How meditation might ward off the effects of ageing

... Visitors here to the Shambhala Mountain Centre meditate in silence for up to 10 hours every day, emulating the lifestyle that monks have chosen for centuries in mountain refuges from India to Japan. But is it doing them any good? For two three-month retreats held in 2007, this haven for the eastern spiritual tradition opened its doors to western science. As attendees pondered the "four immeasurables" of love, compassion, joy and equanimity, a laboratory squeezed into the basement bristled with scientific equipment from brain and heart monitors to video cameras and centrifuges. The aim: to find out exactly what happens to people who meditate.

After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising psychological and cognitive changes – improvements in perception and wellbeing, for example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the process of ageing. ...

Scientists from a range of fields are starting to compile evidence that rather than simply being a transient mental or spiritual experience, meditation may have long-term implications for physical health.

There are many kinds of meditation, including transcendental meditation, in which you focus on a repetitive mantra, and compassion meditation, which involves extending feelings of love and kindness to fellow living beings. One of the most studied practices is based on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, or being aware of your own thoughts and surroundings. Buddhists believe it alleviates suffering by making you less caught up in everyday stresses – helping you to appreciate the present instead of continually worrying about the past or planning for the future.

"You pay attention to your own breath," explains Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist who studies the effects of meditation at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston. "If your mind wanders, you don't get discouraged, you notice the thought and think, 'OK'."

Small trials have suggested that such meditation creates more than spiritual calm. Reported physical effects include lowering blood pressure, helping psoriasis to heal, and boosting the immune response in vaccine recipients and cancer patients. In a pilot study in 2008, Willem Kuyken, head of the Mood Disorders Centre at Exeter University, showed that mindfulness meditation was more effective than drug treatment in preventing relapse in patients with recurrent depression. And in 2009, David Creswell of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh found that it slowed disease progression in patients with HIV.

Most of these trials have involved short courses of meditation aimed at treating specific conditions. The Shamatha project, by contrast, is an attempt to see what a longer, more intensive course of meditation might do for healthy people. The project was co-ordinated by neuroscientist Clifford Saron of the Centre for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. His team advertised in Buddhist publications for people willing to spend three months in an intensive meditation retreat, and chose 60 participants. Half of them attended in the spring of 2007, while the other half acted as a control group before heading off for their own retreat in the autumn. ...

They found that at the end of the retreat, meditators had significantly higher telomerase activity than the control group, suggesting that their telomeres were better protected.  The researchers are cautious, but say that in theory this might slow or even reverse cellular ageing. "If the increase in telomerase is sustained long enough," says Epel, "it's logical to infer that this group would develop more stable and possibly longer telomeres over time." ...

via How meditation might ward off the effects of ageing | Life and style | The Observer.

The Brain's Time Sense

... “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is some other mechanism at work?

via David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker.

The Brain

...“brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

A few years ago, Eagleman thought back on his fall from the roof and decided that it posed an interesting research question. Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives? Does the brain shift gears for a few suspended seconds and perceive the world at half speed, or is some other mechanism at work?

via David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker.

YouTube - How the 2011 Japan tsunami happened

YouTube - How the 2011 Japan tsunami happened.

Tiny church finds original King James Bible

A little English village church has just made a remarkable discovery.

The ornate old Bible that had been sitting in plain view on a table near the last row of pews for longer than anyone could remember is an original King James Bible - one of perhaps 200 surviving 400-year-old original editions of arguably the most important book ever printed in English.

In fact, the Bible at St. Laurence Church in Hilmarton, England, was sitting right under a hand-lettered sign saying it was an original.

The sign said it had been found in "the parish chest" in 1857, that the cover had been added, and that it was the second of the two impressions published in 1611 - the year of first publication.

But no one knew whether to believe it, parish council member Geoff Procter said. As the anniversary of publication in 1611 approached, they decided it was worth investigating.

"We had no way of knowing whether it really was a 1611 Bible so we had to get it verified somehow," he said.

He and two other church members took it to a specialist, the Rev. David Smith at the Museum of the Book in London.

Smith knew immediately what he was looking at, Procter said.

"We put it on his table and he opened it and immediately he said, 'Yes, this is a 1611 Bible,'" Procter remembered. ...

via Tiny church finds original King James Bible – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs.

Saturn linked to icy moon Enceladus via beam of electrons

Saturn is linked to its moon Encleadus by powerful electrical currents with beams of electrons flowing back and forth between the two cosmic bodies, scientists revealed today.

