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Obviously, this story was a fluff piece. Some fluff is okay, but as watchdogs of society and government, journalists should have more important things to do than give endless free publicity to inventors and their "secret" society-altering inventions, be they Jaskars, Segways, or Transmeta chips. Traditional news values are utterly predictable and easy to manipulate (e.g. "Arm the Homeless").

However, zero point energy, as far as I understand it, is one of those quantum weirdities that seem to defy Newtonian physics.

First off, do I believe this inventor has created something worth our attention? No.

However, claiming that it does not work because it's power source is zero point energy is short sighted and incorrect. Zero point energy is an actual true energy source that fills all of space. It is a consequence of quantum mechanics. If this inventor truly has harnessed zero point, it would work just like powering the light bulbs with a battery. Unfortunately, I've never heard of anyone really getting zero point energy to do anything useful.

from the throat-singers-need-not-apply dept.

1. For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths.

No, they don't want to own the third dimension, they just want to own the 3d pie charts.

how can this possibly relate to quantum computing?

From http://www.sciam.com/2001/0701issue/0701hau.html

"Another application for slow and stopped light could be quantum computers, in which the usual definite 1's and 0's are replaced with quantum superpositions of 1's and 0's called qubits. Such computers, if they can be built, would be able to solve certain problems that would take an ordinary computer an enormously long time. Two broad categories of qubits exist: those that stay in one place and interact with one another readily (such as quantum states of atoms) and those that travel rapidly from place to place (photons) but are difficult to make interact in the ways needed in a quantum computer. The slow-light system, by transforming flying photons into stationary dark state patterns and back, provides a robust way to convert between these types of qubits, a process that could be essential for building large-scale quantum computers. We can imagine imprinting two pulses in the same atom cloud, allowing the atoms to interact, and then reading out the result by generating new output light pulses."

The article in Scientific American super cooled gases refers to super cooled gases, not crystals. Like the article says, doing this in a room tempature solid makes it much more feasible for use in solid state computing.

What I want to know is whether this is the Peter St George-Hyslop who is working on Alzheimer's vaccines at the University of Toronto, or the Peter St George who's a TA in landscape architecture at the University of Washington, or the Peter St George who left Salomon Smith Barney in Australia last May. Also I'd like to know why they can't "provide investment opportunities to residents of Kansas". Is fraud especially illegal in Kansas or something?

a Brown Dwarf is said to be Classified Less massive than stars but more massive than planets,
brown dwarfs. so.. at 78 times the size of jupiter how massive is massive? and how massive is it not massive compared to a star?

The renewed concern about nuclear weapons in South Asia comes a little more than three years after the events of May 1998: the five nuclear tests conducted by India at Pokharan in the northwestern desert state of Rajasthan, followed three weeks later by six nuclear explosions conducted by Pakistan in its southwestern region of Chaghai. These tit-for-tat responses mirrored the nuclear buildup by the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, with a crucial difference: the two cold war superpowers were separated by an ocean and never fought each other openly.

http://www.sciam.com/2001/1201issue/1201ramana.htm l

Here are two articles that relate to the work done with NMDA receptors (from late '96). IMHO they are rather convincing of the role that synaptic strengthening plays in the process of learning.

The first article also tells that they were able to translate the activation pattern in hippocampus to the spatial location of the mouse (while it was swimming in Morris water maze).

1. The essential role of hippocampal CAI NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity in spatial memory.
2. Building a Brainier Mouse

Here are two articles that relate to the work done with NMDA receptors (from late '96). IMHO they are rather convincing of the role that synaptic strengthening plays in the process of learning.

The first article also tells that they were able to translate the activation pattern in hippocampus to the spatial location of the mouse (while it was swimming in Morris water maze).

1. The essential role of hippocampal CAI NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic plasticity in spatial memory.
2. Building a Brainier Mouse

Bonobo Sex and Society

The behavior of a close relative challenges assumptions about male supremacy in human evolution

by

Frans B. M. de Waal

(Originally published in the March 1995 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, pp. 82-88)

At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement.Male-biased evolutionary scenarios-- Man the Hunter, Man the Toolmaker and so on--are being challenged by the discovery that females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of one of our nearest relatives. In the past few years many strands of knowledge have come together concerning a relatively unknown ape with an unorthodox repertoire of behavior: the bonobo.

The bonobo is one of the last large mammals to be found by science. The creature was discovered in 1929 in a Belgian colonial museum, far from its lush African habitat. A German anatomist, Ernst Schwarz, was scrutinizing a skull that had been ascribed to a juvenile chimpanzee because of its small size, when he realized that it belonged to an adult. Schwarz declared that he had stumbled on a new subspecies of chimpanzee. But soon the animal was assigned the status of an entirely distinct species within the same genus as the chimpanzee, Pan.

The bonobo was officially classified as Pan paniscus, or the diminutive Pan. But I believe a different label might have been selected had the discoverers known then what we know now. The old taxonomic name of the chimpanzee, P. satyrus-- which refers to the myth of apes as lustful satyrs--would have been perfect for the bonobo.

The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression. Whereas in most other species sexual behavior is a fairly distinct category, in the bonobo it is part and parcel of social relations--and not just between males and females. Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed). And sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates. Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobo's rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.

A Near Relative

This finding commands attention because the bonobo shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile, making it as close to a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have occurred a mere eight million years ago. The subsequent divergence of the chimpanzee and the bonobo lines came much later, perhaps prompted by the chimpanzee's need to adapt to relatively open, dry habitats [see "East Side Story: The Origin of Humankind," by Yves Coppens; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, May 1994].

