Zyklon B

One of the most effective pesticides that exist is the hydrocyanic acid also known as prussic acid or, in German, blue acid, because it tends to leave blue spots. But his reputation has little to do with his effect on insects and other bugs. Any of you will recognize it under the form with which the German company for the control of pests Degesch (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung) commercialized it in 1923: Zyklon B.

Essentially it was consisting of liquid hydrocyanic acid absorbed in inert material, like the wooden pulp, and with an irritating compound so that it was serving as a warning for those that were exhibited incidentally to him. It was thought to use it as a chemical weapon but it had an insuperable problem: in his gaseous form the hydrocyanic acid is lighter than the air and it disperses with too much rapidity. For it, his use as pesticide was coming down to closed spaces. In this case, the workers, properly trained to handle this mortal gas, were opening the receptacles where they were transporting it - perfectly sealed - and were interspersing the Zyklon for the whole place. Later they were going out of the room and were closing it, in expectation that the hydrocyanic acid was turning into gas, was filling the room and was killing to the insects. In the end, it is enough to open door and windows and to ventilate the place. The finished process was long because the evaporation is slow and, obviously, it is necessary to dedicate time to the ventilation. In particular, the first phase needs, according to an informative leaflet of Zyklon B, between 2 at 72 hours for the gassed one and 10 for the ventilation. His use was so dangerous his his that during the Second World war there could only use the said company DEGESCH, which was responsible officially of training those who were going to operate with him.

To disinfect clothes and other articles, in Germany there developed gas cameras where a miscellany of air and Zyklon was interfering from above to a room previously warmed, since the heat accelerates the process. In these one was finishing with the louse, the creature most resistant and more difficult to kill: in three quarters of an hour and after a period of 20 minutes of ventilation the camera was operative again.

Since we all know, the human madness did that it was used in the attempt for eliminating the whole people of the face of the ground. Unfortunately, the hydrocyanic acid keeps on being used to finish with the life of the persons in the gas cameras of the North American prisons.

The science is not a thing only of Europeans

One of a lot of ironies of our technological and scientific civilization is that we, his members, neither apply so even nor know the way in which science is done. Said otherwise, with the appearance of the wage-earning science, somewhere near the epoch of the French Revolution, we have stopped wondering how the world works and we have forgotten to observe and extract conclusions of the observed. This is a mission of the scientists, that for that we pay to them. But the worst thing of everything is that we believe that the science is a western product, which was born in Greece and was perfected some centuries later with Galilean and the hypothetical - deductive famous method. Nothing is more mistaken. We neither are only we nor have been the first ones either.

For example, in Japan a traditional method exists to catch fish ayu (Plecoglossus altivelis) that extracts party of the study of his behavior. During the epoch of the reproduction the males defend territories in the riverbed, as many other fish the length and breadth of this world. When an intruder penetrates in the territory of the male, this one nothing to his meeting: if she is a female, it courts it, but if he is another male, he gives him a strong blow in the side part. Well, all right. The Japanese have made use of this behavior to develop a skill called tomozuri, which literally means “to go fishing with decoy”.

First it is necessary to do with a small fish using the traditional methods. Later this fish sticks to a fishhook with form of U so that the later part is secret for the fish - bait body. Subject to a cane, it is necessary to do that it moves in the water imitating the movement of these fish. Then the male comes and on having given him the blow, it is he who sticks itself in the fishhook. One more thing: this skill only is used for this type of fish. The rest is caught by fishing lines or networks. The Japanese that designed this method had that it realizes a real ethological investigation.

Something similar they do the jeans fulani, in the High place Níger. They do not take horses as the cowboys, for what the use of the force does not serve to guide the herds. For it what they do it is to adopt the behavior and the privileges of the domineering animal of the herd: it is inserted in the social hierarchy of the herd attacking the strongest without provocation coming up and treating with caress and care to the rest. This way they turn into the leaders of the herd and can govern it easily.