The discovery was made using instruments on board NASA's Cassini spacecraft that arrived at Saturn in 2004.

Scientists have long been intrigued by Enceladus, which orbits 112,000 miles above Saturn.

Cassini spotted ice volcanoes erupting from the surface of the moon in 2005 and scientists believe this could be evidence of a massive underground ocean.

The craft has passed the 310mile-wide moon 14 times since it arrived, gradually unlocking its secrets.

Scientists studying resulting data have found that the jets of gas and icy grains emitted from the south pole of Enceladus, form an ionsphere when they become electrically charged.

This has led to the discovery of a new current system, caused by a dynamo effect, due to the motion of Enceladus and its ionsphere passing through the magnetic bubble that surrounds Saturn.

Jupiter has a similar current system that links it to at least three of its moons. Satellites orbit inside its magnetosphere - its giant magnetic bubble - forming the flowing spots that appear in the planet's upper atmosphere. ...

via Saturn linked to icy moon Enceladus via beam of electrons | Mail Online.

Heaviest antimatter found

... a three-dimensional rendering of the STAR time projection chamber surrounded by the time-of-flight barrel (the outermost cylinder). Particle tracks spray out from the collision, including a meter-long track from an antihelium-4 nucleus (highlighted in bold red)

The reports began circulating a few weeks ago, and today's publication in the journal Nature makes it official: Physicists have detected the heaviest bits of antimatter ever found on Earth. And that record is likely to stand for a long, long time.

Members of the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, based at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, say they've seen the traces of 18 nuclei of antihelium-4 among about half a trillion particles produced by almost a billion gold-ion collisions at RHIC. These nuclei are like regular helium nuclei, except that instead of having two protons and two neutrons, they have two negatively charged antiprotons and two antineutrons.

The particles existed for only about 10 billionths of a second before they came in contact with ordinary matter particles and were annihilated, but that was long enough to register on STAR's detectors. Physicists can routinely produce antihydrogen nuclei (basically, antiprotons), and last year a research team reported the first detection of antihydrogen atoms (a positron going around an antiproton). Scientists have even detected antihelium-3 nuclei (two antiprotons and an antineutron). But until now, antihelium-4 has eluded them.

RHIC is best-known for smashing together gold ions so forcefully that particles like protons shatter into their constituent quarks and gluons, producing the kind of primordial soup that existed just an instant after the big bang. When that soup congeals, all sorts of combinations of quarks come together — and statistically, there's an ever-so-slight chance that the quarks will arrange themselves into two antiprotons paired with two antineutrons. The odds of that happening are so vanishingly small that RHIC's researchers had to sift through mountains of data to find the 18 events they were looking for.

The bad news is that the chances of finding anything even heavier are even more vanishingly small. So small, in fact, that physicists don't expect to detect them anytime in the foreseeable future, at RHIC or even at Europe's Large Hadron Collider.

The good news is that these 18 detections confirm the statistical model that theorists expected to see for the creation of antimatter in the lab.

Searching for natural-born antimatter in outer space is one of the top jobs for the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is due to be delivered to the International Space Station a week from now. The AMS should be able to detect antihelium nuclei and other subatomic oddities during its years-long run in orbit.

via Cosmic Log - It's official: Heaviest antimatter found.

'Immortal' Animals Reveal Anti-Aging Secrets

... The animals that can possibly achieve immortality under ideal conditions, such as sea squirts, certain corals, Hydra, and Turritopsis nutricula (the immortal jellyfish), often activate telomerase. Helen Nilsson Sköld of the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and colleague Matthias Obst are studying sea squirts and starfish to learn more about how these marine creatures seem to ward off aging.



Out of the animal immortality A-list, sea squirts and starfish have genes that most closely resemble those of humans.

“Animals that clone themselves, in which part of an individual’s body is passed on to the next generations, have particularly interesting conditions related to remaining in good health to persist," Sköld was quoted as saying in the press release. "This makes it useful to study these animals in order to understand mechanisms of aging in humans.”

“My research has shown that sea squirts rejuvenate themselves by activating the enzyme telomerase, and in this way extending their chromosomes and protecting their DNA," she added. "They also have a special ability to discard ‘junk’ from their cells. Older parts of the animal are quite simply broken down, and are then partially recycled when new and healthy parts grow out from the adult bodies.”