In contrast, bonobos probably never left the protection of the trees. Their present range lies in humid forests south of the Zaire River, where perhaps fewer than 10,000 bonobos survive. (Given the species' slow rate of reproduction, the rapid destruction of its tropical habitat and the political instability of central Africa, there is reason for much concern about its future.)

If this evolutionary scenario of ecological continuity is true, the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees. It could most closely resemble the common ancestor of all three modern species. Indeed, in the 1930s Harold J. Coolidge--the American anatomist who gave the bonobo its eventual taxonomic status--suggested that the animal might be most similar to the primogenitor, since its anatomy is less specialized than is the chimpanzee's. Bonobo body proportions have been compared with those of the australopithecines, a form of prehuman. When the apes stand or walk upright, they look as if they stepped straight out of an artist's impression of early hominids.

Not too long ago the savanna baboon was regarded as the best living model of the human ancestor. That primate is adapted to the kinds of ecological conditions that prehumans may have faced after descending from the trees. But in the late 1970s, chimpanzees, which are much more closely related to humans, became the model of choice. Traits that are observed in chimpanzees--including cooperative hunting, food sharing, tool use, power politics and primitive warfare--were absent or not as developed in baboons. In the laboratory the apes have been able to learn sign language and to recognize themselves in a mirror, a sign of self-awareness not yet demonstrated in monkeys.

Although selecting the chimpanzee as the touchstone of hominid evolution represented a great improvement, at least one aspect of the former model did not need to be revised: male superiority remained the natural state of affairs. In both baboons and chimpanzees, males are conspicuously dominant over females; they reign supremely and often brutally. It is highly unusual for a fully grown male chimpanzee to be dominated by any female.

Enter the bonobo. Despite their common name--the pygmy chimpanzee--bonobos cannot be distinguished from the chimpanzee by size. Adult males of the smallest subspecies of chimpanzee weigh some 43 kilograms (95 pounds) and females 33 kilograms (73 pounds), about the same as bonobos. Although female bonobos are much smaller than the males, they seem to rule.

Graceful Apes

In physique, a bonobo is as different from a chimpanzee as a Concorde is from a Boeing 747. I do not wish to offend any chimpanzees, but bonobos have more style. The bonobo, with its long legs and small head atop narrow shoulders, has a more gracile build than does a chimpanzee. Bonobo lips are reddish in a black face, the ears small and the nostrils almost as wide as a gorilla's. These primates also have a flatter, more open face with a higher forehead than the chimpanzee's and--to top it all off--an attractive coiffure with long, fine, black hair neatly parted in the middle.

Like chimpanzees, female bonobos nurse and carry around their young for up to five years. By the age of seven the offspring reach adolescence. Wild females give birth for the first time at 13 or 14 years of age, becoming full grown by about 15. A bonobo's longevity is unknown, but judging by the chimpanzee it may be older than 40 in the wild and close to 60 in captivity.

Fruit is central to the diets of both wild bonobos and chimpanzees. The former supplement with more pith from herbaceous plants, and the latter add meat. Although bonobos do eat invertebrates and occasionally capture and eat small vertebrates, including mammals, their diet seems to contain relatively little animal protein. Unlike chimpanzees, they have not been observed to hunt monkeys.

Whereas chimpanzees use a rich array of strategies to obtain foods--from cracking nuts with stone tools to fishing for ants and termites with sticks--tool use in wild bonobos seems undeveloped. (Captive bonobos use tools skillfully.) Apparently as intelligent as chimpanzees, bonobos have, however, a far more sensitive temperament. During World War II bombing of Hellabrun, Germany, the bonobos in a nearby zoo all died of fright from the noise; the chimpanzees were unaffected.

Bonobos are also imaginative in play. I have watched captive bonobos engage in "blindman's buff." A bonobo covers her eyes with a banana leaf or an arm or by sticking two fingers in her eyes. Thus handicapped, she stumbles around on a climbing frame, bumping into others or almost falling. She seems to be imposing a rule on herself: "I cannot look until I lose my balance." Other apes and monkeys also indulge in this game, but I have never seen it performed with such dedication and concentration as by bonobos.

Juvenile bonobos are incurably playful and like to make funny faces, sometimes in long solitary pantomimes and at other times while tickling one another. Bonobos are, however, more controlled in expressing their emotions-- whether it be joy, sorrow, excitement or anger--than are the extroverted chimpanzees. Male chimpanzees often engage in spectacular charging displays in which they show off their strength: throwing rocks, breaking branches and uprooting small trees in the process. They keep up these noisy performances for many minutes, during which most other members of the group wisely stay out of their way. Male bonobos, on the other hand, usually limit displays to a brief run while dragging a few branches behind them.

Both primates signal emotions and intentions through facial expressions and hand gestures, many of which are also present in the nonverbal communication of humans. For example, bonobos will beg by stretching out an open hand (or, sometimes, a foot) to a possessor of food and will pout their lips and make whimpering sounds if the effort is unsuccessful. But bonobos make different sounds than chimpanzees do. The renowned low-pitched, extended "huuu- huuu" pant-hooting of the latter contrasts with the rather sharp, high-pitched barking sounds of the bonobo.

Love, Not War

My own interest in bonobos came not from an inherent fascination with their charms but from research on aggressive behavior in primates. I was particularly intrigued with the aftermath of conflict. After two chimpanzees have fought, for instance, they may come together for a hug and mouth-to-mouth kiss. Assuming that such reunions serve to restore peace and harmony, I labeled them reconciliations.

Any species that combines close bonds with a potential for conflict needs such conciliatory mechanisms. Thinking how much faster marriages would break up if people had no way of compensating for hurting each other, I set out to investigate such mechanisms in several primates, including bonobos. Although I expected to see peacemaking in these apes, too, I was little prepared for the form it would take.

