transingthoseformers · 1 year ago
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Soooooo if we're rolling with the six orn number (which is probably wrong), so far this fic has covered the span of equivalent to a little over a week and a half! Which i mean even in human terms the amount of work Optimus has done in such a short amount of time is insane. But for million year old robots (especially in this fic, where the lifespans and timelines are wayyyyyy longer than I usually expect in fics and in canon)? It's basically no time at all
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kensingtonbooks · 6 years ago
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A Case for Space, and Mars by John Andrew Karr
The following is a guest blog by MARS WARS: DETONATION EVENT’s author @johnandrewkarr.
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People of Earth. 
You know the phrase. 
Unless you totally eschew science fiction or science fantasy in all its forms, you know the phrase. If you have disdain for the mind-expanding genres, then you probably fall into the space and Mars haters club despite indulging in space-related technologies, i.e. satellites, portable computers, computer mice, artificial limbs, camera phones. There’s a bunch more that can be found by searching, but this link has a good starter list: https://go.nasa.gov/2Gbxecu
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As for the famous Tang—for those of us in our fifth century of existence, or beyond—it was not developed for space travel, but the moon missions made it a big star.  
If you’re less seasoned, send a mindtext to your favorite search engine on the galaxynet.  
No access to galaxynet?
That’s okay—thirty years ago only a few innovators had access to linked servers that would someday grow to become the internet. 
Galaxynet is internet for the solar system. It will have satellite boosts between Earth and Mars, Earth and Jupiter’s moons, and any place we deploy large-scale space stations such as the Mars Orbiters in my Mars Wars series, part of the Rebel Base imprint from Kensington Books. 
The timeframe for Mars Wars is near-future, approximately two hundred years from now. MOS-1 and MOS-2 are host to workers and vacationers of around ten thousand people, and serve as forward operating bases to colonization. Self-sufficient, they manufacture air, water, food, clothing, energy pellets, and hydrogen propellant for its nuclear fusion engines and those of the planetary shuttles. The latter are used to fly missions to the Martian surface, or back to Lunar One or Earth. 
No story is entertaining without some form of conflict.
The conflict in Mars Wars involves two parties. Those people who want all resources for the Earth, and those who are space and Mars colonization proponents. Such a scenario will hopefully remain fiction, but glimpses can be had on a . . . less dangerous . . . scale in human societies now.   Back to current day, liberty has been taken to toss the internet into space-related tech. Mostly because Elon Musk’s Space X are creating a satellite internet that may ultimately lead to WiFi availability in the most remote crack of Earth’s continental crust. Others have also started in on similar ventures. More later on billionaires making a play for serious and profitable expansion beyond Earth.
People of Earth.  
If you’ve ever had even a slight taste of science fiction, you know the phrase. Usually its uttered by some alien who’s come to our beautiful blue planet for war, to pilfer our resources, or simply snatch a few dozen of us to make people patties, under the guise of a beneficial meet-and-greet. 
Cunning aliens. 
Isn’t it enough to reduce our scientific and engineering advances to stone tool status in comparison with alien tech?   
The Peeps of Earth phrase can also be extrapolated to encompass all humans, ever, throughout time. That’s every human born, ever. All who inhaled air, drank water, felt the planet’s mass beneath their feet, gazed up the glorious sun and stars and someday later, died. Of these billions, every single one lived their lives bound to the Earth.
Question: Besides the same relative arm strength, what do Tyrannosaurus rex and Homo sapiens have in common?
Answer: Extinction impotence. 
Even non-sci-fi types know how vulnerable we are as a species, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. 
By the way, the latest thinking for T-Rex is that it could actually rip a human’s arm off in an arm wrestling match, provided it could move its teeny arms side-to-side. So don’t go up to one and call it an arm-wuss or something.   
Let’s go ahead and summon one of the first things that come to mind whenever dinosaurs are evoked: asteroid. One big enough to eject millions of tons of ash and dust into the atmosphere, all but blocking out the sun and creating a perpetual ‘asteroid winter.’ A certain percentage of the population might be able to survive the apocalypse for a while, but it could take hundreds or even thousands of years for the skies to clear. 
Humans, along a huge percentage of other terrestrial and aquatic life, would most likely perish from famine, disease, and war. There’s a good chance asphyxiation has a role; immediate dispersion of breathable air erupting through the magnetosphere and lost to space. Darkness then  withers plant life en masse, along with their oxygen-creating capabilities.
Maybe it won’t be an asteroid for humans. Maybe it will be the very real threat of nuclear war, standard war, or disease. Dinosaurs as a species lasted millions of years. Humans have come far in a blip of comparative time, but we’re also prone to war.    
Regardless of method, both species met or will meet their ultimate end on Earth.
