The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

News from here, TSUKUBA, JAPAN ... a town that cannot be replicated too ...

Scientists create a pattern so complicated it's impossible to duplicate

Scientists just created a pattern that, according to researchers, is impossible to duplicate or forge, a feat that could quash counterfeiters.

The key to these patterns lies in a two-step verification system that incorporates both micropatterns and the same principles used in whispering galleries, according to the researchers, from the University of Tsukuba in Japan.

In a traditional whispering gallery, two large, concave dishes are placed at opposite ends of a long hallway. A whisper into one of these plastic dishes can be heard clearly by someone standing in the other one down the hall. Entire rooms can also be whispering galleries, such as St. Paul's Cathedral in London. There is also an unintended whispering gallery in the lower concourse of Grand Central Station in New York City. All of these spaces have a few things in common. They are all rounded and their surfaces project sound to unexpected places. For the new impossible-to-duplicate patterns, the researchers used light waves reflected inside of a microscopic chamber, instead of sound waves in a gigantic room.

... Like human fingerprints, no two of these cavities are identical. Into each uniquely-shaped cavity, the Tsukuba researchers placed a microscopic droplet of fluorescent dye that is chemically sensitive to light. Once the dye was in place, the researchers shined visible and ultraviolet (UV) light onto the dye, in a random, unpredictable manner. The light waves reflected inside each cavity, similar to the way sound reflects in a whisper gallery, which caused the dye molecules to react. The variety of cavity shapes combined with the exposure of unique patterns of light applied to the fluorescent dye, result in a unique color signature within each pixel.

"This creates a complex color pattern that cannot be counterfeited," senior study author Yohei Yamamoto said in a statement from the university.

https://www.livescience.com/micropat...be-forged.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

More on the underground mole creatures ... or is it more like "the blob" ...

The monstrous 'blobs' near Earth's core may be even bigger than we thought

Deep within Earth, where the solid mantle meets the molten outer core, strange continent-size blobs of hot rock jut out for hundreds of miles in every direction. These underground mountains go by many names: "thermo-chemical piles," "large low-shear velocity provinces" (LLSVPs), or sometimes just "the blobs."

Geologists don't know much about where these blobs came from or what they are, but they do know that they're gargantuan. The two biggest blobs, which sit deep below the Pacific Ocean and Africa, account for nearly 10% of the entire mantle's mass, one 2016 study found — and, if they sat on Earth's surface, the duo would each extend about 100 times higher than Mount Everest. However, new research suggests, even those lofty analogies may be underestimating just how big the blobs really are.

In a study published June 12 in the journal Science, researchers analyzed the seismic waves generated by earthquakes over nearly 30 years. They found several massive, never before-detected features along the edges of the Pacific blob.

"The structures we located are … thousands of kilometers across in scale,"

https://www.livescience.com/core-man...-enormous.html

Anyway, we already know what is at the center of the earth ...

https://youtu.be/L7-3Ggk0yag

Gassho, J

[Jundo]

Cluttered land led to cluttered brains?

Prehistoric 'clutter' on land led to bigger, smarter human brains

The ways our ancestors adapted to live in patchy landscapes cluttered with obstacles "poured jet fuel" on the evolution of the brains of animals and early human ancestors, according to researchers at Northwestern University.

The combination of our enhanced eyesight and higher intelligence to survive in this complex land environment is "why we can go out for seafood, but seafood can't go out for us," said Malcolm MacIver, a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering in Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. Maciver and his colleagues use computer simulations to study aspects of evolution. Previously, they determined that 380 million years ago, just before animals moved out of the sea to live on land, their eyes tripled in size, he told CNN.

In water, this increase in eyesight capability doesn't offer much of an advantage. Instead, survival in open water is a speed game where prey have to outswim their predators.

Their research suggested, however, that these animals were more like crocodiles in that they lived in the water, but let their eyes rise above the surface, "enabling them to see hundreds of times further than is possible in water because water rapidly absorbs and scatters light," said Maciver, who is also a professor of neurobiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

These animals likely hunted insects that lived on land, lurching out of the water to snack on them. Over time, they evolved to move more on land, and their increased eyesight provided key information about their surroundings.

... In their newest simulation, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers used existing computational models showing how animals interacted with their landscapes. They adapted these models to show whether life on land favored planning or habit-based action. Their simulations showed that in a patchy landscape, a mix of grasslands with trees, bushes, boulders and knolls, the ability to survive was greatly enhanced by planning, which MacIver said is "a distinct brain capacity that seems to have evolved in mammals and birds, and seems particularly well developed in our own species."