For my study, which began in 1983, I chose the San Diego Zoo. At the time, it housed the world's largest captive bonobo colony--10 members divided into three groups. I spent entire days in front of the enclosure with a video camera, which was switched on at feeding time. As soon as a caretaker approached the enclosure with food, the males would develop erections. Even before the food was thrown into the area, the bonobos would be inviting each other for sex: males would invite females, and females would invite males and other females.

Sex, it turned out, is the key to the social life of the bonobo. The first suggestion that the sexual behavior of bonobos is different had come from observations at European zoos. Wrapping their findings in Latin, primatologists Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck reported in 1954 that the chimpanzees at Hellabrun mated more canum (like dogs) and bonobos more hominum (like people). In those days, face-to- face copulation was considered uniquely human, a cultural innovation that needed to be taught to preliterate people (hence the term "missionary position"). These early studies, written in German, were ignored by the international scientific establishment. The bonobo's humanlike sexuality needed to be rediscovered in the 1970s before it became accepted as characteristic of the species.

Bonobos become sexually aroused remarkably easily, and they express this excitement in a variety of mounting positions and genital contacts. Although chimpanzees virtually never adopt face-to-face positions, bonobos do so in one out of three copulations in the wild. Furthermore, the frontal orientation of the bonobo vulva and clitoris strongly suggest that the female genitalia are adapted for this position.

Another similarity with humans is increased female sexual receptivity. The tumescent phase of the female's genitals, resulting in a pink swelling that signals willingness to mate, covers a much longer part of estrus in bonobos than in chimpanzees. Instead of a few days out of her cycle, the female bonobo is almost continuously sexually attractive and active.

Perhaps the bonobo's most typical sexual pattern, undocumented in any other primate, is genito-genital rubbing (or GG rubbing) between adult females. One female facing another clings with arms and legs to a partner that, standing on both hands and feet, lifts her off the ground. The two females then rub their genital swellings laterally together, emitting grins and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experiences. (Laboratory experiments on stump- tailed macaques have demonstrated that women are not the only female primates capable of physiological orgasm.)

Male bonobos, too, may engage in pseudocopulation but generally perform a variation. Standing back to back, one male briefly rubs his scrotum against the buttocks of another. They also practice so-called penis-fencing, in which two males hang face to face from a branch while rubbing their erect penises together.

The diversity of erotic contacts in bonobos includes sporadic oral sex, massage of another individual's genitals and intense tongue-kissing. Lest this leave the impression of a pathologically oversexed species, I must add, based on hundreds of hours of watching bonobos, that their sexual activity is rather casual and relaxed. It appears to be a completely natural part of their group life. Like people, bonobos engage in sex only occasionally, not continuously. Furthermore, with the average copulation lasting 13 seconds, sexual contact in bonobos is rather quick by human standards.

That sex is connected to feeding, and even appears to make food sharing possible, has been observed not only in zoos but also in the wild. Nancy Thompson-Handler, then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, saw bonobos in Zaire's Lomako Forest engage in sex after they had entered trees loaded with ripe figs or when one among them had captured a prey animal, such as a small forest duiker. The flurry of sexual contacts would last for five to 10 minutes, after which the apes would settle down to consume the food.

One explanation for the sexual activity at feeding time could be that excitement over food translates into sexual arousal. This idea may be partly true. Yet another motivation is probably the real cause: competition. There are two reasons to believe sexual activity is the bonobo's answer to avoiding conflict.

First, anything, not just food, that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in sexual contact. If two bonobos approach a cardboard box thrown into their enclosure, they will briefly mount each other before playing with the box. Such situations lead to squabbles in most other species. But bonobos are quite tolerant, perhaps because they use sex to divert attention and to diffuse tension.

Second, bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts totally unrelated to food. A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter's mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults.

I once observed a young male, Kako, inadvertently blocking an older, female juvenile, Leslie, from moving along a branch. First, Leslie pushed him; Kako, who was not very confident in trees, tightened his grip, grinning nervously. Next Leslie gnawed on one of his hands, presumably to loosen his grasp. Kako uttered a sharp peep and stayed put. Then Leslie rubbed her vulva against his shoulder. This gesture calmed Kako, and he moved along the branch. It seemed that Leslie had been very close to using force but instead had reassured both herself and Kako with sexual contact.

During reconciliations, bonobos use the same sexual repertoire as they do during feeding time. Based on an analysis of many such incidents, my study yielded the first solid evidence for sexual behavior as a mechanism to overcome aggression. Not that this function is absent in other animals--or in humans, for that matter--but the art of sexual reconciliation may well have reached its evolutionary peak in the bonobo. For these animals, sexual behavior is indistinguishable from social behavior. Given its peacemaking and appeasement functions, it is not surprising that sex among bonobos occurs in so many different partner combinations, including between juveniles and adults. The need for peaceful coexistence is obviously not restricted to adult heterosexual pairs.

Female Alliance

Apart from maintaining harmony, sex is also involved in creating the singular social structure of the bonobo. This use of sex becomes clear when studying bonobos in the wild. Field research on bonobos started only in the mid-1970s, more than a decade after the most important studies on wild chimpanzees had been initiated. In terms of continuity and invested (wo)manpower, the chimpanzee projects of Jane Goodall and Toshisada Nishida, both in Tanzania, are unparalleled. But bonobo research by Takayoshi Kano and others of Kyoto University is now two decades under way at Wamba in Zaire and is beginning to show the same payoffs.