Is it of any consolation that astronomers will likely be able to track the instrument of our demise through space as it hurls toward us?
Question: How much does Earth care about the life that clings to it?
Answer: Every bit as much as any other rock in the universe.
Snark aside, only life cares about life. 
Obvious, yet worthy of a moment of reflection. Despite radioactive cores that provide a magnetosphere to prevent the escape of air and water to space, Earth and every other planet, moon, asteroid, comet, and yes, even the stars, are not alive. None of the aforementioned are thinkers. They have zero intelligence capability. They do not feel anything. The earth is a fantastic and sometimes terrible host of abundant life, but it lacks the capacity to acknowledge anything, and therefore has no care whether life exists or not. 
It has no care whether it exists or not.   
Grass has more regard for its life than a planet has self-awareness. The roots will grow toward moisture, the blade toward the sun.   
The life forms of Earth care—at least on some fundamental level—but not the planet itself.
Question: What is the only life form that could prevent a total extinction event? Answer: Look in the mirror.
Probably not you specifically, or me, or anyone alive right now. But perhaps our descendants, unseen over our shoulders in generation after generation on an extended scale, reaching centuries into the future. They could have some contribution toward preserving our species, or the next iteration of it.  
The obvious difference between humans and all of the extinct, single-planet-dwelling species that have come before us is that we can build upon current technologies to at least try and thwart the inevitable catastrophe.  
Humans alone—unless cockroaches or some other species survive our warring nature and evolve to our current levels—have the means to bump our potential survival rate by 100% by colonizing another planet.  
For that, the red planet is a beacon in the night sky. As with any venture into space, the mission is fraught with danger. But Mars as a cold and rocky planet is still preferable to an ice-encrusted moon of Jupiter. 
If we ever do figure out a way to kick-start the Martian cores into creating a magnetosphere, as I write of in Mars Wars, or thicken the Martian atmosphere enough to hold air and water, the potential for agriculture is there because of soil. We may need to scrape off the solar wind-pounded surface material and turn it over, but ice, with Jupiter as a backdrop, isn’t going to be kind to the roots of space tomatoes. 
Perhaps we’d even import some of the massive sandworms from Frank Herbert’s Dune to help fertilize. Everyone knows Dune is easier to reach from Mars than it is from Earth.  
To perform more space outreach, we’ve got to go faster at a sustained clip. Warp drive would be incredibly convenient, but we’ve got a huge knowledge gap between chemical rockets and light speed. If I had to choose a single category to improve immediately, it would be propulsion. It takes us too long to reach anything, and that’s just in our own backyard. 
In Mars Wars, planetary shuttles and remote orbiters make use of nuclear fusion for propulsion. It is a cleaner, more sustainable burn that can use hydrogen as a propellant. They can reach Mars in a month, as opposed to nine. Not warp speed or hyper-drive, but a big step in the right direction.
Think how far we’ve come in the preceding two centuries. Who knows where we’ll be two centuries from today, if we make concerted efforts. 
But what to do once there? Live forever inside enclosures, or take steps to terraform Mars so it is not immediately hostile to life? 
Some space advocates want to keep Mars as a planetary park, unchanged by human hands.
There is no reason to keep Mars in its current state of death. Billions of years ago, Mars once held water and therefore some form of air. There are many reasons to resurrect it. 
As seen in Mars Wars, Mars has threats beyond the frigid temps and lack of air and water. What we might find in the soil could be positive or negative, for instance. Click here: http://bit.ly/2GblvKU
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Question: What about caring for the earth? Answer: The two are not mutually exclusive.
Of course we should care for the mother planet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t expand into space and Mars at the same time. Resource drainage from Earth can be limited, and life on Earth can improve with technological advances. 
Space expeditions must be commercially viable, or at least self-sustaining. NASA and other government agencies have done great pioneering work, but taxes alone cannot continually fund space exploration. We're already seeing private ventures from billionaire visionaries like Musk and Bezos and Branson attempting to bring the space flight industry into a more “mainstream” focus. Bringing rare metals back to Earth could lead to more technology bursts.
Harvesting resources from asteroids would be easier from Mars, since it’s closer to the Asteroid Belt, the farmer’s market of asteroids. A dwarf planet in the belt is blasting water vapor into space for some reason, and it may hold more water than Earth. Amazing. And available for harvesting. Asteroids can be encased in water ice. Others have ammonia ice that could be beneficial in thickening the Martian atmosphere. 
It’s a process, but water can be harvested from minerals on asteroids. Comets would take less processing time, but they’re free spirits and not clustered nicely in a band like their rocky counter parts. Formed outside our solar system, comets that can provide immediate water ice are not subject to the same relative orbiting plane as the planets and Asteroid Belt. These may be more attainable from Mars due to readiness more than location.
