The topic of this book is beauty and sublimity – or, rather, the subjective experience of beauty and sublimity. The opening chapter draws a fundamental distinction between what we judge to be “beautiful in itself” – what I call “public beauty” – and what we experience as beautiful, more or less what Palmer and colleagues refer to as “feelings that would elicit verbal expressions such as, ‘Oh wo...

Synopsis: Mid-latitude snowpacks on Mars have been postulated to exist by Christensen [1], who also suggests that runoff from melting snowpacks on slopes might be responsible for carving gullies, and suggests that such snowpacks may currently exist on the walls of Dao Valles (approx. -33.0 lat.). The snowpacks were presumably formed during the last obliquity cycle, about 74,500 years ago. In th...

We have developed a method that enriches for methylated cytosines by capturing the fraction of bisulfite-treated DNA with unconverted cytosines. The method, called streptavidin bisulfite ligand methylation enrichment (SuBLiME), involves the specific labeling (using a biotin-labeled nucleotide ligand) of methylated cytosines in bisulfite-converted DNA. This step is then followed by affinity capt...

It is perhaps illustrative of animal philosophy’s strong intent to establish itself firmly in serious academia that it has recently shown interest in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, a concept which is so abstrusely theoretical and abstract that it appears to say very little on the animal as we know it.1 In her latest study When Species Meet (2007), Donna Haraway ...

A sublime fossil discovery in Brazil shows that dinosaurs and their immediate evolutionary precursors lived together for tens of millions of years before dinosaurs ultimately rose to the top.

In the Indian Holy Book – THE UPANISADS (800 B.C.), man has been described as “the son of the Sublime” (“Amritasya Putra”). It is recorded in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis (First Book of Holy Hebrew Bible [The Old Testament (c. 200 B.C.)] that God made man in his own image after his likeness as the crowning glory of his creation. The Holy Koran (c. 630 A.D.) says : “God sends down no...

Numinosity refers to the spiritual power in the relationship between the individual and other people and things. The numinosity of water is discussed in the context of culture and religions. Science without consideration of numinosity can be dehumanizing. Often considered supernatural, other synonyms of numinosity include transcendent, ineffable and marvelous, not necessarily including religiou...