How Would Humans Know If They Lived in a Multiverse? - Live Science

How Would Humans Know If They Lived in a Multiverse?

By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer   |   June 02, 2014 01:44pm ET

Our universe may be one of many, physicists say.

Some theories in physics give rise to the idea of multiple universes, where nearly identical versions of the known universe exist. But if such a multiverse does exist, how would people know, and what would it mean for humanity?

There may be ways to find out if the known universe is one of many, said Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist and author at Columbia University in New York.

"There are certain versions of the multiverse that, should they be correct, might be most susceptible to confirmation," Greene told Live Science. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse]

Spotting a multiverse

For example, in the multiverse suggested by string theory, a model that says the universe is composed of one-dimensional strings, the known universe might exist on a giant 3D membrane, Greene told Live Science.

In such a world, "if the universe is a loaf of bread, everything we know about takes place on one slice," he said. Conceivably, debris from collisions that migrated off our slice into the wider cosmos might leave missing energy signatures, which a particle accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might be able to detect, Greene said.

Some theories of inflation, the notion that the universe expanded rapidly in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, suggestanother kind of multiverse. The Big Bang could be one of many big bangs, each giving rise to its own universe — a cosmic bubble in a sea of other bubbles.

In such a scenario, the known universe might collide with another one, which might leave an imprint on the cosmic microwave background, the radiation signature left over from the Big Bang, Greene said.

Greene stressed that all of these notions are highly speculative — "There's reason to take the ideas seriously, but they are far from science fact," he said.

Is free will dead?

But if a multiverse does exist, it could have some wacky consequences. A world with an infinite number of universes would virtually ensure that conditions in one universe would repeat in another, Greene said. In other words, there would almost certainly be another version of you reading this article, written by another version of me.

In such a multiverse, you might decide to read the article in one universe and not read it in another. What would that mean for the notion of free will?

Perhaps it's a moot point. "I think free will bit the dust long before multiverse theory," Greene said.

Scientific equations describe the particles that make up all matter, including humans, Greene said. While more-complex structures arise that have no relevance to a single particle — temperature, for instance — everything still has a "fundamental microphysical underpinning," he said.

That means free will is merely a human sensation, not actual control.

"When I move my teapot, that sensation is absolutely real," Green said. "But that's all it is. It's a sensation."

Maybe in another universe, there's a Brian Greene that believes in free will.

5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse


Here are 5 different scientific theories on the possible existence of multiverses :-

( 1 )

Mathematical Universes

Credit: WGBH Educational Foundation

Scientists have debated whether mathematics is simply a useful tool for describing the universe, or whether math itself is the fundamental reality, and our observations of the universe are just imperfect perceptions of its true mathematical nature. If the latter is the case, then perhaps the particular mathematical structure that makes up our universe isn't the only option, and in fact all possible mathematical structures exist as their own separate universes.

"A mathematical structure is something that you can describe in a way that's completely independent of human baggage," said Max Tegmark of MIT, who proposed this brain-twistin gidea. "I really believe that there is this universe out there that can exist independently of me that would continue to exist even if there were no humans."

This story was provided by SPACE.com, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or SPACE.com@Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

( 2 )

Daughter Universes

Credit: NASA/JPL

The theory of quantum mechanics, which reigns over the tiny world of subatomic particles, suggests another way multiple universes might arise. Quantum mechanics describes the world in terms of probabilities, rather than definite outcomes. And the mathematics of this theory might suggest that all possible outcomes of a situation do occur — in their own separate universes. For example, if you reach a crossroads where you can go right or left, the present universe gives rise to two daughter universes: one in which you go right, and one in which you go left.

"And in each universe, there's a copy of you witnessing one or the other outcome, thinking — incorrectly — that your reality is the only reality," Greene wrote in "The Hidden Reality."

( 3 ) 

Parallel Universes

Credit: Shutterstock/Sandy MacKenzie

Another idea that arises from string theory is the notion of "braneworlds" — parallel universes that hover just out of reach of our own, proposed by Princeton University's Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada. The idea comes from the possibility of many more dimensions to our world than the three of space and one of time that we know. In addition to our own three-dimensional "brane" of space, other three-dimensional branes may float in a higher-dimensional space.

Columbia University physicist Brian Greene describes the idea as the notion that "our universe is one of potentially numerous 'slabs' floating in a higher-dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic loaf," in his book "The Hidden Reality" (Vintage Books, 2011).

A further wrinkle on this theory suggests these brane universes aren't always parallel and out of reach. Sometimes, they might slam into each other, causing repeated Big Bangs that reset the universes over and over again. [The Universe: Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps ]

( 4 )

Bubble Universes

Credit: Shutterstock/Victor Habbick

In addition to the multiple universes created by infinitely extending space-time, other universes could arise from a theory called "eternal inflation." Inflation is the notion that the universe expanded rapidly after the Big Bang, in effect inflating like a balloon. Eternal inflation, first proposed by Tufts University cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, suggests that some pockets of space stop inflating, while other regions continue to inflate, thus giving rise to many isolated "bubble universes."

Thus, our own universe, where inflation has ended, allowing stars and galaxies to form, is but a small bubble in a vast sea of space, some of which is still inflating, that contains many other bubbles like ours. And in some of these bubble universes, the laws of physics and fundamental constants might be different than in ours, making some universes strange places indeed.

( 5 )

Infinite Universes

Credit: Shutterstock/R.T.Wohlstadter

Scientists can't be sure what the shape of space-time is, but most likely, it's flat (as opposed to spherical or even donut-shape) and stretches outinfinitely. But if space-time goes on forever, then it must start repeating at some point, because there are a finite number of ways particles can be arranged in space and time.

