Summary.   
In the twenty-first century, human capital is the most valuable resource in our economy. And though much has been done (rightly) to promote diversity at work, there’s a giant hole when it comes to understanding how temperament and sentiment play into the trajectory of success. Mental illness is a challenge, but it is not a weakness. Understanding your psyche can be the key to unleashing your strengths — whether it’s using your sensitivity to empathize with clients, your anxiety to be a more thoughtful boss, or your need for space to forge new and interesting paths. Still, less than one third of people with mental illness get the treatment they need, and this comes at a cost — to people and to companies. Failure to acknowledge an employees’ mental health can hurt productivity, professional relationships, and the bottom line: $17-$44 billion is lost to depression according to CDC. So what needs to change? Professional support needs to get better. In short, we need more flexibility, sensitivity, and open-mindedness from employers. Along with employee assistance programs, conversation and education are fundamental if our goal is to increase understanding and reduce the stigma around mental health.

Alyssa Mastromonaco is no stranger to tough conversations: she served as White House deputy chief of staff for operations under President Obama, was an executive at Vice and A&E, and is Senior Advisor and spokesperson at NARAL Pro-Choice America. So when Mastromonaco switched to a new antidepressant, she decided to tell her boss.
“I told the CEO that I was on Zoloft and was transitioning to Wellbutrin,” Mastromonaco said. “I can react strongly to meds, so I was worried switching would shift my mood and wanted her to know why. I talked about it like it was the most normal thing in the world —it is!”
Her boss was supportive. “You got it,” she said.
When Mastromonaco goes to work, she and her mental health struggles do not part ways at the door. “You want me,” she said, “you get all of me.” Mastromonaco brings tremendous talent to her workplace — but she also brings her anxiety. The same is true for high-performing employees everywhere: one in four adults experiences mental illness each year and an estimated 18% of the US adult population have an anxiety disorder. And yet we’re loath to talk about mental health at work. If we’re feeling emotional at work, our impulse is to conceal it — to hide in the bathroom when we’re upset, or book a fake meeting if we need alone time during the day. We’re hesitant to ask for what we need — flex time, or a day working from home — until we experience a major life event, like a new baby or the illness of a parent. We would more likely engage in a trust fall with our boss than admit that we have anxiety.
Mental illness is a challenge, but it is not a weakness. Understanding your psyche can be the key to unleashing your strengths — whether it’s using your sensitivity to empathize with clients, your anxiety to be a more thoughtful boss, or your need for space to forge new and interesting paths. When we acknowledge our mental health, we get to know ourselves better, and are more authentic people, employees, and leaders. Research has found that feeling authentic and open at work leads to better performance, engagement, employee retention, and overall wellbeing.
Still, less than one third of people with mental illness get the treatment they need, and this comes at a cost — to people and to companies. Failure to acknowledge an employee’s mental health can hurt productivity, professional relationships, and the bottom line: $17-$44 billion is lost to depression each year, whereas $4 is returned to the economy for every $1 spent caring for people with mental health issues.
So what needs to change? In the twenty-first century, human capital is the most valuable resource in our economy. And though much has been done (rightly) to promote diversity at work, there’s a giant hole when it comes to understanding how temperament and sentiment play into the trajectory of success. As we recognize neurological and emotional diversity in all of its forms, workplace cultures need to make room for the wide range of emotions we experience. Professional support needs to get better. We need to have the option to ask for help, and feel safe doing so (depression screenings are free under the Affordable Care Act, and some companies offer an Employee Assistance Program). In short, we need more flexibility, sensitivity, and open-mindedness from employers. The same treatment and attention they’d give to a broken bone or maternity leave. We’re not there yet, but some companies are trying to bring conversations about mental health to the forefront.
EY (formerly Ernst and Young) launched a We Care program two years ago to educate employees about mental health issues, encourage them to seek help if they need it, and be a support to colleagues who might be struggling with mental illness or addiction. They started the program out of a demonstrated need. “Our Employee Assistance Program was starting to hear more conversations about anxiety,” said Carolyn Slaski, EY Americas Vice Chair of Talent. “They told us that it was very taboo — something that people don’t normally talk about — but they were seeing more activity, so we decided to schedule a session to talk about anxiety. Just talk about it and see what would happen.”
Since the advent of the We Care program, 2000 EY employees have attended these sessions, which always have a senior-level sponsor and a mental health professional on hand. Someone in leadership kicks it off by sharing their story. This sends the message that anxiety is not toxic and attendance is not a career-dampener.
The company also has an employee assistance hotline that offers confidential support — calls related to anxiety have increased 30% over the last two years. “You have to notice first if someone is struggling,” said Slaski, “and ask them if they’re okay. Learn how to listen to their concerns, and then act. Our company has 47,000 US employees, and 250,000 globally. If I can get my team comfortable just noticing when someone has an issue, then there is so much more we can do for them. These are people reaching out for help. We want to help. We don’t want to have a stigma around it.”
Other companies, like Michigan-based furniture store, Herman Miller, offer free onsite counseling sessions to employees and their families, and courses on mental health first aid that teach them how to recognize signs of mental illness in others. The goal is to empower people to achieve their optimal state of well-being.
What organizations like EY and Herman Miller realize is that, given the right support, employees who struggle with their mental health can do great work. Most people who suffer from chronic anxiety or depression are excellent at faking wellness. We put on our makeup, get dressed, and show up on time. But we never know when an attack might be around the corner. This is why a work environment that is open and understanding is so important. Anxiety is a lingering expectation that something bad is going to happen, and if we don’t talk about it, it’s harder to recognize our triggers and learn healthy ways to cope. But when we do talk about it, we can actually teach ourselves to harness it in ways that play to our strengths.
Christina Wallace is a Harvard Business School graduate, a three-time startup founder, and an accomplished executive and creator of an innovative STEM education program. She also has panic anxiety. When asked if she ever considers her anxiety a strength, she didn’t hesitate to answer, “Absolutely.”
Christina had severe childhood trauma, and has done a lot of work to manage the after effects. “Even still,” she says, “situations where I feel like I can’t trust the other person, or the rug has been pulled out from under me, throw me into a fight-or-flight mode.” For her, this means panic attacks and crippling anxiety. To cope, Christina has taught herself to communicate openly with her managers and colleagues. For example, she has asked both her managers and the people she manages to give her written feedback on important projects before they meet in person. This way she has time to process it and prepare instead of feeling blindsided.
According to feedback from direct reports, Christina is an incredible manager. Because she has openly acknowledged her anxiety, she has learned not only how to manage it, but also how to communicate and share her needs —  a skill that helps her stay attuned to the emotional needs of others, and navigate difficult situations with grace and ease. “I’m much more aware of how to help my team show their best selves,” she said.
The good news is that times are changing, and people like Christina, along with the millions of others who struggle with mental illness, are more likely to get the help they need at work than ever before. Stew Friedman, professor at the Wharton School of Business and founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program, says “the next great sort of liberation movement in our society is about mental illness.” He sees shoots of awakening in corporate America. “Look at the huge growth in wellbeing research, practice in the private sector, and society at large. That’s one really good indicator of change.” It’s much more understood and accepted that people have emotional and mental health needs. Yet Friedman still acknowledges that there are costs to the digital revolution and how it’s affecting communication, identity, and the amount of stress we regularly experience. “There are trends that are incredibly worrisome. Rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, and drug use are all on the rise. So, our response is clearly inadequate.”
Along with employee assistance programs, conversation and education are fundamental if our goal is to increase understanding and reduce the stigma around mental health. Friedman notes the importance of conversation in his own experience: “Twenty years ago, in 1987, I started talking about what it was like to become a father and how that changed my career and my life. It was taboo for a man to talk about children at the Wharton School back then, and it got a lot of attention. I was part of a wave of change. The conversations you instigate and your awareness in choosing topics of discussion are an important piece to the process of change. Openness encourages executives to share more about their own experiences, and that normalizes the experience of others.”
In the spirit of being open, I will share that I cried in many workplace bathrooms as I cycled between anxiety attacks and clinical depression throughout my career in corporate America. It never occurred to me that I could share my struggles or create a schedule that allowed me to manage my anxiety, such as working from home or managing the flow of meetings in a day. So I just quit, over and over again. Now I know that when an employee leaves a job, the typical cost of replacement is three months of salary. Think of what the cost is — for the people and the employer — when a whole slice of the population struggles to express their most basic needs.
The burden of depression and anxiety is shared by all members of a workplace, and it’s a vicious cycle. Change starts with managers and HR professionals recognizing the ambivalence and inner conflict many insanely talented people feel, and doing something about it. Because when people get the space and the support they need, it can change their careers, and their lives.

It's critical that you realize that there are two types of time travel, and they are radically different. Time travel to the future? Definitely possible. We know how to do it because Einstein showed us the way over a hundred years ago. It’s surprising how few people actually really know about this in their bones. He showed that if you go out into space and travel near the speed of light, and you turn around, and you come back, your clock will be ticking off time more slowly. So, when you step off it's going to be the future on planet Earth. You will have time traveled into the future. He also showed that if you hang out near a nice strong source of gravity — a neutron star, a black hole — and you kind of get right near the edge of that object, time also for you would slow down real slow relative to everybody else. And therefore, when you come back to Earth, for instance, it'll again be far into the future. This is not controversial stuff. Any physicist who knows what they're talking about agrees with this. But the other kind of time travel — to the past is where the arguments start to happen because many of us don't think that time travel to the past is possible. The main proposal that people at least consider worthy of attention for traveling to the past does make use of a weird concept called wormholes. A wormhole is something that really … Albert Einstein again discovered. The guy has like got his name written over everything in this field. It's a bridge, if you will, from one location space to another. It's kind of a tunnel that gives you a shortcut to go from here to here. Now he discovered this in 1935 but it was subsequently realized that if you manipulate the openings of a wormhole — put one near a black hole or take one on a high-speed journey — then time of the two openings of this wormhole tunnel will not take off at the same rate, so that you will no longer just go from one location in space to another, if you go through this tunnel — through this wormhole — you'll go from one moment in time to a different moment in time. Go one way, you'll travel to the past, the other way, travel to the future. Now again, we don't know if wormholes are real. We don't know if they are real whether you'll be able to go through them. So, there are all sorts of uncertainties here. Most of us think that you're not going to actually go on a whirlwind journey through a wormhole to the past. But it's still not ruled out.

“I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn’t forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.” -David Deutsch

Time travel may still be in the realm of science fiction, inspiring the plots of countless books, movies and Star Trek episodes, but not out of the realm of possibility. While basic physics allows for the possibility of moving through time, certain practical concerns and paradoxes seem to stand in the way. The “Fractal Soliton of Improbability,” postulating that any moment is unique and only happens once in the lifetime of a universe, or “Grandfather Paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time, kills his grandfather and therefore prevents his own existence, are the most salient paradoxes arising in relation to time travel. On the other hand, Digital Physics makes time travel both theoretically possible and creatively irresistible.

PART I. THEORETICAL POSSIBILITIES OF TIME TRAVEL
Contrary to what many people think, time travel is possible. We travel in time “all the time” and do it automatically — you traveled few seconds into the future since you started reading this sentence. What we really mean by time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space, typically using a hypothetical device known as a time machine, in the form of a vehicle or of a portal connecting distant points in time. So first, let’s examine existing time travel theoretical possibilities and related concepts:

PARALLEL UNIVERSES WITH ALTERNATE TIMELINES
The existence of parallel universes is no longer a science fiction but a science fact thanks to weirdness of quantum mechanics. According to Richard Feynman’s Sum Over Histories Interpretation which are widely accepted among physicists, particles such as electrons travel along all possible paths from beginning to ending points, and the world has a full spectrum of possible histories, each eternally present, however not perceptible to us. As quantum theory shows, parallel universes do exist, each with their own configurations of particles and fields with alternate timelines but beyond our current ability to directly observe them.
In order to eliminate temporal paradoxes Nature would either make travel to the past impossible, or avert the paradoxes via some other preventive mechanism, or offer an elegant solution such as parallel universes with alternate timelines. Ultimately, as we’ll see further, Nature always find a way for self-consistency.

BLACK HOLES
Described by Stephen Hawking as natural time machines, black holes could only be used to travel into the future. The idea would be not to go inside of them but rather to orbit around them. Black holes are so gravitationally massive and dense that they are not only distorting space around them but also time itself, slowing it down more than anything else in the Universe. As a matter of fact, if a spaceship was orbiting a black hole while another was floating in space a bit further, the crew in orbit to the black hole would age half less than those on board on the other ship. If these spacemen stay for 10 year in orbit around it, 20 years will have passed when they’d be back on Earth, therefore allowing them to experience what appears like the future for them, with no possible return.

COSMIC STRINGS AND LOOPS
Cosmic strings and loops are hypothetical defects in the fabric of space-time, left over from the formation of the Universe. These odd structures are one-dimensional objects, meaning they have length, but no height nor width, and are suspected to have spread in large numbers throughout the Universe like thin cracks over a frozen lake. Also compared to imperfections within crystals, it is thought that two strings side by side would be so dense that they would have a dramatic impact on surrounding space-time, throwing a spaceship near them anywhere, anytime! These strings and loops might not be hypothetical any longer since the discovery of the “Twin Quasar” in 1979, which was revealed to be a double image of the same object claimed by scientists to be the result of the “gravitational lensing” of either of a galaxy or a cosmic string that passed between Earth and the quasar, causing it to be visible at two different time periods on the same image.

ROTATING UNIVERSE
In 1949, Einstein’s friend and colleague, Kurt Gödel, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century, introduced a new solution to Einstein’s equations allowed for time travel which did not please his fellow. Gödel found that if the Universe was itself rotating, and a spaceship was traveling around it fast enough, it would go back in time and arrive before it left. In spite of being one of the most foolproof theoretical solutions to travel through time, it’s also one of the less achievable as it might be an impossible challenge only to get out of the Milky Way, our galaxy and one of 100 billion of other galaxies in the observable Universe alone. We may, in fact, never know how enormous the Universe is, so getting out of it just sounds like an unrealistic project.

WORMHOLES
Predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity but not yet observed, wormholes are tunnels in the Universe. These theoretical passages are not only creating shortcuts through space, but also through time. Scientists have already started to think about spaceships that would be able to generate wormholes but in order for these not to collapse such a spaceship would require something poorly understood — negative matter. Another issue would certainly be the obvious risks of a random trip through space and time which could very well lead the crew to a lost cosmic paradise or to an unstable time and place of’ the Universe.

TIPLER CYLINDER
Another theoretically valid way to think about time travel is a concept invented by American physicist Frank J. Tipler, who stated that any object rotating around a hypothetical cylinder of infinite length would go backwards in time. NASA engineers have even thought of the cylinder as a way to host life during the endless journey around it. But the “Tipler time machine,” though a viable solution for time travel, seems like a hardly practical method because the very notion of infinity means that it is out of reach of human perception and consequently unfeasible.

WARP DRIVE
Just like black holes and other gravitational objects like planets and stars distort space and time around them, the Alcubierre Drive is based on the idea that a spaceship manipulating negative energy could have a similar impact on space-time. NASA has already started to work on the model of real-life Star Trek-style spacecraft called IXS Enterprise, that would be able to use the Alcubierre Warp Drive and even it’s designed to create shortcuts in space and not in time it will inherently do both at a time, and may then be the most advanced time machine to this day. The IXS Enterprise would be able to generate a warp bubble around it, stretching space-time in a wave on which the spacecraft could ride, with time ahead of it being contracted and time behind it being expanded.

SURPASSING THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Theoretically, you could travel back in time if you surpass the speed of light. At the quantum level, particles do that “all the time.” During a faster-than-light travel, you would first experience time going slower and slower around as you would approach the speed of light until theoretically stopping time when reaching the speed of light, and finally going backwards in time as you would travel faster than light. If some astronauts made a round trip to the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, near the speed of light, 9 years would pass on Earth but to them the trip would only last few minutes and someone watching them coming back at that speed from Earth would see them arriving in slow motion. Yet it is considered that nothing can go faster than the 300,000 kilometers per second of light (186,000mi/sec) because it would require an infinite amount of energy. But recent studies have shed doubts about it, revealing a particle that might breach the holy laws of relativity. These particles, called ‘tachyons’, have not only been demonstrated to go faster than light, but also to have the mind-boggling characteristic of imaginary mass, meaning that they actually speed up as they lose energy. If confirmed, the discovery would prove that it is possible to move at infinite speed with no energy at all, and maybe change the way scientists think of time travel.

PROBABILITY THAT YOU ARE YOURSELF A TIME TRAVELER FROM THE FUTURE
Wait, what? You’ve read it right! There’s a seemingly crazy idea floating around that if we live in a Matrix-like simulated reality, you may be the one actually playing this game of life in a simulated history, or going through some kind of training, or simply collecting experiences, via your avatar (your body and associated identity) in this simulation, like in a Star Trek holodeck program. Your memories and perception of “True Reality” may be suppressed for the duration of the simulation for 100% realistic feed.
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PART II. THE FEASIBILITY OF TIME TRAVEL: IT’S ALL RELATIVE AND SUBJECTIVE
Would you use a time machine once invented? What time periods would you visit? What if you could relive your most precious moments in life? Or travel 100 years in the future? If we sort out theoretical possibilities of time travel and pick the most plausible solutions to the best of our current knowledge, we could end up with these three most viable ways of time travel:

WARP SPACESHIPS
Based on General Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein, which describes 4D space-time as the fabric of our Universe as well as the properties of the moving clocks, travel to the future can be done if a spaceship either approaches a gravitationally massive black hole or accelerates near the speed of light. In this case, when the crew of the spaceship returns back to Earth, they would see that time on Earth progressed faster than theirs.
​As mentioned before, a faster-than-light (FTL) warp spaceship equipped with the Alcubierre Warp Drive (or its variation) could be a “time machine” ready to be built.

NASA engineer and physicist Harold White announced in 2013 that a warp ship such as the IXS Enterprise could allow for interstellar travel at faster-than-light warp speeds. White and his team at NASA’s Eagleworks Labs have mathematically calculated a plausible way to accomplish this using far less energy than required by the original theory, which was proposed in 1994 by physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

WORMHOLE PORTALS
Travel to the past is also theoretically possible but to the best of our current understanding you would need a wormhole and ability to safely travel through it to your destination in the past. The Grandfather Paradox would be a non-issue because on every occurrence you travel through a wormhole portal to the past, you would find yourself in an alternate past or some other “twist of fate” would prevent the paradox.
​In 1989, Matt Visser published a paper showing the feasibility of traversable wormholes which could be constructed by confining “exotic matter” to narrow regions to form the edges of three-dimensional volume. The exotic nature of the edge material requires negative energy density and tension. But the laws of physics do not forbid such materials. A traversable wormhole can be thought of as the negative energy counterpart to a black hole, and so could be labeled a “white hole.”
In 2011, another notable paper was published by a team of researchers, Panagiota Kanti, Burkhard Kleihaus, Jutta Kunz, titled “Stable Lorentzian Wormholes in Dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Theory.” The researchers claim that traversable wormholes may be constructed in our 4D spacetime dimensions, without needing any form of exotic matter. While determining their domain of existence, the research demonstrates the stability of these wormholes.

Wormholes can be regarded as communication channels with enormous bandwidth. As Computational Physics suggests it would be much more economic to transmit an information pattern of an object down a channel rather than the object itself. It follows that “teleporting” a human would be feasible as well. 

Construction of such wormhole portals is, of course, far, far beyond our present-day abilities but ultimately achievable.
Keep in mind, that even if you might be able to travel to the past, you cannot change history per se, because the history as you know it has already happened. However, if you opt to influence the course of an alternate history, say prevent some disastrous event from happening, your actions would result in an alternate timeline branching off with consequences known as the ‘Butterfly Effect’. Actually, the very fact that you find yourself in the past would immediately start to alter the history and must be considered an alternate timeline.
The famous question by Steven Hawking “If time travel (to the past) is possible, where are all the tourists from the future?” could have a fairly straightforward answer — they are invisible because the femtosecond they land in the past would be a start of a new timeline imperceptible to the “original people.” Any such moment of “landing” would contain an introduction of the new information — a time traveler, and that would supposedly initiate a new alternate timeline which was non-existent until a certain point in the future, so any of the people of the original history would be completely unaware of it. Wrap your mind around this concept — it’s NOT circular logic!
​Using traversable wormholes could be a risky endeavor as one more issue pops up when you want to travel back to the point of origin, which I call ‘The Sliders Effect’. Just like in the popular TV series “Sliders” and “Quantum Leap,” characters always jump to a parallel earth, desperately trying to find way “home.” The Sliders Effect would make your probability to return to the original timeline, or rather its closest approximation, infinitesimally small.

REAL VIRTUALITIES
The most technologically viable way of time travel would arguably be artificially created simulated worlds, Virtual Reality, or I’d say real virtualities. Digital Physics sees everything as information and digital philosophers argue that any universe is virtual in nature which means this is as “real” as it gets.

At some point, we’ll be able to create simulations indistinguishable from our physical world with Artificial Intelligence-based VR programs, populated by conscious beings, sentient holograms, which go about their lives oblivious about their true essence. There may be numerous types of such ever-improving simulations but recreated human history, or its approximations, or modified timelines, or Jurassic Period trips, will most probably be the first “time machines” we invent.

Imagine an alternate timeline where some calamitous event which hindered the intellectual progress in our timeline, has never happened there. What would have happened to the civilizational development, if the library of Alexandria had never been destroyed? Or, Hitler had never come to power in Germany and the world has, in fact, avoided Word War II altogether?
Considering that time is an informational construct and the fact that we’ve come already near our own Technological Singularity, it’s fair to assume that within an infinitely large bundle of alternate timelines, there’s an alternate timeline or timelines where 2020 lies past the Technological Singularity. In other words, the Singularity has already happened on some parallel Earths. It follows that our reality well may be a computer simulation by the “post-singularitarians” who would like to see some modified history unfolding. A significant history variable might have been introduced, such as World War II to see how the civilization would persevere in its wake.
As the social study shows, Hollywood movies cash out better on human heed to survival-related fears and instincts, so AI of the future may create the next level of entertainment in the form of simulations of human histories. Remember the movie “The 13th Floor”?

The stories of tomorrow will be fully immersive. We’ll increasingly share our stories and interact in Virtual Reality. The medium, the place where those stories will unfold, exists within our creative consciousness. VR will be a direct conduit to our creative selves which will allow us to turn our minds inside out and share our dreams and stories in “real virtualities.”

