Science and Exploration

[Corkey]

"Use of population-genetic data to predict economic success sparks war of words.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.” Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould was referring to purported links between genetics and an individual’s intelligence when he made this familiar complaint in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man.

Fast-forward three decades, and leading geneticists and anthropologists are levelling a similar charge at economics researchers who claim that a country’s genetic diversity can predict the success of its economy. To critics, the economists’ paper seems to suggest that a country’s poverty could be the result of its citizens’ genetic make-up, and the paper is attracting charges of genetic determinism, and even racism."

for the complete article:
http://http://www.nature.com/news/economics-and-genetics-meet-in-uneasy-union-1.11565

Thinks I would be a critic.

[Lasiurus_cinereus]

"After heart-treatment claims collapse, researchers caution against a rush to the clinic.

Rarely has such a spectacular scientific claim been debunked so rapidly. For a few brief hours last week, Hisashi Moriguchi, a project researcher at the University of Tokyo, was riding high, lauded by his nation’s press for pioneering work on induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. His feat was said to be the first successful use in humans of a technology that days earlier had won his countryman, Kyoto University’s Shinya Yamanaka, a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine1.

Yet a swift investigation by Nature and several stem-cell researchers found that Moriguchi’s claim to have cured six heart-failure patients with cells derived from iPS cells was untrue; that he had lied about his university affiliations; and that he had plagiarized key parts of his research papers2. At a hastily convened press conference on 13 October, Moriguchi recanted. “I admit that I lied,” he told reporters, adding that his “career as a researcher is probably over”."

for complete article: http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-fraud-hits-febrile-field-1.11598

[Corkey]

"After heart-treatment claims collapse, researchers caution against a rush to the clinic.

Rarely has such a spectacular scientific claim been debunked so rapidly. For a few brief hours last week, Hisashi Moriguchi, a project researcher at the University of Tokyo, was riding high, lauded by his nation’s press for pioneering work on induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. His feat was said to be the first successful use in humans of a technology that days earlier had won his countryman, Kyoto University’s Shinya Yamanaka, a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine1.

Yet a swift investigation by Nature and several stem-cell researchers found that Moriguchi’s claim to have cured six heart-failure patients with cells derived from iPS cells was untrue; that he had lied about his university affiliations; and that he had plagiarized key parts of his research papers2. At a hastily convened press conference on 13 October, Moriguchi recanted. “I admit that I lied,” he told reporters, adding that his “career as a researcher is probably over”."

for complete article: http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-fraud-hits-febrile-field-1.11598

Wonders if he's cashed the check yet and if his Nobel will be yanked. I hate liars.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-predator-x-sea-monster-gets-official-name-134808720.html

It's official, Predator X gets a name.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/archaeologists-plan-dig-troy-141927332.html

New dig planned at Troy.

[Scuba]

Orionid meteor showers (northern Hemisphere) tonight through Sunday morning. They say one can see up to 25 an hour :) I'll be bundling up tonight and heading out to my back yard for the show!

[Scuba]

Orionid meteor showers (northern Hemisphere) tonight through Sunday morning. They say one can see up to 25 an hour :) I'll be bundling up tonight and heading out to my back yard for the show!

Well crap...it's going to be cloudy here tonight

[Hollylane]

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20026938)

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63628000/jpg/_63628360_c0090693-beluga_whale,_delphinapterus_leucas-spl.jpg

On the page at BBC News (use above link), below the Beluga photo, is a recording of the sounds...Love this!

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/hawaii-volcanos-lava-lake-threatens-overflow-221623347.html

Hawaii volcano lava lake threatens to overflow.


Very cool about the Beluga I could have sworn I heard "I love you" in there.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/amazing-photo-captures-84-million-stars-milky-way-115527272.html


84 million stars, one spectacular photo!

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/salton-sea-volcano-mystery-solved-182258381.html



Salton Sea volcanos moved into Active list.

[Hollylane]

Elephant mimics Korean with help of his trunk (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20142858)

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/tomb-ancient-egyptian-princess-discovered-unusual-spot-162840581.html


Unusual burial site for ancient Egyptian Princess.

[Lasiurus_cinereus]

"You could call this "Pac-Man, the Sequel." Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have spotted a second feature shaped like the 1980s video game icon in the Saturn system, this time on the moon Tethys. (The first was found on Mimas in 2010). The pattern appears in thermal data obtained by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, with warmer areas making up the Pac-Man shape."

source (and for images):
http://http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia16198.html

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/atom-smasher-creates-kind-matter-201132904.html

Hedron creates new kind of matter.

[Greyson]

Bloom TownThe Wild Life of American Cities

By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER
Published: November 27, 2012



"As damaging as urbanization can be to its immediate environs, city living, on the whole, is greener than living in the suburbs."


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-wild-life-of-american-cities.html?_r=0

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/drought-may-killed-sumerian-language-165436243.html

Draught may have killed off Sumerian language.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/never-seen-stage-planet-birth-revealed-180754694.html

Birth of a planet.

[Hollylane]

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/65067000/jpg/_65067064_gloveslice.jpg

A dark lump of rock found in the Moroccan desert in 2011 is a new type of Martian meteorite, say scientists. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20900843)

Weighing 320g, the stone has been given the formal name Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034 - but is nicknamed "Black Beauty".

Its texture and chemistry set it apart from all previous objects picked up off the surface of Earth but known to originate on the Red Planet.

The researchers' analysis, reported in Science magazine, shows the meteorite to be just over two billion years old.

