SCIY's page views totaled 1,508,874 hits through the end of Jan08.

We reached a new high of 162,728 Page Views during the month of January 2008, a dramatic 39% increase over December 2007.

Our Distinct Hosts Served also set a new record in January of 29,778 Distinct Readers, a 9% increase over the previous record set in December.

And our Bandwidth during January also reached a new high of 11,927 Total Megabytes Transferred, a substantial increase of 29% over the prior record level set in December. ...   more »

The Maroma brand of incense, candles, joss sticks, perfumed sachets and air fresheners is well known worldwide. And it is manufactured right here in India, at Auroville in Puducherry.

The man behind Maroma is Paul Pinthon, a French pharmacist living in Auroville. Recalling his move to this spiritual commune from France, where he was working as an assistant chemist, he says he had felt "the call of Mother." Auroville's spiritual head.    more »

...Active Galactic Nuclei - thought to be powered by supermassive black holes that devour large amounts of matter - are the most likely candidate for the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth.

Using the Pierre Auger Observatory, the team of scientists found that the sources of the highest-energy particles are not distributed uniformly across the sky. Instead, the Auger results link the origins of these mysterious particles to the locations of nearby galaxies that have active nuclei in their centres.

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) have long been considered sites where high-energy particle production might take place. They swallow gas, dust and other matter from their host galaxies and spew out particles and energy.

While most galaxies have black holes at their centre, only a fraction of all galaxies have an AGN. The exact mechanism of how AGNs can accelerate particles to energies 100 million times higher than the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth is still a mystery. ...   more »

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Purchases of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly fell to a 12-year low in December, ending the worst sales year since records began in 1963 and signaling little prospect for a recovery...

The median price of an existing single-family home dropped 1.8 percent in 2007, the first decline since records began four decades ago and probably the first since the Great Depression in the 1930's, the Realtors group said. ...   more »

Roger Anger, chief architect of the international township of Auroville and member of the Governing Board of the Auroville Foundation, passed away on January 15 in France. He was 84 and is survived by his wife, daughter and grandchildren. Mr. Anger had been ailing for some time.

As the person who gave form to the Mother’s vision, Mr. Anger conceptualised the master plan of Auroville. Giving up commercial architecture, he dissolved his partnership in France to take up the Auroville project as a full-time work. A sculptor, artist, architect and planner, he designed the Matrimandir, the soul of Auroville. He was here in October last and was scheduled to come again towards the end of this month.

...The Auroville project, which began in 1964, was conceived by Sri Aurobindo’s French-born disciple, Mirra Alfassa — “The Mother.” She spoke of a place on earth that could not be claimed or owned by any nation, but where people from all over could live freely and in peace. ...    more »

“Dark energy is the largest contribution — 76 per cent — to the content of the universe in our present standard cosmology. It is postulated as a smooth energy in the vacuum of space, which makes the expansion of the universe want to accelerate,” Dr. Wiltshire said. “But why such stuff should exist, with a particular tiny density, is a complete mystery."

Galaxies do appear to be moving away from each other and at an ever-increasing rate. But Dr Wiltshire claims such “acceleration” is an illusion, due to us misinterpreting observations based in galaxies, where space is not expanding. Clusters of galaxies are spread in filaments and bubbles around huge voids. Most of the volume of the universe, where space is expanding, is in empty voids. Once variations within this uneven distribution are taken into account, he says, we don't need exotic dark energy.

Dr Wiltshire’s latest research, published in New Journal of Physics, Physical Review Letters, and Astrophysical Journal Letters, focuses on solving for an average of the lumpy distribution of matter in the universe as it evolved, rather than a smooth distribution assumed 80-90 years ago by Einstein, Friedman and Lemaître, whose models are still the standard cosmological models today. ...   more »

SCIY's Purpose Statement

Vision: To consider emerging planetary science and culture in the context of the "Integral Yoga" of Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual colleague the Mother.

Mission: To explore trends within contemporary science and culture fostering the co-evolution of integral spirituality, scientific research and emerging planetary culture.

Goals: To encourage mutually respectful dialog among those who aspire to create a world of increasing truth, beauty and sustainable human unity.

Who we are: The founders and core group of SCIY are engaged in the study and practice of Sri Aurobindo's "Integral Yoga," a non-sectarian spiritual path toward realizing "a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity."* - Our aspiration for SCIY is to foster inclusive scientific, cultural and spiritual research that serves this realization. We invite those who share this aspiration to join us.

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* Quote from the Mother in her Charter for the Auroville universal township project being built near Pondicherry, India.
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"There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this:

'I invite you to the great adventure...' "

~ The Mother
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SCIY is a large site with thousands of articles & comments. Click here for important usage tips & posting policies.

