Consciousness // Current TV

Sacred Geometry - Chief Seattle letter to U.S. President Frankin Pierce - 1852

Sacred Geometry Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That... more

TouchArt
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Two huge icebergs let loose off Antarctica's coast

Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation AFP . SYDNEY – An iceberg about... more

JanforGore
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BBC News - Grizzlies encroach on polar bear territory

The researchers first spotted a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos ) in August 2008.... more

jkw077
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Can You Find Consciousness In The Brain?

MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time... more

cosmobirdie
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The Emergence of a Global Brain - Will It Happen?

"It seems plausible that with technology we can, in the fairly near future create... more

pjacobs51
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The World's Largest Tropical Ice Field is Vanishing

The Quelccaya Ice Cap in the heart of the Peruvian Andres, is the largest tropical body of ice in the world. The ice cap is at an average altitude of 5,470 meters (18,600 ft) and spans an area of 44 square kilometers (17 miles). As the ice cap is retreating, it is exposing almost perfectly preserved plant specimens dating back 5,200 year, indicating that it has been more than 50 centuries since the ice cap was smaller than it is today.

According to recent research, one of the glaciers in this ice cap, the Peruvian Qori Kalis, like the snowfields of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro, is rapidly melting and could soon vanish completely (comparisons with previous mapping showed 33% of Mount Kilimanjaro's ice had disappeared in the last two decades - 82% since 1912).

The icecap has lost approximately 20% of its area since 1978, and the current rate of retreat is increasing. Ice cores taken from Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming show an oxygen isotope profile similar to that of the Quelccaya ice cores at the end of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooler global temperatures between the years 1550 and 1850. The sudden alterations in the oxygen isotope ratio found in ice core samples from these two remotely located glaciers, provide evidence of a sudden global climate change in the mid-latitude regions of the planet.

"I would not be surprised to see half of it disappear in this coming year," said climatologist Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University. Thompson has been studying the Qori Kalis glacier since 1978.

"In the first 10 years [that] we observed the glacier, it was retreating 6 meters (19.7 feet) every year," Thompson said. "In the last few years, it has started retreating 60 meters (197 feet) every year - a 10-fold increase. On top of that you will have natural phenomena like El Nino, which release heat into the lower atmosphere," he predicted.

"The combination of those two things will have a big impact on glaciers throughout the tropics," said Thompson. "No matter what we do, we are going to lose the glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the lower elevation glaciers in the Andes."

"Kilimanjaro could be gone by 2020," he suggested. "In the Andes, some of the glaciers are bigger, but I think we are talking 30 to 50 years."

This will cause many problems for some of the poorest people on earth since they depend upon annual glacial melt to sustain their crops. Loss of these glaciers will cause a huge drought and crop failure.

"These changes are going to take place and these people will be impacted," observed Thompson. "They have to find ways to adapt."The Quelccaya Ice Cap in the heart of the Peruvian Andres, is the largest tropical... more

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Cuba's Aid to Haiti -- CommonDreams.org

"It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact that Cuba had several hundred health personnel on the ground before any other country," said David Sanders, a professor of public health from Western Cape University in South Africa.

The Cuban team coordinator in Haiti, Dr Carlos Alberto Garcia, says the Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel have been working non-stop, day and night, with operating rooms open 18 hours a day.

During a visit to La Paz hospital in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Dr Mirta Roses, the director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) which is in charge of medical coordination between the Cuban doctors, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and a host of health sector NGOs, described the aid provided by Cuban doctors as "excellent and marvellous".

La Paz is one of five hospitals in Haiti that is largely staffed by health professionals from Havana.

History of cooperation
Haiti and Cuba signed a medical cooperation agreement in 1998.

Before the earthquake struck, 344 Cuban health professionals were already present in Haiti, providing primary care and obstetrical services as well as operating to restore the sight of Haitians blinded by eye diseases.

More doctors were flown in shortly after the earthquake, as part of the rapid response Henry Reeve Medical Brigade of disaster specialists. The brigade has extensive experience in dealing with the aftermath of earthquakes, having responded to such disasters in China, Indonesia and Pakistan.

