That's what I was thinking. I can see them trying to use this technology to make robot dog things with machine guns. Be they remote controlled or otherwise. With some further development it could be quite fearsome.
Like dogs with bees in their mouths. And when they bark, they shoot bees at you.
Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter
BY THE standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN's new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.
“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.
Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.
I have no need of that hypothesis
Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.
It is an ambitious shopping list. Fortunately, other researchers have blazed a trail. Patrick McNamara, for example, is the head of the Evolutionary Neurobehaviour Laboratory at Boston University's School of Medicine. He works with people who suffer from Parkinson's disease. This illness is caused by low levels of a messenger molecule called dopamine in certain parts of the brain. In a preliminary study, Dr McNamara discovered that those with Parkinson's had lower levels of religiosity than healthy individuals, and that the difference seemed to correlate with the disease's severity. He therefore suspects a link with dopamine levels and is now conducting a follow-up involving some patients who are taking dopamine-boosting medicine and some of whom are not.
Such neurochemical work, though preliminary, may tie in with scanning studies conducted to try to find out which parts of the brain are involved in religious experience. Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has looked at the brains of religious people. She used positron emission tomography (PET) to measure brain activity in six fundamentalist Christians and six non-religious (though not atheist) controls. The Christians all said that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helped them enter a religious state of mind, so both groups were scanned in six different sets of circumstances: while reading the first verse of the 23rd psalm, while reciting it out loud, while reading a happy story (a well-known German children's rhyme), while reciting that story out loud, while reading a neutral text (how to use a calling card) and while at rest.
Dr Azari was expecting to see activity in the limbic systems of the Christians when they recited the psalm. Previous research had suggested that this part of the brain (which regulates emotion) is an important centre of religious activity. In fact what happened was increased activity in three areas of the frontal and parietal cortex, some of which are better known for their involvement in rational thought. The control group did not show activity in these parts of their brains when listening to the psalm. And, intriguingly, the only thing that triggered limbic activity in either group was reading the happy story.
Dr Azari's PET study, together with one by Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania, which used single-photon emission computed tomography done on Buddhist monks, and another by Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal, which put Carmelite nuns in a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine, all suggest that religious activity is spread across many parts of the brain. That conflicts not only with the limbic-system theory but also with earlier reports of a so-called God Spot that derived partly from work conducted on epileptics. These reports suggested that religiosity originates specifically in the brain's temporal lobe, and that religious visions are the result of epileptic seizures that affect this part of the brain.
Though there is clearly still a long way to go, this sort of imaging should eventually tie down the circuitry of religious experience and that, combined with work on messenger molecules of the sort that Dr McNamara is doing, will illuminate how the brain generates and processes religious experiences. Dr Azari, however, is sceptical that such work will say much about religion's evolution and function. For this, other methods are needed.
Dr McNamara, for example, plans to analyse a database called the Ethnographic Atlas to see if he can find any correlations between the amount of cultural co-operation found in a society and the intensity of its religious rituals. And Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on.
Leviticus's children
On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.
To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.
A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.
As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community—what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified.
Dr Sosis has also studied modern secular and religious kibbutzim in Israel. Because a kibbutz, by its nature, depends on group co-operation, the principal difference between the two is the use of religious ritual. Within religious communities, men are expected to pray three times daily in groups of at least ten, while women are not. It should, therefore, be possible to observe whether group rituals do improve co-operation, based on the behaviour of men and women.
To do so, Dr Sosis teamed up with Bradley Ruffle, an economist at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel. They devised a game to be played by two members of a kibbutz. This was a variant of what is known to economists as the common-pool-resource dilemma, which involves two people trying to divide a pot of money without knowing how much the other is asking for. In the version of the game devised by Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle, each participant was told that there was an envelope with 100 shekels in it (between 1/6th and 1/8th of normal monthly income). Both players could request money from the envelope, but if the sum of their requests exceeded its contents, neither got any cash. If, however, their request equalled, or was less than, the 100 shekels, not only did they keep the money, but the amount left was increased by 50% and split between them.
Dr Sosis and Dr Ruffle picked the common-pool-resource dilemma because the communal lives of kibbutz members mean they often face similar dilemmas over things such as communal food, power and cars. The researchers' hypothesis was that in religious kibbutzim men would be better collaborators (and thus would take less) than women, while in secular kibbutzim men and women would take about the same. And that was exactly what happened.
