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Where is the human fate and who is controlling?

Human Emotions and Feelings:

Admiration, Ambition, Anger, Anxiety, Bitterness, Contempt, Contentment, Despair, Disappointment, Discontent, Disillusionment, Embarrassment, Emotion, Enthusiasm, Envy, Fear, Foreboding, Guilt, Happiness, Hate, Homesickness, Hope, Horror, Inferiority, Intuition, Jealousy, Joy, Loneliness, Loss, Love, Mourning, Nostalgia, Passion, Pity, Pleasure, Regret, Resentment, Satisfaction, Shame, Shyness, Sorrow, Unhappiness, World Weariness.

What is love?

Love, emotion explored in philosophy, religion, and literature, often as either romantic love, the fraternal love of others, or the love of God.

For information on:

• fundamental source of love, see Family: The Modern Family

• capacity to love as a measure of mental health, see Mental Health

• love ranked among other human needs, see Motivation

• philosophical considerations of love, see love (with hate) as a basic force in shaping reality in Empedocles; reference to detailed examination of love and hate in Max Scheler; description of love of God in Baruch Spinoza: Philosophy

• pre-Christian credos of love, see Essenes; Mithraism; Stoicism: Principles

• Christian love of God, self, and others, see Epistles of John; Christianity: Central Teachings;Ethics: Christian Ethics;Existentialism: Existentialism and Literature;Lutheranism: Salvation by Faith

• Platonic love, see Marsilio Ficino

• rituals and customs of romantic love and marriage, see Betrothal; Celibacy; Dowry; Marriage; Courtly Love

• excessive self-love, see explanation of “the Fall” of Adam and Eve in Religion: Salvation; mythological incarnation of obsessive self-love in Narcissus

• rejection of romantic love, see Hippolytus; Pygmalion; Arthur Schopenhauer

• excessive self-love, see Narcissus, see Cupid; Eros; Freya; Hathor; Ishtar; Sumerian Religion; Venus

• creative forms used as expressions of love, see Elegy; Poetry; Popular Music; Romance; Song; Sonnet.

Salvation by Faith

Salvation, according to Lutheran teaching, does not depend on worthiness or merit but is a gift of God’s sovereign grace. All human beings are considered sinners and, because of original sin, are in bondage to the powers of evil and thus unable to contribute to their liberation (see Justification). Lutherans believe that faith, understood as trust in God’s steadfast love, is the only appropriate way for human beings to respond to God’s saving initiative. Thus, “salvation by faith alone” became the distinctive and controversial slogan of Lutheranism. Opponents claimed that this position failed to do justice to the Christian responsibility to do good works, but Lutherans have replied that faith must be active in love and that good works follow from faith as a good tree produces good fruit.

Faith, an attitude of the entire self, including both will and intellect, directed toward a person, an idea, or—as in the case of religious faith—a divine being. Modern theologians agree in emphasizing this total existential character of faith, thus distinguishing it from the popular conception of faith that identifies it with belief as opposed to knowledge. Faith indeed includes belief but goes far beyond it, and in the history of theology the distinction has more often been drawn between faith and works than between faith and knowledge. This distinction was powerfully expressed by the apostle Paul, who argued that the sinful human being cannot achieve salvation through good works, but only through faith in the free grace of God. In this view, forcefully revived by Martin Luther at the time of the Reformation, good works are consequences of faith. The faithful relation to God enables the believer to transcend limitations and bring forth good works.

Soul, in many religions and philosophies, the immaterial element that, together with the material body, constitutes the human individual. In general, the soul is conceived as an inner, vital, and spiritual principle, the source of all bodily functions and particularly of mental activities. Belief in some kind of soul that can exist apart from the body is found in all known cultures. In many contemporary nonliterate societies, human beings are said to have several souls—sometimes as many as seven—localized in different parts of the body and having diverse functions. Disease is frequently explained as “soul-loss,” which can occur, for example, when witches steal the soul or evil spirits capture it.

In the East, belief in a human soul is central to several philosophical and religious systems. Thus, for instance, in early Hinduism the soul or self (atman) was considered the principle that controls all activities and defines one's self-identity and consciousness. The philosophical Hindu writings, the Upanishads, identify the atman with the divine (Brahman), adding an eternal dimension to the soul. Bound up with matter, the human soul is caught in the cycle of reincarnation until it achieves purification and knowledge and merges once again with ultimate reality (see Transmigration). Buddhism is unique in the history of religions because it teaches that the individual soul is an illusion produced by various psychological and physiological influences. Thus, it has no conception of a soul or self that can survive death.

Early Judaism considered the human personality as a whole, without making a sharp distinction between body and soul. By the Middle Ages, however, the soul was defined in Judaism as the principle of life and was considered capable of surviving bodily decay. The Christian doctrine of the soul has been strongly influenced by the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle (see Christianity). Most Christians believe that each individual has an immortal soul and that the human personality as a whole, composed of soul and resurrected body, may, through faith, be granted God's presence in the afterlife (see Resurrection). The Neoplatonic theory of the soul as prisoner in a material body (see Neoplatonism) prevailed in Christian thought until the advent of the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, who accepted Aristotle's analysis of the soul and body as two conceptually distinguishable elements of a single substance.

The teachings of Islam on the soul resemble those of Judaism and Christianity. According to the Qur'an (Koran), God breathed the soul into the first human beings, and at death the souls of the faithful are brought near to God.

SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

The belief in the existence of souls may have important social consequences by reinforcing moral obligations and by serving as a guiding principle in life. The cultural significance of the belief in souls reflects the universality of the problems to which it is a response: the complex question of the human personality, the moral and spiritual experiences of life, and the perennial question of life after death.

See also Immortality.

Immortality, unending existence of the soul after physical death. The doctrine of immortality is common to many religions; in different cultures, however, it takes various forms, ranging from ultimate extinction of the soul to its final survival and the resurrection of the body. In Hinduism, the ultimate personal goal is considered absorption into the “universal spirit.” Buddhist doctrine promises nirvana, the state of complete bliss achieved through total extinction of the personality. In the religion of ancient Egypt, entrance to immortal life was dependent on the results of divine examination of the merits of an individual's life. Early Greek religion promised a shadowy continuation of life on earth in an underground region known as Hades. In Christianity and Islam, as well as in Judaism, the immortality promised is primarily of the spirit. The former two religions both differ from Judaism in holding that after the resurrection of the body and a general judgment of the entire human race, the body is to be reunited with the spirit to experience either reward or punishment. In Jewish eschatology, the resurrection of the soul will take place at the advent of the Messiah, although the reunion of body and spirit will endure only for the messianic age, when the spirit will return to heaven.

Female Reproductive System

The bones of the human female pelvis form a bowl-shaped cavity that supports the weight of a developing fetus and encloses the organs of the female reproductive tract. Two ovaries, the female gonads, produce mature eggs. Leading away from the ovaries are the fallopian tubes, or oviducts, the site of fertilization. The uterus, a muscular organ with an expandable neck called the cervix, houses the developing fetus, which leaves the woman's body through the vagina, or birth canal.

Male Reproductive System

The organs of the male reproductive system enable a man to have sexual intercourse and to fertilize female sex cells (eggs) with sperm. The gonads, called testicles, produce sperm. Sperm pass through a long duct called the vas deferens to the seminal vesicles, a pair of sacs that lies behind the bladder. These sacs produce seminal fluid, which mixes with sperm to produce semen. Semen leaves the seminal vesicles and travels through the prostate gland, which produces additional secretions that are added to semen. During male orgasm the penis ejaculates semen.

Reproduction:

Reproduction is accomplished by the union of male sperm and the female ovum. In coitus, the male organ ejaculates more than 250 million sperm into the vagina, from which some make their way to the uterus. Ovulation, the release of an egg into the uterus, occurs approximately every 28 days; during the same period the uterus is prepared for the implantation of a fertilized ovum by the action of estrogens. If a male cell fails to unite with a female cell, other hormones cause the uterine wall to slough off during menstruation. From puberty to menopause, the process of ovulation, and preparation, and menstruation is repeated monthly except for periods of pregnancy. The duration of pregnancy is about 280 days. After childbirth, prolactin, a hormone secreted by the pituitary, activates the production of milk.