And we, the brilliant Europeans, believe that we invent the science of the animal behavior, the ethology. Perhaps we should have gone to ask to Africa …

The hand, this evolutionary prodigy

The human hand is a notable instrument. And inside the hand, that we have the thumb oponible it is really prodigious. Big Isaac Newton said:“ Only the thumb already would convince me in the God's existence”. Nevertheless, and although to have a finger oponible is a wise move, other primates also have it. Now then, his paws as the man cannot use the hand. For two causes. The first: the hand has two preys that can act of simultaneous form. We can take a ball with the palm and, simultaneously, support a pen with the first two fingers. And second: the union neural direct between the brain, more specifically the previous brain, and the hand by means of what it is called the pyramidal route. In the chimpanzee, for example, the hand is not provided so well from a nervous point of view, what does that his capacities turn out to be drastically wretched. The clearest example is that of the pianist: it can beat 10 times per second only with the index. Obviously, the hand of the chimpanzee is capable of taking fruit, of rising for the trunk of a tree, of drinking, of dressing up, of throwing stones and of poking an anthill with a stick. But the human workmanship meets the hand out of his scope.

And this that the hand humanizes, from a biological point of view, is not a big thing. To have a bone in the arm, the humerus, two in the forearm, the ulna and I remove, eight in the doll arranged in two tiers, five metacarpals in the palm and five fingers with three huesecillos - except the thumb that only has two - it is quite primitively. The amphibians also possess five fingers and other mammals have modified this ancient system. This way, the horses have ended with the only finger that allows them to run.

Nevertheless, she turns out to be advanced enough in some subtle aspects. During 50 million years our ancestors adapted themselves to an existence arborícola, with what they were developing a more agile previous member. Both the shoulder blade and the clavicle survived to provide a notable mobility to the arm. The elbow and the doll developed to allow the widest scale of movements. How many animals can each and everyone of the parts scratch of his body only with his previous members?

One of the most curious discoveries is that certain illnesses can "turn" in the hand. For example, the Down syndrome generally remains reflected in anomalous traces in the palms. In fact, there present less maelstrom, arches and radial handles in the tops of the fingers that who we do not suffer this genetic defect. The Mongolian ones present a major tendency to have these handles in the fleshy part of his ring finger while the normal people usually have them in the index. Also they have major tendency to present in the palm the called line simiesca, the horizontal and only line that crosses from side to side the area nearest to the fingers. Close to 80 % of the syndromes of Down it has it while only 7 % of the normal population possesses it, and normally in one of the palms.

Torrent Melrose Place (2009) S01E14 Stoner Canyon free

In the god's hunting

In Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, the neurocientífico Michael Persinger is pawned in discovering what is the cerebral boss that generates the feeling of being along with God, of the mystical sensations. In fact, he affirms that exciting certain specific regions of the brain with electromagnetic pulses religious experiences can be induced. Persinger belongs to a limited group of scientists, called neuroteólogos, that believe that the spirituality has a neurological base. This investigator feel to his bunnies of indies in a completely silent room where it brings in a light not even beam and the “God's helmet” places them in the head: a device that believes a weak magnetic field on the right parietal and temporary lobes of the brain. Apparently 80 % of the participants has felt this divine presence. Between another 20 % there is the politically active atheist Richard Dawkins, who four years ago sought employment like volunteer and went out disappointed for not being able “to have entered communion with the universe”.

For Persinger the magnetic field shoots the electrical activity of the temporary lobes provoking the spiritual experience. In 2004 a group of Swedish scientists of the University of Uppsala led by Pehr Granqvist it did not manage to reproduce his results; according to Persinger, the subjects had not been exposed to the field during the sufficient time.
Andrew Newberg, of the University of Pennsylvania, also has gained himself his position in this peculiar branch of the neuroscience on having taken cerebral images SPECT (single-photon-emission computed tomography) to Tibetan and Franciscan monks. His work discovered that the meditation deactivates the areas of the brain that regulate the personality – on having lost the aptitude to differ from the others, it is easy to feel identified with the totality – and that the activity of the brain sees modified, being intensified in the frontal part of the brain. The descent of the activity in the parietal lobes, which function is to face our bodies as regards the world, gives place to abnormal spatial perceptions and makes the mystical experience possible. In fact, who have damaged these areas of the brain usually lose his aptitude to move with ease for the environment because it turns out to be to them a difficult knowledge where it finishes his body and the exterior world begins.

“That these experiences should be common to persons of any Indian confession that we are treating with the same processes neuronales”, adds Newberg. The neurocientífico treats in health on having affirmed that it neither should be other studies they cannot even say anything on the God's existence. “It is like taking the images of a brain that is looking at a picture”, he tells. “We can see what areas are activated, like the visual cortex, but we cannot say anything if really he is contemplating it or is imagining it”. The fascinating thing is that certain coincidence exists between the cerebral activity tied to the autotranscendency and that of the sexual pleasure: both break loose for a rhythmic activity – in the religious case dancing, singing or repeating mantras – and both produce sensation of use, of unit … it does not turn out to be strange that Santa Teresa was using a language loaded with romanticism and sexual touches on having described his delight.

