FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: After a week off, this week’s episode opens with a guy named Joseph being harangued by his unpleasant mother in their Worcester, Massachusetts, apartment. He goes to work at Bicoastal Parcel, a shipping company, where a hand-held scanning device shorts out and begins to smoke while he’s holding it. The boss is so mad that he sends Joe out on a delivery. This news perks up Joe because it means he’ll get to visit Bethany, a receptionist at a large office building and the object of his unvoiced affection. As he tries to make small talk, it becomes clear that Bethany’s spoken for. As Joe glares, Bethany’s computer crashes. He takes off, but she follows him to the elevator in search of some IT help. When the elevator car lurches, Joe’s phone falls on the ground, and she sees that he’s got photos of her on it. Before she can freak out, the elevator jerks again, then begins to fall to the garage level. It lands with a big boom and lots of blood, yet Joe is unhurt. Realizing everyone else is dead, he staggers into the garage. Each unattended car starts up as he passes. Amid the blazing lights and sounding alarms, Joe begs for it all just to stop.
At Harvard, Phillip Broyles and Olivia fill the Bishops in on the incident: The elevator didn’t fall, he tells them; it was “driven into the ground.” At the building, the Bishops realize that everyone in the car died from electrocution, not from the crash, which Walter illustrates by making Olivia’s gold pendant “float” on an electromagnetic current in the air. (Probably not actually possible, but it looked cool.)
The accident reminds Walter of a government project he worked on back in the day. (Is every single case going to have a direct link to work he performed decades ago? That just seems a little too easy.) Walter recalls that he was tasked to get carrier pigeons to recognize a person’s unique electromagnetic signature. Problem was, people don’t give off strong enough signals unless they’re “boosted,” and the enhancement made for uncontrollable surges in test subjects. But guess what? Walter theorizes that someone (like the someones in episodes one through four) kept up the work and has created a person who is essentially a loose electromagnetic cannon.
Olivia’s research, aided by Broyles, turns up a Dr. Jacob Fisher, who’s wanted all over the world for atrocities related to “human alteration.” He lures unwitting test subjects with ads in the back of magazines, promising to help them be more confident and tap into their unknown potential. Later that night, while Olivia’s scanning some of Fisher’s gruesome work, the lights go out. She takes a flashlight into the hallway and appears to be alone until the elevator dings and John (her dead, though recently reappearing, ex-partner) steps out. He advances as she backs away, but soon he’s very near. They go back and forth—he says he loved her, she counters that he tried to kill her—before he confirms that she’s on the right track and that she has to find the human electrode before Fisher does. “I will prove it, Liv, that I love you always,” he tells her as he turns to leave. “But not just yet. You’re gonna have to wait.” She races the elevator downstairs, but when it opens, it’s empty… save for a sign indicating its weight limit.
Olivia gets an idea that’s too good to wait until morning, so she wakes up the Bishops at their hotel and informs them, using a formula that doesn’t really matter, that a discrepancy in the weight of the elevator means someone walked away from the accident. When they compare the arm-crushing incident at Bicoastal Parcel to the sign-in sheet at Bethany’s office, they realize that Joe is the link. At his apartment, Joe is in a bad way. He upsets his mother, and himself, so much that her pacemaker malfunctions. When he tries to call an ambulance, his energy field interferes with the cordless phone’s reception. He runs out, leaving mom on the ground, and nearly collides with Jacob Fisher and a goon.
Olivia arrives later to find Joe’s mom dead. A call to the lab nets a suggestion from Walter: One of Joe’s audiocassettes could have his electromagnetic signature imprinted on it. Olivia brings back his tape of REO Speedwagon’s “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” so Walter can extrapolate a signal that can be followed by — you guessed it — carrier pigeons. Olivia buys a soda from a machine in the lab’s hallway and finds herself face-to-face with John once more. He seems very real as he kisses her and vows that he didn’t betray her. “I wasn’t the one,” he asserts. So if there is a “one,” and it’s likely someone we know by now, who? (For the record, at the moment, my money’s on FBI co-worker Charlie.)
The birds are primed and tagged with GPS transponders, then off they go to find Joe. Charlie, Peter, and Olivia follow in their cars. The pigeons lead them to Fisher’s evil operating room, where the bad doc has fitted Joe with subcutaneous electrodes at his temples. Fisher’s henchman interrupts to say that Olivia and crew are there, but as he tries to load Joe into a car, Joe uses his powers to start the vehicle and mow down the bad guy. Charlie collars Fisher while Olivia chases Joe, who’s eventually felled by a crowbar to the head, courtesy of Peter.
Fisher’s taken to solitary confinement. Joe’s taken to be observed. All seems neatly wrapped when Walter notices Olivia looked peaked and asks, “Have you been seeing him? Your friend, John Scott?” When she admits she has, Walter theorizes that their mind-meld from episode one means part of John’s subconscious took up a little real estate in Olivia’s brain. “Your mind is expelling him, exorcising his thoughts,” Walter reassures her. But as she drives home, she sees John on a side street and gets out to follow him to a basement apartment. He’s gone, but she sees boxes of files that Broyles later tells her are all related to John’s own investigation of “the pattern.” Turns out John knew more about Fisher than Broyles’ taskforce did, and through the files, they were able to save seven other test subjects whose powers hadn’t gotten out of control. Even more interesting: A box of John’s personal effects contains a velvet box holding a diamond engagement ring with “Always” engraved on the inside of the band.
And Walter, in his lab notes, wonders whether Joe "understands how special he has become. Does he reject his newfound power as alien? Or does he heed the words of my poetic namesake and embrace it as part of his being:
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul."
THE BOTTOM LINE: The bits with John are still spooky and worth watching, but the cases are becoming so formulaic that it’s difficult to stay engaged. More information on “the pattern,” however—especially the why behind it—might still be a nice entry point for a wider and meaningful science-and-religion discussion.