Big father is watching you
Dr Sosis is not the only researcher to employ economic games to investigate the nature and possible advantages of religion. Ara Norenzayan, an experimental psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, has conducted experiments using what is known as the dictator game. This, too, is a well-established test used to gauge altruistic behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money—Dr Norenzayan set it at $10—and are asked if they would like to share it with another player. The dictator game thus differs from another familiar economic game in which one person divides the money and the other decides whether to accept or reject that division.
As might be expected, in the simple version of the dictator game most people take most or all of the money. However, Dr Norenzayan and his graduate student Azim Shariff tried to tweak the game by introducing the idea of God. They did this by priming half of their volunteers to think about religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.
Exactly what Dr Norenzayan has discovered here is not clear. A follow-up experiment which primed people with secular words that might, nevertheless, have prompted them to behave in an altruistic manner (civic, jury, court, police and contract) had similar effects, so it may be that he has touched on a general question of morality, rather than a specific one of religion. However, an experiment carried out by Jesse Bering, of Queen's University in Belfast, showed quite specifically that the perceived presence of a supernatural being can affect a person's behaviour—although in this case the being was not God, but the ghost of a dead person.
Dr Bering, too, likes the hypothesis that religion promotes fitness by promoting collaboration within groups. One way that might work would be to rely not just on other individuals to detect cheats by noticing things like slacking on the prayers or eating during fasts, but for cheats to detect and police themselves as well. In that case a sense of being watched by a supernatural being might be useful. Dr Bering thus proposes that belief in such beings would prevent what he called “dangerous risk miscalculations” that would lead to social deviance and reduced fitness.
One of the experiments he did to test this idea was to subject a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.
The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student's ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.
The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Dr Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. He found that those who had been told the ghost story were much quicker to press the space bar than those who had not. They did so in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student's death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student. In short, awareness of a ghost—a supernatural agent—made people less likely to cheat.
Who is my neighbour?
It all sounds very Darwinian. But there is a catch. The American communes, the kibbutzim, the students of the University of British Columbia and even the supernatural self-censorship observed by Dr Bering all seem to involve behaviour that promotes the group over the individual. That is the opposite of Darwinism as conventionally understood. But it might be explained by an idea that most Darwinians dropped in the 1960s—group selection.
The idea that evolution can work by the differential survival of entire groups of organisms, rather than just of individuals, was rejected because it is mathematically implausible. But it has been revived recently, in particular by David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, in New York, as a way of explaining the evolution of human morality in the context of inter-tribal warfare. Such warfare can be so murderous that groups whose members fail to collaborate in an individually self-sacrificial way may be wiped out entirely. This negates the benefits of selfish behaviour within a group. Morality and religion are often closely connected, of course (as Dr Norenzayan's work confirms), so what holds for the one might be expected to hold for the other, too.
Dr Wilson himself has studied the relationship between social insecurity and religious fervour, and discovered that, regardless of the religion in question, it is the least secure societies that tend to be most fundamentalist. That would make sense if adherence to the rules is a condition for the security which comes from membership of a group. He is also interested in what some religions hold out as the ultimate reward for good behaviour—life after death. That can promote any amount of self-sacrifice in a believer, up to and including suicidal behaviour—as recent events in the Islamic world have emphasised. However, belief in an afterlife is not equally well developed in all religions, and he suspects the differences may be illuminating.
That does not mean there are no explanations for religion that are based on individual selection. For example, Jason Slone, a professor of religious studies at Webster University in St Louis, argues that people who are religious will be seen as more likely to be faithful and to help in parenting than those who are not. That makes them desirable as mates. He plans to conduct experiments designed to find out whether this is so. And, slightly tongue in cheek, Dr Wilson quips that “secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at best are having only two kids. Religious people are the ones who aren't smoking and drinking, and are living longer and having the health benefits.”
That quip, though, makes an intriguing point. Evolutionary biologists tend to be atheists, and most would be surprised if the scientific investigation of religion did not end up supporting their point of view. But if a propensity to religious behaviour really is an evolved trait, then they have talked themselves into a position where they cannot benefit from it, much as a sceptic cannot benefit from the placebo effect of homeopathy. Maybe, therefore, it is God who will have the last laugh after all—whether He actually exists or not.
Well, Youtube had been blocked for the last week or two, but it's finally back up. Unfortunately, it is still slow as hell, and I can only see the first ten seconds of that video until it just forgets what it's loading and stops.
That ten seconds though is the stuff of nightmares. That grinding...
A comparison of peoples' views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower.
Among the factors contributing to America's low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say.
“American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,” said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University.
The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005. Adults in each country were asked whether they thought the statement “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” was true, false, or if they were unsure.
The study found that over the past 20 years:
* The percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution declined from 45 to 40 percent.
