Read by Thich Nath Hanh, chanted by brother Phap Niem.

The creators of this audio track were Gary Malkin, the composer/arranger, producer, and collaborator Michael Stillwater. The work came from a CD/book called 'Graceful Passages: A Companion for Living and Dying'.

Visuals taken from:
HOME, Earth and Baraka

You can download the audio here
MP3 Download: wkup.org/images/audio/thay_phapniem_greatbellchant.mp3

The biggest radio telescope located in China's Guizhou Province is now operational. Featuring a reflector the size of 30 football pitches, it took five years and $180 million to construct. Called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope's (FAST), the telescope is located in a karst valley in Pingtang County, a mountainous area in southwest China.

Some 8,000 local residents were relocated to ensure a 5km radio silence zone around the facility. About $269 million were allocated to pay compensations to the villagers. The name FAST referrers to the main structure of the gigantic instrument, which has 4,450 triangular 11-meter panels and measures 500 meters in diameter. For comparison, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which held the title of world's largest radio telescope before FAST, has a 305-meter dish.

FAST was first brought online in July for trial observation and received a set of data from a pulsar about 1,351 light-years away, as Xinhua news agency was told by Qian Lei, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observation (NAO) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which built the project. China plans to use one of its best supercomputers, the SkyEye-1, to process the massive amounts of data supplied by FAST. At its peak the data flow is expected to require computing power of over 200 teraflops per second.

The instrument would be used to study gravitational waves, stellar radio emissions and potentially signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, Qian Lei, an associate researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state broadcaster CCTV. "In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar [spinning neutron star] is approaching us," Qian said.

FAST is the world's biggest radio telescope with a single dish. The old Soviet RATAN-600 in southern Russia is bigger still, but, unlike China's new telescope, its 576-meter reflector structure resembles a donut.

[extract] Russian scientists have found that treating cells with cold plasma leads to their regeneration and rejuvenation. This result can be used to develop a plasma therapy program for patients with non-healing wounds. The paper has been published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Non-healing wounds make it more difficult to provide effective treatment to patients and are therefore a serious problem faced by doctors. These wounds can be caused by damage to blood vessels in the case of diabetes, failure of the immune system resulting from an HIV infection or cancers, or slow cell division in elderly people. Treatment of non-healing wounds by conventional methods is very difficult, and in some cases impossible.

An earlier study established the bactericidal properties of low-temperature plasma, as well as the relatively high resistance of cells and tissues to its influence. The results of plasma treatment of patients with non-healing wounds varied from positive to neutral. The authors' previous work prompted them to investigate the possibility that the effect of plasma treatment on wound healing could depend on application pattern (the interval between applications and the total number of applications).

Two types of cells were used in this study: fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) and keratinocytes (epithelial cells). Both play a central role in wound healing.

"The positive response to plasma treatment that we observed could be linked to the activation of a natural destructive mechanism called autophagy, which removes damaged organelles from the cell and reactivates cellular metabolic processes," says Elena Petersen, a co-author of the paper and the head of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Technologies at MIPT.

The scientists are planning additional research into the molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of plasma on cells. They also aim to determine the influence of a patient's age on the effectiveness of plasma therapy.

This article, with images, can be read in its entirety here.

According to folklore, tonight's full Moon is the Harvest Moon. For many observers, the usual luster of the silver orb will be dimmed by a spooky shadow. It's a "penumbral lunar eclipse."

The animation below, created by graphic artist Larry Koehn, shows the eclipse unfolding for nearly 4 hours on Sept 16th:

A penumbral eclipse happens when the Moon passes through the pale outskirts of Earth's shadow. It is much less dramatic than a "blood moon" total lunar eclipse. In fact, when observers are not alerted beforehand, they often do not realize an eclipse is underway. Nevertheless, the subtle shadow of Earth is visible to the naked eye if you know it's there.

The eclipse will be visible everywhere except the Americas:

www.spaceweather.com

In the Lofoten Islands of Norway, Spaceweather.com reader Rob Stammes operates a magnetic observatory. 24 hours a day, he measures the strength and direction of the local magnetic field as well electrical currents running through the ground. During geomagnetic storms, his chart recordings go haywire. On Sept. 12th, something different happened. They rang like a bell:

"During the morning and especially around noon, sinusoidal pulsations appeared on my instruments," says Stammes. "The period was close to 115 seconds."

These are natural ultra-low frequency oscillations known to researchers as "pulsations continuous" (Pc). The physics is familiar to anyone who has studied bells or resonant cavities. Earth's magnetic field carves out a cavity in the surrounding solar wind. Pressure fluctuations in the solar wind can excite wave modes in this cavity much like Stammes observed. References: #1, #2, #3.

