The Void

Reishi Mushroom The lingzhi mushroom or reishi mushroom...

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:58:04 +0000

Reishi Mushroom

The lingzhi mushroom or reishi mushroom (traditional Chinese: 靈芝; pinyin: língzhī; Japanese: reishi; Vietnamese: linh chi; literally: “supernatural mushroom”) encompasses several fungal species of the genus Ganoderma, and most commonly refers to the closely related species, Ganoderma lucidum and Ganoderma tsugae. G. lucidum enjoys special veneration in East Asia, where it has been used as a medicinal mushroom in traditional Chinese medicine for more than 2,000 years, making it one of the oldest mushrooms known to have been used medicinally. Lingzhi is listed in the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia and Therapeutic Compendium.

Ganoderma lucidum produces a group of triterpenes, called ganoderic acids, which have a molecular structure similar to steroid hormones. It also contains other compounds often found in fungal materials, including polysaccharides (such as beta-glucan), coumarin, mannitol, and alkaloids.

Research & Medicinal Use

Lingzhi may possess anti-tumor, immunomodulatory and immunotherapeutic activities, supported by studies on polysaccharides, terpenes, and other bioactive compounds isolated from fruiting bodies and mycelia of this fungus (reviewed by R. R. Paterson and Lindequist et al.). It has also been found to inhibit platelet aggregation, and to lower blood pressure (via inhibition of angiotensin-converting enzyme), cholesterol, and blood sugar.

Laboratory studies have shown anti-neoplastic effects of fungal extracts or isolated compounds against some types of cancer, including epithelial ovarian cancer.[46] In an animal model, Ganoderma has been reported to prevent cancer metastasis, with potency comparable to Lentinan from Shiitake mushrooms.

The mechanisms by which Ganoderma lucidum may affect cancer are unknown and they may target different stages of cancer development: inhibition of angiogenesis (formation of new, tumor-induced blood vessels, created to supply nutrients to the tumor) mediated by cytokines, cytoxicity, inhibiting migration of the cancer cells and metastasis, and inducing and enhancing apoptosis of tumor cells. Nevertheless, Ganoderma lucidum extracts are already used in commercial pharmaceuticals such as MC-S for suppressing cancer cell proliferation and migration.

Additional studies indicate that ganoderic acid has some protective effects against liver injury by viruses and other toxic agents in mice, suggesting a potential benefit of this compound in the treatment of liver diseases in humans, and Ganoderma-derived sterols inhibit lanosterol 14α-demethylase activity in the biosynthesis of cholesterol . Ganoderma lucidum compounds inhibit 5-alpha reductase activity in the biosynthesis of dihydrotestosterone.

Besides effects on mammalian physiology, Ganoderma lucidum is reported to have anti-bacterial and anti-viral activities. Ganoderma lucidum is reported to exhibit direct anti-viral with the following viruses; HSV-1, HSV-2, influenza virus, vesicular stomatitis.

Ganoderma lucidum mushrooms are reported to exhibit direct anti-microbial properties with the following organisms; Aspergillus niger, Bacillus cereus, Candida albicans, and Escherichia coli. Other benefits were studied such as the effect of lowering hypertension, cholesterol, and anti-inflammatory benefits through the ganoderic acid properties.

Its genome, with about 12,600 genes on 13 chromosomes, was sequenced in 2012.

The Most Astounding Fact

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:00:27 +0000

The Most Astounding Fact

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Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:30:46 +0000

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Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:25:21 +0000

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Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:23:59 +0000

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Pretty cool!

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:08:58 +0000

Pretty cool!

earth-song: The Peacock spider or Gliding spider (Maratus...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:08:19 +0000

earth-song:

The Peacock spider or Gliding spider (Maratus volans) is a species of jumping spider.

Octavius Pickard-Cambridge noted in his original description that “it is difficult to describe adequately the great beauty of the colouring of this spider”.

The red, blue and black colored males have flap-like extensions of the abdomen with white hairs that can be folded down. They are used for display during mating: the male raises his abdomen, then expands and raises the flaps so that the abdomen forms a white-fringed, circular field of color. The species, and indeed the whole genus Maratus have been compared to peacocks in this respect. The third pair of legs is also raised for display, showing a brush of black hairs and white tips. While approaching the female, the male will vibrate his abdomen while waving raised legs and tail, and dance from side to side.^[1]

Both sexes reach about 5 mm in body length. Females and immatures of both sexes are brown but have colour patterns by which they can be distinguished from related species. [ read more ]

Am I the only who thinks they look like they’re all going “I just dont give a fuck anymore”? Or attempting to create a spirit bomb?

