secular

Awesome science!

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  • NATALIE WOLCHOVER, QUANTA MAGAZINE SCIENCE
  • 08.12.13
  • 6:30 AM

PHYSICISTS PURSUE THE PERFECT LENS BY BENDING LIGHT THE WRONG WAY

Henri Lezec, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., aligning the optical system with which he and his colleagues demonstrated 3-D negative refraction of ultraviolet light for the first time. Photo Courtesy: Henri Lezec
FROM RIBOSOMES ASSEMBLING proteins to viruses attacking cells, the main dramas in biology happen on a scale that is, tantalizingly, just one order of magnitude below the resolution of the best optical microscopes. Conventional lenses have a hard limit: The light waves propagating through them cannot carry details much smaller than their own crests and troughs. Clever workarounds have emerged, such as  structured illumination microscopy, but all have limitations: They are too slow to image dynamic processes, or they poison cells with too much light.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division ofSimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

The effect was first demonstrated in limited cases more than a decade ago, but by achieving it in novel ways, two groups “have made negative refraction a practical reality at optical frequencies,” said Sir John Pendry, a professor of physics at Imperial College London who was not involved in the new work.

Now, following recent breakthroughs, researchers are laying the groundwork for a “perfect lens” that can resolve sub-wavelength features in real time, as well as a suite of other optical instruments long thought impossible. These devices sidestep old optical limits by bending rays of light the “wrong” way — a phenomenon known as negative refraction.

In addition to biological imaging, perfect lenses could be used for single molecule biosensing, nanofabrication, light harvesting and (in theory) perfectly efficient solar panels, among other possibilities.

“The only prerequisite for realizing [a perfect lens] is negative refraction, which we have demonstrated,” said Hayk Harutyunyan, a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., and lead author of one of the new studies. “The rest is just technical problems that one has to solve.”

From air to silver, every medium has a “refractive index” relating the velocity of light in a vacuum to its velocity inside the medium. This number, plugged into a thousand-year-old formula known as Snell’s Law, gives the angle to which a beam of light bends when it enters the medium. When light passes from air into glass, for example, the refractive index increases from about 1 to 1.5, meaning that the light slows down and its angle steepens.

Reproduction of a page from the Persian mathematician Ibn Sahl’s manuscript showing his discovery of the law of refraction, now known as Snell’s Law, ca. 984.

In 1967, the Russian scientist Victor Veselago wondered: What if that number, and therefore that angle, was negative? His minus sign completely transformed the equations of optics, yielding fantastic new solutions in which light pulled instead of pushed when striking a surface, and stretched when it would normally compress into a shockwave. Best of all, while regular curved lenses can only form images of objects located at the “focal point,” negative refraction is achieved with a flat lens that can form images of large regions of space.

But it all seemed like make-believe. To negatively refract light, a material must somehow send its waves rippling backward as its energy flows forward. “The reaction of the scientific community to this result was initially not positive,” said Veselago, now 84. “Many believed that the negative sign … in the formula was some ‘mathematical joke’ and cannot be realized physically.”

Veselago spent several years searching for materials with a negative refractive index. “However, all my attempts failed,” he said. The concept was forgotten.

Then, in 2000, a paper by Pendry in Physical Review Letters reignited interest in the idea. Pendry proved that negative refraction enables not only flat but also “perfect” lensing because negatively refracting materials can pick up and amplify the tiny wavelets that hug the fine-grained edges of objects. Ordinarily, this “near field” radiation decays within nanometers of an object and only the larger crests and troughs propagate outward. But when near field light hits a negatively refracting medium, the minus sign transforms its decay into growth, amplifying the signal. In a perfect lens, no information is lost.

Materials with a negative index of refraction bend beams of light the “wrong” way, creating new possibilities for optical devices. (Quanta Magazine)

“It’s a very beautiful process if you look at the mathematics of it,” Pendry said.

He also discovered a strategy for bringing the enticing possibilities to life. A material’s refractive index is calculated from its response to electric and magnetic fields. By embedding microscopic structures in a material that resonate with these fields in specially tailored ways, the material’s natural, atomic response to light, which always gives a positive refractive index, could be overridden. The first demonstration of negative refraction followed within months. A team led by David Smith, now a physicist and electrical and computer engineer at Duke University, created an artificial material, or “metamaterial,” consisting of a metal mesh imprinted with millimeter-wide geometric patterns. And as reported in a 2001 paper in the journal Science,  by reversing electric and magnetic fields of specific strengths, the device negatively refracted 3-centimeter-long microwaves.

