COVER GIRL ARIEL FLORENCE GRAHAM SPECIAL EDITION 2014

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena’s idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a ‘duality’, that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa. But although the validity of Maldacena’s ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.

In one paper, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence. In the other, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.

“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team’s work.

Brain-Machine

In February, Duke scientists announced a brain-machine interface that allowed a rhesus monkey to control a single robotic arm more than 7000 miles away. Today, they’veexpanded on the previous experiment, announcing an improved interface that allows for independent control of two arms, assimilating both mechanical arms into the monkeys’ existing motor control systems.

Similar to the previous experiments, the experiment set up two rhesus monkeys in front of a remote video link, while implants monitored nearly 500 neurons to pick up motion signals. After some training, the monkeys were trained to cover targets on the screen with the arms, proving the subjects had control over the remote robotic appendages. This latest experiment is only an incremental improvement over February’s trials, but it shows the basic brain-machine link holds steady through more complex setups that demand more and more of the brain. Scientists hope that future interfaces modeled on this one will someday help paralysis victims or amputees, although and human testing on the interface is still years in the future.

3D printing will give everyone the ability to manufacture anything, anywhere. It excels at producing complicated or specific parts or objects. This will lessen our reliance on shipping and traditional manufacturing while giving consumers greater creative control over the products they use.

People are moving to cities in greater numbers than ever before, and for good reason. Research suggests hyper-dense cities may solve poverty, energy, health care, and education problems, leading to an improved quality of life for residents. It’s an exciting time to be a city dweller.

Like 3D printing, but with organic material. Eventually, scientists and engineers hope to deliver custom-made organs to those in need. Handheld devices could also repair damaged tissues at the scene of accidents or disasters. And researchers will have unlimited tissues for research, paving the road for even more discoveries.CLARITY is a powerful new method of mapping the brain in three dimensions. It will enable researchers to study neurological diseases and disorders in unprecedented detail. It will literally be like looking at age-old problems with new eyes. This is a huge step towards understanding Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and stroke recovery.

Every item on this list depends on one thing: the energy to power it. The future of energy is murky, but one thing is clear. Whether wind, solar, hydrogen, or nuclear energy becomes the next big thing, renewable energy will help power the big ideas of tomorrow.

What if you could access your computer with your mind? No more typing, texting, or clicking. “Looking something up” would become “thinking about it.” Scientists just announced that they’ve successfully wired a monkey to control robotic arms from 7,000 miles away. Candy Crush via thought is next.

CLARITY is a powerful new method of mapping the brain in three dimensions. It will enable researchers to study neurological diseases and disorders in unprecedented detail. It will literally be like looking at age-old problems with new eyes. This is a huge step towards understanding Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and stroke recovery.

Resurrection Lizard Opera poster

Please support this great cause that helps our military during this holiday season. 

A. R. Graham

(Editor Coronado Clarion)

Hell Valley, Jigokudani, Japan

Jigokudani or “Hell Valley” is a spectacular, appropriately named valley just above the town of Noboribetsu Onsen, which displays hot steam vents, sulfurous streams and other volcanic activity. It is a main source of Noboribetsu’s hot spring waters.

When Ray Manzarek died so did The Doors.

After Jim died,  Ray Manzarek kept touring as the Doors and he did so up until shortly before he passed away.

The concerts were always sub standard of course and no matter who was used as the front man the old fire remained elusive.

Manzarek’s Vox organ and Kreiger’s Gibson guitar were all that remained throughout the years, and if you closed your eyes the sweet echo of the glory days could still be heard.

It was also a grotesque carnival at times with each new and utterly ill fitted replacement for Jim Morrison, and instead of a reunion with those Halcyon days, it was more like a perpetually bad acid trip.

The day the music (Manzarek ) died was for me, very sad, because it was Manzarek alone who kept the spirit of the music alive, and even through the worst of shows there was always the faint echo of Jim’s presence.

Now like some new wine comes ‘Other Sides Of The Doors’ a tribute band out of Turin Italy.  Headed by Fabio Cubisino who has the same cheeky playful spirit of the young Jim Morrison they are a cool representation of the legendary Doors.

So, when I thought I would never hear the music again live, I am happily surprised to announce that ‘Other Sides Of The Doors’ is alive and well and now I can say….

The Doors Will Never Die!

Alan Graham

The seahorse head’s shape helps the fish stealthily ambush prey, researchers say.