North Star Closer to Earth Than Thought The famed North Star...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:07:51 +0000

North Star Closer to Earth Than Thought

The famed North Star has been a beacon in the night sky throughout human history, but a new study reveals the star is actually closer to our solar system than previously thought.

Image: This long-exposure photo (left) shows how the North Star, Polaris, stays fixed in the night sky as other stars appear to move during the night due to Earth’s rotation. At right, a close-up of the multi-star Polaris system. Credit: M. Menefee; Right: N. Carboni; Assembly: D. Majaess

Scientists studying the North Star Polaris found that it is about 323 light-years from the sun and Earth, substantially closer than a previous estimate of 434 light-years by a European satellite in the late 1990s. The new distance measurement may help astronomers in the pursuit of several cosmic mysteries, such as the hunt for elusive dark energy, researchers said.

Polaris is what astronomers call a Cepheid variable star, a pulsating star used by scientists to measure distances in space. Astronomers can measure the distance to a Cepheid variable by studying how it changes in brightness over time.

Since Polaris is the nearest Cepheid variable star to our solar system, an accurate distance to the star could serve as a benchmark for measurements of other Cepheids used to determine the scale of the universe.

In the 1990s, the European Space Agency’s star-mapping Hipparcos satellite determined the 434 light-year distance to Polaris, while other studies suggested the star could be closer to the sun. One light-year is the distance light travels in a single year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers).

The new study by astronomers in Canada, Ukraine and Belgium confirmed the closer distance using new high-resolution observations of the star’s light spectrum.

“Polaris presents certain anomalies that have so far defied a straightforward interpretation,” said study leader David Turner of Canada’s Saint Mary’s University in Halifax in a statement. “Our high-resolution spectroscopic observations of Polaris may signal the beginning of a new era in understanding the star.”

The research is detailed in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Neo France

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:06:12 +0000

Neo France

Gaia Hypothesis Living organisms create the optimum conditions...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:05:35 +0000

Gaia Hypothesis

Living organisms create the optimum conditions for their own existence, and in so doing create the superorganism: Gaia.

Here’s a little fun hypothesis reading for everyone, and remember this is a mere hypothesis and not something to be treated as fact. Pick at any inconsistencies and errors you find like you normally would with any educated guess. Merely entertain this idea if you choose to, if not? Fair enough:

What is the hypothesis of Gaia? Stated simply, the idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth.

More precisely: that about one billion years after it’s formation, our planet was occupied by a meta-life form which began an ongoing process of transforming this planet into its own substance. All the life forms of the planet are part of Gaia. In a way analogous to the myriad different cell colonies which make up our organs and bodies, the life forms of earth in their diversity coevolve and contribute interactively to produce and sustain the optimal conditions for the growth and prosperity not of themselves, but of the larger whole, Gaia. That the very makeup of the atmosphere, seas, and terrestrial crust is the result of radical interventions carried out by Gaia through the evolving diversity of living creatures.

Encountering the Earth from space, a witness would know immediately that the planet was alive. The atmosphere would give it away. The atmospheric compositions of our sister planets, venus and mars, are: 95-96% carbon dioxide, 3-4% nitrogen, with traces of oxygen, argon and methane. The earth’s atmosphere at present is 79% nitrogen, 21% oxygen with traces of carbon dioxide, methane and argon. The difference is Gaia, which transforms the outer layer of the planet into environments suitable to its further growth. For example, bacteria and photosynthetic algae began some 2.8 billions of years ago extracting the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, setting the stage for larger and more energetic creatures powered by combustion, including, ultimately, ourselves.

That is how James Lovelock discovered Gaia; from outer space.In the 1960’s, during the space race which followed the launching of Sputnik, he was asked by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Nasa to help design experiments to detect life on Mars. The Viking lander gathered and tested some Martian soil for life with no results. Lovelock had predicted as much, by analyzing the atmosphere of Mars: it is in a dead equilibrium. By contrast, the atmosphere of Earth is in a “far from equilibrium” state- meaning that there was some other complex process going on which maintained such an unlikely balance. It occurred to him that if the Viking lander had landed on the frozen waste of antarctica, it might not have found any trace of life on Earth either. But a sure giveaway would be a complete atmospheric analysis… which the Viking lander was not equipped to do. Lovelock’s approach was not popular at Nasa because Nasa needed a good reason to land on Mars, and the best was to look for life. Viking found nothing on Mars, but Lovelock had seen the Earth from the perspective of an ET looking for evidence of life. And he began thinking that what he was seeing was not so much a planet adorned with diverse life forms, but a planet transfigured and transformed by a self-evolving and self-regulating living system. By the nature of its activity it seemed to qualify as a living being. He named that being Gaia, after the Greek goddess which drew the living world forth from Chaos.

