#Dopamine #Fasting Is The Hot New #SiliconValley Trend

Dopamine Fasting - The Hot Silicon Valley Trend

Dr. Cameron Sepah | 7 Aug 2019

In the age of the "attention economy", many of us are highly overstimulated at best and addicted at worst, and we don't even know how bad our behavior is. As I wrote about, Americans spend a whopping 11 hours a day engaging with media of some kind! It's unclear what the long-term implications of this overstimulation are on our brains, but in my experience working with executive clients in my private practice, I've observed that this interferes with our ability to focus/sustain attention, regulate our emotions in healthy/non-avoidant way, and enjoy simple/mundane tasks that seem boring by comparison. So what's the treatment?

What is Dopamine?

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter in our brains that's responsible for motivation and reward. Dopaminergic drugs (e.g. stimulants such as Adderall, cocaine, & methamphetamine) act on dopamine receptors like a key opening a lock, and over time, downregulate these receptors and makes us less sensitive to dopamine. This requires using more and more of the drug to get the same effects, thus starting the cycle of addiction. But even behaviors such as gaming or gambling can become problematic through the motivation and rewards of near misses and wins.

This is not to demonize dopamine; it's an important brain chemical, and people who are low in it (whether naturally or by taking antipsychotic medications) can be lethargic, emotionally flat, and anhedonic (taking little interest of pleasure in things). And properly-prescribed dopaminergic medications can help people with ADHD & Parkinson's improve their ability to focus and regulate their behavior. Rather, the point is to give our brains a chance to go through a purposeful withdrawal from dopamine overstimulation that lets our brains return to balance and homeostasis.

What is Dopamine Fasting & Why Do It?

Just as intermittent fasting has become all the rage in Silicon Valley and beyond, I am popularizing "dopamine fasting" as the antidote to our overstimulated age. Dopamine fasting has precedent from psychiatric practice. As a clinical professor of psychiatry, my residents often prescribe stimulant medications like Adderall or Ritalin to patients with ADHD. Patients are sometimes advised to take "drug holidays" by taking it for the 5 days it helps them work/study, and take 2 days off on the weekend when it's less important, in order to avoid building a tolerance to the drug, where the effects fade and you increasingly need a higher dose. 

Regardless of whether we are stimulating our dopamine receptors exogenously (from outside the body by taking a stimulant drug) or endogenously (from inside the body, by engaging in a stimulating behavior), the same principle applies. A benefit of dopamine fasting is that it helps retain the pleasure of the behavior instead of getting tired of it. More importantly, you are training yourself to have more control and flexibility over whether or not you engage in a behavior (e.g. choosing not to procrastinate when it's important).

What to Dopamine Fast From?

In my clinical experience, I find the behaviors that are most problematic/prone to addiction are:

• Pleasure eating
• Internet/gaming
• Gambling/shopping
• Porn/Masturbation
• Thrill/novelty seeking
• Recreational drugs 

This list is neither inclusive nor exclusive. I've seen versions of "dopamine fasting" that say absolutely no digital devices, but I find this to be missing the point. For example, browsing compulsively through various articles on your phone can definitely be addictive, while reading a single book on a Kindle Paperwhite device (which has no options for distraction) is probably fine. To decide what to fast from, simply regard whether it's highly pleasurable or problematic for you, and thus you may need a break from.

The Schedule

A suggested schedule for dopamine fasting is as follows:

• 1-4 hours at the end of the day (depending on work & family demands)
• 1 weekend day (spent it outside on a Saturday or Sunday)
• 1 weekend per quarter (go on a local trip)
• 1 week per year (go on vacation!) 