Seahorses are unique among fish for having bent necks and long-snouted heads that make them resemble horses. The overall shape of their body, including the lack of a tail fin, helps make them “one of the slowest swimmers on the planet,” said Brad Gemmell, a marine biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “They don’t swim very much — they tend to anchor themselves to surfaces like seagrass with their prehensile tails.” (Prehensile tails, like those of monkeys, can grasp items.)

Gemmell and his colleagues were investigating how seahorses and other fish feed on microscopic shrimplike crustaceans known as copepods.

Copepods are really important,” Gemmell said. “They’re fed on by a wide majority of marine animals during some point in their life histories — in particular, a lot of commercially harvested fish.”

Since virtually all marine animals like to eat copepods, “these crustaceans have evolved some very impressive escape behavior,” Gemmell said. “They’re very, very sensitive to disturbances in the water, such as those created by approaching predators.”

Once copepods detect these disturbances, they can swim distances of more than 500 times their body length per second. In comparison, “a cheetah probably only runs 30 body lengths per second,” Gemmell said. If the average U.S. adult male traveled 500 body lengths per second, based on their height, they would move nearly 2,000 mph (3,200 km/h).

Unexpectedly, even though seahorses are slow swimmers, “they were very effective at capturing these very fast-swimming, highly evasive prey,” Gemmell told LiveScience.

Seahorses use their arched necks as springs to pivot their heads forward and catch prey. This limits the distances at which they can seize victims to only the length of their necks, about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter). However, seahorses nevertheless could get close enough to copepods to capture them.

“We found they captured copepods more than 90 percent of the time, which is extremely effective for any sort of predator, much less with such elusive prey,” Gemmell said.

To find out how these fish catch their victims, the researchers experimented with the dwarf seahorse Hippocampus zosterae, which is native to the Bahamas and the United States and is only about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) long. They suspended these fish with copepods in water loaded with hollow glass beads about one-sixth the average diameter of a human hair. They shone lasers into this water that illuminated the beads.

By analyzing how the beads moved as seahorses preyed on copepods, the scientists could deduce how they made the water flow around them in three dimensions. They found that the water around the seahorse snout barely moves while the hunter approaches its victims, helping the seahorse to close in undetected.

“Copepods are really important,” Gemmell said. “They’re fed on by a wide majority of marine animals during some point in their life histories — in particular, a lot of commercially harvested fish.”

