Friday, 6 August 2010 by bbbeard.

Continuing the documentation of the determinism thread… BBB wrote:

Well, by all means, take me up on my challenge — formulate a principle of determinism and let’s have at it. You seem to be satisfied to voice increasingly vague arguments about determinism, but it is unclear to me what you mean by the term.

I finished the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom a couple of days ago. I think you might be one of the few people who might be able to address it in its proper spirit. Which is to say, there are certain people for whom any hint of mysticism is enough to validate, and others for whom any religiosity is enough to invalidate. But the Dalai Lama’s approach is quite refreshing, I think. He is willing to spend some time explaining some convoluted doctrine, and then add his own comment, such as “I have never understood why this view was reasonable” and then explain his objections. He is a man of great kindness and humility. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this book, for me — and the thing that distinguishes him from other folks like Fritjof Capra — is that over many decades he has moved in what you would call elevated circles, and been able to cultivate friendships with some of the most insightful people in science and philosophy in the twentieth century. Without a hint of self-importance, he discusses his sustained relationships with people like David Bohm, Carl von Weizsacker, and Karl Popper. His international connections have opened doors to people like Richard Davidson, Anne Harrington, Paul Davies — and Eric Lander.

So anyway, here’s some of what the Dalai Lama relates concerning the free-will / determinism antinomy:

At a two-day retreat on the epistemological issues pertaining to the foundations of quantum mechanics and Buddhist Middle Way philosophy at Innsbruck, where Anton Zeilinger, Arthur Zajonc, and I met for a dialogue, Anton told me that a well-known colleague of his once remarked that most quantum physicists relate to their field in a schizophrenic manner. When they are in the laboratory and play around with things, they are realists. They talk about photons and electrons going here and there. However, the moment you switch into philosophical discussion and ask them about the foundations of quantum mechanics, most would say that nothing really exists without the apparatus defining it.

Somewhat parallel problems arose in Buddhist philosophy in relation to the disparity between our commonsense view of the world and the perspective suggested by Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna invoked the notion of two truths, the “conventional” and the “ultimate,” relating respectively to the everyday world of experience and to things and events in their ultimate mode of being, that is, on the level of emptiness. On the conventional level, we can speak of a pluralistic world of things and events with distinct identity and causation. This is the realm where we can also expect the laws of cause and effect, and the laws of logic — such as the principles of identity, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle  — to operate without violation. This world of empirical experience is not an illusion, nor is it unreal. It is real in that we experience it. A grain of barley does produce a barley sprout, which can eventually yield a barley crop. Taking a poison can cause one’s death and, similarly, taking a medication can cure an illness. However, from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is “empty” in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being….

Here I find it helpful to reflect on a critical distinction drawn by Chandrakirti (seventh century C.E.) in relation to the domains of discourse that pertain to the conventional and the ultimate truths of things. Chandrakirti argues that, when formulating one’s understanding of reality, one must be sensitive to the scope and parameters of the specific mode of inquiry. For example, he argues that to reject distinct identity, causation, and origination within the everyday world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness had suggested, simply because these notions are untenable from the perspective of ultimate reality, constitutes a methodological error….

In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti are suggesting this: when we relate to the empirical world of experience, so long as we do not invest things with independent, intrinsic existence, notions of causation, identity, and difference, and the principles of logic will continue to remain tenable. However, their validity is limited to the relative framework of conventional truth. Seeking to ground notions such as identity, existence, and causation in an objective, independent existence is transgressing the bounds of logic, language, and convention. We do not need to postulate the objective, independent existence of things, since we can accord robust, nonarbitrary reality to things and events that not only support everyday functions but also provide a firm basis for ethics and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is constituted by web of dependently originating and interconnected realities, within which dependently originated causes give rise to dependently originated consequences according to dependently originating laws of causality. What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we’re connected to.

So it would appear that this coming-to-terms would be sufficiently dualistic to satisfy your yen. The Dalai Lama has a good deal more to say about this subject and its relation to modern science, but I advise you read the book.