Lars Farde, teacher of psychiatry in the Institute Karolinska of Stockholm, has put again in the forum a substance that has been always orbiting in the mind of the scientists when one speaks about the religious fact: the serotonina. In his investigation published in 2003 in American Journal of Psychiatry, Farde and his collaborators they measured the levels of serotonina of 15 men between 20 and 45 years. His interest in this neurotransmitter, and especially for the recipient 5-HT1A, “one of the most important, since it serves like scoreboard of the whole system serotonínico”, tells Farde, he is because a high interrelation exists between the cerebral functions and the personality; in fact, this team was the first one in demonstrating it. Studying the relation between the serotonina levels in the depression and in the anxiety, they discovered that a connection exists between those and the spirituality of the individuals: this one is major the more fall is the thickness of recipients of serotonina. Might a chemical base exist to believe in a top being? If a substance that segregates our body is capable of making us have mystical visions, might they be induced artificially if we consume the famous “sacred fungi”? Shamans and wizards have used hallucinogenic drugs to reach the certain states “of communion with the universe”. Although this fact is well-known, it was not possible to have tried with the whole necessary rigor until last year, when a few doctors of the University Johns Hopkins led by Roland R. Griffiths submitted 36 volunteers without previous experience in hallucinogenic to different doses of psilocibina – a present alkaloid in many fungi species–.

The results were amazing: 61 % had finished mystical experiences. After two months of ingestion, 79 % of the participants affirmed that they were sorry more satisfied with his life. Relatives and friends confirmed that they had seen in them a change to better. Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist Buddhist of New Mexico, defends that, to understand the conscience it humanizes, it is essential to bear in mind another substance that also is related to the recipient 5-HT1A: the dimetiltriptamina or DMT, which he the flame the spiritual molecule. In addition to producing our metabolism in small quantities, it is the principal component of the ayahuasca. His ingestion produces visions as that it had the alternative ecologist Terence MacKenna, who has described his meetings with a few beings that it calls Elves of the Machine.

Strassman, the first investigator in obtaining a federal permission to experiment with psychedelic drugs on human beings in the 70s, believes that the DMT is synthesized in the pineal gland – the famous third eye and place where there take place precursors of this molecule, like the triptófano, an essential amino acid–. The explosions of mystical sensation can stem, it adds, to that the pineal gland produces it in excess – it would be as to receive a "shot" – or that, for any motive, our own organism is not capable of regulating it. According to this psychiatrist the DMT also he is responsible for the experiences near to the death, the supposed extraterrestrial abductions and the whole suit of armor of cognitive exotic phenomena. In his more than 400 meetings with DMT, most of 60 volunteers experienced sensations of delight, happiness, inexpressibility, a certain conscience of which the life goes beyond the death and the contact with a “powerful, wise and affectionate presence”. It was clear that also 47 % of the subjects found with so slightly religious beings like robots, elves, clowns, aliens … that not always were friendly.

Bearing in mind that our metabolism and, therefore, the handling that our body does of all these substances is guided by the genes: might we be "programmed" to believe in God? A quarter of century does psychologists and anthropologists were assuming that the religion was a product of the socialization, which one believed for influence of the environment. And this way it had kept on being if it was not for a research program begun in 1979 in the University of Minnesota with twins monozigóticos.

The most interesting and polemic results have been realized studying the personality and cultural features of twins raised separately. The game position is simple: two twins possess the same genetic load; if they have been educated in different ambiences, we will be in knowledge predisposition until point the genes influence his behavior. The problem is not so simple as to measure the load of the electron and it is subject to numerous variables, but it can give us certain tracks. In the first studies, the scientists compared identical twins with normal brothers – who share only 50 % of the genes – all of them separated servants. They thought that the twins were coinciding at the time of believing in God the double that not twins. Curiously, it was on having had to fulfill the rituals of the organized religions where the results were equal between two groups.

Seemingly, to believe in God can be influenced genetically, but be present at mass every Sunday is completely cultural. In 2005 Laura Koenig was publishing a review of the longest questionnaires that realized twins and relatives in Minnesota during the 90s. Analyzed the information, the result was hitting in the eye: during the childhood and the adolescence both the twins and the normal brothers possess practically the same religious faith as in his house. It is in the adult age when the differences arise: while the twins develop common religious rules, which it are not usually do not coincide with faith questions. Finally, during the ripeness the genetics turns into a domineering factor, be already strengthening or reducing the initial religious impetus.