Metamaterials have spawned numerous practical applications, including “cloaking” devices that reduce electrical interference by bending radio waves around receivers, tunable satellite antennas that can access the Internet from anywhere, and vehicle collision avoidance systems. But the Smith team’s metamaterials could not be used to create lenses that negatively refract broadband visible light. They operate at a single wavelength tied to the dimensions of the material, rather than over a spectrum of colors. And their size could not be reduced enough to resonate within the visible 400- to 700-nanometer wavelength range. A new approach was needed.

“After many years of people staring at this problem of negative refraction, we’re finally getting people mastering the very, very difficult technology of making materials which have this property,” Pendry said.

In work that Pendry calls “a technological tour de force,” researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., have exploited the optical properties of objects called plasmonic waveguides to create a negatively refracting flat lens like the one Veselago envisioned 45 years ago. “Our goal was to achieve it in the most classical form, as close as possible to the original presentation back in the ’60s,” said Henri Lezec, principal investigator of the project.

Researchers have created a “flat lens” consisting of a stack of “plasmonic waveguides” that negatively refracts ultraviolet light, realizing an optical instrument first proposed in the 1960s. (Illustration courtesy of Henri Lezec)

For a range of ultraviolet wavelengths, the lens — made of a stack of silver and titanium dioxide layers — has a refractive index of -1, roughly equal and opposite to that of air. When light in this wavelength range bounces off an object and strikes the lens at any angle, interplay between oscillations of electrons in the two types of layers causes the light to bend back to the mirror-image angle as it moves through the stack, converging to form an image of the object on the far side. Because the lens is flat rather than curved like a conventional lens, there are “infinite axes and a continuum of focal planes,” Lezec explained. That means the device can create an image of everything in its vicinity simultaneously. So far, as detailed in the journal Nature in May, the team has created images of test objects such as rings and crosses, but “it could be a cell incorporating some flourophores,” Lezec said.

The device “allows unprecedented control of light,” he said, with immediate applications in 3-D photolithography (micro- or nano-scale printing with light), optical switching (turning light circuits on and off) and imaging. The researchers are also exploring strange physical effects that Veselago argued would be possible with a negatively refracting flat lens, including negative radiation pressure — pulling objects by shining light on them.

“Lezec actually sees this thing fly in space the wrong way; it flies towards light when you illuminate it,” Smith said. The scientists, who do not believe the object actually violates a fundamental principle of physics known as the conservation of momentum, are working on a new theory to make sense of this behavior.

An illustration showing how a straw would appear in a hypothetical negatively refracting fluid. (Hayk Harutyunyan)

Lezec’s flat lens currently dissipates too much energy to sufficiently amplify near field light and achieve super-resolution, but an almost loss-free approach to negative refraction proposed by Pendry in 2008 has also been demonstrated at optical frequencies for the first time. Harutyunyan, Ryan Beams of the University of Rochester and Lukas Novotny of ETH Zürich used a pair of high-powered laser beams to create a hologram on a flake of multilayer graphene, an extremely thin carbon crystal. Graphene is a highly “nonlinear” material, meaning it enhances the strange effects exhibited by very intense light. When a beam of light strikes the hologram, the nonlinearity causes a time-reversed replica of the beam to form on the far side of the graphene flake. This is effectively equivalent to the original beam negatively refracting as it crosses the graphene.

The results were reported in the July issue of Nature Physics. “There’s a lot of firsts in this,” Smith said. “It’s a beautiful experiment.”

The researchers say that, further optimized, the device could be used for super-resolution imaging of visible light, with some caveats. Smith thinks the laser beams used to generate the hologram could disturb a biological sample. Another challenge will be magnifying the sub-wavelength image so that ordinary cameras can pick up its fine details. This could be done, for example, by combining the graphene structure with a hyperlens, a newly developed negatively refracting lens that is curved.

Pendry, who recently began collaborating with experimentalists to build a perfect lens, believes the coveted object will be realized in the next five to 10 years. Several other scientists concur. Even negatively refracting, but not quite “perfect,” lenses will yield many practical applications, Pendry said. He compares negatively refracting devices to the laser. When its invention was first reported in 1960 “it was couched as a solution in search of a problem,” he said. “That is not the way you’d describe the laser today.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division ofSimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

A heartfelt goodbye to an atheist icon.

