Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.47

Series 1

VI - 2: Life is Abundance

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:

Lactase-persistence

In what they claim is the first direct evidence of the evolution of lactase-persistence (the ability to digest milk and other dairy foods), German and British researchers came up empty in their search for the gene variant that allows over 90 percent of northern Europeans to gulp down and properly digest milk. In many others around the world, lactose causes diarrhea and bloating, especially in adulthood. Lactase persistence (also called lactose tolerance), the continued production of the enzyme lactase that breaks down the sugar lactose in milk, correlates heavily with populations currently or once based on dairy farming, estimated to have begun in Europe roughly 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. (Populations in the Middle East and northeastern Africa also have the ability to digest milk.) There's much evidence that it's the most strongly selected single gene variant in Europeans in the last 30,000 years. Researchers searched for the gene variant that confers lactase persistence in most modern-day Europeans in eight samples from the skeletal remains of Europeans who lived during the Neolithic era along with one sample from the Mesolithic era. The Neolithic relics were carbon dated to between 5,000 and 5,840 years ago, while the Mesolithic remains date back almost 4,000 years. The samples were found in locations ranging from Germany to Lithuania. According to the study, the ability to process lactose was not highly prevalent in the Neolithic era. In fact, the researchers did not find any trace of the gene variant in their samples. The total absence suggests that no more than about 40 percent of the population could possibly have been lactose tolerant 5,000 years ago—indicating that the ability to digest the milk sugar probably resulted from the advent of dairy farming. Eight thousand years, in evolutionary terms, is not much, especially when a genotype frequency raises from close to 0 up to more then 70 percent and, in some areas of northern Europe, to even more than 90 percent. The fact that the researchers have found no lactase-persistent individuals in the samples demonstrates that positive selection was acting massively on prehistoric European populations and that the speed of the spread of the allele (gene variant) was enormous.

Think.

Medical Research:

PTZ for Down Syndrome

Learn.

Researchers may have finally found a drug candidate for reducing the mental retardation caused by Down syndrome, which afflicts more than 350,000 people in the U.S. alone. Researchers gave low doses of a human drug to mice bred to mimic the learning and memory problems in people with Down syndrome. After as little as two weeks, the impaired mice performed as well as normal ones in learning tests, and the improvement lasted for up to two months after treatment ended. But there is a catch: the drug was taken off the market 25 years ago after being found to cause dangerous seizures in some people. And many compounds that boost learning in mice fail in human trials. Researchers tested the drug, pentylenetetrazole (PTZ), as well as two other compounds—picrotoxin and a gingko biloba extract called bilobalide—because they all interfere with tiny ion channels on brain cells (neurons). When activated, the channels, known as GABA_A receptors, inhibit the cells, making it harder for them to form new synapses, or connections, with neighboring neurons. The deficits of Down syndrome may occur because the brain contains too many such inhibitory signals. In order to learn, an individual has to have a period during which synapses can get stronger or weaker. Such changing is what's not possible when there is too much inhibition. So a team of researchers gave their mice either low doses of PTZ mixed with milk, or low-dose injections of picrotoxin or bilobalide, daily for two to four weeks to slightly raise the level of excitation in the brain. Immediately after treatment, the animals' scores on two memory tests—for recognizing objects they had seen before or remembering how they last entered a maze—were on par with normal mice; two months later, they still did much better than they normally would. The treatment is allowing the normal properties of neurons to work, which slowly over time leads to an improved circuit. Clinical trials of PTZ could begin in a year or two, and evaluating them might take five to 10 years. Many researchers have long considered Down syndrome too complex to crack, but the study serves as notice to the neuroscience community that there are a lot of interesting things to do here.

Imagine.

Understand.

Quantum Physics:

Stopping Photons

Two independent teams of physicists have overcome the restless nature of light and stopped laser pulses in their tracks. A proposed method, now in tests by a third team, may even make light pulses creep backwards. It's not normal for photons to stop, let alone to back up. Those quintessential particles of light usually zip straight through a vacuum at 300,000 kilometers per second and traverse other materials at slower but still dazzling speeds. In a sense, stopping light is a trivial feat. A black piece of paper can stop light very easily, however the photons absorbed by that paper are destroyed. What's remarkable about the new experiments is that the researchers stop a light pulse without destroying the photons. In each experiment, a so-called coupling laser illuminates a gaseous group of atoms in a glass chamber or magnetic trap while a pulse from another laser penetrates the gas. When the scientists turn off the coupling laser, the electromagnetic energy from the other laser vanishes, but the information that defines its light, such as amplitude and wave properties, transfers onto the gas atoms' quantum state known as spin. By turning the coupling beam back on, the researchers reconstitute the original pulse from the stored information. The light pulse is parked in the atom cloud. When the coupling laser is turned back on, out comes the original pulse. In their report, the researchers describe how they shone a coupling laser on a cloud of ultracold sodium atoms, causing pulses from another laser to slow and then stop. A couple of years ago, the same team made headlines by slowing light to a bicyclist's speed. Using rubidium gas warmed to around 80⁰C, another team of researchers also stopped light dead. The transfer of light-defining information between light and atoms may ease the development of powerful computers and exceptionally secure forms of communication that exploit the quantum properties of particles.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Astrophysics: Star’s Magnetic Field

