Origins of life may lie in electrochemical processes

A few bioscientists in recent years have been rethinking the origin of life in the light of some new ideas. They think the most counter-intuitive trait of life is one of the best clues to its origin. As a result, they have come up with a radically different picture of what the earliest life was like and where it evolved. It's a picture for which there is growing evidence. Life, the new idea argues, is powered not by the kind of chemistry that goes on in a test tube but by a kind of electricity.

http://tinyurl.com/yj3nx55

Begin with oneself (Buber)

Just the perspective, in which a man sees himself only as an individual contrasted with other individuals, and not as a genuine person whose transformation helps towards the transformation of the world, contains the fundamental error which hasidic teaching denounces. The essential thing is to begin with oneself, and at this moment a man has nothing in the world to care about other than this beginning. Any other attitude would distract him from what he is about to begin, weaken his initiative, and thus frustrate the entire bold undertaking.

-- Martin Buber, from The Way of Man According to the Teaching of Hasidism.

How the brain creates "time"

Perhaps the most fundamental question neuroscientists are investigating is whether our perception of the world is continuous or a series of discrete snapshots like frames on a film strip. Understand this, and maybe we can explain how the healthy brain works out the chronological order of the myriad events bombarding our senses, and how this can become warped to alter our perception of time.

It seems that each separate neural process that governs our perception might be recorded in its own stream of discrete frames. But how might all these streams fit together to give us a consistent picture of the world? Ernst Pöppel, a neuroscientist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, suggests all of the separate snapshots from the senses may feed into blocks of information in a higher processing stream. He calls these the "building blocks of consciousness" and reckons they underlie our perception of time

"Perception cannot be continuous because of [the limits of] neural processing," says Pöppel. "A space of 30 to 50 milliseconds is necessary to bring together in one time-window the distributed activity in the neural system."

-- from New Scientist magazine (http://tinyurl.com/yh8ebs9)

Wright

If God dropped acid, would he see people?

-- Steven Wright

Easy as ABCDE

Enlightenment is as simple as ABCDE: Always Being Conscious Divine Energy.

Humans Glow in Visible Light

Scientists in Japan using special high-sensitivity cameras have found that the human body emits a tiny quantity of visible light which varies throughout the day. Unlike the body's usual infrared (heat) radiation which is already well known, this visible light is believed to be a product of various biochemical reactions in the body which can fluctuate based upon changes in the body's metabolism. Future research may investigate the effect that the mind or meditation could have on controlling this light output.

(LiveScience.com, 22 Jul 2009)

Action of the whole (Buber)

An action of the whole being must approach passivity, for it does away with all partial actions, and thus with any sense of action, which always depends on limited exertions.

-- Martin Buber, from I and You (trans. Kaufmann)