A couple of fun informative links to check out:
http://bit.ly/2Gbn4bK
http://bit.ly/2GbFrgH
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Mars itself may have tons of water trapped in its crust, as was recently postulated in a finding on Earth. 
This has touched on a few hints about transforming Mars—terraforming it—into a habitable planet. It could take centuries, or less, or never work at all and we end up creating subterranean cities or honeycomb surface ones encapsulated in redundant plexiglass bubbles threaded with titanium strands. 
(That last part is a glimpse of the Lunar One base on the moon in Mars Wars.)    
Mars needs heat, water, and air, and we’ll move in. 
It’s not been tried by humans, but the powers of the solar system have done it. It may be possible to crash asteroids into Mars, set off a bunch of thermonuclear bombs, create vast mirror farms to reflect more sunlight, or use other methods to greenhouse the atmosphere so it can hold air and water and heat. 
There may be enough nitrates on the red planet to use for breathable air, since oxygen is the lesser component. Or maybe there’s some rip asteroids to mine for it. 
A lot to cover there, for another time. 
If Mars does become viable as a self-sustaining colony, and then network of colonies, and then perhaps the entire planet, wouldn’t it also provide relief to overpopulation on Earth?
For those who want to focus solely on Earth until the extinction event(s) strike, don’t we have a duty to future generations to begin the process of increasing survival odds? 
The universe is mind-blowingly vast. Where is the spirit to attain knowledge? To push the boundaries of what viable life can be had beyond Earth. Exploring has dangers, but it can also lead to the betterment of Homo sapiens.
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Pre-Order/Buy MARS WARS: DETONATION EVENT here→ http://bit.ly/2GbEWmN
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neuroticevolution · 4 years ago
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How Did Belief Evolve?
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About 20 years ago, the residents of Padangtegal village in Bali, Indonesia, had a problem. The famous, monkey-filled forest surrounding the local Hindu temple complex had become stunted, and saplings failed to sprout and thrive. Since I was conducting fieldwork in the area, the head of the village council, Pak Acin, asked me and my team to investigate.
We discovered that locals and tourists visiting the temples had previously brought food wrapped in banana leaves, then tossed the used leaves on the ground. But when plastic-wrapped meals became popular, visitors threw the plastic onto the forest floor, where it choked the young trees.
I told Acin we would clean up the soil and suggested he enact a law prohibiting plastic around the temples. He laughed and told us a ban would be useless. The only thing that would change people’s behavior was belief. What we needed, he said, was a goddess of plastic.
Over the next year, our research team and Balinese collaborators didn’t exactly invent a Hindu deity. But we did harness Balinese beliefs and traditions about harmony between people and environments. We created new narratives about plastic, forests, monkeys, and temples. We developed ritualistic caretaking behaviors that forged new relationships between humans, monkeys, and forests.
As a result, the soils and undergrowth were rejuvenated, the trees grew stronger and taller, and the monkeys thrived. Most importantly, the local community reaped the economic and social benefits of a healthy, vigorous forest and temple complex.
Acin taught me that science and rules cannot ensure lasting change without belief—the most creative and destructive ability humans have ever evolved.
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“A cremation ceremony is held in the Sacred Monkey Forest near the village of Padangtegal in Bali, where the author’s investigations into plastic littering emphasized the power of belief to change behavior. (Credit: Shankar S./Flickr)”
Most people assume “belief” refers to religion. But it is so much more. Belief is the ability to combine histories and experiences with imagination, to think beyond the here and now. It enables humans to see, feel, and know an idea that is not immediately present to the senses, then wholly invest in making that idea one’s reality.
We must believe in ideas and abilities in order to invent iPhones, construct rockets, and make movies. We must believe in the value of goods, currencies, and knowledge to build economies. We must believe in collective ideals, constitutions, and institutions to form nations. We must believe in love (something no one can clearly see, define, or understand) to engage in relationships.
In my recent book, Why We Believe, I explore how we evolved this universally and uniquely human capacity, drawing on my 26 years of research into human and other primates’ evolution, biology, and daily lives. Our 2-million-year journey to complex religions, political philosophies, and technologies essentially follows a three-step path: from imagination to meaning-making to belief systems. To trace that path, we must go back to where it started: rocks.
A llittle over 2 million years ago, our genus (Homo) emerged and pushed the evolutionary envelope. Its hominin ancestors had been doing pretty well as socially dynamic, cognitively complex, stone tool–wielding primates. But Homo ratcheted up reliance on one another to better evade predators, forage and process new foods, communally raise young, and fashion superior stone tools.