HUMAN

Human, common name given to any individual of the species Homo sapiens and, by extension, to the entire species. The term is also applied to certain species that were the evolutionary forerunners of Homo sapiens (see Human Evolution). Scientists consider all living people members of a single species.

CLASSIFICATION

Homo sapiens is identified, for purposes of classification, as an animal (kingdom Animalia) with a backbone (phylum Chordata) and segmented spinal cord (subphylum Vertebrata) that suckles its young (class Mammalia); that gestates its young with the aid of a placenta (subclass Eutheria); that is equipped with five-digited extremities, a collarbone, and a single pair of mammary glands on the chest (order Primates); and that has eyes at the front of the head, stereoscopic vision, and a proportionately large brain (suborder Anthropoidea). The species belongs to the family Hominidae, the general characteristics of which are discussed below.

STRUCTURE AND PHYSIOLOGY

Human Spine :

Although individual vertebrae move little from one to the next, the human spinal column as a whole is a chain flexible enough to allow us to touch our toes. Its unique S-shape centers the weight of our long bodies over our feet, keeping us from toppling. Animals that walk on all four legs have straighter spines that provide even support for their horizontal bodies.

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The details of skeletal structure distinguishing Homo sapiens from the nearest primate relatives—the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orangutan—stem largely from a very early adaptation to a completely erect posture and a two-footed striding walk (bipedalism). The uniquely S-shaped spinal column places the center of gravity of the human body directly over the area of support provided by the feet, thus giving stability and balance in the upright position. Other mechanical modifications for bipedalism include a broad pelvis, a locking knee joint, an elongated heel bone, and a lengthened and aligned big toe. Although varying degrees of bipedalism are seen in other anthropoids, all have straight or bowed spines, bent knees, and grasping (prehensile) feet, and all use the hands to bear part of the body weight when moving about.

Complete bipedalism in the human freed the hand to become a supremely sensitive instrument for precise manipulation and grasping. The most important structural detail in this refinement is the elongated human thumb, which can rotate freely and is fully opposable to the other fingers. The physiological requirements for speech were secondarily established by erect posture, which positions the vocal cords for controlled breathing, and by the skilled use of the hands. The latter development occurs in association with the enlargement and specialization of a brain area (Broca's convolution) that is a prerequisite for refined control of the lips and tongue.

The large (averaging 1400 cc/85.4 cu in) brain of Homo sapiens is approximately double that of early human toolmakers. This great increase in size in only 2 million years was achieved by a process called neoteny, which is the prolongation of retention of immature characteristics. The juvenile stage of brain and skull development is prolonged so that they grow for a longer period of time in relation to the time required to reach sexual maturity. Unlike the early human adult skull, with its sloping forehead and prominent jaw, the modern human skull—with biologically insignificant variations—retains into maturity a proportionately large size, in relation to the rest of the body, a high-rounded dome, straight-planed face, and reduced jaw size, all closely resembling the characteristics of the skull in the juvenile chimpanzee. Its enlarged dimensions required adaptations for passage through the birth canal; consequently, the human female pelvis widens at maturity (with some sacrifice in swiftness of locomotion), and the human infant is born prematurely. Chimpanzees are born with 65 percent of their adult brain capacity; Australopithecine, an erect, tool-using near-human of 3 million years ago, was born with about 50 percent; modern human newborns have only 25 percent of adult brain capacity, resulting in an extended period of helplessness. The many neurological pathways to the rapidly growing brain must be organized and coordinated during a prolonged period of dependency on and stimulation by adults; lacking this close external bond in the early years of life, development of the modern brain remains incomplete.

BEHAVIOR

Human Brain

The human brain has three major structural components: the large dome-shaped cerebrum (top), the smaller somewhat spherical cerebellum (lower right), and the brainstem (center). Prominent in the brainstem are the medulla oblongata (the egg-shaped enlargement at center) and the thalamus (between the medulla and the cerebrum). The cerebrum is responsible for intelligence and reasoning. The cerebellum helps to maintain balance and posture. The medulla is involved in maintaining involuntary functions such as respiration, and the thalamus acts as a relay center for electrical impulses traveling to and from the cerebral cortex.

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The physiological adaptations that made humans more flexible than other primates allowed for the development of a wide range of abilities and an unparalleled versatility in behavior. The brain's great size, complexity, and slow maturation, with neural connections being added through at least the first 12 years of life, meant that learned behavior could largely modify stereotyped, instinctive responses. New environmental demands could be met by rapid adjustments rather than by slow genetic selection; thus, survival in a wide range of habitats and under extreme conditions eventually became possible without further species differentiation. Each new infant, however, with relatively few innate traits yet with a vast number of potential behaviors, must be taught to achieve its biological potential as a human.

CULTURAL ATTRIBUTES

Flint Tools

Humans have been toolmakers for at least 2.5 million years. The earliest technology was a tool kit of haphazardly shaped chopping, cutting, and scraping implements fashioned from pebbles. From the later stone ages, archaeologists have identified some 60 or 70 standard kinds of intricate tools with very specific purposes. While the ax-head, arrowhead, scrapers, borers, and flakes in this picture were all made of stone, materials such as bone and ivory were also used. Tools like these can be made by direct percussion (using a hammerstone or other implement to knock flakes from the raw material) or indirect percussion (using the hammerstone to strike a chisel-like tool that is precisely positioned on the raw material).

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The human species has a unique capability for culture in the sense of conscious thinking and planning, transmission of skills and systems of social relationships, and creative modification of the environment. The integrated patterns of behavior required for planning and fashioning tools were accomplished at least 2.5 million years ago, and some form of advanced code for vocal communication may also have existed at this time. By 350,000 years ago planned hunting, firemaking, and the wearing of clothing were well established, as was possibly ritualized disposal of the dead. Evidence of religion, recorded events, and art date from 30,000 to 40,000 years ago and imply advanced language and ethics for the complex ordering of social groups required for such activities. From about that time the genus Homo began to stabilize into the one generalized species of Homo sapiens.

OTHER DEFINITIONS

The preceding description rests on anatomical observation (see Anatomy) and current scientific theory on the origin of the Homo species. Humankind itself and the essence of being human are also defined in many other ways—religious, social, moral, and legal.

Human Nature, essential qualities shared by all humans. Philosophy has often been concerned with identifying what constitutes and drives human nature and with determining whether human nature is essentially good or evil.

For information on:

• the impermanence of what is generally thought of as human nature, see Michel Foucault

• human nature as constituting formed habits and the desire for happiness, see Aristotle: Ethics

• human nature as driven toward pain, suffering, and death, see Arthur Schopenhauer; Pessimism

• human nature as essentially evil, see Original Sin; Chinese Philosophy: Legalism

• essential goodness of human nature, see Confucianism: Confucian Schools of Thought;Pelagianism

• human nature as a struggle between good and evil, see Western Philosophy: Augustinian Philosophy

• human nature as controlled by natural selection, see Sociobiology; Naturalism (literature)

• human nature as the result of environment and experience, see Ludwig Feuerbach

• creating one's own nature through free choices, see Existentialism; Søren Kierkegaard: The Choice of Life

• human nature as resulting from the struggle to fulfill a hierarchy of human needs, see Abraham Maslow

• human nature as the product of innate drives conflicting with the requirements of social living, see Psychoanalysis: Id, Ego, and Superego

Recessive Gene Transmission

Some genes that cause genetic diseases interact in a dominant-recessive pattern. In these cases, two copies of the recessive gene are required for the disease to occur. A person who has just one copy of the recessive gene is termed a carrier, since he or she carries the gene but is not affected by it. In this illustration, the dominant gene is represented in green, and the recessive in blue. For the couple on the left, the father has one copy of the dominant gene and one copy of the recessive gene. The mother has two copies of the dominant gene. Each parent can contribute just one gene to the child. The four children shown on the lower left represent the probabilities (not the actual children) for the combinations that can result from their parents. The children on the far left received the recessive gene from their father and the dominant gene from their mother, and are therefore carriers. For any child born to these parents, there is a 50 percent chance that the child will be a carrier. Since none of the children can inherit two copies of the recessive gene, none of the children will develop the disease. When both parents are carriers, however, as shown by the couple on the right, there is a 25 percent chance that any child born has the disease, a 50 percent chance that a child is a carrier, and a 25 percent chance that a child does not have the disease and is not a carrier.

