CONTRA EL PINGALISMO CASTRISTA/
"Se que no existe el consuelo
que no existe
la anhelada tierrra de mis suenos
ni la desgarrada vision de nuestros heroes.
Pero
te seguimos buscando, patria,..." - Reinaldo Arenas
Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory
About 40 percent of Greenland's ice sheet thawed at or near the surface on July 8. Four days later, the melt had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed.
By Miguel Llanos, NBC News
Three satellites found that 97 percent of Greenland -- the land mass second only to Antarctica for its volume of ice -- underwent a thaw never before seen in 33 years of satellite tracking, NASA reported Tuesday.
Satellite experts at first didn't trust their readings, especially since they showed an incredible acceleration. Over four days, Greenland's ice sheet -- which covers 683,000 square miles -- went from 40 percent in thaw to nearly entirely in thaw.
"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: Was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA's statement about the findings.
Famed physicist Stephen Hawking visits the Large Hadron Collider's underground tunnel in 2006. He bet against the discovery of the Higgs boson but is now willing to pay up.
By Alan Boyle
When it comes to betting on cosmic outcomes like the discovery of the Higgs boson, British physicist Stephen Hawking is a three-time loser. But there's a good reason for that.
Hawking's latest loss was to Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan who worked out some of the ways that the Higgs boson could be detected in a particle-smasher like the Large Hadron Collider. About 10 years ago, Kane was discussing some of the issues while he and Hawking were together at a physics conference.
"Stephen interrupted, and said he would like to bet me that there was no Higgs boson," Kane recalled today. It took a while to work out the conditions of the $100 bet, and at one point things looked so dim for the search that Kane sent Hawking a check, according to The Detroit News.
But this week, when researchers at the LHC announced that a subatomic particle matching the Higgs boson's general description had been discovered, it was Hawking's turn to concede the bet. "It seems I have just lost $100," he told the BBC's Pallab Ghosh.
Waiting for the check
Kane told me he's heard from several third parties that Hawking is acknowledging his loss, but said Hawking himself "hasn't sent me anything yet." He figures that Hawking will eventually make good on the gambling debt.
"The important thing is the discovery of the Higgs," Kane said. "But it's fun to win a bet from Stephen, and I'm guessing he doesn't mind losing a little money."
This isn't the first time Hawking has lost a small-stakes, high-profile bet on a scientific proposition.
Back in 1975, he bet Caltech physicist Kip Thorne that there was no black hole at the center of the X-ray source known as Cygnus X-1. By 1998, he conceded that the black hole was there, and got Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse magazine as a payoff.
In 1997, Thorne and Hawking bet Caltech's John Preskill that information is completely lost when something falls into a black hole. But in 2004, Hawking changed his mind and said that information could conceivably leak out of a black hole. Hawking paid up by sending Preskill the repository of information he requested: a baseball encyclopedia. At last report, Thorne had not yet conceded.
There's another wager still pending: Hawking is betting that primordial gravitational waves will be detected, resulting in the confirmation of inflationary big-bang theory. The Perimeter Institute's Neil Turok, a proponent of the cyclic model of cosmic origins, is betting against him.
"If these gravitational waves are seen, they will instantly disprove our model," Turok told Cambridge professor Alan Macfarlane. The terms of the bet, however, are still under negotiation.
GENEVA — Peter Higgs was no good in the lab, but he never doubted that one day his theory of a powerful subatomic particle that bears his name would be proven right in practice. His surprise was that he lived to see that day.
Speaking at Geneva's CERN research center on Wednesday after experimental physicists announced the discovery of a new particle, a boson much as Higgs imagined half a century ago, he confessed to Reuters he felt "rather dazed but very pleased."
As a schoolboy in Bristol in the southwest of England, the now 83-year-old Higgs admitted to being "incompetent" at science in the laboratory. He went on, however, to specialize in the theoretical realm, applying mathematics to exploring the outer reaches of our understanding of the universe that makes us.