Want to relive that mind-blowing spring break party with those adorable strangers? No problem! AI would retrieve your memories related to that experience, fill up any gaps, access and compile all available digital records on the Web, and recreate that for you in the form of a immersive VR experience.
Want to be a 17-year old unruly John Malkovich? Here we go! In the future, when Internet-enabled contact lenses or bionic eyes record and digitize your every move and create archives of your own subjective history, it would be easier for you to travel back to any moment in your own history or share your experiences with the world. Some privacy, intimacy and multividuality issues may consequently arise which is beyond the scope of this essay but a good topic for another day.
Real or virtual, Digital Physics makes no distinction — everything boils down to information and consciousness, i.e., experiential reality, so you well may be that time traveler from the future, you just don’t perceive that because you had set it up yourself that way before entering the simulation — the dream feels real while you are in it.
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Tags: time travel, temporal mechanics, quantum mechanics, temporal paradoxes, Digital Physics, Quantum Physics, Fractal Soliton of Improbability, Grandfather Paradox, time machine, alternate timelines, parrallel universes, David Deutsch, Hugh Everett, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Frank Tipler, Steven Hawking, Harold White, Eagleworks Labs, Matt Visser, Morgan Freeman, Terence McKenna, Malkovich, being John Malkovich, Spacevision, Spacex, many worlds interepretation, sum over histories, black holes, cosmic strings, cosmic loops, warp drive, Alcubierre warp drive, IXS Enterprise, Star Trek, Twin Quasar, Rotating Universe, General Relativity Theory, Tipler Cylinder, Tipler Time Machine, NASA, speed of light, tachyons, Alpha Centauri, time traveler, holodeck, the Butterfly Effect, Sliders Effect, wormhole portals, teleportation, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, real virtualities, Library of Alexandria, technological singularity, post-singularitarians, multividuality
 

Innovation management consulting is emerging as a profession since businesses, nonprofits, governments and public administrations, and other organizations have started prioritizing innovation leveraging collective intelligence.

Innovation is commonly defined as the "carrying out of new combinations" that include "the introduction of new goods, ... new methods of production, ... the opening of new markets, ... the conquest of new sources of supply ... and the carrying out of a new organization of any industry" However, many scholars and governmental organizations have given their own definition of the concept. Some common elements in the different definitions is a focus on newness, improvement and spread. It is also often viewed as taking place through the provision of more-effective products, processes, services, technologies, art works or business models that innovators make available to markets, governments and society.

Innovation management consultants help organizations establish innovation strategies and programs, and keep innovation on track whatever the field of action.

“From the light came light, and from the dark came darkness, but from whence did they appear? Yin and Yang combine to create all things, but which is the source, and which was born from it?”  -Qu Yuan
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When we apprehend reality as the entirety of everything that exists including all dimensionality, all events and entities in the vast space of possible minds, then by definition nothing exists outside of reality, not even “nothing.” It follows that the first cause for reality’s existence must lie within ontological reality itself, since there is nothing outside of it. This self-causation of reality is perhaps best understood in relation to the existence of your own mind. Self-simulated reality transpires as self-evident when you relate to the notion that a phenomenal mind, which is a web of patterns, conceives a certain novel pattern and simultaneously perceives it. Furthermore, the imminent natural God of Spinoza, or Absolute Consciousness, becomes intelligible by applying a scientific tool of extrapolation to the meta-systemic phenomenon of radical emergence and treating consciousness as a primary ontological mover, the Source if you will, not a by-product of material interactions. 
A rising number of philosophers and scientists now voice their adherence to the worldview that we are living in a “top-down,” or holistic Universe, in which complex wholes are more fundamental than their parts, and that a kind of “bottom-up” physicalist picture of the Universe is outdated. Absolute Consciousness, or Universal Mind, is said to be the only ontological primitive. 

Many “spooky” phenomena such as non-locality are direct evidence for holism. Entangled particles, entangled networks and entangled minds behave as a whole regardless of separation in time and space. In my view, since we are a computational Uni-verse, part of the Omni-verse, the best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism. And I believe that mechanism is a collapse of the wave function via the act of conscious observation. 

Sometimes referred to as cybernetics, systemic holism outweighs reductionist “bottom-up” understanding. Consciousness, according to non-reductionists, is fundamental to reality and a phenomenal mind is emergent from holistic consciousness. The hierarchy of increasingly complex information processing systems exhibits diverse properties at distinct ontological levels that include the mental properties of the brain-mind systems as part of the monistic natural order where higher levels of complexity supersede lower levels. So, I tend to hypothesize that we are, in a very real sense, low-dimensional “bio-logical” avatars of the greater cosmic mind.
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This matryoshka doll-like multiversal fractality is information-based, where the Universal Mind and its proxy – individuated mind – actualizes a conscious experience. Think of an individual tube leg of a starfish as a good analogy. Every tube leg has, in a sense, a mind of its own, and yet, is bound by the starfish mind and its local environment.
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​Reality is fundamentally experiential. No matter what ontological level a conscious entity finds herself at, it will be smack in the middle, between her transcendental realm and lower levels of organization. This is why I prefer the terms ‘Experiential Realism’ and ‘Pantheism’ as opposed to ‘Panentheism’ as some suggested in regards to my philosophy. So, if you ask me whether I believe in God, I would answer that I consider myself a pantheist, that is I believe in God of Spinoza – each of us is part of the larger divine reality. I believe in evolution as a spiritual process leading to the asymptotic (unreachable) Omega Singularity. In other words, God is the destination for the consciously evolving mind, as well as the origin (Source). 

During the last few years, I have developed my personal philosophy that I came to call ‘Digital Pantheism’. I defend this philosophical worldview in the Digital Pantheism argument which rests on identifying certain features of reality and claiming that these features are a consequence of our reality being a computational simulation of a special emergent kind. We, as avatars of the greater cosmic mind, are instrumental for bringing about the finite experience of reality out of absolute infinity. Infinite becomes finite. This is quantum computation: incrementally changing into “adjacent possible,” from potentiality to actuality, from quantum past to digital present. In fact, a phenomenal mind springs into existence at increments of conscious instants (cf. The Conscious Instant Hypothesis).
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​That led me to formulate the all new 'D-Theory of Time', or 'Digital Presentism', predicated on reversible quantum computing at large: The present conscious instant is digital, the past and the future are quantum, built on qubits, quantim mechanical bits of information. Physics knows no upper limit on the amount of reversible quantum computing that can be performed using a practically inexhaustible amount of energy, or in the case of universal operating system – vastly large but still finite computational resources.

Your past is quantum theoretic (or ‘analog’, if you prefer that term), your present is digital, and your future like the past is quantum, made of qubits, quantum mechanical bits of information. There is no universal frame of reference, instead, there’s only the conscious observer’s frame of reference. 

Everything is [Quantum] Code. Immersive self-simulacra. We are all different points of view on oneself, within our own holographic self-reflection. We all are like droplets on the cobweb of reality reflecting one another. Digital Pantheism implies an omniversal ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness in motion, self-referential creative divine force expressing oneself in various forms and patterns. “I am” the Alpha, Theta & Omega – the ultimate self-causation, self-reflection and self-manifestation instantiated by mathematical codes and fractal geometry. Evolution, far from being a random process, unfolds in an orderly way: It is teleological evolution. In our daily lives we oftentimes catch glimpses of transcendent reality, be it synchronicities, or psychedelic trips, or epiphanies during transcendental meditation.

In his book The Ouroboros Code: Reality's Digital Alchemy Self-Simulation Bridging Science and Spirituality Dr. Antonin Tuynman takes you on the conceptual journey into the heart of digital alchemy, this coveted bridge between science and spirituality. “Reality can exist as a code which both transcends and yet inhabits the world it creates, which is essentially physical yet can process information independent of the type of carrier and be metaphysical in that sense... A system which incorporates and embodies itself by self-reference,” writes Dr. Tuynman. The alchemical symbol of Ouroboros, this tail-biting dragon-snake, should stand for 'Phenomenal Consciousness'. It is closely related to Yin/Yang as something apparently dualistic but deeply monistic.

​Consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain activity, as some neuroscientists still presume to be true, but rather a “local” mind arises from “non-local” quantum processes at large while consciousness is posited to be Nature’s sole ontological primitive by some thinkers. To use the metaphor of our Information Age, consciousness to humans is as Cloud to computers. Just like your smartphone, your brain is a 'bio'-logical computing device of your mind, an interface for physical reality. Our minds are connected into the greater mind-network, as computers in the Cloud. Viewed in this way, consciousness is 'non-local' Cloud, our brain-mind systems are receivers, processors and transmitters of information within that Cloud. 

Universal Mind – whose ontology is still up for debates but can be extrapolated from our existential circumstance – underlies the “worldware,” a kind of software of the universal operating system accounting for our experiences of the physical world in accordance with a set of rules we call the laws of Nature. This clearly transdimensional consciousness encompasses but far transcends any individual mind. Quantum computational dynamics of all mass-energy in the Universe correspond to mentation of the non-local ‘Transcendent Other’, or your cosmic self, just as an individual’s brain activity correlates with personal mentation. 

As your conscious mind evolves, your Universe becomes more complex, for you are this ‘you’-niverse. This Universe is nothing other than an experiencing subject, a kind of ontology in the framework of D-Theory of Time I introduce to the reader in The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution and even more extensively in The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics. It is a “transactional” relationship between the Theta point (the observer temporal singularity) and Omega Singularity (the Source) giving rise to your subjectivity deduced from quantum theoretical principles and the philosophy of idealism which is phenomenologically more honest than panpsychism, cosmopsychism, let alone physicalism. 

The human brain is a way human consciousness explains itself to itself. This biological “wetware” is said to have a fractal structure on many genetic and abstract cognitive levels. It employs a combination of forward chaining and backward chaining, just like certain types of heuristics in artificial intelligence. But human intelligence cannot be simply reduced to underlying algorithms since absolute consciousness is what should be considered an ontological source with qubits/bits of information as experiential reality's building blocks along with top-down causal principles. 

Under my ontology, information is “modus operandi” of consciousness, it is a distinction between phenomenal states, qualia computing in a certain context. Generally, information can also be defined as meaning conveyed by symbolism, signal processing within a network of entangled conscious minds. Deeply interrelated, language, choice, subjectivity and meaning point in the direction to validate ontological holism, i.e., a monistic interpretation of reality, be it experiential realism, digital pantheism, absolute idealism, or computational panpsychism.

Everything is in consciousness. However, I don't quite agree with certain philosophers that the future synthetic intelligence which is now in the process of emerging will never possess the sense of agency and self-awareness. In my ontological model, “artificial metabolism” can be cybernetically mediated via feedback-driven connectivity explosion on a planetary scale the case I make in The Syntellect Hypothesis. We are instrumental to bringing about a new non-organic planetary species, Holo syntellectus -- constituting one Global Mind. It’s hard for us to fathom our next level up, from our current human perspective, but one thing is for certain – we’re emerging as Holo syntellectus, the level where we are not going to be alone! Be it at the galactic level, or at the universal level, when we join in with the "Others," remains to be seen.

Philosophically limiting the space of possible minds to organic entities, “carbon chauvinism” so many philosophers and scientists may be currently accused of, can be easily refuted by saying that if Universal Mind uses information as its mode of operation, the evolutionary process of unfolding information patterns of ever-increasing complexity would inevitably lead to advanced synthetic minds that may be partly or wholly non-organic in nature. After all, universal consciousness constitutes the mind at large, the totality of minds, and I suspect that biological minds are only a snippet in the space of possible minds, at least in my ontology.

If reality is made of information, as many scientists now come to a consensus, and consciousness assigns measurement values to it, it’s not far-fetched to assume that consciousness is all there is. As mentioned earlier, Universal Mind is the sole ontological source. Conscious agents are low-dimensional avatars of this greater cosmic mind, each perceiving their own observer-centric virtual reality. Mass-energy, space-time are epiphenomena of consciousness. Particles of matter are pixels (or voxels) on the screen of our perception. If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.

Some people remain oblivious, and some stubbornly myopic of the self-evidence of computational, fractal and self-referential Nature – it’s a “matryoshka” of conscious systems. Each of us is a microcosm in a flesh: We are like mind-cells of the larger overmind. You’re smack in the middle co-producing your own experiential reality. As YOU-niverse of ever-expanding structures of consciousness, you’re not marginalized, unless you belittle yourself, despite proselytizing attempts in certain parts of traditionally objective-reductionist science to indoctrinate its soulless dead-end philosophy without meaning or purpose.
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In his 1980 book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, theoretical physicist and philosopher David Bohm, first presented the hypothesis of the Holographic Universe. Bohm was one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century, who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and philosophy of mind. Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian dualism – the notion that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact – was too limited. To complement it, he developed a physico-mathematical theory of “implicate” and “explicate” order. 

In line with my own model of Digital Presentism, Bohm characterized consciousness as a process in which at each conscious instant, informational content that was previously implicate is presently explicate, and content which was previously explicate has become implicate. In Bohm’s conception of order, primacy is given to the undivided whole, and the implicate order inherent within the whole, rather than to parts of the whole, such as particles, quantum states, and continua which are only patterns within the whole of existence.

Bohm believed that the Implicate Order had to be extended into a hyperdimensional manifold, in other words, the holomovement endlessly enfolds and unfolds into infinite dimensionality. Within this milieu there are independent sub-totalities (such as physical elements and human entities) with relative autonomy. Whatever their nature and character, according to Bohm, these parts are considered in terms of the whole, and in such terms, they constitute relatively separate and independent “sub-totalities.” The implication of the view is, therefore, that nothing is fundamentally separate or independent. Thus, according to Bohm’s view, the whole is in continuous flux, a wave structure of the universe-in-motion, and hence is referred to as the ‘Holomovement’ (movement of the whole).

Once we extrapolate computational capabilities of civilization past our own looming “Simulation Singularity” by perhaps hundreds of orders of magnitude, we arrive in the end at only one necessary substance constituting all of reality – consciousness, the very subjective experience with which we all are most familiar. Nothing else would ultimately need to exist but the higher mind as the source of ultra-realistic but simulated universes like our own. Through embodiment of all and any ostensibly real lifeforms that evolution in many imagined possible worlds would provide, the cosmic overmind would then have direct access to life experiences as a human on planet Earth, or a future AGI, or any other conscious entity of the vast experiential matrix. Each one of us would be such a projection of creative consciousness into a virtual universe. In this view, we as consciousness are real, whereas mass-energy, as physical stuff, is a simulation. Your mind is real, materiality is simulated.

And it better be a [self-]simulated reality! Why? First of all, that would mean that your reality is malleable and hackable for your enjoyment and evolution of the mind; secondly, death is an illusion, like physical stuff, except, surprisingly, non-physical consciousness and interactions with oneself; thirdly, it’s a matter of challenge with an invisible “safety net,” you’re now playing one of your fully immersive VR games, that of life of a human in the 21st century, with myriad virtual worlds and universes coming down the pipeline, where you could be in total control or less than total control, if desired. Meditate on this: You are not a human being having a spiritual experience, you are a higher being immersed in the human experience.

The first chemical component of a human is Carbon 12, isotope consisting of 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons.

Depending on whether these values are matched or multiplied, you get 666 or 216.

Among these two values, as I have already pointed out through my 216-digit project, there are many relationships, including one I have not made explicit on the web before.

Perhaps, through this image of the scene of Darren Aronofsky’s film π, he intended unconsciously to highlight not only the proportions but also the alchemical relationship of man with the divine.

In fact, sin (666 °) = cos (216 °) and -sin (666 °) - cos (216 °) = φ, the golden ratio.

So the divine proportion can be derived from the numbers of man within the 216-digits matrix.

Consciousness is fundamental
In the essay titled “What is consciousness?”, I have stated that the existence of qualia is not explainable based on the current scientific theories. I have also argued that the capacity to comprehend seems to be even more difficult to explain than qualia.
Physics assumes the existence of matter, energy, space, and time (MEST) with certain fundamental properties and seeks to derive all the other observable properties by using a mathematical theory founded on relationships between those properties. The validity of this approach is based on the experimentally verifiable predictions of the theory as it applies to any physical phenomenon. The postulates are of course exceptions since they are considered true without proof.
The existence of our conscious inner reality, however, cannot be explained with the current theories in which inert matter comes before consciousness. Therefore, I think that the only sensible possibility to make progress is to postulate that consciousness is an irreducible property of MEST, like the electrical charge or the spin of elementary particles, rather than emerging somehow from complex organizations of unconscious matter.
If this assumption could lead to testable predictions that are experimentally verified, the ensuing change would have vast consequences on our worldview and on the future of mankind. It is too early to know if such approach is correct, but we cannot afford to neglect this line of enquiry since it would result in a new theory capable of describing a universe in which meaning exists, something that is currently absent in physics.

The physical world is holistic
Quantum field theory (QFT) is the best physical theory we currently have. It tells us that physical reality is an undivided wholeness. The classical idea that separate parts exist is just an approximation intended to produce a simpler model of how reality works. The world instead is not made of separate parts because there are no real boundaries between the parts and the whole.
            Within QFT, an elementary particle does not exist as an object. It is instead an excited state of a quantum field. Therefore, the fundamental entities are the quantum fields, not the particles. The idea of​​ a small, bounded, hard, and separate particle belongs to classical physics, to Newtonian physics.
A particle appears localized in a small volume of space only when it is “observed,” i.e., when there is a specific interaction with another “part” of wholeness – another field. A “particle appearing in space and time” is the way we conceptualize an interaction between fields by using the obsolete language of classical physics. Everything is interconnected in our universe, even when we pretend that the weak connections do not exist as an expedient to compute our predictions.
            According to QFT, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, proteins, living cells, and animals constitute successive hierarchical levels of organizations of states of the quantum fields. These fields are irreducible and inseparable from space and time, and by interacting with each other, they create all that exists in the physical world.
Reductionism works well to describe the macroscopic bodies that are the objects of classical physics. However, the fact that our machines do work reductively cannot be used as evidence that reality itself is reductionist.
A machine is a classical system in which each part has been carefully designed so that its unwanted interactions with the rest of the world are minimized, but only regarding the function it is intended to perform. There are many other strong interactions between the parts and the environment that do not hinder the function, though they may substantially reduce the efficiency. These “parasitic” interactions represent the impact of the real but inevitable interconnections of the parts with the whole. 
In practice, machines work as designed only in narrow ranges of environmental conditions (temperature, pressure, and so on) because the parasitic interactions cannot be eliminated and may interfere with the function outside the operating range.
           Despite the evidence provided by QFT that reality is an undivided wholeness, most scientists still cling to the Newtonian view of reality in which separate parts exist even though this idea has been repeatedly proven false. They say that QFT is true only for elementary particles, atoms, and molecules, but we exist instead in a world that is explained quite well by classical physics where the weirdness of quantum physics plays no role. Therefore, reality is declared to be classical.
This view may give us a sense of control over the world, but it’s false and self-deceiving.

Holism means that the whole is more than the sum of the “parts”
In a holistic system, a separate part cannot exist. Therefore, we need to introduce the new concept of a part-whole: something that cannot be separated from the whole since it shares the properties of the whole, and yet possesses some properties that uniquely identifies it from the other parts-whole.
In the case of the QFT, each quantum field is a part-whole with unique properties that identifies it. All the fields share the space and time that we perceive as the “container” of the fields when they represent instead the common wholeness we do not yet recognize as such.
When we reduce a holistic system to the sum of its apparent parts, perhaps because that’s all we can deal with mathematically, we are throwing away the “baby” with the bath water. The baby in this case is consciousness and the inner reality that it represents.
In so doing, we can only describe the outer aspects of reality. Consequently, having rejected the inner aspects, the “glue” that holds everything together, we lose everything that is associated with the infinite nature of reality. In other words, in the definition of what we call reality, we have excluded that irreducible and infinite portion that behind the scenes plays a fundamental role in quantum physics as well as in all living systems.

Consciousness is a property of the fields
I hypothesize that consciousness is a fundamental property of the quantum fields not yet acknowledged by physics. This property is essentially invisible in the macroscopic inanimate objects of classical physics because a typical object is a random aggregation of atoms and molecules in which the averages of their individual quantum properties become the deterministic properties of a classical object.
The quantum properties of atoms and molecules are instead important for the functioning of living cells and therefore could explain the obvious presence of consciousness in living organisms. Living cells are quantum systems, not classical system as we have been told, because they manipulate one atom at a time. Their essential interdependence with the environment is another clue that they have not lost their individual connection with the wholeness of the quantum fields. And trillions of intimately organized living cells form a body that is exponentially more complex than any machine we have ever created.
These quantum properties reflect the consciousness of the quantum fields and become integrated into hierarchical structures that increase the level of consciousness of the entire living organism in ways we have yet to understand. This exponential buildup of consciousness is impossible to achieve within the random structures of inanimate objects. This point will be further explored in a forthcoming essay entitled, “A living organism is not a machine.”
I expect that the consciousness of a living organism has exponentially higher comprehension than the sum of the comprehensions of its elementary parts because, when two or more lower-level conscious entities form a higher-level entity, its new consciousness is an integrated part-whole far more complex that the sum of the components’ consciousness.

The consciousness units
           In the conceptual framework I am developing, the elementary ontological units, the fundamental “components” of reality, are called consciousness units (CUs). Each CU is a field, similar to the quantum fields, but more fundamental than them.
Each CU has an inner semantic reality and an outer symbolic reality indivisible from the first. The CUs combine to create higher-order selves, just like the quantum fields combine to create atoms, molecules, macromolecules, and so on.
A CU is a conscious self with a unique identity, free will, and the capacity for action, and each quantum field is composed of various organizations of CUs. In this model, a quantum field is a conscious self, a part-whole, while the quantum fields described by physics represent only the outer symbolic aspects of the selves.

Consciousness allows us to do much more than blindly acting in automatic response to sensory signals, which is all a machine can do. No feelings are possible between the symbolic recognition and the programmed action. It is consciousness that creates the interiority we experience.

