| Japanese stem cell researcher wins Balzan prize By COLLEEN BARRY 2010-09-06T15:39:33ZMILAN (AP) -- A Japanese researcher who found a way to give adults cells certain characteristics of embryonic stem cells, a process scientists say could eventually lead to cures for spinal cord injuries and other ailments, has been awarded the Balzan Prize for biology.... hosted.ap.org |
A surprise from the LHC already! The CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced a surprise yesterday which may dramatically change our ideas about quarks, gluons and protonsThere was a special Cern seminar yesterday evening on some new results from the CMS experiment, one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. The result is summarised in this colourful landscape.First imagine this is a contour map of the cylinder CMS makes around the LHC collisions. It has been cut lengthwise and unrolled. Then for each pair of particles in an event, you put one of them at (0,0), and plot the position of the other. (Thanks to GreyBadger for the comment below correcting the initial over-simplified explanation here).The map is the average distribution of the separation between particle pairs for a very special class of events, with very many particles in them. The big peak is something like a "jet" of particles, what we expect when a quark or gluon in the proton undergoes a collision and is scattered off at an angle.Balancing it on the other side is a long ridge. This is an expected feature. You have to have something there to balance energy and momentum.The weird thing is the other ridge (pointed at by the arrow). This shows particles and energy coming out far away from the jet in rapidity (meaning at angles along the LHC beam) but on the same side of it around the cylinder. Our best models of quark and gluon interactions and jet production do not predict such an effect.What is causing it? Well, a similar effect was seen at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the US. There it was interpreted as the quarks and gluons in a collision between heavy nuclei behaving collectively - moving together like a drop of liquid or a plasma. This is the way quarks and gluons behave under extreme temperature and pressure - for instance shortly after the Big Bang.The big surprise is seeing these in proton-proton collisions. As far as I know, it was thought that the temperature, pressure and the sheer number of quarks and gluons would not be enough to cause this. This is why RHIC uses heavy nuclei, not just protons. The LHC will run with heavy ions at some point soon. (In fact the Alice detector is built specifically for this). My guess is that the CMS scientists were making this measurement with protons as a baseline test for future heavy ion measurements. I suspect they are as surprised as anyone else to see that ridge.I expect a lot of theoretical activity over the next weeks and months as people try to digest and interpret these results. And some experimental activity as we on Atlas try to see if we can see the same effect.Jon Butterworthguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Morality beyond God | Mary Warnock Calls for a return to faith assume God is the only moral authority, but sympathy with human need is the bedrock of good behaviourWhat is faith without God?It is often assumed that religion is the only source of agreed, stable morality. We must therefore either return to literal faith in the existence of God, or we must accept moral "relativism", which is another word for moral anarchy.Such assumptions, surprisingly common even among those who practice no religion, are, in my view, mistaken; they rest on a false belief about the actual nature of the moral. But before I argue that case, I'd like to ask what recent calls for a return to faith entail. Suppose for a moment you understood Stephen Hawkings's argument that it can be shown mathematically that there is no need to suppose a God as creator of universes; and suppose you rejected it, arguing, like creationists now and in the 18th century, that the universe we live in is such that it constitutes proof of a designer, who is God, what else could you infer about this designer?The answer, surely, is: nothing. We cannot move from believing that God lit the blue touchpaper to assuming that he made man in his own image, or gave him dominion over other animals in the world. We cannot assume that just because a creator must exist, he must also be a loving father, interested in the wellbeing of his children, and aiming for the salvation of their immortal souls, or, on the other hand, a stern judge, condemning the sinful to eternal damnation.These beliefs, as David Hume pointed out more than 200 years ago, are quite extraneous to any belief that the world was created by a divine hand. From the need for a creator you can infer nothing but that a creator exists, or did once exist. About the creator's attributes or character you can know nothing. But those who call for a return to faith call for more than a return to the belief in a creator. They want a belief in God as the great and unchanging moral authority, by knowledge of whose commands we can know for certain what it is right and what it is wrong.However, the enthronement of God as the source not only of the laws of nature but of moral law has its origin not in the argument from design, but in the narrative of the scriptures. In the Jewish tradition, the laws that should regulate life in society, among them the Ten Commandments, were given to Moses by God in the mists of Mount Sinai. In the Christian tradition, the new covenant of love that replaced the old was preached by God himself through his incarnate son. To return to faith is to accept the authority of these narratives and treat them as the literal truth.But is it now possible for people simply to decide to believe the literal truth of the scriptures? We have become too scientifically and historically sophisticated to accept the story of the Garden of Eden as other than a myth, albeit a powerful and illuminating myth. How can we simply choose to see God's hand in the Ten Commandments? Our historical sense tells us the small, suffering society that was the Jews needed a cement to hold them together contra mundum and that this was provided by their great moral leader Moses and the story of his shortlived private encounter with God, giving supernatural authority to his teaching. Shared legends are cohesive.Similarly, the genuinely great moral reform that constituted Christianity's break from the rest of Judaism was imbued with the supernatural and acquired power over the imagination as the messianic story was repeated. Religious narrative is the imaginative clothing of morality. Religion is born from moral leaders who are believed either to have seen God or to be God incarnate. So their authority is confirmed.Has morality, then, in reality none but human authority? I do not believe that it has; but this does not entail it must be completely uncertain or that there is no real difference between how we must and how we must not behave. For human beings alone among animals can envisage a world that is better than their own. They can understand the faults, the hazards and the horrors of their own, even if it is others not themselves who suffer. They have much in common and can sympathise with each other. This is part of human nature, though it needs to be taught.Morality arises as the predicament of human beings in the world is recognised and their shared responsibility one for another is understood. No human being is exempt from the temptation to make things worse in his own interest, nor from the responsibility not to do so. One way of marking this human commonality is to talk of universal human rights. Another is to call attention to common human needs, and that sympathy with human need that is the foundation of good, rather than bad behaviour.ReligionEthicsStephen HawkingMary Warnockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
UN meeting aims to set species-saving goals By MALCOLM FOSTER 2010-10-17T12:36:46ZTOKYO (AP) -- An international conference aimed at preserving the planet's diversity of plants and animals in the face of pollution and habitat loss begins Monday in Japan, facing some of the same divisions between rich and poor nations that have stalled U.N. climate talks.... hosted.ap.org |
Langbroek promotes psychological testing of political candidates Queensland Opposition Leader John-Paul Langbroek says psychometric testing could weed out candidates who would not cope with the scrutiny of public life. abc.net.au |