There was no advantage to strategic thinking or planning in a totally open or totally closed environment, like open water or a dense jungle.

But in a patchy landscape, each move could either help hide or reveal the prey's position to a predator. So it requires contemplating several possible ways of navigating the space. "You need quite some brain power to work through those tactics," MacIver said. "Seeing farther away affords you the time and space to 'think further away' as well."

... "Incidentally, our brains nearly quadrupled in size after we split off from our nearest primate ancestors, the chimpanzees," MacIver said. "This brain size increase could be related to how much brain power it takes to be strategic in these spaces, but it will take more research to know for sure."

... It's difficult to imagine what life may have been like had it remained strictly in water, but MacIver was willing to speculate.
"There would be no theory of special relativity. There would be no SpaceX. There would be no such thing as a 747," MacIver said.
"Although these things are all about humans and their ingenuity, the cognitive power that drives them have neural bases that we can see in other animals that live on land, such as mammals and birds."

... Dolphins and whales are the exception because they actually evolved on land and returned to the water. Other exceptions include octopus and cuttlefish, which were subject to predation by land animals as well as dolphins and whales; they could have evolved to evade them.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/06/19/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Speaking of eyes ...

How do our eyes move in perfect synchrony?

It's thanks to a constantly improving alliance of neurons and muscles.

Humans, like most animals, have two eyes. ...

"You have a spare one in case you have an accident, and the second reason is depth perception, which we evolved to help us hunt," said Dr. David Guyton, professor of ophthalmology at The Johns Hopkins University. But having two eyes would lead to double vision if they didn't move together in perfect synchrony. So how does the body ensure our eyes always work together?

To prevent double vision, the brain exploits a feedback system, which it uses to finely tune the lengths of the muscles controlling the eyes. This produces phenomenally precise eye movements, Guyton said. Each eye has six muscles regulating its movement in different directions, and each one of those muscles must be triggered simultaneously in both eyes for them to move in unison, according to a 2005 review in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. "It's actually quite amazing when you think about it," Guyton told Live Science. "The brain has a neurological system that is fantastically organized because the brain learns over time how much stimulation to send to each of the 12 muscles for every desired direction of gaze."

This isn't innate, it's an acquired ability. "Babies master it usually within three to four months of life," said Guyton. "Most people keep it well into their 80s, but age makes us slowly lose the ability over time."

During that recalibration process, the brain uses the data it gathers to help fine-tune the resting length of the muscles that control eye movement. For example, it may realize that one of the muscles has grown faster than the others. "The brain automatically draws a map and then uses it to change the muscle length to relieve the misalignment and that occurs over weeks to months," Guyton said, by adding or subtracting individual building blocks to the muscles. ... In fact, the muscles' lengths are readjusted so often that most of the proteins in them are less than a month old. "The half-life of the proteins in eye muscles is only about 10 to 15 days so the muscles are turning over all the time," Guyton explained.

https://www.livescience.com/why-eyes-move-together.html

But when seeing is not seeing ...

This man can't see numbers. But his brain can.

... This man, referred to by his initials RFS, has a rare degenerative brain condition that does not allow him to "see" numbers — on paper, as objects or even those secretly embedded in scenes. ... He sees something … a scramble of lines and he calls it spaghetti ...

"What is most striking though is that it affects the numbers and not other symbols," he told Live Science. Symbols or letters may look similar to numbers; a capital B, for example, looks like an 8. But he has no problem seeing letters or other characters. This means that his brain has to determine that these digits he's looking at are in their own special category (aka they are numbers) in order for his comprehension of them to be scrambled, McCloskey said. But the question then is: If he can't see them, how does he do that?

... the researchers conducted a word test in which they had RFS press a button every time he saw a particular word, such as "tuba." When the researchers embedded that word in a number, he didn't see the word and wouldn't press the button. Yet his brain activity was the same regardless of whether the target word was alone or inside of a digit. That suggests that his brain does all of the complex processing and knows he's viewing the word and what word it is — but that knowledge never comes up in his awareness ... So it seems "you can do an awful lot of work in the brain to know what it is you're looking at without any awareness resulting from that," McCloskey said.

