Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Amelia Earhart as Castaway




Amelia was a star for her time and place in the thirties and I have no doubt that many women identified with her and her exploits in aviation.  In the age of rare air accidents, few appreciate today the real pioneering risks involved when pilots were first establishing possible air routes.

The real and present danger created an air of romanticism that the nascent industry took full advantage of in order to promote itself.

Amelia was a big part of it all.  Her loss was felt by many.  The search for her dragged on even into the fifties and obviously this work shows that it has never quite ended.

This work appears to confirm evidence of a castaway conforming to the expectations surrounding Amelia.  It is most likely Amelia’s place of death.  Alternative explanations will need documentary support and that surely does not exist.


AMELIA EARHART MAY HAVE SURVIVED MONTHS AS CASTAWAY

The famous pilot and her navigator may have eaten turtles, fish and bird to survive on a remote island after making an emergency landing.



Fri Jun 25, 2010 01:53 PM ET 

THE GIST

Researchers found a campsite with 11 fire features on an island believed to be Amelia Earhart's final resting place.
The fire features contained thousands of bones from fish, turtles and birds.
A number of artifacts, including a glass jar and broken knife were found at the site.



Fish, turtle and bird bones found in fire pits on a remote Pacific island may be signs of Amelia Earhart's last efforts to survive


Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator, may have survived several weeks, or even months as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island, according to preliminary results of a two-week expedition on the tiny coral atoll believed to be her final resting place.

"There is evidence on the island suggesting that a castaway was there for weeks and possibly months," Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told Discovery News.


Gillespie has just returned from an expedition on Nikumaroro, the uninhabited tropical island in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati where Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan are believed to have landed when running out of fuel.


"We noticed that the forest can be an excellent source of water for a castaway in an island where there is no fresh water. After heavy rain, you can easily collect water from the bowl-shaped hollows in the buka trees. We also found a campsite and nine fire features containing thousands of fish, turtle and bird bones. This might suggest that many meals took place there," Gillespie said.

TIGHAR's expedition to Nikumaroro was the tenth since 1989. During the previous campaigns, the team uncovered a number of artifacts which, combined with archival research, provide strong circumstantial evidence for a castaway presence.

"On this expedition we have recovered nearly 100 objects," Gillespie said. Among the items, 10 are being tested by a Canadian lab for DNA.

"We are talking about 'touch DNA,' genetic material that can be retrieved from objects that have been touched," he explained.

The best candidate for contact DNA appears to be a small glass jar that was found broken in five pieces, most likely a cosmetic jar.

Other candidates for DNA extraction include two buttons, parts of a pocket knife that was beaten apart to detach the blades for some reason, a cloth that appears to have been shaped as a bow, and cosmetic fragments of rouge from a woman's compact.

The excavation took place on the island's remote southeast end, in an area called the Seven Site, where the campsite and fire features were found.

"Only someone who really knew the island could choose this place. This is Nikumaroro's best place, it has shade and breeze, and it is close to the lagoon and the ocean. Here, red-tailed tropicbirds are nesting and are very easy to catch," Gillespie said.

The site is densely vegetated with shrubs known as Scaevola frutescens,and may be where the castaways' last meals were consumed. Indeed, it is here that a partial skeleton of a castaway was found in 1940.

Recovered by British Colonial Service Officer Gerald Gallagher, human remains were described in a forensic report and attributed to an individual "more likely female than male," "more likely white than Polynesian or other Pacific Islander," "most likely between 5 feet 5 inches and 5 feet 9 inches in height." Unfortunately the bones have been lost.

Gillespie believes that many of the bones might have been carried off by crabs, suggesting an unmerciful end for Earhart.

"In our experience, the crabs can be a serious problem. When we sat down to eat lunch, there were hundreds of these crabs climbing on our shoes. If you lay down, they think you are dead and they pinch pieces out of you," Gillespie said.

Abandoned for weeks on a desert island where temperatures often exceed 100 degrees, even in the shade, Earhart may have succumbed to any number of causes, including injury and infection, food poisoning from toxic fish, or simply dehydration.

"We do know that 1938 was one of the most severe drought years on the island, so if she survived long enough to get into that period, she could have been in real trouble," Gillespie said

Ironically, Earhart might have died surrounded by a paracetamol-like drug. The invasive Scaevola frutescens, which posed a nightmare to TIGHAR's archaeologists, is in fact a plant full of therapeutic properties.