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Four Decades and 20,000 Abortions Later, Anne Nicol Gaylor’s Organization is Still Going Strong

October 28, 2013 by 439 Comments

Anne Nicol Gaylor is an 86-year-old abortion provider with no medical training of her own. Her “office supplies” consist of little more than a pen, paper, checkbook, and a telephone. On a Tuesday morning this past July, in a retirement home just outside of Madison, Wisconsin, I sat in her living room as we waited for calls from women who needed (or wanted) to obtain abortions but just didn’t have the ability to pay for them. She is their last hope for a handout.

As the founder of Women’s Medical Fund, Inc., a non-profit group she formed in 1976, Gaylor asks intimate questions of strangers without the slightest hesitation. There’s no time for emotion. There’s work to be done.

Are you single or married?

How much money do you make?

Did you use contraception?

Is the man involved helping you?

How much will your procedure cost?

Did you see a doctor yet?

Have you had an ultrasound?

Gaylor has answered the phone like this more than 20,000 times. Since 1995, WMF has raised and spent nearly $3,000,000 to help women, with most of the money — just over $200, on average, per caller — going to a small handful of providers like Planned Parenthood. The funding comes mostly from individual donors, though about a quarter of the funding last year came from foundation grants. Its mission is to make sure that a woman’s right to reproductive choice is not denied because she doesn’t have enough money, regardless of whether the pregnancy is unintended or unwanted. The organization has no paid staffers, only dedicated volunteers. And, for the moment, Gaylor is just sitting in her recliner, waiting for the next caller, waiting to write her next check.

Anne Gaylor at her 80th birthday party (via Annie Laurie Gaylor)

Depending on who you ask, I’m sitting in front of a sweet woman in the final years of her life or someone who will dread meeting her Maker; a modern-day savior or a prolific serial killer; one of the great feminist activists of the past several decades or, as one newspaper columnist put it, “Granny Blood-Money.”

…

There are only a few prerequisites that must be met before a check can be written: the caller must live in (or plan to obtain the abortion from a shortlist of clinics in) Wisconsin, she must be more than eight weeks pregnant, and she must visit a clinic to confirm her pregnancy. Once Gaylor can verify that information, she writes out a check for up to $400 directly to the hospital, clinic, or physician performing the procedure. She also refers the callers to another national organization that may be able to write out an additional check, allowing the women to pay as little out of pocket as possible. Gaylor used to give out some of the money as a loan, hoping to get paid back eventually, but she knows better now. The women are just too poor. Still, she tries to get them to put up a little money of their own, even if it’s only $25, so that they don’t see her fund as a form of free birth control.

When I ask Gaylor how young her callers are, she opens up a nearby nightstand and pulls out a folder containing a stack of papers, all records of her phone conversations over the past few days. A sheet near the top documents a phone call she received the day before my visit, concerning a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by her 17-year-old brother.

How is anyone even supposed to process information like that?

I’m not sure whether to follow up with a question about the incest, the rape, or their ages. All crimes are reported to the police by the clinics, so Gaylor doesn’t deal with those issues. Her primary concern is whether the caller (in this case, the girl’s older sister) can pay for the procedure.

She’s immune to the horror stories by now. While it’s the first time I’ve ever heard such an awful story, she hears them on a regular basis. The youngest caller this year, she tells me, was only 11.

Gaylor knows the trends, too. While she hears from women all throughout the month, the calls tend to come near the end of the week, when some of the women receive a paycheck, and around the first of the month, when the welfare checks arrive. They don’t cry as much as they used to. They all cried when abortions were harder to come by, she recalls, but now only some shed tears. Most are just nervous. Emotional. Worried about how to pay for it. Wondering how they’ll reconcile their religious faith with their decision. Wondering if they can keep this a secret from their immediate and extended families.

Do you ever hear back from the women who call for help? She shakes her head. Few of them ever want to talk about the procedure after it’s happened. Gaylor herself has never had an abortion. In 1958, a few years after giving birth to her fourth child, she had a tubal ligation (something she highly recommends to women who’ll listen).

I wonder if there’s anything that could help make things better for her organization. More donations? Paid staffers? Nope. None of that. She just wishes women had easier access to birth control. She wishes young women could more easily report instances of rape and get immediate help. But “as long as men keep attacking women, you’re going to have a need” for abortion services.