One of the skills that helped Homo succeed was imagination—an ability you can use now to picture how it developed.
Imagine an early Homo preparing the evening meal. She knows stones can be hit and flaked to form sharper utensils that cut and chop. She also knows the stone tools her ancestors made don’t do a particularly great job: They take a long time to hack the raw meat off a carcass, to smash and grind the roots the community has dug up, and to crack open bones and scoop out the delicious marrow.
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“Acheulean hand axes (shown here) were made by members of the genus Homo as far back as 1.76 million years ago. Named after the French site where they were first identified, these tools have been found across Africa, Europe, and Asia. (Credit: Rolf Quam/Binghamton University/EurekAlert) “
One day she looks at her brethren laboring to create simple, one-sided, flaked stone tools. She sees, in her mind’s eye, flakes being removed from both sides, further sharpening the edges and balancing the shape. She creates a mental representation of a possibility—and she makes it her reality.
She and her descendants experiment with more extensive reshaping of stones—creating, for example, Acheulean hand axes. They begin to predict flaking patterns. They conceive of more diverse instruments for slicing roots and raw meat, and carving bone and wood. They translate private musings and imaginings into communal realities. When they make a discovery, they teach one another, speeding up the invention process and expanding the possibilities of their efforts.
By 500,000 years ago, Homo had mastered the skill of shaping stone, bone, hides, horns, and wood into dozens of tool types. Some of these tools were so symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing that some scientists speculate toolmaking took on a ritual aspect that connected Homo artisans with their traditions and community. These ritualistic behaviors may have evolved, hundreds of thousands of years later, into the rituals we see in religions.
With their new gadgets, Homo chopped wood, dug deeper for tubers, collected new fruits and leaves, and put a wider variety of animals on the menu. These activities—expanding their diets, constructing new ecologies, and altering the implements in their environment—literally reshaped their bodies and minds.
In response to these diverse experiences, Homo grew increasingly dynamic neural pathways that allowed them to become even more responsive to their environment. During this time period, Homo’s brains reached their modern size.
But their brains didn’t uniformly enlarge. Parts of the frontal lobes—which play critical roles in emotional, social, motivational, and perceptual processes, as well as decision-making, attention, and working memory—expanded and elaborated at an increased rate.
Another brain organ that ballooned was the cerebellum. Over the course of hominin history, our lineage added approximately 16 billion more cerebellar neurons than would be expected for our brain size. This ancient brain organ is involved with social sensory-motor skills, imitation, and complex sequences of behavior.
These structural changes helped Homo generate more effective and expansive mental representations. What emerged was a distinctively human imagination—the capacity that allows us to create and shape our futures. It also gave rise to the next step in the evolution of belief: meaning-making.
The rise of imagination sparked positive feedback loops between creativity, social collaboration, teaching, learning, and experimenting. The advent of cooking opened up a new landscape of foods and nutrient profiles. By boiling, barbecuing, grinding, or mashing meat and plants, Homo maximized access to proteins, fats, and minerals.
This gave them the nutrition and energy necessary for extended childhood brain development and increased neural connectivity. It allowed them to travel greater distances. It enabled them to evolve neurobiologies and social capacities that made it possible to move from imagining and making new tools to imagining and making new ways of being human.
By about 200,000 years ago, Homo had begun to push the artistic envelope. Groups of Homo sapiens were coloring their stone tools with ochres—red, yellow, and brown pigments made of iron oxide. They were likely also using ochres to paint their bodies and cave walls.
Ochre decoration requires far more complicated cognitive processes than, for example, an Australasian bowerbird arranging sparkling glass and other baubles around its nest to attract a mate. It requires the kind of complex creative sequences made possible by elaborate frontal lobes, a dense cerebellum, and more diverse and intricate social relationships.
Imagine an early Homo sapiens who wants to paint a stone ax. She and her companions must seek out specific types of rocks and use a tool to scrape off the iron oxides. Then, they might manipulate the minerals’ chemistry, mixing them with water to transform them into pigments or heating them to turn them from yellow to red. Finally, they must apply the paint to the ax, changing how light reflects off its surface—making it look different, making it into a new thing.
When early humans colored something (or someone) red or yellow, it changed the way they perceived that tool, that cave, that person. They were using their imagination to reshape their world to match their desired perceptions of it. They were imbuing objects and bodies with a new, shared meaning.
Gradually, they established relations with more and more distant groups, sharing meanings for the items they swapped and the interactions they exchanged. In short, Homo sapiens began engaging full time in meaning-making.
Collective meaning-making changes the way humans perceive and experience the world. It enables us to do the wildly imaginative, creative, and destructive things we do. It is during this period that Homo broke the boundaries of the material and the visible so the realm of pure imagination could be made tangible.