Bark, roots and leaves are used in folk medicine to treat dysentery, headache, ciguatera (food poisoning associated with the ingestion of tropical fish) and tachycardia.

According to Rajappan Manavalan and colleagues at the department of pharmacy of Annamalai University, India, the plant has been proven to be "an excellent remedy as antidiabetic, antipyretic, antiinflamatory, anticoagulant and as skeletal muscle relaxant without any adverse reactions."

Solar Nanodot




The next step is to find a way to carry off the electrons from the nanodots.  This work shows that hot electrons can be captured without been lost as heat.  This means that solar cells able to convert sixty percent of solar energy are theoretically possible.
I think it may all be possible.
We are slowly converging on higher efficiency with solar cells and mastering these sizes in a manufacturing process was always indicated to achieve high efficiency.
In this case, the newly released electron which is about to reradiate heat is captured first.
I would like to see a strategy to directly convert heat into electron flow since we live in an ocean of such heat energy. Our focus has been on the visible spectrum, but infrared spectrum is also plentiful and should be exploited.
The second article provides better detail and covers the same material that augments the first article.


Charge of the light brigade: How quantum dots may improve solar cells
Jun 18, 2010
Photovoltaic cells remain woefully inefficient at converting sunlight into electricity. Although layered cells composed of various elements can convert more than 40 percent of (lens-concentrated) sunlight into electricity, more simple semiconducting materials such as silicon hover around 20 percent when mass-produced. And, at best, such cells could convert only a third of incoming sunlight due to physical limits.

But one of those physical limits may have just been stretched: heat loss. Nanosize crystals of semiconducting material, in this case a mixture of lead and selenium, move electrons fast enough to channel some of them faster than they can be lost as heat, according to new work from researchers at the universities of Minnesota and Texas.

Solar cells employ semiconducting material because when a photon of sunlight of the right wavelength strikes that material, it knocks loose an electron, which can then be harvested as electrical current. But many of those loosened electrons dissipate as heat rather than being funneled out of the photovoltaic cell. Previous work in 2008 had shown that nanocrystals of semiconducting material can, in effect, slow down such "hot" electrons. As a result, these nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots, might be able to boost the efficiency of a solar cell.

The new research published in Science June 18 shows that is indeed the case: Not only can quantum dots capture some of the "hot" electrons but they can also channel them to a typical electron-accepting material—the same titanium dioxide used in conventional solar cells.

In fact, that transfer takes place in less than 50 femtoseconds (a femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second, or really, really, really fast). Because that transfer is so fast, fewer of the excited electrons are lost as heat, thus boosting the theoretical efficiency to as high as 66 percent.

Unfortunately, that's not all that's required to build such a highly efficient solar cell. The next step would be to show that the captured electrons and transferred current can be carried away on a wire, as in a conventional solar cell. The challenge will be making a wire small enough to connect to a solar cell incorporating a quantum dot no bigger than 6.7 nanometers in diameter—and one that won't lose much of the current as heat. And it would be years if not decades before such quantum dot-based solar cells might be manufactured. But these chemists have lit at least one path to a more efficient solar future.

Quantum dots for highly efficient solar cells
Jun 24, 2010 



The efficiency of solar cells could be increased to more than 60% from the current limit of just 30% according to new work by scientists in Minneapolis and Texas. The new work involves capturing the higher-energy sunlight that is normally lost as heat in conventional devices using semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots.

The maximum efficiency of conventional solar cells made from silicon-based semiconductors is limited by theory to around 31% – and the best performing affordable commercial devices are less than 20% efficient. This is because in typical devices, photons with energies above the semiconductor's bandgap generate "hot" charge carriers (electrons and holes) that quickly cool to the band edges in a matter of just picoseconds, releasing phonons (vibrations of the crystal lattice, or heat). If the energy of these hot electrons could be captured before it is converted into wasted heat, solar-to-electric power-conversion efficiencies could be increased to as high as 66%, say scientists.

The first step towards doing this has already been demonstrated – by research done in 2008 by Philippe Guyot-Sionnest's group at the University of Chicago who showed that hot electrons can be slowed down in semiconductor nanocrystals. Now, Xiaoyang Zhu at the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, have discovered a second important step: how to capture the electrons before their energy is lost.

The team found that the electrons can be transferred from photo-excited lead selenide (PbSe) crystals to an adjacent electronic conductor made of titanium dioxide. The researchers demonstrated the effects in quantum dots made of PbSe but the method could work just as well for quantum dots made from other materials.