Sexual reproduction ensures that the genes in a population are rearranged in each generation, a process termed recombination. Although the combinations of genes in individuals change with each new generation, the gene frequency, or ratio of different alleles in the entire population, remains relatively constant if no evolutionary forces act on the population. One such force is the introduction of new genes into the genetic material of the population, or gene pool.

Scientists have long considered the nature of consciousness without producing a fully satisfactory definition. In the early 20th century American philosopher and psychologist William James suggested that consciousness is a mental process involving both attention to external stimuli and short-term memory. Later scientific explorations of consciousness mostly expanded upon James’s work. In this article from a 1997 special issue of Scientific American, Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who helped determine the structure of DNA, and fellow biophysicist Christof Koch explain how experiments on vision might deepen our understanding of consciousness.

The Problem of Consciousness

By Francis Crick and Christof Koch

The overwhelming question in neurobiology today is the relation between the mind and the brain. Everyone agrees that what we know as mind is closely related to certain aspects of the behavior of the brain, not to the heart, as Aristotle thought. Its most mysterious aspect is consciousness or awareness, which can take many forms, from the experience of pain to self-consciousness. In the past the mind (or soul) was often regarded, as it was by Descartes, as something immaterial, separate from the brain but interacting with it in some way. A few neuroscientists, such as Sir John Eccles, still assert that the soul is distinct from the body. But most neuroscientists now believe that all aspects of mind, including its most puzzling attribute—consciousness or awareness—are likely to be explainable in a more materialistic way as the behavior of large sets of interacting neurons. As William James, the father of American psychology, said a century ago, consciousness is not a thing but a process.

Exactly what the process is, however, has yet to be discovered. For many years after James penned The Principles of Psychology, consciousness was a taboo concept in American psychology because of the dominance of the behaviorist movement. With the advent of cognitive science in the mid-1950s, it became possible once more for psychologists to consider mental processes as opposed to merely observing behavior. In spite of these changes, until recently most cognitive scientists ignored consciousness, as did almost all neuroscientists. The problem was felt to be either purely 'philosophical' or too elusive to study experimentally. It would not have been easy for a neuroscientist to get a grant just to study consciousness.

In our opinion, such timidity is ridiculous, so a few years ago we began to think about how best to attack the problem scientifically. How to explain mental events as being caused by the firing of large sets of neurons? Although there are those who believe such an approach is hopeless, we feel it is not productive to worry too much over aspects of the problem that cannot be solved scientifically or, more precisely, cannot be solved solely by using existing scientific ideas. Radically new concepts may indeed be needed—recall the modifications of scientific thinking forced on us by quantum mechanics. The only sensible approach is to press the experimental attack until we are confronted with dilemmas that call for new ways of thinking.

There are many possible approaches to the problem of consciousness. Some psychologists feel that any satisfactory theory should try to explain as many aspects of consciousness as possible, including emotion, imagination, dreams, mystical experiences and so on. Although such an all-embracing theory will be necessary in the long run, we thought it wiser to begin with the particular aspect of consciousness that is likely to yield most easily. What this aspect may be is a matter of personal judgment. We selected the mammalian visual system because humans are very visual animals and because so much experimental and theoretical work has already been done on it.

It is not easy to grasp exactly what we need to explain, and it will take many careful experiments before visual consciousness can be described scientifically. We did not attempt to define consciousness itself because of the dangers of premature definition. (If this seems like a copout, try defining the word 'gene'—you will not find it easy.) Yet the experimental evidence that already exists provides enough of a glimpse of the nature of visual consciousness to guide research. In this article, we will attempt to show how this evidence opens the way to attack this profound and intriguing problem.

Visual theorists agree that the problem of visual consciousness is ill posed. The mathematical term 'ill posed' means that additional constraints are needed to solve the problem. Although the main function of the visual system is to perceive objects and events in the world around us, the information available to our eyes is not sufficient by itself to provide the brain with its unique interpretation of the visual world. The brain must use past experience (either its own or that of our distant ancestors, which is embedded in our genes) to help interpret the information coming into our eyes. An example would be the derivation of the three-dimensional representation of the world from the two-dimensional signals falling onto the retinas of our two eyes or even onto one of them.

Visual theorists also would agree that seeing is a constructive process, one in which the brain has to carry out complex activities (sometimes called computations) in order to decide which interpretation to adopt of the ambiguous visual input. 'Computation' implies that the brain acts to form a symbolic representation of the visual world, with a mapping (in the mathematical sense) of certain aspects of that world onto elements in the brain.

Ray Jackendoff of Brandeis University postulates, as do most cognitive scientists, that the computations carried out by the brain are largely unconscious and that what we become aware of is the result of these computations. But while the customary view is that this awareness occurs at the highest levels of the computational system, Jackendoff has proposed an intermediate-level theory of consciousness.

What we see, Jackendoff suggests, relates to a representation of surfaces that are directly visible to us, together with their outline, orientation, color, texture and movement. (This idea has similarities to what the late David C. Marr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called a '2 1/2-dimensional sketch.' It is more than a two-dimensional sketch because it conveys the orientation of the visible surfaces. It is less than three-dimensional because depth information is not explicitly represented.) In the next stage this sketch is processed by the brain to produce a three-dimensional representation. Jackendoff argues that we are not visually aware of this three-dimensional representation.

An example may make this process clearer. If you look at a person whose back is turned to you, you can see the back of the head but not the face. Nevertheless, your brain infers that the person has a face. We can deduce as much because if that person turned around and had no face, you would be very surprised.

The viewer-centered representation that corresponds to the visible back of the head is what you are vividly aware of. What your brain infers about the front would come from some kind of three-dimensional representation. This does not mean that information flows only from the surface representation to the three-dimensional one; it almost certainly flows in both directions. When you imagine the front of the face, what you are aware of is a surface representation generated by information from the three-dimensional model.

It is important to distinguish between an explicit and an implicit representation. An explicit representation is something that is symbolized without further processing. An implicit representation contains the same information but requires further processing to make it explicit. The pattern of colored dots on a television screen, for example, contains an implicit representation of objects (say, a person's face), but only the dots and their locations are explicit. When you see a face on the screen, there must be neurons in your brain whose firing, in some sense, symbolizes that face.

We call this pattern of firing neurons an active representation. A latent representation of a face must also be stored in the brain, probably as a special pattern of synaptic connections between neurons. For example, you probably have a representation of the Statue of Liberty in your brain, a representation that usually is inactive. If you do think about the Statue, the representation becomes active, with the relevant neurons firing away.

An object, incidentally, may be represented in more than one way—as a visual image, as a set of words and their related sounds, or even as a touch or a smell. These different representations are likely to interact with one another. The representation is likely to be distributed over many neurons, both locally and more globally. Such a representation may not be as simple and straightforward as uncritical introspection might indicate. There is suggestive evidence, partly from studying how neurons fire in various parts of a monkey's brain and partly from examining the effects of certain types of brain damage in humans, that different aspects of a face—and of the implications of a face—may be represented in different parts of the brain.

First, there is the representation of a face as a face: two eyes, a nose, a mouth and so on. The neurons involved are usually not too fussy about the exact size or position of this face in the visual field, nor are they very sensitive to small changes in its orientation. In monkeys, there are neurons that respond best when the face is turning in a particular direction, while others seem to be more concerned with the direction in which the eyes are gazing.

Then there are representations of the parts of a face, as separate from those for the face as a whole. Further, the implications of seeing a face, such as that person's sex, the facial expression, the familiarity or unfamiliarity of the face, and in particular whose face it is, may each be correlated with neurons firing in other places.

What we are aware of at any moment, in one sense or another, is not a simple matter. We have suggested that there may be a very transient form of fleeting awareness that represents only rather simple features and does not require an attentional mechanism. From this brief awareness the brain constructs a viewer-centered representation—what we see vividly and clearly—that does require attention. This in turn probably leads to three-dimensional object representations and thence to more cognitive ones.