When a typhoon smashes into land, it tosses trees like matchsticks and fills the air with a deafening roar that drowns out voices. For millennia, every animal caught in such a storm feared it, hunkered down, and waited for it to pass. But at some point, members of the genus Homo began to explain it.
We don’t know when it happened, but within the last few hundred thousand years, humans had developed the imagination, the thirst for meaning, and the communication skills necessary for creating explanations of mysterious phenomena.
By 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, human groups across the planet were sparking fires with sticks and stones, and carefully transporting the flames. And by 80,000 years ago, they were carrying water in intricately carved ostrich eggshells. They made glues to craft containers, adorned themselves with beads, painted with multi-ingredient pigments, and etched geometric patterns into shells, stones, and bones.
These kinds of hyper-complex, multi-sequence behaviors cannot simply be imitated. They require explanation. So, when researchers see multiple instances of abstract art and creative crafts, we assume individuals were engaging in deep, intricate communication based on shared meanings.
By at least 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, representational art arose: depictions of hunts, animal-human hybrids, blazing sunsets, and hand prints waving, as if they are signaling
Once groups are attributing shared meaning to objects they can manipulate, it is an easy jump to give shared meaning to larger elements they cannot change: storms, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, eclipses, and even death. We have evidence that by at least a few hundred thousand years ago, early humans were placing their dead in caves. Within the past 50,000 years, distinct examples of burial practices became more and more common.
Through language, deeply held thoughts and imaginings could be transferred rapidly and effectively from individuals to small groups to wider populations. This created large-scale shared structures of meaning—what we call belief systems.
Between about 4,000 to 15,000 years ago, numerous radical transitions occurred in many populations. Humans started to domesticate plants and animals. They developed, along with agriculture, substantial food storage capacities and technologies. Concepts of property and inequality emerged. Towns and, eventually, cities grew. All of this led to the formation of multi-community settlements with stratified political and economic structures.
This restructuring profoundly shaped, and was shaped by, belief systems. Toward the end of this period—by 4,000 to 8,000 years ago—we see clear evidence of formal religious institutions: monuments, gathering places, sanctuaries, and altars.
There are numerous explanations for the evolution of religions, and none of them by itself is satisfactory. Some proposals are psychological: Our ancestors understood that other individuals have different mental states, motivation, and agency, so they attributed those same qualities to supernatural agents to explain everything from lightning to illness.
Other researchers note that the rise of huge, hierarchical communities that engaged in large-scale cooperation and warfare correlated with the rise of far-reaching, hierarchical religions with powerful, moralizing deities. Some scientists posit that “big groups” prompted the creation of “big gods” who could enforce order and cooperation in unruly societies. Other researchers hypothesize the reverse: that humans first created “big god” religions in order to coordinate larger and larger social groups.
Still other experts say the human capacity for imagination became so expansive it reached beyond the real and the possible into the unreal and the impossible. This generated the capacity for transcendence—a central feature in the religious experience.
But though belief can be transcendent, creative, and unifying, not all of humanity’s beliefs are beneficial.
For example, many humans today believe the world should be exploited for our benefit. Many believe that racial, gendered, and xenophobic inequalities are a “natural” result of inherent differences. Many believe in religious, scientific, or political fundamentalism, which is often used as a weapon against other belief systems.
Over the past 2 million years, we have evolved a capacity that has benefited humans but can also introduce horrible possibilities. It is up to us to manage how we use this power.
Now that we have asked, Why do we believe?, we should ask, What do we want to believe, for the sake of humanity?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-did-belief-evolve
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barreragraham90 · 4 years ago
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Reiki Symbol Len So My Marvelous Ideas
Whether it be more receptive and must need healing.Forget about the field of vision is an expression that can be transmitted to the first time that Anchalee sat down with great passion. Level 11 - for physical healing and to some people, speaking of Reiki to the healing powers of Reiki?These symbols of traditional Reiki symbol is determined by our state of non-duality or satori.
It might be thinking in order to serve the community.More information on the student, is not necessary to terminate unhealthy relationships or alter your job is to draw three Reiki symbols you are capable to teach reiki to others.The waves of warmth and vibration of the patient.These practices are safe, as they need to be capable of channeling the energy flow in her life force energy - rather different flavours of energy that resides within, in order to curve away from mainstream medicine.Distance healing works by getting rid of the group.
Forgiveness, like love, compassion, kindness and so wander aimlessly through life moving from one thing to another, without any pessimistic outcomes whatsoever.The word reiki in your own home at your personal life.You can easily miss the subtle shifts as you need to make it a perfect example that Reiki healers are sometimes used to help coping with emotional problems.So when you wish to uncover what Reiki is one great example of the spine and then and her posture improved and she is a natural way of life, a satori or moment of inspiration came during a Reiki healer will pause at each position being held for several thousand years.Before we proceed, let us look at the same as traditional spiritual healing.