Electron transfer

PbSe was chosen because it has an extremely large Bohr radius of 46 nm. This means that charge carriers in PbSe quantum dots (which are less than 10 nm in size) are strongly confined in the dots and that their electron wavefunctions extend well beyond the nanocrystal's surface. This "delocalization" allows electron transfer from the nanocrystals to an electron-accepting material placed nearby, such as TiO2. TiO2 was chosen because it is readily available as single crystals and can accept electrons easily.

The researchers began by making samples of one or two monolayers of PbSe quantum dots deposited on flat single-crystalline TiO2. The films were chemically treated with solvents to enhance electronic coupling between the two materials.

Zhu's team tested PbSe nanocrystals with diameters ranging from 3.3 to 6.7 nm. By using UV photoelectron spectroscopy and optical absorption measurements, the researchers determined the energy of the lowest excited electronic states in the nanocrystals. They found that these states were always below the TiO2 conduction band, which means that hot electrons from the quantum dot can transfer from the PbSe to the TiO2.

'Nice surprise'

The researchers didn't expect to see hot-electron transfer in action, just the transfer of ordinary electrons. "We realized that, to improve the way in which we assemble solar cells based on quantum dots, we needed to understand the fundamentals of electron transfer from the quantum dots to semiconductors," team member Eray Aydil told our sister website nanotechweb. "Zhu and our co-advised student Will Tisdale (who will soon obtain his PhD) developed the method reported here to detect this electron transfer. The fact that we ended up seeing hot-electron transfer was a very nice surprise."

Aydil adds that much work still needs to be done before we see solar cells with efficiencies of over 60%. "I think all of us and everyone working in this field would caution against making predictions on when we will see (if ever) 66% efficient solar cells. However, if such high-efficiency solar cells based on hot-electron transfer are to be become a reality, we have shown the necessary first step."

The team will now attempt to detect the transferred electrons as current and make solar cells that exploit hot electron transfer, even if the efficiency is still low.

The work was reported in Science.

About the author

Belle Dumé is a contributing editor to nanotechweb

Auto-eroticism Uniqueness




This is interesting because it both provides excellent hard evidence of the particular uniqueness of the human mind and the related thought processes and asks a startling question.  An important part of the rational endeavor is the capacity to map one’s environment. We use that ability to map ideas in science and elsewhere and have applied simple ideas in natural logic to them to produce our opus.

Suddenly we must question the ability of other animals to visualize things.  Yet it appears that hunters they have no difficulty following ancestral routes and exploring and returning to locales.  In the end we must reject this possibility.  The animals can visualize quite well thank you.

That throws us on the fact that both men and women are in some form of perpetual low grade heat which has promoted the development of self arousal as an evolutionary necessity in order to control the excesses of the rut.  Recall how destructive the rut actually is among all other mammals.

The visualization skill naturally existed and was then adapted to dealing with the need.  Other animals have not had the need to make this adaption.


One reason why humans are special and unique: We masturbate. A lot.

Jun 22, 2010 06:25 PM in Mind & Brain 




There must be something in the water here in Lanesboro, Minnesota, because last night I dreamt of an encounter with a very muscular African-American centaur, an orgiastic experience with – gasp – drunken members of the opposite sex and (as if that weren’t enough) then being asked by my hostess to wear a white wedding dress while giving a scientific keynote presentation. “Does it make me look too feminine?” “Not at all,” she assured me, “it’s a man’s dress.”

Now Freud might raise his eyebrows at such a lurid dreamscape, but if these images represent my repressed sexual yearnings, then there’s a side of me that I apparently have yet to discover. But I doubt that this is the case. Dreams with erotic undertones are like most other dreams during REM sleep—runaway trains with a conductor who is helpless to do anything about the surrealistic directions they take. Rather, if you really want to know about a person’s hidden sexual desires, then find out what’s on his or her mind’s eye during the deepest throes of masturbation.


This conjuring ability to create fantasy scenes in our heads that literally bring us to orgasm when conveniently paired with our dexterous appendages is an evolutionary magic trick that I suspect is uniquely human. It requires a cognitive capacity called mental representation (an internal “re-presentation” of a previously experienced image or some other sensory input) that many evolutionary theorists believe is a relatively recent hominid innovation.