* The percentage overtly rejecting evolution declined from 48 to 39 percent, however.
* And the percentage of adults who were unsure increased, from 7 to 21 percent.
Of the other countries surveyed, only Turkey ranked lower, with about 25 percent of the population accepting evolution and 75 percent rejecting it. In Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and France, 80 percent or more of adults accepted evolution; in Japan, 78 percent of adults did.
The findings are detailed in the Aug. 11 issue of the journal Science.
Religion belief and evolution
The researchers also compared 10 independent variables—including religious belief, political ideology and understanding of concepts from genetics, or “genetic literacy”—between adults in America and nine European countries to determine whether these factors could predict attitudes toward evolution.
The analysis found that Americans with fundamentalist religious beliefs—defined as belief in substantial divine control and frequent prayer—were more likely to reject evolution than Europeans with similar beliefs. The researchers attribute the discrepancy to differences in how American Christian fundamentalist and other forms of Christianity interpret the Bible.
While American fundamentalists tend to interpret the Bible literally and to view Genesis as a true and accurate account of creation, mainstream Protestants in both the United States and Europe instead treat Genesis as metaphorical, the researchers say.
“Whether it’s the Bible or the Koran, there are some people who think it’s everything you need to know,” Miller said. “Other people say these are very interesting metaphorical stories in that they give us guidance, but they’re not science books.”
This latter view is also shared by the Catholic Church.
Politics and the Flat Earth
Politics is also contributing to America's widespread confusion about evolution, the researchers say. Major political parties in the United States are more willing to make opposition to evolution a prominent part of their campaigns to garner conservative votes—something that does not happen in Europe or Japan.
Miller says that it makes about as much sense for politicians to oppose evolution in their campaigns as it is for them to advocate that the Earth is flat and promise to pass legislation saying so if elected to office.
"You can pass any law you want but it won't change the shape of the Earth," Miller told LiveScience.
Paul Meyers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study, says that what politicians should be doing is saying, 'We ought to defer these questions to qualified authorities and we should have committees of scientists and engineers who we will approach for the right answers."
The researchers also single out the poor grasp of biological concepts, especially genetics, by American adults as an important contributor to the country's low confidence in evolution.
“The more you understand about genetics, the more you understand about the unity of life and the relationship humans have to other forms of life,” Miller said.
The current study also analyzed the results from a 10-country survey in which adults were tested with 10 true or false statements about basic concepts from genetics. One of the statements was "All plants and animals have DNA." Americans had a median score of 4. (The correct answer is "yes.")
Science alone is not enough
But the problem is more than one of education—it goes deeper, and is a function of our country's culture and history, said study co-author Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education in California.
“The rejection of evolution is not something that will be solved by throwing science at it,” Scott said in a telephone interview.
Myers expressed a similar sentiment. About the recent trial in Dover, Pennsylvania which ruled against intelligent design, Myers said "it was a great victory for our side and it’s done a lot to help ensure that we keep religion out of the classroom for a while longer, but it doesn’t address the root causes. The creationists are still creationists—they're not going to change because of a court decision."
Scott says one thing that will help is to have Catholics and mainstream Protestants speak up about their theologies' acceptance of evolution.
"There needs to be more addressing of creationism from these more moderate theological perspectives," Scott said. “The professional clergy and theologians whom I know tend to be very reluctant to engage in that type of ‘my theology versus your theology’ discussion, but it matters because it’s having a negative effect on American scientific literacy."
The latest packaging of creationism is intelligent design, or ID, a conjecture which claims that certain features of the natural world are so complex that they could only be the work of a Supreme Being. ID proponents say they do not deny that evolution is true, only that scientists should not rule out the possibility of supernatural intervention.
But scientists do not share doubts over evolution. They argue it is one of the most well tested theories around, supported by countless tests done in many different scientific fields. Scott says promoting uncertainty about evolution is just as bad as denying it outright and that ID and traditional creationism both spread the same message.
“Both are saying that evolution is bad science, that evolution is weak and inadequate science, and that it can’t do the job so therefore God did it,” she said.
Another view
Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the primary backer of ID, has a different view of the study.
"A better explanation for the high percentage of doubters of Darwinism in America may be that this country's citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field," Chapman said. "In particular, the growing doubts about Darwinism undoubtedly reflect growing doubts among scientists about Darwinian theory. Over 640 have now signed a public dissent and the number keeps growing."
Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education in California points out, however, that most of the scientists Chapman refers to do not do research in the field of evolution.
"If you look at the list, you can't find anybody who's really a significant contributor to the field or anyone who's done recognizable work on evolution," Matzke said.