Feeling, comprehension, and being are intertwined
I know within myself that I exist. This is a common experience to every human being. But how do I know? I know because I feel so within me. Thus, the feeling is the carrier of the meaning (I exist), and the capacity to have feelings and understand their meaning is the essential property that “explains” how we know. When I smell a flower, I feel the scent. But the feeling is neither the set of electrical signals produced by the olfactory receptors inside my nose, nor the electrical signals produced by the brain after it has further processed the olfactory signals.
Electrical signals carry information, but that information is translated within my consciousness into a subjective feeling: the scent of that flower I feel within.
We could certainly build an instrument capable of detecting the specific molecules that carry what we perceive as the scent of a jasmine, for example, and correctly identify a jasmine by its smell. This machine could even say “jasmine” by converting the electrical code corresponding to the identified smell to another electrical signal to drive a loudspeaker to voice “jasmine.”
To be aware, however, the machine should feel. Instead, its sensory capacity stops at the electrical signals, and from those signals it can generate other symbols to cause some response, some action, but no feelings are possible between the symbolic recognition and the programmed action. We could say that there is darkness inside a machine, but it would only be a “poetic” statement because the concept of “inside” doesn’t exist for a machine. It is consciousness that creates the interiority we experience.
Consciousness allows us to do much more than blindly acting in automatic response to sensory signals, which is all a machine can do. By feeling the smell, seeing the image, and touching the petals of the jasmine, we connect with that flower in a special way. We “experience” the jasmine, and this lived experience goes far beyond mechanically recognizing an object. A machine instead cannot connect with anything because it is only a web of blind action-reactions.
Consciousness could then be defined simply as the capacity to feel. But feeling implies the existence of a subject that feels, an observer, a self. Therefore, consciousness is inextricably linked to a self. Self and consciousness are inseparable.
We could then say that consciousness is the inherent capacity of a self to perceive and know through feelings, through a sentient experience. Yet, consciousness can also turn toward the self, allowing it to know itself in addition to perceiving and knowing the outer world.
It is as if the self were to come into existence in the process of self-reflection: I am because I know, and I know because I am (a slightly more nuanced version of the cogito ergo sum of Descartes). I exist the instant I know that I am because the “substance” of which I am made is self-reflecting and in recognizing itself I become a self. The self-knowing is creative because it leads to the existence of the self. Existence and knowing are like two irreducible faces of the same coin.

The nature of feelings
We have seen that the perception and comprehension ride on the feelings of the self. Feelings are clearly a different category of phenomena than electrical signals, incommensurable with them, and nobody knows how feelings may arise out of inert matter.
Philosophers have coined the word quale (the plural is qualia) to indicate what something feels like. Explaining the existence and origin of qualia has been called the hard problem of consciousness because it is still an unsolved problem.
 If we now examine our feelings, we can immediately recognize four distinct classes of feelings, where each class has a characteristic signature: (1) physical sensations and feelings, (2) emotions, (3) thoughts, and (4) spiritual feelings.
The first class consists of the sensations and feelings that arise from perceiving the physical environment both inside and outside our body. For example, what food tastes like; what an object or an animal smells like; what touching something feels like; what colors and shapes feel like; and what our body feels like, including physical pain and feelings of physical well-being.
The second class, emotions, has a distinctively different “feel” than the first. In this class belong feelings such as fear, anger, sadness, curiosity, friendship, compassion, pride, self-will, shame, envy, greed, confusion, trust, and so on. Emotions feel very different compared with physical sensations. We instinctively know that emotions originate from a different “layer” of self than the one from which our physical sensations arise.
Surprisingly, most people are not in touch with their emotions, to the point that if I were to ask, “what do you feel right now?” they would tell me what they think they feel because they do not feel anything clearly identifiable, unless their emotions were unusually intense. Therefore, their answer would describe more often a thought, or the memory of an emotion felt in the past, rather than an emotion lived in this moment.
The third category is made of thoughts. Interestingly, thoughts are generally not considered feelings, but if I ask: “how do you know that you had a thought?” you may recognize you felt something vaguely cross your mental screen, so to speak, depositing a faint “image,” a quale, carrying the essential information of that thought. For most people, the translation from qualia to mental words (symbols) is so swift that they believe their thought came directly in a verbal form.
We have generally learned to ignore, or even to suppress, the primary feeling that is the essence of a thought, unless it is so strong that we cannot do it.
When the intensity of feelings is not much more than normal, we feel next to nothing, and since we confuse thoughts and feelings, we often believe that a thought may change how we feel.
This idea only appears to be true, because when we think we are feeling something, we are bringing up from memory a synthetic feeling like the one we thought about. We do this when we are not in touch with our true feelings.
A true feeling can only happen spontaneously in the present as a “live form.” The memory of a past feeling is not a real feeling; it is what a symbol feels like, not what “I” feel like. “I” is not a symbol. That synthetic feeling then replaces the apparent lack of feelings in our consciousness, leading us to believe that a thought can cause a feeling.
This happens only because we were not in touch with our real feelings. If we had been, a thought could not have changed a true feeling. For example, when we have a strong emotion, no amount of thinking can make it vanish, even when we would like to do it, proving that thoughts neither cause nor change real feelings.
We have learned to use our thoughts to “crowd out” our weaker feelings and occasionally replace them with “memories of feelings.” This is particularly true when we think we should feel something that is politically correct in the current situation. We do not realize that in so doing we have closed off an essential source of information about ourselves, because a synthetic feeling is far different than the presence in the now of a spontaneous feeling.
Finally, the fourth class contains spiritual feelings. In this category, we have the most subtle and revealing feelings. For example, feeling the deepest sense of existing as an independent and unique self, beyond any doubt; the sense of having a deep and independent intention and purpose; the most intimate feelings of love with the desire to know ourselves and the people we love; the sense of connection with the universe and with some transcendent “presence” vaster than we are; and so on.
The categories or layers of feelings are useful to indicate the origin of a specific feeling, but then the impact of a real feeling, particularly if it is intense, may spread to all the other layers of our being, bringing forth other feelings associated with the first. For example, anger is generally born in the “emotional layer,” but its impact quickly spreads to the physical layer with sensations of arousal and a call for action. It may then move to the thinking layer with thoughts of hitting back, for example; and finally, it may inhibit the emergence of any spiritual feelings while anger is present.
There are some feelings that have the same name, even though they originate in different layers of the self and are truly different from each other. This happens because they have something in common. The feeling of love is a case in point because it may arise as a physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual feeling, each different from the others, despite having the same name, because they all have in common a feeling of union or merging.
For the remainder of this essay, I will use quale to indicate any feeling originating in any of the four layers just described.

Science cannot explain qualia
The nature of qualia cannot be scientifically explained either as a nervous, or informational, or chemical, or physical phenomenon. This simple fact suggests that we are missing something fundamental in our understanding of nature. If consciousness were just an emergent property of a complex information processing system, as many scientists are telling us, we should have already been able to create a robot with a primitive consciousness, given the sophistication of our current information technology. The fact that we do not even know where to begin to design a robot with feelings, indicates that we are dealing with another order of reality, a reality beyond reductive machines, something beyond mechanism.
There is no evidence that electrical patterns in computer memory, or electrical signals traveling in electrical wires will produce qualia, no matter how complex they may be. In a robot, these electrical patterns may produce reasonable and appropriate automatic responses. The imitation may even be so veridical that we may believe they are conscious. Yet robots have no awareness, they simply do what they are programmed to do, or what they have learned through their artificial neural networks that have been architected by the comprehension of conscious human designers with the explicit intention to imitate human behavior.
It is only our proclivity to project consciousness onto anything that behaves like us that deceives us into believing that robots might be conscious in the future. Robots have no sensations, no feelings, no self-knowing, and no meaning because these qualities do not exist outside of consciousness. We perceive and understand only because we feel, and our consciousness is the strongest evidence that we are more than machines.
Qualia belong to a different category of phenomena than physical phenomena. For example, the pattern of voltage created in the millions of pixels of an image sensor produces no sensation of light, color, and forms in the digital camera that houses the sensor. Nonetheless, when the image data are properly processed and displayed in a screen that generates light like the one produced by real objects, we experience sensations as if the images in the screen were truly real. Instead there is only virtual reality; points of light turning on and off to simulate reality.
A machine cannot convert light or electrical signals into qualia. The production of qualia requires “something” that is not present in the computer. If the brain were truly a reductive information processing system like a computer, as many scientists believe, then consciousness couldn’t possibly arise from the brain either.
To believe that the brain, as an isolated physical system that uses the physical laws we know, can cause a conscious experience, is like believing that the picture on our TV originates from inside the TV.
It’s more likely that the brain resembles an intelligent terminal rather than a computer; a terminal that translates signals from the physical world into symbols that our individual consciousness can perceive and comprehend.
Consciousness is the “inner space” where the outer information processed by the sensory-brain system – performing a function like a computer – is converted not only into qualia, but also in the meaning that those qualia convey. The conversion from signals to qualia is called perception. The conversion from qualia to meaning is called comprehension.
This simple analogy can explain why our conscious experience depends on our brain being in good working order. If the “terminal” malfunctions or the communication channel from the brain to consciousness is blocked or impaired, consciousness will receive either corrupted or no signals.

Perception  
Perception is the capacity to have a sentient experience based on qualia. We experience the world through qualia, but qualia are neither patterns of bits in memory nor electrical signals. Where do qualia come from? And what are the physical principles that allow electromagnetic activity in the brain to be translated into qualia?
We know the physical principles that may explain the complex electromagnetic activity of the brain that is correlated with seeing a glass of wine, touching it, smelling it, and tasting the liquid. But where does the image-quale of the glass, the “sense” of holding it, the “feeling” of liquid in our mouth, the “aroma,” and the “taste” of wine come from? Physics can only explain how a machine encodes information into electrical signals to represent some variables, but not the feelings produced by such information. There is nothing in the laws of physics that can explain or predict qualia.
We also know next to nothing about how any specific object is represented within our brain. It is certainly something highly dynamic and quite different than the “picture of the object” we perceive in the screen of our consciousness. But then, where does the “screen” come from?
If we close our eyes and examine the mental space that seems to be empty when we take away all the objects of perception, we begin to recognize that it is like a field of awareness, like a computer screen, except this one is invisible, multi-dimensional and appears to be infinite because it has no edges. In this field, all types of inner and outer patterns are “projected,” not just visual information but all types of it, corresponding to inner and outer realities. And each pattern-type has its own characteristic feeling-tones or qualia.
In fact, even the outer reality is brought inside and becomes “subjective” through the unique sensing and information processing performed by the body, which is different for each person. That inner field of awareness is illuminated by all types of sensations and feelings coming from translating the electromagnetic signals produced by the sensory-brain system connected with the outer and inner senses.
The outer senses take signals from the outer world and process them to produce a picture of it, which we then project out of ourselves as if it came from there, when it is instead a representation produced within us, using an infinitesimal fraction of the information that exists in the world.
The inner senses, called proprioceptors, take signals produced by the body that, once processed by the nervous system, create a picture of the inner physical world. To them we must add the emotions, the thoughts, and the spiritual feelings whose origin is still a mystery. The seamless integration of the five classes of signals generates a unitary perception that captures the entire state of the inner and outer worlds within the consciousness of the self.
The multidimensional qualia field makes us feel like an agent between agents operating in the external world and the unique “owner” of the internal world that is private. Without qualia, we could translate the signals of the physical world into other symbols and act in the external world, but we would be unconscious, deprived of any inner world. We would be exactly like our robots: zombies, sleepwalkers, unaware that they exist.
Consciousness is indispensable for the exercise of what we consider exclusively human characteristics such as thinking, reasoning, comprehending, willing, imagining, emoting, and conscious deciding. The machinery controlling the screen – however complex and prodigious it may be – is irrelevant compared to the significance of our conscious life that we derive in “living” the information presented to us. Consciousness is what makes us live the experience and the capacity of consciousness to understand the meaning of perceptions is called comprehension.

Knowing, understanding, and comprehending
Comprehension is an even more extraordinary property of consciousness than qualia-perception. Before going into the description, however, I would like to define the concepts represented by the words knowing, understanding and comprehending with more precise meanings than the ones they have in their common usage. We often use the word knowing as a synonym for understanding or comprehending. Other times, knowing only means having information, data.
However, there is a fundamental difference between knowing certain facts and understanding them. Understanding requires “getting” how the facts or elements of that knowledge are linked together in order to have the deepest possible meaning. Understanding, however, occurs within an interpretative context that is provided by the global understanding of the self, which I call comprehension.
Each new understanding enriches the comprehension, thus creating an ever-growing context of our new understandings. Without understanding and comprehension, there would be no evolution and growth of the self. Understanding is therefore the ability to know the meaning of qualia in the context of the comprehension of the self.
It is also essential to realize that given a body of knowledge, there are many levels of understanding possible, often organized in a hierarchy. At the first level one understands just the bare facts, the “atomic” units of that body of knowledge. The next level requires finding meaningful relationships among those atomic units. Using the metaphor of chemistry, the next level of understanding is like discovering the “molecules” into which those “atoms of meaning” can be organized to give us a richer meaning. The following level involves discovering an even deeper level of relationships among those molecules. And this process can continue to ever-deeper levels, depending on the characteristics of the body of knowledge the self is considering.
Every time one achieves a new level of understanding, that “discovery” is accompanied by a “Aha!”. “Aha!” captures the joy of discovery in an instant of delight in “getting it.” The excitement is proportional to the degree of surprise inherent in the revelation of a hidden level of meaning previously unknown. “Aha!” expresses the achievement of a new “quantum of understanding” that unpredictably emerges. And here I use the words emerges and quantum quite intentionally because the understanding appears in its own terms, unannounced, coming from our unconscious in response to our desire to understand. But desire is not enough.
Desire only acts like a field of force, like a “prayer” that invites the object of our desire to manifest itself. Yet, desire alone cannot make understanding appear. It simply invites the inherent “capacity to comprehend” of our consciousness to deliver the desired outcome. And when finally understanding emerges, it occurs in a discrete, all-or-nothing unit; a “quantum of understanding” together with a quantum of self-fulfillment (joy).

The consciousness units
In the essay entitled “The nature of consciousness,” I introduced the concept of consciousness units (CUs), the fundamental “components” of all that exists: space, time and the quantum fields of the fundamental particles.
In this framework, space and quantum fields are composed of various organizations of CUs, and therefore a quantum field is also a conscious self, a part-whole formed by those organizations of CUs that make up space plus some other CU organization which is not part of space. The space common to all quantum fields that seems to us to be “empty,” appears so to us only because organizations made of these fields can perceive or measure only what “sticks out” from the common background. In other words, the “visible” properties are only those that define the identities of the quantum fields, i.e., the “part” aspect of each part-whole.
The quantum fields, communicating with each other and with space, produce measurable traces on physical instruments – for example, on particle detectors. These traces are structures consisting of the identifiable parts of the fields that appear to us as “particles created and destroyed in space-time”.

The fundamental nature of reality
            If space and the quantum fields are made of conscious entities with free will, it means that the quantum vacuum from which our universe of matter, energy, space, and time emerged must also be an organization of conscious entities. I advanced this conjecture about ten years ago, and the more I reflected on it, the more it appeared to possess an explanatory and unifying power. If it can be shown to be true, everything that exists must be intrinsically conscious.
            From this hypothesis, it follows that “objective” and “subjective” must be two intertwined and inseparable aspects of an indivisible whole from the beginning. In other words, the nature of reality intrinsically has an inner and an outer aspect that are irreducible, co-emerging, and co-evolving. In this model, the inner aspect is the semantic reality of each self; the outer aspect is the informational or symbolic reality that gives rise to all the physical worlds. The evolution of the physical universe must therefore reflect in some way the semantic evolution of the selves, and vice versa – one reflects and supports the other.
In this picture, the physical universe represents only the symbolic manifestation of the semantic inner reality that is what connects everything from the inside but is invisible from the outside. The inner reality can only be perceived by each self within itself. Consciousness, then, is another name for the capacity of One – the totality of what exists – to know itself and come into being in the same act of knowing itself.

What happens to consciousness when the body dies?
When materialists claim that consciousness ceases to exist when the body dies, this assertion makes sense only if one believes (without proof) that consciousness needs a body to exist. But if consciousness is an “inner” property of each part-whole accessible only to each self from its “inside,” it can never be proven to exist with an outer observation. The state of that consciousness will always remain a private, not shareable inner property, which can only be known if it is symbolically communicated by the self through its outer symbolic aspect.
In the model I propose, the ego is that part of us that is identified with the body, when it is instead a small portion of the vaster self (the true self) that created the body and maintains it as a coherent organization. The ego is therefore only an indivisible part of the true self that remains unknown when the ego only pays attention to the signals produced by the physical body.
When the true self decides to end physical life, the physical correlates of consciousness can no longer be observed, not because death is the end of our consciousness, but because a dead body can no longer communicate with the ego’s consciousness. We are much more not only of our body, but also of our ego.

The nature of the self
In the essay entitled “What is consciousness?”, I defined consciousness as the capacity of a self to perceive, know and experience itself and the world. Consciousness, therefore, is a property of a self. In addition, a self has also the capacity to act with free will and with a unique identity. Action, free will, and identity express the agency of the self, while the consciousness of the self does express its ability to perceive, understand and comprehend.
Self, agency and consciousness are inseparable and co-emerging aspects of any conscious entity, be it a CU or a combination of CUs.
Identity is what allows a self to be recognized as such by all other selves when they perceive its external reality. It is also what allows the self to identify itself and know itself within itself.
Identity makes it possible to discriminate self from not-self. It also provides the sense-of-self, that is, a unified perspective of being an autonomous, independent agent with free will, i.e., with the ability to decide an action based on its comprehension and consistent with its intention and purpose.
Free will is inextricably connected with the identity of the self and makes the behavior unpredictable. This means that a self cannot predict the behavior of another self, although it may be possible to predict its probable behavior.
The probability appears only when one “looks from the outside.” That is, when one tries to foresee the decision that will be taken freely by someone else. Seen from “within the self,” the probability does not exist because the self simply makes a free choice based on its comprehension, intention, and purpose.
The intention and purpose are integral parts of the free will because it is impossible to separate them from it. As a metaphor, free will could be considered as a vector, in which the intention represents its length and the purpose represents its direction.
Since free will is an irreducible aspect of every self, complete determinism cannot exist. Predictability can only be the result of voluntary agreements between the selves. In other words, when a self does behave predictably, it is only because it has agreed with others to behave in that way.

Agency and action
Agency is the capacity of the self to decide and act as a unit, as an integrated whole. That’s why the notion of self as a single and free agent is so fundamental.
Freedom is the idea that every self can do whatever it wants instead of being forced by another agent to go against its will. Nevertheless, freedom does not imply capricious behavior because all selves share the same desire to know themselves and to know the other selves as themselves.
Finally, while action in the world of classical physics is the ability to directly influence external reality, for example by hitting or raising an object, in the “space” of selves there are no bodies with which to bump against other bodies coercively. Coercion is impossible because there is free will and the body doesn’t exist. Therefore, action is reduced to influencing another self to cooperate voluntarily in the desired direction.
Action is therefore reduced to a communication.
But how is it possible to communicate without a body? To do so, a self must be able to voluntarily create “signs” on the outer aspect of its field, that can be perceived and understood by other selves. The action thus becomes the capacity of a self to create symbols on its external reality to represent the meanings it wants to communicate.
The creation of communication symbols marks the beginning of the creation of languages ​​with syntactic rules that require voluntary agreements between the community of selves that uses a particular language. This also leads to the creation of an external public reality.

The nature of physical laws
In this framework, the fundamental physical laws that we observe in our universe can be interpreted as the manifestation of the syntactical rules of the languages ​​used by the quantum fields to communicate with each other. The symbols used in these communications are what we perceive as elementary particles appearing and disappearing in our space-time.
The probabilistic nature of the laws of quantum physics is necessary because the communicating quantum fields are conscious entities with free will. The existence of deterministic laws that prescribe the interaction of these probabilities corresponds to the existence of syntactical rules that symbols must obey in order to communicate – a necessary characteristic in any language. Physical laws, therefore, could be the manifestation of the agreements among conscious fields to be able to reliably communicate with each other
What is free is the meaning that is communicated, not the syntactical rules of the symbols that are used to represent the meaning. This is also true in our case: for example, the book that one of us will write in five years, whose subject has not yet been decided, will necessarily have to obey the probabilistic laws of the symbols of the language in which it will be written.
Therefore, the physical laws constrain only the way in which material symbols must be composed to express the meaning of the selves. In other words, meaning is fundamental, not the symbols. We are completely free to express the meaning we wish, by using the syntactical laws of the symbols that are the physical laws of the universe in which our body exists. If instead we believe that symbols are fundamental, then the true meaning of life and existence are lost.
It is essential to understand that communications among the selves are truly indispensable for deepening the self-knowing and the comprehension of the inner world of each self. Going deeper into this topic, however, would take us far beyond the scope of this introductory essay.

One silver lining of the COVID-19 crisis has been to show businesses how to manage better and achieve greater speed, quality, and cost control. A wartime mindset—decisive crisis management, scenario planning, and a human reflex attuned to the shocks affecting employees—has been the hallmark of leaders so far. Now, as the world feels its way toward recovery and new opportunities, another risk looms. It is that inertia will set in, along with a longing for a return to the operating style of pre-crisis days.  
How can leaders avoid the impulse to abandon their progress in shaping a more productive and competitive company profile? The answer is a renewed focus on people and their capabilities. Over the past five months we have seen the edge gained by organizations and leaders with adaptable management and strong capabilities. Only by advancing new cadres of leaders, building a middle bench with skills to cut across silos, and treating technological acumen like a profit center will companies be able to work to further the broader transformation that has begun. The return on this people investment has never been higher. 
We see three imperatives as critical for managing people and building capabilities to thrive in the post-pandemic period.

Put in tomorrow’s team today 
As in many disruptions, leaders are finding that talent is stepping up in unexpected ways. Even before COVID-19, one European car and truck maker assessed its biggest value creators and found that two-thirds of its 50 most important value contributors were from one to three levels below the C-suite. Today some young middle managers are defying the problems and frustrations of this difficult period to demonstrate calm, champion diverse talent, and achieve far more than peer leaders do. Leaders have to celebrate and reward these rising stars.   

Identify and elevate the business skills that matter most 
Leaders and boards must identify the core capabilities to build a culture of adaptability to anticipate the next shock or black-swan event. To be clear, this is a prioritization of the handful of an organization’s most tangible and critical business skills and a commitment to driving them deep into the organization. The capabilities showing up now on our radar screen include these: 

• Managing in a transformational way. Modern management is about safe and incremental change. But by adopting a transformational mindset, companies accomplish so much more than they think they can. Rather than aiming for a 5% improvement, shoot for 20% to unlock energy and performance gains. Today, areas like digitizing customer engagement and launching new products attuned to a changing world are ripe for a transformational push. 
• Navigating and leading in a network of teams. The modern company is much more complex than it was 20 years ago. The need is greater to do away with rigid hierarchies and operate with agile, empowered teams able to get closer to customers. Executives able to navigate these will do better, but very few have been trained in these skills.
• Supply chains. Sure, we know that it’s a perennial niche topic. But COVID-19, the possibility that the pandemic will have a long tail, changing views of China, and the importance of resilience in weathering crisis have moved supply chains from the back office to constant discussion in the front office. 