Before similar perspective it is no wonder that any of them have thrown themselves to look for the “God's gene”. The one who says to have found it, or at least to have a candidate, is the North American geneticist Dean Hamer. In 2004, he published the hypothesis of which one of two possible versions that of the gene VMAT2 we have the human beings is the culprit of that we have this autotranscendency sense.

To understand why it exists the religious feeling in the human beings is a recent scientific company: it even is right in little it was a topic taboo. The evolutionary psychology, with Pascal Boyer, takes only 15 years to the head faced to the problem. Many people think that there must be something in the circuitry of our brain that makes us inclined to it and to all the variants of religion that exist; there are someone where the gods die, in the majority the salvation element is not a head office of the doctrine … We will see what the future provides to us and if to believe in God is, as thinks Dawkins, a by-product of our need that someone should say to us how to act to survive or it is, essentially, a necessary idea so that the brain does his work. In Newberg words, “the principal reason so that God does not want to go away is because our brains do not allow to do it”.

(Pompous original in very Interesting)

Atheistic religion, civil religion

The pirahã are a people of hunters - recolectores who live in the shores of the river Maici, a tributary of the Amazon, in Brazil. It is anticipated that there are approximately 360, a number that diminishes in a progressive way and that for it are in extinction danger. They call themselves themselves the Hi'aiti'ihi, the straight ones, and his culture and language represent the whole challenge for the anthropologists: they do not have concepts separated from kinship beyond the brothers, possess very few concepts for dates and hours, lack numerals and abstract thought, the society does not present social hierarchies (there are no chiefs) and, in spite of the efforts of missionaries and other scientists, they are unable to count. His language is a motive of academic disputes: they do not possess relative and his 7 feminine consonants, masculine 8 and vocal 3 turn it into the language with less letters of the world. But the most interesting thing is that they lack the concept of god or religion. They possess spirits, but it is a question of tangible things, like a jaguar or a tree. And, until now, it seems that they do not possess any mythology. There are a people without religion.

Do religions exist without god? Although at first sight it can look like an absurdity, it it is not so much. One of the most ancient of the India, the jainismo, - it appears towards 490 to. C. - denies the possibility of a creative god in spite of being able to intervene in the human matters. They accept neither the gods' existence, spirits nor demons, but and only the Jinas or tir-thankaras, just men who have reached the perfection, we might assimilate them to supernatural beings. For 4 millions of jainistas the world is eternal, he lacks of beginning and, therefore, the souls (what cheers the beings up) and the matter are uncreated and indestructible. More recently there has appeared a series of religious movements born to the calorcillo of the ovnis, like the raëlianos. Everything began when Claude Vorilhon, a sports journalist specializing in careers of cars, found on December 13, 1973 inside a spaceship called Yaweh property of the Elohim, a very advanced extraterrestrial race that created the life in the Earth. Been reborn like Raël, on the following year it was founding in Paris the movement raëliano, “a religion that tries to be a scientist, a hedonist, materialist and atheist” says George D. Chryssides, of the University of the Wolverhampton.

In other occasions a well established religion has taken and one has deprived it of his supernatural cloak. This happened in the Germany of 1920, when the divided Nazi created a model of consistent Christianity with his ideology to which it called positive Christianity; Jesus turned into a preacher that was opposed to the Judaism of his epoch. The restructuring happened for minimizing the miraculous aspects of the gospels and leaving the crucifixion in a simple and tragic end of an Aryan Jesus to hands of the Jews. The program of the divided Nazi was saying: "We want the freedom of all the religious creeds inside the State, whenever they do not put in danger his existence or do not hit the customs and the moral discipline of the German people. The party as such professes a positive Christianity, without uniting under the confessional aspect to any certain creed.” Anyhow, the dome Nazi paid attention to not contradicting the traditional theologies: although Hitler emphasized the expediency of the positive Christianity one was careful to face very very much the different churches for fear of losing votes. Nevertheless, a considerable number of Nazi faced them. As Alfred Rosenberg, responsible for the occupied territories during the Second World War. During his epoch of publisher of the official newspaper of the party Völkischer Beobachter he wrote that the Catholics and Protestants had perverted the Christianity, ignoring the heroic and Germanic aspects of Jesus's life.