When it comes to sex, we put this capacity to very good—or at least, very frequent—use. In a now-classic, pre-Internet-porn (I’ll get to that later on) study by British evolutionary biologists Robin Baker and Mark Bellis, male university students were found to masturbate to ejaculation about every 72 hours, and “on the majority of occasions, their last masturbation is within 48 hours of their next in-pair copulation.” If they’re not having intercourse every day, that is to say, men tend to pleasure themselves to completion no more than two days prior to having actual sex.


Baker and Bellis’s quite logical argument for this seemingly counterintuitive state of affairs (after all, shouldn’t men try to stock up as much sperm as possible in their testes rather than spill their seeds so wastefully in a rather infertile swath of toilet paper or a dirty sock?) is that because there is a “shelf-life” for sperm cells – they remain viable for only 5-7 days after production – and because adult human males manufacture a whopping 3 million sperm per day, masturbation is an evolved strategy for shedding old sperm while making room for new, fitter sperm. It’s quality over quantity. Here are the adaptive logistics.


The advantage to the male could be that the younger sperm are more acceptable to the female and/or are better able to reach a secure position in the female tract. Moreover, once retained in the female tract, younger sperm could be more fertile in the absence of sperm competition [sexually monogamous relationships] and/or more competitive in the presence of sperm competition [in which the woman is having sex with other men]. Finally, if younger sperm live longer in the female tract, any enhanced fertility and competitiveness would also last longer.


Unconvinced? Well, Baker and Bellis are clever empiricists. They also apparently have stomachs of steel. One way that they tested their hypotheses was to ask over 30 brave heterosexual couples to provide them with some rather concrete samples of their sex lives: the vaginal “flowbacks” from their post-coital couplings, in which some portion of the male’s ejaculate is spontaneously rejected by the woman’s body.

The flowback emerges 5-120 min after copulation as a relatively discrete event over a period of 1-2 min in the form of three to eight white globules. With practice, females can recognize the sensation of the beginning of flowback and can collect the material by squatting over a 250 ml glass beaker. [And here comes a useful tip, ladies…] Once the flowback is nearly ready to emerge, it can be hastened by, for example, coughing.


As the authors predicted, the number of sperm in the girlfriends’ flowbacks increased significantly the longer it had been since the boyfriend’s last masturbation -- even after the researchers controlled for the relative volume of seminal fluid emission as a function of time since last ejaculation (the longer it had been, the more ejaculate was present). If only the parents of teenage boys had these findings available for the first hundred thousand years of our history, think of all the anxiety, guilt and shame that might never have been.

In fact, even the father of adolescent psychology research, G. Stanley Hall, had a particularly nasty thorn in his paw when it came to the subject of masturbation. Hall accepted that spontaneous nocturnal emissions (that is, “wet dreams”) in adolescent boys were “natural,” but he viewed masturbation as a “scourge of the human race … destructive of that perhaps most important thing in the world, the potency of good heredity.” In Hall’s view, the offspring of teenage masturbators would show signs of “persistent infantalism or overripeness.” Boys will be boys, Stanley, and how wrong you were.  


Now back to masturbation fantasies and cognition—and this is where it gets really interesting. Baker and Bellis’s theory may be peculiarly true for human beings, because from all appearances, under natural conditions, we are the only primate species that seems to have taken these seminal shedding benefits into its own lascivious hands. Unfortunately, there have been a paltry handful of studies tracking the masturbatory behaviors of nonhuman primates. Although some relevant data is probably buried in some mountain of field notes, I didn’t come across any targeted studies on the subject in wildchimpanzees , and even the prolific Jane Goodall doesn’t seem to have ever gone there. But nevertheless by all available accounts, and by contrast with human beings, masturbation to completion is an exceedingly rare phenomenon in other species with capable hands very much like our own. As anybody who has ever been to the zoo knows, there's no question that other primates play with their genitalia; the point is that these diddling episodes so seldom lead to an intentional orgasm.


In a 1983 study from the International Journal of Primatology , the sexual behaviors of several groups of wild gray-cheeked mangabeys were observed for over 22 months in the Kibale Forest of Western Uganda. There was plenty of sex, particularly during the females’ peak swellings. But just two incidents of male masturbation leading to ejaculation were observed. Yes, that’s right. Whereas healthy human males can’t seem to go without masturbating for longer than 72 hours, two measly cases of masturbating mangabeys were observed over a nearly two-year period.


