Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.43

Series 1

V - 7: The Great Way

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.

Alternative Fuel:

Membrane-less Fuel Cell

As scientists increasingly realize, everyday materials tend to act weird at small scales. Microstreams of water, for instance, behave like viscous flows of honey. Recently, a team of engineers and chemists found a way to exploit a consequence of that microscale sluggishness. The result is a fuel cell that does away with a particularly troublesome and expensive component: the membrane usually needed to split the cell into two parts. Fuel cells intended for use in laptops and other portable electric devices typically generate power in a process that sends protons from a hydrogen-rich fuel solution, such as methanol in water, through a membrane to meet up with oxygen gas and form water. The membrane must keep the fuel contained while letting through the protons. But membranes don't do this perfectly and often create troubles of their own. Many fuel molecules sneak through the barrier and so produce no energy. In other instances, the membrane dries out or becomes waterlogged. To create a membrane-free fuel cell, researchers took advantage of the property called laminar, or layered, flow. In a channel about the diameter of a human hair, multiple streams of aqueous solutions can flow with almost no mixing. Because only a little oxygen typically dissolves in water, previous versions of the group's all-liquid design didn't have enough of the gas to produce much power. The cell's developers say, however, they've found a way to make the cell richer in oxygen. The team has released no details about how it attained such performance.

Think.

Quantum Physics: Counting Photons Alive

Learn.

Physicists have found a way to count photons as they zip along, without destroying them. The researchers say that the technique will enable scientists to probe quantum effects that so far have been the subject only of speculation. In physics labs, detecting light has long been synonymous with absorbing photons. Typically, the photons cease to exist and the light's energy transforms into an electrical signal. Physicists can count single photons—but they haven't been able to count them and keep them. Now, a research team has shown how to count photons nondestructively while they bounce back and forth between two mirrors. The team began by introducing small numbers of photons into the space between two niobium-coated screens. Kept at less than 1 kelvin, the niobium became superconducting, which made the screens into virtually perfect mirrors. The photons could bounce back and forth up to a billion times, lingering inside their hall of mirrors for more than a tenth of a second. The team then shot rubidium atoms one by one across the photons' path. The atoms were in a highly excited state in which their electrons were especially sensitive to the photons' electric fields. The electrons responded with a shift in the timing of their orbits, essentially acting as the hands of microscopic clocks. The amount of shift was proportional to the number of photons between the two mirrors. Quantum uncertainty dictates that the number of photons could not be well defined at the start of the experiment. Measuring the influence of the photons on a single rubidium atom yielded only incomplete information about the number of photons. But after the researchers had shot about 100 atoms through the chamber—gaining information and reducing uncertainty at each step—the number of photons converged to a definite value. Subsequent measurements confirmed that count. So far, the team has managed to count up to seven photons. While the photons didn't die, their lives would never be the same. In any experiment, measuring one physical quantity with increasing precision leads to increased fuzziness in a related quantity. In this case, obtaining a precise count of the photons came at the expense of losing knowledge about the relative timing, or phase, of the photons' wavelike fluctuations.

Imagine.

Understand.

Neuroscience:

Fasting

Fasting may kick off a complex cascade of chemical interactions that keep brain cells alive and appetites up in the absence of food. Until now, researchers believed that neurons or nerve cells survived fasting thanks to leptin, a hormone secreted by fat when the body is starved. But a new study suggests that the process is actually similar to another mechanism in the body linked to obesity and diabetes, and could provide insight into the molecular processes behind those conditions. Neurobiologists at Yale University School of Medicine recently found that the thyroid hormone triiodothyronine increased in fasting mice, activating an "uncoupling" protein that disrupts the breakdown of food into energy. In turn, the number of mitochondria, the cellular factories that convert food into energy, increased in neurons responsible for stimulating appetite. When the ravenous mice were fed, they ate more food than they needed. On the other hand, there was no increase in mitochondria in fasting mice that lacked the uncoupling protein, and they ate less than their littermates when food was reintroduced to them. The findings suggest that the uncoupling protein's effect on mitochondria in brain cells plays a critical role in regulating the neurons that direct energy metabolism. The dysfunctional mitochondria in the brain may also be important players in obesity and diabetes, conditions that are influenced by the ability of mitochondria to metabolize food into energy in muscle, liver and other tissue in the body.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Global Warming: Dying Eelpout

The eelpout—a shallow water, bottom-dwelling fish—is an indicator species. Zoarces viviparous, or the one that gives birth to live young, rests near the top of its local food chain in the shallow waters of the southern North Sea, an area also known as the Wadden Sea. Although it is not commercially fished, records on its population go back more than 50 years and its health is taken as a general proxy for the overall health of this sea. New research combining lab tests on its ability to thrive in warmer waters and these long-term records show, for the first time, how climate change might be driving the eellike fish out of its ancestral home. Animal physiologists compared field data with lab tests to show that the fish face an oxygen constraint as the water warms up. Because the eelpout gives birth to relatively few live young and does not migrate, environmental challenges quickly register in its population numbers. Plotting the instrumental record of temperatures against these population numbers revealed that the eelpout declined during hotter years—where there was not any significant change in other factors such as predation or fishing. Meanwhile, lab tests showed that when exposed to warmer water, the fish were unable to get as much oxygen as they needed to cope with the increased temperature. On top of that, warmer temperatures mean less oxygen dissolves into the sea's waters; not only are the fish able to get less oxygen out, but there is less oxygen available. This oxygen deprivation provides a mechanism for how climate change directly affects the ability of a species to thrive and now has been demonstrated in aquatic animals ranging from worms to the eelpout.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Astrophysics:

3-D Modeling Pulsars

Researchers may finally have hit on why pulsars, the rotating balls of neutrons that pepper the universe, spin the way they do. Simulations indicate that the key may be a wobbling shock wave that accompanies the explosion of a dying star. When stars a few times heavier than our own sun run out of fuel, they collapse into ultradense pulsars. The hallmark of that collapse is a supernova explosion, which scours away much of the star's prior mass. In principle, the resulting pulsar should spin much more rapidly than its larger parent star, like a figure skater drawing her arms toward her to twirl faster. The neutron stars would be spinning so fast they would just break themselves apart, but something must be slowing them down. Researchers speculate that magnetic fields piercing the stars act as a brake, but they do not know if those fields can slow pulsars down to their observed range of speeds. A team of researchers propose that a shock wave rumbling through the star during its collapse is the real culprit. Prior simulations of the process in 2-D had found that as the star's material condenses into a hard nugget, a powerful shock wave reverberates through its core and spreads outward. The researchers' 3-D simulation picked up something the past models had missed: The shock wave rotates. They propose that this rotation causes the collapsing star to turn in the opposite direction that the shock wave moves. After about a second, the rotation would be fast enough to account for typical pulsar speeds of one rotation every 300 milliseconds. But there is a hitch: Magnetic fields or some other effect would have to drastically slow down the core first, so the shock wave could dial it up to the right speed. That would require magnetic fields to be more effective brakes than current crude estimates suggest.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Genetics: Identifying Mendel’s Green Pea Gene

Penetrate.

It only took 141 years, but researchers report they have finally pinpointed one of the genes that Austrian monk Gregor Mendel manipulated in his pioneering experiments that established the basic laws of genetics—specifically, the gene that controlled the color of his peas' seeds. A team identified the sequence of a gene common to several plant species, which use it to break down a green pigment molecule, and found that it matches Mendel's gene. This marks the third of the monk's seven genes that researchers have precisely identified, and the first since the late 1990s, before the genome sequencing boom. If you've ever taken a biology class, you may recall seeing a portrait of Mendel next to a picture of pea plants that vary in traits such as their height and the color and shape of their seeds (round or wrinkled; green or yellow). By counting the proportions of these traits in several generations of pea plants, the inquisitive monk concluded that these features must derive from pairs of what we now call genes, which he discovered were randomly divided between offspring. But researchers had never managed to sequence Mendel's gene for seed color, and the pea genome is too huge to go fishing for it. Luckily, a team of researchers were working to precisely locate the sequence of a gene called staygreen (sgr) in the meadow grass Festuca pratensis, some variants of which remain green in drought and other unfavorable conditions because they are unable to break down a green pigment. The key forward was the genetic similarity between Festuca and rice, which has had its genome sequenced. The group compared genetic markers specific to the sgr region of the grass's chromosome with the markers on the corresponding portion of the rice genome. The rice chromosome contained 30 potential genes in that area, including one similar to other pigment-metabolizing proteins. To confirm the gene's function, the researchers turned to another lab plant, the thale cress Arabidopsis thaliana, in which they could deactivate the corresponding gene; they found that the resulting plants stayed green longer. To find out if the equivalent pea sgr was Mendel's gene, they picked out the location of its sequence from pea plants that varied in their seed color. Sure enough, the pea version of sgr was always found in the same tiny part of the chromosome as the old monk's seed color gene.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

The mystery is solved when you have become the mystery itself. You cannot solve it remaining yourself.

There is no truth beyond understanding. In fact, understanding itself is the truth.

Truth is not somewhere waiting for you to happen; it is through your understanding that it will be revealed — revealed within you.

What is this Great Way? This Great Way is your nature — you are already it!

Wherever you go you will carry your Tao within you. Your intrinsic nature it is. It is not dispensable, you cannot put it aside and forget it.

You are already there because here is that ‘there’. You need not look in the future: you simply be here and you find it.

Seek and you will miss. Don't seek, just be, and it is there.

Just because of your seeking you were missing it, just because you were so much in a hurry you couldn't see within.

You are the way and you are the goal. No distance between you and the goal there is.

10.

You are the seeker and you are the sought. No distance between the seeker and the sought there is.

11.

You are the means and you are the end.

12.

You are like a drunkard seeking your own home, asking for something that is just in front of your eyes. But the eyes are not clear —

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

If you don’t distinguish between coarse and fine, good and bad, beauty and ugliness, this and that — if you don't distinguish, if you don't discriminate, then you simply accept the whole as it is. You don't put your mind in it, you don't become a judge. You simply say, "It is so." The thorn is there, you say, "It is so." The rose is there, you say, "It is so." A saint is there, you say, "It is so." A sinner is there, you say, "It is so." And the whole knows; nobody else can know why a sinner exists. There must be some reason, but that is a mystery for the whole, not for you to bother about. The whole gives birth to saints and sinners, thorns and roses — only the whole knows why. You simply fall into the whole and you don't make any discriminations. You will also know why, but only when you have become the whole.

- Osho