One paper he dispatched from Edinburgh University in 1964, as he was formulating a theory of an elusive particle to explain how an ordered universe emerged from Big Bang, was rejected by an academic physics journal edited at CERN.
But he gave no sign of bearing a grudge when he spent the day at the institution watching its experimental experts vindicate him.
"For me personally it is just the confirmation of something I did 48 years ago, and it is very satisfying to be proved right in some way," Higgs said in the interview. "I haven't been dreaming about it for 48 years because I had other things to do with my life. At the beginning, I had no expectation that I would still be alive when it happened."
That experimental proof had been delivered in his own lifetime was, he said, "incredible," and he suggested the moment would have greatly surprised his early science teachers: "I certainly did some lab work as a schoolboy in Bristol. I was incompetent," he said, a boyish grin flitting across his round face.
Olympic athletes have become increasingly reliant on scientists as advisers. A Wiredarticle by Mark McClusky explores the efforts of sports scientists to improve athletic performance as gains have become harder to achieve. The Australian Institute of Sport is leading the charge; its success is best-demonstrated by an example from the skeleton, a sledding event that was recently reintroduced as an Olympic event:
They determined that one significant predictor of success had nothing to do with the sled itself or even the skill of the pilot. The faster a competitor pushed the sled through the 30-meter start zone before jumping on it, the better they performed. So researchers set up a national testing campaign, looking for women with backgrounds in competitive sports who excelled at the 30-meter sprint. They also evaluated candidates to see how well they responded to feedback and coaching. Eventually, they picked a group of 10 athletes—including track sprinters, a water skier, and several surf lifesavers, an Australian sport that requires sprinting through sand.
The athletes were given access to the best coaching, equipment, and sports science. Every training and competitive run was analyzed and dissected as coaches looked for places to improve start and steering techniques. Specialized strength and conditioning programs targeted the needs of the sport, especially explosive power and sprint speed.
The program was a success: An Australian racer qualified for the Olympics just 18 months after she first saw a sled. Amazingly, she had completed only 220 runs before qualifying. (A typical US skeleton racer makes upwards of 2,000 runs before appearing in the Olympics.)
A researcher from the University of Bristol removes samples from Tito Bustillo Cave in Spain. The stalactite is painted with a red figure that dates back 29,000 to 36,000 years.
By Alan Boyle
When archaeologists tried out a new technique to determine the age of Spain's most famous Paleolithic cave paintings, they were surprised to discover that the paintings were thousands of years older than previously thought — so old that it's conceivable they were painted by Neanderthals.
The technique just might change the way we think about the paintings, and the way we think about our long-extinct, long-maligned Neanderthal cousins as well.
"Neanderthals, of course, have had this bad press for a long time," the University of Barcelona's Joao Zilhao, a member of the research team, told reporters. "But the research developments over the last decade have shown that this is probably not deserved." More >>
LOS ANGELES — Ray Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master who transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters, and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning future of “Fahrenheit 451,” has died. He was 91.
He died Tuesday night, his daughter said Wednesday. Alexandra Bradbury did not have additional details.
Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active into his 90s, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. He wrote every day in the basement office of his home in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles and appeared from time to time at bookstores, public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.
His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humor and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans. Bradbury also scripted John Huston’s 1956 film version of “Moby Dick” and wrote for “The Twilight Zone” and other television programs, including “The Ray Bradbury Theater,” for which he adapted dozens of his works.
“What I have always been is a hybrid author,” Bradbury said in 2009. “I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theater, and I am completely in love with libraries.”
Bradbury broke through in 1950 with “The Martian Chronicles,” a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization.
OUR core physiology relies on subtle organic timers: disrupt them, and effects range from jet lag to schizophrenia. Exactly how and when life began keeping time is unclear, but a candidate for the original biological clock may solve the mystery.