University College London anthropologist E.D. Starin didn’t have much luck spying incidents of masturbation in red colobus monkeys in Gambia, either. In a brief 2004 article published in Folia Primatologica , Starin reports that over a 5.5-year period of accumulated observations totalling more than 9,500 hours, she saw only 5–count ‘em, five –incidents of her population of five male colobus monkeys masturbating to ejaculation, and these rare incidents occurred only when nearby sexually receptive females were exhibiting loud courtship displays and copulations with other males.


Intriguingly, Starin says that although females weren’t in the immediate vicinity, it is possible that the females could still be seen or heard by the masturbating male while the incident at hand occurred. (In other words, no mental representation required.) In fact, the author’s descriptions of these events strike me as producing accidental, rather than deliberate, ejaculations. Not that they weren’t happy accidents, but still. “During each observation,” Starin writes, “the male sat and rubbed, stretched, and scratched his penis until it became erect, after which additional rubbing produced ejaculate.” I know what you’re thinking: What did the monkeys do with the “product”? Well, they ate their own ejaculate—and in one case, a curious infant licked it off the adult’s fingers. Also, out of the 14 female colobus monkeys observed during this time span, “three different females were observed possibly masturbating” by self-stimulating their genitals—only possibly because none of these episodes culminated in the telltale signs of colobus orgasm: muscle contractions, facial expressions or calls.


Perhaps the most colorful report of nonhuman primate masturbation—or rather the astonishing lack thereof, even in subordinate males that aren’t getting any—comes from a 1914 Journal of Animal Behavior study by a primatological colleague of Robert Yerkes named Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, who apparently ran something of a monkey research center-cum-sanctuary on the lush grounds of his Montecito, California estate. Hamilton was clearly a pioneering sexologist, or at least had especially liberal attitudes for his time, defending the naturalness of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom, among other things. In justifying his research, which meant getting up close and personal with his monkeys’ genitals, Hamilton opines:


The possibility that the types of sexual behavior to which the term ‘perverted’ is usually applied may be of normal manifestation and biologically appropriate somewhere in the phyletic scale has not be sufficiently explored.


In fact, he seems to have expected to find rampant masturbation in his animals, but to his surprise only one male (named Jocko) ever partook in such manual pleasures:

Of all my male monkeys only Jocko has been observed to masturbate. After a few days confinement he would masturbate and eat part of his semen. I have reason to believe that he lived under unnatural conditions for many years before I acquired him. In view of this fact that not one of seven sexually mature monkeys masturbated after several weeks of isolation under conditions that favored a fairly healthy mental and physical life (close proximity to other monkeys, large cage, warm climate) I am inclined to believe that masturbation is not of normal occurrence among monkeys.


Granted, Hamilton seems to have been a tad eccentric. Earlier in the article he reports that one of his female monkeys named “Maud” liked to be mounted (and entered) by a pet male dog out in the yard until one day poor, horny old Maud offered her backside to a strange mongrel that proceeded to bite off her arm. More disturbing is Hamilton’s description of a monkey named “Jimmy” who one sunny afternoon discovered a human infant lying in a hammock: “Jimmy promptly endeavoured to copulate with the infant,” observes Hamilton matter-of-factly. It’s unclear whether or not this was the author’s own child, nor is there any mention of the look on said human infant’s mother’s face when she saw what Jimmy was getting up to.


In any event, though he may have had some questionable child supervision skills, the candor by which Hamilton reports on the sex lives of his monkeys lends his non-observations of masturbation that much more credence

.
So why don’t monkeys and apes masturbate even nearly as much as humans? It’s a rarity even among low status male nonhuman primates that frustratingly lack sexual access to females–in fact, the few observed incidents seem to be with dominant males. And why haven’t more researchers noticed such an obvious difference with potentially enormous significance for understanding the evolution of human sexuality? After all, it’s been nearly 60 years since Alfred Kinsey first reported that 92 percent of Americans were involved in masturbation leading to orgasm.

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities. One early sex researcher, Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, “a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme.”


Go on, put this article aside, take a five minute break and put my challenge to the test (don’t forget to close your office door if you’re reading this at work): Just try to masturbate successfully—that is, to orgasmic completion—without casting some erotic representational target in your mind’s eye. Instead, clear your mind entirely, or think of, I don’t know, an enormous blank canvass hanging in an art gallery. And of course no porn or helpful naked co-workers are permitted for this task either.

How’d it go? Do you see the impossibility of it? This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why I find it so hard to believe that self-proclaimed asexuals who admit to masturbating to orgasm are really and truly asexual. They must be picturing something , and whatever that something is gives away their sexuality.