Representations corresponding to vivid consciousness are likely to have special properties. William James thought that consciousness involved both attention and short-term memory. Most psychologists today would agree with this view. Jackendoff writes that consciousness is 'enriched' by attention, implying that whereas attention may not be essential for certain limited types of consciousness, it is necessary for full consciousness. Yet it is not clear exactly which forms of memory are involved. Is long-term memory needed? Some forms of acquired knowledge are so embedded in the machinery of neural processing that they are almost certainly used in becoming aware of something. On the other hand, there is evidence from studies of brain-damaged patients that the ability to lay down new long-term episodic memories is not essential for consciousness to be experienced.

It is difficult to imagine that anyone could be conscious if he or she had no memory whatsoever of what had just happened, even an extremely short one. Visual psychologists talk of iconic memory, which lasts for a fraction of a second, and working memory (such as that used to remember a new telephone number) that lasts for only a few seconds unless it is rehearsed. It is not clear whether both of these are essential for consciousness. In any case, the division of short-term memory into these two categories may be too crude.

If these complex processes of visual awareness are localized in parts of the brain, which processes are likely to be where? Many regions of the brain may be involved, but it is almost certain that the cerebral neocortex plays a dominant role. Visual information from the retina reaches the neocortex mainly by way of a part of the thalamus (the lateral geniculate nucleus); another significant visual pathway from the retina is to the superior colliculus, at the top of the brain stem.

The cortex in humans consists of two intricately folded sheets of nerve tissue, one on each side of the head. These sheets are connected by a large tract of about half a billion axons called the corpus callosum. It is well known that if the corpus callosum is cut, as is done for certain cases of intractable epilepsy, one side of the brain is not aware of what the other side is seeing. In particular, the left side of the brain (in a right-handed person) appears not to be aware of visual information received exclusively by the right side. This shows that none of the information required for visual awareness can reach the other side of the brain by traveling down to the brain stem and, from there, back up. In a normal person, such information can get to the other side only by using the axons in the corpus callosum.

A different part of the brain—the hippocampal system—is involved in one-shot, or episodic, memories that, over weeks and months, it passes on to the neocortex. This system is so placed that it receives inputs from, and projects to, many parts of the brain. Thus, one might suspect that the hippocampal system is the essential seat of consciousness. This is not the case: evidence from studies of patients with damaged brains shows that this system is not essential for visual awareness, although naturally a patient lacking one is severely handicapped in everyday life because he cannot remember anything that took place more than a minute or so in the past.

In broad terms, the neocortex of alert animals probably acts in two ways. By building on crude and somewhat redundant wiring, produced by our genes and by embryonic processes, the neocortex draws on visual and other experience to slowly 'rewire' itself to create categories (or 'features') it can respond to. A new category is not fully created in the neocortex after exposure to only one example of it, although some small modifications of the neural connections may be made.

The second function of the neocortex (at least of the visual part of it) is to respond extremely rapidly to incoming signals. To do so, it uses the categories it has learned and tries to find the combinations of active neurons that, on the basis of its past experience, are most likely to represent the relevant objects and events in the visual world at that moment. The formation of such coalitions of active neurons may also be influenced by biases coming from other parts of the brain: for example, signals telling it what best to attend to or high-level expectations about the nature of the stimulus.

Consciousness, as James noted, is always changing. These rapidly formed coalitions occur at different levels and interact to form even broader coalitions. They are transient, lasting usually for only a fraction of a second. Because coalitions in the visual system are the basis of what we see, evolution has seen to it that they form as fast as possible; otherwise, no animal could survive. The brain is handicapped in forming neuronal coalitions rapidly because, by computer standards, neurons act very slowly. The brain compensates for this relative slowness partly by using very many neurons, simultaneously and in parallel, and partly by arranging the system in a roughly hierarchical manner.

If visual awareness at any moment corresponds to sets of neurons firing, then the obvious question is: Where are these neurons located in the brain, and in what way are they firing? Visual awareness is highly unlikely to occupy all the neurons in the neocortex that are firing above their background rate at a particular moment. We would expect that, theoretically, at least some of these neurons would be involved in doing computations—trying to arrive at the best coalitions—whereas others would express the results of these computations, in other words, what we see.

Fortunately, some experimental evidence can be found to back up this theoretical conclusion. A phenomenon called binocular rivalry may help identify the neurons whose firing symbolizes awareness. This phenomenon can be seen in dramatic form in an exhibit prepared by Sally Duensing and Bob Miller at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Conflicting Inputs

Binocular rivalry occurs when each eye has a different visual input relating to the same part of the visual field. The early visual system on the left side of the brain receives an input from both eyes but sees only the part of the visual field to the right of the fixation point. The converse is true for the right side. If these two conflicting inputs are rivalrous, one sees not the two inputs superimposed but first one input, then the other, and so on in alternation.

In the exhibit, called 'The Cheshire Cat,' viewers put their heads in a fixed place and are told to keep the gaze fixed. By means of a suitably placed mirror, one of the eyes can look at another person's face, directly in front, while the other eye sees a blank white screen to the side. If the viewer waves a hand in front of this plain screen at the same location in his or her visual field occupied by the face, the face is wiped out. The movement of the hand, being visually very salient, has captured the brain's attention. Without attention the face cannot be seen. If the viewer moves the eyes, the face reappears.

In some cases, only part of the face disappears. Sometimes, for example, one eye, or both eyes, will remain. If the viewer looks at the smile on the person's face, the face may disappear, leaving only the smile. For this reason, the effect has been called the Cheshire Cat effect, after the cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Although it is very difficult to record activity in individual neurons in a human brain, such studies can be done in monkeys. A simple example of binocular rivalry has been studied in a monkey by Nikos K. Logothetis and Jeffrey D. Schall, both then at M.I.T. They trained a macaque to keep its eyes still and to signal whether it is seeing upward or downward movement of a horizontal grating. To produce rivalry, upward movement is projected into one of the monkey's eyes and downward movement into the other, so that the two images overlap in the visual field. The monkey signals that it sees up and down movements alternatively, just as humans would. Even though the motion stimulus coming into the monkey's eyes is always the same, the monkey's percept changes every second or so.

Cortical area MT (which some researchers prefer to label V5) is an area mainly concerned with movement. What do the neurons in MT do when the monkey's percept is sometimes up and sometimes down? (The researchers studied only the monkey's first response.) The simplified answer—the actual data are rather more messy—is that whereas the firing of some of the neurons correlates with the changes in the percept, for others the average firing rate is relatively unchanged and independent of which direction of movement the monkey is seeing at that moment. Thus, it is unlikely that the firing of all the neurons in the visual neocortex at one particular moment corresponds to the monkey's visual awareness. Exactly which neurons do correspond to awareness remains to be discovered.

We have postulated that when we clearly see something, there must be neurons actively firing that stand for what we see. This might be called the activity principle. Here, too, there is some experimental evidence. One example is the firing of neurons in a specific cortical visual area in response to illusory contours. Another and perhaps more striking case is the filling in of the blind spot. The blind spot in each eye is caused by the lack of photoreceptors in the area of the retina where the optic nerve leaves the retina and projects to the brain. Its location is about 15 degrees from the fovea (the visual center of the eye). Yet if you close one eye, you do not see a hole in your visual field.

Philosopher Daniel C. Dennett of Tufts University is unusual among philosophers in that he is interested both in psychology and in the brain. This interest is much to be welcomed. In a recent book, Consciousness Explained, he has argued that it is wrong to talk about filling in. He concludes, correctly, that 'an absence of information is not the same as information about an absence.' From this general principle he argues that the brain does not fill in the blind spot but rather ignores it.

Dennett's argument by itself, however, does not establish that filling in does not occur; it only suggests that it might not. Dennett also states that 'your brain has no machinery for [filling in] at this location.' This statement is incorrect. The primary visual cortex lacks a direct input from one eye, but normal 'machinery' is there to deal with the input from the other eye. Ricardo Gattass and his colleagues at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro have shown that in the macaque some of the neurons in the blind-spot area of the primary visual cortex do respond to input from both eyes, probably assisted by inputs from other parts of the cortex. Moreover, in the case of simple filling in, some of the neurons in that region respond as if they were actively filling in.

Thus, Dennett's claim about blind spots is incorrect. In addition, psychological experiments by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran [see 'Blind Spots,' Scientific American, May 1992] have shown that what is filled in can be quite complex depending on the overall context of the visual scene. How, he argues, can your brain be ignoring something that is in fact commanding attention?