So if you look far enough, you would encounter another version of you — in fact, infinite versions of you. Some of these twins will be doing exactly what you're doing right now, while others will have worn a different sweater this morning, and still others will have made vastly different career and life choices.

Because the observable universe extends only as far as light has had a chance to get in the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang (that would be 13.7 billion light-years), the space-time beyond that distance can be considered to be its own separate universe. In this way, a multitude of universes exists next to each other in a giant patchwork quilt of universes. [Visualizations of Infinity: A Gallery]

Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/technology/internet-giants-erect-barriers-to-spy-agencies.html?emc=edit_th_20140607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=56381892&_r=0

By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTHJUNE 6, 2014

Google servers in Douglas County, Ga. The company is encrypting more data as it moves between servers. CreditConnie Zhou/Google

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.

As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.

After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.

Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.

Photo

Robert Litt, of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, bemoaned the new lack of the cooperation.CreditYuri Gripas/Reuters

A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.

But governments are fighting back, harder than ever. The cellphone giant Vodafone reported on Friday that a “small number” of governments around the world have demanded the ability to tap directly into its communication networks, a level of surveillance that elicited outrage from privacy advocates.

Vodafone refused to name the nations on Friday for fear of putting its business and employees at risk there. But in an accounting of the number of legal demands for information that it receives from 14 companies, it noted that some countries did not issue warrants to obtain phone, email or web-searching traffic, because “the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”

The company also said it had to acquiesce to some governments’ requests for data to comply with national laws. Otherwise, it said, it faced losing its license to operate in certain countries.

Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.'s own behavior invited the new arms race.

“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.

“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.

In Washington, officials acknowledge that covert programs are now far harder to execute because American technology companies, fearful of losing international business, are hardening their networks and saying no to requests for the kind of help they once quietly provided.

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.

“Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.

In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”

Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.

Many point to an episode in 2012, when Russian security researchers uncovered a state espionage tool, Flame, on Iranian computers. Flame, like the Stuxnet worm, is believed to have been produced at least in part by American intelligence agencies. It was created by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s operating systems. Companies argue that others could have later taken advantage of this defect.

Worried that such an episode undercuts confidence in its wares, Microsoft is now fully encrypting all its products, including Hotmail and Outlook.com, by the end of this year with 2,048-bit encryption, a stronger protection that would take a government far longer to crack. The software is protected by encryption both when it is in data centers and when data is being sent over the Internet, said Bradford L. Smith, the company’s general counsel.

Mr. Smith also said the company was setting up “transparency centers” abroad so that technical experts of foreign governments could come in and inspect Microsoft’s proprietary source code. That will allow foreign governments to check to make sure there are no “back doors” that would permit snooping by United States intelligence agencies. The first such center is being set up in Brussels.

Microsoft has also pushed back harder in court. In a Seattle case, the government issued a “national security letter” to compel Microsoft to turn over data about a customer, along with a gag order to prevent Microsoft from telling the customer it had been compelled to provide its communications to government officials. Microsoft challenged the gag order as violating the First Amendment. The government backed down.

Hardware firms like Cisco, which makes routers and switches, have found their products a frequent subject of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, and theirbusiness has declined steadily in places like Asia, Brazil and Europe over the last year. The company is still struggling to convince foreign customers that their networks are safe from hackers — and free of “back doors” installed by the N.S.A. The frustration, companies here say, is that it is nearly impossible to prove that their systems are N.S.A.-proof.

Continue reading the main story

• 
  

Most American companies said they never knowingly let the N.S.A. weaken their systems, or install back doors. But Mr. Snowden’s documents showed how the agency found a way.

In one slide from the disclosures, N.S.A. analysts pointed to a sweet spot inside Google’s data centers, where they could catch traffic in unencrypted form. Next to a quickly drawn smiley face, an N.S.A. analyst, referring to an acronym for a common layer of protection, had noted, “SSL added and removed here!”

Google was already suspicious that its internal traffic could be read, and had started a program to encrypt the links among its internal data centers, “the last chink in our armor,” Mr. Grosse said. But the slide gave the company proof that it was a regular target of the N.S.A. “It was useful to have proof, in terms of accelerating a project already underway,” he said.

Facebook and Yahoo have also been encrypting traffic among their internal servers. And Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been moving to more strongly encrypt consumer traffic with so-called Perfect Forward Secrecy, specifically devised to make it more labor intensive for the N.S.A. or anyone to read stored encrypted communications.

One of the biggest indirect consequences from the Snowden revelations, technology executives say, has been the surge in demands from foreign governments that saw what kind of access to user information the N.S.A. received — voluntarily or surreptitiously. Now they want the same.

At Facebook, Joe Sullivan, the company’s chief security officer, said it had been fending off those demands and heightened expectations.

Until last year, technology companies were forbidden from acknowledging demands from the United States government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But in January, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft brokered a deal with the Obama administration to disclose the number of such orders they receive in increments of 1,000.

As part of the agreement, the companies agreed to dismiss their lawsuits before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“We’re not running and hiding,” Mr. Sullivan said. “We think it should be a transparent process so that people can judge the appropriate ways to handle these kinds of things.”

The latest move in the war between intelligence agencies and technology companies arrived this week, in the form of a new Google encryption tool. The company released a user-friendly, email encryption method to replace the clunky and often mistake-prone encryption schemes the N.S.A. has readily exploited.