Biological clocks are ubiquitous in nature, so the first clock should pre-date the evolutionary parting of the ways that led to modern groups of organisms. All the clocks found so far are unique to different groups of organisms, though. Not so the clock discovered by Akhilesh Reddy at the University of Cambridge and colleagues. In an enzyme called peroxiredoxin (PRX), they seem to have found a grandfather clock - one that is common to nearly all life.
PRX gets rid of poisonous, highly reactive oxygen (ROS), which is produced by oxygen-based metabolism. And the enzyme oscillates: it flits between an active and inactive state, depending on whether oxygen is bound to the active site. Using antibodies that bind only to the oxidised enzyme, the team found that PRX oxidation keeps cycling independently on a 24-hour cycle, even when organisms were kept in constant light or constant dark.
Moreover, they found this PRX cycle in mice, fruit flies, a plant, a fungus, an alga, bacteria and even in archaea - the most primitive of all cellular life (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11088). That suggests PRX evolved early in life's history. A gene sequence analysis suggests it did so 2.5 billion years ago, during the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) - a critical interval when the oxygen released by photosynthesis began to accumulate in the atmosphere.
Reddy thinks PRX protected primitive cells from ROS damage by surging when peaks in photosynthesis related to daylight temporarily bumped up levels of oxygen. "Initially this was externally driven," he says. Then PRX began oscillating spontaneously in anticipation of this load - thus becoming an independent daily clock. "Organisms with this anticipatory ability would be better adapted than organisms that merely 'reacted' to things as they happened," Reddy says.
Because all forms of life appear to dance to the metabolic rhythm of PRX oxidation, Reddy believes it pre-dates the other gene-related clocks that organisms carry.
It may even have driven their evolution. A gene-related clock, unique to cyanobacteria, appears to have evolved alongside PRX. What is more, another archaean that lives without oxygen and never had to deal with ROS has no PRX clock - and no circadian rhythms at all.
When PRX emerged 2.5 billion years ago, the Earth spun faster and a day lasted only 11 hours. "It will have adapted to the lengthening of the day-night cycle over time," says Reddy.
It may have done more than adapt - day lengths best suited to biological clocks may have coincided with times during which life made important evolutionary leaps. Ioannis Karafyllidis of the Democritus University of Thrace in Xanthi, Greece, has found that the cycling of the cyanobacterial clock resonates, or works most efficiently, at periods of 11 and 21 hours. These are the day lengths of the GOE and the Cambrian explosion of life, around 530 million years ago (Biosystems, DOI: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2012.02.008).
...The study is a first step in determining how widespread a dislike for cilantro is, at least in a sample of young Canadians. It's unclear whether older Canadians feel similarly or how much the herb is despised by people in other countries.
Eventually, the Toronto scientists hope to pinpoint the genetic basis for why cilantro is an herb some people love to hate. More >>
CERN announces sightings, but not proof,
of possible Higgs boson signatures in the LHC, and our correspondents
take a look inside the world's largest microscope
Squeezed into a submersible as futuristic as anything in his movies, James Cameronintends to descend solo to the ocean's deepest point within weeks, the Canadian filmmaker and explorer announced Thursday. (See more pictures of Cameron's sub.)
Just Tuesday, during testing off Papua New Guinea, Cameron dived deeper than any other human has on a solo mission. Now he aims to become the first human to visit the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep in more than 50 years—and to return with animals, images, and data that were unthinkable in 1960.
By contrast, the Cameron-designed DEEPSEA CHALLENGER
sub is expected to allow the explorer to spend about six hours on the
seafloor. During that time he plans to collect samples and film the
whole affair with multiple 3-D, high-definition cameras and an
8-foot-tall (2.4-meter-tall) array of LED lights.
Already the
tech-laden sub has taken Cameron a record-breaking 5.1 miles (8.2
kilometers) straight down. That Tuesday dress rehearsal for Mariana made
the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER the deepest-diving submersible in operation and the deepest-diving single-pilot sub in history.
Designed
to sink strangely—and efficiently—upright, the 24-foot-tall
(7-meter-tall) craft was eight years in the making. Among its advances
is a specially designed foam that helps allow the new sub to weigh in at
12 metric tons, making it some 12 times lighter than the Trieste.