Both bonobos and chimpanzees live in so-called fission- fusion societies. The apes move alone or in small parties of a few individuals at a time, the composition of which changes constantly. Several bonobos traveling together in the morning might meet another group in the forest, whereupon one individual from the first group wanders off with others from the second group, while those left behind forage together. All associations, except the one between mother and dependent offspring, are of a temporary character.

Initially this flexibility baffled investigators, making them wonder if these apes formed any social groups with stable membership. After years of documenting the travels of chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains, Nishida first reported that they form large communities: all members of one community mix freely in ever changing parties, but members of different communities never gather. Later, Goodall added territoriality to this picture. That is, not only do communities not mix, but males of different chimpanzee communities engage in lethal battles.

In both bonobos and chimpanzees, males stay in their natal group, whereas females tend to migrate during adolescence. As a result, the senior males of a chimpanzee or bonobo group have known all junior males since birth, and all junior males have grown up together. Females, on the other hand, transfer to an unfamiliar and often hostile group where they may know no one. A chief difference between chimpanzee and bonobo societies is the way in which young females integrate into their new community.

On arrival in another community, young bonobo females at Wamba single out one or two senior resident females for special attention, using frequent GG rubbing and grooming to establish a relation. If the residents reciprocate, close associations are set up, and the younger female gradually becomes accepted into the group. After producing her first offspring, the young female's position becomes more stable and central. Eventually the cycle repeats with younger immigrants, in turn, seeking a good relation with the now established female. Sex thus smooths the migrant's entrance into the community of females, which is much more close-knit in the bonobo than in the chimpanzee.

Bonobo males remain attached to their mothers all their lives, following them through the forest and being dependent on them for protection in aggressive encounters with other males. As a result, the highest-ranking males of a bonobo community tend to be sons of important females.

What a contrast with chimpanzees! Male chimpanzees fight their own battles, often relying on the support of other males. Furthermore, adult male chimpanzees travel together in same-sex parties, grooming each other frequently. Males form a distinct social hierarchy with high levels of both competition and association. Given the need to stick together against males of neighboring communities, their bonding is not surprising: failure to form a united front might result in the loss of lives and territory. The danger of being male is reflected in the adult sex ratio of chimpanzee populations, with considerably fewer males than females.

Serious conflict between bonobo groups has been witnessed in the field, but it seems quite rare. On the contrary, reports exist of peaceable mingling, including mutual sex and grooming, between what appear to be different communities. If intergroup combat is indeed unusual, it may explain the lower rate of all-male associations. Rather than being male- bonded, bonobo society gives the impression of being female- bonded, with even adult males relying on their mothers instead of on other males. No wonder Kano calls mothers the "core" of bonobo society.

The bonding among female bonobos violates a fairly general rule, outlined by Harvard University anthropologist Richard W. Wrangham, that the sex that stays in the natal group develops the strongest mutual bonds. Bonding among male chimpanzees follows naturally because they remain in the community of their birth. The same is true for female kinship bonding in Old World monkeys, such as macaques and baboons, where males are the migratory sex.

Bonobos are unique in that the migratory sex, females, strongly bond with same-sex strangers later in life. In setting up an artificial sisterhood, bonobos can be said to be secondarily bonded. (Kinship bonds are said to be primary.) Although we now know HOW this happens--through the use of sexual contact and grooming--we do not yet know WHY bonobos and chimpanzees differ in this respect. The answer may lie in the different ecological environments of bonobos and chimpanzees--such as the abundance and quality of food in the forest. But it is uncertain if such explanations will suffice.

Bonobo society is, however, not only female-centered but also appears to be female-dominated. Bonobo specialists, while long suspecting such a reality, have been reluctant to make the controversial claim. But in 1992, at the 14th Congress of the International Primatological Society in Strasbourg, investigators of both captive and wild bonobos presented data that left little doubt about the issue.

Amy R. Parish of the University of California at Davis reported on food competition in identical groups (one adult male and two adult females) of chimpanzees and bonobos at the Stuttgart Zoo. Honey was provided in a "termite hill" from which it could be extracted by dipping sticks into a small hole. As soon as honey was made available, the male chimpanzee would make a charging display through the enclosure and claim everything for himself. Only when his appetite was satisfied would he let the females fish for honey.

In the bonobo group, it was the females that approached the honey first. After having engaged in some GG rubbing, they would feed together, taking turns with virtually no competition between them. The male might make as many charging displays as he wanted; the females were not intimidated and ignored the commotion.

Observers at the Belgian animal park of Planckendael, which currently has the most naturalistic bonobo colony, reported similar findings. If a male bonobo tried to harass a female, all females would band together to chase him off. Because females appeared more successful in dominating males when they were together than on their own, their close association and frequent genital rubbing may represent an alliance. Females may bond so as to outcompete members of the individually stronger sex.

The fact that they manage to do so not only in captivity is evident from zoologist Takeshi Furuichi's summary of the relation between the sexes at Wamba, where bonobos are enticed out of the forest with sugarcane. "Males usually appeared at the feeding site first, but they surrendered preferred positions when the females appeared. It seemed that males appeared first not because they were dominant, but because they had to feed before the arrival of females," Furuichi reported at Strasbourg.

Occasionally, the role of sex in relation to food is taken one step further, bringing bonobos very close to humans in their behavior. It has been speculated by anthropologists-- including C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University and Helen Fisher of Rutgers University--that sex is partially separated from reproduction in our species because it serves to cement mutually profitable relationships between men and women. The human female's capacity to mate throughout her cycle and her strong sex drive allow her to exchange sex for male commitment and paternal care, thus giving rise to the nuclear family.

This arrangement is thought to be favored by natural selection because it allows women to raise more offspring than they could if they were on their own. Although bonobos clearly do not establish the exclusive heterosexual bonds characteristic of our species, their behavior does fit important elements of this model. A female bonobo shows extended receptivity and uses sex to obtain a male's favors when--usually because of youth--she is too low in social status to dominate him.