It was back in the 1930s when an American teenager discovered an abandoned mine tunnel in Mexico’s Copper Canyon region.  Inside it she found a human skeleton and, clutching onto its arm, was the hand bone of another skeleton buried mostly under the earth. It was described as being small and misshapen. The teenager returned to the site the following day only to find that a flash flood had washed most of the bones away. Nevertheless, the upper section of the skull of the buried skeleton, along with a small piece of the upper jaw bone remained.  The significance of the skull remained unrealised for nearly 70 years.   In 1999, the highly unusual skull, which has been dated at 900 years old, was handed to author and researcher Lloyd Pye to investigate after health professionals failed to identify a condition that could explain its appearance. The skull became known as the “Starchild Skull,” and between 1999 and 2013, Lloyd enlisted the help of numerous experts and independent medical and scientific institutions across three countries (USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom) to conduct extensive research and testing. One of the major contributors to the research project was Dr Ted Robinson, who had a background in medicine and plastic surgery and specialised knowledge of cranial surgery and cranial anatomy.  Dr Robinson studied the skull for a period of two years and involved specialists in the disciplines of radiology, ophthalmic surgery, oral surgery, craniofacial surgery, neurology and paediatric neurosurgery. The report Dr Robinson prepared was astounding. Firstly, Dr Robinson’s expertise in cranial deformities enabled him to rule out all the human deformities he knew of that could account for the skull’s appearance, nor were any of the other specialists able to find any deformity, illness or cultural practice that could account for the misshapen head. Secondly, Dr Robinson reported that the bone of the skull is much thinner, lighter, and stronger than regular human bone, it contains unusual reinforcing fibres, the brain is 30% larger than a normal human of its size, the frontal sinuses are absent, the eye sockets are shallow, and the entire skull has over 10 standard deviations from the human norm, a highly unusual statistic. Robinson wrote: “One can only reasonably conclude from these statistical studies that the Starchild skull is distinctly different from human.” Nevertheless, the medical reports and investigations were not enough to convince mainstream scientists that this skull was definitely not human.  Instead, they explained away the abnormalities with the claim that ‘nature can do anything’. The scientists running the Starchild Project knew that the only definitive way of proving that the skull was not human was through DNA testing. So they waited nearly a decade while the technology for recovering and sequencing “ancient” DNA, such as the 900-year-old Starchild’s, could be perfected. In 2010, the Project secured access to a highly sophisticated ancient DNA lab capable of recovering non-human DNA. Preliminary DNA testing found that a significant percentage of the DNA in the skull appears to not be human, a finding that, if verified, would indicate the skull belongs to a new species. In 2012, a geneticist was able to secure a fragment of gene from the 5% of human nuclear DNA that code for proteins and which is a highly functional ‘master gene’, one of the most vitally important genes in the body of any species on Earth. It is known as the FOXP2 gene.  An analysis was carried out on this gene, the full report of which can be read here, and the results were again startling. The FOXP2 gene in normal humans is 2,594 base pairs long and contains no variations. In mammals and other “higher” species, any single flaw in FOXP2, any isolated mutation or variation, can cause a severe negative impact in some of the most important aspects of development and will normally lead to death. While a tiny amount of survivable mutations are possible in FOXP2, every one that occurs presents debilitating or life-threatening consequences, so up to this point in time none have been passed on to the general population of humans. This means in the vast, vast majority of humans, the FOXP2 master gene is absolutely identical.   The fragment of gene that was recovered from the skull and analysed is 211 base pairs long (out of 2,594 base pairs).  Now comes the incredible result of the analysis.  While all normal humans have the exact same base pairs, the Starchild’s gene contained a total of 56 variations within the fragment! To understand the significance, in a rhesus monkey only 2 of its 211 base pairs would contain variation from humans. If it were a mouse, it would be 20. If a dog, 27. To put this in perspective, let’s imagine that when alive, the Starchild was indeed some unknown humanoid. No matter how different from humans it might have been, to be in the humanoid family its FOXP2 gene would have to be in the range of 1 or 2 or at most 3 base pair variations from a normal human. To go past 5 or 10 would put it into another class of species. To have 56 is to put it in another realm, another dimension entirely. It is utterly unique. These amazing findings are the result of only a partial analysis of the DNA.  This year the Starchild Project was registered as a company in order to raise the necessary funds to undertake a complete DNA test, which will determine once and for all the true nature of this most unusual species. – See more at: http://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/humanoid-skull-unlike-any-other-001069#sthash.cKIZOaHB.dpuf

ON DECEMBER 8TH 2013

JIM MORRISON WOULD HAVE BEEN 70 YEARS OLD.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JIM

In memory James Douglas Morrison 1943-1971 R.I.P.

I Remember Jim Morrison will be published in French and Swedish on december 8th 2013.

www.irememberjimmorrison.com

On december 8th 2014, Jim Morrison would have been 70 years old.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JIM

Kayaks found near Imperial Beach had 297 pounds of marijuana with a street value of $178,000.

Federal agents apprehended four suspects and almost 300 pounds of marijuana hidden in kayaks Friday morning, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials.

Four kayaks were detected in American waters off the coast of Imperial Beach near the U.S.-Mexico border around 4 a.m., according to a statement. 

A helicopter and boat crew responded to apprehend the kayaks and the smugglers aboard the kayaks were arrested within an hour of when the kayaks were found.

99 bundles of marijuana were found inside the kayaks.

“While a kayak is an unusual mode of transporting drugs in the maritime environment, as opposed to the more familiar panga, we also see the use of surfboards and jet skis,” said Office of Air and Marine Director of Air and Marine Operations William Raymond. “No matter what transnational criminal organizations choose to use, CBP remains vigilant in protecting our coastline.”

In addition to the kayak incident Friday morning, federal agents apprehended migrants coming across the border around 7 a.m. Monday at Silver Strand State Beach in Coronado and around 4 a.m. Tuesday at Seacoast Drive and Elkwood Avenue in Imperial Beach.

Every day, 22 veterans take their own lives. That’s a suicide every 65 minutes. As shocking as the number is, it may actually be higher.

The figure, released by the Department of Veterans Affairs in February, is based on the agency’s own data and numbers reported by 21 states from 1999 through 2011. Those states represent about 40% of the U.S. population. The other states, including the two largest (California and Texas) and the fifth-largest (Illinois), did not make data available.

Who wasn’t counted?