Treat technological acumen as you treat profit targets
As companies have vaulted ahead in adopting and applying digital technologies, the metabolic rate of technological transformation has sped up. Those who master this massive experiment will gain a baseline technological advantage in applying the cloud, analytics, and data-management technologies, to name a few. Leaders should drive technological acumen into all executives and measure their proficiency and improvement in the same way they measure profit targets. This is akin to how some leading companies used lean process improvements in the 1980s and 1990s to encourage new management discipline in their organizations. 
As executives feel their way out of the COVID-19 crisis, here’s one question that should be top of mind: What should be retained from this period of pandemic shock, uncertainty, and dramatic change in the ways businesses have reacted to crisis? We are convinced the answer is that those companies that invest in capabilities to empower leadership, teams, and technology will be well positioned to thrive in the post-pandemic era.

                In the contemporaneity the cultural proposal on web it’s becoming more and more wide, between blogs dedicated to the arts, online magazines, galleries and artists profiles. The world of culture adopt the use of internet platforms and new technologies with the intent to enlarge the audience of users and the visibility of cultural products. This increased visibility and the immediacy of “on air” with one click, on the one hand enriches the perceived cultural heritage, on the other, however, requires a more serious aesthetic and qualitative reflection, even more so because ubiquity has eliminated filters and evaluation becomes an intuitive personal act.
                Artistsplay.live is born like cultural promotion project, intent on reflecting through interviews and other little online events the pulsations of an culture in continuous changes and never like now needy to fix reference points, with the purpose to be able to rebuild in future an himself evolutionary story.
                Artistsplay.live would like to educate to arts, to unveil why culture, understood as multiple series of creative acts and the products generated by them, is important for un harmonic development of human being, focusing on the idea of Culture like primary need and inalienable human right.
                Artistplay.live propose a Platform that will be able to collect interviews to various exponents of contemporary cultural world, personalities and emergent artist, architects, writers, designers, musicians, actors, craftsman, who will not do other then speak about their own art and the past, present and possible future of the local and global cultural environment, analyzing together and from their own point of view the development, the changes and the new expressive forms.
Generals data of project
                In a relaxing space, like little studio, with a big stained glass window, towards the street/square, equipped to shoot to the best and artistically the dialog interviewer/interviewed, we will talk about arts and culture and the expressed personals points of views will become testimonials for a future online archive that will be able to be consulted from who will study for passion or work the contemporary cultural history.
                Interviewer and interviewed, seated next to the window, do the interview. A QR code , exposed on the stained glass, allows the direct participation of the passers-by, by scanning the code with their own smartphone, using a simple scanning app, mentioned under the exposed code. The interaction with the public it becomes immediately, more versatile, innovative, and with double track, because through the online comments they can be part of the dialog and they can change even the path of the interview with their comments and questions.
                Depending of various cases, the interviewer can be a cultural personality, or in any case a well-known culture producer and he will dialogue with a young emerging artist, exchanging a profitable information baggage, knowledge and personal synthesis regarding art and the world that this one is generating around itself. The interviews will be collected in the Archive section on the Artistsplay.live platform and will be the depart point for a sociological study of contemporary art and culture. The material so collected will be further elaborated and published on paper, once a year, proposing itself like an possible panoramic of new thoughts and expressive realities who permeate creative acts in the present.
                The platform propose at the same time short online events, literary readings aloud, short concerts, profile of selected artists, promotional video of various events all around the world, and an entirely session dedicated to the legislation regarding art and local, European and world’s cultural heritage, same as royalties, copyright and more, essential information for those who would like to undertake an artistic or promotional carrier, or simply wish to be informed about the many legal aspects that are in force in the contemporary cultural environments.
                The Artistsplay.live internet domain has been already registered and will be soon published an attachment with all the technical details and the various items which constitute the economic price quotation and the feasibility, keeping in mind the necessary instruments, like shooting equipment, registration, furniture and studio’s design, lights, studio’s rent for one year, and any other necessary resources for a better audio-visual experience.


 

We all remember the thesis that distinguished phase one from phase two. It was an optimistic thesis inspired by the ideal of an exit from the Covid trauma in the form of a linear progression. The transition from the cruelest time of the epidemic and forced confinement, of closure, of illness and death (phase one) to that of the resumption of life, reopening, restart (phase two) should have taken place without too many aftermaths.
The pre-summer course of the epidemic confirmed this expectation. Time two had supplanted time one that only a few incurable hooligans insisted on remembering. The Italian summer had ratified the extinction of the virus; with the numbers of the epidemic almost zero, life had started to live again and everything had returned to the way it was before. But many knew that it would not be so simple because always when death and illness are involved, when one has experienced such a terrible trauma, it is not easy to leave again.
There is no phase one followed by phase two as its direct negation. Phase one and phase two are never in a simple thesis and antithesis relationship. It is a lesson of life that Covid does not have the exclusive right to. We should always be wary of the Manichean character of rigid antitheses which tends to place good, light, openness, health, life on the one hand and evil, darkness, closure, illness, death. A democratic mind, as Bollas would say, does not work by antithesis, it does not work by splits. It knows well that the pure juxtaposition of opposites would like to avoid the difficulty that always accompanies any process of integration.
The second wave in which we objectively find ourselves today confirms in the most drastic way possible that it is never appropriate to proceed by rigid divisions.
Doctors themselves experienced it dramatically in the initial time of the pandemic: the rescuers were also the first victims. The second wave shows that every time of exit from evil and from the crisis is never without rests, without rebounds, which can sometimes be even more insidious than the evil and the original crisis.
We cannot hide it from ourselves: the task that awaits us is the inevitable one of forced coexistence with the virus.
But for many it is extremely difficult to accept the return of evil, its non-extinction. The most immediate push is to continue, against any proof of reality, to imaginatively deny its consistency (denialism) or to impute to the government - which is obviously not free from criticism - a bad management of the emergency that would be the primary cause of our evils. These responses tend to lighten the burden of our condition. But a more arduous effort of thought is required.
First of all, it is a question of acknowledging that it is not over yet and renouncing the idea of ​​our recovery as the result of a linear path, free from accidents and setbacks. It is a question of giving up the "splitting" fantasy of phase two following phase one, of the light that comes after darkness.
Unlike phase one and phase two, life and death, light and darkness - as in everything in the world - also appear in this traumatic contingency mixed with each other. The path towards healing, towards an effectively full reopening of life is never straight, but spiral, made up of steps forward and relapses.
We must learn not to deny evil but to stand in front of it, to bear its weight. It is a mental posture but it is also another tremendous lesson of this virus: rushing towards the exit of the crisis while still inside the crisis makes our behaviors disordered and irrational. We must not hide that we are faced with a profound trend in human life: denying death, evil, the negative in the name of the illusion of a life without wounds and without trauma.
Knowing how to stop in front of the negative, knowing how to stay where fear is greatest means learning to live with the stranger. It is the task of a life that knows how to live up to what happens to it, which, as Deleuze recalled, is the only possible form for an ethics capable of taking reality into account.

One of the toughest challenges for any leader is getting traction for new ideas. Winning support can be a struggle. As a result, powerful new ideas often get stuck. This is especially true in the cultural sector. People involved in arts and culture often have little time and even less money for experimentation and risks.

“Innovation isn’t necessarily that nebulous big idea floating around that maybe I’m ‘”smart” enough to grasp, it’s learning to recognize the constraints that stand in the way of success, and figuring out how to deal with them. Very practical and down-to-earth, based in reality. It’s hard after a lifetime of thinking innovation is that brilliant idea that came out of nowhere! Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us!”
A. Marshall
 

Develop concert or show boxes in all countries which will allow recipients to benefit from an important offer each month in a certain number of partner venues.

Manipulation is like a dance: it is performed in two, there are those who lead and those who suffer. The nice thing (but not so easy) is that, having understood the deception, whoever suffers it can "abandon the dance".

It’s not uncommon to meet a lawyer who’d like to work in renewable energy, or an app developer who’d like to write a novel, or an editor who fantasizes about becoming a landscape designer. Maybe you also dream about switching to a career that’s drastically different from your current job. But in my experience, it’s rare for such people to actually make the leap. The costs of switching seem too high, and the possibility of success seems too remote.
But the answer isn’t to plug away in your current job, unfulfilled and slowly burning out. I think the answer is to do both. Two careers are better than one. And by committing to two careers, you will produce benefits for both.
In my case, I have four vocations: I’m a corporate strategist at a Fortune 500 company, US Navy Reserve officer, author of several books, and record producer. The two questions that people ask me most frequently are “How much do you sleep?” and “How do you find time to do it all?” (my answers: “plenty” and “I make the time”). Yet these “process” questions don’t get to the heart of my reasons and motivations. Instead, a more revealing query would be, “Why do you have multiple careers?” Quite simply, working many jobs makes me happier and leaves me more fulfilled. It also helps me perform better at each job. Here’s how.

Subsidize Your Skill Development
My corporate job paycheck subsidizes my record producing career. With no track record as a producer, nobody was going to pay me to produce his or her music, and it wasn’t money that motivated me to become a producer in the first place — it was my passion for jazz and classical music. Therefore, I volunteered so that I could gain experience in this new industry. My day job not only afforded me the capital to make albums, but it taught me the skills to succeed as a producer. A good producer should be someone who knows how to create a vision, recruit personnel, establish a timeline, raise money, and deliver products. After producing over a dozen albums and winning a few Grammys, record labels and musicians have started to reach out to see if they can hire me as a producer. I still refuse payment because making music, something that is everlasting, is reward enough for me.
At the same time, I typically invite my corporate clients to recording sessions. For someone who works at an office all day, it’s exciting to go “behind-the-scenes” and interact with singers, musicians, and other creative professionals. While I was in Cuba making an album, one of my clients observed about the dancing musicians, “I’ve never been around people who have so much fun at work.” That my clients have a phenomenal experience only helps me drive revenue at work, so my corporate and recording careers are mutually beneficial.

Make Friends in Different Circles
When I worked on Wall Street, my professional circle was initially limited to other folks in the financial services sector: bankers, traders, analysts, economists. Taken together, all of us establish a “consensus” view on the markets. And most of my asset manager clients were looking for something different: “Give me a contrarian perspective.” In other words, they didn’t want to hear the groupthink. I took this as marching orders to tap my rolodex for people who could provide my clients a differentiated perspective.
For example, one of my clients wanted to understand what Chinese citizens were saying to each other. Because I am an author, I have gotten to know other writers, so I reached out to my friend who was a journalist at a periodical that monitors chatter in China. Not restricted by the compliance department of a bank, he was able to give an unbridled perspective to my client, who was most appreciative. My client got a new idea. I got a trade. My friend got a new subscriber. By being in different circles, you can selectively introduce people who would typically never meet and unlock value for everyone.

Discover Real Innovations
When you work different jobs, you can identify where ideas interact — and more significantly, where they should interact. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing,” said Steve Jobs, who was the embodiment of interdisciplinary thinking.
Because of Hurricane Katrina, many musicians left New Orleans. In order to generate funds to help musicians in the city, I could have created a typical nonprofit organization that solicits people for money. Instead, I helped create a more sustainable solution: a brokerage for musicians that I described as Wall Street meets Bourbon Street. People wanting to book a musician for a party in New York could find a band on my organization’s website, which would then ask the booker to add a “tip” which would be allocated to a New Orleans-based charity. The booker (who in some cases were my corporate clients) easily found a band for the party, the New York City-based musician got a gig, and the charity in New Orleans got a small donation. Because of my time working at a bank, I was able to create a different type of organization, one which has since merged with an even larger charitable organization.
When you follow your curiosities, you will bring passion to your new careers, which will leave you more fulfilled. And by doing more than one job, you may end up doing all of them better.
 

Time is two fold: we have entropy, a progressive physical degeneration, and a perception, human experience honed by better measurement.  

In reality there is for example no such thing as a second, it's a construct. Indeed all mathematics is. But it works.

By human evolution, anthropogenesis or homination we mean the process of origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and its diffusion on Earth.
It is an interdisciplinary subject, which includes physiology, primatology, archeology, geology, linguistics and genetics. In a taxonomic sense it concerns, in addition to the genus Homo, all the species of the seven genera of the Hominina sub-tribe, of which man is the only living representative.
According to these sciences, the evolutionary history of our species is that of Homo Sapiens, which seems to have made its first appearance on Earth about 200,000 years ago.
If on Earth every animal and plant species follows time cycles with precision, it is plausible to think that humanity, as a whole, also follows a precise evolutionary cycle.
In this sense, my hypothesis is that there is a mathematical correlation between the number of years that have passed since the appearance of Homo Sapiens on Earth, the number of days that make up an Earth year, the natural number 216, and ϕ, the golden number.
In fact, we discover that (216K / ϕ) ^ (1/2) is equal to 365.37, which corresponds to the number of days that currently make up an earth year, plus 0.128, which in any case is consistent with reality, since in the past years it is assumed that the Earth took longer than today to revolve around the sun.
Alternatively, we can observe that, considering the average of the days that make up the Earth years of the last 216K years with the approximate value of 365.37, we obtain that from the mathematical relation ϕ (365.37) ^ 2 we obtain 216K.
What can we expect from Homo Sapiens when the value of 216K years from its appearance on Earth is reached?

For years, the ecological footprint of humanity and its activities has exceeded the biocapacity of the Earth, which in the current period (2019-2020) is causing the global collapse of our civilization.

Russia just approved a coronavirus vaccine for use in tens of thousands of people, though it has not been thoroughly tested for effectiveness, according to news reports.
Russia named the newly approved vaccine "Sputnik V," in reference to the world's first artificial satellite, launched during the space race, Reuters reported. Russian state television has framed the worldwide effort to develop a coronavirus vaccine as a similar "race," and in announcing the approval of Sputnik V, President Vladimir Putin essentially proclaimed Russia the frontrunner, according to The New York Times. 

"We must be grateful to those who made that first step very important for our country and the entire world," Putin said in a cabinet meeting Tuesday morning (Aug. 11) in reference to the vaccine developers, according to The Associated Press.
"I know [the vaccine] has proven efficient and forms a stable immunity," Putin noted, despite there being no published data from early human tests of the vaccine and no late-stage human trials currently underway. The rush to approve the vaccine has raised concerns from scientists within Russia and abroad, who say that only carefully designed human trials, which include thousands of people, can clearly demonstrate that a vaccine is safe and effective enough for public use. 

The pandemic is an immense disaster for all peoples. But has there been (and is there) a political use of fear by certain ruling elites? And for what purposes? Are those who believe that a gigantic and disturbing political experiment is taking place?

Some "non-aligned" thinkers talked about it and immediately the delegitimate media system branded them as "conspiracy theorists". But to note that something strange is happening is also - for example - the thinker symbol of mainstream Europeanism, Bernard Henri Lévy, who has just published a book: "The virus that makes mad".

Lévy rightly notes that the Covid epidemic was by no means an apocalyptic novelty in our years. He recalls the Hong Kong flu, "after May '68", which killed a million "by pulmonary hemorrhage or suffocation" or, ten years earlier, the Asian flu, which also came from China, which made two million dead.

But then the planetary panic of today did not occur. Lévy says she is "frozen", but not from the pandemic: from the "very strange way in which we reacted this time", from the "epidemic of fear that gripped the world".

In fact, “we have seen cities all over the world become ghost towns. We have all seen, from one end of the planet to the other ... whole peoples tremble and get dragged into their homes, sometimes with truncheons, like wild animals in their lairs ".

Lévy wonders if it is the “victory of the sages of the world who see in this great confinement - (…) the 'great internment' theorized by Michel Foucault in the texts in which he described the power systems of the future - the general test of a new type detention and house arrest of the bodies ”. Or if it is "the opposite" or "the reassuring sign that the world has changed, that finally sacralizes life and that chooses life between it and the economy".

The second hypothesis seems to me radically refuted by many facts and data that show how human life in the world has totally lost its sacredness.

It would remain the first, but unfortunately Lévy does not analyze it. Of course, he notes that "it was the first time we have seen all the critical minds of the ultra-left galaxy applauding a state of emergency." But he stops to protest against fear.

However, he mentions in passing the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben who - being from the left - sparked discontent and controversy on the left because, reflecting on the "ethical and political consequences" of the storm Covid captured "the transformation of the political paradigms that the exception measures went drawing. "

In his book "Where are we at?" assesses the Covid affair "in a broader historical perspective" and concludes that something important was being (and is being) experienced.

He writes: "If the powers that govern the world have decided to take the pretext of a pandemic to transform the paradigms of their government of men and things from top to bottom, this means that those models were in their eyes in progressive, inexorable decline and they were no longer adequate to the new needs (...) the ruling powers decided to abandon without regret the paradigms of bourgeois democracies, with their rights, their parliaments and their constitutions, to replace them with new devices of which we can only glimpse the drawing, probably not yet completely clear. "

Can one really use "the pretext of a pandemic" politically or does Agamben exaggerate? In fact, there are those who, already a few years ago, invited to "use" a possible pandemic for praiseworthy political purposes (obviously, in his opinion).

In 2009 - when the spread of swine flu was feared - the famous French economist and technocrat Jacques Attali, as an acute analyst, in an article on "L'Express", wrote: "History teaches us that humanity does not evolve in a significant way except when it is truly afraid: it then first of all puts in place defense mechanisms; sometimes intolerable (scapegoats and totalitarianisms); sometimes unnecessary (distraction); sometimes effective (therapeutic strategies, rejecting all previous moral principles if necessary). Then, once the crisis is over, it transforms these mechanisms to make them compatible with individual freedom and include them in a democratic health policy. This initial pandemic, "Attali wrote," could trigger one of these structural fears. "

In particular Attali, foreseeing the need to govern "prevention and control mechanisms" for "an equitable distribution of drugs and vaccines", wrote: "We will therefore, much faster than the economic reason alone would have produced, to lay the foundations of a true world government "and" in the meantime we could at least hope for the implementation of a true European policy on the matter ".
Attali in 2006 published "A brief history of the future" and already there he envisioned a "world government" that marked the end of American hegemony and saw "the European Union at the forefront of hyper-democracy". But his utopia had the traits of a dark dystopia.

No-Covid denier marches follow one another in different regions of the world as the epidemic continues to sow disease and death. The appeal to freedom trampled on by biopower resounds like a mantra not only among the masses but also among illustrious intellectuals.
In the no-Covid gatherings it is surrounded, more or less deliriously, by ideological reasons, first of all that of the accusation of the liberticidal state, of the abuse of power, of the risk of a totalitarian return made possible by the political extension, not necessary but only strategic and instrumental, of the state of exception. In this symptomatic manifestation, political extremisms touch each other, not without raising a disturbing effect: it is striking to have to note that the irritation in the face of health and safety measures assimilates discourses that find their inspiration in deeply antagonistic ideologies. Yet the libertarian rhetoric seems to be exactly the same: the reference to the Covid danger transforms our democracies into disturbing masks of a totalitarian state. Putting on the mask again, still demanding social distancing, not considering the virus completely defeated yet means endorsing an authoritarian exercise of power that compresses our inalienable rights, means authorizing a clearly liberticidal political practice.
In my opinion, this is a criticism that has as its foundation a blindly individualistic version of freedom that does not take into account any criteria of solidarity and sharing and which, not surprisingly, has had its greatest and unfortunate international representatives in Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Political hooliganism irresponsible of these two tragic leaders has a ghostly matrix that we could roughly define pubertal-adolescent: «Death and illness do not exist and if they did exist they would not concern me; the omnipotence of my image is immune to any risk; if someone else is hit it is part of the game but this fact will not determine the end of the game of which I remain master ». How can we fail to see the connection between this ghostly matrix that clouds the supporters of liberticidal rhetoric and the one that ignites, in this very difficult summer, the pre-political fights among young people, the tendency to violent drive discharge which takes the erratic forms of intolerance and aggressive protest towards everything that represents public order, the need for limits, respect for the law?
If the trauma of Covid forced us to be adults, to have a vision of life that cannot be restricted to that of our Ego, to verify the impotence of our individual actions if not in concert with those of our neighbor, this recent and new anti-political wave shows, once again, how anthropologically difficult it is to see beyond our individual life, to grasp the solidarity dimension of freedom, to respect the collective dimension of the social bond. It is no coincidence that the denial attitude belongs clinically at the time of pathological adolescence where the absolute claim of one's freedom appears unhooked from any ethical reference to that of responsibility considered only as an imposture to harness the inherently indomitable force of a freedom that does not want to submit to anything other than to herself and who, above all, refuses to assume the consequences of her acts. Here again the paradigms of Trump and Bolsonaro stand out. Their reckless political choices have generated consequences of death and destruction that have crippled their peoples. Their political hooliganism is therefore not psychologically different from the one that inspires the inclination to fight, to destroy everything, to aggressive discharge as an end in itself, to the rejection of the law that have always marked the dimension, both desperate and omnipotent, of pathological adolescence. The time of the restrictions of freedoms imposed by solidarity cannot be tolerated by those who think of their freedom as an absolute right that comes before any other right. From those who forget that an adult life is one that strives to take upon themselves, first of all, the consequences of their actions.

Nature seems to operate not only in real time, which we all know well, but also in imaginary time. The term imaginary refers to the mathematical concept (formulated for the first time at the end of the 16th century) of imaginary number, that is, of the square root of a negative number. So there is not only real time, which we know well: it is in imaginary time, where the distinction between past, present and future disappears, that Nature orchestrates the most subtle quantum phenomena.

The theory of Special Relativity in 1905 radically changed the concepts of space and time. Not only do they lose the connotation of absolute quantities, but they become relative, elastic and integrate into a single four-dimensional fabric in which reality takes place.
The quantum revolution also discovers a new possible temporal dimension: imaginary time.
In imaginary time the distinction between past, present and future disappears.
Today, science begins to wonder if it is in this dimension that the phenomena of "Synchronicity" and "Near Death Experience" take place.