At the San Diego Zoo, I observed that if Loretta was in a sexually attractive state, she would not hesitate to approach the adult male, Vernon, if he had food. Presenting herself to Vernon, she would mate with him and make high- pitched food calls while taking over his entire bundle of branches and leaves. When Loretta had no genital swelling, she would wait until Vernon was ready to share. Primatologist Suehisa Kuroda reports similar exchanges at Wamba: "A young female approached a male, who was eating sugarcane. They copulated in short order, whereupon she took one of the two canes held by him and left."

Despite such quid pro quo between the sexes, there are no indications that bonobos form humanlike nuclear families. The burden of raising offspring appears to rest entirely on the female's shoulders. In fact, nuclear families are probably incompatible with the diverse use of sex found in bonobos. If our ancestors started out with a sex life similar to that of bonobos, the evolution of the family would have required dramatic change.

Human family life implies paternal investment, which is unlikely to develop unless males can be reasonably certain that they are caring for their own, not someone else's, offspring. Bonobo society lacks any such guarantee, but humans protect the integrity of their family units through all kinds of moral restrictions and taboos. Thus, although our species is characterized by an extraordinary interest in sex, there are no societies in which people engage in it at the drop of a hat (or a cardboard box, as the case may be). A sense of shame and a desire for domestic privacy are typical human concepts related to the evolution and cultural bolstering of the family.

Yet no degree of moralizing can make sex disappear from every realm of human life that does not relate to the nuclear family. The bonobo's behavioral peculiarities may help us understand the role of sex and may have serious implications for models of human society.

Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first. We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female- centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent. In the end, perhaps the most successful reconstruction of our past will be based not on chimpanzees or even on bonobos but on a three-way comparison of chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.

Social Organization among Various Primates

BONOBO Bonobo communities are peace-loving and generally egalitarian. The strongest social bonds are those among females, although females also bond with males. The status of a male depends on the position of his mother, to whom he remains closely bonded for her entire life.

CHIMPANZEE In chimpanzee groups the strongest bonds are established between the males in order to hunt and to protect their shared territory. The females live in overlapping home ranges within this territory but are not strongly bonded to other females or to any one male.

GIBBON Gibbons establish monogamous, egalitarian relations, and one couple will maintain a territory to the exclusion of other pairs.

HUMAN Human society is the most diverse among the primates. Males unite for cooperative ventures, whereas females also bond with those of their own sex. Monogamy, polygamy and polyandry are all in evidence.

GORILLA The social organization of gorillas provides a clear example of polygamy. Usually a single male maintains a range for his family unit, which contains several females. The strongest bonds are those between the male and his females.

ORANGUTAN Orangutans live solitary lives with little bonding in evidence. Male orangutans are intolerant of one another. In his prime, a single male establishes a large territory, within which live several females. Each female has her own, separate home range.

FRANS B. M. de WAAL was trained as an ethologist in the European tradition, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht in 1977. After a six-year study of the chimpanzee colony at the Arnhem Zoo, he moved to the U.S. in 1981 to work on other primate species, including bonobos. He is now a research professor at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta and professor of psychology at Emory University.

FURTHER READING

• THE PYGMY CHIMPANZEE: EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR. Edited by Randall L. Susman. Plenum Press, 1984.

• THE COMMUNICATIVE REPERTOIRE OF CAPTIVE BONOBOS (PAN PANISCUS) COMPARED TO THAT OF CHIMPANZEES. F.B.M. de Waal in "Behaviour," Vol. 106, Nos. 3-4, pages 183-251; September 1988.

• PEACEMAKING AMONG PRIMATES. F.B.M. de Waal. Harvard University Press, 1989.

• UNDERSTANDING CHIMPANZEES. Edited by Paul Heltne and Linda A. Marquardt. Harvard University Press, 1989.

• THE LAST APE: PYGMY CHIMPANZEE BEHAVIOR AND ECOLOGY. Takayoshi Kano. Stanford University Press, 1992.

• CHIMPANZEE CULTURES. R. Wrangham, W. C. McGrew, F.B.M. de Waal and P. Heltne. Harvard University Press, 1994.

Microsoft is in the same boat. It won't be until the Blue Screen of Death is really, provably responsible for human fatalities (Think saftey control at a power plant, or a crash aboard a military vehicle of some kind) that Microsoft will start being more responsible about their security and program design.

I find the USS Yorktown still a pretty good example when people start thinking about using Windows in a mission-critical application.

From Scientific American (April 25, 2001): Researchers have found differences in the blood chemistry of newborns which may predict whether they become autistic. This difference occurs long before any vaccination.

Excerpt from the article: "Scientists have identified blood markers that may be associated with the development of autism and mental retardation later in childhood.... Karin B. Nelson of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and her colleagues studied archived neonatal blood samples from children who developed normally, as well as those who went on to develop autism, mental retardation or cerebral palsy. The team found that the blood of children who later developed autism or mental retardation contained significantly elevated levels of neural growth factors in contrast to the blood from the other two groups."

From Scientific American (April 25, 2001): Researchers have found differences in the blood chemistry of newborns which may predict whether they become autistic. This difference occurs long before any vaccination.

Excerpt from the article: "Scientists have identified blood markers that may be associated with the development of autism and mental retardation later in childhood.... Karin B. Nelson of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and her colleagues studied archived neonatal blood samples from children who developed normally, as well as those who went on to develop autism, mental retardation or cerebral palsy. The team found that the blood of children who later developed autism or mental retardation contained significantly elevated levels of neural growth factors in contrast to the blood from the other two groups."