People like Levi Derby, who hanged himself in his grandfather’s garage in Illinois on April 5, 2007. He was haunted, says his mother, Judy Caspar, by an Afghan child’s death. He had handed the girl a bottle of water, and when she came forward to take it, she stepped on a land mine.

When Derby returned home, he locked himself in a motel room for days. Caspar saw a vacant stare in her son’s eyes. A while later, Derby was called up for a tour of Iraq. He didn’t want to kill again. He went AWOL and finally agreed to a dishonorable discharge.

Derby was not in the VA system, and Illinois did not send in data on veteran suicides to the VA.

Experts have no doubt that people are being missed in the national counting of veteran suicides. Luana Ritch, the veterans and military families coordinator in Nevada, helped publish an extensive report on that state’s veteran suicides.

Part of the problem, she says, is that there is no uniform reporting system for deaths in America. It’s usually up to a funeral director or a coroner to enter veteran status and suicide on a death certificate. Veteran status is a single question on the death report, and there is no verification of it from the Defense Department or the VA.

“Birth and death certificates are only as good as the information that is entered,” Ritch says. “There is underreporting. How much, I don’t know.”

Who else might not be counted?

A homeless person who has no one who can vouch that he or she is a veteran, or others whose families don’t want to divulge a suicide because of the stigma associated with mental illness; they may pressure a state coroner to not list the death as suicide

If a veteran intentionally crashes a car or dies of a drug overdose and leaves no note, that death may not be counted as suicide.

 

An investigation by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper last year revealed an alarmingly high percentage of veterans who died in this manner in Texas, a state that did not send in data for the VA report.

“It’s very hard to capture that information,” says Barbara van Dahlen, a psychologist who founded Give an Hour, a nonprofit group that pairs volunteer mental-health professionals with combat veterans.

Nikkolas Lookabill had been home about four months from Iraq when he was shot to death by police in Vancouver, Washington, in September 2010. The prosecutor’s office said Lookabill told officers “he wanted them to shoot him.” The case is one of many considered “suicide by cop” and not counted in suicide data.

Carri Leigh Goodwin enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2007. She said she was raped by a fellow Marine at Camp Pendleton and eventually was forced out of the Corps with a personality disorder diagnosis. She did not tell her family that she was raped or that she had thought about suicide. She also did not tell them she was taking Zoloft, a drug prescribed for anxiety.

Her father, Gary Noling, noticed that Goodwin was drinking heavily when she returned home. Five days later, she went drinking with her sister, who left her intoxicated in a parked car. The Zoloft interacted with the alcohol, and she died in the back seat of the car. Her blood alcohol content was six times the legal limit.

Police charged her sister and a friend in Goodwin’s death for furnishing alcohol to an underaged woman: Goodwin was 20. Noling says his daughter intended to drink herself to death. Later, Noling went through Goodwin’s journals and learned about her rape and suicidal thoughts.

A recent analysis by News21, an investigative multimedia program for journalism students, found that the annual suicide rate among veterans is about 30 for every 100,000 of the population, compared with the civilian rate of 14 per 100,000. The analysis of records from 48 states found that the suicide rate for veterans increased an average of 2.6% a year from 2005 to 2011 — more than double the rate of increase for civilian suicide.

Nearly one in five suicides nationally is a veteran, even though veterans make up about 10% of the U.S. population, the News21 analysis found.

The authors of the VA study, Janet Kemp and Robert Bossarte, included many cautions about the interpretation of their data, though they stand by the reliability of their findings. Bossarte said there was a consistency in the samples that allowed them to comfortably project the national figure of 22.

But more than 34,000 suicides from the 21 states that reported data to the VA were discarded because the state death records failed to indicate whether the deceased was a veteran. That’s 23% of the recorded suicides from those states. So the study looked at 77% of the recorded suicides in 40% of the U.S. population.

The VA report itself acknowledged “significant limitations” of the available data and identified flaws in its report. “The ability of death certificates to fully capture female veterans was particularly low; only 67% of true female veterans were identified. Younger or unmarried veterans and those with lower levels of education were also more likely to be missed on the death certificate.”

“We think that all suicides are underreported. There is uncertainty in the check box,” says Steve Elkins, the state registrar in Minnesota, which has one of the best suicide data recording systems in the country.

People suffering from depression may be aging faster than other people, according to a new study from the Netherlands.

In the study of about 1,900 people who had major depressive disorders at some point during their lives, along with 500 people who had not had depression, researchers measured the length of cell structures called telomeres, which are “caps” at the end of chromosomes that protect the DNA during cell division. Normally, telomeres shorten slightly each time cells divide, and their length is thought to be an index of a  Cell’s aging.