... "He does the brain work to determine what he's looking at, but then the additional work to be aware of it is going wrong." Once the brain has determined what you're looking at, one of two things may cause awareness, and it's an ongoing debate in the field of neuroscience, he said. The brain might either send signals to an area involved in higher-processing tasks such as analyzing and identifying what you're looking it or it may send signals back down to areas of the brain involved in lower-processing functions where just the basics of the figure, such as its shape, is analyzed, McCloskey said. "Whichever of these it is, that's where things are going wrong with RFS," McCloskey said.

https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can-not-see-numbers.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

https://youtu.be/Kf_UwzIVoeI

NASA has released a 10-year timelapse of the sun by capturing 425 million high-resolution images.

The full 10 years ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QQQu7QLoM&feature=emb_logo

Gassho, J

STLah

PS - I learned something:

The Sun rotates on its axis once in about 27 days. This rotation was first detected by observing the motion of sunspots. The Sun's rotation axis is tilted by about 7.25 degrees from the axis of the Earth's orbit so we see more of the Sun's north pole in September of each year and more of its south pole in March.

Since the Sun is a ball of gas/plasma, it does not have to rotate rigidly like the solid planets and moons do. In fact, the Sun's equatorial regions rotate faster (taking only about 24 days) than the polar regions (which rotate once in more than 30 days). The source of this "differential rotation" is an area of current research in solar astronomy.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/s...e%20in%20March.

[Jundo]

How our aquatic mammalian cousins learn.

Well, not exactly vegetarians, but maybe fish is a healthy diet. That may be why they live an average 30 to 50 years in the wild, even with sharks and no health insurance plan.

Dolphins are learning smart fish-catching trick from peers, not mothers

Only a very few animals use tools. Crows wield sticks to find food, chimps have fashioned primitive spears to hunt and dolphins in Australia have been spotted trapping fish in huge conch shells.

Now, scientists have discovered just how these dolphins learn to catch their prey in this extraordinary way — using their beaks to bring the shells to the surface and then shake the fish into their mouths — similar to how we humans get at those last few chips at the bottom of a packet.

"Our study shows that the foraging behavior 'shelling' — where dolphins trap fish inside empty seashells — spreads through social learning among close associates," said Sonja Wild, who conducted this research for her doctorate at the University of Leeds.

"This is surprising, as dolphins and other toothed whales tend to follow a 'do-as-mother-does' strategy for learning foraging behavior," she said in a press statement. Dolphin mothers and calves typically form very tight bonds, staying close to one another for at least two years learning social behaviors and feeding techniques.

The findings provided more evidence of similarities between dolphins and great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas and humans — who have also shown a range of socially learned foraging behavior, the study, which published Thursday in Current Biology, said.

"Despite their divergent evolutionary histories and the fact they occupy such different environments: Both dolphins and great apes are long-lived, large-brained mammals with high capacities for innovation and the cultural transmission of behaviors," said Michael Krützen, director of the department of anthropology at the University of Zurich and senior author on the study.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/06/25/world/...scn/index.html

First Dolphin chases fish into shell ...



... then picks up shell with nose and heads to surface ...



... and then ...



Gassho, J

STLah

PS - Another creative dolphin fishing trick: mud nets ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzfqPQm-ThU

Also, in another technique, cooperation among dolphins in Florida (frankly, more cooperation than usually seen among residents of my old home state):

... one dolphin swims tight circles in marshy water, smacking the surface loudly with its tail. Dozens of fish leap from the water to escape—right into the mouths of other dolphins waiting in their path. ... [Researcher] Gazda found that dolphins always play the same roles. They’re like the members of a football team, she says. One dolphin in each group is always the driver, kind of like a quarterback. The rest always form the barrier. There are other ways dolphins cooperate, and other animals that hunt in packs, but this kind of role specialization is much more unusual. Previously, it had only been seen in African lionesses. ... “These kinds of really specialized foraging tactics are found in lots of different bottlenose dolphin populations,” says Connor. For example, some of the dolphins he studies in Australia’s Shark Bay use a dramatic fin-slapping method called “kerplunking.” Others use sponges as tools for hunting on the seafloor. Dolphins in Florida Bay trap fish inside rings of mud. The Cedar Key dolphins may help explain why these different methods arise and how they spread. Do they simply depend on a dolphin population’s habitat and prey? Or do they represent a kind of cultural tradition? https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/t...tics-dolphins/

https://youtu.be/kzqEJ7Mf9ps

[Jundo]

I saw this, and just want to share the tale ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7mli4LnN0s

Apparently, it is a book and movie too ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_El...humans%20alike.