The main idea of Religulous seems to be pretty well encapsulated in the title's portmanteau: Religion is ridiculous. But a film that seems like it might just be a lighthearted—if slightly mean—romp through a cascade of religious idiosyncrasies takes a left turn down a dark path in its final five minutes.
In a lot of ways, this isn’t so much a documentary about religion as it is about Bill Maher, or, rather, about Bill Maher’s views of religion. And, to Maher’s credit, he does not zero in exclusively on one religion. The film has him talking to (to name just a few) Christian truckers, Jewish scientists, a Muslim singer, and ex-Mormons. He takes shots at Scientology, the Creation Museum, and at the religion of Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda—a man with followers in about 35 countries who calls himself both the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and the Antichrist.
Of course, this scattershot approach means Maher really can’t go any more than ankle deep in any of these discussions. But that’s really his point: You don’t need to go beyond ankle deep. To Maher, religion is just that shallow.
This helps explain why he doesn’t spend more than a minute or so with genome researcher (and Christian) Francis Collins: It’s not as easy to make him look ridiculous (though Maher and director Larry Charles—who also directed Borat—do their best). Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory and another proponent of the compatibility of science and religion, comes off significantly better; Maher’s purpose with Coyne is simply to undercut the creationist Ken Ham.
In the end, two things really bothered me about Religulous. The first was pretty predictable: The interviews were somewhat akin to bullying, just intellectual rather than physical. While Maher was certainly able to mine some comedic moments, my response as an audience member was caught in that uncomfortable place between wanting to laugh and wanting to shout “Hey! Pick on someone your own size!”
The other troublesome aspect was the film’s jarring and somewhat unexpected final moment. Bill Maher delivers a rousing monologue—intercut with images of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks—that essentially boils down to this: Religion has been used to violent ends in the past, and it will be again, only now we have nuclear weapons. He calls upon his allies—atheists, agnostics, even the religiously uncommitted—to come out of hiding, to break the polite code that we don’t talk about religion, and to challenge religious people’s beliefs.
Certainly, certainly, certainly, Maher means well. His intentions, by all means, seem completely pacifistic and idealistic. The problem is this: We’ve seen calls to convert the unconverted in this way before, and—even when they’re delivered by the most well-intentioned, non-violent messengers imaginable—they frequently do devolve into hatred, resentment, and violence against those not in the group with the “truth.” He’s not really speaking to religious believers in this film (as the R rating will ensure); he’s rallying his base.
In the end, one of the most prescient lines in the film comes from the unlikely source of Tal Bachman (the musician famous for his 1999 hit “She’s So High,” but interviewed by Maher because of his credentials as an ex-Mormon). Bachman, answering a question from Maher about why more people don’t leave Mormonism, explains that once you call into question the teachings of founder Joseph Smith, you’ve severed a tie with your family and friends.
Unfortunately, the moment passes with no follow-up comment. Which makes sense: There’s no reason for Maher to explore the idea of religion as a social adhesive. His goal in this film was to splash around in the puddles of religion, not to plunge into the ocean. —Dan Messier

"Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changes the World," a new permanent exhibit at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, will open on November 1. The exhibit of books, manuscripts, illustrations, and scientific instruments will be divided into four galleries assembled by theme—astronomy, natural history, medicine, and light—and will showcase some of science's greatest achievements from such famous figures as Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. The focus of the Dibner Hall of the History of Science will be on the changing role of science over time and its influence on culture (the exhibit displays 250 copies of On the Origin of Species, for example, to convey the influence of Darwin's famous book), and it will highlight many of the discoveries that broadened our imaginations (such as those that caused us to rethink Earth's place in the heavens or how to understand the evolution of species). According to senior curator Daniel Lewis, the goal is to get people to think about "the beauty of science in an historical context—the elegant breakthroughs, the remarkable discoveries, and the amazing people and stories behind them." —Michele Calandra

The first pictures of Paul Bettany playing Charles Darwin in the upcoming movie Creation have been released. (Bettany's real-life wife Jennifer Connelly will play his on-screen wife Emma.) The movie is based on the book Annie's Box by Randal Keynes (Darwin's great-great grandson), and the script, producer Jeremy Thomas told the Hollywood Reporter, "tells the remarkable story behind Darwin's revolutionary theory and the foundation of a book that changed the world. We think of Darwin as an old man with a gray beard. The reality of our story is very different."

"Theology in the Context of Science," a five-part lecture series with the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, begins today and runs through the next two weeks at the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Here's a detailed descriptions of his lectures, which will later be published and available through the university's book store:

Contextual Theology: The aim of the series is to develop theology in the specific context of science, in a manner concerned not only with specific problematic issues (evolution, big bang, etc.), but also with the style and orientation of an intellectual perspective. This requires an openness to surprising new concepts, coupled with a demand for evidential support for such concepts. A critical realist stance together with the technique of “bottom-up” thinking will also be necessary in the move from evidential experience to theological understanding.

Discourse: Scientists do not ask “Is it reasonable?”, for the world has often proved stranger than prior thought would have supposed, but rather, “What makes you think that might be the case?” The thought of Michael Polanyi, with its emphasis on the importance of commitment and of intellectual daring in the quest for scientific understanding, can be readily extended beyond science to embrace the search for religious truth. These ideas will be illustrated through a consideration of the perplexing question of the nature of time.

Persons: Science approaches reality in an impersonal mode, bracketing out questions of meaning and value from its discourse. Nevertheless, the contemporary scientific imagination is being extended by the discovery of the astonishing powers of spontaneous self-organization possessed by complex systems, encouraging a metascientific evaluation of science’s remarkable achievements. This development offers the prospect of a concept of “holistic information” playing as fundamental a role in science as that played by constituent exchanges of energy. The relevance of this to the understanding of psychosomatic personhood will be explored.

Consonance: The differing descriptions of science and theology about the nature of reality must bear some complementary relationship to each other. There must, therefore, be a degree of mutual consonance in what they have to say on certain matters. This is illustrated in considerations of how physical cosmology relates to a doctrine of creation; how science’s account of the causal nexus of the world relates to claims of divine providential action; and how the deep-seated inter-relationality of the physical world, evident in such phenomena as quantum entanglement, might be viewed in the light of Trinitarian theology.

Motivated Belief: Theology trades in motivated belief as much as science does, though the kinds of beliefs, and consequently the kinds of appropriate motivation, are different in the two cases. This claim is supported by considering how a bottom-up thinker can defend Christian theological belief. Some discussion is also given of how one may seek to understand the varying insights of the world faith traditions into the nature of sacred reality.