Filling in, therefore, is not to be dismissed as nonexistent or unusual. It probably represents a basic interpolation process that can occur at many levels in the neocortex. It is, incidentally, a good example of what is meant by a constructive process.

How can we discover the neurons whose firing symbolizes a particular percept? William T. Newsome and his colleagues at Stanford University have done a series of brilliant experiments on neurons in cortical area MT of the macaque's brain. By studying a neuron in area MT, we may discover that it responds best to very specific visual features having to do with motion. A neuron, for instance, might fire strongly in response to the movement of a bar in a particular place in the visual field, but only when the bar is oriented at a certain angle, moving in one of the two directions perpendicular to its length within a certain range of speed.

It is technically difficult to excite just a single neuron, but it is known that neurons that respond to roughly the same position, orientation and direction of movement of a bar tend to be located near one another in the cortical sheet. The experimenters taught the monkey a simple task in movement discrimination using a mixture of dots, some moving randomly, the rest all in one direction. They showed that electrical stimulation of a small region in the right place in cortical area MT would bias the monkey's motion discrimination, almost always in the expected direction.

Thus, the stimulation of these neurons can influence the monkey's behavior and probably its visual percept. Such experiments do not, however, show decisively that the firing of such neurons is the exact neural correlate of the percept. The correlate could be only a subset of the neurons being activated. Or perhaps the real correlate is the firing of neurons in another part of the visual hierarchy that are strongly influenced by the neurons activated in area MT.

These same reservations apply also to cases of binocular rivalry. Clearly, the problem of finding the neurons whose firing symbolizes a particular percept is not going to be easy. It will take many careful experiments to track them down even for one kind of percept.

It seems obvious that the purpose of vivid visual awareness is to feed into the cortical areas concerned with the implications of what we see; from there the information shuttles on the one hand to the hippocampal system, to be encoded (temporarily) into long-term episodic memory, and on the other to the planning levels of the motor system. But is it possible to go from a visual input to a behavioral output without any relevant visual awareness?

That such a process can happen is demonstrated by the remarkable class of patients with 'blindsight.' These patients, all of whom have suffered damage to their visual cortex, can point with fair accuracy at visual targets or track them with their eyes while vigorously denying seeing anything. In fact, these patients are as surprised as their doctors by their abilities. The amount of information that 'gets through,' however, is limited: blindsight patients have some ability to respond to wavelength, orientation and motion, yet they cannot distinguish a triangle from a square.

It is naturally of great interest to know which neural pathways are being used in these patients. Investigators originally suspected that the pathway ran through the superior colliculus. Recent experiments suggest that a direct albeit weak connection may be involved between the lateral geniculate nucleus and other visual areas in the cortex. It is unclear whether an intact primary visual cortex region is essential for immediate visual awareness. Conceivably the visual signal in blindsight is so weak that the neural activity cannot produce awareness, although it remains strong enough to get through to the motor system.

Normal-seeing people regularly respond to visual signals without being fully aware of them. In automatic actions, such as swimming or driving a car, complex but stereotypical actions occur with little, if any, associated visual awareness. In other cases, the information conveyed is either very limited or very attenuated. Thus, while we can function without visual awareness, our behavior without it is rather restricted.

Clearly, it takes a certain amount of time to experience a conscious percept. It is difficult to determine just how much time is needed for an episode of visual awareness, but one aspect of the problem that can be demonstrated experimentally is that signals received close together in time are treated by the brain as simultaneous.

A disk of red light is flashed for, say, 20 milliseconds, followed immediately by a 20-millisecond flash of green light in the same place. The subject reports that he did not see a red light followed by a green light. Instead he saw a yellow light, just as he would have if the red and the green light had been flashed simultaneously. Yet the subject could not have experienced yellow until after the information from the green flash had been processed and integrated with the preceding red one.

Experiments of this type led psychologist Robert Efron, now at the University of California at Davis, to conclude that the processing period for perception is about 60 to 70 milliseconds. Similar periods are found in experiments with tones in the auditory system. It is always possible, however, that the processing times may be different in higher parts of the visual hierarchy and in other parts of the brain. Processing is also more rapid in trained, compared with naive, observers.

Because it appears to be involved in some forms of visual awareness, it would help if we could discover the neural basis of attention. Eye movement is a form of attention, since the area of the visual field in which we see with high resolution is remarkably small, roughly the area of the thumbnail at arm's length. Thus, we move our eyes to gaze directly at an object in order to see it more clearly. Our eyes usually move three or four times a second. Psychologists have shown, however, that there appears to be a faster form of attention that moves around, in some sense, when our eyes are stationary.

The exact psychological nature of this faster attentional mechanism is at present controversial. Several neuroscientists, however, including Robert Desimone and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health, have shown that the rate of firing of certain neurons in the macaque's visual system depends on what the monkey is attending to in the visual field. Thus, attention is not solely a psychological concept; it also has neural correlates that can be observed. A number of researchers have found that the pulvinar, a region of the thalamus, appears to be involved in visual attention. We would like to believe that the thalamus deserves to be called 'the organ of attention,' but this status has yet to be established.

Attention and Awareness

The major problem is to find what activity in the brain corresponds directly to visual awareness. It has been speculated that each cortical area produces awareness of only those visual features that are 'columnar,' or arranged in the stack or column of neurons perpendicular to the cortical surface. Thus, the primary visual cortex could code for orientation and area MT for motion. So far experimentalists have not found one particular region in the brain where all the information needed for visual awareness appears to come together. Dennett has dubbed such a hypothetical place 'The Cartesian Theater.' He argues on theoretical grounds that it does not exist.

Awareness seems to be distributed not just on a local scale, but more widely over the neocortex. Vivid visual awareness is unlikely to be distributed over every cortical area because some areas show no response to visual signals. Awareness might, for example, be associated with only those areas that connect back directly to the primary visual cortex or alternatively with those areas that project into one another's layer 4. (The latter areas are always at the same level in the visual hierarchy.)

The key issue, then, is how the brain forms its global representations from visual signals. If attention is indeed crucial for visual awareness, the brain could form representations by attending to just one object at a time, rapidly moving from one object to the next. For example, the neurons representing all the different aspects of the attended object could all fire together very rapidly for a short period, possibly in rapid bursts.

This fast, simultaneous firing might not only excite those neurons that symbolized the implications of that object but also temporarily strengthen the relevant synapses so that this particular pattern of firing could be quickly recalled—a form of short-term memory. If only one representation needs to be held in short-term memory, as in remembering a single task, the neurons involved may continue to fire for a period.

A problem arises if it is necessary to be aware of more than one object at exactly the same time. If all the attributes of two or more objects were represented by neurons firing rapidly, their attributes might be confused. The color of one might become attached to the shape of another. This happens sometimes in very brief presentations.

Some time ago Christoph von der Malsburg, now at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, suggested that this difficulty would be circumvented if the neurons associated with any one object all fired in synchrony (that is, if their times of firing were correlated) but out of synchrony with those representing other objects. Recently two groups in Germany reported that there does appear to be correlated firing between neurons in the visual cortex of the cat, often in a rhythmic manner, with a frequency in the 35- to 75-hertz range, sometimes called 40-hertz, or g, oscillation.

Von der Malsburg's proposal prompted us to suggest that this rhythmic and synchronized firing might be the neural correlate of awareness and that it might serve to bind together activity concerning the same object in different cortical areas. The matter is still undecided, but at present the fragmentary experimental evidence does rather little to support such an idea. Another possibility is that the 40-hertz oscillations may help distinguish figure from ground or assist the mechanism of attention.

About the authors: Francis Crick and Christof Koch share an interest in the experimental study of consciousness. Crick is the co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the double helical structure of DNA. While at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he worked on the genetic code and on developmental biology. Since 1976, he has been at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. His main interest lies in understanding the visual system of mammals. Koch was awarded his Ph.D. in biophysics by the University of Tübingen. After spending four years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the California Institute of Technology, where he is now professor of computation and neural systems. He is studying how single brain cells process information and the neural basis of motion perception, visual attention and awareness. He also designs analog VLSI vision chips for intelligent systems. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, born in 1947, Austrian-born bodybuilder, who became an American motion-picture star and later governor of California. Schwarzenegger ran as a Republican in 2003 in the California recall election that ousted the incumbent Democratic governor, Gray Davis. He was reelected in a landslide in the 2006 elections.