Again, these are guidelines, not strict rules. If it's easier to start by dopamine fasting for 1 hour a day (vs. 4 hours a day), then go for it, and then try to ramp up to what you're willing to do and sustain long-term (e.g. 2 hours/day). Perfect is the enemy of good. So like Nike: just do it. Let's now tackle each of the six major vices in turn:

See the whole article here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dopamine-fasting-new-silicon-valley-trend-dr-cameron-sepah

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Deepest-ever sub #dive (10,928m) to the #MarianaTrench finds...plastic waste

An American explorer finds plastic waste on the seafloor while breaking the record for the deepest ever dive.




Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic waste

Why Do Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others? | Surprising Science

An estimated 20 percent of people are especially delicious for mosquitoes

Blood type, metabolism, exercise, shirt color and even drinking beer can make individuals especially delicious to mosquitoes:

• Just a single 12-ounce bottle of beer can make you more attractive to the insects, one study found 
• In several different studies, pregnant women have been found to attract roughly twice as many mosquito bites as others

Why Do Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others?




Blood type, metabolism, exercise, shirt color and even drinking beer can make individuals especially delicious to mosquitoes. Photo by Flickr user Johan J. Ingles-Le Nobel

You come in from a summer hike covered with itchy red mosquito bites, only to have your friends innocently proclaim that they don’t have any. Or you wake up from a night of camping to find your ankles and wrists aflame with bites, while your tentmates are unscathed.

You’re not alone. An estimated 20 percent of people, it turns out, are especially delicious for mosquitoes, and get bit more often on a consistent basis. And while scientists don’t yet have a cure for the ailment, other than preventing bites with insect repellent (which, we’ve recently discovered, some mosquitoes can become immune to over time), they do have a number of ideas regarding why some of us are more prone to bites than others. Here are some of the factors that could play a role:

Blood Type
Not surprisingly—since, after all, mosquitoes bite us to harvest proteins from our blood—research shows that they find certain blood types more appetizing than others. One study found that in a controlled setting, mosquitoes landed on people with Type O blood nearly twice as often as those with Type A. People with Type B blood fell somewhere in the middle of this itchy spectrum. Additionally, based on other genes, about 85 percent of people secrete a chemical signal through their skin that indicates which blood type they have, while 15 percent do not, and mosquitoes are also more attracted to secretors than nonsecretors regardless of which type they are.

Carbon Dioxide
One of the key ways mosquitoes locate their targets is by smelling the carbon dioxide emitted in their breath—they use an organ called a maxillary palp to do this, and can detect carbon dioxide from as far as 164 feet away. As a result, people who simply exhale more of the gas over time—generally, larger people—have been shown to attract more mosquitoes than others. This is one of the reasons why children get bit less often than adults, on the whole.




Photo by Flickr user Desiree N. Williams

Exercise and Metabolism
In addition to carbon dioxide, mosquitoes find victims at closer range by smelling the lactic acid, uric acid, ammonia and other substances expelled via their sweat, and are also attracted to people with higher body temperatures. Because strenuous exercise increases the buildup of lactic acid and heat in your body, it likely makes you stand out to the insects. Meanwhile, genetic factors influence the amount of uric acid and other substances naturally emitted by each person, making some people more easily found by mosquitos than others.

Skin Bacteria
Other research has suggested that the particular types and volume of bacteria that naturally live on human skin affect our attractiveness to mosquitoes. In a 2011 study, scientists found that having large amounts of a few types of bacteria made skin more appealing to mosquitoes. Surprisingly, though, having lots of bacteria but spread among a greater diversity of different species of bacteria seemed to make skin less attractive. This also might be why mosquitoes are especially prone to biting our ankles and feet—they naturally have more robust bacteria colonies.

Beer

Just a single 12-ounce bottle of beer can make you more attractive to the insects, one study found. But even though researchers had suspected this was because drinking increases the amount of ethanol excreted in sweat, or because it increases body temperature, neither of these factors were found to correlate with mosquito landings, making their affinity for drinkers something of a mystery.

Pregnancy

In several different studies, pregnant women have been found to attract roughly twice as many mosquito bites as others, likely a result of the fact the unfortunate confluence of two factors: They exhale about 21 percent more carbon dioxide and are on average about 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than others.