Curiously, this "desdivinización" of a religion also has been realized by the proper Jews. David Ben-Gurion considered Israel like Father of the Nation, agnostic and deeply lay, wrote: "The most important book of my life is the Bible”. For the first president of Israel and Zionist convinced, the Bible was endorsing the sacrosanct right of property of the people chosen on Palestine, “with a genealogy of 3.500 years”.

This idea was new.“ During two milleniums the Jewish tradition and the religion had ordered categorically the Jews to wait for the arrival of the Messiah and the end of the times before returning to the Engaged Earth”, mentions Nur Masalha, of the Department of Theology, Philosophy and History of the St. Mary's College. The Zionism, which origin is tied to the European colonialism of the XIXth century, used the Bible as powerful and irrefutable justification at the time of claiming his right to colonize Palestine and to return to Eretz Yisrael, the Earth of Israel, “breaking radically with 2.000 years of Jewish tradition and rabbinical Judaism”, it adds notes to Masalha. The "scientific" support came from the hand of the Biblical archaeology, which from his beginnings in the XIXth century wanted to endorse the western roots of Holy Land and authenticate the historicity of the Bible. It does not wonder, since his priests were Christian and Jews pawned in one wrote like conclusion to his works ‘and the Bible was right’. This way, from the creation of Israel “the Biblical archaeology turned into an obsession solidly institutionalized like keystone of the civic religion of Israel”, mentions Masalha.

As many nationalistic movements, the Jew needed to find “historical roots” and re-interpret the remote past in view of the new ideology, in a similar way to as the religious believers re-interpret his sacred writings. It was the common ancestry and not the citizenship independent from the ethnic group or the professed religion, what was determining the national character of the state, was telling in 1958 in the magazine Menorah Journal the historian Jewish and expert in nationalism Hans Kohn. According to the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, the creation of a new Jewish collective conscience was based on the work of two out-standing Jewish historians: Heinrich Graetz, German Biblical critic of the ends of the XIXth century, and the Russian Simon Dubnob, on horseback between the XIXth and the XXth. Both used sources and religious Jewish texts, between others, to defend that they belonged to an ancient nation that existed from immemorial times. This peculiar secularization of the Bible and sacralización from the ethnic group and the ground it went on for turning the holy language, the Hebrew, into a modern language, and using the Bible, in particular the books of Josué, Isaías and Amós, like ideological base. “The first one was offering the militaristic and virile dimension of the conquest of the ground, while two last ones were preaching the social justice and the equality”, points out Kimmerling. “In Israel to turn into history the Bible is a domestic enterprise that there realize hundreds of students of all the universities … The Israeli Minister of Defence he has published even a finished chronology of Biblical events, giving exact dates of the creation of the world”, was writing in 1992 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, of the University of Haifa.

If the religion one can desacralizar, also a political ideology one can sacralizar. This is the one that has happened in North Korea, where the official doctrine of this communist country is the Juche. It does not wonder, since many specialists consider the Marxism to be a religion. Between his peculiarities we have an absolute devotion to the military thing, the respect and the defense of the traditional culture, the exaltation of the national symbols and, how not, the voluntarismo. It is said that Kim Il Sung, head of the state of Korea from 1948 up to his death in 1994 and creator of the Juche, received his source of inspiration of the mount Baekdu - on the border with China - ancestral summit and symbol for the Koreans. It might be said that the propaganda device has raised to you will tie of the Korean communism Sung: he is the Eternal President, the citizens call him the Big Leader and the day of his birth and that of his death there are national holidays. Even the childhood of the new president, son of Sung, Kim Jong Il has been quasideified. According to the official biography, Jong was born and his childhood happened in a modest hut - today turned into sanctum of the Juche - in the forest that makes a detour to the mount Baedku. His birth in 1942 was presaged by a swallow and it indicated by the appearance of a new star in the sky and a double rainbow on the mountain. Pure legend, since the Soviet files show that really he was born in the small fishing Vyatskoye people, close to the city of Khabarovsk - the second biggest of the extreme Russian east and to 30 kilometers of the Chinese border. This atheistic religion - politics has its own calendar, which year 1 is our 1912, that of the birth of his creator.

