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Scientists cast doubt on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
In other words, scientists measure uncertainty, and found it wanting... Not only that, they found it not by measurement, but by using one of the most ancient arts of divination, the I Ching.
"Each shot only gave us a tiny bit of information about the disturbance, but by repeating the experiment many times we were able to get a very good idea about how much the photon was disturbed," says Rozema.
Welcome to the Dao says conciousness, glad you could make it!

Pack up your troubles!

While many people believe that happiness is as easy as winning the lottery, human experience will show that happiness is much more elusive than winning, power or cash, and history hold many a legendary tale of fabulous fortune and ultimate ruin.

In the past, the only tried and tested way of finding happiness lay in monastic pursuit, but somehow the habit of monks, the vows of chastity and never ending meditation never caught on, and somehow the vow of poverty could never quite make sense.

While happiness through sacrifice may feel good while you are doing it, the pleasure quickly fade in the face of our modern day living. But thanks to the research that started this journey to sense, we now have the answer again. And were it not for the fact that the secret was hiding in sight all the time, we may never have believed that it's as easy as making up our mind.

In his article that highlight the latest revelation on nature, Dumb Little Man provides his readers with the science behind the facts that make happiness a breeze. Take for example that only 20% of our reality experience is made up by perception, be that sensory or more, while a whopping 80% is preconceived and subject to choice.

It boggles the mind when you think that happiness is a decision, and in the absence of choosing it our feelings would default to any of a number of subconscious fears, assumptions, probabilities and presumption. That our live can change miraculously if we start to choose how we feel, and that lofty and noble ideas of mindful living, of being the change we want to see, of creating our own destiny and making the most out of every single moment of life are all in within reach.

If you think about it, it almost make sense, until you start living it. By living our life as nature intend, we begin to comprehend the the answer to most of the questions in life look for value and meaning, and most of the time we'd be happy to live it just as it is, if only we were happy to get it.

Got it?

Good!

More on nature, laws and such...

It seems when looking for "laws" to help in defining nature and life that this is probably not the wisest thing to do, as the mere concept of "laws" still have some wrinkles to iron out. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, three issues are especially pressing ones.

The first concerns whether laws “govern” the universe, exactly what it means to say that they do, and how that affects our understanding of lawhood.

The second is the issue of whether there are any contingent laws of nature. Necessitarians continue to work feverishly on filling in their view, while Humeans and others pay relatively little attention to what they are up to; new work needs to explain the source of the underlying commitments that divide these camps and to figure what each group is doing right.

Finally, more attention needs to be paid to the language used to report what are the laws and the language used to express the laws themselves.

It is clear that recent disputes about generalizations in physics and the special sciences turn on precisely these matters, but exploring them may also pay dividends on central matters regarding ontology, realism vs. antirealism, and supervenience.

Modern science fails medicine

Contemporary medicine has come a long way since the Ancient Greeks, where getting a cure meant sleeping over in a temple where a deity would appear to give us advice in a dream, but there is many a wisdom that has endured, and much of the knowledge they gained we have lost.
 

With the high-tech tools at every clinicians beck and call, and modern day diagnostic devices to prod and to probe every cavity and crevice we have, the familiar Rod of Asclepios may seem like a rock to an Apple, but the traditional system of medicine as practiced by the ancient Greeks still form the foundation of Western Medicine.

 

In the East, the Indian system of Ayurveda is in practice much the same way as it was, centuries before Hippocrates formulated his Oath, but it was the Greeks that started to shift the focus of healing from a spiritual practice to a physical science. 

Since the dawn of the scientific method, modern day medicine has established rigorous research methods, where the results are testable and reproducible, and where there is little room for veda’s or pressure points or any of the other “alternative” medical practice. As science and technology developed, medicine became more and more reliant on medications, and the practice of finding remedies and cures in the natural environment slowly gave way to the pharmaceutical industry that we have today. 