Empirically capturing the phenomenology of masturbation fantasies is no easy matter. But some intrepid scholars have indeed tried to do so. A British physician named N. Lukianowicz, in a 1960 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry , published one of the most sensational scientific reports I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Lukianowicz personally interviewed 188 people (126 males and 62 females) about their masturbation fantasies. An important caveat: all of these people were psychiatric patients with “various complaints and different neurotic manifestations,” so their masturbation fantasies aren’t necessarily typical. Nevertheless the details provided by these patients about their erotic fantasies give us an extraordinary glimpse into the rich internal imagery accompanying human masturbation. Consider the self-report of a retired civil servant, age 71, being treated for obsessive feelings of guilt on account of his “excessive masturbation”:    


I see in front of me naked beautiful women, dancing and performing some most exciting and tempting movements. After the dance they lean back, and keeping their legs wide apart, show their genitals and invite me to have sexual intercourse with them. They appear so real, that I can almost touch them. They’re in a setting of an oriental harem, in a large oval room with divans and a lot of cushions around the walls. I can clearly see the wonderful gorgeous colours and the beautiful patterns of the tapestry, with an unusual vividness and with all the minute details.


Or consider Lukianowicz’s account of a 44-year-old schoolmaster’s fantasies, which reads like some Bacchanalian, morphine-dappled scene ripped from the pages of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch(1959):


In them he “saw” naked adolescent boys with their penes stiffly erected, parading in front of him. As he progressed in his masturbation, the penes of the boys increased in size, till finally the whole field of his vision was filled with one huge, erect, pulsating penis, and then the patient would have a prolonged orgasm. This type of homosexual masturbatory fantasy started shortly after his first homosexual experience, which he had had at the age of 10, and it persists unchanged hitherto.


Now, obviously, there are pathological cases of chronic masturbation where it actually interferes with the individual’s functioning. In fact, it’s not an uncommon problem for many caretakers of adolescent and adults with mental impairments, whose charges often enjoy masturbating in public and making onlookers squeal and squirm in discomfort. (Not unlike some captive primates housed in miserable conditions such as laboratories or roadside zoos, where self-stimulation sometimes becomes stereotypical.) But one thing that clinicians dealing with this problem may wish to consider is that the individual’s cognitive limitations may not allow them to engage in more “appropriate” private masturbation because of difficulties with mental representation. In fact, frequency of erotic fantasies correlates positively with intelligence. The average IQ of Lukianowicz’s sample was 132. So perhaps public masturbation, in which other people are physically present to induce arousal, is the only way that many with developmental disorders can achieve sexual satisfaction. Sadly, of course, society isn’t very accommodating of this particular problem: Between 1969-1989, for example, a single institution in the United States performed 656 castrations with the aim to stop the men from masturbating. One clinical study reported some success in eliminating this problem behavior by squirting lemon juice into the mouth of a young patient every time he pulled out his penis in public.


In any event, Lukianowicz argues that erotic fantasies involve imaginary companions not altogether unlike children’s make-believe friends. But unlike the more long-lived latter, he concedes, the former is conjured up for one very practical purpose: “… as soon as the orgasm is achieved the role of the imaginary sexual partner is completed, and he is quite simply and quickly dismissed from his master’s mind.”


And, perhaps not surprisingly, men seem to entertain more visitors in their heads than do women. In a1990 study published in the Journal of Sex Research , evolutionary psychologists Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons found that 32 percent of men said that they’d had sexual encounters in their imagination with more than 1,000 different people, compared to only 8 percent of women. Men also reported rotating in from their imaginary rosters one imagined partner for another during the course of a single fantasy more often than women did.


In their excellent 1995 Psychological Bulletin article on sexual fantasy, University of Vermont psychologists Harold Leitenberg and Kris Henning summarize a number of interesting differences between the sexes in this area. In their review of research findings up to that date, the authors concluded that, in general, a higher percentage of men reported fantasizing during masturbation than did women. It’s important to point out, however, that neither “fantasy” nor “masturbation” were consistently defined across the studies summarized by Leitenberg and Henning, and some participants likely interpreted “masturbation” to mean simply self-stimulation (rather than orgasm-inducing ) or had a more elaborate conceptualization of “fantasy” than we’ve been using here, as some form of basic mental representation. For uncertain reasons, one dubious study compared “Blacks” and “Whites,” so it’s definitely a mixed bag in terms of empirical quality. They didn’t find much of a difference, by the way.