Starfish are also amazingly immune to problems that affect

the rest of us. If they lose a body part, for example, many species can simply grow another one. Reproduction involves tearing apart their bodies, somewhat akin to growing a new plant from a broken off piece of a "mother plant."

Eternal life, from an evolutionary standpoint, however, has a big drawback. Due to asexual reproduction, the species as a whole retains very low genetic variation. This means they could be particularly vulnerable to climate change and not enjoy immortality after all.

Scientists are therefore rushing to study such species, which may hold the secrets of increasing our own longevity. ...

via 'Immortal' Animals Reveal Anti-Aging Secrets : Discovery News.

Easter Island mystery solved?

...In their new book, The Statues that Walked: Unravelling the Mystery of Easter Island, to be published in June, Dr Lipo and Professor Hunt present their evidence that Polynesian colonists arrived in 1200, up to 800 years later than the conventional theory claims, and immediately modified the environment with slash-and-burn agriculture.

The effect this had on the giant palm forest was magnified by the rats that arrived with them. The rodent population, feeding extensively on palm seeds, exploded.

Dr Lipo argues that deforestation didn't make things much worse for humans. Rapa Nui was no tropical paradise. It's an old volcanic island and many of the nutrients in the soil had already been washed away. Burning the giant palms actually helped, but the settlers soon turned to a technique called stone mulching, in which freshly broken volcanic rocks are planted in the poor soil to add nutrients and cut down on erosion.

The same people who used rock mulching and greeted the Dutch could have moved the moai from Rano Raraku, the quarry where they were carved, to the shore, he says. The statues seem designed to allow small groups of men to move them by rocking them, as you would a refrigerator.

Similar suggestions have been made in the past, but experiments indicated that the moai would have been worn away by the time they got to the coast. Dr Lipo, aided by anthropologist Sergio Rapu, the island's first native governor under Chilean rule, thinks he has found a way around this, with more rocking and less shuffling.

Defenders of the old theory are not taking this lying down. The British archaeologist Paul Bahn and his co-author John Flenley are bringing out a third edition of The Enigmas of Easter Island with a response to the upstarts. "They're ignoring the oral tradition and just cherry-picking the data they like," he said ...

via Has the mystery of Easter Island finally been solved? - Science, News - The Independent.

Did we miss a call from ET in 1977?

On August 17, 1977, Ohio State University astronomer Jerry Ehman was sitting at his kitchen table, pouring over pages of printouts from the SETI Project's Big Ear radio telescope's computers. On these pages were line after line of numbers and letters. A cluster of six characters jumped out at Ehman and he circled them in red ink. Next to that circle he wrote: "Wow!".

SETI stands for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, and in the 34 years since Ehman's discovery astronomers have been agonizing over the precise meaning of what has become known as the "Wow! signal". It's non-terrestrial in origin, meaning it's not man-made and didn't originate from Earth. Wow! was traced back to a cluster of 100,000 densely packed stars in the Sagittarius constellation.

But was this just a noisy star, or a signal sent from a distance race? And if this was first contact, why did the sender transmit just once? The mystery is made worse by the "what if" factor: what if Ehman had received the data sooner, or if modern computers were available to crunch the data?

The data was three days old by the time Ehman spotted Wow!, meaning that if it were a message, the sender could have moved on for lack of a reply.

Such a delay wasn't unusual: it was standard practice to distribute Big Ear printouts once a week. Meanwhile, the kinds of computers Ehman might rely on today were still in the future: Steve Wozniak had only just built the Apple I and II. The most computing power SETI had at the time was an already 12-year-old IBM 1130 – powerful for its time but with limited memory and no GUI input.

SETI Institute's research director Jill Tarter, in a conversation with The Reg at SETICon in Santa Clara, California, last year, lamented the missed opportunity and the lack of computing power. "Back in 1977, the computers were just dumping numbers to paper readout that somebody collected every week," she told us. ...

via ET, phone back: Alien quest seeks earthling coders • The Register.

Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study + Xeno's meditation technique

In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.

But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious diseases?

Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise.

Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The scanner tracks blood flow within the monks' heads as they meditate inside its clunky walls, which echoes a musical rhythm when the machine is operating.

Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find how some meditators achieve a state of "nonduality" or "oneness" with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.

"One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it cultivates attentional skills," Dr Josipovic says, adding that those harnessed skills can help lead to a more tranquil and happier way of being.