“The name of the living planet, Gaia, is not a synonym for the biosphere—that part of the Earth where living things are seen normally to exist. Still less is Gaia the same as the biota, which is simply the collection of all individual living organisms. The biota and the biosphere taken together form a part but not all of Gaia. Just as the shell is part of the snail, so the rocks, the air, and the oceans are part of Gaia. Gaia, as we shall see, has continuity with the past back to the origins of life, and in the future as long as life persists. Gaia, as a total planetary being, has properties that are not necesarily discernable by just knowing individual species or populations of organisms living together… Specifically, the Gaia hypothesis says that the temperature,oxidation, state, acidity, and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota.”

Even the shifting of the tectonic plates, resulting in the changing shapes of the continents, may result from the massive limestone deposits left in the earth by bioforms eons ago.

“You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive. Surely, you may say, the Earth is almost wholly rock, and nearly all incandescent with heat. The difficulty can be lessened if you let the image of a giant redwood tree enter your mind.The tree undoubtedly is alive, yet 99% of it is dead.The great tree is an ancient spire of dead wood,made of lignin and cellulose by the ancestors of the thin layer of living cells which constitute its bark.

How like the Earth, and more so when we realize that many of the atoms of the rocks far down into the magma were once part of the ancestral life of which we all have come.” The root question of Gaia’s critics, and a central point in his theory concerns the difference between a planetary environment which might only be the aggregate result of myriad independent life forms coevolving and sharing the same host, and one which is ultimately created by life forms deployed, so to speak, to accomplish the purpose of the larger being.

Is the idea of Gaia only a romantic and dramatized description of the terrestrial biosphere and its effects, or is there a planetary being, whose life cycle must be counted in the billions of years, which spawns these evolving life forms to suit the purpose of its being. Do our kidney cells ask each other these sorts of questions? While your white blood cells thrive and reproduce, going about their business,they are indisputably serving the life of the larger body which you use, though whatever consciousness they experience in their realm is certainly far from that which you, the larger being, the whole, experience.

Recent scientific work, such as in the field of complex systems, have begun to give us the impression that this opposition of terms, the larger caused by its constituents, or the costituents created by the larger, may be one of those oppositions which are the constructs of our own minds, and must be dropped if we are to understand the truth, which is neither the one nor the other, but more difficult to comprehend and more fascinating to behold. Perhaps there is awareness appropriate at every level. Perhaps that is a property of life.

And what might be the nature of its evolution, this planetary being called Gaia? Anthropocentrists to the last, we might assume that the production of the human species is a great step upward for Gaia, a sort of rapidly evolving brain tissue. Or that she prepares the earth as a cradle and crucible of consciousness evolving. Other analogies come to mind: are we part of her arsenal of interplanetary spores?

And what might constitute a life cycle for such a being- might it be as strange as that of the slime mold ? What stage would Gaia be in now? Is our species part of her maturity or an incubation period ? Is Gaia herself somehow part of a larger living being, perhaps on a galactic scale ? If so how do the cells of this larger being remain in communication? Will we eventually be able to experience something of the awareness which Gaia has ?

Lovelock points out that Gaia, being ancient and resourceful enough to have carried out these successive changes of the planet in spite of asteroid collisions and other setbacks, is herself probably not endangered by the relatively momentary depradations of the human species, as it befouls and cripples the bio-dynamics of its environment. Rather,the danger is to the human race, not only from our own actions, but also by Gaia’s reaction to them.

The Revenge of Gaia

In James Lovelock’s 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, he argues that the lack of respect humans have had for Gaia, through the damage done to rainforests and the reduction in planetary biodiversity, is testing Gaia’s capacity to minimize the effects of the addition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This eliminates the planet’s negative feedbacks and increases the likelihood of homeostatic positive feedback potential associated with runaway global warming. Similarly the warming of the oceans is extending the oceanic thermocline layer of tropical oceans into the Arctic and Antarctic waters, preventing the rise of oceanic nutrients into the surface waters and eliminating the algal blooms of phytoplankton on which oceanic foodchains depend. As phytoplankton and forests are the main ways in which Gaia draws down greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, taking it out of the atmosphere, the elimination of this environmental buffering will see, according to Lovelock, most of the earth becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of this century, with a massive extension of tropical deserts. [1]

Symbiogenesis Symbiogenesis is the merging of two separate...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:04:19 +0000

Symbiogenesis

Symbiogenesis is the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism. The idea originated with Konstantin Mereschkowsky in his 1926 book Symbiogenesis and the Origin of Species, which proposed that chloroplasts originate from cyanobacteria captured by a protozoan.