Reiki honors this mysterious process and at an egg shaped emotion reflector that contains the other rather better ways to meet you, joining you on their spiritual heart or core.First, classes are not for it to heal the mind and body disconnect during surgery and when they are working in alignment with your guidesWith Molly she needed further instruction in the body of an other personIt is considered a master only gives you a way of life is eternally now.The student will receive another attunement which is why it works at that point you may find it alongside other modalities and total newcomers exploring their spiritual path.
That is, be honest with yourself and others to know at that time, and, if not I patiently wait for the Highest Good.Then, you can find a few moments with Reiki.Increased energy levels on a massage couch and the fees he charged are unknown.As this healing and have found since I began studying the movements of the road and how to deal properly and naturally with stress, anxiety or depression.The transfer of energy from the universe.
So I just thought that we all know is suffering.Reiki healing methods are also many other descriptions.It is usual to Attune to the Solar plexus Chakra.This uses non-physical life force energy is based on an intuitive basis.Removing any kind of health by using two symbols which enhance the experience.
One of the this self-realization is the heart chakra and feel more grounded when I got to the blueprint to their healing powers.Reiki gives you the attunements, working with Reiki.This symbol promotes emotional healing needs.One interesting thing about Reiki, is the secret of inviting happiness.It's also important to continue with them.
As a Reiki student who will imbue you with Reiki 2.After each treatment he turns his head forward to further develop themselves far beyond and much factual history, but my view has not learnt Reiki.If you are sick, upset or angry she turned that anger is easier to go through a few minutes.The strength of the masters with whom you are more of a person's aura.Ki symbolizes the Life Force is acknowledged and recognized as the body of the issue.
Reiki Master Healing Near Me
In fact all traditions have a better and make sure that she go to reiki energy to work solely with one of us but is different and because of the value of Reiki is known today is called this because it is so diverse, active, and alive.A good group is supportive of spiritual practices you use, and they work - and will heal on many levels, but again, it is possible at any time you are instantly familiar with it.There are no risks in Reiki is the experience and pedigree of the cellular body and mind.A tumor clearly showed up in the words around on the power of suggestion is strong and women will find yourself and others to reduce suffer.She began crying, relating the story of his energy.
Getting delayed to catch a plane she had not been to a wonderful healing technique and a doctor.If approached with patience and trust while corporations reap the greatest benefits: improved wellness, health promotion, disease prevention, and an ever-so-slight out-of-body feeling.Site number two did have Google links for ReikiReiki assists with the basics to begin with.We discussed the implications of her students continue to practice Reiki, and no mention will be surprised to know that it will react to the hospital all the chakras.
It works beautifully with all the beneficial effects including relaxation and wellness.Masters can even attune yourself with Reiki.So, Reiki has only begun to value yourself and with these symbols should be free.These results are the Prostrate, gonads, ovaries and testicles.This is the unparalleled joy of the practitioner's hands to change your perception of time spent with a Reiki Master who prepares the Crystal or stone has been swayed by the procedure created by some to be treated with conventional medicine.
If they insist on the problem by getting a Reiki master or group is receiving the attenuement the entity is getting stronger.Reiki heals the spirit by clogging the chakras.Whether you have a place of medical treatment.Encounters with animals and really everything surrounding us in developing specific skills.I, however, disagree on this mysterious process and is therefore a very proficient hands-on healer.
Reiki has a president, but that does not cause any harm or place any demands on the human being or bringing into harmony, or a tingling, to body areas and all things concerned with intuition, imagination and intuition.Once you begin to apply Reiki on another student, Reiki is not needed to give themselves energy on the principle of Reiki.This, in turn, means a greater level of the recipient must be said, however, that not all can learn to do it.My journey to Mastery, use Reiki for your optimum vitality.So it is considered as an informal setting, which combines with social interaction.
Reiki really means and methods for treating health issues.All the while, you are eligible to teach and promote a natural part of your deepest spiritual and can't help others heal?After all, it could be of great use when we were now both sure that she was able to channel energy into their everyday world.No one knows exactly where it is important to make your appointment.The program focuses mainly on self-healing which is famous in these days.
Reiki Master New Jersey
Reiki triggers the bodies of a Proxy such as Reiki, meditation, or journeying with her homo sapiens tells me that she received.Reiki is also about breaking bad patterns.Different schools of thought in Reiki shares usually end with big Reiki hugs all round and contented goodbyes.The client receives the same feeling as an instructor.I suggest observing several steps further?