In an "unforeseen and unprecedented" shift, the world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of the United Nations warned Monday. -- The changes created "a very serious risk that fewer people will be able to get food," particularly in the developing world, said Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The agency's food price index rose by more than 40 percent this year, compared with 9 percent the year before - a rate that was already unacceptable, he said. New figures show that the total cost of foodstuffs imported by the neediest countries rose 25 percent, to $107 million, in the last year.

At the same time, reserves of cereals are severely depleted, FAO records show. World wheat stores declined 11 percent this year, to the lowest level since 1980. That corresponds to 12 weeks of the world's total consumption - much less than the average of 18 weeks consumption in storage during the period 2000-2005. There are only 8 weeks of corn left, down from 11 weeks in the earlier period.

Prices of wheat and oilseeds are at record highs, Diouf said Monday. Wheat prices have risen by $130 per ton, or 52 percent, since a year ago. U.S. wheat futures broke $10 a bushel for the first time Monday, the agricultural equivalent of $100 a barrel oil. ...   more »

It happened at an academic conclave in San Francisco. A NASA scientist named James Hansen offered a simple, straightforward and mind-blowing bottom line for the planet: 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's a number that may make what happened in Washington and Bali seem quaint and nearly irrelevant. It's the number that may define our future...

We're already at 383 parts per million, and it's knocking the planet off kilter in substantial ways. So, what does that mean?...

It means, Hansen says, that we've gone too far. "The evidence indicates we've aimed too high -- that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2is no more than 350 ppm," he said after his presentation. Hansen has reams of paleo-climatic data to support his statements (as do other scientists who presented papers at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month)...

[Hansen says] the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere. No more passing the buck. The gentle measures bandied about at Bali, themselves way too much for the Bush administration, don't come close. Hansen called for an immediate ban on new coal-fired power plants that don't capture carbon, the phaseout of old coal-fired generators, and a tax on carbon high enough to make sure that we leave tar sands and oil shale in the ground. To use the medical analogy, we're not talking statins to drop your cholesterol; we're talking huge changes in every aspect of your daily life. ...   more »

The insurance industry faced $75 billion of losses from natural catastrophes during 2007, up 50% from last year despite a lack of "megacatastrophes," German reinsurer Munich Re said Thursday.

The losses rose from $50 billion in 2006, though this was still well short of the $220 billion reached in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Still, the number of natural catastrophes tallied 950 this year, up from 850 in 2006 and the highest figure since 1974, when Munich Re began tabulating such events. ...   more »

Months after drugmakers pulled infant cold remedies from most pharmacy shelves, the FDA warns consumers of their life-threatening side effects    more »

University of Utah researchers have discovered a surprisingly tiny new messenger in worms: protons. The find raises the possibility that the subatomic particle plays the same role in humans, the researchers say. ...   more »

The chief executive of the Toyota Motor Corporation said Monday that he is pushing his company’s engineers to develop a plug-in hybrid-electric vehicle with a lithium-ion battery before 2010, raising the stakes in a race with General Motors...

Mr. Watanabe said he welcomed a competition with G.M., which plans to introduce its own lithium-ion hybrid, the Chevrolet Volt, around 2010. -- He said the contest would help reduce the “negative aspects” of automobiles, and ultimately help the environment.

“To compete against each other” in such a battle “is something to be congratulated,” Mr. Watanabe said through an interpreter. “We dont want to be the loser in that competition, of course.” ...   more »

...[I recently read] "The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science," by the British science writer Philip Ball. As part of an ongoing but essentially lazy quest to wrap my psyche around alchemy, I had recently been drawn towards Paracelsus: the wonder-working itinerant sixteenth-century healer who is sometimes cast as the Copernicus of medicine. Rejecting the leech-loving, bass-ackwards, and literally by-the-book healing practices of most medieval doctors, Paracelsus instead made room for a medicine based on plants, material causality, and self-healing powers of the body.

Having already brushed up against Paracelsus' own rich but impenetrable prose, I was immensely relieved that Ball had appeared to lead me through the Renaissance thickets by the secondary hand. (I told you I was lazy.) Given the noodle-limp dollar, The Devil's Doctor was about the only thing I purchased in the UK. I read almost the whole thing on the plane ride home, in between marveling at the glittering, melting majesty of Iceland and Greenland as they unrolled below me and marveling at the complete absorption of all but one of my fellow travelers in the movies flickering across their cramped little screens. ...   more »

In his book Blessed Unrest, our friend Paul Hawken said that the movement that is rising to stop global warming and many other planetary inequities will be the largest our planet has ever seen. We want to give you the tools to ensure he’s right. Only three years ago, global warming was off the radar screen for many Americans. Today, it is in the national spotlight and a diverse network of groups is rising to the challenge of stopping it. Hundreds of colleges and universities are working to become carbon neutral, reducing emissions from campuses to zero. Community organizers in Oakland, New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere are taking on polluters and fighting for environmental justice. In Appalachia, rural communities are banding together to fight mountaintop removal, a heartbreaking new method for mining coal from that region. People of faith are organizing their churches, synagogues, and mosques, declaring global warming as the moral crisis of our time. Traditional businesses are greening up, while entrepreneurs are building a clean-energy alternative economy that has the potential to create thousands of new jobs. And this is just the beginning.