Schwarzenegger was born in Graz, the second-largest city in Austria. As a bodybuilder he won the Mr. Universe title three times and the Mr. Olympia title seven times. Schwarzenegger showed considerable charm in a supporting role as a bodybuilder in Stay Hungry (1976) and again in his appearance in the documentary Pumping Iron (1977). The sword-and-sorcery movies Conan the Barbarian (1982) and Conan the Destroyer (1984), each of which grossed more than $100 million worldwide, established Schwarzenegger as a major box-office attraction. Schwarzenegger then starred in the science fiction film The Terminator (1984), a cult favorite that helped develop a genre of futuristic action films.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, motion picture about a cyborg who travels back in time to protect a future revolutionary leader from assassination. Released in 1991, the film won Academy Awards for special effects, sound, and makeup. This is the sequel to The Terminator (1984), which also starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg time traveler. The Terminator travels back in time to protect the young boy, John Connor (played by Edward Furlong), from T-1000 (Robert Patrick), an assassin from the future.

Graz, city in southeastern Austria, capital of Steiermark (Styria) Province, on the Mur River, bordered on three sides by the Alps. Graz is the second-largest city in Austria, after Vienna. Steel, railroad equipment, automobiles, chemicals, leather goods, and precision instruments are among the products manufactured in the city, which is the center of a considerable trade in wine, fruit, and cereal grains. The old town, on the western bank of the river, is connected with the new town, on the eastern bank, by seven bridges. The old town is built around the Schlossberg Park, which was a strongly fortified hill until 1809, when its fortifications were destroyed by the French. The buildings of Graz include an 11th-century castle, the 13th-century church of the Teutonic Knights, the 15th-century Gothic Cathedral of Saint Aegidius, and a 16th-century parish church with an altarpiece by the Venetian artist Il Tintoretto. Among educational institutions in the city are Graz University (1586), Graz Technical University (1811), and the University of Music and Dramatic Art (1963).

Graz is known to have existed in the 9th century ad and is thought to occupy the site of a Roman town. In the 15th century it was a residence of the Holy Roman emperors. In the 16th century it became one of the important centers of resistance to the Ottoman expansion in central Europe. The town was occupied by the French in 1797, 1805, and 1809, during the Napoleonic Wars. Following World War II (1939-1945) until 1955, Graz was included in the British Zone of Occupation of Austria. The city's name comes from gradec, a Slavic word meaning “small fort,” which refers to the fortress that once stood on top of the Schlossberg. Population (2006 estimate) 244,604

Hi a whole world wide populations. How many are you all? Hi whole world wide International Bank. Those shit behind the shadows in their Caves (Satellite stations) how many are they? Whom they are serving? Let them to give us all their explanations! For what they were doing this to us all during this much years? Your virus shove in your ass holes. Majority minority who wins? How about killing us all?! Hi Monica Lewinsky & Bill Clinton, Hi higher courts, Anything official by any law of yours shit satellites acting as Interpol on all of us! what a business! Who can sue who now? All are witnesses. Stick with logic all of you & stop talking to me through TV. as Polis Yeltsen of Russia said once at court that they told him & he didn't has any prove! That I saw in TV news. So stop trapping me please. I'm nothing but civilian. Even Jesus did not suffer this much! Hi Sept,11th & Al Qaeda! What about God? We were since along time before satellites to have existence. Are we in an artificial magical circle? Put me in history like Clinton & Lewinsky! دخلونى التاريخ مثل كلينتن و لوينسكى

Clinton’s Televised Speech About Lewinsky

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. This afternoon in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life—questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

Still I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

As you know, in a deposition in January I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

But I told the grand jury today, and I say to you now, that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence, or to take any other unlawful action.

I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that. I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors: first, by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct. I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit which has since been dismissed was a consideration, too.

In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings 20 years ago—dealings, I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago.

The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life, and now the investigation itself is under investigation. This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.

Now this matter is between me, the two people I love most—my wife and our daughter—and our God. I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so. Nothing is more important to me personally. But it is private. And I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It's nobody's business but ours. Even Presidents have private lives.

It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives, and get on with our national life. Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long. And I take my responsibility for my part in all of this; that is all I can do. Now it is time—in fact, it is past time—to move on. We have important work to do—real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.

And so, tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century.

Thank you for watching, and good night.

The news media has answered this question with a collective 'yes' by making personal information about political candidates available. Such information tends to increase the size of the news media's audience, since personal lives and behavior seem to be more interesting to more people than are detailed discussions of issues and policy. Many scholars would say that private information should be available only if it is relevant to a person’s performance in office. Was information about President Bill Clinton’s relationship with White House aide Monica Lewinsky relevant to this performance? Democrats and Republicans disagreed in their answers, but people on both sides were interested in what the president did, which is why the press kept reporting such material.

1998: Clinton, Bill: Starr Testifies As Impeachment Hearings Open

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr testified before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary for 12 hours on November 19, 1998, as impeachment hearings against U.S. president Bill Clinton got underway. The hearings provided little new information about Clinton's relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, however.

Starr's appearance before the Judiciary Committee highlighted the partisan nature of the inquiry. Democratic panel members repeatedly criticized Starr in an attempt, observers said, to shift attention away from the president's behavior. Democratic representative John Conyers, Jr., of Michigan characterized Starr as a “federally paid sex policeman” whose investigation had “crossed the line into obsession.”

Republicans, meanwhile, attempted to keep the committee focused on the core questions of whether Clinton lied under oath and convinced others to do the same. “Do we still have a government of laws and not of men?” asked committee chairman Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican. “Does the law apply to some people with force and ferocity while the powerful are immune?” Other Republicans praised Starr's handling of the investigation and commended him for standing firm despite his many critics.

Starr began his testimony with a prepared statement that recapped the contents and conclusions of his September 1998 report: that Clinton is guilty of 11 allegedly impeachable offenses, including perjury, witness tampering, and abuse of power. He spent the remainder of the day fielding questions from Democratic and Republican committee members, and from David Kendall, Clinton's private attorney.

The Democrats assailed Starr on several fronts, accusing him of illegally leaking grand jury information to the press, ignoring evidence that favored the president, and using strong-arm tactics against Lewinsky and other witnesses. Starr maintained his temper throughout the day, revealing little emotion as he deflected the Democratic attacks on his handling of the case.

Opinion polls indicated that many Americans approved of Starr's presentation. A poll conducted on the evening of November 19 by the Cable News Network (CNN), USA Today, and Gallup showed that 67 percent of those who saw or heard about Starr's testimony thought he did an “excellent” or “good” job of presenting his case. But Starr's testimony did little damage to Clinton's job approval rating, which remained above 60 percent.

Starr's Democratic opponents also assailed him for belatedly revealing that Clinton had been cleared of wrongdoing in the Whitewater real-estate scandal, White House travel office firings, and the White House's use of confidential FBI files on prominent Republicans—three of Starr's original avenues of inquiry. Democrats criticized Starr for withholding the information until after the midterm congressional elections.

Starr's testimony was the highlight of the committee hearings in November. Four other witnesses were scheduled to testify behind closed doors, reportedly on the subject of Clinton's alleged sexual advances toward Kathleen Willey, a onetime White House volunteer, in 1993. The committee also heard from expert witnesses on the history of impeachment and the legal ramifications of perjury.

Most observers expected the Judiciary Committee to vote on articles of impeachment some time in early December. On November 26 the New York Times reported that the committee planned to accuse Clinton of three impeachable offenses: perjury, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, and abuse of power. Once approved by the Judiciary Committee, the accusations—known as articles of impeachment—would go before the full 435-member House. If approved by a majority of the House, Clinton would be considered impeached and the process would move into the Senate for trial.

But many analysts predicted the process would never get that far. More than a dozen Republicans said they would vote against impeachment, enough to derail the process. Democrats, meanwhile, planned to offer censure as an alternative to impeachment, observers said. Both Hyde and incoming House Speaker Robert Livingston said they wanted the inquiry completed before Congress reconvenes in early January 1999.