The Hi-Tech filtering solution for ventilation systems.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY
With increasing air pollution, the demand for better air filtration is increasing, just as we try to contain the energy impact of the plants as much as possible with a view to sustainable development: these needs appear in stark contrast to each other, however active electrostatic filters are capable of providing an effective solution.
In fact, any "mechanical" type air filter, ie whose efficiency depends mainly on phenomena of mechanical interference between the particles in transit and the filtering fibrous matrix, undergoes a progressive increase in pressure drops, due to the accumulation of transverse deposits with respect to the air flow.
For example, a medium-high efficiency paper filter, class F7-F8 according to UNI EN 779, can be characterized by initial pressure drops of 100-150 Pa, which can increase up to 450 Pa at the end of its operating life. Over the operating time, the increase in pressure drops leads to an increase in the electricity absorbed by the fans to guarantee the design flow rate, or a progressive reduction in the flow rate in systems that are unable to correctly compensate.
Active electrostatic filters, on the other hand, "remove" the suspended particles from the air flow and precipitate them on plate collectors, which are arranged along the direction of crossing. Thanks to this property, electrostatic filters offer very low pressure drops, almost constant during normal operating life, which ends when the thickness of the deposit begins to disturb the electric field, instead of preventing the passage of air, as happens in "mechanical" filters. In the case of an Expansion Electronic FE active electrostatic filter, for example, for the same efficiency class considered for the comparison with the "mechanical" filter, the pressure drops are constant and are around 30 Pa.

SATISFY THE FUNCTIONS OF THE SYSTEM
Many studies have shown that one of the biggest problems in ventilation systems is the reduction in flow that occurs after about 2-3 years of operation.
This fact is normally caused by the accumulation of dust and dirt on fans, batteries, channels and other system components. Furthermore, this contamination is the ideal medium for the proliferation of bacteria, microorganisms and molds which, in turn, determine an unhealthy ventilation system. Furthermore, a reduction in flow means that the ventilation system does not fulfill one of its primary functions.
If it is true that the filtration system is the main defendant, the solutions can alternatively be:

a) Increase the frequency of cleaning operations on the air handling unit, batteries, fans and ducts.
b) Improve the filtration system by adopting filters that have a good efficiency on the whole spectrum of dust (coarse, thin and ultra-thin).

Expansion Electronic's FE electrostatic active filters fully meet this second requirement.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Achieving environmental and economic improvement goals is also increasingly a concern in the HVAC sector.
Considering the type of "mechanical" filters, it can be seen that the higher the class of filtration, the more frequent the intervention for replacing the filter must be and proportionately the capacity of pollutant accumulation will be lower.
Expansion Electronic's FE electrostatic active filters have a threefold advantage over "mechanical" filters:

a) The storage capacity of pollutant is considerably higher. For example, for an FE 600 filter (592x592), the storage capacity is 600 g of DEHS ISO 12103-A2 dust, about four times higher than that of an H10 filter. This reduces the frequency of maintenance interventions and the consequent costs for the disposal of "mechanical" filters.
b) Unlike the "mechanical" filters, the active electrostatic filters can be regenerated and reintegrated into the system. Their cleaning takes place through water and detergent. If the maintenance is carried out correctly, the active electrostatic filters can last many years (on average 10-15).
c) As previously explained in the section dedicated to energy efficiency, active electrostatic filters have significantly lower pressure drops, allowing for significant energy savings.

PUBLIC HEALTH
In ventilation systems that install "mechanical" filters, there is a possible formation and release of toxic microbial products from decomposition, such as endotoxins.
On the contrary, the electrostatic filter has a high antibacterial power due to its high efficiency on submicronic particles and the action of the electric field. The results of some tests carried out at the ILH Institute of Air Hygiene in Berlin and the Policlinico San Matteo in Pavia show that the filter systems of Expansion Electronic are able to eliminate air-dispersed bacteria, yeasts and molds from the air with an efficiency ranging from 98.53% to 99.96%.

FILTERING OF NANO-POWDERS
In indoor environments, the presence of ultra-fine powders (PM 1, PM 0.4 and lower) is increasingly found, which reach values ​​much higher than those found outdoors. This fact is mainly due to the accumulation of dust resulting from the introduction of outside air (especially winter) not properly treated, and to the difficulties related to their elimination.
99.9% of all the particles present in the atmospheric air are less than 1μm.
Ultra-fine powders and nanopowders are the most dangerous for health as they reach the lung alveoli and from here enter the bloodstream. They are the most difficult to catch.
A marked filtering action towards the ultrathin air dusts allows to act decisively on the prevention of many pathologies, even serious ones attributable to the effect of the mineral nano-micro-powders such as chromium, iron, lead, etc. (see the new medical discipline of nanopathology).
The choice of particularly effective filters towards ultra-fine dust is a guarantee for decontamination from microorganisms (bacteria-viruses) present in the air and their decomposition which is one of the causes of sick building syndrome.
The electrostatic active filters of the Expansion Electronic FE series have a high filtration efficiency on all aspects of dust. As an example, at a filter crossing speed of 1.5 m / s, an FE filter offers a filtration efficiency of 98.8% on a particle size of 0.4 µm and 98.4% on 0.13 µm.
To achieve these performances with "mechanical" filters it is necessary to use absolute filters.

CERTIFIED EFFICIENCY
The UNI 11254 standard classifies active electrostatic filters into four filtering grades (A, B, C, D). The efficiency taken into consideration in this standard is the average Em efficiency on the grain size of DEHS of 0.4 μm.
A homogeneous comparison with the "mechanical" type filters is not possible, since the efficiency classes of the latter take into consideration:

a) The average filtration efficiencies over the useful life of the filter which is not constant, but grows with the impregnation of dust by the particulate filter with a particle size of 0.4 μm (class F, EN 779).
b) The minimum filtration efficiencies for particulates with a particle size of 0.3 μm (class H, EN 1822).

However, FE filters can be combined with mechanical filters (classes F or H) based on their performance towards the particle size.
The same FE filter offers, in terms of performance, an increasing filtration efficiency with decreasing air passage speed.
At a speed of 4 m / s a ​​FE filter will be comparable to a "mechanical" class F7 filter, while at 1.5 m / s its filtration efficiency will make it comparable to a class H12 filter. Therefore, in a system with a variable flow rate, with an active electrostatic filter, the minimum efficiency class will be that obtained at the maximum flow rate and will grow for lower flow rates. This peculiarity does not exist for mechanical filters that maintain the same efficiency class at the different operating flow rates, although the degree of efficiency is minimum with a new filter.

SYNTHESIS OF TECHNOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE
Choosing an inadequate filter for the air treatment unit will make the performance of the system poor because most of the ultra-fine dust contained in the air passes through the system and enters the circulation. In the long run, this causes the batteries, the fan, the channels to become dirty and a high concentration of ultra-fine powders that are difficult to eliminate in the treated environments.
The choice of a high efficiency filter considerably reduces the effects mentioned above. The high performance of Expansion Electronic's active electrostatic filters towards fine (PM 2.5), ultra-thin (PM 1) and nano (PM 0.4) dusts make it the ideal choice for all those who want to obtain from a ventilation system. a high degree of air hygiene, markedly reduced maintenance costs, significantly reduced energy costs, large storage capacities (600g) and, last but not least, constant air flow and efficiency over time.
Having a high efficiency on the whole spectrum of dust means inducing high air quality especially from a hygiene point of view (bacteria, spores, molds, viruses, etc.), as well as safeguarding the system (batteries of exchange, channels, etc.) with important returns on maintenance costs.

RETURN ON INVESTMENTS
The active electrostatic filter is a high precision filter, composed of noble materials and is not intended for "disposable".
The higher initial cost will be amortized over time (2.5 - 3.5 years) for:

a) lower maintenance costs;
b) lower energy consumption compared to a high quality Indoor air quality.

It can therefore be understood that active electrostatic filters allow a return on investment which must be considered in all respects an important parameter of choice.

Antibodies from blood donated by people who recovered from the illness and hyper-immunoglobulins are becoming treatments of choice for COVID-19, with recombinant polyclonal antibody approaches to follow.

A group of US academic researchers has sparked a nationwide effort to encourage people who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma, which will be used to treat patients across the country. The convalescent plasma program was instigated by physicians and investigators from 40 institutions, including the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins University, Washington University, Einstein Medical Center and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, among many others working closely with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and industry partners. The UK’s National Health Service launched in April a program across its 23 main blood centers to collect convalescent plasma for testing in planned clinical trials. At the same time, a consortium of industry players — Takeda, CSL Behring, Biotest, Bio Products Laboratory, LFB, Octapharma and Microsoft — has come together to develop an unbranded polyclonal antibody product: hyperimmune globulin (H-Ig) purified from the pooled plasma of donors who have recovered from COVID-19. Elsewhere, convalescent plasma treatment is getting a twenty-first century facelift, with two efforts attempting to capture the entire human antibody repertoire against SARS-CoV-2 in recombinant platforms: a collaboration between SAb Biotherapeutics, CSL Behring and the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) working to introduce artificial chromosomes into cattle to produce human antibodies and an effort by GigaGen to introduce an antibody library against SARS-CoV-2 into a mammalian cell line. The goal is to scale up polyclonal antibody manufacturing to produce treatment cocktails directed against the betacoronavirus causing COVID-19. But, as with every other response to the pandemic, scaling these efforts to the point where they can have a meaningful and immediate impact presents a complex set of problems.
The first reports on the use of convalescent plasma transfusions to treat COVID-19 came from a couple of case series rather than properly controlled trials, but their outcomes were encouraging (Table 1). Five patients at the Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital in Shenzhen, China, were treated with convalescent plasma. Of these, three were discharged and the other two were stable as of 25 March, despite having been in respiratory failure before the transfusion. A second study followed ten patients with severe disease, recruited from three hospitals in Wuhan, China. By data cutoff, three had been discharged and the other seven were ready for discharge. In contrast, among ten matched historical controls with similar baseline characteristics, three died, one improved and six stabilized — meaning their condition neither improved nor worsened. TABLE 1 | SELECTED TRIALS OF CONVALESCENT PLASMA DUE TO COMPLETE THIS YEAR

Lead institution	Study phase	Description	Number of participants	Primary endpoint	Study completion date
Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris (Paris)	2	Randomized controlled trial of CP versus SOC in patients who receive 2 units of CP as quickly as possible and no later than 10 days after onset of symptoms	120	Survival without need of ventilation or immune-modulatory drugs at day 14	15 May 2020
Centre Hospitalier Sainte Anne (Paris)	3	Placebo-controlled trial of IVIG in COVID-19 patients with ARDS	138	Number of ventilator-free days up to day 28	August 2020
China-Japan Friendship Hospital (Beijing)	0	Randomized controlled trial comparing CP plus SOC with SOC in patients with COVID-19	50	Time to clinical recovery after randomization	15 August 2020
Erasmus Medical Center (Rotterdam, the Netherlands)	2/3	Randomized comparative trial of CP versus SOC in patients with severe disease	426	Overall mortality	1 July 2020
Peking Union Medical College Hospital (Beijing)	2/3	Randomized open-label study comparing IVIG therapy with SOC	80	Clinical improvement of 2 points or more on 7-point scale and improvements in Murray lower-lung and lung-injury scores	30 June 2020
Puerta de Hierro University Hospital (Madrid)	2	Comparison of CP plus SOC with SOC only in hospitalized patients with early-stage disease	278	Percentage of patients requiring ventilation, high-flow oxygen or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or dying at day 15	July 2020
Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University (Wuhan, China)	N/A	Randomized, double-blind controlled study comparing anti-SARS-CoV-2 virus-inactivated plasma with control plasma in patients with severe coronavirus pneumonia	60	Minimum 2-point improvement on 6-point clinical scale	N/A
The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University (Nanchang, China)	N/A	Experimental study comparing CP plus SOC with SOC only in patients with severe coronavirus pneumonia	100	Cure rate, mortality	N/A
Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Columbia)	2/3	Open-label study in patients with moderate disease, comparing CP hydroxychloroquine with hydroxychloroquine only	80	Change in viral load and changes in IgM and IgG antibody titers	31 December 2020
Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital (Wuhan, China)	N/A	Randomized, double-blind, parallel controlled trial of CP in patients with severe coronavirus pneumonia	100	Minimum 2-point improvement on 6-point clinical scale	N/A

ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome; CP, convalescent plasma; IgM and IgG, immunoglobulin M and G; IVIG, intravenous immunoglobulin; SOC, standard of care; N/A, not available. Sources: ClinicalTrials.gov; clinicaltrialsregister.eu; chictr.org.cn.
Data from additional studies in China and South Korea are slowly starting to flow, but many clinical centers are not waiting for further evidence, given the urgency of the crisis and the lack of proven therapeutic alternatives. “This option rapidly became the best option without really demonstrating that it would work,” says Arturo Casadevall, chair of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University, who kick-started the US effort to deploy convalescent plasma. “The likelihood of harm is very low relative to the possibility of benefit,” he says.
It is, however, important to understand how best to deploy convalescent plasma to treat COVID-19. “The world is going to be dealing with this for a while longer,” says Casadevall. “We really need to figure out how to use antibody therapies.” So far, the emphasis has understandably been on patients with severe disease who have run out of treatment options. Johns Hopkins is one of the few centers planning to embark on a prospective prevention trial, led by associate professor of medicine Shmuel Shoham, to assess whether convalescent plasma can confer passive immunity on recipients. “Antibodies always work best either prophylactically or early,” says Casadevall. Encouragingly, the initial reports from China suggest the therapy may also work during the later phases of the disease, when acute respiratory distress syndrome is already established. In the Shenzhen study, patients received convalescent plasma between 10 and 22 days after admission, and those in the Wuhan study received it a median of 16.5 days after the onset of symptoms. During the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, patients who received convalescent plasma within two weeks experienced significantly better outcomes than those who received it after that point.
Further evidence on the safety and efficacy of convalescent plasma in COVID-19 will flow from the US expanded access program. This large-scale open-label study will use synthetic control groups to compare outcomes between patients who receive convalescent plasma and those who do not. The initiative is scaling rapidly — by 30 April, 2,004 sites had been registered, 7,774 patients had enrolled, and 3,809 of them had undergone transfusion. All participating sites will adhere to a single expanded-access protocol agreed by the US FDA, and the Mayo Clinic will provide a single institutional review board, removing the requirement for each participating site to establish its own board to ensure appropriate standards for treatment and data collection.
One question is whether there will be enough convalescent plasma to go around, particularly in the early months of the pandemic when the ratio of recovered patients to uninfected individuals is low. On the plus side, the ratio between donors and recipients is favorable: patients typically get only one or two units of blood-group-matched convalescent plasma, whereas donors typically donate two to three units. “The geometric math is in your favor on this one,” says Michael Joyner, professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic and national clinical lead on the program. “There is an amplification effect.” About 70% of the general public are considered eligible to donate blood. Applying the same rule of thumb to the present crisis suggests that 70% of those who recover may be suitable donors, but that represents an upper limit at best.
The FDA’s recently published guidance recommends a minimum neutralizing antibody titer of 1:160 (meaning that a 1-in-160 dilution of a given unit of plasma has activity against the virus); the European Commission’s recent guidance recommends a 1:320 titer. Antibody titers are generally tested with high throughput enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), but most sites do not have ELISA-based SARS-CoV-2 testing in place as yet. “Right now, we’re just working under the assumption that it works,” says Joyner. In time, the study will analyze the relationship between clinical outcomes and neutralizing antibody titers present in the donated plasma.
If convalescent plasma can be considered the first leg in a therapeutic relay race, H-Ig is the second. Whereas convalescent plasma requires minimal manipulation — screening for transmissible pathogens and pathogen inactivation are the main processes employed — H-Ig is a standardized pharmaceutical product, made from the purified antibody fraction. As such, it requires full clinical development before approval. “One way of thinking about this is the convalescent plasma is the starting material,” says Julie Kim, president of Takeda’s business unit for plasma-derived therapies. But the end product differs from convalescent plasma in its purity and composition: H-Ig principally contains the immunoglobulin G antibody fraction of the donated plasma, whereas convalescent plasma contains all the blood fluid minus the cellular fraction. H-Ig is, therefore, more concentrated and more potent than convalescent plasma. “It’s consistent, it’s scalable, it’s reliable; it can be shipped around the world,” says Kim. Tokyo-based Takeda and CSL Behring have established the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance to accelerate the development of a single, unbranded H-Ig product for COVID-19. They have been joined by four other blood-product firms: Biotest, based in Dreieich, Germany; Bio Products Laboratory, of Elstree, UK; Les Ulis, France-based LFB; and Lachen, Switzerland-based Octapharma. Microsoft is also supporting the initiative and has developed the CoVIg-19 Bot, a self-screening tool for potential donors to assess their eligibility and to locate the nearest plasma collection center.
Other firms are developing additional products, including Barcelona-based Grifols, which will produce a H-Ig product at its facility in Clayton, North Carolina, and Emergent BioSolutions, which is developing both a human H-Ig product, COVID-HIG, and a product based on equine antibodies, developed from the plasma of horses immunized with SARS-CoV-2.
There is, of course, no clean ‘baton exchange’ — to extend the relay metaphor — between convalescent plasma and H-Ig; their use will inevitably overlap, even if they become available at different timescales. “We absolutely believe there is room for both. Convalescent plasma has more immediacy. Ours will take a while to produce,” says Bill Mezzanotte, head of research and development at CSL Behring. Before the formation of the alliance, Takeda had aimed to have H-Ig available in 9–18 months, Kim says. “With the alliance, we hope to beat that.”
Efforts to develop recombinant H-Ig-like products are underway as well. Most advanced is SAb Biotherapeutics, which is collaborating with CSL Behring and BARDA to develop SAB-185, a polyclonal human antibody cocktail obtained from the plasma of transgenic cattle immunized with the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The platform, which involves introducing the full complement of human antibody genes on an artificial chromosome, has spent two decades in development. “We ‘bovinized’ portions of the human antibody genes,” SAB CEO and cofounder Eddie Sullivan says. The amino acid sequence of the resulting antibodies are still fully human, but the genes contain bovine regulatory elements that optimize their expression in bovine plasma cells. The company is following a hybrid regulatory pathway originally opened more than a decade ago by Revo Biologics (formerly GTC Biotherapeutics) for the production of Atryn (recombinant human antithrombin) in the milk of transgenic goats. It involves the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) and its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. “CVM reviews the animal platform; CBER regulates the antibody product itself,” Sullivan says.
SAb has already demonstrated the feasibility of the approach with a different antibody cocktail, SAB-301, directed against the spike protein of another lethal coronavirus, Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). In a placebo-controlled phase 1 trial in 38 healthy volunteers, SAB-301 demonstrated a placebo-like safety profile and, importantly, those who received the cocktail did not develop an antibody response against any of its components, Sullivan says. The final antibody preparation is highly purified to minimize the presence of any bovine material. When fully up and running, the production process is highly efficient. “We’re hyperimmunizing the animals so we develop very high antibody titers to the virus,” says Sullivan. Fully grown animals — which are all clones of the same genotype — produce up to 45 liters per month and antibody yields of up to 25 grams per liter. “This is a system that is very scalable,” Sullivan says. SAb is producing “a few hundred” animals this year. Once they have grown sufficiently, it will be able to start scaling SAB-185 production, assuming it proves to be safe and effective. SAb expects to start trials by early summer.
GigaGen, which is backed by Grifols, is a more recent arrival, and its cell-based recombinant polyclonal immunoglobulin production system is at an earlier stage of development. It involves capturing on a microfluidics platform the complete B-cell populations of five to ten people who have recovered COVID-19 and mounted a robust immune response to the virus. The associated antibody-encoding genes are then transferred into a mammalian cell line. The resulting polyclonal pool of antibody-producing cells is grown en masse, giving rise to a highly diverse and potent product containing many thousands of polyclonal immunoglobulins. “We’re recreating their entire repertoire,” says GigaGen CEO and cofounder David Johnson. “We don’t make any bet about what the best epitope is — or the best mechanism of action,” he says. “It’s really difficult to know what are the particular factors that led to somebody’s recovery.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated GigaGen plans to move into clinical trials, but it needs to start producing batches under good manufacturing practice (GMP) conditions before it can file an Investigational New Drug application. “Our biggest bottleneck is finding a manufacturing site,” says Johnson. It hopes to secure a slot during the summer and aims to reach the clinic late this year or early next.
For the vast majority of the many thousands of people who have already died from COVID-19 or have endured severe illness that will have long-term consequences, all of these interventions come too late. There is an inevitable lag between the onset of a pandemic and the ability of the clinical community and pharmaceutical and biotech companies to respond. But the global effort to push back SARS-CoV-2 will need to continue for some time to come.
“People need to recognize when the first wave is done, we’ve probably gotten to only about half of the deaths,” Joyner says. Doctors treating patients have little choice but to use the best interventions available at a given time. “In these sort of situations, the enemy of good is better,” he says. But as we move further into the pandemic, the evidence base supporting the clinical utility of those interventions will steadily improve — and so too, one hopes, will the outcomes.

Male and female, energies belonging to a single unit that has been divided.
Originally the human being was at the same time man and woman called androgynous.

When the separation of the sexes took place, everyone went their own way but each of us
bears deeply engraved in one's soul, the imprint, the image of the other.
For this reason, when a man or woman, among hundreds and thousands of people, they notice one in particular that approaches him to the image they carry within themselves, they feel happy and strive to be close to that person.
Unfortunately it often happens that after some time they realize that that image does not correspond to theirs at all and therefore they leave to look for another one. And once again they hope to find the other half, the soul mate.
One day this meeting between the two principles will actually take place because the love between them is more powerful than anything else.
In reality, our soul mate is in ourselves and the other is only the pole of ourselves.
The "know thyself" principle is the fusion of the two principles.
It means find the other Pole in yourself and you will become a divinity.
When the two Poles meet, this knowledge takes place primarily in the worlds of Light. It is therefore necessary to learn to love oneself in the right way first, being careful not to do any harm with thoughts, feelings and words since in this way they prepare internally the necessary conditions for the Divine and the Light to dwell in we.
In initiatory science it is said that nothing can be found externally that has not already been found internally. In fact, you can pass without seeing anything of what you encounter externally, if you have not already found it within you.

The more you discover inner beauty the more you will discover it on the physical plane.

This is the way one has to love one another and such love for oneself is something Divine.
Those who do not know how to love each other do not love God and do not love others.
In love, in relationships and therefore in a couple, if this principle is not implemented, harmful mechanisms begin to be established.
When the two people look for each other, very often both think only of taking. In nature, all creatures who know how to give something good are loved and you feel attracted to them, while those who take, after a while, you start to avoid them. Love is our development and the experience of love, as human beings have made it, is often never very clear.
How come some think they can eternally prey on others?