Clothing Color

This one might seem absurd, but mosquitoes use vision (along with scent) to locate humans, so wearing colors that stand out (black, dark blue or red) may make you easier to find, at least according to James Day, a medical entomologist at the University of Florida, in commentary he gave to NBC.

Genetics

As a whole, underlying genetic factors are estimated to account for 85 percent of the variability between people in their attractiveness to mosquitoes—regardless of whether it’s expressed through blood type, metabolism, or other factors. Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) have a way of modifying these genes, but…
Natural Repellants

Some researchers have started looking at the reasons why a minority of people seem to rarely attract mosquitoes in the hopes of creating the next generation of insect repellants. Using chromatography to isolate the particular chemicals these people emit, scientists at the UK’s Rothamsted Research lab have found that these natural repellers tend to excrete a handful of substances that mosquitoes don’t seem to find appealing. Eventually, incorporating these molecules into advanced bug spray could make it possible for even a Type O, exercising, pregnant woman in a black shirt to ward off mosquitoes for good.


Why Do Mosquitoes Bite Some People More Than Others? | Surprising Science

The X Prize Foundation: Now count to a hundred

One last one from this week's Economist newspaper

The X Prize Foundation
Now count to a hundred 

A new prize for the genomics of the elderly is now on offer

IN BRITAIN, those who live to be 100 years old receive a birthday card from the queen. In the future, centenarians everywhere may also receive a call from a geneticist. If they do, he or she will be seeking a sample of DNA that might, eventually, help to reveal the genetic components of extreme longevity. The more immediate use, however, will be in a competition. For on October 26th the X Prize Foundation, based in Playa Vista, California, unveiled its latest carrot to the world's scientists.


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Pollution and evolution: Waters of change

Evolution in action before our eyes!

Waters of change

Pollution and evolution

The Economist

An accidental experiment in America shows how evolution happens

NEW YORK

IT IS not often that biologists have a chance to watch natural selection in action. The best-known cases—the evolution of resistance to antibiotics in bacteria and to pesticides in insects—are responses to deliberate changes people have made in the environment of the creatures concerned. But mankind has caused lots of accidental changes as well, and these also offer opportunities to study evolution.

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The Economist | Reading the brain: Mind-goggling

Great article from the economist newspaper on the latest advances in reading our mind, when awake and while we dream...

Reading the brain

Mind-goggling


It is now possible to scan someone's brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going through his mind

IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do.




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Nobel Prize group breaks its own rules after unexpected death of recipient | Tecca

Nobel Prize group breaks its own rules after unexpected death of recipient

Immunologist Dr. Ralph M. Steinman will be one of the first posthumous Nobel Prize recipients

by Taylor Hatmaker | Last updated 7:55PM EDT on October 3, 2011

After one of the 2011 Nobel Prize honorees died on Friday, the Nobel commitee was forced with a tough choice: revoke Dr. Ralph M. Steinman's prize, or allow him to be in violation of an essential tenet of the world's most prestigious award? In a decision today, the Nobel committee opted to go against time-honored tradition — Steinman's status as a Nobel winner won't be revoked, since he was selected while he was still alive.

Along with two other researchers, Steinman was recognized within the medicine category for his work in immunology. In 1973, Steinman discovered dendritic cells, a new class of immune cell with practical applications for virus vaccination and cancer treatment. Dendritic cells are a kind of Antigen Presenting Cell (APC) known for their role in activating T cells — a process critical to the human body's immune response. Steinman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, and has been at work on a treatment for his own condition based on his work with dendritic cells.

The Nobel Prize was established in 1895 by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The first round of honors across categories was awarded in 1901, spanning Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. In 1961, the Nobel Prize was was also awarded posthumously, to a Swedish diplomat who (like Steinman) died after the award was announced but before the ceremony.