The study was led by Carl Agee from the University of New Mexico, US.

"It has some resemblance to the other Martian meteorites but it's also distinctly different in other respects," he told BBC News, "both in the way it just looks in hand sample, but also in its elemental composition."

There are just over 100 Martian meteorites currently in collections worldwide. They were all blasted off the Red Planet by some asteroid or cometary impact, and then spent millions of years travelling through space before falling to Earth.

Their discovery was mostly chance (few were seen in the act of falling) but their dark forms mean they will have caught the eye of meteorite hunters who scour desert sands and polar ice fields for rare rocks that can trade for tens of thousands of dollars.

Virtually all the Martian meteorites can be put in one of three classifications referred to as Shergotty, Nakhla, and Chassigny after key specimens. Scientists will often refer to these rocks simply as the SNC meteorites.

Prof Agee and colleagues argue that NWA 7034 now be put in its own class.

This rock is a basaltic breccia in character. It is made of a jumble of fragments that have been cemented back together in the high temperatures of a volcanic eruption. There are many examples of Moon meteorites that look this way, but no SNC ones.

Geochemically, NWA 7034 is dominated by alkali elements such as potassium and sodium. This is precisely what the robot rovers studying basalts down on the ground on Mars also see. This is not a trait seen in the SNC meteorites, interestingly.

Prof Agee's team also see much more water in the new meteorite - about 6,000 parts per million. That is about 10 times more water bound into the rock than is the case in the most water-rich SNC specimens.

This says something about the environment in which the rock formed, indicating there was a much greater abundance of water to interact with the basalt.

"This rock is from two billion years ago and a lot of the SNCs are from only about 200-400 million years ago," explained Prof Agee.

"And of course those most recent times on Mars have witnessed a cold, dry planet with a thin atmosphere. A lot of people believe that early Mars, on the other hand, was a lot warmer and a lot wetter, and maybe even a harbour for life.

"So, what happened in between? When did this transformation to drier conditions occur? Well, NWA 7034, because of its greater age, may be able to address those questions."

[Lasiurus_cinereus]

"Flesh-eating flies map forest biodiversity


DNA in insects' guts reveals inventory of rare mammals.

The blowflies and flesh flies that settle on dead animals aren't just feasting on the carrion — they're sampling their DNA. Scientists in Germany have now shown that this DNA persists for long enough to be sequenced, providing a quick and cost-effective snapshot of mammal diversity in otherwise inaccessible rainforests."

complete article: http://www.nature.com/news/flesh-eating-flies-map-forest-biodiversity-1.12147

[Ginger]

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20026938)

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/63628000/jpg/_63628360_c0090693-beluga_whale,_delphinapterus_leucas-spl.jpg

On the page at BBC News (use above link), below the Beluga photo, is a recording of the sounds...Love this!




I'm sure the vocalizations go beyond this one word, but in the article they just mention the whale saying "out," and I'm thinking the poor thing is saying, "Get me the fuck out of here, out of this concrete box I've lived my life in."

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/famed-roman-shipwreck-could-two-192818118.html

Famed Roman shipwreck may be two.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/garden-sprinkler-star-fires-jet-near-light-speed-120912516.html

Vela Pulsar caught on video.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-louisiana-earthworks-nominated-world-heritage-150415576.html

Ancient site in Louisiana nominated for UNESCO world heritage.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/supergiant-star-betelgeuse-crash-cosmic-wall-151545820.html


Super giant star on collision course.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/did-rise-ancient-human-ancestor-lead-stone-tools-202218339.html


Intriguing use of tools.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/sun-grows-super-hot-dragon-tail-amazing-nasa-212050577.html


Super cool, super hot.

[KCBUTCH]

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/67429_588581011158608_1199477827_n.jpg

[Pinup_femme]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=universe-blackhole-collapse

This is an interesting explanation of relativity.

[dreadgeek]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=universe-blackhole-collapse

This is an interesting explanation of relativity.

If you have an iTunes store account and a spare $10 you can get Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos NOVA special which also has a fantastic explanation of relativity theory. It is well worth watching. Your local PBS station also runs it from time to time.

Cheers
Aj

[LeftWriteFemme]

BvTBsduaDQM

[dreadgeek]

So I want to get on top of this issue:

Next week a 150 foot asteroid will pass very close to the Earth (17,000 miles being very close). However, no matter what else you might here NASA is saying there is *no* chance that this rock will hit the planet. None. Even though it will be within the area in which most satellites orbit there is very little chance it will even hit a satellite. How can we be so certain? Physics. Since we know how the Earth-Moon system affects the orbits of objects (since we've been putting objects in orbit for almost 60 years now) and we know the trajectory and speed of the asteroid, we know where it's going and how it will be effected by its close encounter with Earth. What will happen is that the rock is going to 'slingshot' around the Earth and head toward Sol where it will go into a long orbit. Article link below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/08/asteroid-flyby-february-15-how-close_n_2644960.html

Cheers
Aj

[femmeInterrupted]

Here is an outstanding presentation on what the Higgs boson is and why it's a such a big deal:

http://vimeo.com/41038445

Cheers
Aj

Thanks! I enjoyed that!