"Meditation research, particularly in the last 10 years or so, has shown to be very promising because it points to an ability of the brain to change and optimise in a way we didn't know previously was possible."

When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves and their environments, Dr Josipovic says.

And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings.

Shifting attention

Dr Josipovic's research is part of a larger effort better to understand what scientists have dubbed the default network in the brain.

He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic network and the intrinsic, or default, network.

The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee.

The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve themselves and their emotions.

But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw, when one rises, the other one dips down.

This neural set-up allows individuals to concentrate more easily on one task at any given time, without being consumed by distractions like daydreaming.

"What we're trying to do is basically track the changes in the networks in the brain as the person shifts between these modes of attention," Dr Josipovic says.

Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same time during meditation - that is to say, they have found a way to lift both sides of the seesaw simultaneously.

And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment. ...

via BBC News - Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study.

Wow! I got shivers down my spine when I read this. I think because in my first and only day long meditation class, I discovered and explained to the group that rather than focusing only on the breath as was being prescribed, what works for me is to develop a dual perception of the breath along with your thoughts, the external along with the internal.

This is the only realistic way to not let your mind wander. No one understood what I was saying. I was told by the person leading the class that, "well, no, the practice is to focus on the breath. " Yes, but the only way to be able to focus for long periods of time without getting distracted is to split and balance the perception.

For the record, I'm told my ability to focus is very unusual. I can and on most days do work on one single complicated task for 5 hours at a time, stopping only to eat, then back at it for another 3 to 5 hours.

The way I see it, this study validates my discovery. Perhaps the best way to get to the balanced "Buddha mind" for most people is the rather long path that has been laid out, but my understanding of Buddhism is that you are supposed to try, not follow. Find what really works, for you.  I hope my insight can help a few people with their basic meditation instruction.

Try it:

1. Test 1 (Standard meditation): Sit for 5 minutes focusing only on your breath. Bring your mind back gently if it wanders.
   -


2. Test 2 (Xenoic meditation): Sit for 5 minutes and focus on your breath continuously allowing  the breath to be simultaneous with anything else, external or internal, that comes to your awareness. Focus mostly on the breath, but never let your attention completely off of it.

Results?

Although I've only heard of him from Professor Charlie Tart, my impression of George Gurdjieff's "Waking up" is that it seeks this state.

Gurdjieff argued that many of the existing forms of religious and spiritual tradition on Earth had lost connection with their original meaning and vitality and so could no longer serve humanity in the way that had been intended at their inception. As a result humans were failing to realize the truths of ancient teachings and were instead becoming more and more like automatons, susceptible to control from outside and increasingly capable of otherwise unthinkable acts of mass psychosis such as the 1914-18 war. At best, the various surviving sects and schools could only provide a one-sided development which did not result in a fully integrated human being. According to Gurdjieff, only one dimension of the three dimensions of the person - namely, either the emotions, or the physical body or the mind - tends to develop in such schools and sects, and generally at the expense of the other faculties or centers as Gurdjieff called them. As a result these paths fail to produce a proper balanced human being. Furthermore, anyone wishing to undertake any of the traditional paths to spiritual knowledge (which Gurdjieff reduced to three - namely the path of the fakir, the path of the monk, and the path of the yogi) were required to renounce life in the world. Gurdjieff thus developed a "Fourth Way"^[18] which would be amenable to the requirements of modern people living modern lives in Europe and America. Instead of developing body, mind, or emotions separately, Gurdjieff's discipline worked on all three to promote comprehensive and balanced inner development. - wiki

I don't see emotions as separate from the body and mind. It just seems that way. Emotions are the activity of certain parts of your brain, experienced as the interpretation by the mind of the state of your body and mind.

New York cabbie picks up $5,000 fare to California

New York taxi driver Mohammed Alam has picked up the fare of a lifetime - $5,000 (£3,000) to drive across the US to Los Angeles.

Investment banker John Belitsky said he and friend Dan Wuebben wanted to do something "magical".

They decided on a cab ride to LA and struck the deal with Mr Alam after finding him at LaGuardia Airport.

The 2,448-mile trip took six days and included a stop in Las Vegas where the friends won $2,000.

Mr Belitsky, of Leonia, New Jersey, and Mr Wuebben, of Queens, New York, haven't yet said how they intend to get back to the East Coast.

But Mr Alam says a friend will help him make the drive back home.

The epic trip has been documented by Mr Belitsky on his Twitter page.