But the best part of the tool was buried in Google’s code, which included a jab at the N.S.A.'s smiley-face slide. The code included the phrase: “ssl-added-and-removed-here-; - )”

Steve Lohr contributed reporting from New York and Mark Scott from London.

7 Things Happy People Choose to Do Every Single Day - TIME

http://time.com/2837221/happy-people/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Bill Murphy Jr
 

6:41 AM ET

    

Science shows that you can have an impact on only 12 percent of the things that determine whether you're happy. The happiest people among us understand that if you make the right choices, that small sliver is enough.

This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published atInc.com.

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What separates the world’s happiest people from the rest of us?

P

About one-third of the U.S. population describes itself as “very happy,” according to the polling agency Harris Interactive–a higher number than I think many of us might expect.

These are the people in your office who are upbeat and eager no matter what unexpected challenges come their way, and the ones who seem to get genuinely excited over the smallest opportunities and kindnesses. They’re the folks in your social circles who endure hardship with smiles on their faces and who seem hard-wired always to look on the bright side.

Studies show that half of happiness is determined by genetics, and a little under 40 percent is governed by the impact of external events. You own the 12 percent of the package that’s left, however, and it turns out that the choices you make within that sliver make all the difference between being happy or not. Happier people realize this, and as a result they make seven key choices every day.

1. They choose to exercise.

There are many happy people who aren’t in great physical shape, so how does this make sense? The explanation is that you need onlyseven minutes of exercise a day if you’re exercising for the sake of happiness. That’s enough to make your body release endorphins, the neurotransmitters responsible for that famous “runner’s high.” They might not even call it exercise, but happy people find at least a small period of time each day to devote to moving around.

2. They choose to spend time outside.

Just 20 minutes a day outside is enough to elevate your level of happiness. You can even combine this with choice No. 1 and take your short exercise break outside. A simple walk at lunch or even a little time in the backyard, on the patio, or at a nearby park makes the difference. They might not even realize its impact on their happiness, but happy people make it a point to get outdoors.

3. They choose to focus on their families.

Three-quarters of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2010 said that their family was “the most important, most satisfying element of their lives,” according to a U.S. News report on the study. So, bury the hatchet with your brother-in-law and focus on your parents, children, or siblings if you want to be happier. Happy people might not always want to, but they find at least a few minutes every day (often much more) to do things to improve their family relationships.

4. They choose to make time for friends.

Friends are the family we choose for ourselves, and at least some small amount of social time with them every day is necessary if you want to improve happiness. Even just checking in with friends for a few minutes on the phone or a 10-minute conversation or activity together can make a difference. If you’re truly among the busiest people among us, merge this with choices No. 1 and 2, and exercise outside together. Happy people might not always have as much time as they’d like, but they find a way to interact with friends.

5. They choose to find meaning in their work.

It’s uniquely American in that work satisfaction can make or break our happiness, but as an entrepreneur, you probably think about this choice all the time: Part of happiness comes from using your gifts and talents every day to make some kind of difference. Happy people might not have found their dream job or their true calling–heck, they might not love their work–but they find a way to put their daily tasks in perspective and to take pride and joy from what they do.

6. They choose to contribute to their communities.

Being part of a community gives you a sense of belonging and helps improve your sense of self-worth, even as you work to define who you truly are. Thus, every day, truly happy people find a way to share something with their broader communities–going beyond their families and groups of close friends. Happy people might be involved with professional associations, church groups, athletic organizations, or something else, but they make sure to find some way to share with them every day.

7. They choose to get enough sleep.

It’s true: Lack of sleep will ruin your life. If you don’t get enough shuteye, you’ll be more likely to be irritable, your judgment gets impaired, and your libido suffers, all of which affect your overall happiness. Happy people might be no less busy than the rest of us, but they squeeze something else out of their lives if necessary. They give up television watching, Internet surfing, or simply worrying about things they can’t affect–and they choose to get at least seven or eight hours of sleep every day.

Centenarians: Study Reveals What They Die of, and Where - Live Science

http://www.livescience.com/46082-centenarians-what-they-die-of.html?cmpid=514645_20140604_25311276

Centenarians: Study Reveals What They Die of, and Where

By Martta Kelly, Contributing Writer   |   June 03, 2014 05:45pm ET

The number of people living past 100 is growing, researchers say.

Centenarians, people 100 years or older, are more likely to die of pneumonia or as a result of frail health than from cancer or heart disease, compared with "younger" elderly adults, according to the results of a new study.

The study also revealed thatpeople who reach their 100th birthday and beyond were most likely to die in a residential care home (61 percent) or hospital (27 percent), and less likely to die at home (10 percent) or in hospice (0.2 percent), said Catherine Evans, clinical lecturer on palliative care at King's College London, one of the study's authors.

Centenarians are a rapidly growing demographic group worldwide, projected to reach more than 3.2 million by 2050, Evans said. In the United Kingdom, the number of centenarians has doubled every 10 years since 1956, and is estimated to reach more than half a million by 2066.

"Despite the worldwide increase in the number of centenarians, few studies have considered the health and social care needs of older adults," she told Live Science. "The rising number of centenarians, coupled with continued use of hospital care at the end of life, indicates an urgent need to ensure adequate long-term care and responsive community care services to support people living to advanced age."

The researchers used data on deaths from the Office for National Statistics for England from 2001 to 2010, which included information on socioeconomic status of the region, place of residence and care- home bed capacity. The number of centenarian deaths in England per year increased by 56 percent over that 10-year period, from 2,823 to 4,393, Evans said. [Extending Life: 7 Ways to Live Past 100]

The median age of the nearly 36,000 people in the study — of whom 87 percent were women — was 101  at the time of death. The proportion of people who died in the hospital changed little over time, despite the increased number of centenarians.