The researchers found telomeres were shorter in people who had experienced depression compared with people in the control group. This suggests cellular aging in people with depression is accelerated by several years, the researchers said.

The severity of a person’s depression, as well as a longer duration of symptoms were linked with shorter telomere length, and the results held after controlling for weight, smoking, drinking and several other factors that may contribute to aging, according to the study published today (Nov. 12) in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

“Psychological distress, as experienced by depressed persons, has a large, detrimental impact on the ‘wear and tear’ of a person’s body, resulting in accelerated biological aging,” said study author Josine Verhoeven, a researcher at the Free University in Amsterdam.

“The findings might help explain the variety of health complaints often experienced by people with major depression,” Verhoeven said.

Studies have shown that people with depression are at increased risk for diseases that tend to come with aging — for example, dementia, cancer and type 2 diabetes — even when health and lifestyle factors are taken into account. This has raised the question whether depression accelerates aging.

The length of telomeres is measured in terms of their number of DNA building blocks, called base pairs (bp). In the study, the telomeres in healthy people were about 5,540 bp long on average, whereas people with depression had telomeres about 5,460 bp long.

The study participants ranged in age from 18 to 65. In line with previous studies, the researchers found that with each year of age, telomeres shortened by 14 bp, on average.

The researchers showed an association, but not a cause-and-effect relationship between depression and shorter telomeres. It is possible that some other factor, such as a genetic vulnerability, underlies both, the researchers said.

It is also possible that telomere shortening is a consequence of impairment in the body’s stress system.

“An important question remains whether this aging process can be reversed,” the researchers said in their study. An enzyme called telomerase elongates telomeres by adding nucleotides to the end of chromosomes, and its possible that lifestyle changes could increase the activity of telomerase, thereby lengthening telomeres, Verhoeven said.

“A healthy lifestyle, such as enough physical exercise, not smoking and a healthy diet, might be of even greater importance in depressed individuals than it is in the non-depressed,” she said.

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY TO ALL FROM THE CORONADO CLARION STAFF 

Although still not equal with men, Women have made great strides when it comes to equal rights.

The television series Mad Men depicts the 1950s society as utterly Misogynist, women were nothing short of chattel, powerless and completely dependent on me.

The First Humans: Neanderthals had zero regard for women, it is told not by examining fossils per say, but by the lack of regard for the female during the burial process. In ancient graves we find that a ritual of reverence was performed when members lay flowers and garlands on the body before covering it. The only relics discovered in this way were of males. no females were ever found in this way, in fact only limbs were found strewn about depicting mentality that women were of little status. But throughout history, women have excelled, have equalled, and some have bested men in many ways.

Readers are invited to submit their own materials of any style not just this form.

Jack Kerouac

American Haiku (Copyright 1959)

“The American Haiku is not exactly the Japanese

Haiku.  The Japanese Haiku is strictly disciplined

to seventeen syllables but since the language

structure is different I don’t think American

Haikus (short three-line poems intended to be

completely packed with Void of Whole) should worry

about syllables because American speech is

something again…bursting to pop.

Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free

of all poetic trickery and make a little picture

and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi

Pastorella.”

             Jack Kerouac

Early morning yellow flowers,

thinking about

the drunkards of Mexico.

No telegram today

only more leaves

fell.

Nightfall,

boy smashing dandelions

with a stick.

Holding up my

purring cat to the moon

I sighed.

Drunk as a hoot owl,

writing letters

by thunderstorm.

Empty baseball field

a robin

hops along the bench.

All day long

wearing a hat

that wasn’t on my head.

Crossing the football field

coming home from work –

the lonely businessman.

After the shower

among the drenched roses

the bird thrashing in the bath.

Snap your finger

stop the world –

rain falls harder.

Nightfall,

too dark to read the page

too cold.

Following each other

my cats stop

when it thunders.

Wash hung out

by moonlight

Friday night in May.

The bottoms of my shoes

are clean

from walking in the rain.

Glow worm

sleeping on this flower –

your light’s on.  

Four Haiku

by Matsuo Basho

Spring:

A hill without a name

Veiled in morning mist.

The beginning of autumn:
Sea and emerald paddy
Both the same green.

The winds of autumn
Blow: yet still green
The chestnut husks.

A flash of lightning:
Into the gloom
Goes the heron’s