On 22 April, after their winning streak in Las Vegas, he tweeted: "Woke up Alam to a shower of $100 bills at sunrise."

New York news blog NYU Local estimated that the trip would have cost $17,000 (£10,000) if the meter had been running for the whole trip.

via BBC News - New York cabbie picks up $5,000 fare to California.

Life is short, make fun of it.

Rosie Vela

Today I got curious about the female singer who is singing with Jeff Lynne in ELO. It turned out to be quite  a story. Roseanne "Rosie" Vela, born in the coastal city of Galveston, Texas,  stayed with her boyfriend Jimmy Roberts, and married him in the hospital before he died of cancer. He sang her a song he wrote on the last night before he slipped into a coma and died. One story says he died in her arms.

Following that tragedy, she landed a modeling job and appeared on the cover of Vogue 14 times before she decided to focus on her music (and a bit of acting).

Her story gives the lyrics to the ELO song "Turn to Stone" (released October 1977)  new meaning.

"Through all I sit here and I wait I TURN TO STONE I TURN TO STONE
You will return again some day TO MY BLUE WORLD"

I had no idea that one of my favorite bands of all times included a red-headed supermodel with heart of gold.

In my band Xenophilia, I had many fun years performing with the super hot and talented Amy Anne, who I'm sure could have been a model if she was so inclined. I believe I took this photo of Amy Anne myself.  I think she'd give Rosie a run for her money, so to speak.  ;-)

Getting an early start on my 2012 New Year's Resolutions: After I finish writing and recording my 100 original songs in 2011 -- I resolve to find my supermodel musician girlfriend, get a fantastic band together, book a bunch of shows, entertain people and enjoy many years of fun!

I like what Rosie said about playing music until you are 100 years old. Yes, I'd like that.

Who can say how long any of us have, really, but I believe in this dream. It feels like what I am supposed to do.  Do you know the feeling?

This is why I've never married.  I'm in love with someone I haven't met yet. I saw her once in a dream. She was at a party on some steps, wearing an over-sized white men's dress shirt.  I'll know her when I see her, or when I hear her sing.

The tragedy--and the comedy--is that I'm one of the most stubborn and idealistic people you'll ever meet and if I can't have what I envision, I will just wait and wait. I'll search forever, passing up so many good things. I already have. Wish me luck.

Apple's iPhones and Google's Androids Send Cellphone Location

Apple Inc.'s iPhones and Google Inc.'s Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google, respectively, according to data and documents analyzed by The Wall Street Journal—intensifying concerns over privacy and the widening trade in personal data.

Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people's locations via their cellphones. These databases could help them tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services—expected to rise to $8.3 billion in 2014, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

In the case of Google, according to new research by security analyst Samy Kamkar, an HTC Android phone collected its location every few seconds and transmitted the data to Google at least several times an hour. It also transmitted the name, location and signal strength of any nearby Wi-Fi networks, as well as a unique phone identifier.

Google declined to comment on the findings.

Until last year, Google was collecting similar Wi-Fi data with its fleet of StreetView cars that map and photograph streets world-wide. The company shut down its StreetView Wi-Fi collection last year after it inadvertently collected e-mail addresses, passwords and other personal information from Wi-Fi networks. The data that Mr. Kamkar observed being transmitted on Android phones didn't include such personal information.

Apple, meanwhile, says it "intermittently" collects location data, including GPS coordinates, of many iPhone users and nearby Wi-Fi networks and transmits that data to itself every 12 hours, according to a letter the company sent to U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) last year. Apple didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Google and Apple developments follow the Journal's findings last year that some of the most popular smartphone apps use location data and other personal information even more aggressively than this—in some cases sharing it with third-party companies without the user's consent or knowledge.

Apple this week separately has come under fire after researchers found that iPhones store unencrypted databases containing location information sometimes stretching back several months. ...

Unlike many cell-phone-enabled violations of your privacy, whose purpose is mainly to enrich the app maker, the storage of location data on iPhones and the gathering of location data by Android phones at least provide benefits to users and are under user control.

The database works behind the scenes mainly to improve wireless data service, traffic maps and other basic functions of a smartphone.

Location data isn't even gathered if location services are turned off.

Yes, the storage of unencrypted location data on your phone is a potential privacy breach waiting to happen. But there's a whole list of privacy violations taking place through your phone every day.