The case of Korea is not only. The historian of the middle of the XXth century Carlton J. H. Hayes was arguing that the western nationalism was born in the shade of the Christianity adapting many of his characteristics. For Hayes it was clear that a political religion existed in the USA. The geographer of the University of the State of Minnesota Wilbur Zelinsky has made to notice that, for example, the American flag has the visual power and the presence of the medieval, always omnipresent crucifix. The flag talks each other with a devotion and deference that turns it into the sacred object of the religion of the patriotism. “To know that the flag is put enclosed in the Moon is with complete certainty the biggest conquest of the American civil religion”, was mentioning Elisabeth Peter in the seminar organized by the Center on Studies on the New Religions, celebrated in Turin in 1992.

What we are here this is what the experts call a civil religion, of which the illustrated Frenchman Rousseau delineated his dogmas in The social contract: the God's existence, the future life, the reward of the virtue and the punishment of the vice, and the exclusion of the religious intolerance. It is in case of the USA where more this phenomenon has been studied. This way, all the presidents without exception, from the Catholic Kennedy up to almost known Iglesia Trinitaria Unida of Christ de Barack Obama – a religion that sinks his roots in the puritanism - have alluded to God in his speeches. Something showy for a society where it is supposed that a separation exists Church and the State guaranteed by the first amendment of his Constitution. But that works for religious organizations, not for a God without ascription to a certain creed. The famous person In God we trust is one of his national mottoes, chosen by the Congress in 1956. In fact, there exists the quite cynical belief of which a president must mention God if he does not want to lose votes.

Also it has his sacred places, like the National Cemetery of Gettysburg, to which Lincoln dedicated his famous speech, or the National Cemetery of Arlington, the most important monument of the American civil religion. For his part the grave to the unknown soldier, who arises on having finished the World War I, is other of the big symbols of the nationalistic religion. Obviously also it takes his sacred days as The Brief Day, last Monday of May, which celebrates the fallens from the War of Secession.“ It is a big event where the whole community interferes in a memory thrilled to the martyrs, to the spirit of sacrifice and to the way of seeing the world American”, was saying the psychologist Robert N. Bellah in his fundamental article about the topic of 1967 in the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Something of less religious load has on July 4, the day of the veteran, and the births of Washington and Lincoln, “that offer the annual ritual calendar of the civil religion, where the public schools serve to strengthen his celebration”. Behind the American civil religion Biblical archetypes are discovered: the Exodus, the elected people, the engaged ground, the piece of news Jerusalem, the vicarial death and the renaissance. There were the puritanical and Calvinist features of the Peculiar Parents those who restored a type of “civil piety”, which has turned the United States into a species of “new Israel”, an elected people, whose destination not very well definite providence is guided by one. “On behalf of this civil religion, the North American speaks very often to God, even in a profane context”, adds Bellah.

It is a question of a real cult: it has his prophets and martyrs, his events and sacred places, his rituals and his symbols. All the North Americans know that his is a society “quite it perfect that the men can construct in accordance with the God's desires, and a light for all the nations”, it finishes Bellah. With more or less intensity the civil religion is perceived in all the peoples, be already in the shape of nationalism or patriotism. Only it is necessary to remember the public cult to the Constitution or the devout singing to the democracy and the popular will whenever elections are celebrated. What to say about the polemic Education subject for the Citizenship, one of whose targets it is to educate good citizens? is not it the atheistic version of the set of moral norms that any God reveals to his faithful?

(Published in very Interesting)

Divided brain

In the sixties Mike Gazzaniga was defending his doctoral thesis in the famous person Caltech, the Technological institute of California. A thesis that was going to cause sensation between neurologists and psychologists.

The topic of his work of doctorate was to study the psychological consequences of the surgery of cerebral split, a procedure in which the nervous connections are cut between two hemispheres of the brain. The reason to so tremendous surgical operation was an attempt for controlling the serious epilepsy. They had produced a group of patients in Darmouth and the surgeon asked Gazzaniga to study them. His discoveries were amazing.

When the brain splits communication stops existing between both hemispheres. Because the functions of the language are located normally in the left side, the person is only capable of speaking about things that this side knows. If a person with the divided brain there appear stimuli that only the right hemisphere sees, it is not capable of describing what it has seen. Nevertheless, if to the right hemisphere one gives him the opportunity to answer without having to speak – for example, admit it as the tact with the left hand - of that time yes is capable of identifying it.