…

Women’s Medical Fund, Inc. unofficially began in March of 1970, just after Wisconsin’s anti-abortion laws were declared unconstitutional by a district court. The ruling effectively made first-trimester abortions legal in the state. (It wasn’t until 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, took a similar position.)

Gaylor was already a vocal abortion-rights advocate at the time. In 1967, she wrote an editorial (she believes it to be the first of its kind) in favor of an overhaul of the state’s abortion laws. In the years to follow, she joined the Association for the Study of Abortion and the Wisconsin Committee to Legalize Abortion, spoke about the issue on radio and TV shows, and wrote a number of letters-to-the-editor of local newspapers. But in 1970, building off a program launched by scientist Paul Ehrlich, Gaylor began the Zero Population Growth Referral Service (ZPG), where she could direct women to cities where abortion services were readily available. After the Wisconsin court’s ruling, her phone began ringing — women knew they could get abortions now, but they weren’t sure from where, and they believed the outspoken Gaylor would have the answers.

On August 12, 1970, Gaylor placed an ad in two local newspapers that included ZPG’s post office box and her personal phone number. The ad urged women to contact her if their doctors weren’t helping them obtain an abortion. In the weeks to follow, nearly 100 women contacted her. Playboy magazine later mentioned her as a resource for women who needed such help, which only ramped up the number of phone calls. (“Contrary to popular opinion,” she later wrote, “Playboy readers rarely went to bed.”)

Unfortunately, local hospitals were expensive, often had long waiting periods, and required getting through all sorts of bureaucratic red tape (including, in one hospital’s case, letters from two physicians confirming that the procedure was required to save the life of the woman). One provider in Madison, Dr. Alfred Kennan, opened up an outpatient clinic for women who needed abortions, but he was limited to seeing about 100 patients a week. It wasn’t long before Gaylor began referring her callers to sites in Mexico, where the total cost for the flight, procedure, and hotel room was still less than a trip to the expensive hospital next door. (Abortions were illegal in Mexico, and still are in many parts of the country, but bribes to police officers allowed some doctors to practice without problem.) Referrals to New York soon followed.

With the help of University of Wisconsin professor Robert West, Gaylor began Women’s Medical Fund, Inc. in 1972 as an outgrowth of the service she was already providing. It was incorporated as a non-profit in 1976 and is now said to be the country’s largest and oldest independent, all-volunteer abortion fund.

The Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1976 and still in effect today, resulted in an even greater demand for Gaylor’s service. The legislation bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, with exceptions made only for rape, incest, and to save the life of the woman. Because Medicaid funds are included in this ban, poor women are disproportionately affected and they frequently need financial help to go through with the procedure. According to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which WMF is a member of, “[t]here are 15 states that use their own money to pay for abortion care as part of their Medicaid programs, but there are 35 that do not.” Wisconsin is one of the 35.

WMF no longer advertises as it once did, but local clinics are aware of it and they frequently refer clients who need financial assistance to Gaylor’s organization. It’s not hard to see why: the non-profit has virtually no overhead costs and, as the group’s financial records show, more than 99% of its income goes right back to paying for abortion care.

…

If you called WMF today, using information available on some older websites, you might reach the offices of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), another organization Gaylor founded in the late 1970s. FFRF is a church/state separation watchdog, writing letters of complaint to those who appear to be violating the First Amendment and filing lawsuits against them if needed. Gaylor officially retired from the organization in 2004, though she still holds the title of “president emerita.” Staffers at FFRF screen the callers and only then give them Gaylor’s direct line — to the phone in her living room — offering her an additional layer of security. (Most clinics, after screening the women, give them Gaylor’s number directly.)

After 61 years of marriage, Gaylor’s husband Paul died of brain cancer in 2011 and she moved into the retirement home where she now lives in the summer of 2012. Gaylor herself suffers from macular degeneration and glaucoma, but her voice, while frail, is still strong enough to answer the calls. (Her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor said about her in a 2004 tribute, “She may be losing her eyesight, but she is not losing her vision.”)

Gaylor’s only daughter inherited her mother’s activist streak. Annie Laurie Gaylor is one of the co-presidents of the FFRF, along with Dan Barker, and she’s also no stranger to anger from the opposition. At FFRF’s headquarters in Madison, they even have a system in place for dealing with all the hate-mail they receive: Serious threats go in one pile, angry letters go in another.

According to Annie Laurie, fighting for church/state separation is similar to fighting for abortion rights, but “they want to kill you more” when you do abortion work.