The hard reality is that there's only one way to guarantee privacy with a cell phone: Remove the battery.

via Apple's iPhones and Google's Androids Send Cellphone Location - WSJ.com.

US drone raid 'kills 25' in Pakistan

At least 25 people have been killed in a US drone strike in the troubled Pakistani tribal region of North Waziristan, officials told the BBC.

Missiles were fired on a large compound in the town of Spinwam, but five women and four children in a nearby house were also killed.

The area is a haven for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.

Meanwhile, at least 13 soldiers died when hundreds of insurgents attacked a checkpoint near the Afghan border.

Pakistani security officials told the BBC that Afghan militants had crossed the border and stormed the army post in the Lower Dir area.

Security forces temporarily abandoned the post but now, residents say, they are back in control and have placed the entire area under curfew.

Pakistani-US tensions

Pakistani officials say four missiles were fired on a large compound occupied by supporters of local militant commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in Spinwam, 40km (25 miles) north-east of the tribal region's main town of Miranshah.

Several people were also wounded in Friday's attack, a local intelligence official was quoted as telling AFP news agency.

The US does not routinely confirm it conducts drone operations in Pakistan.

But analysts say only American forces have the capacity to deploy such aircraft. US drone attacks have escalated in the region since President Barack Obama took office. More than 100 raids were reported last year. ...

via BBC News - Pakistan: US drone raid 'kills 25' in N Waziristan.

Switzerland: Smelly corpse flower draws thousands

Thousands of people are flocking to the northern Swiss city of Basel to see a giant, stinky flower bloom for the first time.

The amorphophallus titanum - known as corpse flower because it exudes a smell of rotting flesh - is the first to blossom in Switzerland in 75 years.

The Basel Botanical Gardens expects the 6.6ft (2m) plant to attract 10,000 people whilst in bloom.

The bloom is set to wilt late Saturday or Sunday.

Worldwide, there have been only 134 recorded blooms from artificial cultivation, according to AP news agency.

The flower first began to poke out of the soil in March, and in the past few days it had been growing at about six centimetres a day, according to Swissinfo news website.

Its mother plant last bloomed in the Frankfurt Palm Garden in 1992.

Originally native to the tropical rainforests on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the plant requires a humid climate to grow and rarely blossoms, even in the wild.

The flower's smell, said to be a cross between burnt sugar and rotting flesh, is designed to attract insects for pollination.

via BBC News - Switzerland: Smelly corpse flower draws thousands.

Police investigate Charlie Sheen's high-speed escort

Police in Washington DC are investigating who authorised a controversial high-speed police escort for actor Charlie Sheen.

He was apparently escorted from an airport outside the city to his stage show, Violent Torpedo of Truth: Defeat is Not an Option, on Tuesday.

Police chief Cathy Lanier told a local TV station the escort appeared to violate department policy.

Police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump said the department was investigating.

Sheen posted a photo to Twitter of a speedometer reaching about 80mph (129km/h) and wrote: "In car with Police escort in front and rear! Driving like someone's about to deliver a baby! Cop car lights #Spinning!"

Sheen was reportedly running late for the one-man show. It is not clear for how much of the journey he had a police escort.

Sheen's spokesman, Larry Solters, declined to comment on Friday.

Phil Mendelson, who chairs the DC Council's committee on public safety, said on Friday he considered the escort inappropriate and was glad it was being investigated. ...

via BBC News - Police investigate Charlie Sheen's high-speed escort.

Related:

Google fined $5m over Linux patent row

A judgement by a Texas jury against Google could have major implications for the search giant and the open source world said experts.

The internet titan was found guilty of infringing a patent related to the Linux kernel and fined $5m (£3.2m).

The software is used by Google for its server platforms and could also extend to its Android mobile platform.

The kernel is at the core of the open-source operating system meaning this verdict could be far-reaching.

The case resulted in a victory for a firm called Bedrock Computer Technologies which has also sued Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon, PayPal, Match.com and AOL.

"The amount of the fine is not what makes this an important issue," intellectual property activist Florian Mueller told BBC News.

"This is a modest amount considering Google is probably the largest scale Linux user in the world.

"The implication here is really that there is a huge number of Linux users who will be required to pay royalties if this patent holder knocks on their doors in the US. This is definitely a major impediment to the growth of Linux and makes companies, including Google, that rely on open source code particularly vulnerable to patent threats."

That is also the view of other industry watchers who expect a flood of lawsuits against companies who rely on open source code.