[Greyson]

World Wildlife Fund turns to drones in bid to tackle poaching
Rhino poaching at an all-time high in South Africa due to demand from Vietnam.

by James Holloway - Feb 22 2013



http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/world-wildlife-federation-turns-to-drones-in-bid-to-tackle-poaching/

[Greyson]

By Tia Ghose , LiveScience

Tweets reveal the happiest U.S. cities



The 10 happiest cities were:

1.Napa, Calif.
2.Longmont, Colo.
3.San Clemente, Calif.
4.Santa Fe, N.M.
5.Santa Cruz, Calif.
6.Green Bay, Wis.
7.Santa Rosa, Calif.
8.Simi Valley, Calif.
9.Lafayette, Colo.
10.Asheville, N.C.

The 10 least happy cities:

1.Beaumont, Texas
2.Albany, Ga.
3.Texas City, Texas
4.Shreveport, La.
5.Monroe, La.
6.Memphis, Tenn.
7.Battle Creek, Mich.
8.Flint, Mich.
9.Lima, Ohio
10.Houma, La.

Looks like the State of Louisiana is the winner.


http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/tweets-reveal-happiest-u-s-cities-1C8502786

[Jean_TX]

Here's an interesting article about the microbes (bacteria, fungi, and protozoa) that live in the human body:

http://news.yahoo.com/body-bugs-5-surprising-facts-microbiome-170617561.html

[femmeInterrupted]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/318222_479682308763613_1558786693_n.jpg

[Toughy]

interesting...........

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-micro-continent-found-under-indian-ocean-194239722.html

[femmeInterrupted]

This is really fascinating.


https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/s480x480/558155_480605138671330_1036582012_n.jpg


Europa is the second of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, when counted outwards from the planet. First observed by Galileo Galilei in 1610, all four moons can be easily seen with a small telescope or binoculars. Europa is the smallest of the four, but still only slightly smaller than Earth's Moon.

Europa is considered by many planetary scientists to be the most likely place in our Solar System to harbour life, besides Earth. It is very cold on the surface, between 50 K and 110 K (-220 C to -160 C), but it's abundant in water. Our understanding of Europa's inner structure is based mostly on photographs taken by spacecraft, in particular the Galileo probe during its many flybys of the moon.

Europa is covered with a crust of ice, estimated to be 10-30 km thick, but planetary models indicate that underneath it there should be liquid ocean, as deep as 100 km. As Europa's eccentric orbit moves it closer or farther from Jupiter, the planet's tidal forces change in strength causing the moon to elongate slightly and then relax to its rounder shape. This constant squeezing and pulling is thought to generate enough heat to keep the ocean from freezing completely.

Europa has an atmosphere that's made mostly of oxygen. It is quite thin, with the surface pressure a trillion times lower than Earth's. The oxygen is not thought to be of biological origin. It's likely a result of molecules of water being split into oxygen and hydrogen by solar ultra-violet radiation and charged particles from Jupiter's magnetosphere.

A mission to Europa to examine it up close and to look for signs of life is being proposed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory together with Johns Hopkins University, Maryland. The spacecraft named Clipper would be launched in 2021 and enter an orbit of Jupiter some 3 years later to focus on flybys of Europa. The mission hasn't yet been funded so its future is uncertain, but exploring the moon is high on the list of priorities for future planetary exploration. ESA is planning to launch its own spacecraft JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer) around the same time (2022) that would target also Ganymede and Callisto.

The image taken by Galileo in 1998 shows the surface of Europa with its characteristic lines and freckles, thought to be a result of liquid water or warmer ice erupting through to the surface of the moon.


FAQ about Europa

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa/faq.cfm

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/images/stryk_ee14_700.jpg

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/500-million-old-sea-creature-limbs-under-head-180743101.html


Earliest anthropoid found.

[dreadgeek]

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/supermassive-black-holes-spin-at-nearly-the-speed-of-light.php?ref=fpblg

What I find so fascinating about this is that a consequence of E=mc^2* is as any object with mass approaches the speed of light it becomes more massive requiring every more energy to push it even closer to C**. A black hole is, by necessity, several solar masses (the mass of Sol multiplied by some number N). Supermassive black holes are in the realm of millions to billions of solar masses! So if a tiny sub-atomic particle with mass requires a fantastic amount of energy to get it moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, imagine the kind of energy it takes to get something billions of times more massive than our local star moving at close to the speed of light! That's an unimaginable amount of energy!

* E=mc^2 is energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
** C is the common shorthand notation for the speed of light.

[femmeInterrupted]

A canyon greater than 800 feet in depth has been discovered on the floor of the Red Sea. The discovery was made by the United Kingdom Royal Navy’s HMS Enterprise using an echo sounder that produces 3D images.

The multi-beam echo sounder equipment used works similarly to sonar. Pulses of sound waves are bounced off the sea floor and then returned back to the instrument on board.
The longer it takes for the sound waves to return to the ship the deeper the seafloor.
This data can then be compiled into an image, like the one shown.

The “Grand Canyon-style” feature may have been created through erosion of ancient rivers prior to the flooding of the Red Sea.
It could also be a newer geological feature; possibly the result of underwater currents scouring the landscape. More likely, it is a combination of the two.


https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/75977_484386891622360_2010793669_n.jpg

[femmeInterrupted]

Located some 200,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Tucana, Hubble spies an active star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

The star cluster, which is formally designated as NGC 602, is a mere 5 million years young.
The infant stars are still encased in their stellar cocoons, tucked away with the remainder of the gas and dust leftover from their formation.
The intricate ridges that are around the inner brownish portion of the image are the result of erosion, which was caused by the harsh ultraviolet light that is radiating from the energetic baby stars inside, who will eventually eat their way out of their predicament.