Now, in my opinion, the really smart guy is Shuji Nakamura, without whom you wouldn't have white LEDs yet.

BBC latest news on technology issue? Come on Michael....

Slashdotors want technical details!

is here

Correct link with no space!

I've been crunching data for SETI@Home since it first began. I've currently got 4 computers going full-time at it. I don't think it'll find anything, but I think it's a worthwhile program.

There was a great piece in Scientific American last year about why there are no ETIs in our galaxy. I found it thoroughly convincing, at least if you think along these lines: If there were an extra-terrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and they were explorers, like us (and really, that's probably the only kind of race we'll find until we go out, physically, and look for them), then they most likely would have already colonized the entire galaxy by now.

Chances are, we will colonize the entire galaxy before any other species gets a chance.

That doesn't mean there's not life out there. I think that life is probably commonplace in our galaxy, and I'm sure there's intelligent exploring life in others (but most SETI projects aren't looking that far yet). I would imagine most life in our galaxy is single-celled. Of the entire history of life on this planet, 85+% of the time, it was single-celled.

The conditions under which single-celled organisms evolved to multi-celled organisms was a fluke. In fact, many of the important steps that led to our evolution, were a series of flukes. Evolution does not necessarily lead to intelligence. The objective of evolution is to give you the tools necessary to procreate and continue to exist as a species. Once that job is done, evolution is done.

Humans have been around, what 100,000-200,000 years? The dinosaurs were here for 140,000,000 years, or roughly 1000 times as long as we've been here, and they never developed intelligence.

Anyway, until we have the ability to listen to search for ETIs in other galaxies, I don't think we're going to find any.

http://www.sciam.com/news/101101/3.html

As penance, I'll plagiarize some text for my honorable master, the slashdot audience:

Novel Semiconductor Device Heats and Cools on a Dime

[...] Rama Venkatasubramanian and co-workers, publishing in today's Nature, built a faster and more powerful than ordinary thermoelectric device, which converts heat and electricity back and forth, by alternating very thin layers of two semiconducing materials. This film-made of bismuth, antimony and tellurium-is 2.4 times more efficient than conventional bulk devices, 23,000 times faster, and can be applied in tiny dots for pinpoint refrigeration. "This marks a major advance in a field that has stagnated for 30 years," says John Pazik of the Office of Naval Research, which provided funding for the research.

Thermoelectric devices are longer lasting and tougher than mechanical refrigerators. Their high cost and low efficiency, though, have generally confined them to niche markets: powering deep-space probes, cooling infrared detectors, and, lately, heating and cooling luxury car seats. Cheaper, more convenient thermoelectrics could speed up microprocessors and fiber-optic lines, make possible miniature biotech tools capable of stopping and starting small biochemical reactions, or running a car's air conditioner with waste heat from the engine.

-Pimproot, betting his transplantable head on the Promised Land of scientific salvation

Nano tubes will change the world far more than any other creation of man.

They are little more than lab curiosities, with no practical applications. The late 1980's gave us Cold Fusion, and the late 1990's gave us Bucky Balls and Nano-tubes. What will change the world, (and NOT for the better is the continual meddling in cloning and human genetics. The moral, ethical, legal, environmental, and biological problems are not being addressed by those who are doing the research. We are behaving like children with shiny, dangerous toys. One thing many Science Fiction writers have done over the years is examine these things, as they relate to technology.

First, why would we mine the moon when Near Earth Asteroids are cheaper to get to and have a much greater abundance of useful stuff (As opposed to rock)? Just one 2km iron asteroid is supposed to have more ore than we have ever mined in the history of civilization. Others are thought to be almost all ice (ice + electricity = rocket fuel).

Second, space mining isn't going to be able to compete with Earth-based mining for a long time. Guess what, it doesn't need to. We currently spend vast sums of money launching intrinsically cheap rocket fuel and metal into space when all we need is already up there. To get a gallon of gas soft-landed on the moon is costs ~$40,001, ~$1 for the gas and $40,000 to get it there. This is utterly ridiculous. If you could get that gallon (Ok, not gas but pretend it's liquid hydrogen) for $20,000 by asteroid mining, you are already way, way in the black.

All this Moon mining crap is just looking for an excuse to go back. I want to go back too, but this is just poor economics and makes space mining seem like a pipe dream when it's almost practical today.

See Making Money in Space or just Google it for more.

Of course you remember to shield your system so that it does not leak telltale signals while your message is in clear text. ;-)

Why is everyone so interested in Solar power? Solar power is not gonna be the alternative fuel of the future, it just doesn't make enough power for pratical use. Fuel Cells and Hydrogen is the way to go. Go here for more info on fuel cells

Rather than illumination, they use electrified pigments or rotaing, embedded spheres to change the color of a sheet of plastic. One difference with the technology at UoA is that charge is only needed to change the image, not maintain it. One of the developers described it as "paper that prints itself," which gives you an idea of what kind of applications it could be used for (e.g. hourly updated price signs=good. Monitor to watch a live video stream=bad).

It sounds like a second-hand description of "quantum dot" technology. This is where you create a potential well in a conducting material and confine an electron within the well. Because the well is small, you get only certain energy levels permitted for the electron, just as in an atom. By changing the properties of the well, you change the properties of this "fake atom".

Just out of curiousity, do you any more info on this, or on applications for it? I buy that you can do this, but it seems hard to control this sort of potential except using nuclei?

It's actually quite easy to control the resulting energy configuration. The "allowed" energy levels depend on the size of the well (controlled when you etch it) and the electric potential between the inside and the outside of the well (which you can get "for free" by making the well on a semiconductor wafer and doping the inside and outside differently, or which you can fine-tune by having an electrode next to the well).