Astronomers say that they have for the first time directly measured the magnetic field of a star known to host a giant planet. Although the magnetic field of the star, called Tau Boötes, is only a few times as strong as that of the sun, it appears to wield enormous influence on the planet. That's because the orb whips around Tau Boötes at just one-twentieth the distance that Earth circles the sun. To measure the field, researchers examined the polarization of light from the star using a device on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. Light waves are composed of electric and magnetic fields that oscillate in specific directions. The extent to which light coming from the star is polarized indicates the strength of a magnetic field along a particular direction. The astronomers also determined that the equator of Tau Boötes rotates once every 3 days, while the star's poles rotate about 20 percent slower than that. The difference in rotation probably generates the star's magnetic field. Astronomers would have expected the planet's orbital axis to align with the star's rotation axis. But the team found that the planet moves in sync with material residing at about latitude 45° on the star's surface. This arrangement suggests that the magnetic field of the star interacts with the planet in a complex fashion.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Cosmology:

Dwarf Spheroidals

Researchers may have explained why a few tiny galaxies around the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies are so rich in dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up most of the matter in the universe. The key seems to be the bigger, brighter galaxies next door. Simulations indicate that million-degree coronas around these larger galaxies could have scoured away much of the visible gas in their young neighbors while leaving the dark material behind. Researchers believe that all galaxies large and small should have started out the same—as a ball of dark matter with a disk of visible matter in the center. But some small galaxies, called dwarf spheroidals, are relatively dark for their size; a handful contain roughly 100 times more dark matter per star than the Milky Way and are a million times less luminous. They also tend to cluster around bigger galaxies such as our own. The big question is why. In new simulations of galaxy formation, a team of researchers find that, 10 billion years ago, the darkest of today's spheroidals (such as Draco, Ursa Minor and Andromeda IX) were forming around big galaxies from the same mix of visible gas and dark matter, much like planets would form around a star. But they happened to get pulled into orbit around the central galaxy earlier than their counterparts. Once there, according to the group's simulations, shocks from the central galaxy's gravity, and pressure from the hot corona around it, combined to knock loose most of the smaller galaxies' shimmering gas. Only a few remaining stars studded each blob of dark matter. Ultraviolet radiation, which permeated the universe at the time, would have heated the spheroidals' visible gas, leaving it weakly attracted to the little galaxies and thus easy to scrape away. The model is the first to explain why the spheroidals would be both dark and found near bigger galaxies.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Astronomy: No Water on Extrasolar Planets

Penetrate.

For the first time, telescopes have captured the light spectra emitted directly from planets outside of our solar system. Researchers trained the infrared-sensitive Spitzer Space Telescope on two extrasolar gas giant planets, called HD 209458 b and HD 189733 b. The atmospheres are most notable for what they lack: The scientists have found no evidence for water in the spectrum, though all the theorists would have predicted that there should be water (in the form of vapor) in the atmospheres of these planets. Both planets' spectra are missing water along with carbon monoxide and methane—at least some of which researchers had expected to find. The two planets are members of a large class of extrasolar planets known as "hot Jupiters" because they are gaseous like Jupiter but orbit closely to their stars, giving them high temperatures of 1,000 to 2,000 kelvins. Based on the inferred quantities of elements in the planets and their temperatures, researchers had deduced that certain compounds, including water, should form. As seen from Earth, both planets travel in front of and behind their stars during their orbits, which last only a few days. To make their measurements, two separate groups had Spitzer's infrared detector take a steady bead on the planets' stars while the planets were eclipsed by them. The researchers determined the planets' spectra by subtracting the light emitted by each star from the combined light radiated by the star and planet, leaving just the planet's light spectrum. Prior observations of extrasolar planets had detected elements by analyzing light passing through their atmospheres, but this is the first measurement of the energy coming directly from the planets at many different wavelengths. Researchers can get clues about the types of chemicals in the atmosphere by analyzing the brightness of wavelengths emanating from it, because all chemicals absorb light of characteristic wavelengths.

Wonder…

But Beware!

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

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

When you want to think, then sit under a tree, close your eyes — enjoy thoughts! Nothing is wrong with thoughts. Enjoy them as a flowering, beautiful flowering, a great poetry.

If you can accept fully whatsoever you are, this is enlightenment.

Enlightenment happens only in that moment when there is no complaint in you, when you are not going anywhere, not desiring, not condemning, not judging.

You simply exist and with total acceptance. This moment there is enlightenment. A very ordinary thing enlightenment is.

There is no demand, no hankering for anything, no clinging. Simply you are, and you are happy — happy without any cause.

Bliss is a happiness uncaused. Simply as you are, you are happy. There is nothing to say about why you are happy.

Discomfort can happen to an enlightened man, but never misery — because how can misery happen? When there is no cause for his blissfulness misery is impossible.

Life is abundance, life is a luxury, perfect luxury! It is not concerned with your needs, it always gives you more than you need.

When you feel that you accept, you suddenly feel the whole existence accepts you. Then you can bless the whole, and the whole blesses you. It is uncaused.

10.

Accept the reality as you are and the world is. Don't try to change anything — and there is enlightenment. And then everything changes, because now you are no more the same.

11.

If you change something, change nothing will. If you accept, transformed everything is. It becomes luminous with an unknown light.

12.

A door opens, darkness disappears, a sun has risen. But it happens only when you are at ease with yourself. It is a happening, it is not a result of your efforts.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

Remember, in repressive societies people enjoyed sex more, because even to meet with one's own wife was such a difficult thing. It was almost impossible to meet another's wife — there were so many hurdles to be crossed to meet one's own wife. In India you couldn't see your wife in daylight. Such a big family, a hundred people living together, sleeping together. Sometimes, even with your wife, you had to make arrangements to make love. It was beautiful, beautiful in a way, because tension was so high that there was a peak, and then there was a valley of relaxation. In the West sex has become absolutely flat. Now nobody enjoys sex in the West — there is too much.

- Osho