This image is a composite, stitched together using several different exposures, each of whic, were made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope using several different filters.
Two filters were used to capture broad wavelength ranges. Another was used to sample narrow wavelength emission.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1004/ngc602_hst_large.jpg

[Hollylane]

Richard III: The twisted bones that reveal a king (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21282241)

Richard III: Facial reconstruction shows king's features (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21328380)

[dreadgeek]

[COLOR="Gray"][SIZE="3"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Located some 200,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Tucana, Hubble spies an active star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

Wrap your mind around this: when the light of those stars left their points of origin Homo sapiens was just getting its start on this planet. Music, art, religion, all of the things we are accustomed to as culture were still tens of thousand of years in their future. There was no agriculture, no farming, no indication that we buried our dead, no indication that we made music or art, there was certainly no writing. The Hubble Space Telescope is a time machine in that it allows us to, quite literally, look at the universe as it was.

Cheers
Aj

[femmeInterrupted]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc6/285680_427167617369653_970923908_n.jpg


I found this fascinating:


Today, we bring you some food for thought about the reality of perception -- not the glass empty or half full debacle, but the sort of perception that seriously impairs us on a cosmological time scale, and biologically too. As we know, due to the finite speed that light travels in a almost-perfect vacuum, we are incapable of seeing things in "real time." We see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, the sun eight minutes ago, Proxima Centauri (the closest star from Earth) as it was more than four years ago, and the Andromeda galaxy (our closest galactic neighbor) as it was more than 2.5 MILLION years ago.

In essence, observing anything in space from our little chunk of rock is surprising, in the sense that simply looking out into the night sky is the closest thing to time travel we currently know of. In the same way, observers in other parts of our galaxy could look at Earth's development over the course of our evolutionary time-line, and they would see the Earth as it appeared hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago (depending on which part of the galaxy they live in and how far away this location is from Earth).

The phenomena of how fast the speed of light is also allows us to study the universe as it appeared mere hundreds of millions of years after the big bang occurred. The most distant sources of light were emitted from the first generation of stars and galaxies in the primordial universe more than 13.7 billion years ago.

Something else that limits our overall perception of the universe is our inability to see light in all of its various wavelengths. Light with properties of both particles and waves (in its various forms) is just like the universe, in that it is an expression of energy. Albeit, an extraordinarily unique expression of it. Most obvious to us is light at optical wavelengths, which is emitted from many stars glittering throughout the universe. Then there is light at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. Astonishingly, our sun only emits about 44% of its total electromagnetic radiation at optical wavelengths, the rest of it is emitted in other frequencies invisible to the naked eye (but their true nature can be discerned using special tools and filters).

These phenomena are most obvious at large distances, but they are also very applicable to our day to day lives here on Earth, though the effects are not nearly as extreme or noticeable.

I want all of you to stop whatever you are doing for a moment (unless all you are doing is reading this article) and participate in a little experiment with me.

First, close your eyes and extend both of your index fingers. After you've done that, take one of your fingers and touch your nose. With the other finger on the other hand, touch your knee or ankle. Repeat this a few times. (Even better, have a friend do it to you!) After which, you should be able to feel your fingers touching your nose and ankle simultaneously. Think about this for a second...the nerve signal from your ankle had to travel exponentially farther (about twenty times over) to get to your brain than the signal from your nose did, but it *FEELS* simultaneous, doesn't it?

Basically, (and this is trippy) we aren't sure if the ankle and the nose were truly touched at the same time, or if they were touched at slightly different moments, and the brain reassembled asynchronous signals which led to the sensory information being put together at exact same time.

There was actually an experiment done on this very subject where scientists had a group of volunteers press a button that would cause a light to flash after a small delay. After several rounds of this, they found that the volunteers were seeing the flash only milliseconds AFTER they pushed the button, as the brain edited the delay out after it got used to it...suggesting that our brain modifies the sensory information from our bodies in different ways, ways that would typically make more sense to us, causing our consciousness to exist in the past (on a microscale).. kind of like radio stations that operate on a delay of a few seconds to prevent the f-bomb (or something equally scandalous) from being played live on air.

Now, let's tie some of these portions together... if you were to stick your hand straight in front of your face, you will not see a present image of it. Instead, it will be delayed over the course of a few milliseconds due to the constraints of Einstein's theory of special relativity (given the time that it takes light to illuminate your hand, and the biological processes we must undergo before our brain can register stimulus). In addition, we must also factor in the speed of nerves traveling to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, where visual information is sorted through and the "speed of thought," which is largely different form person to person.

In conclusion, many things on a micro and macroscale are directly influenced from our perspective due to a myriad of variables placed on us by the laws of physics and our anatomy itself. There is the reflection and refraction of light scattered in our atmosphere, the observer effect witnessed with subatomic particles, light at various frequencies, and even the properties of time itself, or time dilation more specifically, whose effects can be seen on our satellites in LEO and the event horizons of black holes. All of this bring up an interesting philosophical question... Are we really observing reality, or can we only see into the past--glimpse the world as it was a nanosecond ago?

What are your thoughts?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/15/time-on-the-brain-how-you-are-always-living-in-the-past-and-other-quirks-of-perception/

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/1st-photo-alien-planet-forming-snapped-telescope-153016924.html

1st photo from ESO in Chile of alien planet being formed.

[femmeInterrupted]

Making Waves Stellar Style

Zeta Ophiuchi is making waves in its neighborhood. The star is located 370 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.
It is six times hotter, eight times wider, twenty times more massive and 80,000 times brighter than our sun.
Zeta Ophiuchi would be ranked among the brightest stars if not shrouded by cosmic dust.