The development of biologically active chemical compounds introduced medicine to statistical measures to ensure therapeutic value. It also gave raise to concepts like the Bell Curve distributions we commonly see in study populations, and anomalies like the Placebo Effect that we still can't explain. Far from being the infallible measuring tool, the scientific method is at a loss it would seem and the attitude of most researchers have typically been to keep a good eye on it, and then cautiously ignore it. 

While some are insisting on finding a reason for the anomaly, others are starting to wonder if the scientific method is the staff of good measure that we claim, and every so often there are murmurs that question the validity of biomedical research, particularly as practiced by the pharmaceutical industry.

While the Temple of Asclepius may have long since crumbled to dust, there are those that wonder if the smoldering smoke doesn't mean there's a fire after all. Meanwhile the "art" of Ayurveda is still alive and well, and like traditional Chinese medicine it has seem to have stood the test of time. Though neither may  be able to provide the answers with statistically proven relevance, I cannot help thinking there's more to the so-called 'ancient' arts of healing than most of our physicians would care to admit.

The pursuit of happiness

It struck me as odd when I first found scientific confirmation that we remember bad things better. If the design of the universe was based on a positive principle, and my experience constantly reaffirms me that it is, then why would we forget the happy things?

But if you take a moment and think about it, it actually makes perfect sense. The reason that we have such difficulty in remembering the joy of our journey is that fun is something you have. It implies participation, and it only makes sense at the time.

Quite the opposite is true when you look at the bad and the ugly, they exist in the past. In fact, without them our past would probably be somewhat uneventful. Not that it would matter of course! If the argument holds true we will most likely be having too much fun to care.

It is therefore no real surprise that scientific evidence has shown that the relation between fun and care is inversely proportionate to each other. This means that if you have more of the one, you will by equation, have less of the other.

So how can we get more? Mingyur Rinpoche is a Buddhist monk and the author of the book "Joyful Wisdom". He carries the distinction of being dubbed "The happiest man alive" after he participated in research aimed at showing how mindfulness meditation could increase our happiness coefficient.

Previous research had shown that there is a shift in activity from the right to the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain in subjects who were happy, and the experiment wanted to determine if purposeful meditation could achieve such a change.

It turned out to be a huge success, and after eight weeks some of the participants showed an increase of up to 800 percent in left sided brain activity by following a 30 minute a day program of mindfulness meditation.

But meditation is only one of the ways that we can increase happiness. Various other experiments has shown that anyone can put a smile on their face just by focusing on happy things, proving the age old wisdom that energy flows where the mind goes.

Those who actively pursue happiness get it, and there is at least one Tibetan Lama that can vouch for it!

The nose knows...

Most people can recall someone in their lives who had a nose for trouble, be they the motherly figure that knew when mischief was brewing, or the fiend that always knew when trouble was afoot. The nose is also linked to various other expressions, all with the implication of some "higher" purpose or greater knowledge. Take for instance the expression: "Being led by the nose", or describing someone as noseying around. It now seems that many of these expressions are being supported by scientific discoveries, proving that there is a very good reason that the nose knows.

In a range of experiments towards understanding the human brain and how it works, scientists have found that our noses play an important role in a wide range of human experiences. Findings that our sense of smell and emotions activate the same areas in our brain begs the question whether there is any link between our emotional well being and where we have been poking our noses?

In addition, our sense of smell seems to be active even when we do not notice any, and it has been proven that what we smell may influence what we visually perceive when the odor is linked to memories with negative emotional content. What we smell may therefore filter or color what we see, and in the case where someone was being led by the nose it may just be that the person they following was pleasant on the nose.

Unfortunately no-one can blame their nose for anything because it also seems that we have a semi-conscious ability to increase our perception of smell which causes the neurons in our olfactory bulb, the area in our brain responsible for our sense of smell, to light up in anticipation even if there is no odor. It also gives us the ability to adapt to unpleasant odors, allowing us to ignore them when they permeate the air we breathe from day to day.

All of which still does not fully explain the fact that my mother could smell out secrets, but there seems to be enough reason to pay attention to the person who is smelling the rat. As far as the expressions go I believe they may all have some origin in fact, even if those facts are only now being discovered by science.