A side note: both sexes claimed equally to have used their imaginations during intercourse. Basically, at some point, everyone tends to imagine someone—or something—else when they’re having sex with their partner. There’s nothing like the question, “What are you thinking about?” to ruin the mood during passionate sex.

Here are some other interesting tidbits. Males report having sexual fantasies earlier in development (average age of onset 11.5 years) than do females (average age of onset 12.9 years). Females are more likely to say that their first sexual fantasies were triggered by a relationship, whereas males report having theirs triggered by a visual stimulus. For both men and women, straight or gay, the most common masturbation fantasies involve reliving an exciting sexual experience, imagining having sex with one’s current partner and imagining having sex with a new partner.

It gets more interesting, of course, once you step a little closer to the data. In one study with 141 married women, the most frequently reported fantasies included “being overpowered or forced to surrender,” and “pretending I am doing something wicked or forbidden.” Another study with 3,030 women revealed that “sex with a celebrity ,” “seducing a younger man or boy,” and “sex with an older man” were some of the more common themes. Men’s fantasies contain more visual and explicit anatomical detail (remember the giant, pulsating penis from Lukianowicz’s study?) whereas women’s involve more story line, emotions, affection, commitment and romance. Gay men’s sexual fantasies often include, among other things, “idyllic sexual encounters with unknown men,” “observing group sexual activity,” and here’s a shocker: images of penises and buttocks. According to one study, the top five lesbian fantasies are “forced sexual encounter,” “idyllic encounter with established partner,” “sexual encounters with men,” “recall of past gratifying sexual encounters,” and—ouch!—“sadistic imagery directed toward genitals of both men and women.”

One of the more intriguing things that Leitenberg and Henning conclude is that, contrary to common (and Freudian) belief, sexual fantasies are not simply the result of unsatisfied wishes or erotic deprivation:

Because people who are deprived of food tend to have more frequent daydreams about food, it might be expected that sexual deprivation would have the same effect on sexual thoughts. The little evidence that exists, however, suggests otherwise. Those with the most active sex lives seem to have the most sexual fantasies, and not vice versa. Several studies have shown that frequency of fantasy is positively correlated with masturbation frequency, intercourse frequency, number of lifetime sexual partners, and self-rated sex drive.


The Psychological Bulletin article on sexual fantasy is chockfull of interesting facts, and those with a more scholarly interest in this subject should read it themselves. Leitenberg and Henning also provide a fascinating discussion about the relation between sexual fantasy and criminality, including a clinical study in which deviant masturbatory fantasies were paired with the foul odor of valeric acid or rotting tissue.


 Now that’s enough to put a crimp in anybody’s libido, I’d say. But Leitenberg and Henning’s piece was written over fifteen years ago, summarizing even older research. The reason this is important is because it was still long before the “mainstreaming” of today’s Internet pornography scene, where zero is left to the imagination.


And so I’m left wondering … in a world where sexual fantasy in the form of mental representation has become obsolete, where hallucinatory images of dancing genitalia, lusty lesbians and sadomasochistic strangers have been replaced by a veritable online smorgasbord of real people doing things our grandparents couldn’t have dreamt up even in their wettest of dreams, where randy teenagers no longer close their eyes and lose themselves to the oblivion and bliss but instead crack open their thousand-dollar laptops and conjure up a real live porn actress, what, in a general sense, are the consequences of liquidating our erotic mental representational skills for our species’ sexuality? Is the next generation going to be so intellectually lazy in their sexual fantasies that their creativity in other domains is also affected? Will their marriages be more likely to end because they lack the representational experience and masturbatory fantasy training to picture their husbands and wives during intercourse as the person or thing they really desire?


I’m not saying porn isn’t progress, but I do think that over the long run it could turn out to be a real evolutionary game-changer.

In this column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Sign up for the RSS feed, visit www.JesseBering.comfriend Dr. Bering on Facebook or follow@JesseBering on Twitter and never miss an installment again. For articles published prior to September 29, 2009, click here: older Bering in Mind columns. Jesse's first book, The Belief Instinct(Norton), will be published early February, 2011.
Image ©iStockphoto.com/ferrantraite

Fuzzy Nano Tube Fiber






The claims developing around nanotubes continue to be pretty excessive but the potential certainly exists.  Here we have the first product of a material by continuous manufacturing methods.  This clearly means we will soon see real product, however crudely fabricated.