But the most amazing case was that of a patient of ends of the 30s known by the initials P.S. He was a special patient because he could read words with both hemispheres, thing that the others were unable to do. Nevertheless, and like the rest of the patients, he could only speak across his left hemisphere. When emotional stimuli were appearing before him to the left hemisphere, P.S. could say what the stimulus was and how he was feeling, if it was something bad or good. When the same emotional stimulus was appearing to the right hemisphere, the speech of the lefthander was unable to say what was. Nevertheless, yes it could judge correctly if the stimulus seen by the right was bad or good. This way, before the word “mother“ P.S. it was qualifying it as well and the word “devil“ like villain. Apparently, the emotional stimuli continue a way that the split surgery does not cut.

The physics of the bag

To describe in a useful way a system that consists of a big number of particles one must be appealed to statistical procedures. The gases are a classic example. One liter of any gas in environmental conditions — for example, the air one spring day — contains the fortune of approximately 20.000 trillions of molecules: to want to describe it studying the behavior of each of them is practically impossible. To achieve it there are used statistical methods that allow to obtain relations between the properties of the individual molecules, like the energy and the speed, with the properties of the gas like everything, this is, his pressure, temperature …

The study of the behavior of the gases, realized by the physicist and mathematician German Ludwig Boltzmann in 1877, put the bases of a branch of the physics called physical statistical. Without her nowadays it would be an impossible comprehension sew so dispa¬res like the internal structure of the stars or the superconductors.

The statistical physics has multitude of applications but the most spectacular is his use in economy. On having heard one, he can wonder what relation can be between the behavior of the gas of a gas cylinder of butane and the evolution of the interest rates. It is possible that we see it clear if we analyze the movement that realizes an any molecule in the air. This molecule is subject to such a number of influences, principally clash with other molecules of the air, which is impossible to predict the direction in which it is going to move. This is the brownian movement discovered at the beginning of the XIXth century for the Scotch botanist Robert Brown, and it constitutes the best sample of erratic movement.

The stock market also is subject to a very high number of influences, unpredictable all of them, which it makes impossible to foresee his future evolution. Can a relation be established between both disciplines? Yes. In 1900 the French mathematician Bachelier discovered that the fluctuations of the bag could be described using the theory of the brownian movement. In particular, he proposed a formula to fix the price of an option being based on the idea of that such fluctuations were following the same process as a molecule moving inside an any gas.

This work remained forgotten until the 70s, when the scientists Black and Scholes introduced the methods of the statistical physics to describe financial activities as the market of options. Since then we have been present at a renewed interest in this curious relation. Up to that moment one was depending on the 'smell' and subjective analysis of the economist; now he already prepares of objective hardware to study them.

Truth that it turns out to be fascinating to discover that the study of the behavior of a gas serves to evaluate the risks which a bank faces on the world market?

Testicles for the eternity

Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard was a professor of experimental medicine in the School of France and a legendary figure in the European scientific circles. Author of more than 500 articles about investigation and considered one of the big pioneers of the endocrinology, in the spring 1889 began going of mouth in mouth the news about that had begun to work with a type of extracts endocrinos and that at the beginning of the summer, in June, would report of his discoveries in the meeting of the Society of Biology of Paris.

When Brown-Séquard began his conference the emotion in the auditorium was in his icy moment. The figure of the endocrinologist, who was measuring meter ninety, had to be a depositor. And it started:

I have always thought that the weakness of the elders owed, partly, to the decrease of the function of his sexual glands. I am 72 years old. My natural vigor has declined greatly in the latter 10 years.

It kept on describing how there had been drooping both his sexual vigor and his physical condition. Brown-Séquard told that on May 15 it had crushed a testicle of dog's pup, it had strained it and the remaining liquid had been injected into his leg. Some time after it had done the proper thing in two occasions with the guinea pigs testicles. But the bomb was coming next. After the injections, his physical force had increased in a spectacular way. And he confessed: "I have rejuvenated 30 years and today ‘I could do a visit’ to my young wife».
Impressive. The source of the eternal youth was placed in the testicles of the dogs and the guinea pigs. So that then they say.

The impact of such revelations was immediate. And not only for the prestige of the scientist, not either because it had proved it in his body. Bearing in mind that the life expectancy of the members of the Society of Biology was 71 years, it is no wonder that there was anything any more than pure scientific interest in his conference.

The newspaper Matin it initiated a campaign to collect money with the laudable end of creating an Institute of the Rejuvenecimento. Brown-Séquard surrendered in body and soul to so great project. As if of a serial production factory it was talking each other, the bull testicles were entering on the one hand and the eternal youth was going out for other. In the history so many people never had so much interest in the sweetbreads. And not precisely to eat up them.

