Can enlightenment be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior? No, and (a qualified) Yes

The field of contemplative science is rapidly growing and integrating into the basic neurosciences, psychology, clinical sciences, and society-at-large. Yet the majority of current research in the contemplative sciences has been divorced from the soteriological context from which these meditative practices originate and has focused instead on clinical applications with goals of stress reduction and psychotherapeutic health. In the existing research on health outcomes of mindfulness-based clinical interventions, for example, there have been almost no attempts to scientifically investigate the goal of enlightenment. This is a serious oversight, given that such profound transformation across ethical, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive domains are taken to be the natural outcome and principle aim of mindfulness practice in the traditional Buddhist contexts from which these practices are derived. If short-term interventions as short as a few sessions are now beginning to produce neuroplastic changes, it may be that even in secular contexts, practitioners are already developing states and traits that are associated with progress toward enlightenment. In order to carefully assess the potential effects of meditative interventions it is of singular importance to ask whether enlightenment can be traced to specific neural correlates, cognition, or behavior

Local density of diffeomorphisms with large centralizers

Given any compact manifold M, we construct a non-empty open subset O of the space of C^1-diffeomorphisms of M and a dense subset D of O such that the centralizer of every diffeomorphism in D is uncountable, hence non-trivial

Revision of the stratospheric bomb 14CO2 inventory

About 4900 values of 14CO2 activity have been measured on stratospheric air samples collected between 1953 and 1975 when the major nuclear weapon tests injected large amounts of 14C into the atmosphere. However, the validity of these data published in the Health and Safety Laboratory reports where repeatedly criticized and their relevance is thus usually denied in model studies tracing the global carbon cycle with bomb 14CO2. To oppose this criticism, we perform here a comprehensive analysis of the measurements and calculate stratospheric bomb 14CO2 inventories for the period in question. We find out that the recognized weakness of the survey do not justify a general discrimination against the 14CO2 observations. Our 14CO2 inventories determined using numerical methods to interpolate the observations widely confirm more "hand-made" results from a former study from Telegadas (1971) except in the northern poleward stratosphere. We are also able to clear away the reasons commonly advanced to call into question the stratospheric bomb 14CO2 inventories by up to 20%. These findings rehabilitate the most extensive data set of stratospheric 14CO2 observations and establish them, together with our corresponding bomb 14CO2 inventories, as a valuable observational constraint which should be seriously accounted for in global carbon cycle models and in other studies relying on an accurate simulation of air mass transport in the atmosphere

Cambridge Sustainability Residence

The Sustainability Residency started as a playful experiment, dreamed up by two alumni of the Cambridge School of Art, Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert, back in 2012. As artists preoccupied with the idea of sustainability, we wanted to re-frame, re-connect and re-think with dialectics of liberation present in art movements in the 60s and 80s, and artists such as Joseph Beuys and Gustav Metzger. Driven by the idea that cross-disciplinary work is pivotal in order to create a society in which people and technology co-exist sustainably, the artists’ residency has been from its beginnings a multidisciplinary project. We wanted to bring together artists, scientists, biologists, engineers and other experts working in the field of sustainability and to provide a space for reflection, debate and experimentation that is open ended, inspirational and experimental. We believe that experimentation has its own value, which usually acts as an antidote to discipline narcissism, and affects sensitivity and perception in powerful ways. The residency aspires to act as a lab for what Beuys called ‘social sculpture’, by encouraging the participants to critically engage with ideas of sustainability and visions towards an ecologically viable and humane society. Critical to the residency and its projects are the collaboration between institutions and artists, where the former provide the infrastructure and support needed for the project and the latter bring a fresh, creative, non-linear and unconstrained approach. The structure, length, theme and scope of the residency varies each year as new artists join in and influence and shape the project. The residency will continue working with people, growing, questioning and will be present in the world in a diversity of ways that may include symposiums, exchanges, exhibitions, publications and academic research. This research has to be inclusive because, as Shelley Sacks says on the Social Sculpture Research Unit website: “there is only one field of transformation, and no-one is outside”. MILK. is the first in a series of publications to be generated by the residency, capturing both the independent and collaborative research of the participating artists. It comprises a compilation of images and text which, in their different ways, give an insight into the dialogue, inspirations, ideas and energy arising from the first two residencies

Radiocarbon - a unique tracer of global carbon cycle dynamics

Climate on earth strongly depends on the radiative balance of its atmosphere, and, thus, on the abundance of the radiatively active greenhouse gases. Largely due to human activities since the Industrial Revolution, the atmospheric burden of many greenhouse gases has increased dramatically. Direct measurements during the last decades and analysis of ancient air trapped in ice from polar regions allow to quantify the change of these trace gas concentrations in the atmosphere. From a presumably "undisturbed" pre-industrial situation several hundred years ago until today, the CO2 mixing ratio increased by almost 30%. In the last decades this increase was nearly exponential, leading to a global mean CO2 mixing ratio of almost 370 ppm by the turn of the millenium. The atmospheric abundance of CO2 the main greenhouse gas containing carbon, is strongly controlled by exchange with the organic and inorganic carbon reservoirs. The world oceans are definitely the most important carbon reservoir, with a buffering capacity for atmospheric CO2 largest on time scales of centuries and longer. In contrast, the buffering capacity of the terrestrial biosphere is largest on shorter time scales from decades to centuries. Although today equally important, the role of the terrestrial biosphere as a sink of anthropogenic CO2 emissions is still poorly understood. Any prediction of future climate strongly relies on an accurate knowledge of the greenhouse gas concentrations in the present day atmosphere, and of their development in the future. This implies the need to quantitatively understand their natural geophysical and biochemical cycles including the important perturbations by man's impact. In attempting to disentangle the complexity of these cycles, Radiocarbon observations have played a crucial role as an experimental tool enlightening the spatial and temporal variability of carbon sources and sinks. Studies of the “undisturbed” natural carbon cycle profit from the radioactive decay of 14C in using it as a dating tracer, e.g. to determine the turnover time of soil organic matter or to study internal mixing rates of the global oceans. Moreover, the anthropogenic disturbance of 14C through atmospheric bomb tests has served as an invaluable tracer to get insight into the global carbon cycle on the decadal time scale

Radiocarbon evidence for a smaller oceanic carbon dioxide sink than previously believed

Radiocarbon produced naturally in the upper atmosphere or artificially during nuclear weapons testing is the main tracer used to validate models of oceanic carbon cycling, in particular the exchange of carbon dioxide with the atmosphere and the mixing parameters within the ocean itself. Here we test the overall consistency of exchange fluxes between all relevant compartments in a simple model of the global carbon cycle, using measurements of the long-term tropospheric CO2 concentration and radiocarbon composition, the bomb 14C inventory in the stratosphere and a compilation of bomb detonation dates and strengths. We find that to balance the budget, we must invoke an extra source to account for 25% of the generally accepted uptake of bomb 14C by the oceans. The strength of this source decreases from 1970 onwards, with a characteristic timescale similar to that of the ocean uptake. Significant radiocarbon transport from the remote high stratosphere and significantly reduced uptake of bomb 14C by the biosphere can both be ruled out by observational constraints. We therefore conclude that the global oceanic bomb 14C inventory should be revised downwards. A smaller oceanic bomb 14C inventory also implies a smaller oceanic radiocarbon penetration depth, which in turn implies that the oceans take up 25% less anthropogenic CO2 than had previously been believed