Other related developments included:

Clinton's response on November 27 to 81 questions sent by Hyde on November 5. Hyde asked Clinton to admit or deny each of the 81 questions, the purpose of which, Hyde said, was to establish what facts the president disputed so as to narrow the inquiry and allow it to proceed more quickly. Clinton's responses mirrored earlier statements in which he denied lying or telling others to lie and provided little new information.

The announcement on November 13 that Clinton had reached a settlement with Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state worker who accused Clinton of sexually harassing her in 1991. Clinton agreed to pay Jones $850,000 to settle the case. Starr has accused Clinton of committing perjury in a deposition he gave during a civil lawsuit filed by Jones.

The resignation of Samuel Dash, Starr's ethics advisor, on November 20. Dash accused Starr of overstepping the bounds of his office by becoming an advocate of impeachment.

Independent counsel Kenneth Starr said that the ruling would not affect his investigation into allegations that Clinton lied about—and advised former White House intern Monica Lewinsky to lie about—their alleged extramarital affair. Many analysts, however, said the ruling could sharpen public opinion against Starr, whose investigation has increasingly been seen as partisan, and put pressure on him to wrap up the probe. Others noted that while Wright's ruling did not legally forbid Starr's investigation from proceeding, it was unlikely that the U.S. Congress would seek impeachment on charges related to a case dismissed by a federal judge.

Read the below & praise God! This planet Earth is so small to our God that has the power to tell Noah to take what ever to his ship to rescue the living ones because the over flow of water ( Tsunami! or a melting Antarctica )

Noah, in the Old Testament and the Koran, son of Lamech, tenth in descent from Adam, and, as survivor with his family of the flood, the father of all humanity (see Genesis 6-9). According to the biblical account, Noah was spared for his piety when God, angered at the corruption of the world, destroyed it with a flood lasting 40 days and 40 nights. Noah had been warned to build the ark, a great ship, and to take on board with him his wife, his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, his sons' wives, and two mated specimens of every species of animal on Earth. Noah (Nuh) is also regarded by Islam as a prophet. In an episode after the flood, Noah is portrayed as having discovered wine making and becoming helplessly drunk (see Genesis 9:20-27). Noah is said to have lived 950 years (see Genesis 9:29). Similar heroes of flood stories are found in Babylonian, Greek, and other cultures.

Antarctica, fifth largest of Earth’s seven continents. Antarctica surrounds the South Pole and is a place of extremes. It is the southernmost, coldest, iciest, driest, windiest, most remote, and most recently discovered continent. Nearly the entire landmass lies within the Antarctic Circle. Air temperatures of the high inland regions fall below -80°C (-110°F) in winter and rise only to -30°C (-20°F) in summer. Massive ice sheets built up from snow over millions of years cover almost all of the continent and float in huge ice shelves on coastal waters. In winter frozen sea water (sea ice) more than doubles the size of the Antarctic ice cap. Antarctica's vast areas of ice on land and on sea play a major role in Earth’s climate and could be strongly affected by global warming. The melting of Antarctic ice could dramatically raise global sea level.

Antarctica means “opposite to the Arctic,” Earth’s northernmost region. Antarctica is completely encircled by the Southern Ocean. The entire area south of the Antarctic Convergence zone where cold Antarctic waters sink below warmer waters on the northern boundary of the Southern Ocean is referred to as the Antarctic region.

The small human presence on Antarctica is made up of visiting scientists, support staff, and tourists. The last continent to be discovered, Antarctica remained hidden behind barriers of fog, storm, and sea ice until it was first sighted in the early 19th century (see Polar Exploration). Because of the extreme cold and the lack of native peoples, forests, land animals, and obvious natural resources, the continent remained largely neglected for decades after discovery. Scientific expeditions and seal hunters had explored only fragments of its coasts by the end of the 19th century, while the interior remained unknown. Explorers first reached the South Pole in 1911, and the first permanent settlements—scientific stations—were established in the early 1940s. From that time the pace of exploration and scientific research has accelerated rapidly. In the mid- to late 20th century, the region’s majestic scenery and wildlife began to attract increasing numbers of tourists.

Seven nations—Argentina, Australia, the United Kingdom, Chile, France, New Zealand, and Norway—claim territory in Antarctica. Other nations, including the United States and Russia, do not acknowledge these claims and make no claims of their own, but reserve rights to claim territory in the future. Since 1961 the continent has been administered under the Antarctic Treaty, an international agreement to preserve the continent for peaceful scientific study.

With the pole conquered, explorers began to take on new challenges. In 1912 Australian scientist Douglas Mawson led the Australian Antarctic Expedition to explore the coast of East Antarctica directly south of Australia. An overland party explored the area now known as George V Land, although two of Mawson’s companions died and Mawson returned to his base barely alive. Shackleton returned in 1915, intending to cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea by way of the pole. But his ship never reached the continent; it became trapped by the ice and sank ten months later. Shackleton reached South Georgia in a lifeboat, and returned to rescue his stranded men three months later.

Between 1929 and 1931 the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) used floatplanes to explore and photograph many kilometers of East Antarctica’s coast. Between 1929 and 1934 Norwegian whaler Lars Christensen equipped his expeditions with seaplanes, which flew over and photographed the remote island of Bouvetoya and stretches of the Antarctic coast from Enderby Land to Coats Land. In 1936 American explorer Lincoln Ellsworth crossed Antarctica by air, flying from Dundee Island at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula to the Bay of Whales. In 1938 a German expedition flew over and photographed an extensive area of East Antarctica now known as Queen Maud Land (Dronning Maud Land).

In 1908 Britain revived long-standing territorial claims, based on discovery, to South Georgia, the South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Sandwich islands, as well as Graham Land, to justify the control and taxation of whaling in those areas. In 1923 Britain claimed the Ross Ice Shelf and adjacent coasts (now Ross Dependency) for similar reasons. In 1924 France claimed Adélie Land, a narrow sector of East Antarctica where Dumont d'Urville had landed in 1840. In 1933 Britain claimed the sectors of East Antarctica that BANZARE had explored as an Australian territory; this area was formally declared the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1936. Spurred by the possibility of a German claim, Norway in 1939 claimed the sector of East Antarctica later called Queen Maud Land, along with Peter I Island and Bouvetoya. When Britain set up wartime stations in the peninsular region in 1943, Argentina and Chile lodged rival claims to the sector. Because U.S. policy for Antarctica states that all nations should have free access for peaceful pursuits, the U.S. government did not support claims made by American explorers and does not recognize any foreign territorial claims.

During the exploratory period of Antarctic history, scientific research was less important than discovery. In 1939 the U.S. Antarctic Service Expedition under Richard Byrd introduced the concept of permanent stations with science as a major objective. Two stations, at Bay of Whales and Stonington Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, opened in 1941, but closed after a year when the United States entered World War II. In 1943 Britain set up several permanent stations. Although the British stations were set up primarily to assert sovereignty against Argentine and Chilean claims in the maritime Antarctic, they were staffed by scientists.

Establishment of these early bases began the era of scientific research that was closely coupled with political rivalry. During this period Argentina, Australia, Chile, and France established permanent national expeditions, both to maintain territorial claims and to conduct scientific research. In 1946 the United States conducted Operation Highjump, the largest Antarctic expedition to date, involving massive exploration by means of ships, aircraft, and temporary land stations. This operation also gave U.S. military forces experience in polar conditions, seen as a necessity should a confrontation with Soviet troops occur in the Arctic region of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Against the backdrop of the Cold War, a period of political tension between the Soviet Union and its associated nations and Western countries allied with the United States, the USSR declared its right to make an Antarctic territorial claim in 1950.

The International Geophysical Year (IGY), a period of worldwide coordinated geophysical research from July 1957 to December 1958, proved a useful step toward resolving political disputes in Antarctica. Twelve nations (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the United States, and the USSR) agreed to cooperate on scientific research in Antarctica.

Starting a year beforehand, survey parties established research stations on an unprecedented scale. During the IGY more than 5,000 scientists and support staff served at 49 Antarctic stations. Projects included studies of a wide range of geophysical topics such as upper atmosphere physics, meteorology, oceanography, glaciology, seismology, and geology. The IGY led to the establishment in 1958 of the Special (later Scientific) Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), a group designed to coordinate additional research; SCAR continues in that same function today.