It seems to me that the kind of predictability to which you refer in physical experimentation revolves around conserved quantities. Four-momentum is always conserved. But that doesn’t place much of a constraint on things. In a two-body decay (e.g. alpha production), conservation of 4-momentum is enough to determine the alpha’s energy (but not its direction), given the initial and final masses of the nuclides. But three-body decay is different, e.g. the decay of a beta emitter into daughter nuclide, beta-minus, and antineutrino gives rise to a spectrum of energies.because the end-state energies are insufficiently determined by 4-momentum conservation. So. We know there are a handful of conserved quantities — 4-momentum, electric charge, angular momentum, baryon number, etc. but these are only sufficient to determine the end states for certain classes of reaction. So I don’t think this has anything to do with your (still unformulated) determinism.

It seems to me that your other examples are of a species I would call “contingent determinism”. That is, the outcome of some measurement, or the behavior of some object, can be forecast, provided that nothing that would change the outcome intervenes. A cynic might call this “tautological determinism”. It is one way to avoid facing the relativistic indeterminism I mentioned in the last post but it really solves nothing.

A personal anecdote addresses your question about clocks. I own a nice big Invicta wristwatch. Had you asked me last week what time it would show right now, I might have guessed “6:48 pm Central Standard Time”. But I would have been wrong, you see. Because I happened to drop my nice Invicta on the floor of the bathroom last Friday and it stopped working a few hours later. So it now shows 12:36 (right twice a day, just as predicted).

Funny thing, moral culpability. On the one hand, some folks (like Alan Dershowitz) argue for a restrictive interpretation of moral culpability. They feel that conditions like mental incapacity, or the inability to tell “right” from “wrong”, should exempt some humans from moral culpability. I would say the broader Buddhist view is that all sentient beings participate in the cycle of karma, but that moral culpability per se is a “conventional level” concept that we use to ground our system of ethics. I think a number of science fiction authors have tackled the concept of moral culpability in alien and other variant forms. Obviously Kirk thinks it is reasonable to hold Klingons and Romulans (and hortas?) to human standards of culpability. Androids and clones, of course, were dealt with in the Alien movie series and Blade Runner, speaking of Philip K. Dick.

Ironically, when #2 Son G is trying to evade responsibility for causing some foreseeable disaster, he exclaims, “It was an accident!”, i.e. the result was unintentional. Perhaps instead he should say, “It was pre-determined!” and thereby avoid culpability altogether.

BBB

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Friday, 6 August 2010 by CVM.

Following up on documenting our discussion of determinism, here is CVM’s response to the previous post:

As to dualism, that is my model, yes, even though I’d be the first to admit that it is unlikely that there is any “real” sense in which the two fundamentally different substances exist.

Never read “Einstein’s Dreams“.  I read “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe” and was turned off by his poetic conflation of memory and physics.  However, I have seen the book and was intrigued — next time it comes up I’ll take a look.

Your argument about determinism and relatively is interesting and new to me — indeed, most texts I have read have suggested that the theory of relativity is firmly deterministic, as indeed the great man himself seems to have believed, but then again, he seems to have believed quantum mechanics is deterministic too, so there you go.

However, your arguments about relativity smack a bit to me of Hume — yes, in principle I agree that the universe need not, perhaps is not, deterministic, but then again there are those pesky measurements, testing both quantum mechanics and relativity, that repeatedly agree with both theories down to the, I don’t know, trillionth decimal place or something (Feynman had some kind of analogy about the precision was as if you could measure the distance between New York and L.A. with the precision to the width of a human hair). That of course is no guarantee of future performance, but I wouldn’t bet a lot that your mileage may vary- while there may very well be influences in our absolute elsewhere, they don’t seem to have had much impact so far.

Strangely, though your arguments invoke science, they seem metaphysical to me.  The problem I put before you was that we hold humans morally accountable in a way we don’t hold other beings, yet there is not reason to believe humans are less (or in your case, more) deterministic than other beings. So what’s the difference?   The gist of your argument seems to be that since we don’t live in a deterministic universe, there is no barrier to ascribing moral responsibility. That’s got promise, but then we have to address why conscious beings are reasonably held morally responsible, but, for examples, computers are not (unless you want to go all Philip K. Dick on me).  As we have discussed, in my model at least computers behave deterministically, though you somewhat snarkily evaded this hypothesis.  How, then, about a clock?

An interesting solution might be that moral responsibility only makes sense in the context of conscious belief in free will (whether or not that belief is true, so we need not get into ontology).  That would rule out clocks, and possibly even variously incapacitated humans, but maybe not electric androids.  If one then accepts your argument against determinism (which however doesn’t explain clocks) this would neatly solve the problem.