Scott says the news is not all bad. The number of American adults unsure about the validity of evolution has increased in recent years, from 7 to 21 percent, but growth in this demographic comes at the expense of the other two groups. The percentage of Americans accepting evolution has declined, but so has the percentage of those who overtly reject it.
"I was very surprised to see that. To me that means the glass is half full,” Scott said. “That 21 percent we can educate."
I think the shocking part in this is a DECLINE in people who believe in evolution... I always jsut figured that was the waxing side of the argument. Though I wonder if they considered the growing "Intelligent Design" to not be a belief in evolution. I mean, that's basically saying "sure... evolution is there, and that's God's work!" While I personally don't agree with that perspective, at least it doesn't try to argue against evolution's existence. Oh and that test part is kind of worrisome - but I'd rather see all the questions before I come to a conclusion on that.
Intelligent Design doesn't include evolution. It purports that some aspects of the Universe are better explained by an intelligent cause than undirected "random" forces, including natural selection and evolution. They just remove specific mention of a deity in an attempt to be more mainstream. They very much do argue against evolution, and are a dangerous foe in the battle against ignorance.
This is the problem with American news. Every topic has to have two sides, no matter how absurd or stupid the opposing side is, it gets equal time on the airwaves.
US man Thomas Beatie and his wife were expecting their first child in July, US news service TransWorldNews reports.
Mr Beatie, from the state of Oregon, was born a woman but had a sex change in which he had chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy, but no change to his reproductive organs, TransWorldNews said.
He stopped taking testosterone injections to get pregnant, he reportedly wrote in an article for The Advocate, a magazine for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender readers.
Doctors had refused to treat him. One sent Mr Beatie to "the clinic's psychologist to see if we were fit to bring a child into this world and consulted with the ethics board of his hospital" , the article said.
Mr Beatie admitted his situation "sparks legal, political and social unknowns", TransWorldNews said.
Mr Beatie said he and his wife, Nancy, resorted to home insemination after buying an anonymous donor's sperm from a cryogenic sperm bank.
This kinda reminds me of the character of Mr./Ms. Garrison.
I like women, I swear!
Wait... I'm gay! Hooray.
Damn these men! I'm going to become a woman!
Guess what children... I'm a lesbian!
I feel like if you're going to go through a sex change operation, it shouldn't be so easy to just take back one of the biological functions you got rid of.
I don't know.. is it acceptable to straddle the gender/sex lines like this..... person..... is?
The English language does not have the capabilities within its corpus to talk about a "person" like this.
I don't know about the kid though. I'm trying to be open minded about the whole ordeal, because they could be good people at heart and fully capable of taking care of a child, but I can't imagine that kid is going to have a normal social life when people find out about his odd home life. Kids can be little shits.
Well I think that when farmers want to impregnate a cow, they insert a rod of frozen semen into the cow's vagina. Maybe it's something similar, or perhaps it's a syringe.
EVEN the blink of an eye is nowhere near fast enough. To get an idea of how quickly the latest ultra-fast lasers operate, try an F-16 fighter. With the throttles fully open at supersonic speed the jet would barely traverse an atom in the same time as a pulse from one of today's fastest lasers.
Instead of emitting a continuous beam, a pulsed laser concentrates its energy into brief bursts. An ultra-fast laser produces fantastically short bursts in which the intensity and power of the pulses can reach mind-boggling levels. Because the pulses happen so quickly, the effects are concentrated in time. This gives ultra-fast lasers valuable properties that their slower predecessors do not have. They can, for instance, cut something out before the energy from the pulse gets a chance to heat up and possibly damage the surrounding area. This means ultra-fast lasers are better at such jobs as cutting and welding, eye surgery and creating some of the smallest man-made structures on the surface of semiconductors.
Lasers have already come a long way. When they were developed in the 1960s they were seen as a solution in search of a problem. But now they can be found in all shapes and sizes and inside all sorts of things, from CD players to supermarket scanners, printers, spectrometers and telecoms equipment. This week Sun Microsystems said it was going to try to replace the wires between silicon chips with tiny lasers to build a new generation of faster computers.
Lasers all work in much the same way: amplifying light into a concentrated beam of a single wavelength or colour. When energy is “pumped” into a laser medium (synthetic ruby was the first to be used to make a red light) the atoms inside become excited and create a chain reaction in which photons of light prompt the generation of more photons. A conventional pulsed laser may take a millisecond (a thousandth of a second) to pump up, but if its pulse is squeezed into only a nanosecond (a billionth of a second), its power is increased a million times.