The data also indicated that most elderly people would prefer to die not in a hospital, but rather in an environment where they are surrounded by familiarity, autonomy and loved ones, Evans said.

Evans added that in order to reduce centenarians' reliance on hospital care at the end of life, the response must be proactive rather than reactive. "There needs to be a greater emphasis on anticipatory care with contingency planning that details treatments and interventions when an unanticipated, or sentinel, event occurs," she said. "A chest infection, for example, can be managed at home with oral antibiotics and comfort care, rather than in the hospital with intravenous antibiotic treatment."

Increasing the number of beds in residential care homes may also reduce reliance on in-patient hospital stays for people with extreme longevity, Evans noted. "Better health care provisions could enable people to remain in their usual residence and reduce hospital admission — a major cost driver in end of life care."

The study is published online today (June 3) in the journal PLOS Medicine. 

Tiananmen, Forgotten - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/tiananmen-forgotten.html?emc=edit_ty_20140603&nl=opinion&nlid=18615288&_r=1

Tiananmen, Forgotten

By HELEN GAOJUNE 3, 2014

BEIJING — I don’t remember the first time I heard the term liu si — June 4 — which is how the Tiananmen protests, the widespread demonstrations in 1989 that ended in bloodshed, are referred to in China. It was perhaps sometime around 2003, when I was 15 or 16. The word was probably uttered at the dinner table by one of my parents, both of whom were on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the street in front of Tiananmen Square, on that night. They bore witness to the senseless killing, a memory that has haunted them ever since.

I do remember the first time the topic came up in conversation with my Chinese peers. On June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, I was shopping with a friend at a convenience store near Tsinghua University, when she, a junior at the university, turned to me, next to a shelf of colorful shampoos and conditioners. “Some people have been talking about this incident, liu si,” she said. “What was it all about?”

Twenty-five years after the massacre, the topic remains taboo here. I try to piece together the events of that spring through underground documentaries, foreign reports and conversations with my parents. Yet the more facts and anecdotes I gather, the more those crowds and gunshots seem unreal, like tragic scenes from an old foreign film.

To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement.

Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits.

This alternation between exertion and ennui slowly becomes a habit and, later, an attitude. Both, if well-endured, are rewarded by a series of concrete symbols of success: a college diploma, a prestigious job, a car, an apartment. The rules are simple, though the competition never gets easier; therefore we look ahead, focusing on our personal well-being, rather than the larger issues that bedevil the society.

Many of my Chinese peers, for example, are unfamiliar with the stories ofChen Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei, whose courageous struggles against the state are better known among my Western friends. Topics such as the religious repression in Tibet and military crackdowns in Xinjiang barely make a dent on the collective consciousness of my generation. The few times that I’ve spoken to my Chinese friends about the self-immolations among Tibetan monks, I’ve been met with looks of surprise. A few seconds later, some have asked, “Why?”

Perhaps nowhere is this indifference toward politics and civil rights more pronounced than in the insouciance of young people about the Communist Party’s attempts to expunge historical truths from public memory.

The majority of my generation still believes, for instance, that the war against Japanese invasion in the 1930s and ’40s was fought primarily by Communist soldiers, while the Nationalist army “passively resisted the Japanese and actively combated the Communists,” as told in my high school history textbook. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution mean little more than the scanty facts we had to memorize for the national college entrance exam.

The massacre of 1989, the most recent tragedy of all, is also the most forgotten: One of the first victims of the massacre, Jiang Jielian, was a junior at my high school. While his mother, Ding Zilin, and other mothers of the victims, are still seeking justice for the death of their sons and daughters, Jiang’s name is known to few of my classmates.

The party is responsible for distorting my generation’s understanding of history through state education and blocking our access to sensitive information. Yet even those who are well-aware of the state’s meddling make little effort to seek truth and push for change.

When I returned to China after finishing college in the United States in 2012, I was shocked to discover how few of my friends use VPN, software that allows one to scale China’s Great Firewall and access blocked sites like Twitter and other media platforms. Well-educated and worldly, they nonetheless see censorship more as a nuisance of daily life, something to be begrudgingly endured, rather than an infringement on their freedom of speech.

“I have to keep an eye on my watch when I browse foreign websites,” a friend at Peking University told me. Contrary to academic institutions worldwide that aim to make information available to students and scholars, Peking University charges an hourly fee for on-campus access to foreign websites. “It’s a little annoying, but I don’t browse them often anyway,” my friend explained. “Except when I check my email.”

If the previous generations learned the cost of political transgression through persecutions and crackdowns, today’s youth, especially those from elite backgrounds, instinctively understand the futility of challenging the system. After all, most of the time, power interferes with our personal lives only in the form of nettlesome restrictions. These inconveniences — from censorship to the vehicle license lottery, a system that distributes a limited number of license plates to a huge number of new drivers who apply each month — feel not unlike the dogmatic words of Marxist philosophy in our school textbooks, which we mock in private but dutifully memorize and copy onto exams.

Rebelling against these hurdles seems both naïve and unproductive — an understanding that the system has inculcated into us early on — as it would likely achieve little. Circumvention and compromise help us move forward, in a society where the price of falling behind is surely greater than the minor harms in our daily lives caused by state power.

Over time, such an approach is rationalized, and even defended by the very group of young elites who in previous generations have been the most passionate advocates for change.