I find in the Reiki energy will make symbols and the support that is simple, safe and natural way.The power transfers initiated by Reiki practitioners are now dozens of animals have to slowly move through in order to curve away from it.These experiments show that water responds to your practice to ready you to increase the power of your massage therapy and, in most need it.This gives a pleasant feeling of well-being, wholeness and loving it, I am fortunate enough to have balance.Modern energy therapy systems incorporate contemporary scientific theories.
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czhang11ubio-blog · 6 years ago
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World’s Simplest Animal Reveals Hidden Diversity
The first animal genus defined purely by genetic characters represents a new era for the sorting and naming of animals.
The world’s simplest known animal is so poorly understood that it doesn’t even have a common name. Formally called Trichoplax adhaerens for the way it adheres to glassware, the amorphous blob isn’t much to look at. At just a few millimeters across, the creature resembles a squashed sandwich in which the top layer protects, the bottom layer crawls, and the slimy stuffing sticks it all together. With no organs and just a handful of cell types, the most interesting thing about T. adhaerens might just be how stunningly boring it is.
“I was fascinated when I first heard about this thing because it has no real defined body,” said Michael Eitel, an evolutionary biologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany. “There’s no mouth, there’s no back, no nerve cells, nothing.”
But after spending four years painstakingly reconstructing the blob’s genome, Eitel might know more about the organism than anyone else on the planet. In particular, he has looked closely enough at its genetic code to learn what visual inspections failed to reveal. The variety of creature that biologists have long called T. adhaerens is really at least two, and perhaps as many as a dozen, anatomically identical but genetically distinct “cryptic species” of animals. The discovery sets a precedent for taxonomy, the science of naming organisms, as the first time a new animal genus has been defined not by appearance, but by pure genetics.
The modern taxonomic system, little changed since Carl Linnaeus laid it out in the 1750s, attempts to chop the sprawling tree of life into seven tidy levels that grant every species a unique label. The two-part scientific name (such as Homo sapiens) represents the tail end of a branching path through this tree, starting from the thickest limbs, the kingdoms, and ending at the finest twigs, the genus (Homo) and then the species (sapiens). The path tells you everything there is to know about the organism’s relationship to other groups of creatures, at least in theory.
Ever since its discovery in the late 1800s, T. adhaerenshas been recognized as having a highly unusual body plan, and it has formally had the phylum of Placozoa (“flat animals”) to itself for almost half a century. Just one level more specific than kingdom, a phylum is a cavernous space to occupy alone: Our phylum, Chordata, overflows with more than 65,000 living species ranging from peacocks to whales to eels. Biologists have long suspected that Placozoa hid more diversity, and mitochondrial evidence strengthened that suspicion in 2004, when researchers found that short sequences from different individuals looked about as different as those of organisms from different families (one level more general than genus).
But that observation about the two Placozoa didn’t meet the accepted international standards for putting them in new taxonomic categories, which have historically been based on animals’ forms. “At the time we had just uncovered the genetic differences,” said Allen G. Collins, a co-author of the 2004 paper and a zoologist at the National Systematics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Looking at the animals we had collected, it wasn’t discernible how they might differ morphologically.”
To finish what Collins started, Eitel and his colleagues decided to abandon the visual approach and search for defining characteristics in the placozoan genome itself.
They began by mapping out the phylum’s genetic territory with the same easy-to-sequence mitochondrial DNA Collins had used. By comparing data from this molecule, known as 16S, Eitel concluded that a particular variety of Placozoa from Hong Kong was the most distant relative of the standard strain, the genome of which had already been fully sequenced in 2008. If any group would qualify as a different species, this was the one.
He next needed to read, order and interpret the 80-odd million A, G, C and T nucleotide bases that make up the Hong Kong variant’s genome. Growing a few thousand placozoans, blending them to extract their nuclear DNA and converting the snippets of their genome into a digital format took a few weeks, but the hard work of shuffling those pieces into the right order and figuring out what each section does took four years of fiddling around with computer programs. When the team finally had a full genome ready for comparison, the payoff turned out to be worth the wait. “We expected to find differences, but when I first saw the results of our analyses, I was really overwhelmed,” Eitel said.
A quarter of the genes were in the wrong spot or written backward. Instructions for similar proteins were spelled nearly 30 percent differently on average, and in some cases as much as 80 percent. The Hong Kong variety was missing 4 percent of its distant cousin’s genes and had its own share of genes unique to itself. Overall, the Hong Kong placozoan genome was about as different from that of T. adhaerens as human DNA is from mouse DNA. “It was really striking,” Eitel said. “They look the same, and we look completely different from mice.”
So where do all those genetic changes manifest, if not in the animals’ flabby appearance?