Despite its innovations, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER's spherical steel cockpit just barely accommodates its single occupant—in this case, Cameron, the man behind Avatar, Titanic,The Terminator, and, fittingly, The Abyss.
Nothing
in his fictional worlds could quite prepare him for real-life
exploration, said Cameron, a veteran of dozens of deep-sea submersible
dives.
¨Saturno jugando con sus hijos¨/ Pedro Pablo Oliva
Seguidores
Carta desde la carcel de Fidel Castro Ruz
“…después de todo, para mí la cárcel es un buen descanso, que sólo tiene de malo el que es obligatorio. Leo mucho y estudio mucho. Parece increíble, las horas pasan como si fuesen minutos y yo, que soy de temperamento intranquilo, me paso el día leyendo, apenas sin moverme para nada. La correspondencia llega normalmente…”
“…Como soy cocinero, de vez en cuando me entretengo preparando algún pisto. Hace poco me mandó mi hermana desde Oriente un pequeño jamón y preparé un bisté con jalea de guayaba. También preparo spaghettis de vez en cuando, de distintas formas, inventadas todas por mí; o bien tortilla de queso. ¡Ah! ¡Qué bien me quedan! por supuesto, que el repertorio no se queda ahí. Cuelo también café que me queda muy sabroso”. “…En cuanto a fumar, en estos días pasados he estado rico: una caja de tabacos H. Upman del doctor Miró Cardona, dos cajas muy buenas de mi hermano Ramón….”. “Me voy a cenar: spaghettis con calamares, bombones italianos de postre, café acabadito de colar y después un H. Upman #4. ¿No me envidias?”. “…Me cuidan, me cuidan un poquito entre todos. No le hacen caso a uno, siempre estoy peleando para que no me manden nada. Cuando cojo el sol por la mañana en shorts y siento el aire de mar, me parece que estoy en una playa… ¡Me van a hacer creer que estoy de vacaciones! ¿Qué diría Carlos Marx de semejantes revolucionarios?”.
Quotes
¨La patria es dicha de todos, y dolor de todos, y cielo para todos, y no feudo ni capellanía de nadie¨ - Marti
"No temas ni a la prision, ni a la pobreza, ni a la muerte. Teme al miedo" - Giacomo Leopardi
¨Por eso es muy importante, Vicky, hijo mío, que recuerdes siempre para qué sirve la cabeza: para atravesar paredes¨– Halvar de Flake[El vikingo]
"Como no me he preocupado de nacer, no me preocupo de morir"- Lorca
"Al final, no os preguntarán qué habéis sabido, sino qué habéis hecho" - Jean de Gerson
"Si queremos que todo siga como está, es necesario que todo cambie" - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
"Todo hombre paga su grandeza con muchas pequeñeces, su victoria con muchas derrotas, su riqueza con múltiples quiebras" - Giovanni Papini
"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans" - John Lennon
"Habla bajo, lleva siempre un gran palo y llegarás lejos" - Proverbio Africano
"No hay medicina para el miedo"-Proverbio escoces "El supremo arte de la guerra es doblegar al enemigo sin luchar" -Sun Tzu
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother" - Albert Einstein
"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office" - H. L. Menken
"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" -Elie Wiesel
"Stay hungry, stay foolish" - Steve Jobs
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years ther'ed be a shortage of sand" - Milton Friedman
"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel
"No se puede controlar el resultado, pero si lo que uno haga para alcanzarlo" - Vitor Belfort [MMA Fighter]
Liborio
A la puerta de la gloria está San Pedro sentado y ve llegar a su lado a un hombre de cierta historia. No consigue hacer memoria y le pregunta con celo: ¿Quién eras allá en el suelo? Era Liborio mi nombre. Has sufrido mucho, hombre, entra, te has ganado el cielo.
Para Raul Castro
Cuba ocupa el penultimo lugar en el mundo en libertad economica solo superada por Corea del Norte.
