humans with black skin. What other explanation could there be? That trip made Darwinism clear to me at 12. I was certain of this answer until I recently chanced upon this video...

Do not miss Golob's wonderful piece about wonderful snot:

Snot is your body's best defense mechanism, a sticky moat of protection against invading bacteria, viruses, and fungi. When it comes to where your body is open to the outside world, snot (more properly, mucus) provides a barrier against these alien invaders.

Later in the column:

As the outer layers of snot are eaten or rubbed away, new layers are forming underneath—creating a sort of treadmill of slime for invaders to run on. Hence, during an infection, our bodies tend to make more snot in an attempt to run the invaders out.

Although the surplus of snot is not much fun when we're sick, it's better than the alternative. People with cystic fibrosis have a damaged chloride receptor, preventing them from properly filling their snot with water. Without the nice slick snot, people with the disease are subject to all sorts of terrible infections—particularly in their lungs.

According to a theory proposed by Terence Davidson, M.D. (Department of Otolaryngology, U.C. San Diego)... human vulnerability to sleep apnea, as well as the risk of choking, is the price our species paid (in evolutionary terms) for the rich repertoire of sounds we can make with our voice. In other words, sleep apnea is the price we paid for our ability to speak. The modification of the human airway has generated such enormous advantages for survival through improved communication that the overall benefits have been well worth the risks. But evolutionary adaptation can involve significant tradeoffs.

Who is surprised to read this?

That the Nazis were able to make such connections between their hateful, white supremacist ideology and ancient India is undoubtedly perverse. But the idea of a distinct “Aryan” identity — and the Aryans’ arrival some 3,500 years ago in the Indian subcontinent — is a very real narrative in contemporary historiography. The racial stock of much of South Asia has tended to be classified “Aryo-Dravidian,” the combination of Aryan settlers and the subcontinent’s earlier indigenous inhabitants. Aryan lore supposedly underlays the early legends of Hinduism; the archaic Hindu caste system is seen by some as the political legacy of an Aryan conquest of India.

But a new study adds to mounting genetic evidence that no such clear distinction ever existed and that the Aryans of Nazi repute — whose identity has also been embraced over the years by some in the Hindu far-right — weren’t as pure (or real) as arch-racialists would hope. Published in the American Journal of Human Genetics by a team spearheaded by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, the article argues the roots of South Asia’s genetic diversity are far older and more complex than the myth of Aryan invasion would suggest.

It's all just fiction...

I love the (real/reflected) winter trees in this image...

• Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

Testing continues at NASA Langley Research Center as the 18,000-pound (8,165 kg) Orion test article took its eight and final splash of the year into the Hydro Impact Basin on Dec. 13. Orion, the next deep space exploration vehicle, will carry astronauts into space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel, and ensure safe re-entry and landing.

I looked up all my syllables on Merriam-Webster (I think). Also, I know that comment 1's haiku is not proper. "Fire Grant Brissey" is only four syllables.

UPDATE: Now with link that actually goes to the right page!