This massive star is moving fast enough (54,000 mph) to break the sound barrier, creating “bow shocks” in surrounding material.
Bow shocks in space are similar to the wake caused by boats and are usually visible when two areas of gas or dust collide.
Zeta Ophiuchi produces very strong winds of hot gas particles that collide with the surrounding interstellar dust clouds.

Normally bow shocks can be seen in visible light, but Zeta Ophiuchi’s dust veil only allows NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to view the longer infrared wavelengths.
The red areas in the image are the “bow shocks” and have a slightly longer wavelength than the fine dust filaments shown in green.

source:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16604

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/856248_482152841849893_54917649_o.jpg

[femmeInterrupted]

Scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center are in the process of developing warp technology.
Specifically, they are in the process of investigating the logistics of the Alcubierre drive, which would hypothetically allow spaceships to travel more than ten times faster than light-speed WITHOUT violating the laws of physics. Instead, this technology would use deformations in the foundations of spacetime that are permitted by general relativity to propel a spaceship forward.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/558085_429096770510071_872793695_n.jpg

http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/sci-fi-becomes-sci-fact-the-real-star-trek/

[femmeInterrupted]

Beautiful Images :)


https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/581748_483631085035402_848674126_n.jpg

Venus shines through the rings of Saturn, in one of two photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft on Nov. 10, 2012.

It appears as a bright white dot, just above and to the right of the picture’s center.

The image was taken while Cassini was slightly below the ring plane, looking towards the unlit side of the rings.
Each dot represents about 44km (28miles).
The Cassini was at the time 802,000 km away from Saturn and about 1,42 billion km from Venus.

Venus is much hotter than the Earth(reaching 500 degrees Celsius) and has a surface pressure 100 times our own.
Its thick, carbon-dioxide-dominated atmosphere is to blame.
However, it is still considered a twin to Earth due to similar size, mass, orbit, and rocky composition.
Its brightness is enhanced by thick sulfuric acid clouds covering the planet.

Venus is not the only planet that the Cassini has seen from Saturn.
An image snapped in 2006, called “In Saturn’s Shadow”, shows a staggering view of Earth, and happens to be one of the most popular pictures taken from the Cassini.


http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/160335main_pia08329-516.jpg


In Saturn's Shadow
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia08329.html

[femmeInterrupted]

http://phys.org/news/2013-03-evidence-comets-seeded-life-earth.html

[Jean_TX]

Doubly good news - there is some evidence that suggests having sex may prevent and/or ameliorate migraine headaches!

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2013/03/04/Sex-may-lead-to-migraine-relief-for-some/UPI-76181362457741/

[Corkey]

Doubly good news - there is some evidence that suggests having sex may prevent and/or ameliorate migraine headaches!

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2013/03/04/Sex-may-lead-to-migraine-relief-for-some/UPI-76181362457741/

LOL when I've had migraines the last thing on my mind is sex.:hamactor:

[Jean_TX]

LOL when I've had migraines the last thing on my mind is sex.:hamactor:

Well now you know the cure ....go for it!!!

[femmeInterrupted]

Retinal implants have given sight to 9 people.

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18fbi49utavxcjpg/xlarge.jpg


http://gizmodo.com/5985863/this-retinal-implant-has-given-sight-to-nine-blind-people

[femmeInterrupted]

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/humanbody_female3.gif

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/humanbody_male1.gif

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/humanbody_side2.gif


http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/06/vintage-human-body-gifs/

[femmeInterrupted]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/554927_546739312024412_862001816_n.png



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21520404

[dreadgeek]

So it appears that physicists are pretty close to confirming that the newly found particle really is the long-sought Higgs boson. However, they need to rule out one possibility which would be *at least* as cool as the Higgs, the graviton.

Haven't heard of the graviton before? It is a particle predicted to exist based on the following (simplified of course): All the other forces (electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces) all have a messenger particle. The messenger particle for electromagnetism is the photon. For the strong force the messenger particle is the gluon. For the weak force it is a weak-gauge boson. For gravity it is the graviton.

The problem with the graviton is that it is carrying the weakest of the four forces (really, it doesn't seem like it but gravity is very weak, I'll get to that in a minute)*. It also has no mass (meaning it can move at the speed of light). So physicists have to find a very weak, mass-less particle. If the particle they've found has no spin** then it's Higgs and one kind of mystery in physics is solved. If the particle they've found has spin then it's the graviton and another kind of mystery has been solved.


* The weakness from gravity can best be understood like this. When you lift anything you are overcoming the force of gravity pulling on the object and your arm. The reason why you don't fall through the floor if you fall down is that the electromagnetic force is overcoming the strength of gravity quite literally all of the negatively charged particles in your body are being repelled by all of the negatively charged particles in the ground! While both gravity and electromagnetism have infinite range, electromagnetism is 10^36 times more powerful than gravity! (That's a ten with 36 zeroes after it. To give you a sense of scale, it's the difference between the size of a single helium atom and the size of the visible universe.)

**Spin is a characteristic of subatomic particles. You can, by way of analogy, think of it in the normal sense of rotation in a particular direction around an axis but this should not be taken too far. It is a quantum mechanical description using the language of classical physics but the spin of, say, an electron is not the same as a ball spinning.