As to a Buddhist treatment of free will, I’m all ears.  As I suggested before the dissolution of the self goes a long way toward solving the problem, and, though I agree that this a profound idea, it’s tough to put into practice.  It’s interesting however what the dissolution of the self does to the concept of free will: doesn’t make much sense then does it? I mean, what then is said to be free?

Looking forward to your further disquisition on Buddhism and moral responsibility- and also a description of your personal Buddhist praxis (e.g., meditation?).

CVM

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Sunday, 11 July 2010 by bbbeard.

About a year ago, CVM and I exchanged a series of emails on the fruitless topic of free will and determinism. It transpired that I argued that, well, determinism is inconsistent not just with quantum mechanics (as any sophomore philosopher knows), but also relativity in an inflationary universe. I thought I should post the key paragraphs for posterity.

Well, the reference to Kant at the end of my last message was not flippant. The free-will/determinism antinomy is interesting but I think lies in the same category as our intuitions that the universe is infinite and that it has an intelligent designer. Which is to say, from the standpoint of ‘pure reason’ one might make the argument that there is a contradiction between free will and determinism but in light of the nature of the universe we live in, it’s not much of a paradox.

Have you ever read Alan Lightman’s book, Einstein’s Dreams? It’s a delightful little book. He tells 30 stories describing the experience of time in different possible, or at least imaginable, universes. One of those happens to coincide with the way our universe actually is, i.e. objects moving quickly experience time dilation. What you are proposing as “that annoying apparent contradiction between determinism and free will” pertains to some universe other than the one we inhabit.

Just in case you are thinking I am getting back to quantum mechanics being the camel’s nose that enables free will to sneak back into the ontological tent, let me point out that, as I see it, relativity provides just as much of a challenge to determinism as does quantum mechanics. The reason is thus: I propose that the principle of determinism states that if the initial states of all the particles and fields composing a system can be measured precisely, the future state of the system will be determined. Set aside quantum mechanical uncertainty for the moment. This determinism principle is not consistent with relativity. As you know, special relativity dictates that there are three topologically distinct regions of spacetime associated with any point in 4-space: the absolute future, the absolute past, and the absolute elsewhere. These regions are separated by the light cones forward and back attached to the point. Now, any state that is to be “predicted” must lie in our absolute future, that is, it must be contained in the forward part of our light cone. The crucial point is this: that future state will be influenced by particles and fields that lie in our absolute elsewhere, that is, outside our current light cone.There is no way — not even in principle — to ascertain the states of those particles and fields because we have never been in contact with them before. When you look up at night and see starlight (well, you might have to leave the City), those photons were traveling on a light cone that merged with your worldline only in the instant they entered your eye, not before — until that instant you could not have accounted for their existence in calculating a deterministic future. Of course, the photons are on the light cone, but the reasoning also applies to any massive particle traveling towards you at nearly the speed of light (say, the solar neutrinos that left the sun eight minutes ago and are only now weakly interacting with your electrons). And a curious footnote to this observation is that all those massive ‘elsewhere’ particles, because of the relativity of simultaneity, could be in the future or in the past, depending on the frame of reference you choose.

So I believe relativity is at least as insurmountable an obstacle as quantum mechanics to a principle of determinism.

I challenge you to come up with a reasonable formulation of the principle of determinism that is consistent with the universe we live in. Until then, I don’t see what the problem is. We don’t live in a deterministic universe.

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Monday, 26 October 2009 by bbbeard.

Today I had the good fortune to catch on TCM the end of Inherit the Wind, the 1960 Stanley Kramer movie starring Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, based on the play of the same name. If you’ve never seen it, set your DVR sometime. It’s a compelling fictionalization of the Scopes Monkey Trial, with Tracy taking the Clarence Darrow role and March playing William Jennings Bryan (albeit with fictionalized names). It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it, and it was interesting to ponder the themes and symbolism in the context of our modern struggles.

The film deals with the tension between our obligations to our conscience and our need to conform to the mores of society at large, including our religious beliefs.