A new study suggests that cultivating compassion through meditation can lead to reductions in the body's inflammatory and emotional responses to stress, which are linked to a variety of mental and physical illnesses. The study, led by Dr. Charles Raison, clinical director of Emory University's Mind-Body Program, divided 61 college students into two groups: one participated in compassion meditation classes based on a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice, while the other took part in health discussions. While little difference was found between the stress responses of the two groups, the researchers did find that the more hours students in the training group spent meditating, the less severe were their bodies' inflammatory and emotional reactions to psychological stress.
"It will require conducting stress tests before and after meditation training in order to conclusively show it was the practice of compassion meditation that resulted in reduced stress responses," says Thaddeus Pace, a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory. "But these initial results are quite exciting. If practicing compassion meditation does reduce inflammatory responses to stress it might offer real promise as a means of preventing many conditions associated with stress and with inflammation including major depression, heart disease, and diabetes." Based on these findings, Pace and his colleagues will offer compassion meditation classes to patients at Emory Winship Cancer Institute, and the researchers are teaming with the Emory Predictive Health Institute for a series of studies on the potential long-term health benefits of compassion meditation. —Stephen Mapes

FROM ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN, HOST AND CREATOR OF CLOSER TO TRUTH: My inner self, my private sense of “I”—of this I am more sure than I am of anything else. How to understand this consciousness, this internal mental experience of an external physical world? What possibly could generate, create, cause it?
We know to begin with the brain. Biological brains are the most complex form of matter in the universe (as far as we know), and the human brain, three pounds, 75 percent water, is the pinnacle. How brains make their magic is just astonishing.
How to understand the brain? I start with brain structure, and to do so, I return to my roots, the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, where more than 40 years ago I did my doctorate in brain research. Although my career went off in other directions, I’ve always followed advances in the brain sciences, and in my personal self-conception, if this means anything, I’ve always considered myself more as a lapsed brain scientist than an investment banker or writer.
I recently visited three of my former professors at UCLA, to whom I owe much: Carmine Clemente, a distinguished neuroanatomist whose research focused on central brain mechanisms related to sleep and wakefulness and behaviors like sexuality and feeding (he is also the editor of Gray’s Anatomy); Arnold Scheibel, a professor of neurobiology and psychiatry, and an expert in relating function and malfunction to the organization and structure of brain cells; and John Schlag, a neurophysiologist who has shown clear relationships between various motor behaviors and detailed electrophysiology of specific brain areas. It was wonderful seeing them again, and it made me realize once more how tightly brain and behavior are connected.
What is it about brain structure, I reflected, that can make all this consciousness and self and stuff happen? To oversimplify:

At the macro level of brain systems, it’s:
• symmetry and subtle asymmetries between sides—left and right brains are both similar and different
• specificity in function—different brain areas do different things
• plasticity in development—brains remodel and revise continuously.

At the micro level of brain cells, it’s:
• dozens of billions of neurons (nerve cells)
• trillions of connections between them
• incalculable permutations of electrochemical communications.

Christof Koch, a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology, and a pioneer in investigating the “neural correlates of consciousness,” explains why the analogy of a brain to a computer falls off. In a computer’s central processing unit, the transistor equivalents are pretty much alike, whereas in a biological brain, there are many different kinds of nerve cells and different kinds of macro brain areas. This structure is a fundamentally distinguishing characteristic of biological brains.
And brain structure is not as rigid and inflexible as was once the accepted wisdom. New nerve cells are being created constantly in adults, and there is tremendous brain plasticity, as the fascinating work of Michael Merzenich of the University of California, San Francisco has shown, particularly in developing the basic science for cochlear implants, which enable deaf people to hear. (That the brain can learn to process input from artificial electronic signals and make them into meaningful sounds is remarkable evidence of the brain’s plasticity and adaptability.)
But our internal sense of “I,” believes Rodolfo Llinas, chairman of the department of physiology and neuroscience at New York University, is created by the cyclical waves of recursive feedback between the cerebral cortex (that covers the brain and accounts for the conscious registration of our senses, movements, and thoughts) and the thalamus (a kind of central relay deep in the center of the brain). Llinas calls this system the “I of the Vortex,” and he makes the claim that this is consciousness.
To understand consciousness, we know to begin with brain. The next question, to me, is as difficult to answer as it is easy to ask: Do we end with the brain? Most scientists, but not all, think surely so. Most theologians, but not all, think surely no. There is no compromise here.
I chose to study the brain because only by means of the brain can we know anything at all. Understanding the brain certainly brings us closer to truth. But, I wonder, will it ever bring us all the way to truth?

Robert Lawrence Kuhn speaks with Carmine Clemente, Arnold Scheibel, John Schlag, Christof Koch, Michael Merzenich, and Rodolfo Llinas in "How Are Brains Structured?" the fifth episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, which airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants in the series will share their views on the previous day's episode.