If you find the Nobel Prize's research and tradition a bit too stuffy, check out the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes — the serious ceremony's zanier counterpart. This year's Ig Nobel winners include publications on the yawning habits of tortoises and the viability of wasabi in waking up unsuspecting sleepers during emergencies.

[via The New York Times]
Nobel Prize group breaks its own rules after unexpected death of recipient | Tecca

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"Soccer Ball" Nebula Discovered by Amateur Astronomer

Amateur astronomer Matthias Kronberger discovered the soccer-ball nebula, called Kronberger 61, in January 2011 after poring over digitized photos of sky surveys from the 1980s. After he alerted professional astronomers, the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii zoomed in on the region to create the new, color-composite image.
Kronberger 61 lies roughly 13,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation and is almost perfectly round—an oddity when compared with the other 3,000 or so planetary nebulae already discovered.
"Very few are this spherical. They're usually elongated and look like butterflies and other objects," said astronomer George Jacoby of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization in Pasadena, California, who helped image the nebula with Gemini.

"Soccer Ball" Nebula Discovered by Amateur Astronomer

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We're going back to Mars!!

Curiosity is his name, Martian Exploration is his game...

Did you know NASA is sending another Rover to Mars?

The Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity


Mission: Study the habitability of Mars

Mars Science Laboratory - Curiosity Rover - Mission Animation

This artist's concept animation depicts key events of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, which will launch in late 2011 and land a rover, Curiosity, on Mars in August 2012

NASA - Multimedia - Video Gallery

See the video explaining the mission:

The ‘Facebook Class': Apps & Fortune Makers

The Class That Built Apps, and Fortunes

May 7, 2011

NYTimes.com

By MIGUEL HELFT

STANFORD, Calif.

ALL right, class, here’s your homework assignment: Devise an app. Get people to use it. Repeat.

That was the task for some Stanford students in the fall of 2007, in what became known here as the “Facebook Class.”

No one expected what happened next.

The students ended up getting millions of users for free apps that they designed to run on Facebook. And, as advertising rolled in, some of those students started making far more money than their professors.

Almost overnight, the Facebook Class fired up the careers and fortunes of more than two dozen students and teachers here. It also helped to pioneer a new model of entrepreneurship that has upturned the tech establishment: the lean start-up.

“Everything was happening so fast,” recalls Joachim De Lombaert, now 23. His team’s app netted $3,000 a day and morphed into a company that later sold for a six-figure sum.

“I almost didn’t realize what it all meant,” he says.

Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.

But by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. For many, the long trek from idea to product to company has turned into a sprint.

Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and “cloud” services have brought costs down, while ad networks help bring in revenue quickly.

The app phenomenon has accentuated the trend and helped unleash what some call a new wave of technology innovation — and what others call a bubble.

Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.

Nazi war plane lying off UK coast is intact - Technology & science - Science - msnbc.com

Nazi war plane lying off UK coast is intact 
Technology & science - msnbc.com 
By Stefano Ambrogi

updated 4/8/2011 6:11:30 PM ET

A World War II-era German Dornier 17 bomber is seen using high-tech sonar equipment, showing it to be largely intact and well-preserved on the sea floor, in an undated photo off the Kent coast.

LONDON — A rare World War II German bomber, shot down over the English Channel in 1940 and hidden for years by shifting sands at the bottom of the sea, is so well preserved a British museum wants to raise it.

The Dornier 17 — thought to be world's last known example — was hit as it took part in the Battle of Britain.

It ditched in the sea just off the Kent coast, southeast England, in an area known as the Goodwin Sands.

The plane came to rest upside-down in 50 feet of water and has become partially visible from time to time as the sands retreated before being buried again.

Now a high-tech sonar survey undertaken by the Port of London Authority has revealed the aircraft to be in a startling state of preservation.

Ian Thirsk, from the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon in London, told the BBC he was "incredulous" when he first heard of its existence and potential preservation.