A decent introduction into quantum dots is here:

http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/1097solidstate/ 1097corcoran.html

Scientific American has a few other articles on quantum dots, which you can find through their search page.

A collection of more in-depth articles is here:

http://www.mitre.org/research/nanotech/quantum_dot .html

Applications include quantum computing (if you put multiple dots on a chip close enough together to interact with each other), and building semiconductor lasers with any frequency you like (even tunable frequency). More applications will undoubtedly arise; we've only just started to play with these things.

Frankly, the government should rethink its policy and seek reimbursement from thrillseekers.

Um, these particular thrillseekers ARE the government (UK government that is). From their website: "QinetiQ comprises the greater part of DERA, the British Government's 'Defence Evaluation and Research Agency'" While many posts about this story seem to think that this is a couple of guys puttering about their garage looking to get an honorable mention in the Darwin Awards they are in fact doing military research. For a quick explanation on why a modern military might be interested in balloons check out this Scientific American article on modern "observations ballons" or "Aerostat Radar System" as the U.S. military calls it.

As a matter of fact, Scientific American has an article about two morons (how could anything like this be considered anything but moronic) who will attempt to jump from balloons at 130,000 feet. See this article.

[smile]

Scientific American has this article on Information Technology, 2500 B.C. on what life was like for the information worker of that day.

As many as half a million cuneiform tablets, hand size up to book-page size, are now available around the world. Surely many more are waiting to be found. Those samples are of every quality: once prized accounts and receipts, schoolboys' lessons, litigation profound or droll, literary essays, erotica, mathematics--and entire ancient epics, centuries older than Father Abraham's. A mostly unread treasury, comprising the equivalent of tens of thousands of large printed volumes.

Looks like there could be a lot of fun and good stuff there.

[smile]

Scientific American has this article on Information Technology, 2500 B.C. on what life was like for the information worker of that day.

As many as half a million cuneiform tablets, hand size up to book-page size, are now available around the world. Surely many more are waiting to be found. Those samples are of every quality: once prized accounts and receipts, schoolboys' lessons, litigation profound or droll, literary essays, erotica, mathematics--and entire ancient epics, centuries older than Father Abraham's. A mostly unread treasury, comprising the equivalent of tens of thousands of large printed volumes.

Looks like there could be a lot of fun and good stuff there.

Both the Shuttle and the ISS are collosal wastes of money, and should be scrapped. Why do we care how prolonged weightlessness affects the human body when we can't afford a manned space mission such as a trip to Mars anyway? Instead we should focus on making spaceflight more practical and cheap. New ways of getting to space cheaply such as lightcraft would enable profitable space based economic activity that could deliver real benefits to real people.

Go ahead and read your crappy Disney owned pop-science trash. I'll stick with a real mainstream science mag: Scientific American.

Now it's well more than half of my friend's worst-case estimate later. We have nothing approaching any of those things. What we have is exactly one thing, C 60, also called buckminsterfullerene. It's a very interesting thing, but it's a material, not a machine. Its co-inventor, Dr. Richard E. Smalley, explained in the Sept. 2001 Scientific American that the Drexler assembler is and always will be impossible, because molecules are not tinkertoys that you can put together an atom at a time.

In his 1999 Senate statement, Dr. Smalley said this about potential natural security ramifications of nanotechnology research:

National Security. The Department of Defense recognized the importance of nanostructures over a decade ago and has played a significant role in nurturing the field. Critical defense applications include: (a) Continued information dominance, identified as an important capability for the military, will depend on U.S. nanotechnology. (b) Nanostructured electronics will provide more sophisticated virtual reality systems that enable affordable, effective training. (c) Reduction in military manpower must be compensated by the increased use of nanostructure-enhanced automation and robotics, both of which will benefit from nanostructures. The use of uninhabited combat vehicles is desired, both to reduce risk to human life as well as to improve vehicle performance. For example, several thousand pounds could be stripped from a pilotless fighter aircraft, resulting in longer missions. In addition, the fighter agility could be dramatically improved without the necessity to limit g-forces on the pilot, increasing its combat effectiveness. (d) Nanostructured materials hold the promise for the high performance (lighter, stronger) needed in military platforms while simultaneously providing diminished failure rates and lower life-cycle costs. (e) Advances in medicine and health enabled by nanoscience will provide badly needed chemical/biological/nuclear sensing, protection and improvements in casualty care. (f) Changes are also possible in the design and weight reduction of nuclear weapons and systems used in non-proliferation.

As you can see, it promises some incremental advances, but no basic revolutions -- certainly nothing on the level of the atomic bomb. Stronger armor, lighter planes, faster computers, smaller missiles, absolutely. But hordes of nanobattlebots? Get real.

The Drexler revolution has fallen flat on its face. We do not yet have even a semi-autonomous microbot, much less any kind of nanobot. Even at the microscale it turns out the laws of mechanics are too different from the mesoscale to allow for something as standard as a gear, and the nanoscale is much more different than that. We do not have anything vaguely resembling an assembler, and chemists say that the assembler will always be impossible.

Yet for some reason people are still concerned with these fantasies. It's just bad science fiction, like warp drives and human-animal hybrids. It's not important. We will have nanotechnology but it will be far more modest and less dangerous than the whacked-out speculations of fake futurists. Start dealing with the technology issues we really do face, like cloning, nuclear proliferation, and social monitoring. They're important. Drexler and his cult are not.

Tim

I wonder if some similar technique could be used to produce thermoneuclear fusion.

See, for example, this Scientific American article about "Z-pinch fusion".