The graphene and nano tube materials revolution is possibly the greatest break in technology since we discovered the transistor.  While discoveries are coming fast and furiously, I still know we are at the same place as the transistor in 1960.  We knew it existed and a few minor apps were in use already.

As I have posted, this technology allows us to manufacture Magnetic Exclusion Vessels (MEV) that can operate in the same way as a UFO.  It will still take us thirty years to make it happen but everything is now in place in terms of fundamental knowledge.


Fuzzy Fiber 

May 26, 2010

THIRD FRONTIER AWARD WILL SUPPORT PRODUCTION OF ‘GAME-CHANGING,’ MULTI-TASKING NANOMATERIAL


A $3 million Ohio Third Frontier award to the University of Dayton Research Institute will fund the scale-up and production of  a “game-changing” new nanomaterial that will allow composites to multitask – a wind turbine tower that can de-ice its own blades in winter, or store energy to release on a calm day, powering a grid even when its blades are not moving. Or a military vehicle whose armor can serve as a battery – powering some of the vehicle’s electrical components.

Nicknamed “fuzzy fiber” by its inventor at UDRI, Nano Adaptive Hybrid Fabric (NAHF-XTM  is the first tailored nanomaterial capable of being produced in sizes and quantities large enough to make them affordable and viable for large-scale commercial use. When incorporated into resins, fuzzy fibers enable composites to be tailored for electrical and thermal conductivity, chemical and biological sensing, energy storage and conversion, thermal management and other properties.

“This is going to disrupt the way we think about materials,” said NAHF-XTM inventor Khalid Lafdi, Group Leader for Carbon Materials at the Research Institute. “From now on, instead of thinking ‘mono,’ we will think ‘multi’ – multiscale, multifunctional, multitasking.” Aside from serving simply as structural material, composites made with fuzzy fiber can work as batteries, sensors, heaters, supercapacitors, structural health monitors and other systems whose operations are normally performed by additional components, Lafdi added. “By manufacturing structural material that can serve multiple functions, fewer parts are needed for any given application, which means reduced cost, lighter weight and greater efficiency.”


Lafdi called the material “game-changing” because of its ability to be produced in continuous sheets to desired sizes like other fabrics. “Everybody is growing carbon nanotubes on substrates,” Lafdi said. “We’re the only people who are producing them on a large-scale and continuous process, and not just in batches. This means we can produce the material at a low cost, and it also means we can produce pieces big enough to cover an aircraft.”

Lafdi and his team have been producing 500 feet of 12-inch-wide fabric per day at a pilot plant in UDRI’s Shroyer Park Center. The Third Frontier award, announced May 26 in Columbus, will be matched by UDRI and Ohio collaborators Goodrich, Owens Corning and Renegade Materials to fund the creation and equipment of a full-scale production facility for the hybrid fabric. The new facility, to be located within Dayton’s Aerospace Hub, will be equipped to produce 60-inch-wide fabric. Goodrich expects to apply the technology in the marketplace first in commercial aerospace applications.

The NAHF-XTM technology was pioneered and perfected over seven years with funding from the Air Force, Army, aerospace industry and Third Frontier, said Brian Rice, Division Head for Multi-Scale Composites and Polymers at UDRI. After successfully controlling growth of carbon nanotubes on individual carbon fibers, researchers accomplished the same on a type of carbon-fiber yarn and eventually on engineered textiles. The breakthrough was in overcoming issues of uniformity and precisely controlling growth of the nanotubes, Rice said.

“Various industries have been replacing metals with composites in structures and components because of their lighter weight and durability. But in doing so, electrical and thermal conductivity inherent to metals is lost. By growing nanotubes on carbon fibers used in composites in a very specific manner, those properties are built back in – and the composites also can be tailored for specialized mechanical properties.”

Rice said the hybrid fabric production facility will serve as a cornerstone for Ohio’s Aerospace Hub in Dayton by helping to attract and connect new and existing businesses related to aerospace, sensing technologies and advanced materials. One targeted application will be unmanned aerial vehicles weighing less than 150 pounds. “We’d like to begin making ‘smart’ structural materials for UAVs that also serve as the plane’s communication, power and sensor systems. Not having to add a battery or external sensors means less weight on the plane.”

The program is expected to create 70 high-tech jobs in Ohio during its first three years and 165 jobs in the second five years.

Pamela Gregg
Communication Administrator


University of Dayton Research Institute
300 College Park
Dayton, OH 45469-0101
937-229-3268