Cheers
Aj

[femmeInterrupted]

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02146/pinkDiamond_2146467b.jpg



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/9097641/Unprecedented-12.76-carat-pink-diamond-worth-7-million-mined.html

[dreadgeek]

So some physicists have come up with a new family of solutions for the three-body problem. For those not aware of this problem, it basically is this: Isaac Newton worked out the math to calculate the orbits for any two bodies. However, calculating the orbits of three bodies is fiendishly difficult. In the last few hundred years only three families of solutions were found. The most well-known of these are the Lagrange-Euler family. Most solutions for three bodies in orbit around one another are one-offs but the holy grail is a generalized solution for any three bodies.

Now some physicists have found 13 new families of solutions to the problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/three-body-problem-solutions_n_2853631.html

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/03/mars-curiosity-rover-finds-proof-life-could-have-thrived-on-planet-in-past/

Mars rover finds proof life could have thrived on the planet.

[femmeInterrupted]

Astronomers have detected the building blocks of DNA in an interstellar gas cloud located about 25,000 light years from Earth.



https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/578255_549902078374802_72667091_n.jpg


http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2013/newchem/

[meridiantoo]

"Scientists working with data from a large particle accelerator in Europe are now almost certain they have pinned down the elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs Boson," NPR's Joe Palca tells our Newscast Desk.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/14/174287416/god-particle-update-scientists-think-theyve-pinned-down-the-higgs-boson?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130314

http://i1277.photobucket.com/albums/y483/ca_dence/subatomicparticle_zpsfffb1b27.jpg

[dreadgeek]

So the Voyager 1 probe has reached the absolute outer edge of Sol's influence. Earlier today it was announced that Voyager 1 had left the solar system and had now entered interstellar space but that might be a bit premature. There are still charged particles from the Sun being detected but when the direction of those charged particles change (meaning that they are inbound to the system and not outbound from it) then the probe will truly be in interstellar space.

How far is Voyager 1 from Earth? It is 72 light hours. That means it takes a radio signal, which is just a form of light, 72 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. That's 670,615,200 miles per hour so 48,284,294,400 miles away. Purely for sake of comparison the Moon is 1.5 light seconds away (~250,000 miles) and the Sun is 8 light minutes away (93 million miles).

This is now the farthest out anything made by the hands of humanity has ever been from Earth.

Cheers
Aj

[Ascot]

I heard a story the other day on NPR in which they were discussing a book titled Frankencat, about some of the different genetic modifications that are being performed on animals. Specifically, the story was about how spider DNA has been introduced into goats so that when the goat's milk is purified, it contains a significant amount of silk that can be harvested and used in any number of applications. Because silk is super light but very strong, it's being looked at for use in things like bullet proof vests, etc.

[Corkey]

I heard a story the other day on NPR in which they were discussing a book titled Frankencat, about some of the different genetic modifications that are being performed on animals. Specifically, the story was about how spider DNA has been introduced into goats so that when the goat's milk is purified, it contains a significant amount of silk that can be harvested and used in any number of applications. Because silk is super light but very strong, it's being looked at for use in things like bullet proof vests, etc.

I had to google to get the right book.
http://www.npr.org/books/titles/173510965/frankensteins-cat-cuddling-up-to-biotechs-brave-new-beasts

[Ascot]

Oh, ha, oops! I was in the car and no doubt yelling at some dumb ass who was driving poorly. Thanks for finding that. I think at one point the commentator said "Frankencat" and it stuck in my mind.

[Little Fish]

I heard a story the other day on NPR in which they were discussing a book titled Frankencat, about some of the different genetic modifications that are being performed on animals. Specifically, the story was about how spider DNA has been introduced into goats so that when the goat's milk is purified, it contains a significant amount of silk that can be harvested and used in any number of applications. Because silk is super light but very strong, it's being looked at for use in things like bullet proof vests, etc.

This reminds me of when I took Molecular Genetics in college. The scientist who taught discussed how their exists a fish whose blood contains a distinct "anti-freeze" gene. (I'm unclear how it is used originally by the fish.) This anti-freeze gene has since been isolated from the fish, reproduced in a laboratory and ultimately transferred into the genome of a strawberry. The idea was to prevent strawberry crop loss from untimely freezing etc. I'm sure there are people who scoff and otherwise flip out about this but honestly, I think that shit is bitchin' !

[Corkey]

This reminds me of when I took Molecular Genetics in college. The scientist who taught discussed how their exists a fish whose blood contains a distinct "anti-freeze" gene. (I'm unclear how it is used originally by the fish.) This anti-freeze gene has since been isolated from the fish, reproduced in a laboratory and ultimately transferred into the genome of a strawberry. The idea was to prevent strawberry crop loss from untimely freezing etc. I'm sure there are people who scoff and otherwise flip out about this but honestly, I think that shit is bitchin' !

And people wonder why GMO's are bad...

[Ascot]

This was being discussed when I worked at Whole Foods, specifically introducing cod DNA into tomatoes to make them impervious to cold and what the ramifications would be for people who, for example, adhere to a vegan diet.

[Corkey]

This was being discussed when I worked at Whole Foods, specifically introducing cod DNA into tomatoes to make them impervious to cold and what the ramifications would be for people who, for example, adhere to a vegan diet.

The whole Monsanto GMO stuff is going to kill off the human race, along with the bees.

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-egyptian-sundial-discovered-valley-kings-180758166.html

On a lighter note, oldest yet sundial found

[dreadgeek]

This reminds me of when I took Molecular Genetics in college. The scientist who taught discussed how their exists a fish whose blood contains a distinct "anti-freeze" gene. (I'm unclear how it is used originally by the fish.) This anti-freeze gene has since been isolated from the fish, reproduced in a laboratory and ultimately transferred into the genome of a strawberry. The idea was to prevent strawberry crop loss from untimely freezing etc. I'm sure there are people who scoff and otherwise flip out about this but honestly, I think that shit is bitchin' !