Hitting the spot A new record for intensity was recently reported by a team using a titanium-sapphire laser known as HERCULES, which occupies several rooms at the University of Michigan. It produced a beam with 300 terawatts of power (several hundred times the capacity of America's entire electricity grid). But it was concentrated onto a speck a little more than one thousandth of a millimetre across—and it lasted for just 30 femtoseconds (30 million billionths of a second). HERCULES takes about ten seconds to charge up for each pulse, compared with an hour or so for some similar lasers.
Smaller femtosecond lasers are already in production. The precision of their high-intensity pulses and their ability to cause less “collateral damage” to surrounding areas means they can make finer holes in things like medical stents, which are used to keep arteries open, or the nozzles of fuel injectors. Amplitude Systèmes, a French company, produces a femtosecond laser for the engraving of security codes inside transparent materials, like scent bottles or syringes, to help prevent counterfeiting. This could be done with a slower nanosecond laser, but would risk making tiny cracks in the glass, which can cause the contents to deteriorate.
Femtosecond lasers are beginning to be used in medicine, although such applications are at an early stage of development. The extremely short heating time and “cleaner” cuts they produce mean it is possible to remove tissue much more accurately—down to individual cells, says Robert Tzou, of the University of Missouri. Dr Tzou and his colleagues are looking at uses ranging from cutting out burnt skin and melanomas, to dentistry, bonding joint implants to bone, and general surgery.
Groups like the one in Missouri are also investigating exactly how different types of human tissue and bone react to femtosecond lasers. The optimal wavelength, pulse and duration can vary, according not just to which part of the body is being operated on but also to the age of a patient, says Dr Tzou. And the ultra-fast lasers need to be made easier for surgeons to use in operating theatres. Later this year Dr Tzou hopes to have one that will deliver femtosecond pulses along flexible fibre cables, which can be held like a light-pen. Surgeons can also insert fibre lasers into the body to perform precision surgery.
Meanwhile, femtosecond lasers will continue to set speed records and explore new frontiers. Their rapid flashes can be used to “freeze” events that may be impossible to observe by other means. Earlier this year a team at Lund University in Sweden used a laser with pulses measured in attoseconds (billion billionths of a second) to record an electron in motion.
Femtosecond lasers can also be used to interact with other materials and generate particle beams for experiments, says Karl Krushelnick, of the University of Michigan. This could shrink the size and cost of building giant accelerators, which produce sub-atomic particles. Dr Krushelnick thinks laser-powered particle generators could fit into the basements of universities, if not on laboratory benches. That could mean the enormous Large Hadron Collider, now nearing completion inside a 27km tunnel in Geneva at a cost of some $5 billion, is the last of its kind.
The tone of that article makes it sound like these lasers are faster than normal lasers.
Light speed is light speed, geez.
That's what I thought, but I think the emphasis was on the duration of the laser. They have the quickest laser producing devise. As well as the ability to measure smaller fractions of time with those lasers.
Comments
That's what I was thinking. I can see them trying to use this technology to make robot dog things with machine guns. Be they remote controlled or otherwise. With some further development it could be quite fearsome.
Like dogs with bees in their mouths. And when they bark, they shoot bees at you.
Phil Plait debunking the silly egg-standing myth for like the 15th year in a row? Awesome Wil Wheaton t-shirt? A desktop of SCIENCE!? Yes please!
That ten seconds though is the stuff of nightmares. That grinding...
U.S. Lags World in Grasp of Genetics and Acceptance of Evolution
Especially as a condemnation of American education/seperation between (dominant)Church and State.
I'm pretty sure the Pope agrees with evolution. Where's the argument against it?
This is why things like Scientology exist.
I like women, I swear!
Wait... I'm gay! Hooray.
Damn these men! I'm going to become a woman!
Guess what children... I'm a lesbian!
I feel like if you're going to go through a sex change operation, it shouldn't be so easy to just take back one of the biological functions you got rid of.
I don't know.. is it acceptable to straddle the gender/sex lines like this..... person..... is?
I don't know about the kid though. I'm trying to be open minded about the whole ordeal, because they could be good people at heart and fully capable of taking care of a child, but I can't imagine that kid is going to have a normal social life when people find out about his odd home life. Kids can be little shits.
WHERE ARE THE LASERS?
Ultra-fast lasers: Zapping with the light fantastic
Where am I gonna get that kind of power Tom? It can't be done!
Light speed is light speed, geez.
That's what I thought, but I think the emphasis was on the duration of the laser. They have the quickest laser producing devise. As well as the ability to measure smaller fractions of time with those lasers.
"What'd you say?"
"A bolt of lightning!"