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[COLOR="Purple"]*for the filthy minded you will have to go to Treasure Island.

Got a script to this mag a while ago and finally picked up an issue.

Will post a few things I found fascinating in the mag. If anyone wants to comment would be great.

Boxing with Shadows SEEDMAGAZINE.COM[/COLOR]

Plato was all about the invisible. He believed that reality in its most exquisite state was unknowable, that the most perfect things were too perfect to see. The world of ordinary sensation? That was a crude lie, a dishonest distraction. What Plato wanted to do was lead us out of this dimly lit cave so we could know more than the shadows dancing on the wall.

The biggest empirical void belongs to the Higgs, which, unfortunately for physicists, often sounds like a paradox perfectly designed to confuse them: It gives mass to matter, yet it remains practically weightless. It is indivisible and pointlike, yet so ephemeral that to say it exists requires one to redefine existence. Can such a thing ever be found? Or is this the one particle that will stay invisible to the end?

The question, of course, is how to see something that lasts less than 10-24 seconds, this is where the detective work begins. Although the collider contains a vast array of sensory equipment, these sensors are blind to the Higgs. So physicists must search for the particle by looking for the signature of its decay, the collection of subatomic species that are left behind after the Higgs disappears.

We gather specks of nearnothingness and then smash them together to re-create the very origins of the universe. We look at those shadows on the wall and can infer the forms that cast them.

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NERVELESS AND DISC-SHAPED, TRICHOPLAX STILL HAS SOME OF COMPLEX LIFE'S MOST IMPORTANT CELLULAR TOOLS.

*** some highlights

Before there were worms, there were placozoans: a group of animals somewhat more complex than a simple colonial mass, yet not as complicated as a sea anemone. And even after there were worms, placozoans stuck around. One of them — Trichoplax — recently got its star turn in biological circles: Its genome has been sequenced. And the results make it one of the most interesting simple animals that most people have never heard of.

Trichoplax has another set of genes for which it doesn’t seem to have much use: those coding for the core cellular machinery of our nerves and synapses. Despite those genes, it doesn’t even have any cells resembling neurons; it really is a brainless, nerveless blob without any kind of fast integrative signaling network. Yet it contains genes for a variety of ion channels, the switches that are imbedded in the membranes of our nerves and that generate the fluxes of charged molecules that are the current flows in our brain’s activity; they have enzymes that make neurotransmitters, the small molecules that flow between neurons to trigger coordinated activity between cells. The precursors and prerequisites for brain development are imbedded and active in a creature that lacks any nervous system at all.

and finally...

And that’s exactly what we would expect from evolution! Neurons didn’t simply appear out of nowhere, but gradually evolved from cellular processes that were co-opted for new functions.

Elaborate Origins for Simple Things SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

These arts are something I have become very interested in since picking up this magazine. Seems that thru this study of our past we will develop a move beautiful future (optimistic realist viewpoint).

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If you have 4+mins for a bit of relaxation...

***works pretty nicely with full screen