Last October, Xia Yeliang, an economics professor at Peking University, was dismissed from his job after making bold demands for political change. The school insisted that Mr. Xia was fired for poor teaching skills. When the news broke, scores of university students rushed to defend the school’s claim on social media from what one called “Western media’s typical tactic to smear the image of China.”

“Outsiders may pay more attention to freedom of speech, but students here care more about academics and teaching,” a friend who was a student at the university said to me at the time. “Neither side should impose its opinion on the other.”

Today, most of my high school friends, having graduated from top Chinese universities, are working at state banks and government-owned enterprises. Several have passed the competitive civil-service exam and landed cushy positions in government. Nationwide, China’s best and brightest are chasing the stability and prestige offered by the state system: A survey conducted by Tsinghua University reveals that state-owned enterprises and government organs rank as the two most desirable destinations for university graduates.

Outsiders, as my Peking University friend might say, may lament the contrast between the conservative outlook of today’s Chinese youth and the unbounded liberalism of the Tiananmen generation. But among the minority of my peers who are familiar with liu si, the rosy romanticism on the square in 1989 takes on a different hue today, when viewed in the fluorescent light of a government office cubicle.

In a recent conversation with a high school friend, who is now an editor at People’s Daily, the flagship of the state-run media, he brought up the subject of Tiananmen. An avid follower of Western news and user of Facebook, he shrugs off the urgency for Chinese society to revisit the event. “What do you think it can bring us, to resurrect liu si?” he asked. “Nothing is going to change. We have to move forward.”

Helen Gao is a journalist based in Beijing.

The brave new world of DIY faecal transplant - BBC NEWS

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27503660

26 May 2014 Last updated at 23:29

The brave new world of DIY faecal transplant

By William KremerBBC World Service

You would have to be desperate to take a sample of your husband's excrement, liquidise it in a kitchen blender and then insert it into your body with an off-the-shelf enema kit. This article contains images and descriptions which some might find shocking.

In April 2012, Catherine Duff was ready to try anything. She was wasting away with crippling abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea so severe she was confined to the house. At 56, in the US state of Indiana, she had come down with her sixth Clostridium difficile infection in six years.

"My colorectal surgeon said: 'The easiest thing would be to just take your colon out.' And my question was: 'Easier for whom?'"

Appalled at the idea of losing her large intestine, Duff's family feverishly searched for alternative treatments on the internet. One of them turned up an article about a doctor in Australia, Thomas Borody, who had been treating C. diff with an unusual process known as faecal transplant, or faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).

Clostridium difficile is an obnoxious microbe, usually kept in check by other bacteria in our guts. Problems arise when antibiotics remove some of these "friendly" bacteria, allowing C. diff to take over. One doctor compares it to the hooligan on the bus who is prevented from doing any harm by the sheer number of people on board. A course of antibiotics is equivalent to some of these people getting off at a stop, allowing the hooligan to run wild. About 50% of a person's faeces is bacteria, and a faecal transplant is like a whole new busload of people - the friendly bacteria - being hustled on board.

John and Catherine Duff

It's an emerging, but not new treatment. Chinese medicine has recommended swallowing small doses of faecal matter for some ailments for 1,500 years. It's also a treatment option in veterinary medicine. In 1958, a Denver surgeon, Ben Eiseman, used faecal transplants to treat an inflammation of the colon. He wrote the procedure up in a journal article, which, years later, inspired Thomas Borody to try the radical treatment on patients with C. diff. Now the head of the Centre for Digestive Diseases in New South Wales, Borody has recorded some striking successes.

Duff showed the article about Borody to her gastroenterologist, her infectious diseases consultant and her colorectal surgeon. But none of them had performed a faecal transplant and none was willing to try. When Duff said that she intended to administer the treatment herself with her husband's faeces, the gastroenterologist agreed to send a sample away to be screened for disease.

After they received the all-clear to use the stool, it was Duff's husband John that donned plastic gloves and assiduously followed the instructions they found online. He was no doctor, but as a retired submarine commander Duff considered him equal to the task.

"He was in the habit of spending months at a time in a metal tube with over 100 men," Duff says. "As a result, nothing grosses him out. So he was the one that made the donation, and then mixed it in a blender with saline, and then he gave it to me in an enema.

"My husband kissed me after I lay down and told me not to worry, that everything was going to be OK, and that it was going to work."

Then he threw away the blender.

Duff lay on her back with her legs in the air, trying to hold the foreign material in her body. She lasted four hours before needing to go to the toilet. They started the process at 16:00 in the afternoon. By 22:00 that night she felt almost completely better. "And I had been literally dying the day before," she says. "I was going into renal failure - I was dying."

Lots of people die from Clostridium difficile. In the US, the figure is estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be 14,000 per year, while in England and Wales, 1,646 deaths from C. diff were recorded in 2012.

Even though antibiotics cause the disease, most patients are cured by more antibiotics. But for some, the problem returns after every course of drugs, as it did for Catherine Duff.

There is growing recognition that faecal transplant is the best way to treat patients like these. In the first randomised trial of the technique published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, 94% of patients were cured by the treatment, whereas a course of antibiotics cured just 27%. The disparity was so huge that the researchers stopped the trial early, on the grounds that it was unethical to deny the better cure to the cohort assigned antibiotics.

Dozens of other trials involving faecal transplants are either in progress or have recently been completed. Dr Ilan Youngster was one of the authors of a pilot study, published in April in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which found that using frozen faecal samples, administered "top-down" through a tube in the nose, was as effective as using fresh samples in a "bottom-up" procedure.