I cannot verify the end of the story, except for this quote attributed to his son Dylan ...

It has been reported that after his death his beloved elephant herd came to his house to say goodbye. The elephant’s remarkable yearly ‘memorial’ continues to reoccur annually since the home-grown conservationist, adventurer and best-selling author’s untimely death 2012. For 12 hours the huge beasts slowly made their way through the Zululand bush until they reached the house of the man they loved – to say good-bye. There are two elephant herds at Thula Thula Game Reserve and according to Anthony’s son Dylan, both herds arrived at the house after Anthony’s death. ‘They had not visited the house for a year-and-a-half and it must have taken them about 12 hours to make the journey,’ said Dylan. ‘They all hung around for about two days before making their way back into the bush,’ said Dylan.
https://www.peoplemagazine.co.za/rea...n-his-passing/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shokai]

Great book, have read it at least twice. apparently, the elephants still make their annual trek to mark the anniversary of his death each year. Anthony died while in Iraq (he was there to solve the care of displaced animals in the Baghdad Zoo as a result of war) and the elephants had to have started their first goodbye trip before his wife even received the cable to say he had died. That and their annual celebration of his death is the part the experts can't explain.

gassho, Shokai
stlah

[Jundo]

A somewhat dystopian start to the Japanese baseball season this year ...

https://youtu.be/QE21XY8FNso

If anyone does not know "spot" from Boston Dynamics ...

https://youtu.be/VRm7oRCTkjE

Gassho, J

stlah

[Jundo]

Some important science stories not to miss this week ...

Charming:

Physicists discover new, exotic flavor of tetraquark: The particle is made of 4 charm quarks.

... The finding marks a major breakthrough in a search of almost 20 years, carried out in particle physics labs all over the world. ...

We now know that there are six different kinds of quarks — up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. These particles also have respective antimatter companions with opposite charge, which can bind together according to simple rules based on symmetries. A particle made of a quark and an antiquark is called a "meson"; while three quarks bound together form "baryons." The familiar protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nucleus are examples of baryons. ... All tetraquarks and pentaquarks that have been discovered so far contain two charm quarks, which are relatively heavy, and two or three light quarks — up, down or strange. This particular configuration is indeed the easiest to discover in experiments.

But the latest tetraquark discovered by LHCb, which has been dubbed X(6900), is composed of four charm quarks. Produced in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the new tetraquark was observed via its decay into pairs of well-known particles called J/psi mesons, each made of a charm quark and a charm antiquark. This makes it particularly interesting as it is not only composed entirely of heavy quarks, but also four quarks of the same kind — making it a unique specimen to test our understanding on how quarks bind together. ... The strong force operating between quarks obeys very complicated rules - so complicated, in fact, that usually the only way to calculate its effects is to use approximations and supercomputers.

The unique nature of the X(6900) will help understand how to improve the accuracy of these approximations, so that in the future we will be able to describe other, more complex mechanisms in physics that are not within our reach today.
https://www.livescience.com/physicis...traquarks.html

A strand of the cosmic web ...

Spectacular 3D maps of the universe have revealed one of the biggest cosmic structures ever found — an almost-inconceivable wall stretching 1.4 billion light-years across that contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies.

The South Pole Wall, as it's been dubbed, has been hiding in plain sight, remaining undetected until now because large parts of it sit half a billion light-years away behind the bright Milky Way galaxy. The South Pole Wall rivals in size the Sloan Great Wall, the sixth largest cosmic structure discovered. (One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers, so this "biggest cosmic structure" is mind-bendingly humongous.)

Astronomers have long noticed that galaxies are not scattered randomly throughout the universe but rather clump together in what's known as the cosmic web, enormous strands of hydrogen gas in which galaxies are strung like pearls on a necklace that surround gigantic and largely empty voids.

... But determining where exactly these enormous, crisscrossing structures begin and end is tricky, she added.

"When you look at the network of filaments and voids, it becomes a semantic question of what's connected," she said.

https://www.livescience.com/south-pole-wall-discovered-in-space.html

Growing brain cells in the space womb ...

Why are scientists trying to manufacture organs in space?

Gravity influences cellular behavior by impacting how protein and genes interact inside the cells, creating tissue that is polarized, a fundamental step for natural organ development. Unfortunately, gravity is against us when we try to reproduce complex three dimensional tissues in the lab for medical transplantation. This is difficult because of the intrinsic limitations of bio-reactors used on Earth.

