Sephen Hawking, eat your freaking heart out!

[maatsmom843]

no, seriously!

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - he's a crackpot physicist...

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven'
In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he called the notion of heaven a "fairy story."

Stephen Hawking, the famous British physicist, called the notion of heaven a "fairy story" in an interview with The Guardian newspaper published today. The physicist, 69, who was diagnosed with A.L.S. at age 21, made the heaven comment in response to a question about his fears of death. "I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he told the newspaper.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven of afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark." The comments are seen as going beyond those in his 2010 book, "The Grand Design," which stirred up passions with the observation that science can explain the universe's origin without invoking God.

Hawking has far outlived most people who have A.L.S., also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, producing important cosmological research and writing books. His "A Brief History of Time," published in 1988, has sold more than 9 million copies. The Guardian interview is the latest the scientist has given to news media in recent weeks. It is published the day before he is scheduled to address the question "Why are we here?" at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London.

In the talk, according to The Guardian, he will argue that the tiny fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.

Source

 

[sinister59]

YouTube - 1/5 - God Almighty's Grand Unified Theorem (GAGUT)

no, seriously!

Hawkins is much more intelligent then this fact twisting panderer to the christian right .

 

[waltky]

Breakthrough discovery in treating ALS...

Breakthrough could lead to effective treatment for Lou Gehrig's disease
August 22, 2011 — Northwestern University researchers say they have found a common cause behind amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Researchers say they have found a common cause behind amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, that could lead to an effective treatment. Dr. Teepu Siddique, a neuroscientist with Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the key was the discovery of an underlying disease process for all types of ALS. The discovery also could help in developing treatments for other, more common neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's, Siddique said. The Northwestern team identified the breakdown of cellular recycling systems in the neurons of the spinal cord and brain of ALS patients that results in the nervous system slowly losing its ability to carry brain signals to the body's muscular system.

Without those signals, patients gradually are deprived of the ability to move, talk, swallow and breathe. "This is the first time we could connect [ALS] to a clear-cut biomedical mechanism," Siddique said. "It has really made the direction we have to take very clear and sharp. We can now test for drugs that would regulate this protein pathway or optimize it, so it functions as it should in a normal state." The announcement of the breakthrough appears in Monday's issue of the research journal Nature. ALS afflicts about 30,000 Americans. With no known treatment for the paralysis, 50% of all ALS patients die within three years.

In 1941, New York Yankee baseball star Lou Gehrig died at 37 of the disease that now carries his name. The paper lists 23 contributing scientists, including the lead authors, Northwestern neurological researchers Han-Xiang Deng and Wenjie Chen. Deng and Chen led research that discovered a key protein, ubiquilin 2, in the ALS mystery. Ubiquilin 2 in spinal and brain system cells is supposed to repair or dispose of other proteins as they become damaged. The researchers discovered a breakdown of this function in ALS patients.

When Ubiquilin 2 is unable to remove or repair damaged proteins, they begin to pile up in the cells, eventually blocking normal transmission of brain signals in the spinal cord and brain, leading to paralysis. Amelie Gubitz, a research program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said the Northwestern study was a big step forward. "You need to understand at the cellular level what is going wrong," Gubitz said. "Then you can begin to design drugs."

Source

 

[waltky]

Important ALS discovery...

Common Link Found in All Forms of "Lou Gehrig's Disease"
September 19, 2011 - Researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago believe they have found a common genetic cause for all forms of an incurable disease called ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The discovery could speed development of a treatment for this degenerative disease, which afflicts 350,000 people worldwide. Americans learned about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis from a well-known athlete named Lou Gehrig, a first baseman for the New York Yankees baseball team. Gehrig gracefully bowed out of the game in 1939 after he was diagnosed with ALS. The illness is sometimes called "Lou Gehrig’s Disease."

In this neurodegenerative disorder, nerve cells that control the body's voluntary movements become damaged and no longer communicate properly with the muscles. ALS begins with symptoms such as stumbling, muscle stiffness or cramping, eventually causing weakness in an arm or leg, slurred or distorted speech. ALS patients lose the ability to move their arms, legs and body. Dr. Teepu Siddique led the research team at Northwestern University. He says as the disease progresses, the patient eventually becomes trapped in his own body, unable to swallow, speak or breathe. “From a human point of view, it’s a very degrading experience, besides being fatal," he said. ALS patients usually die within two to five years from onset.

There is no cure, and until recently there was no known cause. But at Northwestern University, a team of scientists from the United States and Canada recently reported a breakthrough: they found common genetic traits among a group of families with ALS. The key could be a gene called Ubiquilin-two. Normally the gene recycles and repairs the proteins critical to the functioning of nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain. But in ALS patients, Ubiquilin-two breaks down and proteins are not repaired, causing progressive damage to the neurons. Dr. Siddique says this discovery will help direct future research towards a single treatment. “It provides us insight into how this may be happening in terms of mechanism of disease. Mechanism of disease is the most difficult question in neurodegeneration: why and how cells become sick and degenerate, how they lose their connections to the periphery, those are the major questions of the disease," he said.

The Saltzman family knows the tragic consequences of ALS and has participated in the ongoing research. Joanne Saltzman lost her grandmother, father, two aunts and her son to the disease. She worries about what lies ahead for her own grandchildren. Saltzman says her family hopes that Dr. Siddique and his team of researchers will develop a drug that will at least buy time for ALS patients living now with the disease, and possibly a cure for those diagnosed with it in the future.

Source

 

[waltky]

Dr. Hawking a millionaire now...

Stephen Hawking wins US$3m prize for physics
Wed, Dec 12, 2012 - His mind has grappled with space and time, and explored the strange beauty of black holes aglow, but in recent days, a more earthly problem has occupied the world’s most famous scientist.

Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, must ponder how to spend US$3 million that has landed in his bank account after winning the most lucrative science prize ever established. The renowned physicist has won the Special Fundamental Physics Prize for a lifetime of achievements, including the discovery that black holes emit radiation, and his deep contributions to quantum gravity and aspects of the early universe. Announced yesterday, the award is one of several set up in July by Yuri Milner, a Russian Internet mogul who quit his doctorate in physics and made US$1 billion from investments in social media and other companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and Groupon.

The prize winners were selected by an independent committee of physicists, such as Ed Witten, the string theorist, and Alan Guth, who proposed the theory of cosmic inflation. The awards can go to much younger researchers than typically receive the Nobel prize, as experimental proof of theoretical work is not required. In an e-mail, Hawking said he was “delighted and honored” to receive the prize. “No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before. Nevertheless, prizes like these play an important role in giving public recognition for achievement in physics. They increase the stature of physics and interest in it,” he wrote. “Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low,” he added.

The physicist, who rose to fame with his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, has not settled on how to spend the windfall. “I will help my daughter with her autistic son, and maybe buy a holiday home, not that I take many holidays, because I enjoy my work,” he wrote. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a member of the selection committee, said: “In the case of Hawking, what can you say? This is an absolutely true giant of modern physics. He’s done massive, massive things.”

Milner, 51, holds an advanced degree in theoretical physics from Moscow State University, but abandoned a doctorate at the Russian Academy of Sciences for an MBA at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He remains a physics enthusiast though, and established the awards to recognize the greatest minds in fundamental physics, and help them to make significant contributions in the future. Hawking, 70, is not the only winner. The scientists who led the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and discovered what looks like the Higgs boson share another US$3 million prize. The winnings go to Lyn Evans, the head of the LHC, and the six past and present heads of the two detector groups, Atlas and CMS, which found the particle.

Stephen Hawking wins US$3m prize for physics - Taipei Times