But the time was in charge of putting the things in his place. A Viennese newspaper commented with sarcasm: "The conference must be considered to be one it proves more of the need to retire the teachers who have come at the age of 70». Brown-Séquard happened of a scientist was respected to turn into the laughing stock of all and, in spite of the whey of the eternal youth, his wife left him for a younger man.

Let's not think that it operated of bad faith, so at least that he did not even want to take advantage of his, let's say, ‘discovery‘. Victim of the effect was a placebo.

Explosion in 1987

It was the night from February 23 until February 24, 1987 in the astronomical observatory of The Bells, in the Chilean Andes. One of the assistants of the astronomer who this night was operating in one of the telescopes went out a moment on the outside and looked at the sky. Suddenly he realized that there was something beyond the common there above. Inside this whitish spot that is the Big Cloud of Magallanes, a galaxy satellite of ours, there was a star especially brilliant, a star that should not be there. It ran to the interior and attracted attention of the astronomer who was bottled in his own remarks.

Some hours before the discovery of these two astronomers slightly also completely unusual it was happening almost to another side of the balloon, inside a mine of zinc left in Japan. In the Kamioka mine there was developing an experiment that was trying to verify one of the most fascinating predictions realized by a theory of the particles physics much in vogue in that epoch. The called theories of big unification were predicting that in this universe nothing is eternal, not even the matter. According to his calculations the proton, one of the constituents of the atomic nucleus and of the one that believed that it was immortal, in fact was disintegrating. The Japanese verified it it had filled an enormous deposit with 3.000 tons of the purest water and they had surrounded it with multitude of detectors destined to register the twinkles of light that would generate the products of his disintegration. To avoid other undesirable sparks provoked by the thunderstorm of elementary particles that comes to us from the cosmos, they had buried this immense water bucket in the depths of the mine of Kamioka, to 3.300 meters deep.

About half after 7 in the afternoon of February 23 his detectors went off suddenly twelve times. Simultaneously, another detector buried in the mine of salt Morton-Thiokol close to Fairport, Ohio, told 8 neutrinos, and a third detector placed under the mount Andyrchi, in the Caucasus, registered the arrival of 5 neutrinos. What had caused similar crackling? The jet of neutrinos that, after hundreds of thousands of years of trip, had swept the Earth originated from this brilliant star discovered in Chile.

Two events were corresponding to an explosion of supernova, the first visible one to simple sight from 1604. In the following months big part of the telescopes of the world continued even the most minimal detail the course of this impressive deflagration, the most violent end that can happen to a star. A star with several times the mass of our Sun had died was doing 170.000 years and this day, February 23, 1987, the news about his death was coming to us: of ten trillion trillions of neutrinos that took place in the explosion 25 were detected only.

Black holes in evaporation

One of the most interesting results related to the black holes is what the scientific Englishman Stephen Hawking knows as an evaporation Hawking, in honor to the one who described it for the first time.

The evaporation Hawking says that, after all, the black holes are not black but gray. Said otherwise, the black holes not only capture all that that happens close to them but also they express energy, light. To understand the process it is necessary to bear in mind an essential fact: the black holes have an extremely small temperature, of the order of ten millionth of grade over the absolute zero. After the laws of the physics have temperature they say that they must express energy at the cost of contained in his interior.

Conclusion: a black hole loses energy of a continuous way. As in our bank accounts, the quantity that it is interesting to us to control is not the one that goes out, but the clear flow, profit less losses. In the black holes the calculation is simple. The universe is to approximately 3 grades over the absolute zero. That means that the entire universe is warmer than the black holes, with what they receive more energy than they express ⎯el energy it flows from the warm body to the cold ⎯. Now then, the average temperature of the universe descends with the time because it is in expansion. This means that there will come one day in which the universe will be colder than the black holes and then they will be able to lose all his energy as a heater does it. Bad and that warms little, but heater to end and to the end.

In a speculative boasting we can calculate the time that must happen so that a black hole disappears completely after throwing all his mass to the space in the shape of energy. One child, with a mass of approximately 3 solar masses, will eliminate after passed the fortune of 10 raised to 66 years, or, a million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. Knowing that the universe goes existing for 15.000 million years, to say that the life of a black hole is 10 to 56 times longer that the current one of the universe is the most nearby example of the immortality. And to say that the removed potency is the billionth one of billionth of watt ⎯para to express so many light as a hundred watts bulb we would need ten thousand trillion black holes ⎯ it is the most next thing to zero in the electricity companies invoice.