I am a stem cell biologist and interested on brain health and evolution. My lab studies how the human brain is formed inside the womb and how alterations in this process might have lifelong consequences to human behavior, such as in autism or schizophrenia. Part of that work includes growing brain cells in space.

... in weightless conditions, cells can freely self-organize into their correct three-dimensional structure without the need for a scaffold substrate. By removing gravity from the equation, we researchers might learn new ways of building human tissues, such as cartilage and blood vessels that are scaffold-free, mimicking their natural cellular arrangement in an artificial setting. While this is not exactly what happens in the womb (after all the womb is also subject to gravity), weightless conditions does give us an advantage.
https://www.livescience.com/growing-...-in-space.html

A theoretical diamond for that theoretical engagement ring? News from Tsukuba Japan ... also know as the home of Treeleaf Sangha! ...

Weird new 'pentadiamonds' could be ultrahard, ultralight and conduct electricity

What's lighter than a diamond, almost as hard and could zip with electricity? A pentadiamond — a crystalline arrangement of carbon atoms that is made up mostly of pentagons.

These pentadiamonds don't exist yet; they've only been created in computer simulations. But if a pentadiamond can be made, it could have a number of useful properties. ... The search for additional allotropes is like "playing [with] LEGO blocks to create materials with fascinating shapes and structures," Susumu Okada, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Tsukuba in Japan and co-author of a paper published June 30 in the journal Physical Review Letters, told Live Science.

Using state-of-the-art computer modeling, Okada and his colleagues decided to bring together two molecules — called spiro[4.4]nona-2,7-diene and [5.5.5.5]fenestratetraene — each of which contained a pentagonal ring of carbon atoms, to see if they might generate a potentially useful material. Along with being about 80 percent as hard as diamond, one of the hardest substances known, pentadiamond would be slightly porous, and could conduct electricity like the semiconductors used in electronic devices if chemical impurities were added, the authors wrote. It would also have the odd ability to expand uniformly in all directions when stretched, sort of like the children's toy known as a Hoberman sphere. Because of its porous nature, pentadiamond might be useful for storing gas, Okada said. Its lightness and hardness could make it useful for building the bodies of race cars, he added.

Jena, who was not involved in the work but has discovered other carbon allotropes, said the material is potentially quite exciting. "However, it needs to be experimentally synthesized," he added, and until then remains strictly theoretical.

Sometimes materials behave differently in real life than in simulations, Jena said, though he considers the work interesting enough to send the paper to a colleague who might be able to produce it in a lab.

For his part, Okada thinks chemists will be able to create pentadiamond in the near future. And, until then, he will continue to play with "LEGO blocks of carbon atoms."
https://www.livescience.com/pentadia...imulation.html

And the most important discovery of all ... I predict an igNoble in the works ...

Penguins shoot 'poop bombs' more than 4 feet, incredibly important study finds

... These tubby, aquatic birds can squirt arcing jets of poop to distances nearly twice their own body length, and scientists recently calculated just how much force their tiny rectums produce in order to do so — and how far the poop can fly. ... When a new team of researchers revisited the question, they expanded on the earlier results by recalculating internal pressures inside the penguin's gut and rectum, correcting for viscosity of the poo, and factoring in air resistance along an arcing trajectory. They then discovered that the forces at work were even more extreme than previously suggested. ... "I was surprised by the extremely strong penguin's rectal pressure," said lead study author Hiroyuki Tajima, an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Science at Kochi University in Japan. ...



The new study described the penguins expelling a fecal arc that curved upward before descending, which Benno Meyer-Rochow and his colleague had not seen in Adélie penguins. Nevertheless, "it is of course possible that either we missed that or that these penguins sometimes do that when they stand on an uneven rock and/or bend forward more than what we had observed," Benno Meyer-Rochow told Improbable Research.

Birds that eat meat or fish typically poop with more force than seed-eaters, likely because their waste contains higher amounts of irritating uric acid, Benno Meyer-Rochow wrote in a 2019 blog post.