The tension is timeless, and we are still hashing out the particular conflict between Darwinism and religion that provided the premise for the trial, play, and movie. One of the ironies of our situation is that the same language that defended John Scopes (Bertram Cates in the play and movie) might also reasonably be used to defend the teachers who wish to inject creationism into the classroom today. My own opinion is that it was misguided to frame the teaching of Darwinism in terms of freedom of expression. It’s simply that it’s the correct scientific theory, and that the dead-end of revelatory creationism is not. Despite the crucial role of dissent in the advancement of science, science is not merely an exercise in freedom of expression, as theatre is.

The larger irony, though, is that the play / movie are not really “about” Darwinism at all. Like The Crucible, the work was intended as a rebuke of McCarthyism. The noble Bertram Cates is meant to be a symbol of the “free-thinking” Communists who were persecuted by the closed-minded McCarthy and others during the “Red Scare”. As played by Fredric March, Matthew Harrison Brady (the Bryan / McCarthy character) is an insufferable demogogue, a manipulator of populist fears, and an all-around bête noire.

That Communists, of all people, fancy themselves advocates of human rights and free speech, conjoins the comic and the deeply tragic. And it has always been a puzzle to me whether the defenders of the Hollywood Ten and their ilk do so out of a misguided understanding of Communism or an overestimation of the gullibility of their audience.

And we still struggle against leaders who believe themselves to be above criticism, believers in the freedom only for speech that sanctifies their viewpoint.

The title Inherit the Wind comes from Proverbs 11:29, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” I’ve wondered about the significance of that choice, and what it has to do with the themes of the play/movie. I can’t quite shake the feeling that the playwrights, like so many in the nomenklatura, feel that the proper role of the “fools” like McCarthy (or Fox News!) is to be “servant to the wise of heart”, i.e. the wise central planners.

But I’d welcome an alternate reading.

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Thursday, 5 February 2009 by bbbeard.

Our newly-minted Secretary of Energy says that unless we do something about global warming, there will be no agriculture in California a hundred years from now.

Is this claim part of the IPCC predictions, or is this an independent assessment by a laser guy? Okay, that’s a bit unfair, inasmuch as Steve Chu has been involved in climate change lobbying for a number of years. But it seems only inches short of the wilder “Earth has a fever” brand of climate zealotry. Is this really science “restored to its rightful place“? Or is this some guardian of a partisan viewpoint trying to spread the gospel? Plus ça change….

But I still find it baffling that people think they can project not only what climate will be like in 100 years, but also technology. Imagine someone in 1909 proposing drastic government-mandated restrictions on electricity production because numerical models indicate that coal reserves need to be conserved for use on steamships and railroads… or that the major capitals of the world should begin a phased depopulation because horse dung will be choking the streets of 2009….

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Friday, 16 January 2009 by lukemeister.

NASA held an interesting press conference yesterday about the discovery of localized emissions of methane from Mars. The discovery of Martian methane, using both ground-based telescopes and a spacecraft orbiting Mars, was reported in 2003, but the detections weren’t certain. Now high-resolution infrared spectra taken by Michael Mumma at NASA/Goddard and colleagues, reported online in Science, seems to provide definitive measurements. The CH₄ appears to arise from three regions near or within Arabia Terra, Nili Fossae, and Syrtis Major. The most intriguing observation in the new study is that the atmospheric abundance of methane dropped by a factor of two between 2003 (northern summer on Mars) and 2006 (vernal equinox on Mars), possibly suggesting a seasonal cycle. Methane has a lifetime of centuries against destruction by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so there must be another sink, possibly involving reactions with perchlorate or peroxide in the Martian soil.

On Earth most methane is generally thought to originate biologically, although it can also be produced through serpentinization, which involves the reaction of minerals like olivine and pyroxene with water and carbon dioxide. Both biological and abiological origins for Mars’ methane are in play. If martian microbes exist, their metabolism might resemble that of organisms found at 3 km depth in a gold mine in South Africa. Even if Martian methane originates abiologically, the new observations seem to imply that Mars shows a surprisingly high level of geological activity, as serpentinization on Earth is associated with hydrothermal systems.

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Saturday, 27 December 2008 by bbbeard.

Well, Aurora Guy seems to think the appointment of John Holdren as Science Advisor is a step in the right direction. I have to say I have my doubts. Several articles have popped up in the last week discussing Holdren’s relation to Paul Ehrlich (of Population Bomb infamy). Now, I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for statements I made thirty-five years ago. But the articles raise some issues that I hope Dr. Holdren will clarify during his confirmation hearings, including recent statements he has made praising Ehrlich’s views.