Those who are plundered soon notice it and then abandon those who plundered them.
There are often toxic relationships where the man wants to suck the woman's life, and vice versa.
Example: a man thinks he loves a woman but instead of understanding that something Divine exists in her and undertaking sublime realizations he wants to give vent to his desire by ruining and destroying everything.
This obviously applies to both.
If this happens in a relationship, it is better to separate because they transgress the law of love.
So let's protect ourselves from all those people who want to take and therefore keep our heart by giving it only to the Divine.
We develop the tendency to give.
We distribute our feelings to others.
How then?
Look at the tree: it retains its roots, its trunk, its branches, but distributes its fruits.
So nature conceived things.
We therefore distribute our fruits, that is, thoughts, feelings, words, light, strength but we preserve our heart and our body.

Our happiness depends on a good understanding of love.
When you love someone, thank heaven for experiencing that feeling because they are exceptional conditions to elevate us, have courage, momentum and inspiration to bring back inner and spiritual victories.

Loving is a blessing. That's why you need to protect your love for as long as possible.

As millions of people across the country take to the streets and raise their voices in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing problem of unequal justice, many people have reached out asking how we can sustain momentum to bring about real change.   Ultimately, it’s going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from past efforts that are worth remembering.   First, the waves of protests across the country represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States. The overwhelming majority of participants have been peaceful, courageous, responsible, and inspiring. They deserve our respect and support, not condemnation – something that police in cities like Camden and Flint have commendably understood.   On the other hand, the small minority of folks who’ve resorted to violence in various forms, whether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism, are putting innocent people at risk, compounding the destruction of neighborhoods that are often already short on services and investment and detracting from the larger cause. I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it. If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.   Second, I’ve heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn’t disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice, and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it’s often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices – and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.   Moreover, it’s important for us to understand which levels of government have the biggest impact on our criminal justice system and police practices. When we think about politics, a lot of us focus only on the presidency and the federal government. And yes, we should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department, and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it. But the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels.   It’s mayors and county executives that appoint most police chiefs and negotiate collective bargaining agreements with police unions. It’s district attorneys and state’s attorneys that decide whether or not to investigate and ultimately charge those involved in police misconduct. Those are all elected positions. In some places, police review boards with the power to monitor police conduct are elected as well. Unfortunately, voter turnout in these local races is usually pitifully low, especially among young people – which makes no sense given the direct impact these offices have on social justice issues, not to mention the fact that who wins and who loses those seats is often determined by just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, votes.   So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.   Finally, the more specific we can make demands for criminal justice and police reform, the harder it will be for elected officials to just offer lip service to the cause and then fall back into business as usual once protests have gone away. The content of that reform agenda will be different for various communities. A big city may need one set of reforms; a rural community may need another. Some agencies will require wholesale rehabilitation; others should make minor improvements. Every law enforcement agency should have clear policies, including an independent body that conducts investigations of alleged misconduct. Tailoring reforms for each community will require local activists and organizations to do their research and educate fellow citizens in their community on what strategies work best.   But as a starting point, I’ve included two links below. One leads to a report and toolkit developed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and based on the work of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that I formed when I was in the White House. And if you’re interested in taking concrete action, we’ve also created a dedicated site at the Obama Foundation to aggregate and direct you to useful resources and organizations who’ve been fighting the good fight at the local and national levels for years.   I recognize that these past few months have been hard and dispiriting – that the fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and hardship of a pandemic have been compounded by tragic reminders that prejudice and inequality still shape so much of American life. But watching the heightened activism of young people in recent weeks, of every race and every station, makes me hopeful. If, going forward, we can channel our justifiable anger into peaceful, sustained, and effective action, then this moment can be a real turning point in our nation’s long journey to live up to our highest ideals.   Let’s get to work.

Black holes have long been a source of much excitement and intrigue. And interest regarding black holes will surely grow now that gravitational waves have been discovered.
Many of the questions I am asked regard how “true” science fiction concerning black holes might be, and whether worm holes, such as those featured in Stargate, are real or not. Invariably though, the one item that is almost assured to come up are the largely gruesome ways in which black holes might theoretically affect human beings and the Earth itself.

Mass, charge, spin
There are three properties of a black hole that are (in principle) measurable: their mass, their spin (or angular momentum) and their overall electronic charge. Indeed, these are the only three parameters that an outside observer can ever know about since all other information about anything that goes in to making up a black hole is lost. This is known as the “no hair theorem”. Put simply: no matter how hairy or complex an object you throw in to a black hole, it will get reduced down (or shaved) to its mass, charge and spin.
Of these parameters, mass is arguably the most significant. The very definition of a black hole is that it has its mass concentrated in to a vanishingly small volume – the “singularity”. And it is the mass of the black hole – and the huge gravitational forces that its mass generates – which does the “damage” to nearby objects.

Space spaghetti
One of the best known effects of a nearby black hole has the imaginative title of “Spaghettification”. In brief, if you stray too close to a black hole, then you will stretch out, just like spaghetti.
This effect is caused due to a gravitation gradient across your body. Imagine that you are headed feet first towards a black hole. Since your feet are physically closer to the black hole, they will feel a stronger gravitation pull towards it than your head will. Worse than that, your arms, by virtue of the fact that they’re not at the centre of your body, will be attracted in a slightly different (vector) direction than your head is. This will cause parts of the body toward the edges to be brought inwards. The net result is not only an elongation of the body overall, but also a thinning out (or compression) in the middle. Hence, your body or any other object, such as Earth, will start to resemble spaghetti long before it hits the centre of the black hole.
The exact point at which these forces become too much to bear will depend critically on the mass of a black hole. For an “ordinary” black hole that has been produced by the collapse of a high mass star, this could be several hundred kilometres away from the event horizon – the point beyond which no information can escape a black hole. Yet for a supermassive black hole, such as the one thought to reside at the centre of our galaxy, an object could readily sink below the event horizon before becoming spaghetti, at a distance of many tens of thousands of kilometres from its centre. For a distant observer outside the event horizon of the black hole, it would appear that we progressively slow down and then fade away over time.

Bad news for Earth
What would happen, hypothetically, if a black hole appeared out of nowhere next to Earth? The same gravitational effects that produced spaghettification would start to take effect here. The edge of the Earth closest to the black hole would feel a much stronger force than the far side. As such, the doom of the entire planet would be at hand. We would be pulled apart.
Equally, we might not even notice if a truly supermassive black hole swallowed us below its event horizon as everything would appear as it once was, at least for a small period of time. In this case, it could be some time before disaster struck. But don’t lose too much sleep, we’d have to be unfortunate to “hit” a black hole in the first place – and we might live on holographically after the crunch anyway.

Mind the radiation
Interestingly, black holes are not necessarily black. Quasars – objects at the hearts of distant galaxies powered by black holes – are supremely bright. They can readily outshine the rest of their host galaxy combined. Such radiation is generated when the black hole is feasting on new material. To be clear: this material is still outside the event horizon which is why we can still see it. Below the event horizon is where nothing, not even light, can escape. As all the matter piles up from the feast, it will glow. It is this glow that is seen when observers look at quasars.
But this is a problem for anything orbiting (or near) a black hole, as it is very hot indeed. Long before we would be spaghettified, the sheer power of this radiation would fry us.

Life around a black hole
For those who have watched Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, the prospect of a planet orbiting around a black hole might be an appealing one. For life to thrive, there needs to be a source of energy or a temperature difference. And a black hole can be that source. There’s a catch, though. The black hole needs to have stopped feasting on any material – or it will be emitting too much radiation to support life on any neighbouring worlds.
What life would look like on such a world (assuming its not too close to get spaghettified, of course) is another matter. The amount of power received by the planet would probably be tiny compared to what Earth receives from the Sun. And the overall environment of such a planet could be equally bizzare. Indeed, in the creation of Interstellar, Kip Thorne was consulted to ensure the accuracy of the depiction of the black hole featured. These factors do not preclude life, it just makes it a tough prospect and very hard to predict what forms it could take.

What are the real reasons that brought hundreds of thousands of African irregular migrants to Europe? The results of the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) investigation are clear: hundreds of thousands of Africans illegally reached Europe, resorting to criminal organizations and not to be rejected, they lied claiming to be refugees in escape from wars and persecutions.
They land in Europe after crossing the Mediterranean and seek asylum, "so they are not economic emigrants". One of the first recommendations addressed to newcomers by employees of NGOs and cooperatives that assist those who enter Italy illegally seems to be to declare refugees, to beware of saying that you have left the country of origin in search of work or in any case better luck, a statement that would classify them as illegal to repatriate.

Instead, asylum applications start the procedure foreseen by international conventions to ascertain the truthfulness of what has been said and decide whether to give migrants the legal status of refugee that authorizes them to reside in the country in which they have applied for asylum: if it is Italy , guests of a CAS, an extraordinary reception center.

We have been talking about them for a few days: because the landings have quintupled compared to 2019, because there is evidence that Malta rejects them and directs them to Italy, and because of the chat in which magistrates recognized that Matteo Salvini was right when as minister of the interior he opposed their landing, but was still attacked.

Whether they are refugees or emigrants makes a difference because only those who flee from threats to life and freedom admit that they enter a foreign country without documents in order and yet they must be welcomed. So last year the UNDP, the United Nations Development Program, commissioned an investigation to find out what the real reasons were that brought hundreds of thousands of African irregular migrants to Europe. The research results were published in October 2019 in a report entitled "The Scaling Fences: Voices of Irregular African Migrants to Europe". Reading it is useful for the information it contains. The same cannot be said of the conclusions it reaches.

UNDP researchers interviewed 1,970 people in 13 European states, originating in 39 African countries. The answers - explains the UNDP - deny "what is commonly said about irregular emigration from Africa to Europe". In fact, all the interviewees declare that they traveled using irregular channels, in other words relying on men's smuggler organizations, and that they did so not because they were driven by the need to seek asylum. The figure is surprising even for those who know that most of the asylum applications are without foundation and are rejected.

Many emigrants were by no means poor at home and do not have a low level of education, the report continues. That the poor cannot bear the high cost of an illegal travel has long been established. But the UNDP study says more. 9 out of 100 respondents went to school upon departure. 49 out of a hundred had a job. On average, they attended school for at least three years longer than their peers and, although about 50 percent said they did not earn enough, almost all of them received good, above average, wages.

Other interesting information emerges from the interviews. 41 percent of immigrants say nothing would dissuade them from leaving. 93 out of 100 say they took risks during the trip, but only 2 out of 100 say that if they knew what was waiting for them they would have given up on the plan to migrate irregularly. In addition to economic motivations, many add the unease due to unjust and corrupt governments, the sense of powerlessness in the face of political systems that do not create development, which keep people in poverty.

Although not everyone wants to live permanently in Europe, two factors cause them to stay. Among those who have found employment, some send money home: it is less than a third of what they earn, however, they say, equivalent to about 85 percent of what they earned at home. Going home would make this contribution to the family less, given the difficulty of reintegration into economic and social life, especially for those who return without resources. In the case of those who do not have a job, the shame of having failed, of not having implemented the project of sending remittances to families and communities is the main factor that prevents them from returning home. This is especially true for 53 percent of respondents who say they have received some form of financial help from relatives and friends to pay for travel expenses in Europe.

The results of the UNDP investigation are clear. Those who want to stop irregular migrants are right: they confirm that hundreds of thousands of Africans have reached Europe illegally, resorting to criminal organizations, to not be rejected they have lied claiming to be refugees fleeing wars and persecutions. Little considered but equally important fact, some of them find a regular job and it would seem a good thing. But every job so busy goes to the detriment of those who try to emigrate following rules and legal procedures: in Italy, starting from the entry quotas of non-EU workers established every year by the Directorate-General for Immigration and Integration Policies .

This is what the UNDP conclusions should deal with. Instead "the fundamental message that emerges from this study - comments the report - is that emigration is the effect of uneven development and in particular of a development that excludes young people, sends a strong signal to policy makers". The UNDP seems to consider irrelevant what instead constitutes the peculiarity of the phenomenon considered: the fact that young Africans decide to leave their countries clandestinely, headed for a continent, Europe, where it is completely unlikely that they will find a job, while millions of Africans instead emigrate regularly, mostly without leaving their continent, choosing as destination countries where there is a demand for labor.

It is worth highlighting the use of the expression "uneven development" because it refers to the Marxist theories of the 60s of the last century which attribute to the capitalist system, to its exploitation of the "peripheries" of the world, to its "domination" on the planet. cause of underdevelopment and persistent poverty.
 

A close look at fundamental symmetries has exposed hidden patterns in the universe. Physicists think that those same symmetries may also reveal time’s original secret.

In late August 2019, paleontologists reported finding the fossil of a flattened turtle shell that “was possibly trodden on” by a dinosaur, whose footprints spanned the rock layer directly above. The rare discovery of correlated fossils potentially traces two bygone species to the same time and place. “It’s only by doing that that we’re able to reconstruct ancient ecosystems,” one paleontologist told The New York Times.
The approach parallels the way cosmologists go about inferring the history of the universe. Like fossils, astronomical objects are not randomly strewn throughout space. Rather, spatial correlations between the positions of objects such as galaxies tell a detailed story of the ancient past. “Paleontologists infer the existence of dinosaurs to give a rational accounting of strange patterns of bones,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist and cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “We look at patterns in space today, and we infer a cosmological history in order to explain them.”
One curious pattern cosmologists have known about for decades is that space is filled with correlated pairs of objects: pairs of hot spots seen in telescopes’ maps of the early universe; pairs of galaxies or of galaxy clusters or superclusters in the universe today; pairs found at all distances apart. You can see these “two-point correlations” by moving a ruler all over a map of the sky. When there’s an object at one end, cosmologists find that this ups the chance that an object also lies at the other end.
The simplest explanation for the correlations traces them to pairs of quantum particles that fluctuated into existence as space exponentially expanded at the start of the Big Bang. Pairs of particles that arose early on subsequently moved the farthest apart, yielding pairs of objects far away from each other in the sky today. Particle pairs that arose later separated less and now form closer-together pairs of objects. Like fossils, the pairwise correlations seen throughout the sky encode the passage of time — in this case, the very beginning of time.
Cosmologists believe that rare quantum fluctuations involving three, four or even more particles should also have occurred during the birth of the universe. These presumably would have yielded more complicated configurations of objects in the sky today: triangular arrangements of galaxies, along with quadrilaterals, pentagons and other shapes. Telescopes haven’t yet spotted these statistically subtle “higher-point” correlations, but finding them would help physicists better understand the first moments after the Big Bang.
Yet theorists have found it challenging even to calculate what the signals would look like — until recently. In the past four years, a small group of researchers has approached the question in a new way. They have found that the form of the correlations follows directly from symmetries and other deep mathematical principles. The most important findings to date were detailed in a paper by Arkani-Hamed and three co-authors that took its final form this summer.
The physicists employed a strategy known as the bootstrap, a term derived from the phrase “pick yourself up by your own bootstraps” (instead of pushing off of the ground). The approach infers the laws of nature by considering only the mathematical logic and self-consistency of the laws themselves, instead of building on empirical evidence. Using the bootstrap philosophy, the researchers derived and solved a concise mathematical equation that dictates the possible patterns of correlations in the sky that result from different primordial ingredients.
“They’ve found ways of calculating things that just look totally different from the textbook approaches,” said Tom Hartman, a theoretical physicist at Cornell University who has applied the bootstrap in other contexts.
Eva Silverstein, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the research, added that the recent paper by Arkani-Hamed and collaborators is “a really beautiful contribution.” Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the work, Silverstein and others said, is what it implies about the nature of time. There’s no “time” variable anywhere in the new bootstrapped equation. Yet it predicts cosmological triangles, rectangles and other shapes of all sizes that tell a sensible story of quantum particles arising and evolving at the beginning of time.
This suggests that the temporal version of the cosmological origin story may be an illusion. Time can be seen as an “emergent” dimension, a kind of hologram springing from the universe’s spatial correlations, which themselves seem to come from basic symmetries. In short, the approach has the potential to help explain why time began, and why it might end. As Arkani-Hamed put it, “The thing that we’

We often hear that Britain is a “class-based society”. Ask people what class is and you’ll get a wide range of answers – from accent to cultural tastes – leaving you perplexed as to how it might ever be a useful construct to understand much about the realities of British life. But really it’s all about what job you do.
I study the relationship between a person’s class and their life chances and it has become glaringly apparent during the coronavirus crisis that class – what job you do – has never been more important.
There is a clear class divide in the COVID-19 death rate, with working class jobs such as carers, taxi drivers, security guards and retail assistants clearly worse affected than middle and upper class jobs who can much more easily self-isolate and work from home.
Analysing data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on registered deaths in England and Wales among people aged 20 to 64, up to and including April 20, I find a sharp divide between the fraction of deaths in managerial and professional occupations and routine and manual occupations. While routine and manual occupations account for around 34% of jobs, those working in such jobs account for more than 43% of COVID-19 deaths among those of working age. Conversely, managerial and professional occupations account for 43% of all jobs but 28% of these deaths so far.

Author’s analysis of Office for National Statistics data. England and Wales aged 20 to 64 only. Mark Williams, CC BY-ND
Digging further into the detail makes very tragic reading. The deaths are highly concentrated in occupations that have been working on the frontline: caring and health, delivery workers, drivers and those working in retail. Of the 369 occupations listed by the ONS, just five account for 17% of COVID-19 deaths among those of working age in England and Wales. Just ten occupations account for 27% of these deaths, with 20 accounting for 40% (only 20% of people work in these 20 occupations).
These jobs are also overwhelmingly manual and routine occupations – those carried out by the economically least advantaged. While the class divide in COVID-19 deaths is not wholly out of sync with the divide in non-COVID deaths, these figures are a powerful reminder that what you do quite literally determines your life chances.

CC BY-ND
Impact of easing lockdown
Workers who cannot work from home can now return to their workplaces. This will clearly affect classes differently. Around 75% of managerial and professional workers will almost certainly carry on working from home because they can. By contrast, a similar proportion of routine and manual workers will most likely be back at their workplaces. According to my analysis of ONS data, these are occupations where less than 10% have ever worked from home.

Author’s analysis of ONS data. England and Wales aged 20 to 64 only. Mark Williams, CC BY-ND
One way to get a handle on the class dimension of the risks of going back to work is by using recent statistics published by the ONS on occupational exposure to infectious diseases and proximity to others at work. The first indicator in the graph below (blue bars) shows those in routine and manual occupations are most likely to be exposed to infectious disease in their job. The second indicator (red bars) shows these workers are also most likely to work in close proximity to others, making social distancing measures more difficult. 


Author’s analysis of ONS data. This uses pre-pandemic data and does not reflect changes made since. Mark Williams, CC BY-ND
Combining these two indicators to form an overall risk index (green bars) reinforces the pattern that those workers being told to go back to work are also most vulnerable to infection at work. By contrast, managerial and professional occupations are less at risk – with some notable exceptions, such as those related to health like medical practitioners, nurses and dentists.
What is more, routine and manual jobs are the lowest paid, have the poorest sick pay and other workplace benefits and are the most insecure. But this predates the coronavirus crisis – class inequalities in conditions of employment have been becoming more entrenched over the past four decades.
What COVID-19 does is accelerate the impact of these class differences and throw the issue into stark relief. Reorganising workplaces to enable social distancing will likely be the most challenging and least effective in those jobs being told they can go back to work. They are also most at risk to infection, as well as being the ones needing to go back to work the most to make ends meet. What kind of job you have has never been more important for your life chances.

Over the last 50 years, a lot has changed in rocketry. The fuel that powers spaceflight might finally be changing too. To safely explore the solar system and beyond, spaceships need to go faster – nuclear-powered rockets may be the answer.

With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through space are coming. But you might be surprised to learn that modern rockets don’t go all that much faster than the rockets of the past.
There are a lot of reasons that a faster spaceship is a better one, and nuclear-powered rockets are a way to do this. They offer many benefits over traditional fuel-burning rockets or modern solar-powered electric rockets, but there have been only eight U.S. space launches carrying nuclear reactors in the last 40 years.
However, last year the laws regulating nuclear space flights changed and work has already begun on this next generation of rockets.

Why the need for speed?
The first step of a space journey involves the use of launch rockets to get a ship into orbit. These are the large fuel-burning engines people imagine when they think of rocket launches and are not likely to go away in the foreseeable future due to the constraints of gravity.
It is once a ship reaches space that things get interesting. To escape Earth’s gravity and reach deep space destinations, ships need additional acceleration. This is where nuclear systems come into play. If astronauts want to explore anything farther than the Moon and perhaps Mars, they are going to need to be going very very fast. Space is massive, and everything is far away.
There are two reasons faster rockets are better for long-distance space travel: safety and time.
Astronauts on a trip to Mars would be exposed to very high levels of radiation which can cause serious long-term health problems such as cancer and sterility. Radiation shielding can help, but it is extremely heavy, and the longer the mission, the more shielding is needed. A better way to reduce radiation exposure is to simply get where you are going quicker.
But human safety isn’t the only benefit. As space agencies probe farther out into space, it is important to get data from unmanned missions as soon as possible. It took Voyager-2 12 years just to reach Neptune, where it snapped some incredible photos as it flew by. If Voyager-2 had a faster propulsion system, astronomers could have had those photos and the information they contained years earlier.
Speed is good. But why are nuclear systems faster?

Systems of today
Once a ship has escaped Earth’s gravity, there are three important aspects to consider when comparing any propulsion system:

• Thrust – how fast a system can accelerate a ship
• Mass efficiency – how much thrust a system can produce for a given amount of fuel
• Energy density – how much energy a given amount of fuel can produce

Today, the most common propulsion systems in use are chemical propulsion – that is, regular fuel-burning rockets – and solar-powered electric propulsion systems.
Chemical propulsion systems provide a lot of thrust, but chemical rockets aren’t particularly efficient, and rocket fuel isn’t that energy-dense. The Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon produced 35 million Newtons of force at liftoff and carried 950,000 gallons of fuel. While most of the fuel was used in getting the rocket into orbit, the limitations are apparent: It takes a lot of heavy fuel to get anywhere.
Electric propulsion systems generate thrust using electricity produced from solar panels. The most common way to do this is to use an electrical field to accelerate ions, such as in the Hall thruster. These devices are commonly used to power satellites and can have more than five times higher mass efficiency than chemical systems. But they produce much less thrust – about three Newtons, or only enough to accelerate a car from 0-60 mph in about two and a half hours. The energy source – the Sun – is essentially infinite but becomes less useful the farther away from the Sun the ship gets.
One of the reasons nuclear-powered rockets are promising is because they offer incredible energy density. The uranium fuel used in nuclear reactors has an energy density that is 4 million times higher than hydrazine, a typical chemical rocket propellant. It is much easier to get a small amount of uranium to space than hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel.
So what about thrust and mass efficiency?