The elder Gaylor is used to that kind of hostility, too. When I asked how she responded to threats, her voice became a little stronger, a little more confident.

“I ignore them.”

Anne Nicol Gaylor and daughter Annie Laurie stand near the family tombstone (via Annie Laurie Gaylor)

…

Just as I’m leaving Gaylor’s apartment, with my computer packed up and my keys in hand, the phone rings. Gaylor answers it while instinctively picking up a pen and a form. She listens quietly for a few seconds while jotting down some basic information about the caller. Gaylor asks where she’s from. And how much the provider is charging. And if she’s visited the clinic for her first appointment. There’s an extended pause after that question, after which I hear Gaylor gently cut in: “You have to have that appointment before I can take your application, because at that point, they will do the ultrasound which will confirm exactly how far you are, and then they’ll be able to tell you exactly what the cost will be.”

The call lasts only two minutes before Gaylor hangs up the phone and smiles at me. “Ordinarily, they’re more interesting to listen to,” she jokes.

…

WMF won’t last — can’t last — much longer in its current form. Gaylor won’t always be around to answer the phone. But a contingency plan has already been drawn up. When the time comes, the group’s board of directors and additional volunteers will take over the phone calls and other menial tasks that Gaylor has been doing for decades now. They haven’t worked out all the logistics yet, but thankfully, they haven’t had to. They’re considering getting a dedicated cell phone that is assigned to volunteers during shifts or getting a phone number that goes straight to voicemail and having volunteers call the women back. For now, Gaylor is able to answer all the calls herself on a landline without leaving her home.

One of WMF’s board members, Nora Cusack, wrote to me that if abortion services were covered by health insurance providers or Medicaid the same way as other medical procedures, the phone might just stop ringing. Or at least not ring as much. That, too, would ease the succession problem.

Gaylor’s mission when she began WMF was to help women obtain legal abortions even if they couldn’t afford them. That mission hasn’t changed, but as she sits back down to wait for the next call, she reflects on the grander vision she has for the future: “It would be nice to not be needed.”

-Best wishes to the family of Anne Nicol Gaylor, a woman who did more for humanity than most in taking care of the needs of women and fighting religious bullies on their own ground! This is a sad time for all who respect the separation of church and state.

Thank GOD no one else was killed!

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DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. —

A small plane crashed minutes after takeoff in DeKalb County, smashing into the interstate and killing four people.

The plane crashed onto Interstate 285 eastbound at Peachtree Industrial Boulevard just after 10 a.m. Friday.

Traffic reopened on westbound lanes three hours later, but eastbound lanes remain closed until just before 3:30 p.m. Friday.

DeKalb County Public Safety director Dr. Cedric Alexander said there were three men, a woman and a pet on board the plane.

The victims were identified as Christopher, Phillip, and Greg Byrd, and Jackie Kulzer.

The pilot, Greg Byrd, was a retired Buncombe County, North Carolina deputy, and father to Phillip and Christopher.

The Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office say, “This is a tremendous loss for his family, the Sheriff’s Office and the community.”

Christopher and Jackie were engaged. Jackie is a graduate of St. Pius X Catholic High School in Atlanta.

The school said, “Jackie is remembered as a wonderful young lady, very popular, very energetic, out-going individual that was always concerned about others.”

Christopher Byrd worked as a property manager in midtown Atlanta.

Channel 2 investigative reporter Mark Winne say a source told him Greg Byrd “calmly” reported an issue “climbing out” and said, “Hey, we’re going down.”

Winne’s source told him that the pilot mentioned he was headed to Oxford, Mississippi, to graduation then after he was airborne, a controller asked if he was flying the heading he had been given and the pilot replied, “Yes,” but he was having a problem climbing.

The source said the pilot’s next transmission was to the PDK tower saying they were going down.

Witnesses say they felt the impact of the plane crash on the interstate, but somehow the pilot avoided hitting any vehicles.

“The impact was large, like a bomb being dropped,” said witness Don McGee.

Gerald Smith told Channel 2’s Tyisha Fernandes that he was driving his tractor-trailer along I-285 when he saw the plane flying lower than usual, and that it was coming straight him.

Smith said he was able to stop the big rig before crashing into the plane, but not before it clipped the front of his truck.