The Sept. 12th oscillations are Pc4 waves; in other words, their frequencies fall in the range 6.7–22 mHz. Pc4 waves, and their even lower frequency cousins Pc5 waves (1.7–6.7 mHz), can have an energizing influence on particles in Earth's inner magnetosphere because the waves resonate with the natural motion of particles around the geomagnetic field. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that bright auroras were observed on both Sept. 11th and 12th.

Ole Salomonsen photographed these from the window of an airplane just before sunrise in Norway:

"To get the shot was not easy," says Salomonsen. "I had to use a handheld camera in a moving plane! To create some darkness, I draped one of my jackets to over me and the window to prevent cabin-light reflections ruining the shot. The people sitting next to me probably must have had a good laugh :) Anyway I think it was worth it. Observing the auroras from air is definitely special."

Rob Stammes has been monitoring magnetic pulsations in Norway for years. "They seem to occur most often around the equinoxes," he says. That means we should stay tuned for more. It is aurora season, after all.
www.spaceweather.com

Picture a steady breeze blowing through the leaves of a tree. Now imagine these leaves could do more than simply churn in the current of air—what if they could capture the wind and transform it into renewable energy?

Energy from wind is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the world, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and social research institution. This development of wind power has mostly taken place on a large scale, usually by utility companies providing power to a grid of millions of customers. That's because wind energy is most efficient when it's capturing very strong winds, more common in remote areas and at heights greater than 50 feet off the ground. Those turbines need to be as tall as a five-story building, and they take up a lot of horizontal room, too—several hundred feet per turbine, in many cases. They also require more maintenance than solar panels.

All of these factors make it challenging to capture wind energy in small amounts. But that hasn't stopped companies from experimenting in the hopes of one day allowing individual homeowners to capture energy from their own backyards or balconies, and reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

Last December, two "wind trees"—or arbres à vent—quietly churned in a plaza in Paris, as world leaders met for the historic climate talks at the Le Bourget conference center nearby. Developed by a French company called New Wind, the "trees" had plastic "leaves" painted green, with curves that held dozens of tiny blades soundlessly harnessing the wind no matter which way it blew. Unlike larger industrial turbines, which need winds of over 22 miles per hour to function, the leaves captured energy from wind speeds of less than five mph.

New Wind was founded by former film and television writer Jérôme Michaud-Larivière in 2011, and created its first prototype in 2013. After working through several possible iterations, the company settled on a "seemingly chaotic" arrangement of leaf-turbines on each branch. The latest design is just under 30 feet tall and 23 feet wide, sporting a total of 54 leaf-turbines that can capture up to 5.4 kilowatts of energy at a time and produce around 2,400 kWh annually, said New Wind spokesperson Marine Bieliaeff. The startup estimates this would meet half of the average French household's annual energy needs; run a small, low-consumption office for 12 months; or charge an electric car for 10,000 miles each year. That's the equivalent of about 160 gallons of fuel.

In January, New Wind installed its first tree for a private company, the Swiss bank Piguet Galland. They also have contracts to provide more trees to companies in France, Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg in the year ahead, with plans to expand beyond Europe next year. "A lot of companies are looking for renewable energy," Bieliaeff said.

One advantage of the unusual wind turbines, however, is their adaptability to different locations. A 5.4 kW solar array would take up about 430 square feet of roof space—not an option for those living in apartments or houses without direct sunlight. But a wind tree's curved branches could be attached to any balcony or rooftop, even in areas that don't get much wind.

So far, New Wind has positioned aeropower at the intersection of art and sustainability, which appeals to businesses eager to take a green stance. But they plan to launch smaller, more customizable products for homes next year. "We will bet on modularity," Bieliaeff said. Rather than selling entire trees, the company would like to provide as many individual curved branches as a customer wants or needs. Such flexibility would allow those with small amounts of space or lower budgets to access at least some wind energy—and potentially prove that wind companies' commitments to affordable, customizable turbines aren't just hot air.

A device developed at UCLA may have been responsible for a barely-conscious patient recovering from a coma and becoming fully able to comprehend language just three days after being the first subject of a novel brain treatment, a new study has found.

The device, which is the size of a coffee cup saucer, focuses acoustic energy on a specific region of the brain, stimulating it. For the new study, it was aimed at the thalamus of a 25-year-old man recovering from a coma. The procedure took 10 minutes, during which the patient received ten 30-second stimulating impulses.

The Thalamus is a structure located between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain that acts as a relay for information. It processes signals from all senses, apart from smell, to other regions of the brain. In people suffering from reduced mental function after a coma, the thalamus typically performs worse than in healthy individuals. However, stimulating it with electrodes requires risky surgery, while medications can only target it indirectly.

Before undergoing the new procedure, the man showed only minimal signs of consciousness and limited ability to communicate. For example, he could only make small movements when asked. Three days later, he had regained full consciousness and full language comprehension and could reliably indicate "yes" or "no" by nodding or shaking his head.

"It's almost as if we were jump-starting the neurons back into function," said Martin Monti, the study's lead author and a UCLA associate professor of psychology and neurosurgery. He said that similar results could previously only be achieved through electrode implantation and no non-invasive procedure had been effective.