Youngster admits that even when frozen, faeces have a slight smell. "It's not a very pleasant treatment, especially from a psychological point of view," he says. "But we have yet to encounter a sick person with C. diff who has refused this treatment. It's a horrible disease. We had a patient with cancer that contracted C. diff and he said 'If I could get rid of one of these two diseases, please get rid of the C. diff.'"

Frozen faecal matter in Dr Youngster's trial at Massachusetts General Hospital

In the US, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has puzzled over how to regulate faecal transplant, but some doctors do offer the treatment, usually by colonoscopy. Catherine Duff, who set up the patient advocacy group the Fecal Transplant Foundation at the beginning of 2013, originally listed 19 providers on her website. Now there are about 75.

But she says that's nowhere near enough and people are dying because there is no provider close to their home. "Even if those doctors did nothing but faecal transplant, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they couldn't meet the need," she says.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I decided, after hemming and hawing and talking to my son, that yes, he would let me put poo up his bum to see if that would work”

Sky CurtisAuthor, The Fecal Transplant Guidebook

Dr Alexander Khoruts at the University of Minnesota says clinics are concerned that offering faecal transplant could scare other patients away, as the smell is unmistakeable. "Imagine blending stool in a clinic space - the aesthetic problems with that are not trivial. When you click on the 'blend' button and the surface area of that faecal material increases thousands of folds in a matter of seconds, it is quite potent."

The difficulty of getting to a clinic that offers faecal transplant and abundant availability of free faeces explains why many continue to opt for what Duff and her husband did in 2012 - a self-administered transplant. She estimates that for every procedure that takes place in a clinic, scores more occur in bedrooms and bathrooms around the US.

A website, The Power of Poop, is full of tips and personal stories to help people with their first at-home faecal transplant, and a Facebook group under the name Sally Brown shares advice from patients who have immersed themselves in the science of gut microbiota.

Alongside the science there is humour, and Duff's Fecal Transplant Foundation is planning to bring out a range of merchandise including sweatshirts, beverage holders, baseball caps and bumper stickers with "unique and possibly hysterically funny slogans" alongside the foundation's awareness-raising brown ribbon.

Most DIY faecal transplant patients are, in fact, not suffering from C. diff, but from a range of other diseases that they believe the procedure will help, and which doctors are not willing or allowed to treat with faecal transplant. They include conditions that would appear to have very little to do with gut bacteria - including MS, autism, and diabetes - but the most common ailments treated are the inflammatory bowel diseases Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.

The efficacy of faecal transplant on these diseases - which around 1.5 million people suffer from in the US - is uncertain. Dr Elaine Petrof, an infectious diseases specialist at Kingston General Hospital, Ontario, says that for C. diff sufferers, taking antibiotics is like throwing gasoline on a weed-ridden lawn. "What you've done is you've killed the weeds but you've also killed the grass. So you're now left with a charred, barren, destroyed piece of land and you have to put seeds back on there to get stuff to grow again or the else the weeds will just come back."

She goes on: "With Crohn's disease it's different. Now you're dealing with another garden full of weeds, if you like. So then you're trying to replace a bad ecosystem that's already taken hold with another ecosystem. That's got to be much trickier and more difficult to accomplish."

Gut bacteria - five astonishing facts

1. 90% of cells in our body are bacteria - organically, our bodies are only 10% human
2. We are less than 1% human in terms of the overall gene activity in our bodies
3. Babies are born sterile, but 50% become carriers of C. diff in their first year of life - other bacteria hold it in check
4. One strain of bacteria, marketed as the probiotic Mutaflor, is reportedly from a culture taken from the stomach of a German soldier in WW1 - he was apparently the only one in his barracks not to succumb to food poisoning
5. Jeremy Nicholson at Imperial College London says that developed nations have probably changed their microbial communities more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000, thanks to antibiotics and other lifestyle changes

Radio 4 Frontiers: How gut microbiotica influence our health

In 2006, on the very day her husband died from lung cancer, Sky Curtis found herself sitting with her 18-year-old son in a doctor's waiting room in Toronto. He was curled up in a ball in pain, with bloody diarrhoea, a fever, cankers in his mouth, a rash on his face and boils on his legs. He was later diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and informed that his colon would have to be removed.

Like Catherine Duff, Curtis searched for alternative medicines and came across Thomas Borody in Australia. She gave him a call. "He talked to me for hours at a time," she says. "The man is a saint."

Continue reading the main story

Top-down or bottom-up?

• The form of faecal transplant chosen by DIY patients is the enema, but this doesn't send the faecal matter high into the colon, so the process may need to be repeated
• Most US surgeons use colonoscopies, which deliver the solution to the furthest end of the colon, but they require sedatives and the system must be flushed out beforehand
• A nasogastric tube removes the need for a preparatory treatment, but is opposed by some doctors since it sends faecal matter into the stomach - not its normal home
• Dr Alexander Khoruts says gastroenterologists tend to go bottom-up, and infectious disease physicians top-down

Curtis found a local doctor who was willing to prescribe a series of drugs which Borody recommended. Her son went into remission, but later fell sick again, with a new diagnosis of Crohn's. With her son wasting away in front of her eyes, she called Borody again and he suggested a faecal transplant.

"I decided, after hemming and hawing and talking to my son, that yes, he would let me put poo up his bum to see if that would work," she recalls. She had a sample of her own stool screened and they performed their first transplant on Christmas Day, 2008. "I kept thinking, 'I'm giving my kid a bag of [faeces] for Christmas. It wasn't ideal, but he was just so sick and I knew if I waited until after the Christmas holidays he would be dead."