"Those looking to cash in on buried patents need only spend time poring over code and looking for infringements," said Christopher Dawson of technology blog ZDNet.

"It costs a lot less than $5m to hire a team of programmers in India to do code review. This, I'm afraid, is just the beginning and stands to do a fair amount of harm to industry momentum and to the private companies that provide vast incentive for the advancement of open source software."

But Google has said it will continue to defend against such attacks like this one on the open source community.

"The recent explosion in patent litigation is turning the world's information highway into a toll road, forcing companies to spend millions and millions of dollars defending old, questionable patent claims and wasting resources that would be much better spent investing in new technologies for users and creating jobs," said Google. ...

via BBC News - Google fined $5m over Linux patent row.

Do Aliens Speak Particle-Tongue?

Extraterrestrials may have a better way to communicate across space than radio waves or optical beams. A team of scientists suggests ET could encode neutrinos, for example.

These particles of matter are similar to electrons, but since they have no electric charge, they can pass through anything. This makes them ideal for long-distance travel, as neutrinos are undisturbed by gas, dust and other matter that can block radio waves and other types of electromagnetic radiation.

Astronomers have been scouring the galaxy for decades for alien-produced radio signals -- and more recently for non-naturally occurring light pulses, as well -- to no avail.

"We really have no clue as to how some advanced civilization might want to transmit to us, nor do we have any really good idea why they would want to transmit to us," physicist John Learned, with the University of Hawaii, told Discovery News.

"Everything that we're doing is exploratory science: You don't know the game; you don't know if you're in the game; you don't know the rules of the game... which is what makes it so much fun," said Learned, who, along with colleagues, has written a series of articles about how neutrinos could be used for communication.

ET could, for example, send out a neutrino beam at precise (and non-naturally occurring) energy levels that would be sure to catch a scientist's eye.

"If there's a civilization, like our civilization, which is at the stage of setting up large neutrino detectors, then one would see this signal of a unique signature and you would right away say: 'What the heck is going on here? This is certainly not a natural signature.' This is something that would really get your attention on the very first (detection.) ...

via Do Aliens Speak Particle-Tongue? : Discovery News.

Pope Benedict appears in TV question-and-answer show

Pope Benedict XVI has made history as the first pontiff to take part in a televised question-and-answer session.

The pre-recorded programme was broadcast on the Italian Rai channel on Good Friday afternoon.

Seven questions were chosen from thousands submitted for the Pope to answer during the 80-minute programme.

Most of the questions, from people across the world, dealt with the struggle with suffering.

TV viewers saw a split screen, with the Pope sitting in the Vatican library and those asking the questions filmed near their homes.

The first question was asked by a seven-year-old Japanese girl traumatised by the recent devastating earthquake and tsunami.

She asked why she and other children should have to feel afraid. The Pope replied that he had also asked himself the same question.

"We do not have the answers but we know that Jesus suffered as you do," he said.

Another question came from the Italian mother of a boy in a long-term coma. She asked if he still had a soul, to which the Pope replied that, yes, his soul is still present in his body.

"The situation, perhaps, is like that of a guitar whose strings have been broken and therefore can no longer play," he said.

"The instrument of the body is fragile like that, it is vulnerable, and the soul cannot play, so to speak, but remains present."

To a Muslim woman in the Ivory Coast who asked his advice about how to cope with the conflict that has afflicted her country, he said people should look to Christ as an example of peace.

"Violence never comes from God, never helps bring anything good, but is a destructive means and not the path to escape difficulties," he said.

He told Christian students in Iraq - when asked how to encourage fellow Christians not to flee the country - that the Church was encouraging dialogue between religions.

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy, watching the programme, said it would be viewed by critics as very controlled and a little sanitised...

There was no opportunity to ask tough questions of the Church, such as about the priestly sex scandals that overshadowed the Church's Easter celebrations last year.

But the Vatican will have viewed it as a first step in their overall effort to be more accountable and transparent, arising from accusations that the Church was failing to be open about the abuse scandal, our correspondent adds.

Until now, he has only ever taken questions from journalists on planes during foreign trips. ...

via BBC News - Pope Benedict appears in TV question-and-answer show.

It's about time the Pope pipped up. Plenty of people he oversees overseas could use practical prescriptions for peace.  What else is the purpose of the position? Not to placate people, nor to persuade a population of puppets they are protected by some prosperous papal pallium. Pope powers, activate!