Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.39

Series 1

V - 3: The Real Cannot Die

Mind is a tangled web.

Use it to catch the world.

Try to comprehend the infinite complexity of it all…

…elegantly embedded in the fabric of space and time.

Open your eyes in amazement.

Be Aware.

See.

Human Evolution:

Stone Age Burial Sites

Researchers have unearthed the graves of three Stone Age infants that may ultimately bear on the question of whether humans interbred with Neandertals. The rare find, from a 27,000-year-old site in Austria, includes two bodies that might be twins sheltered under a mammoth's shoulder blade. The team discovered the skeletons in two separate burial pits: One contained two infants side by side—twins, apparently. A second pit containing a single body was found about a meter from the first pit. The twins had been protected from the elements by the mammoth bone and were very well preserved. An incisor from one of the pair indicates they died at nine or ten months of age. Numerous traces of burial practice survived. All of the infant remains were covered in red pigment, and more than 30 ivory beads lay near the pelvis of one of the presumed twins. The lone skeleton contained an ivory pin, which may have held shut a leather or fur wrapping. The excavators found the remains in an 18-square-meter site in lower Austria, near where the river Krems meets the Danube. The location contains a well preserved earthen floor and other artifacts characteristic of so-called Gravettian culture, including a fired piece of clay bearing a human fingerprint. Studying the Austrian infants or any DNA extracted from them may contribute to the debate over whether or not humans and Neandertals exchanged DNA. In recent weeks researchers have presented evidence that humans and Neandertals interbred when humans left Africa 30,000-40,000 years ago. Human skeletons found in Romania seem to show certain Neandertal traits, for example. The new remains could be examined for similar features.

Think.

Quantum Physics: LHC Safety Concerns

Learn.

Any black holes created at a new particle accelerator near Geneva will not make Swiss cheese of the nearby countryside. Nor will they gobble up Earth. That’s the consensus of two new reports, including a safety review by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, the group that oversees the Large Hadron Collider. Scheduled to start soon, the collider will be the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Protons in the accelerator will reach energies of 7 trillion electron volts and smash into each other at nearly the speed of light, briefly re-creating the extreme densities and energies existing a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. In fact, it is possible that the LHC, according to one theory, could be a veritable factory of mini-black holes — no larger than a thousandth of the diameter of a proton. That theory proposes that gravity is weak, compared to the other forces in nature, because some of it leaks out into other, hidden dimensions folded up into sizes as small as 10^-17 centimeters, a tiny fraction of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. At the high energies and small scales probed by the LHC, gravity would become much stronger than it is in ordinary three-dimensional space. Gravity could then cram enough matter together to form microscopic black holes as often as once a second. However, such black holes, according to research first reported by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, ought to rapidly radiate away their energy and evaporate in an instant, before doing any harm. But even if Hawking is wrong, and tiny black holes linger, they still would not pose a danger, according to the new studies. Both studies reaffirm the findings of a 2003 CERN report that the high-energy collisions generated at the LHC would pose no danger to Earth. The studies note that cosmic rays — charged particles from outer space that have energies far greater than those generated at the LHC — have pummeled Earth for billions of years. These collisions could have generated as many black holes as a million LHC experiments, yet the planet still exists.

Imagine.

Understand.

Electricity:

Transmitting Power Wirelessly

Scientists are perfecting a new method for transmitting electrical energy from a base station using a technique that resembles a wireless Internet connection. Researchers say that a specially designed device should be able to draw power from a strong magnetic field permeating a room. The effect, which has not yet been demonstrated, would take advantage of the stationary magnetic field that surrounds a charged loop of metal. This so-called near-field can be powerful—it is what makes an electric motor turn. And in principle its oscillations can induce an electric current in another nearby loop, because dynamic magnetic fields create electric fields and vice versa. The second loop could act as a battery or recharger, but it would normally receive only a slight current because the near field fades rapidly over distance. The key to boosting the induced current is resonance, says photonics researcher Marin Soljacic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Soljacic and his colleagues propose introducing a short gap in a metal loop and attaching two small disks at each end. When electrified, such an object has a natural, or resonant, frequency that results from current flowing back and forth along the loop from one disk to the other. If two loops have the same frequency, one should be able to receive energy from the other through the magnetic near field—much like two identical tuning forks brought into close proximity, the group reasoned. From a few meters away, the rate of energy transferred in this way might reach tens of watts, or enough to power a laptop, according to simulations. The results seem strongly encouraging but the real test of the thing will be experiments.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Social Health:

Chronic Diseases Plague Developing Nations

The international community has set its sights on easing the burdens of infectious disease and malnutrition around the world. Yet some projections find that a bigger fraction of deaths in developing countries may soon come from chronic ailments such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and respiratory illness. In one example of the underlying trend, researchers report that high blood glucose exacts a global death toll comparable to any pathogen and has fueled an epidemic of diabetes in Asia. In 2000 the United Nations issued its eight Millennium Development Goals for poorer nations, including the eradication of extreme poverty. As soon as children stop dying from pneumonia and malnutrition, however, new problems come into focus. As the same children survive to slightly older ages they start getting hit by chronic disease. People in India, other countries in south Asia and impoverished parts of Latin America all suffer from significant rates of chronic disease, in part from a withering trinity of cheap high-calorie food, tobacco and alcohol. During the last quarter century the rate of diabetes alone has nearly quadrupled in most east and south Asian countries, including China and India. These countries now have similar rates of diabetes to that in the U.S., where the disease afflicts 8 percent of the population. But the condition is even more of a problem in Asia. People there contract it at a younger age and a lower weight than those in other regions, and as a result they experience longer-lasting complications and die sooner from the disease. Even when it doesn't lead to diabetes, which kills a million people annually, high blood sugar causes 2.2 million deaths globally from heart disease and stroke every year. The economic consequences of such health problems may be considerable. Focusing more on chronic disease need not totally compete with efforts to control infection and malnutrition. Managing infectious and chronic disease alike requires a strong public health infrastructure.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Neuroscience:

Intraparietal Sulcus

People who are so-called simultagnosics have a problem with a crease in their brains that links the top and bottom of the parietal lobe. Because of damage to this crease, called the intraparietal sulcus, simultagnosics cannot actively perceive the different properties of an object. If you don't have an actively functioning intraparietal sulcus and you are looking at a red car moving down the street, you can't actively perceive the color and the movement. You can only attend to the color or the movement. And now a new study has revealed that this crease also plays a pivotal role in tying the separate strands of an event or object into a fully-woven memory. A team of neurobiologists tested 20 volunteers on a variety of recall tests. While presented with a series of 100 words to remember, the subjects' brains were scanned with an fMRI machine. The researchers presented the fully capitalized words in one of four quadrants of a box on a small computer screen. The words were either in black or in one of four colors: red, green, blue or pink. For colored words, the subjects had to decide if a signified object was living or not, while for black-lettered words the test focused on whether the object would fit into a shoe box. Following the brain scan, the researchers tested the subjects' recall of the various words, their color and location, and then compared this with the subject's fMRI scans during the initial presentation. As expected, the various regions of the brain associated with determining color or location showed increased activity when subjects memorized either color or location specifically. But when they were in the act of memorizing all the features—uniting memory of the words, colors and locations—the intraparietal sulcus came into play. Of course, memory is centrally mediated by the hippocampus, a region ensconced in the temporal lobe and therefore difficult to image. It did show some increase in activity in this test but only at a lower threshold, which the researchers ascribes to the difficulty of distinguishing signal and noise from such embedded regions. The current research offers some compelling evidence that one obscure fold in the brain plays a critical role in enabling the storage of coherent, holistic memories.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Genetics:

Auf1

Penetrate.

A gene called auf1 seems to protect against septic shock in mice, a new study finds. Animals lacking the gene were more likely to undergo shock, suggesting that the gene helps keep the immune system's response to infections in check. Researchers hope to discover whether different forms of auf1 and related genes make people more likely to suffer autoimmune disease or life-threatening reactions to infections such as anthrax or flu. Infectious organisms trip specialized immune cells in the body and cause them to pump out proteins called cytokines, which produce inflammation and other hallmarks of infection, such as chills and fever. The body must carefully regulate its cytokine response, however, because if it isn't turned off it can lead to septic shock and rapid death. Septic shock, which causes 9 percent of deaths in the U.S. each year, occurs when the immune reaction to a bacterial infection grows out of control, shutting down organs and sending blood pressure plummeting. Researchers think similar effects contribute to death from anthrax and pandemic flu. The auf1 gene had previously turned up as a player in cytokine regulation. To learn more about its role, a team of researchers bred mice that lacked the gene. The animals were five times as likely as regular mice to go into shock and die when exposed to bacterial cells. The engineered mice contained heightened quantities of RNA, the precursor of protein synthesis, for the cytokines interleukin-1 beta and tumor necrosis factor alpha. Loss of the AUF1 protein seems to make these RNA molecules more stable and more easily translated into cytokine proteins. How that happens remains unclear, but researchers are beginning to understand how the cytokine response, the so-called cytokine storm, is regulated and controlled.

Wonder…

But Beware!

Don't get caught in the mighty maze of your own mind.

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

Mind distorts the reality and consciousness reveals it.

Sometimes you are after wealth, sometimes you are after a woman or a man, sometimes you are after prestige and power... and you go on pursuing appearances.

You may attain in the outside world many things, but in the end you will find you have not attained anything. You have missed the one which carries all meaning.

Dying, you may be very powerful, you may be the supreme chancellor of the Galactic Republic, but deep down you will know that you are impotent.

Death will prove that just an appearance your power was; powerless your power is, helpless before death.

Only that is power which goes beyond death — impotence all else is.

Always remember that death is coming, and death is the criterion: whatsoever death disproves is disproved, whatsoever death approves is approved.

The real cannot die; the unreal dies a thousand and one deaths.

Whatsoever can go beyond death, whatsoever is more powerful than death, is the reality.

10.

When you are real, the world is real; when you are living in unreal desires, a world of appearances you create.

11.

Whatsoever you are is your world.

12.

Nobody is young and nobody is old and nobody is a child. The inner is ageless, only the outer form changes.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

The nature of consciousness is to be just a mirror. The mirror has no choice of its own. Whatsoever comes in front of it is reflected — good or bad, beautiful or ugly — whatsoever. The mirror does not prefer, it does not judge, it has no condemnation. The nature of consciousness, at the source, is just mirrorlike. A child is born; he reflects whatsoever comes before him. He does not say anything, he does not interpret. The moment interpretation enters, the mirror has lost its mirrorlikeness. Now it is no more pure. Now it is filled with opinions, disturbed, many fragments, divided, split. It has become schizophrenic. When the consciousness is divided, not mirrorlike, it becomes the mind. Mind is a broken mirror. In the root, mind is consciousness. If you stop making discriminations, if you stop making dual division — choosing this against that, liking this, disliking that — if you drop out of these divisions the mind again becomes a mirror, a pure consciousness. So the whole effort for a seeker is how to drop opinions, philosophies, preferences, judgments, choices.

- Osho