Cuba ocupa el lugar 147 entre 153 paises evaluados en "Democracia, Mercado y Transparencia 2007"
Cuando vinieron a buscar a los comunistas, Callé: yo no soy comunista. Cuando vinieron a buscar a los sindicalistas, Callé: yo no soy sindicalista. Cuando vinieron a buscar a los judíos, Callé: yo no soy judío. Cuando vinieron a buscar a los católicos, Callé: yo no soy “tan católico”. Cuando vinieron a buscarme a mí, Callé: no había quien me escuchara.
Un sitio donde los hechos y sus huellas nos conmueven o cautivan
CUBA LLORA Y EL MUNDO Y NOSOTROS NO ESCUCHAMOS
Donde esta el Mundo, donde los Democratas, donde los Liberales? El pueblo de Cuba llora y nadie escucha. Donde estan los Green, los Socialdemocratas, los Ricos y los Pobres, los Con Voz y Sin Voz? Cuba llora y nadie escucha. Donde estan el Jet Set, los Reyes y Principes, Patricios y Plebeyos? Cuba desesperada clama por solidaridad. Donde Bob Dylan, donde Martin Luther King, donde Hollywood y sus estrellas? Donde la Middle Class democrata y conservadora, o acaso tambien liberal a ratos? Y Gandhi? Y el Dios de Todos? Donde los Santos y Virgenes; los Dioses de Cristianos, Protestantes, Musulmanes, Budistas, Testigos de Jehova y Adventistas del Septimo Dia. Donde estan Ochun y todas las deidades del Panteon Yoruba que no acuden a nuestro llanto? Donde Juan Pablo II que no exige mas que Cuba se abra al Mundo y que el Mundo se abra a Cuba? Que hacen ahora mismo Alberto de Monaco y el Principe Felipe que no los escuchamos? Donde Madonna, donde Angelina Jolie y sus adoptados around de world; o nos hara falta un Brando erguido en un Oscar por Cuba? Donde Sean Penn? Donde esta la Aristocracia Obrera y los Obreros menos Aristocraticos, donde los Working Class que no estan junto a un pueblo que lanquidece, sufre y llora por la ignominia? Que hacen ahora mismo Zapatero y Rajoy que no los escuchamos, y Harper y Dion, e Hillary y Obama; donde McCain que no los escuchamos? Y los muertos? Y los que estan muriendo? Y los que van a morir? Y los que se lanzan desesperados al mar? Donde estan el minero cantabrico o el pescador de percebes gijonese? Los Canarios donde estan? A los africanos no los oimos, y a los australianos con su acento de hombres duros tampoco. Y aquellos chinos milenarios de Canton que fundaron raices eternas en la Isla? Y que de la Queen Elizabeth y los Lords y Gentlemen? Que hace ahora mismo el combativo Principe Harry que no lo escuchamos? Donde los Rockefellers? Donde los Duponts? Donde Kate Moss? Donde el Presidente de la ONU? Y Solana donde esta? Y los Generales y Doctores? Y los Lam y los Fabelo, y los Sivio y los Fito Paez? Y que de Canseco y Miñoso? Y de los veteranos de Bahia de Cochinos y de los balseros y de los recien llegados? Y Carlos Otero y Susana Perez? Y el Bola, y Pancho Cespedes? Y YO y TU? Y todos nosotros que estamos aqui y alla rumiando frustaciones y resquemores, envidias y sinsabores; autoelogios y nostalgias, en tanto Louis Michel comulga con Perez Roque mientras Biscet y una NACION lanquidecen? Donde Maceo, donde Marti; donde aquel Villena con su carga para matar bribones? Cuba llora y clama y el Mundo NO ESCUCHA!!!
![NEOCASTRISMO [Hacer click en la imagen]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5jy0SZhMlaU/SsuPVOlq2NI/AAAAAAAAH1E/4xt2Bwd2reE/S150/ppo+saturno+jugando+con+sus+hijos.jpg)