John Tierney has been pointed in his criticism (”Flawed Science Advice for Obama?“, “Science Adviser’s Unsustainable Bet (and Mine)“). He details the story of the famous Simon-Ehrlich futures wager. In the picture he paints, Holdren is an opinionated ass:

Now, you could argue that anyone’s entitled to a mistake, and that mistakes can be valuable if people learn to become open to ideas that conflict with their preconceptions and ideology. That could be a useful skill in an advisor who’s supposed to be presenting the president with a wide range of views. Someone who’d seen how wrong environmentalists had been in ridiculing Dr. Simon’s predictions could, in theory, become more open to dissent from today’s environmentalist orthodoxy. But I haven’t seen much evidence of such open-mindedness in Dr. Holdren.

Tierney also discusses the shabby jihad against Bjørn Lomborg undertaken — with Holdren’s contribution — in the pages of Scientific American, once a fine publication.

From the pages of the Atlantic, Ross Douthat takes Holdren to task for recent praise of The Population Bomb.

It is, I suppose, possible to find a “key insight” about population growth in Ehrlich’s book that’s anodyne enough to qualify as “elementary” and irrefutable. But there’s a pretty good reason that the book is remembered primarily for its mix of hysteria and moral idiocy: When you kick off your argument by predicting that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over,” and that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” and then proceed to argue for mass sterilization programs, the quarantine and abandonment of countries too overpopulated to save from total collapse, and various other “triage” methods (honestly, The Population Bomb has to be read to be believed), you pretty much forfeit the right to be praised for your prescience forty years down the line.

Maybe Tierney and Douthat qualify as right-wing zealots in someone’s book. But I have a sinking feeling that science has not been liberated from politics by the coming of the Messiah. But scientists with a different political bias may be happy for awhile… fair’s fair.

Now, from my perspective, I associate The Pop Bomb with the Club of Rome and the fiasco of Limits to Growth. Of course, the Club of Rome has ignored its record of failures and moved on to climate change. Is anyone surprised? After all, if you have a perfectly good (pfft) planetary system dynamic model, already shown to exhibit divergent behavior on command, why not apply it to climate?

But seriously, I think that there is much to learn from the efforts to make the World3 model reflect reality. Lesson #1 is that it is relatively easy to generate divergent behavior when stabilizing feedback loops are left out of the model. It is reported, for example, that World3 has no implementation of economic substitution for resources as they become scarcer. Anyone familiar with standard microeconomic theory should understand this is a major defect — and also understand why there is no generalized model for substitution even today. Substitution is really hard to predict. If chestnut blight makes wood more expensive, people use… what, instead? Plastic for ladles, metal for building frames, electrons for newsprint — raising the price of all these goods, pushing consumption (and innovation) in a thousand different directions. None of this is in World3.

Likewise: anyone care to link to a list of flaws in general circulation models?

What do World3 and GCMs have in common? Beautifully complex models, nicely filigreed predictions, none have been validated. I wouldn’t design a car with such a model, much less make macroeconomic decisions with them.

So where does Malthus stand these days? Have I repudiated “Malthus was Right”? No, not so much. The Reverend was a man of great insight. To be continued in a future blog post….

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Friday, 19 December 2008 by aurora_guy.

It’s only natural this time of year to kind of recap recent events in one way or another.  I’d like to know what you think are the most important developments related to science and/or medicine in 2008, and why.

My picks:

#1. The election.  I already get a sense of shifts in policy tones, which will impact alternative energy development and space exploration.  Obama’s energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, is a physicist for all occasions, demonstrated by his industrial experience (former head of the quantum electronics group at Bell Labs for many years and director at NVIDIA since 2004) as well as running Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since August 2004. I recently discovered Dr. Chu serves as director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which focuses on educational, social, and environmental issues.  The question remains, of course, about whether or not his leadership can get a seriously dysfunctional agency back on track.  There’s a lot of inertia to overcome.

John Holdren, another physicist, is rumored to be top pick for science advisor.  This clearly strengthens the upcoming administration’s ostensible commitment to alternative energy and reducing human impact on the environment.  Dr. Holdren, a specialist in energy and technology policy and nuclear proliferation, also runs the Woods Hole Research Center, which has a lot to say about climate change.