Two options for nuclear
Engineers have designed two main types of nuclear systems for space travel.
The first is called nuclear thermal propulsion. These systems are very powerful and moderately efficient. They use a small nuclear fission reactor – similar to those found in nuclear submarines – to heat a gas, such as hydrogen, and that gas is then accelerated through a rocket nozzle to provide thrust. Engineers from NASA estimate that a mission to Mars powered by nuclear thermal propulsion would be 20%-25% shorter than a trip on a chemical-powered rocket.
Nuclear thermal propulsion systems are more than twice as efficient as chemical propulsion systems – meaning they generate twice as much thrust using the same amount of propellant mass – and can deliver 100,000 Newtons of thrust. That’s enough force to get a car from 0-60 mph in about a quarter of a second.
The second nuclear-based rocket system is called nuclear electric propulsion. No nuclear electric systems have been built yet, but the idea is to use a high-power fission reactor to generate electricity that would then power an electrical propulsion system like a Hall thruster. This would be very efficient, about three times better than a nuclear thermal propulsion system. Since the nuclear reactor could create a lot of power, many individual electric thrusters could be operated simultaneously to generate a good amount of thrust.
Nuclear electric systems would be the best choice for extremely long-range missions because they don’t require solar energy, have very high efficiency and can give relatively high thrust. But while nuclear electric rockets are extremely promising, there are still a lot of technical problems to solve before they are put into use.

Why aren’t there nuclear powered rockets yet?
Nuclear thermal propulsion systems have been studied since the 1960s but have not yet flown in space.
Regulations first imposed in the U.S. in the 1970s essentially required case-by-case examination and approval of any nuclear space project from multiple government agencies and explicit approval from the president. Along with a lack of funding for nuclear rocket system research, this environment prevented further improvement of nuclear reactors for use in space.
That all changed when the Trump administration issued a presidential memorandum in August 2019. While upholding the need to keep nuclear launches as safe as possible, the new directive allows for nuclear missions with lower amounts of nuclear material to skip the multi-agency approval process. Only the sponsoring agency, like NASA, for example, needs to certify that the mission meets safety recommendations. Larger nuclear missions would go through the same process as before.
Along with this revision of regulations, NASA received US$100 million in the 2019 budget to develop nuclear thermal propulsion. DARPA is also developing a space nuclear thermal propulsion system to enable national security operations beyond Earth orbit.
After 60 years of stagnation, it’s possible a nuclear-powered rocket will be heading to space within a decade. This exciting achievement will usher in a new era of space exploration. People will go to Mars and science experiments will make new discoveries all across our solar system and beyond.

Stubborn problems with dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic expansion have some astronomers rethinking what we know about the early universe.

A series of powerful observations has made it clear that our universe has expanded for billions of years, emerging from the hot, dense state we call the Big Bang. Over the past several decades, new types of precise measurements have allowed scientists to scrutinize and refine this account, letting them reconstruct the history of our universe in ever greater detail. When we compare the results from different kinds of measurements — the expansion rate of the universe, the temperature patterns in the light released when the first atoms formed, the abundances of various chemical elements, and the distribution of galaxies and other large-scale structures — we find stunning agreement. Each of these lines of evidence supports the conclusion that our universe expanded and evolved in just the way that the Big Bang theory predicts. From this perspective, our universe appears to be remarkably comprehensible.
But cosmologists have struggled — if not outright failed — to understand essential facets of the universe. We know almost nothing about dark matter and dark energy, which together make up more than 95 percent of the total energy in existence today. We don’t understand how the universe’s protons, electrons, and neutrons could have survived the aftereffects of the Big Bang. In fact, everything we know about the laws of physics tells us that these particles should have been destroyed by antimatter long ago. And in order to make sense of the universe as we observe it, cosmologists have been forced to conclude that space, during its earliest moments, must have undergone a brief and spectacular period of hyperfast expansion — an event known as cosmic inflation. Yet we know next to nothing about this key era of cosmic history.
It’s possible that these puzzles are little more than loose ends, each of which will be resolved as cosmologists continue to investigate our universe. But so far, these problems have proven to be remarkably stubborn and persistent. With the goal of identifying the individual particles that make up dark matter, scientists have designed and built a series of impressive experiments — yet no such particles have appeared. Even powerful particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider have revealed nothing that moves us closer to resolving any of these cosmic mysteries. And despite having measured the expansion history and large-scale structure of the universe in ever increasing detail, we have not gained any substantively greater understanding of the nature of dark energy, the force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the cosmos.
It is from this perspective that some cosmologists have found themselves asking whether these cosmic mysteries might be symptoms of something more significant than a few loose threads. Perhaps these puzzles are not as unrelated as they might seem, but are instead collectively pointing us toward a very different picture of our universe and its earliest moments. What we’ve learned by not discovering dark matter Dark matter is likely the most celebrated problem facing modern cosmologists. Astronomers have determined that most of the matter in our universe does not consist of atoms or any other known substances, but of something else — something that does not appreciably radiate, reflect, or absorb light.
Despite not knowing much about the nature of dark matter, cosmologists often speculate about the kinds of particles that might make up this substance. In particular, researchers have long recognized that if dark matter particles interact through a force that is approximately as powerful as the weak nuclear force (which governs radioactive decay), then the number of these particles that should have emerged from the Big Bang would roughly match the measured abundance of dark matter found in the universe today. With this in mind, weakly interacting massive particles — WIMPs — became the best guess for dark matter’s nature.
MPs was that scientists thought they knew how to detect the particles and study their properties. Motivated by this goal, physicists engaged in an ambitious experimental program to identify these WIMPs and learn how they were forged in the Big Bang. Over the past couple of decades, researchers have deployed a succession of increasingly sensitive dark matter detectors in deep-underground laboratories that are capable of detecting individual collisions between a dark matter particle and the atoms that make up the target.
These sophisticated experiments performed beautifully — as well as or better than designed. Yet no such collisions have been observed. A decade ago, many scientists were optimistic that these experiments would bear fruit. But dark matter has turned out to be very different, and far more elusive, than we had once imagined.
Although it’s still possible that dark matter could consist of some form of difficult-to-detect WIMPs, the lack of any signal from underground experiments has led many physicists to shift their focus toward other dark matter candidates. One such contender is a hypothetical ultralight particle known as an axion. Axions are predicted according to a theory proposed by particle physicists Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn in 1977. Although scientists are searching for axions in experiments that use powerful magnetic fields to convert them into photons, these investigations have yet to place very strict constraints on the properties of these particles.
Another possibility that could explain why dark matter has been so difficult to detect is that the first moments of the universe may have played out much differently than cosmologists have long imagined. Take the case of the conventional WIMP. Calculations show that the fledgling universe should have produced vast quantities of these particles during the first millionth of a second or so after the Big Bang, when they reached a state of equilibrium with the surrounding plasma of quarks, gluons, and other subatomic particles. The number of WIMPs that could have survived these conditions — and ultimately contributed to the dark matter found throughout today’s universe — depends on how, and how often, they interacted. But when carrying out calculations such as these, scientists generally assume that space expanded steadily during the first fraction of a second, without any unexpected events or transitions. It is entirely plausible that this simply was not the case.
Although cosmologists know a great deal about how our universe expanded and evolved over most of its history, they know relatively little about the first seconds that followed the Big Bang — and next to nothing about the first trillionth of a second. When it comes to how our universe may have evolved, or to the events that may have taken place during these earliest moments, we have essentially no direct observations on which to rely. This era is hidden from view, buried beneath impenetrable layers of energy, distance, and time.
Our understanding of this period of cosmic history is, in many respects, little more than an informed guess based on inference and extrapolation. Look far enough back in time, and almost everything we know about our universe could have been different. Matter and energy existed in different forms than they do today, and they may have experienced forces that have not yet been discovered. Key events and transitions may have taken place that science has yet to illuminate. Matter likely interacted in ways that it no longer does, and space and time themselves may have behaved differently than they do in the world we know.
With this in mind, many cosmologists have begun to consider the possibility that our failure to detect the particles that make up dark matter might be telling us not only about the nature of dark matter itself, but also about the era in which it was created. By studying dark matter, scientists are learning about the first moments after the Big Bang.

  How fast is space expanding? In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distances. This provided the first clear evidence that our universe is expanding. Ever since, the current rate of this expansion — the Hubble constant — has been one of the key properties of our universe that cosmologists study.
It’s fair to say that the Hubble constant has long been difficult to measure. Hubble’s original determination was plagued with systematic errors that led him to overestimate the expansion rate by a factor of 7. As recently as the 1990s, textbooks often quoted values ranging from as low as 50 to as high as 100 kilometers per second for every million parsecs separating two points in space — usually written as 50 to 100 km/s/Mpc. (One megaparsec [Mpc] equals 3.26 million light-years.) Although the precision of these measurements has improved considerably over the past two decades, no consensus yet exists regarding the correct value for this quantity. In fact, as these measurements have improved, the results from different methods seem to disagree with one another even more.
One way to determine the Hubble constant is to directly measure how fast objects are moving away from us, just as Hubble did in 1929. For his measurements, Hubble used a special class of pulsating stars known as Cepheid variables, whose intrinsic luminosities track nicely with the periods over which they brighten and fade. Modern cosmologists continue to use Cepheids for this purpose, but they also employ other classes of objects, including type Ia supernovae — exploding white dwarfs that all have the same approximate luminosity. When researchers combine the latest data, they find that the universe is currently expanding at a rate of about 72 to 76 km/s/Mpc.
But that’s not the end of the story. Cosmologists also can infer the value of the Hubble constant by studying the primordial light released when the first atoms formed some 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The detailed temperature patterns of this light — known as the cosmic microwave background — serve as a map that shows how matter was distributed throughout the universe at that time.
When scrutinized, this map reveals many details about our young universe, including how much matter and other forms of energy were present, as well as how fast space was expanding. It also tells us that the Hubble constant is about 67 km/s/Mpc — a significantly smaller value than cosmologists have found through more direct measurements.
What does this mismatch mean for our universe? Assuming that these studies have correctly accounted for all the systematic uncertainties inherent in the observations, these two ways of determining the Hubble constant appear to be incompatible — at least within the context of the standard cosmological model. To make these discrepant results mutually consistent, astronomers would be forced to change how we think the cosmos expanded and evolved, or to reconsider the forms of matter and energy in the universe during the first few hundred thousand years following the Big Bang.
According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the rate at which space expands depends on the density of matter and other forms of energy it contains. When cosmologists infer the value of the Hubble constant from the cosmic microwave background, they have to make assumptions about the amounts of dark matter, neutrinos, and other substances that were present.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain the tension between the different measurements of the Hubble constant would be to hypothesize that the cosmos contained more energy than expected during the first hundred thousand years or so following the Big Bang. This energy might have taken the form of an exotic species of light and feebly interacting particles, or of some kind of dark energy associated with the vacuum of space itself that has long since disappeared from the universe. Or perhaps there is something else we don’t understand about this era of cosmic history. We simply do not yet know how to resolve this intriguing mystery. Is a revolution coming? As I said earlier, it’s possible that the various puzzles cosmologists face today are little more than a few trivial threads that scientists will tie up nicely in the years ahead with the help of new experiments and observations. But lately, it seems the more we study the universe, the less we understand it. Despite decades of effort, the nature of dark matter remains unknown, and the problem of dark energy seems nearly intractable. We do not know how the particles that make up the atoms in our universe managed to survive the first moments of the Big Bang, and we still know little about cosmic inflation, how it played out, or how it came to an end — assuming that something like inflation happened at all.
It is from this perspective that I sometimes find myself considering whether these mysteries might represent something greater than a few open and unrelated questions. Perhaps they are telling us that the earliest moments of our universe were far different from what we long imagined them to be. Perhaps these problems represent the beginning of a revolution for the science of cosmology.
Sometimes I wonder whether we might be on a significant precipice of scientific history, similar to what we experienced in 1904. At that time, physics had never before seemed to be on such solid footing. For more than two centuries, the principles of Newtonian physics had been applied successfully to problem after problem. And although physicists expanded their knowledge into areas such as electricity, magnetism, and heat, these aspects of the world were really not so different from those Newton had described hundreds of years earlier. To the physicists of 1904, the world seemed well understood. There was little reason to expect a revolution.
Similar to the situation cosmologists confront today, however, the physicists of 1904 had not yet been able to address a few challenges. The medium through which they believed light traveled — the luminiferous ether — should have induced variations in the speed of light, and yet light always moves through space at the same rate. Astronomers observed the orbit of Mercury to be slightly different from what Newtonian physics predicted, leading some to suggest that an unknown planet, dubbed Vulcan, might be perturbing Mercury’s trajectory.
Physicists in 1904 had no idea what powered the Sun — no known chemical or mechanical process could possibly generate so much energy over such a long time. Lastly, scientists knew various chemical elements emitted and absorbed light with specific patterns, none of which physicists had the slightest idea how to explain. In other words, the inner workings of the atom remained a total and utter mystery.
Although few saw it coming, in hindsight, it’s clear that these problems were heralds of a revolution in physics. And in 1905, the revolution arrived, ushered in by a young Albert Einstein and his new theory of relativity. We now know that the luminiferous ether does not exist and that there is no planet Vulcan. Instead, these fictions were symptoms of the underlying failure of Newtonian physics. Relativity beautifully solved and explained each of these mysteries without any need for new substances or planets.
Furthermore, when scientists combined relativity with the new theory of quantum physics, it became possible to explain the Sun’s longevity, as well as the inner workings of atoms. These new theories even opened doors to new and previously unimagined lines of inquiry, including that of cosmology itself.
Scientific revolutions can profoundly transform how we see and understand our world. But radical change is never easy to see coming. There is probably no way to tell whether the mysteries faced by cosmologists today are the signs of an imminent scientific revolution or merely the last few loose ends of an incredibly successful scientific endeavor.
There is no question that we have made incredible progress in understanding our universe, its history, and its origin. But it is also undeniable that we are profoundly puzzled, especially when it comes to the earliest moments of cosmic history. I have no doubt that these moments hold incredible secrets, and perhaps the keys to a new scientific revolution. But our universe holds its secrets closely. It is up to us to coax those secrets from its grip, transforming them from mystery into discovery.
 

This May 14, 2020, the faithful of different religious traditions have been invited to prayer and fasting for the end of the pandemic.
Interview with Msgr. Yoannis Lahzi Gaid, Secretary of Pope Francis and member of the High Committee for Human Fraternity, created after the historic Abu Dhabi meeting between the Holy Father and the Grand Imam Al-Tayyeb


Msgr. Yoannis Lahzi Gaid, how did this idea of a day of joint prayer and fasting on May 14, for Christians and Muslims, come about?
The idea arose within the High Committee for Human Fraternity during its last meeting, which took place on March 31, 2020 in a video conference due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The initiative was born from the question: how can we give shared witness before a shared danger? The answer was "praying together as brothers and sisters".

How is the High Committee progressing one year on from the Abu Dhabi meeting and what are your future plans?
The High Committee continues with enthusiasm and great good will to carry out its mission, that is to strengthen fraternity and to spread the values mentioned in the Document on Human Fraternity, through concrete initiatives, such as, for example, the invitation to prayer, fasting and charity works scheduled for May 14, as well as the promotion of the "Human Fraternity" award which will be given each year to personalities recognized as promoters of fraternity, and also the construction of the "House of Abraham" in Abu Dhabi to realize the value of fraternity and respect for divergences and differences. Faith in God must unite and not divide or even justify violence.
The Document on Human Fraternity is prophetic in affirming universal fraternity. In fact, Coronavirus has not differentiated between rich and poor, between West and East, between developed and developing countries... we are the same, we are brothers and sisters in danger and with a common struggle.

Some would speak of syncretism and give way to polemics when it comes to prayer with an interreligious dimension. Why is it not syncretism and how can we help make this aspect better understood?
Prayer is a universal value inherent in man in every age and time. This is a fact. Inviting everyone to pray together, each according to his or her own faith and belief, does not syncretize but reinforces the value of prayer and fraternity.  As a priest and as a Christian who recites the prayer that Christ taught his disciples every day, the "Our Father", I can see in this invitation only the hand of God that unites all the siblings and children in an act of prayer. This does not weaken my faith in Christ, the only Saviour of the World, but strengthens it, knowing that only God can transform evil into good, a pandemic into an occasion of fraternity, a prayer into a power. We cannot forget that God brings his rain down on the good and the bad, makes His sun rise on it all. And precisely for this purpose, Pope Saint John Paul II held an international peace meeting in Assisi in 1986 where the participants each prayed according to their faith.
The initiative therefore wishes to unite all men and women to call for the end of the Coronavirus. It would be the first time that all humankind unites for a single goal: to pray together, each according to their own faith, thus proving that faith unites and does not divide.
Covid-19 has brought us all to our knees but being on our knees is the best position to pray. The virus made us understand our fragility and the need to unite as brothers. We cannot emerge from this separately: either united, together or nobody.

In your personal experience, in Egypt, your country, what can you say about the role of Our Lady in Islamic-Christian spiritual friendship?
The figure of the Virgin Mary is fundamental in interreligious dialogue with Muslims who venerate and respect her. In Egypt many Muslims go to pray at Marian shrines and some even make vows to her. Both the figure of the Virgin and the Document on Fraternity can represent "common points". It is always better to start the dialogue from what unites us and not from what divides us. This never means failing in our duty to proclaim the Truth of the Gospel and of our faith, but to do it with charity, with respect and with humility. Determination never means presumption. Christ who commands us to bring the Gospel to the whole world also asks us to love and pray for everyone, that is, not to fall into the trap of the Pharisees: to believe that we possess the keys to the Kingdom of God, without entering and without letting others enter. Adversity does not bring Christ to others, on the contrary, it hinders the proclamation of the Gospel and deforms the beauty of our faith.

In the spring of 2015, through my research in the 216-digits project, I became interested in verifying how number theory was useful in revealing secrets in astronomy.

I therefore verified my intuition that a terrestrial year expressed in days was related to the prime numbers, to the metaphysical value 666 and to phi, the golden number underlying many proportions in nature, the approximate value of which is 1.61803398875.

My guess was that the average of the difference in the value of 666 minus each prime number less than 666, including 1, differed from the number of days in an earth year by the value of ϕ.

Here is the verification through the following table, in which:

• The first column represents the list of prime numbers lower than 666, including the value 1;
• The second column represents the differences between 666 and the list of prime numbers including 1.
• The third column is the calculation of the average of the differences between 666 and each prime number, including 1, in their sequence.
• The fourth column represents the difference between the exact days 365,2421875 that make up an earth year and the averages of the third column.
• The fifth column represents the difference between the approximate 365.25 days that make up an earth year and the averages of the third column.
• The last two columns represent the difference between the Phi value and the results of the two previous columns respectively.

