Among the things we don't know

Some fun articles you are missing by not being subscribed to the physorg.com newsletter

The search for Earth's missing carbon
Deep beneath the surface of the Earth, a vast and unseen community of strange, microscopic lifeforms quietly subsists on the heat rising from our planet's interior.....Twenty years ago, the idea that there was a deep underground biosphere would have been laughed at,” said Robert Hazen, a research scientist

Giant galaxies akin to snowflakes in space
(PhysOrg.com) -- Giant galaxies that contain billions of stars are born in much the same way as delicate snowflakes, new research from Swinburne University of Technology has shown.....

A wealth of molecules in an extreme galaxy
(PhysOrg.com) -- Arp 220 is the closest galaxy to the Milly Way with an extreme luminosity, defined as being more than about 300 times that of our own galaxy. Some dramatic galaxies have values of luminosity ten times brighter still. Astronomers are still piecing together the reasons for these huge energy outputs, while sorting out why our own galaxy is so modest...

Startling News about Star Formation

Below are a few brief excerpts from an article summarizing a new paper (published, where? not sure) on new and surprising astronomical observations. The excerpts are a brief part of the summary, which you should read. Also the following is rearranged a bit.
...
ESA's Herschel space observatory has discovered a population of dust-enshrouded galaxies that do not need as much dark matter as previously thought to collect gas and burst into star formation....

The galaxies are far away and each boasts some 300 billion times the mass of the Sun. The size challenges current theory that predicts a galaxy has to be more than ten times larger, 5000 billion solar masses, to be able form large numbers of stars...Most of the mass of any galaxy is expected to be dark matter, a hypothetical substance that has yet to be detected but which astronomers believe must exist to provide sufficient gravity to prevent galaxies ripping themselves apart as they rotate....

Current models of the birth of galaxies start with the accumulation of large amounts of dark matter. Its gravitational attraction drags in ordinary atoms. If enough atoms accumulate, a 'starburst' is ignited, in which stars form at rates 100-1000 times faster than in our own galaxy does today....

Further analysis and simulations have shown that this smaller mass for the galaxies [Herschel's results] is a sweet spot for star formation. Less massive galaxies find it hard to form more than a first generation of stars before fizzling out. At the other end of the scale, more massive galaxies struggle because their gas cools rather slowly, preventing it from collapsing down to the high densities needed to ignite star formation....

Electrifying results from brain waves

The following is an excerpt from an article reporting recent research on monitoring the electric signals from the human brain. T he whole article is interesting, this is just a small part, of what is actually a precis.

In another paper that will publish Feb. 9 in The Journal of Neuroscience, Leuthardt and his colleagues have shown that the wavelength of brain signals in a particular region can be used to determine what function that region is performing at that time. They analyzed brain activity by focusing on data from a single electrode positioned over a number of different regions involved in speech. Researchers could use higher-frequency bands of activity in this brain area to tell whether patients:

* had heard a word or seen a word
* were preparing to say a word they had heard or a word they had seen
* were saying a word they had heard or a word they had seen.

“We’ve historically lumped the frequencies of brain activity that we used in this study into one phenomenon, but our findings show that there is true diversity and non-uniformity to these frequencies,” he says. “We can obtain a much more powerful ability to decode brain activity and cognitive intention by using electrocorticography to analyze these frequencies.”

Paleolithic Sex

An artistic carving on a reindeer antler has been evaluated by archeologists, and their report will soon be published in March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, The picture accompanying this preview is crucial to appreciating the points made below. So look at it. The scholarly concensus seems to be that this carving is 10,900 years old (radio carbon dating) and that the subject is a woman with spread legs. The symbolic value would seem to be a fertility ritual. Okay, if you have looked at this picture, and read the article accompanying it, you will notice, perhaps, that there could be other interpretations. First off----that is a figure of a woman and man in one body, and a quick guess would be it represents a union of natural and/or spiritual forces. That is not what the article says, but that part seems obvious to me, just from the photograph of the carving.

The meaning of the universal zigzag pattern around the figure is illuminated, by the stick figure,  if I am correct. You have the opposition of angles in the zigzag itself, perhaps connoting a recognition of the duality of forces controlling the world.Duality as in light/dark, male/female, hunger/satiation, etc.  If  (IF) this is an early evidence for man's rational intellect (binary thought, there are only ever two options) it would have been more powerful and creative at it's inception, and therefore more able to deal with complex spiritual realities (as opposed to today's mechanical intellect where binary connotes an inability to deal with novelty.) My thought that the figure represents of union, a transcendence of the dueling dualities, is strengthening by the positioning of the stick figure in relation to the zigzag. Notice the legs of the figure align with the zigzags opposite it, (to make a new pattern, whose effect is of more balance) and also there is a rhythmic flow with a different stretch of zigzag and the legs of the figure, so the effect is of a continuous zigzag pattern.
Another question that comes to mind after reading this fascinating article is about the dating. Did anyone think that this antler, found by a farmer in Poland recently, might have been first found by someone living more recently than the radiocarbon dates. It seems plausible to me that the paleolithic hunter and gatherer might well have found an old antler, tossed up to the surface by some climatic event, and viewed the find as auspicious, and the opportunity to celebrate, as we might finding precious gems. Just a thought, which I mention also as an example of how keeping in mind a horizon of ignorance, in one's intellectual adventures, leads not just to more complicated answers, but the joy of more questions.