NASA seems to be sweating the transition, but I have little doubt it’s for good reason.  The back-to-the-moon-and-onto-Mars projects are about to run into major funding problems.  Manned space exploration is all fine and dandy, but it is a hugely expensive endeavor.  In today’s economy, an era when other important (unmanned) space-related projects lack talent and/or money, manned space seems a luxury, a sensible space science policy would cut back on the latter.  We shall see how much.  I predict continued political pressure to fund big manned-space programs in the US, since China made quite a spectacle over their first space walk a few months back.

#2. I have to confess I am torn here.  I get all tingly over exo-planets, Mars polar scrapings, and dark energy.  However, after much teeth-gnashing, I decided to give my vote to Jon Miller, a professor from Michigan State University, who has been tracking scientific literacy for two decades.  Although his work covers quite a long time, he did get a fair amount of press in 2008.  His latest survey placed the US second of 33 countries in rankings of adult scientific literacy. Sweden is first with a rate of 38%, and the US is right around 25%.  By Dr. Miller’s definition, a person considered “scientifically literate” can read and comprehend, at least on a basic level, most of the articles written at a level of, say, the NY Times weekly science section.

The research shows that the strongest single predictor of scientific literacy in the US is having participated in a college science course.  This argues in favor of retaining or strengthening general education requirements that include science courses for non-science majors.

The news is actually a bit depressing to me, since it does mean the vast majority of people in this country are scientifically illiterate.  More and more important policy decisions seem to depend on a basic knowledge of scientific principles, whether it’s climate change or the teaching of creationism in the schools.  Such a disparity in the general population means it’s easy for politicians to handily dismiss scientific arguments inconsistent with their economic or religious interests, and the majority of Americans would have no rational basis to disagree or to demand change.

#3.  I thought there was a lot of interesting medical-related news in 2008, not the least of which were promising results from malaria vaccine trials in Africa.  Malaria is a huge and deadly problem across vast regions of the globe.  Nearly a million people per year die of the disease.

These are just trials on the vaccine, so I’ll have to split my vote here and also go with the body of research related to developing sources of stem cells and therapies derived from them.  While embryonic stem cell research remains somewhat controversial, non-embryonic stem cells were in the news a lot in 2008.  Just a couple of months ago, researchers at University of Tübingen in Germany reported in Nature they harvested samples from testicles to form stem cells.  The team took spermatogonial cells, which normally mature into sperm, and used a series of chemicals to turn them into various cell types like skin, bone, muscle, and neurons.

Scientific American recently featured the work of Shinya Yamanaka .  Dr. Yamanaka “led one of two teams that showed that normal human skin cells can be genetically reprogrammed into the equivalent of stem cells. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) seem to be essentially identical to embryonic stem cells and possess the ability to become any cell.”

Multiple methods of creating stem cells — as well as understanding their similarities and differences — go a long way towards developing treatment of serious injuries and illnesses.  Although a bone marrow transplant is a well known stem cell therapy for some cancers and blood disorders, in theory, any condition in which there is tissue degeneration can be a potential candidate for such therapies. Potential applications include treatment of Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophies, and liver diseases.  In addition, retinal regeneration with stem cells isolated from the eyes can lead to a possible cure for damaged or diseased eyes and may one day help reverse blindness. This is exciting stuff!

Your turn.

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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 by bbbeard.

The big news we’ve all been tracking this summer and fall, of course, is the disconcerting lack of sunspots. This is correlated BTW with a dramatic drop in solar wind pressure.

But now it looks like Cycle 24 might finally be starting:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/07nov_signsoflife.htm

A concern has nagged the climatology community that the fluctuation in solar activity represented by Cycle 23 has contributed to the muting of the global warming signal, at least relative to the GCMs employed by the modelers. It will be interesting to see if Cycle 24 does continue the recent trend of less active solar disturbances, and whether there is a correlation with cooler climatology on Earth. As always, correlation is not causation — but it’s food for thought and model fodder.

It might also be informative to hear the perspective from our Arctic Circle friends, who actually know something about solar physics. And about ice.

UPDATE: Nice big sunspot image from 12 Nov 2008 located here.

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Saturday, 8 November 2008 by bbbeard.

Now that the nasty Republican war on science is over, scientists at last feel free to post pictures like these.

Great job, all you planetary scientists out there!

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