The international cooperation and overall success of the IGY led the governments of the 12 nations to develop the Antarctic Treaty, an agreement to extend cooperation in Antarctica after the IGY ended. Concluded in 1959, the treaty asserts that Antarctica be used only for peaceful purposes; prohibits military measures, fortifications, and weapons testing; and requires freedom of scientific investigation and scientific cooperation to continue. It provides for exchanges of scientific personnel, plans for scientific programs, and scientific observations and results. It also provides for exchanges of observers, mutual inspection of stations and of ships and aircraft that are loading or discharging cargoes or personnel, and meetings of representatives to promote its objectives. The treaty prohibits nuclear explosions and disposal of nuclear waste in the treaty area (south of latitude 60° south).

The treaty addressed long-standing territorial conflicts of interest over Antarctica. It made no ruling on the validity of existing claims by seven nations (Argentina, Australia, Britain, Chile, France, New Zealand, and Norway), and particularly on the overlapping claims of Argentina, Britain, and Chile. However, it forbids any new claims while the treaty is in effect and states that no member nations are required to recognize the claims of other nations. Although the United States and the USSR reserved the right to lodge future claims of their own, the indefinite freeze on territorial claims served to ease Cold War suspicions of each other’s activities in Antarctica.

Research projects to study changes in the Antarctic include the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007/2008, conducted from March 2007 to March 2009. The IPY involves thousands of scientists from more than 60 nations in more than 200 projects focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic. Topics of study include biology, geology, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, and geophysics. Also ongoing is the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML). The CAML is part of the international Census of Marine Life (CoML), a ten-year international initiative begun in 2000 to study life in the oceans. Satellites in space regularly monitor and map Antarctica and the ocean waters and ice around the continent.

McMurdo Base, Antarctica

McMurdo is the largest scientific station in Antarctica, with laboratories and living quarters for scientists and visitors. During the summer months, McMurdo accommodates up to a thousand residents.

In addition to such special projects, scientists from dozens of nations at more than 40 stations participate in year-round research on Antarctica. Most stations are located on rocky shores or coastal ice slopes. A few stations sit farther inland on the ice cap, cut off from the outside world except by radio. Small stations have up to a dozen scientists and support staff, while larger stations may have two to three times as many. The largest is McMurdo, which may accommodate several thousand visitors in summer, including those on their way to inland stations or field camps. Life at the smaller stations is simple, with comfortable living quarters and a family atmosphere. Larger stations resemble hotels or barracks, with cafeteria meals and fewer home comforts. The largest stations are effectively small towns, with stores, cinemas, chapels, banks, offices, laboratories, garages, powerhouses, airstrips, and hostels for residents and visitors.

Men far outnumber women in Antarctica. Although some people spend one or two years there at a time, most visit just for the summer months when good weather facilitates fieldwork. Many scientists who work indoors in laboratories or offices, perhaps servicing self-recording instruments or collecting data by radio from remote instruments, may hardly be aware of the cold world outside. Field scientists who travel in small parties by tractor or skidoo (motorized toboggan), surveying or collecting specimens and camping for weeks on end, live and work much closer to the challenges of Antarctica’s unique landscape and climate.

Scientists have studied extensively Antarctica’s ice sheet and the land beneath it. Geologists and solid-earth geophysicists conduct research in plate tectonics, the study of the plates of the Earth’s crust. Antarctica is a valued source of fossils, which provide a record of the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwanaland. Although most of Antarctica is covered in ice, ancient rock is exposed in the parts of the Transantarctic Mountains and on islands on the Antarctic Peninsula. Paleontologists have found fossils of dinosaurs, marine reptiles, birds, mammals, and other prehistoric animals as well as plant life that lived in Antarctica when the climate was much more temperate, although sunlight was absent or reduced for part of the winter.

Astronomers have installed telescopes in Antarctica to take advantage of the long dark nights and clear atmosphere. In addition to infrared and visible-light observatories, neutrino detectors have been buried in ice to map the source of these elusive subatomic particles. The converging magnetic force lines at the poles also increase the flux of cosmic rays, which can be studied with instruments on high-altitude balloons. Scientists also collect meteorites that have landed in the ice sheet, including specimens from the Moon and from Mars.

Biologists study the microbial, plant, and animal life of the Antarctic region. These scientists model the continent’s relatively simple ecosystems, study responses of plants and animals to hostile environments, and measure the impacts of people on the polar environment. Marine biologists study the local marine food chains. Warmer ocean temperatures and increased ultraviolet radiation could have major effects on marine life in the Antarctic region.

Launching Ozone Balloon, Antarctica

Earth scientists launch a balloon from the roof of a building at McMurdo research base in Antarctica. The balloon will be used to study Earth’s ozone layer.

The atmosphere above the continent provides another important area of study. Antarctica provides important information for climatologists modeling atmospheric circulation, or the constant flow of warm air toward the poles and cold air toward the equator (see Meteorology: Energy Flow and Global Circulation). Antarctica’s relatively unpolluted, thin, and dry atmosphere allows scientists to study phenomena such as auroras and transmission of radio waves. Most notably, these scientists study the levels of ozone, the atmospheric gas that protects life on the Earth from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. In 1985 they identified the so-called ozone hole, a region of depleted ozone that develops over Antarctica each spring and virtually disappears several months later. Continuous monitoring revealed that the size of the hole continued to increase.

Largely due to the work of Antarctic scientists, many nations have reduced or eliminated the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have been linked to ozone depletion. In 1987, 36 nations, including the United States, signed the Montréal Protocol, a treaty to protect the ozone layer. In the 1990s further steps were taken to ban the production of CFCs. Many scientists believe that the presence of CFCs in the atmosphere peaked in 2001 and then began to decline. Nevertheless, U.S. government scientists reported in 2006 that the ozone hole over Antarctica had reached its greatest extent ever. They do not expect the ozone layer to recover until 2065.

Finally, medical researchers study the scientists and support staff living in Antarctica. Physicians have made discoveries about the behavior of viruses in a cold, isolated environment. Immunologists study the ability of expeditioners to resist infection. Psychological and sleep studies are frequently conducted during the winter, when the extreme climate and lack of visitors isolate workers from the outside world.

GROWING PUBLIC INTEREST IN ANTARCTICA:

Until the middle of the 20th century only explorers and technical staff were the main visitors to Antarctica. With the establishment of the first research stations the continent became the preserve of scientists. More recently Antarctica has slipped into public awareness, both as a wilderness in need of conservation and as a venue for tourism. The two trends began together: Tourists from the 1960s onward drew attention to accumulating garbage and abandoned buildings littering Antarctica—relics of installations used and discarded by scientists. Motion pictures and other forms of popular culture have made penguins in particular a symbol of endangered wildlife in the Antarctic region.

In the 1970s and 1980s growing environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) effectively organized public opinion against practices at the bases that impacted the natural environment, such as construction near animal breeding grounds, improper disposal of containers and chemical wastes, and open burning of garbage. Largely as a result of public pressure, many stations cleaned up former dumping sites. They also began disposing of waste by shipping it back to the countries operating the bases. Environmental groups continue to oppose mining in Antarctica and to press for high standards of environmental protection. Some seek to have Antarctica managed as a world park, a status akin to a national park in the United States. This would protect Antarctica from mining, military activities, and permanent human settlement.

Glaciologists measure the movement and the layers of the ice sheet. They use satellites to plot the slow movement of the ice surface. Ice cores drilled through the layers of the ice sheet have enabled scientists to trace changes in the climate over a period of tens of thousands of years. Scientists have put radio transmitters on icebergs to plot their movement. Some countries have considered the possibility of towing icebergs to arid regions as a source of fresh water.

Tourism has grown slowly since its beginning in 1958. Tens of thousands of tourists visit Antarctica annually between November and March. Most travel by ship and only go ashore for brief periods, so they require very few facilities on land. Several thousand more tourists take sightseeing flights over the continent from countries in the southern hemisphere. Although some environmental groups feel that an increase in tourism would undoubtedly increase its impact, on its current scale tourism makes few demands on the environment and does not interfere significantly with scientific activities. In introducing nonscientists to the scenery, wildlife, and mystery of Antarctica, tourism may well be helping broaden public interest in Antarctica, thereby ensuring a safer future for this most remarkable area of the world.

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