“I guess it was just God telling me to slam on brakes to see whether it would go on in front of me, but by the time I hit the brakes I heard the impact hit the front of my truck and not knowing what to expect, I looked at the front of my truck and the only thing I seen was the mirror laying down, I looked back to my left, once I stopped the truck and that plane was just against the wall burning,” Smith said.

Witness Blake Green told Fernandes that the plane propeller flew off on impact. He said the impact sounded like a bomb going off.

Green said he tried to run over and help get the people out of the plane but it was too late.

“As soon as it hit, it burst into flames, there wasn’t anything you could do,” Green said.

The FAA tells Channel 2 Action News it was a Piper PA-32 aircraft that went down after departing from Runway 3 Left. It was flying to Oxford, Mississippi.

Channel 2 investigative reporter Aaron Diamant searched for records on the plane and learned it was licensed to an LLC in Asheville, North Carolina, belonging to Greg Byrd.

Channel 2’s Richard Elliot was the scene Friday afternoon as investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board removed the wreckage from the expressway and took it to their facility in Griffin to reconstruct the incident and try to figure out why the plane went down.

“It’s not going to be difficult. The airplane is somewhat complex, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Once it gets to Griffin, we’ll be able to reconstruct it and figure out what happened,” said NTSB investigator Eric Alleyne.

The NTSB told Elliot that the reconstruction of the entire aircraft which will take about two weeks. A final crash report will take six months to a year.

We have several reporters working to learn more about the tragic crash. Refresh this page and watch the Channel 2 Action News Nightbeat at 11 for updates.

– 4 people were killed in this plane crash yet some idiot actually has the fucking GALL to “Thank God” that more people weren’t killed, only the pilot and his family including one of his son’s fiance! This total ignorance demonstrates the cognitive dissonance demonstrated by the faithful on a minutely basis! This is a goddammed tragedy that killed 4 fucking people, PERIOD!

Thanks Patton, it really isn’t religion’s fault!

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Washiqur Rahman: Another secular blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh

By Saeed Ahmed, CNN

Updated 5:36 AM ET, Tue March 31, 2015

A relative of dead Bangladeshi blogger Washiqur Rahman reacts after seeing his body at Dhaka Medical College on March 30, 2015.

A relative of dead Bangladeshi blogger Washiqur Rahman reacts after seeing his body at Dhaka Medical College on March 30, 2015.

Story highlights

  • The 27-year-old Rahman falls victim to the same brazen act that killed Avijit Roy
  • The deaths have emboldened the movement, an activist says

(CNN)When American writer Avijit Roy was hacked to death on a Dhaka, Bangladesh, street in full view of horrified onlookers, blogger Washiqur Rahman doubled down.

Fundamentalists were choking free thought in his secular nation, he wrote. But they couldn’t silence it.

His friends warned him to be careful, to watch what he posted online. But Rahman dismissed those concerns, saying his Facebook profile page didn’t even bear his picture. They don’t even know what I look like, he told them.

On Monday, the 27-year-old Rahman fell victim to the same brazen act that killed Roy, hacked to death by two men with knives and meat cleavers just outside his house as he headed to work at a travel agency.

He was so maimed — with wounds to his head, face and neck — that police identified him through the voter identification card he was carrying.

American blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death in late February.

American blogger Avijit Roy was hacked to death in late February.
EXPAND IMAGE

His death was the second time in five weeks that someone was killed in Dhaka for online posts critical of Islam — but they are hardly the only two who’ve paid a steep price.

In the last two years, several bloggers have died, either murdered or under mysterious circumstances.

“The despicable murder of Avijit Roy last month should have led authorities to step up protection measures for bloggers and others at risk. The killing of Washiqur Rahman today is another clear example of the Bangladeshi government’s utter failure to ensure the safety of those at risk,” said Abbas Faiz of Amnesty International.

“How many more bloggers will have to be attacked before action is taken?”

Mocking religion

As shocking as Rahman’s death was, the reaction from some quarters was equally disturbing.

On his Facebook page (for which he picked a custom URL that translates to “unbeliever”), Rahman had posted a picture with the hashtag #IamAvijit.

After his death, someone left a comment, “Now you are.”

Another wrote, “I felt sorry when I first learned of your death. But then I saw what you wrote and I am not.”

On his page, Rahman reposted a cartoon depicting Prophet Mohammed from the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. He wished a happy birthday to author Taslima Nasreen, who was forced to flee Bangladesh due to death threats from fundamentalists. And he “liked” a picture of sausages wrapped in crescent rolls that someone had captioned, “Pigs in burqas.”