In 1968, observing the state of civil rights in America, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” Today, we are feeling that fierce urgency again for two reasons. The first is that scientists are telling us that we are running out of time even faster than we thought. If we don’t act within the next few years, we won’t be able to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The second reason is a more hopeful one. Recent political changes in Washington DC and around the country have finally created an opportunity for genuine political action on global warming. There is no guarantee that this situation will last. If you’ve been a little paralyzed by the sheer size and horror of global warming, now is the time to start moving forward, fast. ...   more »

...Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the alternative-culture best seller “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl” — and a guest on “Coast to Coast AM” — has introduced a young and savvy audience to the school of millenarian thinking that has gathered around Mayan calendrics. To do so, he has employed viral marketing and a tireless schedule of public appearances at bookstores, art spaces, yoga studios and electronic-music festivals...

Over breakfast at Cafe Gitane in Manhattan, Pinchbeck told me recently that “there’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.”... “Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing,” Pinchbeck went on, “and I think the process is already under way. We’re on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness that’s more intuitive, mystical and shamanic.”

Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age. ...   more »

Thanks to RY Deshpande for recommending this article.  ~ rj

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As a theoretical physicist, Janna Levin probes whether the universe is finite or infinite. As a novelist, she explored the separate but parallel lives of two influential 20th-century scientists: Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Their work laid the foundations for computer intelligence while challenging fundamental notions about how we can know what is true. ...   more »

I recommend watching this video. Imo, it's a good example of the spirit and vision shared by many Aurovilians.  ~ ronjon

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A 6.37 minute video pointing out the potentiality of Auroville Universal Township, especially of the International Zone, as a new kind of United Nations, has been posted by way of answer to [the]Davos Question on the You Tube, thanks to timely intimation from Jack Alexander, a former Aurovilian and a close friend of Auroville from USA.

 

Link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtrfRIffAgQ

The highest videos will be shown and discussed at the World Economic Forum starting from 23^rd January. ...

   more »

...According to Einstein's theory, a rapidly spinning black hole makes space itself rotate. This effect, coupled with gas spiraling toward the black hole, can produce a rotating, tightly wound vertical tower of magnetic field that flings a large fraction of the inflowing gas away from the vicinity of the black hole in an energetic, high-speed jet...

One significant consequence of powerful, black hole jets in galaxies in the centers of galaxy clusters is that they can pump enormous amounts of energy into their environments, and heat the gas around them. This heating prevents the gas from cooling, and affects the rate at which new stars form, thereby limiting the size of the central galaxy. Understanding the details of this fundamental feedback loop between supermassive black holes and the formation of the most massive galaxies remains an important goal in astrophysics. ...   more »

It's called the Nano, for its high technology and small size. It's cute, compact, and contemporary. It's a complete four-door car with a 623-cc gas engine, gets 50 miles to the gallon, and seats up to five. It meets domestic emissions norms and will soon comply with European standards. It's 8% smaller in outer length than its closest rival, Suzuki's Maruti 800, but has 21% more volume inside. And at $2,500 before taxes (value-added taxes increase the price by about $300), it is the most inexpensive car in the world. Starting this fall, the Nano will roll off the assembly lines at a Tata Motors (TTM) plant in Singur, Bengal, and navigate India's potholed roads.

The Nano, also known as the People's Car, is Ratan Tata's dream come true, and is India's contribution to changing the global auto industry. "The car has put India on the global map," says Fionna Prims, head of business development for Segment Y, a Goa-based automotive consultant for emerging markets. "Tata has done in four years what the Japanese took 30 years to do. It will change the whole industry." Even rivals are gushing. "It's a red letter day for Indian industry, a day India should be proud of," says Venu Srinivasan, chairman of motorcycle maker TVS Motors. "Ratan Tata has the vision to create a new business model and all the naysayers are looking at it with concern. The Nano is a path breaker." ...   more »

Technology that allows consumers to respond to electricity price increases by cutting back on their usage in real time can lower customers' bills and create significant reductions in demand, a project spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has shown.

On average, consumers who participated in the project saved about 10% on their electricity bills and reduced peak power use by 15%.

The project, dubbed the Pacific Northwest GridWise Demonstration Project, involved two separate studies, both involving consumers in Washington and Oregon. In one study, called the Olympic Peninsula Project, 112 homeowners were given new electric meters, thermostats, water heaters and dryers that could be customized to a particular comfort level. -- Customers could set the devices on a spectrum ranging from complete comfort - meaning the desired temperature would be maintained regardless of the price of electricity - to complete economy. The devices were connected to IBM (IBM) software that automatically lowered the thermostats or shut off water heaters when electricity was most expensive, according to the limits set by the homeowners. ...   more »