A bit of Googling revealed the following:

From The Ramjet/Scramjet Engine:

• a scramjet is a kind of ramjet
• "A ramjet has no moving parts and achieves compression of intake air by the forward speed of the air vehicle. Air entering the intake of a supersonic aircraft is slowed by aerodynamic diffusion created by the inlet and diffuser to velocities comparable to those in a turbojet augmentor. The expansion of hot gases after fuel injection and combustion accelerates the exhaust air to a velocity higher than that at the inlet and creates positive push."
• "Scramjet is an acronym for Supersonic Combustion Ramjet. The scramjet differs from the ramjet in that combustion takes place at supersonic air velocities through the engine. It is mechanically simple, but vastly more complex aerodynamically than a jet engine. Hydrogen is normally the fuel used."

Finally, here's Scientific American article that gives a bit more technical detail.

A much more detailed (7 pages) article on time-reversed acoustics appeared in the November 1999 issue of Scientific American.

I pasted the summary below, but here's a link to the summary just to make it official.
Time-Reversed Acoustics
Mathias Fink
Record sound waves, then replay them in reverse from a speaker array, and the waves will naturally travel back to the original sound source as if time had been running backward. That process can be used to destroy kidney stones, locate defects in materials and communicate with submarines.

I thought it was so cool that I wrote a program to simulate the effect. It simulates 1 or more waves emitted by 1 or more sources, and records the waves at 1 or more "microphones". It then treats the "microphones" as "speakers" and plays back the time reversal of the recording. At first the screen is filled with chatoic expanding circles, but after a while the expanding (and fading) circles combine to create a CONTRACTING and STRENGTHENING circle!

I wrote it for my own curiosity, and the code is "dirty". If there's some real intrest here I could dig it out and clean it up a bit.

THE CLASSICS: DEEP SPACE HOMER

Episode Guide

BTW, I see some prick mod'd you down for injecting a little bit of ON TOPIC humor (must be some type 'A'sshole who combs the bristles to his toothbrush after flossing for an hour).

Well, here are some ON TOPIC links that shows this entire article is OLD hat (relatively speaking).

Scientific America : STRANGE ATTRACTORS - Chemists make magnets without metal

New Magnetic Materials

Cryostat Modeling for the Superconducting Interaction Region Magnets: CESR Phase III

All of these articles are circa 1997-98.

Why do we need to first build a base on the Moon? There's no resources there, no way to make fuel, no building materials. It's just a gravity well that we'd be better off avoiding. If you use Mars' atmosphere as a brake, it actually costs less delta-v (and therefore fuel) to land on Mars than on the Moon.

Altough its unconventional, Zubrin's Mars Direct plan makes a lot of sense. I suggest everyone interested in space exploration pick up a copy of his book.

Still, we need to lessen the cost of Earth low orbit. That should be the administration's first goal. Sadly, this goal isn't compatible with NASA's current corporate welfare programs (ISS and Shuttle) that please the constituents.

in the words of hienlein (I think), "once you are on the moon, you are halfway to anywhere"

Perhaps you're thinking of "Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System", which is indeed a quote from Robert Heinlein

I read about this over a year ago. Why is it just now being reported as "new"?

I've been increasingly reading more articles like this one which seems to show that all these claims about typing causing RSI or carpal tunnel syndrome is a bunch of garbage. The neck cramps you referred to is more along the right path I think. Just something for everyone to keep in mind!

My favorite off of the hardware page is the Symbol PPT 2800, which has some impressive stats but also looks like a Star Trek prop as well..

On the other hand, the Casio E-200 seems to have expandability locked down with a Type II slot, a PC card slot and a memory slot.

For cool, the "O2 xpda" listed on the Pocket PC Thoughts homepage takes the prize. Jason Dunn says "I'm at a total loss here...who knows what this device is? Is this the BT device I've heard rumblings about?" I have a thought. I'd bet that this is related to MIT's Oxygen Project, profiled in this article from Scientific American.

Secondly, this was only a matter of time. I hope we switch from methane to hydrogen soon though. Anywho, Scientific American has a pretty informative article on fuel cells in mobile devices. It's a bit old (1998) but still relevant. A quick Google search turned up some more:
CNN: NEC develops fuel cell for handhelds
ABCNEWS: Fuel Cell Batteries Could Power Next Wave of Technology

I don't follow you. While many of our diseases are caused by self-inflicted behavior (smoking, exposure to chemicals, bad diet), most other diseases are not.

The goal of Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned Dolly, was to produce transgenic animals that would secrete drugs in their milk. He did that, with another clone, named Polly. This sheep secreted human factor IX, which is used to treat hemophilia B. This disease is inherited, and is not caused by technology.

With The End of Oil coming as world production declines in the next decade, and as it will take 30-40 years for substantial global warming, we have an opportunity to move away from fossil fuels to renewables. Rising energy prices may make this more possible, but fusion is and has always been long term. It will be hard for it to compete with solar.

Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago?

(Pons and Fleischmann)

First, it became instantly clear that, whatever was, it probably wasn't fusion. (Fusion would yield energy and other stuff; the other stuff wasn't there.)

Second, the effect wasn't reproducable at will. This is a death knell for both scientific research (since research needs to be confirmed by others reproducing the original work) and practical applications.

There's a great "Ask The Experts" discussion at the Scientific American site here (Google cache).

Forget smart dust, I want smart liquid!

I want to be able to DRINK an upgrade and have it interface with me directly. A pint of CPUs on the house! That way I can drink and actually get SMARTER instead of the current opposite result.

It has been told that they were testing a version of the Shkval supercavitating torpedo. These torpedoes apparently operate by forming bubbles of gas around the torpedo, therefore reducing the amount of friction.

More on supercavitation here.