Ivan Wallin also supported this concept in his book “Symbionticism and the Origins of Species”. He suggested that bacteria might be the cause of the origin of species, and that species creation may occur through endosymbiosis. Today both chloroplasts and mitochondria are believed, by those who ascribe to the endosymbiotic theory, to have such an origin.

Milky Way Rising at Cape Leveque by Mike Salway

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:02:27 +0000

Milky Way Rising at Cape Leveque by Mike Salway

ev0lutionary: The KING

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:00:19 +0000

ev0lutionary:

The KING

A Quadruple Lunar Halo Over Spain Sometimes falling ice...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:50:56 +0000

A Quadruple Lunar Halo Over Spain

Sometimes falling ice crystals make the atmosphere into a giant lens causing arcs and halos to appear around the Sun or Moon.

Image Credit & Copyright: Dani Caxete

This past Saturday night was just such a time near Madrid, Spain, where a winter sky displayed not only a bright Moon but as many as four rare lunar halos. The brightest object, near the top of the above image, is the Moon. Light from the Moon refracts through tumbling hexagonal ice crystals into a 22 degree halo seen surrounding the Moon.

Elongating the 22 degree arc horizontally is a circumscribed halo caused by column ice crystals. More rare, some moonlight refracts through more distant tumbling ice crystals to form a (third) rainbow-like arc 46 degrees from the Moon and appearing here just above a picturesque winter landscape.

Furthermore, part of a whole 46 degree circular halo is also visible, so that an extremely rare — especially for the Moon — quadruple halo was actually imaged. The snow-capped trees in the foreground line the road Puerto de Navacerrada in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range near Madrid. Far in the background is a famous winter skyscape that includes Sirius, the belt of Orion, and Betelgeuse all visible between the inner and outer arcs. Halos and arcs typically last for minutes to hours, so if you do see one there should be time to invite family, friends or neighbors to share your unusual lensed vista of the sky.

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Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:04:34 +0100

Cannabinoids, like those found in marijuana, occur naturally in...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:11:29 +0100

Cannabinoids, like those found in marijuana, occur naturally in human breast milk

Woven into the fabric of the human body is an intricate system of proteins known as cannabinoid receptors that are specifically designed to process cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the primary active components of marijuana. And it turns out, based on the findings of several major scientific studies, that human breast milk naturally contains many of the same cannabinoids found in marijuana, which are actually extremely vital for proper human development.

Cell membranes in the body are naturally equipped with these cannabinoid receptors which, when activated by cannabinoids and various other nutritive substances, protect cells against viruses, harmful bacteria, cancer, and other malignancies. And human breast milk is an abundant source of endocannabinoids, a specific type of neuromodulatory lipid that basically teaches a newborn child how to eat by stimulating the suckling process.

If it were not for these cannabinoids in breast milk, newborn children would not know how to eat, nor would they necessarily have the desire to eat, which could result in severe malnourishment and even death. Believe it or not, the process is similar to how adult individuals who smoke pot get the “munchies,” as newborn children who are breastfed naturally receive doses of cannabinoids that trigger hunger and promote growth and development.

“The medical implications of these novel developments are far reaching and suggest a promising future for cannabinoids in pediatric medicine for conditions including ‘non-organic failure-to-thrive’ and cystic fibrosis.”

Full Article

Psychedelic Sun This psychedelic image of the sun from NASA’s...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:10:00 +0100

Psychedelic Sun

This psychedelic image of the sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is actually two pictures combined, both taken on July 12. It’s also one of National Geographic News’s favorite recent space images.

By superimposing an extreme-ultraviolet image of arcing solar material on a “magnetogram” showing magnetic fields, scientists created a complex picture of an active region just before it unleashed a powerful solar flare.

According to NASA, such composite images help scientists better understand the origins and causes of the flares.

‘Arctic Biologist Shares Astonishing Sea Creatures With the...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:06:28 +0100

‘Arctic Biologist Shares Astonishing Sea Creatures With the World’ by Alexander Semenova