The first few transplants, Curtis says, "sort-of worked". She then toyed with Borody's protocol, and on the basis of personal research into her son's condition, changed the frequency of the transplants and gave him painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, sedatives and steroid creams. Bit by bit, he got better.

Curtis was left from this ordeal with material for a memoir and her own protocol, developed through trial-and-error experiments with her son's treatment. This became a handbook that is now one of the key works in the DIY faecal transplant community.

Curtis's story is an inspiration to many, but the impact of faecal transplant on inflammatory bowel diseases is unpredictable, and varies from patient to patient. Unlike Curtis's son, some find they have to continue performing transplants to sustain their health. A team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York hopes to start a study soon identifying the subgroups of patients that will potentially benefit from the treatment.

"We have to prove the science," says Dr Ashish Atreja from the hospital. "Because if we can't prove the science really works then we are creating an optimism which is not genuine."

Curtis says she has had plenty of people thanking her for her book, and so far, no feedback from disappointed patients, or criticism from doctors. Advocates of faecal transplant insist that it is safe, and point out that there are no published reports of anyone becoming ill as a result of the procedure. "It's about as dangerous as changing a baby's diaper," says Curtis.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I'll be the first to admit it's crude - it's essentially like pouring sewage into people”

Elaine PetrofInfectious Diseases Specialist, Kingston General Hospital

Dr Lawrence Brandt at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, one of the first advocates of the procedure in the US, agrees that the administration of stool in an enema is reasonably safe, but he worries that some people may be doing it before other treatment options have been explored, or after a faulty diagnosis.

Ilan Youngster agrees. "We wouldn't want anyone out there getting a stool transplant just because they feel they would benefit from it," he says.

A bigger concern is that they are using untested stool. At Brandt's clinic, donors are screened for a long list of infectious diseases, including HIV and hepatitis, and are subjected to a battery of questions about their lifestyle and habits. Donors with allergies and heart disease are excluded, as well those who have recently taken antibiotics.

"We had one woman who said: 'Can I use my dog's stool?'" says Brandt. "I'm sure that there are some people out there who are saying, 'Well, I have a horse. He's pretty healthy and he has an adequate supply of stool - I'll use his stool." But using animal stool is absolutely not recommended.

Curtis, like all faecal transplant advocates, agrees that it is vital to get stool samples tested, but says that unfortunately only a few per cent of at-home patients do this.

For many patients, the choice of donor is often about more than just choosing someone with healthy stool, she says. "It is important that the donor feels psychologically 'right' because their poo is going into the sick person's body." In the online faecal transplant community, patients occasionally refer to their donors as "poop angels".

In November 2011, Edward Bondurant had a "very strange conversation" with a friend he had known since he was five. "I just said well, you have something that you do every day that might change my life. I knew this person better than my brother but I still felt odd asking - but he immediately said yes."

Edward says he often reads the BBC News website while carrying out a faecal transplant

Bondurant has suffered with ulcerative colitis since 1978, on and off. When it flares up, he says, "you need to be 10 steps from the bathroom - and sometimes that's two steps too many". The drugs he takes for it are expensive - around $11,000 (£6,500) a dose - and have bad side-effects.

Bondurant's first attempt at faecal transplant was a messy disaster but he is now something of a pro, able to do his job as a financial adviser while adopting the best positions needed for the faecal matter to slip into his colon. "I have actually had long conversations, doing large business deals for large sums of money, while hanging upside down," he says.

Although Bondurant still takes drugs when his colitis flares up, he does regular faecal transplants to keep the disease at bay - he has now done more than 100. He can adapt his schedule to his donor's body clock. He only lives five blocks away, so Bondurant either swings by his house, or his donor, letting himself into Bondurant's house with his own key, drops off his droppings, leaving them in Tupperware in his fridge.

Faecal deposits being processed at OpenBiome

But there is no medical reason why you need to be best friends with your faecal donor. At the beginning of 2013, two friends at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started OpenBiome, a non-profit making stool bank. Deposits from three fully-screened donors are kept in 250ml bottles at -80C, before being shipped to hospitals for $250 (£150) each. A frozen stool bank gets around the logistical problems of handling fresh faeces, and the time delay involved in screening new donors. So far, 370 little bottles have been sent to 39 hospitals.

A recently proposed rule from the FDA, that donors should be known to the patient or the doctor administering the faecal transplant, threatens OpenBiome's business model, but the owners are still feeling upbeat about the future. Their latest venture is in capsules containing faeces. Similar products have been trialled successfully by researchers at the University of Calgary and Ilan Youngster is currently working on a further study. Thomas Borody also uses them - he calls them "crapsules". Taking faecal tablets, although still revolting as a concept, is less invasive than a colonoscopy or enema.

OpenBiome's prototype faecal capsule

A different vision of the future of the treatment is a move away from faeces altogether. Instead, patients would receive a live bacterial culture targeted to fight Clostridium difficile - in effect, a synthetic stool.

Although it would be developed from faecal samples, it would only need to contain a handful of strains of bacteria, not the hundreds present in excrement, which would make its impact on the human gut more reproducible and understandable.

Trevor Lawley at the Sanger Institute in the UK is down to just 18 strains in his synthetic stool. He is in the process of overcoming a series of technical problems, such as how to grow these anaerobic organisms and prevent them from evolving before they can be used. But he says the real challenge in the emerging field of "live biotherapeutics" is how to regulate it.