Posts threatening him were numerous.

“Get ready for the afterlife,” one person commented on one of his posts.

“See you in hell,” said another.

He used to write under the pseudonym “Stupid Man” on a blog but switched to posting on Facebook after 2011.

On Facebook, he is credited for a series, “Jaw-crushing answers to insulting comments of atheists.”

There, he posted questions that critics of Islam often raised and then answered them. But he paired the answers in such a way that they highlighted the contradiction within Islam.

For example, one question asked what proof was there that the Quran was the word of God. The answer, “Mohammed said in his own words that the Quran is the word of God. Since Mohammed is the messenger of Allah, his claims are true.”

He placed the question next to one that asked, “What is the proof that Mohammed was the messenger of Allah?”

The answer, “The Quran claims that Mohammed was the messenger of Allah. And since the Quran is God’s word, its claims must be true.”

Asif Mohiuddin, a blogger who himself was wounded by machete-wielding attackers in 2013 but survived, remembered Rahman as a great satirist.

“I named him the George Carlin of Bangladesh,” he told the International Humanist and Ethical Union. “He wanted with all his heart, a true secular country, where everyone can practice their freedom.”

Few arrests

The irony is that the people who killed Rahman weren’t even familiar with his writings; they were simply following orders, police said.

Of the three involved in the Monday morning attack, two were quickly caught by bystanders.

In confessions to police, the pair — both students at Islamic schools — said they didn’t know what a blog was, nor had they seen Rahman’s writing.

They said they were acting on orders from another person who told them killing Rahman was a religious duty, Police Commissioner Biplob Kumar Sarkar told reporters.

The third person is still to be apprehended.

That appears to be par for the course in the killings of bloggers in Bangladesh.

The only person arrested in the killing of Roy, the U.S. blogger, is Farabi Shafiur Rahman, who had called for his death in Facebook posts.

There has been no conviction in the January 2013 attack on Mohiuddin.

And no convictions in yet another case — the hacking death of blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider, also in 2013.

“The Bangladeshi government must urgently establish accountability in this murder case and others,” the Committee to Project Journalists said after Rahman’s death. “Otherwise the rest of the country’s bloggers, commentators and journalists covering sensitive topics remain at grave risk of being attacked as well.”

Marching on

Bloggers, unlike political parties, aren’t an organized force — and that makes them an easy target for radicals, said Imran Sarker, who heads the Blogger and Online Activists Network in Bangladesh.

“They want peace, they talk of humanity. If you strike them with stones, they don’t strike back. They try to reach you with flowers,” he said. “So, if you want to sow fear and stifle progressive thought, they are easy to pick on.”

But the deaths — of Rahman, of Roy, of Haider — have emboldened the movement, rather than chill them into silence.

“No one is cowering in their homes because this is happening. Because this has been happening regularly for a long time,” he said. “We want to take the society forward. We know we have a lot left to accomplish.”

CNN’s Omar Khan, Kunal Sehgal and Ravi Agrawal contributed to this report.

This is yet another glaring testament to the chaos that religion causes in the world, especially in areas that are dense with followers that still mentally dwell in the 10th century!

Chemical Reactions. Love is just this…….

Standard

I believe that many things attributed to the supernatural, or ‘Unknown,’ are automatically given special powers and considerations by the less than educated, and those who try to pad their understandings with fluff, because the cold, hard truth is just too much for an evolved ape brain to handle. I believe in the strict science because I have observed the evidence and have seen the validation process first hand, therefore, I do not have to imagine the unprovable to explain that which I cannot comprehend, because I actually DO comprehend the thing of which I speak.

I shall attempt to use a personal reference in which to illustrate the facts and evidence regarding the situation to which I refer. I am speaking, of course, to decisions made by human brains which defy logic and reason, but demonstrate the chemical process that is actually in control of all aspects of human decision making. We are the sum of the chemicals in our brains and nothing will interfere with this, not even the notion of romantic love which is, as I have said, just a chemical reaction in the brain of an evolved ape.

The science of love

When do you know if you fancy someone? What does love do to your brain chemicals, and is falling in love just nature’s way to keep our species alive?

We call it love. It feels like love. But the most exhilarating of all human emotions is probably nature’s beautiful way of keeping the human species alive and reproducing.