The gene is in a fish that, if memory serves, lives under one of the ice packs either the Arctic or the Antarctic. It literally evolved a means of keeping its blood from freezing. Like you, I think that it is so amazing and I really wish there were some way to communicate so that the general public would understand that there's no 'essence of fish' that is taken out and put it into a strawberry. Rather, a specific gene that builds a very particular protein, is inserted in another organism which then can build that protein. It's the same protein. It does the same thing. A gene that codes 'for' something codes for that thing not all of the traits of the organism the sequence came from. All living things can transcribe the same DNA because the bases ACGT are the same in fish and in plants and in mammals. It is a sign of the unity of all life on this planet that the gene that says "build eyes here" is the same in the fruit fly, mice and humans.

The fact that the gene originally came from a fish wouldn't trigger a fish allergy because the DNA in the strawberry doesn't 'know' that it came from a fish. It knows that when it gets a signal to start making some protein X, it starts making that protein until some other signal tells it to stop.

Cheers
Aj

[Hollylane]

The gene is in a fish that, if memory serves, lives under one of the ice packs either the Arctic or the Antarctic. It literally evolved a means of keeping its blood from freezing. Like you, I think that it is so amazing and I really wish there were some way to communicate so that the general public would understand that there's no 'essence of fish' that is taken out and put it into a strawberry. Rather, a specific gene that builds a very particular protein, is inserted in another organism which then can build that protein. It's the same protein. It does the same thing. A gene that codes 'for' something codes for that thing not all of the traits of the organism the sequence came from. All living things can transcribe the same DNA because the bases ACGT are the same in fish and in plants and in mammals. It is a sign of the unity of all life on this planet that the gene that says "build eyes here" is the same in the fruit fly, mice and humans.

The fact that the gene originally came from a fish wouldn't trigger a fish allergy because the DNA in the strawberry doesn't 'know' that it came from a fish. It knows that when it gets a signal to start making some protein X, it starts making that protein until some other signal tells it to stop.

Cheers
Aj

While all of this is amazing, and only possible because of the human brain, I am still appalled. In nature, a strawberry and a fish would never meet. If I buy a strawberry, I want it to be only a strawberry. Thankfully, I can avoid all of these mutations (for now) by purchasing locally grown organic fruits/vegetables, and making sure that other vegetables/fruits that I may buy are non-gmo.

I want to see strong labeling laws, that protect those of us who desire to eat whole foods, that are unaltered from their natural state. The sick part of all of this to me is, that even though I am making these important choices for myself, the fact that these things exist, means that I may still be exposed to them over time.

Altering animals to produce things that they would never produce naturally will never be okay with me, and I don't think it is a matter of me "freaking out", it is simply appalling to me that humans are meddling in nature this way, and subjecting other creatures to experimentation for the purpose of production.

[dreadgeek]

But Hollylane, that strawberry isn't in its natural state. Everything we eat, every fruit and every vegetable and every domesticated animal has been genetically modified. The difference between genetic engineering and what humans have been doing since we invented agriculture is two-fold:
1) Instead of doing things blindly we are being far more targeted and subtle with it.
2) We are able to across the species barrier in ways we couldn't before.

Other than that, the essence of what is happening is exactly the same. We are taking genes and selecting the ones we want/need for our purposes. When I say we are no longer doing things blindly I mean that in the past, all we could do was take one plant or animal that had traits we wanted and cross it with another planet or animal that had traits we wanted. The problem was that many traits don't breed 'true' and there could be genes that were 'hangers on' that might bring in traits we didn't want.

Now, if we want to breed for a particular trait, all we have to do is know what genes or combination of genes code for the appropriate protein.

The second issue, being able to cross the species barrier, I can understand a bit more but it still seems, to me, to rest on an essentialist view of living things. Even you say so below that you want a strawberry to only be a strawberry as if the insertion of a gene that makes a protein that prevents damage from freezing somehow makes it not a strawberry. The *only* reason why strawberries never hit on this neat little trick is that Nature never put that species in the position where the ability to resist extended cold was selected for. Plants have a different mechanism for surviving cold and, in the case of strawberries, it's called 'seeds'. But if strawberries had evolved in an environment where it was *always* cold (like under the ice pack) then they almost certainly would have hit on a similar trick. We are not, however, taking some essence of fish and putting it into a strawberry. We're simply taking a gene that, for reasons of historical contingency and evolutionary history, found itself in a fish and putting it in a strawberry where it does the same thing as it does in the fish. Nothing 'fishy' comes over because the protein *happens* to come from a fish, it isn't necessarily a protein that a fish and only a fish could ever have need of.

So why didn't the strawberry come up with anti-freeze on its own? Here I have to digress into evolutionary biology because it's the only way to make sense. I'm going to use two examples to explain evolutionary contingency, one real and one fanciful.

First the real:

The primate eye is actually built 'upside down'. What one would expect, if the eye had been designed by, say, an optical engineer that the light-sensing cells would be facing the source of light with all of the supporting infrastructure (blood vessels, etc.) behind the eye. That is not, in fact, how the primate eye is built. Instead, the light sensing cells are at the *back* of the eye and all the other structure of the eye is on top of it. This means that our eyes are less efficient then they otherwise could be. Now, if evolution could take steps backward the primate eye could have been rebuilt over evolutionary time so that it was more efficient (the eyes of cephalopods--squids and the like) are actually built the right way round. But evolution can't take back steps it can *only* work with what it already has.