The authors say they are still cautious about declaring that the treatment, in fact, caused the recovery.  "It is possible that we were just very lucky and happened to have stimulated the patient just as he was spontaneously recovering," Monti said.  However, they hope that the technique will prove to be effective in other patients as well.

The study was conducted by a group of UCLA researchers, including Alexander Bystritsky, who pioneered the technique the device uses, which is called "low-intensity focused ultrasound pulsation." They published their results in the journal Brain Stimulation.

Even in modern times we are fascinated by crystals - from the diamonds we use as a sacred symbol of partnership, to the plethora of 'healing' gems that can be found in a New Age gift shop. So we can only imagine how ancient people viewed these transparent rocks with hidden structure.

Evidence of the esteem in which crystals were held can be found in a "remarkable set" of 'crystal weapons' found in the megalithic tombs of southwestern Spain. At the site of Valencina de la Concepci
on, archaeologists have uncovered crystal arrowheads, an exquisite dagger blade, and cores used for creating the artifacts, that date to the 3rd millennium BCE.

The Montelirio tholos, excavated between 2007 and 2010, is "a great megalithic construction...which extends over 43.75 m in total", constructed out of large slabs of slate. At least 25 individuals were interred within the structure , along with "an extraordinary set of sumptuous grave goods...the most notable of which is an unspecified number of shrouds or clothes made of tens of thousands of perforated beads and decorated with amber beads". Additionally however, a large number of crystal arrowheads were found together, which be suggestive of a ritual offering at an altar. The arrowheads have the characteristic long lateral appendices of flint arrowheads from the area - but investigators remarked that "even greater skill must have been required to produce these unique features when using rock crystal."

The manufacture of the rock crystal dagger blade must have been based on an accumulation of transmitted empirical knowledge and skill taken from the production of flint dagger blades as well from know-how of rock-crystal smaller foliaceous bifacial objects, such as Ontiveros and Montelirio arrowheads... It was obtained from a large monocrystal at least 220 mm in length and 60 mm in width. Given that these single crystals are hexagonal, they would have a similar width along all their different axes. The rock crystal source used in creating the crystal weaponry has not been pinpointed exactly at this stage, though analysis suggests two potential sources, "both located several hundred km away from Valencina".

Mallory Pickett : Forbes : 12 Sep 2016

In the summer of 2014, Mardi McNeil was an undergraduate student at the Queensland University of Technology. She was spending the summer helping a team of scientists with a big research project: mapping the ocean floor around the Great Barrier Reef.

McNeil's job was to map the extent and structure of bioherms, mounds of ancient calcified algae, scattered outside the Great Barrier Reef 60 to 100 feet below the surface. Scientists in the 80s had documented the bioherms using acoustic sound waves, but no one had re-visited them with modern technology. So McNeil used lidar data (a mapping technique that measures distance with lasers) collected by the Australian navy to create high-resolution 3D renderings of the ocean floor. But as soon as she started looking through the images she made, McNeil knew she'd found something big.

Scientists had previously thought the bioherms covered an area of about 800 square miles. McNeil's map showed a bioherm network covering over 2,300 square miles, triple the original area estimate. And it wasn't just the extent of the bioherms that was a surprise: it was their shapes. There were huge doughnut-shaped bioherms, 30 feet tall and 600 feet across, honeycombed sheets of bioherms with sharp ridges and crests, and undulating waves of bioherms spread across the ocean floor for miles and miles.

McNeil was on Skype with the other scientists on her team at the moment of discovery. "We were sharing a screen and just scrolling down the coastline, looking at it unfold, looking at these weird circular shapes, and we were all amazed," she says. "It just went on and on."

The new understanding of the bioherm reef has huge scientific significance. In the report they just published on their findings in the journal Coral Reefs, McNeil and her coauthors suggested the bioherms' "vast size and volume perhaps elevate their importance to rival that of the northern Great Barrier Reef coral reefs".

The bioherm reef is believed to be about 8,000 years old, the same age as the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. Their mounds of ancient algae are a kind of geochemical archive, containing records of ocean temperature and acidity from the last Ice Age until now. The records can be used to understand how past ocean changes affected corals and other organisms, in order to predict how today's warming and acidifying oceans could affect future ecosystems.

The bioherm reef could be an important part of that future: because it's deeper than the Great Barrier Reef, the water around them is cooler and has a different chemical environment. McNeil says this kind of deep reef, called a mesophotic reef, has potential to provide refuge for sensitive species as the ocean warms.

But at the moment of her big discovery, McNeil wasn't thinking about the future. She was thinking about her scientific predecessors who mapped the bioherms in the 80s.  "They did a really good job of mapping and interpreting the shape based on the technology they had at the time," she says, but they couldn't come close to what today's technology revealed. "If they could see this they would just be completely blown away."