Meanwhile, in Canada Dr Petrof has already cured C. diff in two patients using a synthetic solution containing 33 strains of bacteria grown inside a "robogut"- an imitation colon.

Faecal transplant, she says, works. "But I'll be the first to admit it's crude. It's essentially like pouring sewage into people." Her synthetic stool, on the other hand, smells a lot less obnoxious and is a sterile-looking milky colour.

"It's still the same concept of using a microbial ecosystem or community of bacteria," says Petrof. "But we're just moving away from taking it out of the toilet."

A miniature Robogut in action - Petrof and her colleagues call their synthetic stool "RePOOPulate"

The Original Wolf of Wall Street Carl Icahn Returns - TIME

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2c9171%2c2159274%2c00.html

The world's most ravenous capitalist is taking on the world's most valuable firm, Apple

By Rana Foroohar Monday, Dec. 16, 2013

Carl Icahn is the richest man on Wall Street. He's the most feared corporate raider In the world. He may also be the most entertaining financier on the planet. Having grown up in a family that resembled a darker version of Woody Allen's multigenerational working-class Jewish clan in Radio Days, Icahn is prone to one-liners. His real talent is as a mimic, but when I ask him to do Apple CEO Tim Cook, he declines. "Nah, I can't do Cook. I can only do crazies."

Of course, some people say Cook is crazy to listen to Icahn, who has been trying to persuade him since August to give some of Apple's $147 billion cash hoard back to investors in the form of a massive share buyback. Now Icahn is ratcheting up the pressure: he tells TIME that he filed a precatory proposal with Apple on Nov. 26, three days before the deadline for measures to be voted on at the company's next annual shareholders meeting.

His proposal, which calls for a stock buyback, would not be binding on the company's management, and that's typical for shareholder resolutions. But a buyback would almost certainly push up the price of Apple's stock--and increase the value of Icahn's $2 billion in Apple holdings along with those of all the other Apple investors. Icahn says he doesn't consider his proposal an indictment of Cook, who has been at Apple's helm since Steve Jobs died in 2011. "Tim Cook is doing a good job with the business," Icahn tells TIME. "I think he's good at running the business whether he does what I want or not. But Apple is not a bank."

Silicon Valley’s rush to back Bitcoin services rouses concerns - Financial Times

Silicon Valley’s rush to back Bitcoin services rouses concerns - Financial Times

May 30, 2014 at 1:30am

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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8baa2bb8-e5bb-11e3-aeef-00144feabdc0.html?segid=0100320#axzz337QiNP00

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

©Bloomberg

Silicon Valley is in danger of promoting a new wave of Bitcoin services for consumers and merchants before the digital currency is secure or stable enough for the mass market, according to some entrepreneurs and financiers working in the field.

Some of the US technology industry’s leading lights have joined the rush to build companies around Bitcoin, seeing it as the foundation for a new financial services industry independent of the current banking system. That has led to a spate of start-ups trying to make it easier for consumers to make payments with the digital currency, and for merchants to accept it.

But a potential lack of security, extreme levels of volatility and regulatory uncertainty make Bitcoin highly unsuitable for such uses, critics say.

“It’s an idiotic sideshow,” said Wences Casares, founder of Xapo, a Silicon Valley start-up that recently launched a service for holding the currency. The relatively small market for Bitcoin – the total amount outstanding is valued at about $7bn – means it is likely to be years before it becomes accepted as a currency for payments, if ever, he added.

Significant parts of the infrastructure needed to support the mass-market use of Bitcoin are also still lacking.

A lack of guaranteed security for the “wallet” services where consumers hold their Bitcoins is one of the biggest obstacles, said Adam Shapiro of Promontory Financial, a consulting firm. Most banks have also held back from working with Bitcoin companies given the regulatory uncertainty surrounding the area, he added.

Despite that, US start-ups have rushed into the field, drawn by hopes that the Bitcoin protocol, like the internet protocol underpinning the web, will provide the foundation for a wave of new applications that disrupt the existing finance industry.

FT Video

Bitcoin future in doubt?

February 2014: The Bitcoin trading website Mt Gox has disappeared from the internet, raising serious concerns among investors and other Bitcoin holders. Stephen Foley, the FT’s US investment correspondent, speaks to Arash Massoudi about what the event might mean for the future of the digital currency

Halsey Minor, a serial entrepreneur and investor who co-founded online news site Cnet and was a prominent early backer of Salesforce.com, joined the race earlier this month with an attempt to take the volatility out of paying with the currency. Users of Bitreserve, which is currently in a private test phase, would have their accounts denominated in whatever currency they choose, with Bitcoin only used as the “back end” of a payments system that would make it possible to move money without incurring the usual fees.

The size of venture capital rounds for Bitcoin companies has also escalated sharply in recent weeks, with a $30m investment earlier this month in Bitpay , a company in Atlanta, and $25m in San Francisco-based Coinbase. Prominent investors who have jumped into the field in recent months include Marc Andreessen, developer of the first web browser, and Jim Breyer, an early backer of Facebook.

Bitcoinmania

FT Alphaville takes you through the latest news as well as the history of Bitcoin

Their rush to back companies building applications for the currency echoes the stampede to invest in consumer internet start-ups in the mid-1990s, after the launch of Netscape’s first browser opened the web to wider consumer use.

But doubters argue that the first successful Bitcoin companies are more likely to be involved more in the back-end “plumbing” needed to make the currency secure and stable, rather than in mass-market services.

“It’s like the beginning of the internet, the first cases were pretty boring,” said Mr Casares. “The really sexy things came later.”