While blasting poop jets helps penguins keep their nests tidy, their high-pressure pooping poses an occupational hazard for penguin caregivers in zoos and aquariums, the study authors reported. Their findings therefore have a practical side: helping wildlife experts who care for penguins to establish a foolproof "safety zone," so they can keep well out of range during the birds' explosive bathroom breaks, Tajima said.
https://www.livescience.com/pengins-projectile-poo.html

So, don't stand behind a penguin!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Welcome COMET Neowise ... visiting once every 6000 years ... now visible with the naked eye from much of earth ....

https://youtu.be/JJu-hYa8SbQ

Why is this particular comet so bright? This is pretty interesting:

https://youtu.be/8_rNmF5DLp0

It is visible in the pre-dawn hours during July and, I have heard (confirm for your location) in the early evening during August ...

https://youtu.be/Gry0B-GleZk

And, finally, for those of you who might think that, with all going on, this is just one more sign of the impending apocalypse ... well, ask a Babylonian ...

... but I doubt it ...

https://youtu.be/jiAUSQy_Hak

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Need to get this bird to New York, we could make some money at the shell game ...

This parrot beat 21 Harvard students in a classic memory game

His name is Griffin, and he is the subject of a recent study published May 6 in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers challenged Griffin to a working memory task where he had to locate a colorful pom-pom hidden under a plastic cup after it was shuffled around a table several times (aka, the Shell Game). Meanwhile, 21 Harvard students were given the same task — and Griffin matched or outperformed them in 12 of 14 trials.

... To be fair, Griffin is not your average parrot. According to the study authors, the 22-year-old bird "has been the subject of cognitive and communicative studies … since his acquisition from a breeder at 7.5 weeks of age." Griffin's handler and bird-mom, Irene Pepperberg — a Harvard psychologist and co-author of the new paper — previously taught the parrot to reproduce some 30 English words and to comprehend at least 40, including the names of colors.

... At first, the participants were asked to memorize the positions of just two pom-poms hidden under two cups, which were never moved. By the end of the day, the participants had to keep track of four different-colored pom-poms under four cups, which were shuffled four times. Following the shuffling, participants were shown a pom-pom from a separate pile and asked to find the matching color beneath the cups. ... When the Harvard students' performance started to slip in trials of three pom-poms shuffled three or four times, Griffin continued to hit his targets 100% of the time. Only at the end of the day, when four pom-poms were shuffled three or four times, did Griffin's accuracy finally drop. (The students also saw a significant decline in accuracy, though not quite as much as Griffin’s).
https://www.livescience.com/grey-par...-students.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jakuden]

We already knew our brains are constantly popping up new thoughts... sounds like they have discovered it is over 6000 a day!!

https://apple.news/A7AiP2D_NTlGzUZUc8rsSaA

Gassho
Jakuden
SatToday/LAH


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[Jundo]

After five years of peering into the deepest reaches of space, researchers have released what they call the "largest three-dimensional map of the universe" ever. No, you cannot see your house.

The mind-boggling map is the result of an ongoing project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) — an ambitious, international quest to map the expansion of the observable universe, and hopefully solve a few cosmic conundrums in the process. With this newest update, the project has mapped and measured more than 2 million galaxies, stretching from our Milky Way to ancient objects more than 11 billion light-years away.

https://youtu.be/p2ctOsIdV-U

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

By the way, on the above 3-D map of the universe ... not matter how it makes us feel "small" ... please just remember a few points that human beings often forget ...

- The universe has no "center" or, better said, every point is as much the center as every other point ...

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...e%20everywhere.

... and all poured out of, and is, the very same "center" now expanding (the singularity of the big bang), so every place is "at the center" even now. People misunderstand Copernicus about this point. You are at --the-- center of the universe, as well as being --a-- center of the universe (but before it goes to your head, recall that so is everything!)

- It is a human subjective value judgement about which parts of the universe are more or less "valuable" than any other, e.g., that we or an ant are just "puny" so of less value than something massive. The ant's wife might disagree about what is more precious, the ant or an elephant or a star in the sky. One might say that each and all are individually infinitely precious ... so an ant is infinitely precious, and you are infinitely precious as the unique you in the universe, and a whole world or galaxy is infinitely precious as themselves, and the whole cosmos is infinitely precious ... and infinite = infinite, so all are equally infinitely precious. (Likewise if you subjectively decide that everything is just "meaningless").

- The universe is not big or small ... assuming that there is nothing outside it to compare it to.

Stuff like that are insights that Buddhists bring to the table, and most people don't consider who easily assume "earth is in a dusty, unimportant corner of a vast universe, and it is all kinda pointless"

Gassho, J

STLah