"This aircraft is a unique aeroplane and it's linked to an iconic event in British history, so its importance cannot be over-emphasized, nationally and internationally," he said.

"It's one of the most significant aeronautical finds of the century."

RAF Museum / Reuters
A German Luftwaffe Dornier 17 bomber is seen dropping bombs in a World War II-era archive photo.

Known as "the flying pencil," the Dornier 17 was designed as a passenger plane in 1934 and was later converted for military use as a fast bomber, difficult to hit and theoretically able to outpace enemy fighter aircraft.

In all, some 1,700 were produced but they struggled in the war with a limited range and bomb load capability and many were scrapped afterwards.

Striking high-resolution images appear to show that the Goodwin Sands plane suffered only minor damage, to its forward cockpit and observation windows, on impact.

"The bomb bay doors were open, suggesting the crew jettisoned their cargo," said Port of London Authority spokesman Martin Garside.

Two of the crew members died on impact, while two others, including the pilot, were taken prisoner and survived the war.
"The fact that it was almost entirely made of aluminum and produced in one piece may have contributed to its preservation," Garside told Reuters.

The plane is still vulnerable to the area's notorious shifting sands and has become the target of recreational divers hoping to salvage souvenirs.

The RAF museum has launched an appeal to raise funds for the lifting operation.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters

Nazi war plane lying off UK coast is intact - Technology & science - Science - msnbc.com

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Christchurch's seismic fireworks, seen on Google Maps

Christchurch's seismic fireworks, seen on Google Maps
13:58 22 February 2011

Michael Reilly, senior technology editor

ChristChurchQuakemap.jpg(Image: Whereis/Sensis PTY/TerraMetrics/Google)

The people of Christchurch are reeling after a devastating earthquake struck earlier today, the second powerful temblor to hit the city in the last five months. The internet and a global, up-to-the-minute news cycle allow us to wade through death tolls, images of city blocks in ruin, even live missing persons reports. Still, for those of us who live outside of earthquakes prone areas, can we know what it's like to live in an area alive with seismic activity?

Paul Nicholls of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch wants to show us. Following the magnitude 7.1 quake in September, he set up Christchurch Quake Map, a new visualisation that brings home just how seismically restless his home city is.

The website combines Google Maps with data from GeoNet, New Zealand's government-backed service for monitoring earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and other natural hazards.

The end product is something like a seismic fireworks display - a time-lapse of the nearly 49,000 earthquakes that have struck the region since 4 September. Running through the whole data set is a bit overwhelming, but zooming in on the last 24 hours paints a powerful picture of what it means to live through a big quake and its many, many aftershocks.

One Per Cent: Christchurch's seismic fireworks, seen on Google Maps

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Did you know....

Did you know the modern parachute was invented by Da Vinci?

a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus (fol. 381v) dated to ca. 1485.^[2] Here, the scale of the parachute is in a more favorable proportion to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo's canopy was held open by a square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal.^[3] It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but he may have learnt about the idea through the intensive oral communication among artist-engineers of the time.^[4] The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by the British Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by another skydiver.^[5] According to the historian of technology Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, much more elaborate than early artistic jumps with rigid parasols in Asia, mark the origin of "the parachute as we know it".^[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute

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BBC - Newsnight: Susan Watts: Are we closer to a 'theory of everything'?

Are we closer to a 'theory of everything'?

Susan Watts | 12:09 UK time, Wednesday, 8 September 2010

The physicists' ultimate dream is the search for a "theory of everything", a unifying explanation that can make sense of the infinitely tiny as well as the infinitely large.

From the strange particles that are the terrain of atom-smashing machines such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, to galaxies beyond our own, about which we're learning more and more through increasingly powerful telescopes and observatories.

Much of Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, makes his case for so-called M-Theory as the prime contender to be that elusive theory of everything.

The Large Hadron Collider is helping in the quest

But it's esoteric stuff. So, in his first television interview, Newsnight asked him how he would explain the importance of M-theory to the many people in the UK who have little interest in theoretical physics.