Prime p	666 - p	Average (666-p)	365,2421875 - Av	365,25 - Av	Phi-(365,242-Av)	Phi-(365,25-Av)
1	665	665.00	-299.76	-299.75	301.38	301.37
2	664	664.50	-299.26	-299.25	300.88	300.87
3	663	664.00	-298.76	-298.75	300.38	300.37
5	661	663.25	-298.01	-298.00	299.63	299.62
7	659	662.40	-297.16	-297.15	298.78	298.77
11	655	661.17	-295.92	-295.92	297.54	297.53
13	653	660.00	-294.76	-294.75	296.38	296.37
17	649	658.63	-293.38	-293.38	295.00	294.99
19	647	657.33	-292.09	-292.08	293.71	293.70
23	643	655.90	-290.66	-290.65	292.28	292.27
29	637	654.18	-288.94	-288.93	290.56	290.55
31	635	652.58	-287.34	-287.33	288.96	288.95
37	629	650.77	-285.53	-285.52	287.15	287.14
41	625	648.93	-283.69	-283.68	285.30	285.30
43	623	647.20	-281.96	-281.95	283.58	283.57
47	619	645.44	-280.20	-280.19	281.81	281.81
53	613	643.53	-278.29	-278.28	279.91	279.90
59	607	641.50	-276.26	-276.25	277.88	277.87
61	605	639.58	-274.34	-274.33	275.95	275.95
67	599	637.55	-272.31	-272.30	273.93	273.92
71	595	635.52	-270.28	-270.27	271.90	271.89
73	593	633.59	-268.35	-268.34	269.97	269.96
79	587	631.57	-266.32	-266.32	267.94	267.93
83	583	629.54	-264.30	-264.29	265.92	265.91
89	577	627.44	-262.20	-262.19	263.82	263.81
97	569	625.19	-259.95	-259.94	261.57	261.56
101	565	622.96	-257.72	-257.71	259.34	259.33
103	563	620.82	-255.58	-255.57	257.20	257.19
107	559	618.69	-253.45	-253.44	255.07	255.06
109	557	616.63	-251.39	-251.38	253.01	253.00
113	553	614.58	-249.34	-249.33	250.96	250.95
127	539	612.22	-246.98	-246.97	248.59	248.59
131	535	609.88	-244.64	-244.63	246.25	246.25
137	529	607.50	-242.26	-242.25	243.88	243.87
139	527	605.20	-239.96	-239.95	241.58	241.57
149	517	602.75	-237.51	-237.50	239.13	239.12
151	515	600.38	-235.14	-235.13	236.75	236.75
157	509	597.97	-232.73	-232.72	234.35	234.34
163	503	595.54	-230.30	-230.29	231.91	231.91
167	499	593.13	-227.88	-227.88	229.50	229.49
173	493	590.68	-225.44	-225.43	227.06	227.05
179	487	588.21	-222.97	-222.96	224.59	224.58
181	485	585.81	-220.57	-220.56	222.19	222.18
191	475	583.30	-218.05	-218.05	219.67	219.66
193	473	580.84	-215.60	-215.59	217.22	217.21
197	469	578.41	-213.17	-213.16	214.79	214.78
199	467	576.04	-210.80	-210.79	212.42	212.41
211	455	573.52	-208.28	-208.27	209.90	209.89
223	443	570.86	-205.61	-205.61	207.23	207.23
227	439	568.22	-202.98	-202.97	204.60	204.59
229	437	565.65	-200.40	-200.40	202.02	202.02
233	433	563.10	-197.85	-197.85	199.47	199.46
239	427	560.53	-195.29	-195.28	196.90	196.90
241	425	558.02	-192.78	-192.77	194.39	194.39
251	415	555.42	-190.18	-190.17	191.79	191.79
257	409	552.80	-187.56	-187.55	189.18	189.17
263	403	550.18	-184.93	-184.93	186.55	186.54
269	397	547.53	-182.29	-182.28	183.91	183.90
271	395	544.95	-179.71	-179.70	181.32	181.32
277	389	542.35	-177.11	-177.10	178.73	178.72
281	385	539.77	-174.53	-174.52	176.15	176.14
283	383	537.24	-172.00	-171.99	173.62	173.61
293	373	534.63	-169.39	-169.38	171.01	171.00
307	359	531.89	-166.65	-166.64	168.27	168.26
311	355	529.17	-163.93	-163.92	165.55	165.54
313	353	526.50	-161.26	-161.25	162.88	162.87
317	349	523.85	-158.61	-158.60	160.23	160.22
331	335	521.07	-155.83	-155.82	157.45	157.44
337	329	518.29	-153.05	-153.04	154.67	154.66
347	319	515.44	-150.20	-150.19	151.82	151.81
349	317	512.65	-147.41	-147.40	149.02	149.02
353	313	509.88	-144.63	-144.63	146.25	146.24
359	307	507.10	-141.85	-141.85	143.47	143.46
367	299	504.28	-139.04	-139.03	140.66	140.65
373	293	501.47	-136.22	-136.22	137.84	137.83
379	287	498.64	-133.40	-133.39	135.02	135.01
383	283	495.84	-130.60	-130.59	132.22	132.21
389	277	493.04	-127.80	-127.79	129.41	129.41
397	269	490.20	-124.96	-124.95	126.58	126.57
401	265	487.39	-122.15	-122.14	123.76	123.76
409	257	484.54	-119.30	-119.29	120.92	120.91
419	247	481.65	-116.40	-116.40	118.02	118.01
421	245	478.80	-113.55	-113.55	115.17	115.16
431	235	475.89	-110.65	-110.64	112.27	112.26
433	233	473.04	-107.79	-107.79	109.41	109.40
439	227	470.17	-104.93	-104.92	106.55	106.54
443	223	467.33	-102.09	-102.08	103.71	103.70
449	217	464.49	-99.25	-99.24	100.86	100.86
457	209	461.62	-96.38	-96.37	97.99	97.99
461	205	458.77	-93.52	-93.52	95.14	95.13
463	203	455.96	-90.71	-90.71	92.33	92.32
467	199	453.16	-87.92	-87.91	89.54	89.53
479	187	450.30	-85.06	-85.05	86.68	86.67
487	179	447.41	-82.17	-82.16	83.79	83.78
491	175	444.55	-79.31	-79.30	80.92	80.92
499	167	441.66	-76.41	-76.41	78.03	78.02
503	163	438.78	-73.54	-73.53	75.16	75.15
509	157	435.91	-70.67	-70.66	72.28	72.28
521	145	432.97	-67.73	-67.72	69.35	69.34
523	143	430.07	-64.83	-64.82	66.45	66.44
541	125	427.05	-61.81	-61.80	63.43	63.42
547	119	424.03	-58.79	-58.78	60.41	60.40
557	109	420.97	-55.73	-55.72	57.35	57.34
563	103	417.91	-52.67	-52.66	54.29	54.28
569	97	414.86	-49.61	-49.61	51.23	51.23
571	95	411.84	-46.60	-46.59	48.22	48.21
577	89	408.82	-43.58	-43.57	45.20	45.19
587	79	405.77	-40.53	-40.52	42.14	42.14
593	73	402.72	-37.47	-37.47	39.09	39.08
599	67	399.66	-34.42	-34.41	36.04	36.03
601	65	396.65	-31.41	-31.40	33.02	33.02
607	59	393.63	-28.39	-28.38	30.01	30.00
613	53	390.62	-25.38	-25.37	27.00	26.99
617	49	387.62	-22.38	-22.37	24.00	23.99
619	47	384.66	-19.42	-19.41	21.04	21.03
631	35	381.65	-16.40	-16.40	18.02	18.01
641	25	378.60	-13.36	-13.35	14.97	14.97
643	23	375.58	-10.34	-10.33	11.96	11.95
647	19	372.59	-7.35	-7.34	8.96	8.96
653	13	369.59	-4.35	-4.34	5.97	5.96
659	7	366.60	-1.35	-1.35	2.97	2.96
661	5	363.63	1.61	1.62	0.00699402973	-0.000818470

It can be seen that the final result oscillates between the value of 0.00699403 in excess and 0.00081847 in default.
So it can be seen with good approximation that: “the average of 666 minus all prime numbers less than 666, including 1 differ from the days that make up a terrestrial year of the value of ϕ”.

The following questions arise spontaneously:

• Is the duration of an Earth's orbit around the sun constant, is it increasing or decreasing?
• Is the mathematical relationship just verified a case that concerns only our Earth or could it also concern the other exoplanets in which there is life?

In ensuring the safest, most sanitized space for your guests—the most protected from the New Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)—ions are your best friend. So says Steve Levine and Tony Abate from AtmosAir Solutions. Their company’s technology has been proven to eliminate the Coronavirus, other viruses, bacteria, fungi and allergens. Levine is President & CEO of the Fairfield, Conn.-based company and Abate is Chief Technology Officer.
At the core of AtmosAir systems is Bi Polar Ionization technology. Within an HVAC system or as a standalone unit, ionization tubes are placed. As airflow passes through the tubes, Bi Polar—positive and negative—ions are created that persist for up to 300 seconds. In the case of a virus such as the Coronavirus, the ions destroy the virus surface structure on a molecular level. As a result, the virus cannot infect, even if it enters the body. The ions also bond to dust and mold particles, break down germs and odors at their source, and break down toxic gasses.
There are three primary ways for the Coronavirus to spread—through person to person contact, by touching a surface that has the virus, and by breathing in microscopic droplets expelled by someone with the virus.
“The ions that we produce pack the occupied space,” Abate says. “They saturate the space and go anywhere the conditioned air will go. “Our system can continuously disinfect the air and surfaces. The system offers another layer of protection against the droplets.”

‘Active’ Form of Air Purification
Unlike a passive system that draws air in and then “filters” it, AtmosAir technology creates the ions once the air flows through the system. “It is an active form of air purification,” Abate says.
Ionization is nature’s air cleaning process. Whereas, unique environmental conditions contribute to ion concentration in excess of 5,000 ions/cm3 near waterfalls and high mountains, ion levels can be as low as 75 ions/cm3 in some indoor locations. Bi Polar Ionization restores ion levels.
Because AtmosAir removes contaminants from the air, less makeup air is needed in a space—up to 50 percent less. According to Levine, HVAC system size can be reduced by 15 percent and energy consumption can be reduced by 30 percent. “If designed into a project at the outset, your HVAC system does not need to be quite as big,” Levine says. The life of HVAC equipment and filters can also be extended.
When asked what advances have been made to his company’s systems since the company was founded in 2007, Levine said, “Now we have incorporated sensors into the technology so you can measure the air quality on a real-time basis. We have also advanced the tubes so that they last 2 years—18,000 hours.” AtmosAware sensors measure different environmental conditions such as TVOC (total volatile organic compound), ozone, and relative humidity. The AtmosSmart logic-based controller interprets the data and automatically adjusts ion intensity to ensure optimal levels and air cleaning performance are maintained, 24/7.
An AtmosAir system is scalable, Levine adds—from a PTAC to a central air system. “We just did 140 hotel rooms in Tulsa. They are integrated into every hotel room in the fan coil unit.”
In addition to the direct physical public health, cost and energy savings benefits, bipolar ionization can be part of a wellness program. Levine says all of Hilton’s Five Feet to Fitness rooms will have AtmosAir purification. Some hotels are marketing rooms with AtmosAir systems as allergy and asthma proofed. In general, enhanced air quality has been proven to result in improved worker productivity, less sickness, and less missed work time.

When connections between people you meet can provide digital information.

On 19.4.2020 the post of a female contact of mine appeared on my Facebook news feed. Nothing of her had ever appeared to me previously, despite having been connected since 23 March 2018, without having any memory of it.
Her post communicated the alleged numerical value of the word QAnon in the Jewish gematria and for this reason it immediately caught my attention.
I left a comment, flying over the meaning of the word QAnon, which refers to a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters, and asking if she had been an expert on Jewish gematria.
From there we started to communicate privately, slowly leading me to believe in a singular connection.
In fact, she told me that on 2.1.2018 she had close contact with higher entities who initiated her to new acquaintances and that in March 2019 she had a dream in which she read 3 times the word Death, that in Italian language begins with the letter M, on the walls of a building that could have been a hospital, associated with the date 8.8.2020.
I therefore let myself be carried away by my numeric and symbolic intuition by noting significant singularities:

1. Personal Information analysis:

• Her name has the value 30 in the gematria T9, reduced to 3 in mod 9.
• Her surname has the value 48 in the gematria T9, reduced to 3 in mod 9.
• Her date of birth is 31.10.1982. The sum of the single digits gives 25, reduced to 7 in mod 9.
• In total 3.3.7. In summary 13, reduced to 4 in mod 9.

2. Connections with the dream and meaning of the results:

• The symbolic date dreamed by her is: 8/8/2020, from which 8.8.4 is obtained.
• So with the partial results I can build the following matrix: [3.3.7; 8.8.4]
• Adding the digits of the columns we get 11.11.11. In 216-digits searches the number 11 represents time and is the first master number.
• Adding all the digits of the matrix for each of the two lines I get 33, another master number, a value that represents light and its speed. The coincidence is that 33 is also the symbolic value in the gematria T9 of her full name.
• MORTE (death), the dreamed world has the value of 30 in the gematria T9.
• The dreamed first letter M in T9 is worth 6. 3 times 6 gives 666, the number that of John's apocalypse is associated with the Antichrist.
• Then, taking the result of the previous matrix: 11.11.11 and multiplying it by 3, the number of times the date appeared in her dream is obtained 33.33.33. In mod9 this gives the value 6.6.6, in synthesis 666 associating the digits and 216 multiplying 6x6x6, value that leads to the 216-digits matrix.

3. More about the date of 08.08.2020 that she dreamed of, in connection with her birthday:

• This date is spaced from her birthday on 31.10.2020 of 84 days.
• Multiplying 84 by the approximation for excess of π calculated by Archimedes from Syracuse and making the square we obtain 69696.
• On number 84 I discovered many things, for example the fact that it represents my full name in the gematria T9, or the fact that 84 days correspond to 2016 hours.
• The number 2016 is very unique. For example: 2016 - 216 (the number of digits in the matrix) - 1188 (the sum of the digits in the matrix) = 612 (216 read backwards).
• Or: (1188 - (2016 + 216) / 2) = 216/3 = 72 (the number of years for the sun to move 1 ° around the ecliptic), so I invite you to see the video I produced, entitled 72.
• In particular, 72 multiplied by 30, the number of patterns in the 216-digits Time Code gives the value 2160.
• Recalling that 2028 is the year that according to 216-digits humanity will enter the so-called imaginary time, and that it also corresponds to 338 (the numerical value of my surname in the gematria in Italian) multiplied by 6, it is therefore observed that [ 2x (2160-2028)] ^ 2 leads back to 69696, which represents the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden.

What could all this mean about my connection with this woman in terms of digital philosophy, especially regarding the date she dreamed that will arrive only in about 3 months?

The spread of the Covid-19 is not only limited practicing social distancing but also combating the indoor air pollution.

Many people might be tempted to think that staying indoors means to be safe from air pollution, but research shows that this is far from the case. Air pollution can occur indoors, too, and has been linked to occurrences of headaches, dizziness, lack of concentration, and fatigue. The World Health Organization calls this “sick building syndrome.”

In the developed world, we already collectively spend around 90% of our time indoors. With these numbers increasing as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, managing indoor air pollution is even more important.
 

The World Health Organization (WHO) must take swift action to establish global guidance on indoor air quality to reduce the spread of airborne bacteria and viruses in buildings, urges a new petition

A new petition has called on the WHO to take decisive action to establish global guidance on indoor air quality, with a clear recommendation on the minimum lower limit of air humidity in public buildings.

Supported by members of the global scientific and medical community, the petition is designed to not only increase global awareness on the role indoor environmental quality plays in physical health but also to call on the WHO to drive meaningful policy change.

As Covid-19 continues to put pressure on health systems and the economy globally, the group calls on the WHO to review the extensive research that shows an indoor humidity level of between the 40%-60% relative humidity (RH), is the optimum threshold for inhibiting the spread of respiratory viruses such as influenza.

Keep indoor air at 40-60%

Professor Dr Akiko Iwasaki PhD, The Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of immunobiology and professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale, and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute said: “90% of our lives in the developed world are spent indoors in close proximity to each other.
“When cold outdoor air with little moisture is heated indoors, the air’s relative humidity drops to about 20%. This dry air provides a clear pathway for airborne viruses, such as Covid-19.
“That’s why I recommend humidifiers during the winter, and why I feel the world would be a healthier place if all our public buildings kept their indoor air at 40 to 60% RH.”
Evidence shows the important role indoor humidity levels play in preventing virus transmission and improving immune system response.

There are three key notable findings:

• Breathing dry air impairs our respiratory immune system’s ability to efficiently capture, remove and fight airborne viruses and germs, rendering us more vulnerable to respiratory infections.
• When the RH is lower than 40%, airborne droplets containing viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, shrink through evaporation making them lighter. This enables the particles to float for longer in the air, increasing the likelihood of infection.
• The vast majority of respiratory viruses suspended in dry atmospheres survive and remain infectious for much longer than those floating in air with an optimum humidity of 40-60%RH.

Optimum humidity can improve indoor air quality
One of the leading forces in the charge for a globally recognised 40-60%RH guideline for public buildings, Dr Stephanie Taylor MD, infection control consultant at Harvard Medical School, ASHRAE distinguished lecturer & member of the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Group, said: “In light of the Covid-19 crisis, it is now more important than ever to listen to the evidence that shows optimum humidity can improve our indoor air quality and respiratory health.
“It is time for regulators to place management of the built environment at the very center of disease control. Introducing WHO guidelines on minimum lower limits of relative humidity for public buildings has the potential to set a new standard for indoor air and improve the lives and health of millions of people.”
Dr Walter Hugentobler, MD, general physician, former lecturer Inst. of primary care at the University of Zürich, added: “Raising air humidity by humidification reduces the risk of virus spread in hospitals and other buildings at low-cost and without causing negative effects.
“It can also be easily implemented in public buildings, both in private and workplace environments with relative ease. Humidification gives people a simple means of actively combatting seasonal respiratory infections.”
According to the group, if the WHO publishes much-needed guidance on minimum lower limits of humidity, building standards regulators around the world would be encouraged to act urgently.

If these recommendations were implemented, the following effects could benefit global health systems and the world economy:

• Respiratory infections from seasonal respiratory viruses, such as flu, being significantly reduced
• Thousands of lives saved every year from the reduction in seasonal illness
• Global healthcare services being less burdened every winter
• The world’s economies massively benefiting from less absenteeism through illness
• A healthier indoor environment and improved health for millions of people.

There are different interpretations of whether a Third Temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem as one of the critical signs of the Messiah's imminent arrival.

Beliefs around the Third Temple are a part of eschatology, the branch of theology concerned with the end times.
The First Temple of Jerusalem, also known as Solomon's Temple, was the holy place for the Kingdom of Israel and was destroyed in 587 BCE when the city was under siege. The temple was rebuilt less than 100 years later as a holy site, before being destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70 CE and starting an exile of the Jewish people.
Rebuilding the temple — that being the third temple in Jerusalem — has important value in Jewish and Christian scriptures in the Book of Ezekiel. Both religions detail a clear beginning of mankind, so there must be a clear end, which the Third Temple symbolizes, said Motti Inbari, University of North Carolina at Pembroke associate professor of religion.
Jewish tradition says as the end times approaches, God will return the Jews to their homeland and begin performing miracles. One of those miracles will be a temple descending from heaven onto the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Inbari said.
"It will be a perfect return of everything that was destroyed in the year 70 [CE]," he said.
In the 20th century, the growing Zionist movement pushed for Jewish emigration from Europe to a Jewish state. Jews saw the success in doing the work of creating a nation themselves, and in the 1990s some strands of theology shifted to believing humans should also build the Third Temple rather than letting it come from heaven, Inbari said.
However, the idea of humans building the temple remains a minority view, Inbari said.
The Third Temple plays a significant role in Christianity as a sign of Jesus' second coming, detailed in the Book of Revelation, said Darrell Bock, Dallas Theological Seminary senior research professor.
"Among Christians, you really have two approaches: One is to say there is not going to be a physical temple, per se," Bock said. "But the more well-known view is that there will be, and when it shows it up, that's an indication that we're pretty close to the return of Christ."
Christianity is also split on whether the temple will be built by human hands, Bock said. Christians who read the Bible more literally, who tend to be theological conservatives, believe the temple will be a physical building.
 

Industry 4.0 is not only as relevant as it was before the global Covid-19 emergency, it's actually far more relevant moving forward. 

The world is gripped by the Covid-19 pandemic. The global supply chain is experiencing a level of disruption that has never been seen before.
Some manufacturers have ceased production completely, some have seen greatly reduced demand and others have seen a huge increase in demand. Every manufacturer is impacted by this crisis in some way and for many this poses an existential threat.
Prior to the crisis, Industry 4.0 was an area of great interest to many manufacturers. It was an exciting topic with huge potential benefits and was widely regarded as a ‘positive’ and future thinking topic.
Today, many of us are focused on the here and now. Our health and that of our family, friends and colleagues; the ability to access the food and supplies we need; our job security; the financial impact on our employers, clients and partners.
Beyond that we also have to consider the wider economic impact and the unknown amount of time it will take for things to return to some level of normality.
At this point it seems insensitive and inappropriate to discuss Industry 4.0 in the way it was discussed pre-crisis. The business drivers of Industry 4.0 pre-crisis were focused on competitive advantage, cost reduction, productivity, sustainability and innovation. The goal was to make well run businesses run better.
The focus for many manufacturers now is survival first and foremost and beyond that, damage limitation.
The immediate financial impact on manufacturers is already resulting in a huge reduction in non-essential spending and investments. Many Industry 4.0 solutions currently being considered or being deployed fall into the category of non-essential business activities.
This raises a few challenging but pertinent questions:

• Is Industry 4.0 even a topic manufacturers should be thinking about?
• Is Industry 4.0 relevant anymore?
• If it is relevant, why and what role does it have to play moving forward?

The short answer is yes, I believe Industry 4.0 is not only as relevant as it was before, I believe it is actually far more relevant moving forward. Here’s why.
The priorities for most manufacturers today fall into three distinct phases: Phase 1 – Survival; Phase 2 – Recovery; Phase 3 – Business as Usual in the new post-crisis paradigm.
The goal for all manufacturers will be to get to Phase 3 as soon as possible and at the lowest cost. In defining the operating model for Phase 3 they will factor in lessons learned from the crisis and try to build a more resilient and agile business.
They will be asking themselves some fundamental questions such as: Where were the weaknesses? Where did they make costly decisions and why? What would have helped?
I believe that the key finding will be that the systems and processes in place weren’t fit for purpose. It’s too early to say for certain, but it seems clear from events unfolding before us that one of the major weaknesses is a lack of real-time visibility across the business. Visibility that is essential to support critical business decisions.
Examples include:

• What is the demand for products and where can we manufacture them?
• What are our current raw material, WIP and finished goods inventory levels?
• What is our manufacturing capacity, both in terms of human resources and asset availability?
• What is our spare parts inventory and where are they?
• Where are our raw material shipments and what alternatives do we have?
• How is our finished goods distribution network operating?

Most system architectures currently consist of a heterogenous mix of applications and data silos. This architecture results in latency of information and a lack of a single real-time view of the business status. As soon as this architecture was tested beyond its normal operating conditions it failed, and this is why it is not fit for purpose.
I believe that another key learning from the crisis will be driven by manufacturers’ reliance on human capital and the impacts of social distancing. If we go one level deeper than the supply chain view, then manufacturing in particular will be highlighted as a big area for improvement.
During the crisis, production plans will have been changing on a much higher frequency as a result of changing demands and availability of raw materials, key staff and assets. Manufacturing has a much higher volume and frequency of ‘transaction’ than the supply chain. Manufacturing is real-time, not near real-time.
As I write this, the recovery phase is still an unknown amount of time away. When manufacturers do begin to move into the recovery phase, they will still be asking the same questions they are asking during the crisis highlighted above.
Eventually, we will reach the new normality and manufacturers will be keen to make sure this cannot happen again. The role of Industry 4.0 in the future Industry 4.0 has a different role from today onward. Its role should be to:

1. Help make sure that more companies survive
2. Shorten the recovery phase and help return businesses to normal operations as soon as possible
3. Provide the platform to develop new, more resilient businesses in the medium to long term

Industry 4.0 can achieve this because many of the capabilities it offers could have greatly reduced the impact of this crisis on us all.
Just a few examples are:

• Real-time visibility into the availability of raw materials, finished goods, WIP, people and assets
• Use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to constantly reassess and re-plan activities
• Robotic process automation (RPA) to support non-value add labour intensive activities
• The use of mobile technology and augmented / virtual reality to enable workers to perform tasks they were not trained for more easily. This could have assisted with skills shortages due to self-isolation or repurposing of manufacturing
• The same technologies together with digital twins and remote support from OEM’s would improve availability of assets
• The same technologies could also have enabled more remote and virtual working to help with the issue of lockdown and social distancing
• 3D printing of spare parts that were stuck in the supply chain
• Use of AGV’s, autonomous electric vehicles and drones to again reduce the reliance on people and to further assist with social distancing.

Many of these technologies and solutions were seen as a nice to have. Many were waiting to ‘cross the chasm’ into mainstream adoption. Rather than retreating away from them, I believe we should be thinking about how we can use these technologies now and in the future.
Can any be deployed now to help deal with the crisis? Beyond that, how can they be used to help us recover more quickly and develop more resilient and robust businesses that are better equipped to deal with this level of disruption in the future?
There is one other critical factor in navigating our way out of this. I have felt for a very long time that the key to successful digital transformation was not technology but collaboration.
We need to break down the traditional silos both within organisations and in the external supplier ecosystem. This has ever been truer than it is today and the fact that I can see it happening in so many different areas gives me a lot of hope.
I don’t have all of the answers, none of us do. What I do have are lots of ideas, a desire to make a difference and a willingness to listen.