With an irresistible cocktail of chemicals, our brain entices us to fall in love. We believe we’re choosing a partner. But we may merely be the happy victims of nature’s lovely plan.
It’s not what you say…
Psychologists have shown it takes between 90 seconds and 4 minutes to decide if you fancy someone.
Research has shown this has little to do with what is said, rather
55% is through body language
38% is the tone and speed of their voice
Only 7% is through what they say

The 3 stages of love
Helen Fisher of Rutgers University in the States has proposed 3 stages of love – lust, attraction and attachment. Each stage might be driven by different hormones and chemicals.

Stage 1: Lust
This is the first stage of love and is driven by the sex hormones testosterone and oestrogen – in both men and women.

Stage 2: Attraction
This is the amazing time when you are truly love-struck and can think of little else. Scientists think that three main neurotransmitters are involved in this stage; adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin.

Adrenaline
The initial stages of falling for someone activates your stress response, increasing your blood levels of adrenalin and cortisol. This has the charming effect that when you unexpectedly bump into your new love, you start to sweat, your heart races and your mouth goes dry.

Dopamine
Helen Fisher asked newly ‘love struck’ couples to have their brains examined and discovered they have high levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This chemical stimulates ‘desire and reward’ by triggering an intense rush of pleasure. It has the same effect on the brain as taking cocaine!

Fisher suggests “couples often show the signs of surging dopamine: increased energy, less need for sleep or food, focused attention and exquisite delight in smallest details of this novel relationship” .
Serotonin
And finally, serotonin. One of love’s most important chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new lover keeps popping into your thoughts.

Does love change the way you think?
A landmark experiment in Pisa, Italy showed that early love (the attraction phase) really changes the way you think.

Dr Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa advertised for twenty couples who’d been madly in love for less than six months. She wanted to see if the brain mechanisms that cause you to constantly think about your lover, were related to the brain mechanisms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

By analysing blood samples from the lovers, Dr Marazitti discovered that serotonin levels of new lovers were equivalent to the low serotonin levels of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder patients.

Love needs to be blind
Newly smitten lovers often idealise their partner, magnifying their virtues and explaining away their flaws says Ellen Berscheid, a leading researcher on the psychology of love.

New couples also exalt the relationship itself. “It’s very common to think they have a relationship that’s closer and more special than anyone else’s”. Psychologists think we need this rose-tinted view. It makes us want to stay together to enter the next stage of love – attachment.

Stage 3: Attachment
Attachment is the bond that keeps couples together long enough for them to have and raise children. Scientists think there might be two major hormones involved in this feeling of attachment; oxytocin and vasopressin.

Oxytocin – The cuddle hormone

Oxytocin is a powerful hormone released by men and women during orgasm.
It probably deepens the feelings of attachment and makes couples feel much closer to one another after they have had sex. The theory goes that the more sex a couple has, the deeper their bond becomes.
Oxytocin also seems to help cement the strong bond between mum and baby and is released during childbirth. It is also responsible for a mum’s breast automatically releasing milk at the mere sight or sound of her young baby.

Diane Witt, assistant professor of psychology from New York has showed that if you block the natural release of oxytocin in sheep and rats, they reject their own young.

Conversely, injecting oxytocin into female rats who’ve never had sex, caused them to fawn over another female’s young, nuzzling the pups and protecting them as if they were their own.
Vasopressin
Vasopressin is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex.

Vasopressin (also called anti-diuretic hormone) works with your kidneys to control thirst. Its potential role in long-term relationships was discovered when scientists looked at the prairie vole.

Prairie voles indulge in far more sex than is strictly necessary for the purposes of reproduction. They also – like humans – form fairly stable pair-bonds.

When male prairie voles were given a drug that suppresses the effect of vasopressin, the bond with their partner deteriorated immediately as they lost their devotion and failed to protect their partner from new suitors.

And finally … how to fall in love
Find a complete stranger.
Reveal to each other intimate details about your lives for half an hour.
Then, stare deeply into each other’s eyes without talking for four minutes.

York psychologist, Professor Arthur Arun, has been studying why people fall in love.
He asked his subjects to carry out the above 3 steps and found that many of his couples felt deeply attracted after the 34 minute experiment. Two of his subjects later got married.

These and other studies are factual and in to prove the chemical reaction that is LOVE. It is nothing more and it is only those who use pseudoscience that try to make chemicals more than they actually are. We skeptics are sure, I just will never show this post to a potential sex partner due to the inability of HER to face the scientific fact of the nature of romantic love.