"M-theory is the theory of everything. It explains how the universe was created out of nothing in the Big Bang, and how it behaves now. It governs everything we think and do. Isn't that of interest?" Hawking asks.

Though he hasn't really tackled the important part of the question, it's clear from his answer that Professor Hawking is as dogmatic about M-theory as he is about God. Recall his quote from the book: "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

He deals with M-theory in a similar tone: "M-theory is the only (sic) candidate for a complete theory of the universe." He adds later: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find."

But not all physicists agree that M-theory is the answer. The blogosphere has been almost as alive with chit chat from critics of his support for M-theory as it has over his views on God.
The thing about M-theory that most people find confusing is that its maths implies extra dimensions - not yet observed - that exist alongside the four dimensions of space and time that we have become familiar with in our everyday world.

The trouble with theories of everything, including M-theory, is that testing them in the laboratory is tricky - and that leaves them open to the charge that they're as much a leap of faith as religion. Theoretical physicist and broadcaster, Jim Al-Khalili, suggested as much on Newsnight last week.

But experimental evidence may be closer than some think. Atom smashers such as the LHC may one day "see" the extra dimensions that M-Theory implies, and London's Imperial College has published a paper in Physical Review Letters with a press release making the bold claim: "Researchers discover how to conduct first test of 'untestable' string theory."

Lead author Michael Duff tells me it's not quite as black and white as that and that the "test" is an indirect one, but it could have important implications for both string theory and M-theory - effectively an umbrella theory that embraces all five leading string theories.

The team from Imperial say they've found that string theory predicts the behaviour of entangled quantum particles - another mind-boggling area of physics. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers say they can now test string theory.

"This will not be proof that string theory is the right 'theory of everything' that is being sought by cosmologists and particle physicists," Professor Duff explained.

"However, it will be very important to theoreticians because it will demonstrate whether or not string theory works, even if its application is in an unexpected and unrelated area of physics."

But Professor Hawking is not alone in his attachment to M-theory, or to the idea that our universe is just one world in a "multiverse" of worlds.

This is an idea which echoes work by the physicist Hugh Everett III in the 1950s on quantum theory. This was roundly dismissed while he was alive, but has enjoyed a late renaissance in recent years. Everett described the universe as having not one single history, but multiple histories, in his so-called Many Worlds, or Parallel Worlds, theory.

Though there's no direct link between Everett's many worlds theory and M-theory, Professor Hawking does describe how M-theory "allows for 10 to the power of 500 different universes, each with its own laws".

Hugh Everett's son, the musician Mark Everett, more famously known as E of the rock band Eels, has tried to grapple with some of this physics in an effort to better understand his difficult relationship with his father.

E, promoting his latest album Tomorrow Morning, tells me how he believes his father's withdrawn character was down to the early dismissive reaction to his work from other physicists.
"He was a 24-year-old genius that was brushed under the carpet, and that ruined his life," he tells me.

But Professor Hawking explains how Hugh Everett III contributed to our knowledge of the universe.

"Hugh Everett made an important contribution to our understanding of quantum theory," he said. "In classical theory the universe has a definite history but this is not the case in quantum theory, Instead Everett suggested we could think of it as if the history kept branching into alternative histories."

The struggle to understand our world, or worlds, will continue, and the concluding paragraph of Professor Hawking's book sets out a seductive insight into the drive behind that search.

"The fact that we human beings - who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature - have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph... If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3,000 years. We will have found the grand design."

Incidentally, the M in M-theory is variously said to stand for "membrane", or according to Professor Hawking, possibly "master", "miracle" or "mystery". And mystery it may well remain for those of us still trying to make sense of it all.
Watch Susan's film featuring interviews with Stephen Hawking and Eels musician Mark Everett on the BBC iPlayer and Newsnight website.


BBC - Newsnight: Susan Watts: Are we closer to a 'theory of everything'?

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