"In the case of Cuban doctors, they are rapid responders to disasters, because disaster management is an integral part of their training," explains Maria a Hamlin Zúniga, a public health specialist from Nicaragua.

"They are fully aware of the need to reduce risks by having people prepared to act in any disaster situation."

Cuban doctors have been organising medical facilities in three revamped and five field hospitals, five diagnostic centres, with a total of 22 different care posts aided by financial support from Venezuela. They are also operating nine rehabilitation centres staffed by nearly 70 Cuban physical therapists and rehab specialists, in addition to the Haitian medical personnel.

The Cuban team has been assisted by 100 specialists from Venezuela, Chile, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Canada and 17 nuns."It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact... more

jkw077
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The Water diary (A film by Jane Campion) - OneClimate.net -

Directer Jane Campion's short film highlighting the accelerating water crisis.

jkw077
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Washington Snow breaks mid-Atlantic records | Top AP Stories | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Old-timers talk about a storm that blew through Washington in 1922, collapsing the... more

jkw077
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EATING ANIMALS - a rhyme dedicated to the animals that we eat

We eat flesh constantly, religiously/ and wickedly/ we chomp on KFC and Mickey... more

WrittenWithWit
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The Science (Fiction) Of Embodied Cognition

Science fiction has long played with the idea of projecting unified personalities/minds/"souls" into different bodies. The premise is baked into the plots of stories like Avatar and Caprica. But how would it work in the real world?

That's what the science of "embodied cognition" is all about. The basic idea in this new(ish) research area (which overlaps with cognitive psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, and others) is this: Your mind is defined by your physical form. Not just in terms of "the mind is what the brain does"-we all are pretty down with that already. This takes it further to encompass the whole enchilada: your mind-your "I"-is a function of a cephalized, bipedal, plantigrade, bilaterally symmetrical body between 1.5 and 2 meters tall with two arms terminating in five-fingered hands with opposable thumbs, two lungs, a warm-blooded vascular system, mostly hairless skin, two front-focused eyes, etc. etc. Change any aspects of that physical configuration-in subtle or radical ways-and the mind will inevitably change too.

That might sound a bit "no shit, Sherlock" at first blush, but it's actually got profound implications about what it means to be recognizably human "on the inside." In fact, that very phrase might not even make sense. After all, there's no "little you" inside your body "looking out", Terminator-style. Your perceptions, actions and thoughts all feel direct, integrated, and grounded. You don't "drive" your body, you ARE it. So why do we still assume that we might take that "little man" out and plop him into a different body to "look out of", without any consequences?

Take Avatar. James Cameron stacked the deck by making the Na'Vi basically humanoid with a few cosmetic changes thrown in. Then again, the Na'Vi are twice as tall as humans, have longer arms, fewer fingers, have bigger, wider-set eyes, and ears that can move independently. Not to mention their prehensile plug-in-brain-tails, which add a major perceptual (and explicitly cognitive, given how the Na'Vi "jack in" to the mass Eywa consciousness) modality that has absolutely no analogue in the human body. What would all of that feel like? What would that think like? (Not human, that's for sure.) The point is that through the lens of embodied cognition, those questions are just two sides to the same coin.

Of course, Avatar doesn't go into any of that interesting territory; it sticks with the "Jake Sully can effortlessly interchange between bodies on the fly" approach. Granted, there is one minor scene showing Jake clumsily acclimating to his Na'Vi body-which makes sense, given that all his proprioperceptive expectations and instincts no longer apply. But it's more likely that the disorientation would be much more profound, and he probably would have needed some serious physical therapy before bounding off into the forest in his hospital gown. His mind, his literal sense of self, would need time to retune and retrofit itself to his new body. And the same thing would happen every time he jacked out of his Avatar body back into his human one. What kind of unpredictable effects would that stress have on his mind, his "I"?

Continued below . . .

http://io9.com/5462883/the-science-fiction-of-embodied-cognitionScience fiction has long played with the idea of projecting unified... more