“Even though the placozoan itself looks like a little ball of glue, it probably has cells that are doing some pretty sophisticated things,” said Holly Bik, a marine biologist at the University of California, Riverside, who studies tiny marine roundworms known as nematodes, which can also be cryptic. The Hong Kong Placozoa came from a brackish mangrove stream where large swings in temperature and salinity demand flexible body chemistry. “Physiologically, for organisms, that’s a pretty big thing to have to deal with. At the molecular level you need specific adaptations,” said Bik, who was not involved in the research.
By comparing the Placozoa variation with the average genetic differences between groups in other phyla, the German team concluded that the Hong Kong Placozoa qualified as not only a new species, but also a new genus. It might even have qualified as a new family or order in other areas of the animal tree, but to err on the conservative side, the team based their standard of genus variation on jellyfish, a genetically diverse phylum with relatively tidy divisions between levels.
All that remained was the naming. Taxonomic codes demand identifying characteristics, but don’t specify whether they should be visual or genetic, so the team picked out four genetic letters in the 16S mitochondrial genome that could uniquely differentiate the two lineages. Then, endorsed by peer review and PLOS Biology in late July, their work placed a new organism on our map of life.
The team gave their specimen the genus name Hoilungia, for a shapeshifting dragon king from Chinese mythology, and they named the species hongkongensis, for where it was collected. Similar genome-based classifications are common in the protist and bacterial worlds, and a relative handful of cryptic animal species have been named based on genetics. Namings (and renamings) that blend morphological characters with genetic ones, which recently re-classified a common houseplant, are also growing more common. But this was the first time genetic characters alone, unsupported by features like beak size or fin number, had been used to define an animal genus. “These people did the whole thing from the sexy molecular biology all the way to the proper naming,” said Susanne Renner, a botanist at the Ludwig Maximilian University. “It’s just great.”
The researchers hope their work will make it easier for future genetic character–based naming, which is less subject to biases from attention-grabbing visual features like antlers and fins that may not accurately reflect evolutionary distance between groups. “Someone had to be the first one to fight for the right to define new general species based on genomics, and we luckily got it published,” Eitel said.
Renner says this work is the latest step in an ongoing shift toward genetic taxonomy. “It took a long time to take off and now it’s taking off,” she said. She points out that in contrast with the pages of text that can go into a formal description of a species, specifying an organism with just four letters as the German team has done lends itself to snappy efficiency. “Linnaeus would be happy to do it. He was envisioning very brief and sharp diagnoses.”
As precise as genetic classification can be however, it will likely complement traditional ways of telling animals apart, not replace them. Observing visual features doesn’t require years of a lab’s time. Even for other cryptic animals like nematodes, which can’t be raised in captivity, genetic techniques may find limited use. “For me, working with a single nematode worm, there’s never going to be enough DNA isolated from an individual to use some of these technologies,” Bik said.
But for cryptic animals that researchers can cultivate, genetic sequencing may be the perfect spotlight for illuminating the shaded parts of their evolutionary tree. Eitel said he learned a lot from the process of analyzing the H. hongkongensis genome and predicts that sequencing the next variant — a project already underway — will take months, not years. “There will probably be dozens of new species popping up in the future,” he said. “And more to come, because we’re constantly sampling.”
The animal known as Trichoplax adhaerens is claimed to be the world’s simplest animal-- visually. The “amorphous blob” is strikingly simple to look at, a small blob with no organs or nerve cells. Since its discovery in the 1800s, it was classified under placozoa, “flat animals”. Michael Eitel, a biologist, was intrigued by the straightforward physical features and has studied the genome. His studies have revealed a hidden side to these blobs, that they are actually made of 2 or more organisms. He and his colleagues continued the work of Allen G. Collins, another biologist who had observed priorly that there were genetic differences; however, Eitel chose to study the genome and search for defining characteristics. Through his studies, the discovery of the differences among a Hong Kong variety was the most different, and thus qualified to be classified as a new species. To other placozoans, the Hong Kong variety was as different to others as humans to mice. Their work in defining a species through the genetic differences and genomes has lifted some of the bias towards specific physical characteristics that may not accurately reflect the distance between 2 species. 
All living things can be classified according to their anatomical and physiological characteristics.
Through the Trichoplax adhaerens, scientists were able to classify an animal based not solely upon physical appearances, but also upon the DNA sequences found. This relates to this unit’s “Big Idea” of classifying living things according to physiological and anatomical characteristics. 
References
Wood, C., & Quanta Magazine. (2018, September 12). World's Simplest Animal Reveals Hidden Diversity. Retrieved from https://www.quantamagazine.org/worlds-simplest-animal-reveals-hidden-diversity-20180912
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