The other example is the potential for human flight. The reason why we *can't* fly isn't that it is impossible for us to develop wings but that all of the things it would take for us to develop wings are simply not available to our species. Those pathways were closed off millions of years ago and there's no way to go back even though the ability to fly like bats would be mightily helpful to our species. Strawberries and fish haven't shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years. The reason why the fish and the strawberry would never meet isn't that nature doesn't *want* them to but because there's no pathway by which they *could* meet. Not because there's something 'wrong' with it but simply because there's no selective benefit for either the fish or the strawberry to trade genes with one another.

Lastly, there's the issue of commonality of genes. While you look nothing like a banana you share 70% of all your genes with bananas. You are also not much like a fruit fly or a mouse (although you are, obviously, much more closely related to a mouse than a fruit fly) yet the very same gene that tells the developing human body "build eyes here" tells both the developing mouse or fruit fly to "build eyes here". To think about the implications of this try this thought experiment. If we took the gene, called 'eyeless', out of a human being and implanted it in a mouse what kind of eye do you think would grow? If you said "a human eyeball" you're wrong. It doesn't. The gene doesn't specify "grow this kind of eyeball here" instead it specifies "whatever kind of eye is appropriate for this species, it goes here". Do we know this to be true? Yes. How? Because we can and have taken that gene from a fruit fly, inserted it into the genome of a mouse where that gene had been 'knocked out' and pasted it in. Mice grew mice eyes where the gene specified it should. The same thing worked in reverse. A copy of the eyeless gene from a mouse, inserted into a fruit fly, caused the fruit-fly to grow a fruit-fly eye in the specified location.

Was there anything 'mouse-like' about the gene? No. In fact, there's a gene--the HOX gene--that specifies the body plan for almost everything living on the planet that *isn't* a bacteria.

DNA is DNA. There's no such thing as 'fish' DNA which is different from and incompatible with banana DNA. DNA either codes for a protein or tells another strand to start or stop.

I'm not saying we should go full-speed ahead with genetic engineering but I am saying that there is a lot of confusion and, in my mind, needless fear of the technology. I am not, let me be clear, defending Monsanto or any other agribusiness. I am talking solely about the scientific questions of genetic engineering.

At the end of the day, selective breeding and genetic engineering are the same kind of thing. Selective breeding is walking, genetic engineering is ballet.

Cheers
Aj



While all of this is amazing, and only possible because of the human brain, I am still appalled. In nature, a strawberry and a fish would never meet. If I buy a strawberry, I want it to be only a strawberry. Thankfully, I can avoid all of these mutations (for now) by purchasing locally grown organic fruits/vegetables, and making sure that other vegetables/fruits that I may buy are non-gmo.

I want to see strong labeling laws, that protect those of us who desire to eat whole foods, that are unaltered from their natural state. The sick part of all of this to me is, that even though I am making these important choices for myself, the fact that these things exist, means that I may still be exposed to them over time.

Altering animals to produce things that they would never produce naturally will never be okay with me, and I don't think it is a matter of me "freaking out", it is simply appalling to me that humans are meddling in nature this way, and subjecting other creatures to experimentation for the purpose of production.

[Hollylane]

But Hollylane, that strawberry isn't in its natural state. Everything we eat, every fruit and every vegetable and every domesticated animal has been genetically modified. The difference between genetic engineering and what humans have been doing since we invented agriculture is two-fold:
1) Instead of doing things blindly we are being far more targeted and subtle with it.
2) We are able to across the species barrier in ways we couldn't before.

Other than that, the essence of what is happening is exactly the same. We are taking genes and selecting the ones we want/need for our purposes. When I say we are no longer doing things blindly I mean that in the past, all we could do was take one plant or animal that had traits we wanted and cross it with another planet or animal that had traits we wanted. The problem was that many traits don't breed 'true' and there could be genes that were 'hangers on' that might bring in traits we didn't want.

Now, if we want to breed for a particular trait, all we have to do is know what genes or combination of genes code for the appropriate protein.

The second issue, being able to cross the species barrier, I can understand a bit more but it still seems, to me, to rest on an essentialist view of living things. Even you say so below that you want a strawberry to only be a strawberry as if the insertion of a gene that makes a protein that prevents damage from freezing somehow makes it not a strawberry. The *only* reason why strawberries never hit on this neat little trick is that Nature never put that species in the position where the ability to resist extended cold was selected for. Plants have a different mechanism for surviving cold and, in the case of strawberries, it's called 'seeds'. But if strawberries had evolved in an environment where it was *always* cold (like under the ice pack) then they almost certainly would have hit on a similar trick. We are not, however, taking some essence of fish and putting it into a strawberry. We're simply taking a gene that, for reasons of historical contingency and evolutionary history, found itself in a fish and putting it in a strawberry where it does the same thing as it does in the fish. Nothing 'fishy' comes over because the protein *happens* to come from a fish, it isn't necessarily a protein that a fish and only a fish could ever have need of.

So why didn't the strawberry come up with anti-freeze on its own? Here I have to digress into evolutionary biology because it's the only way to make sense. I'm going to use two examples to explain evolutionary contingency, one real and one fanciful.

First the real:

The primate eye is actually built 'upside down'. What one would expect, if the eye had been designed by, say, an optical engineer that the light-sensing cells would be facing the source of light with all of the supporting infrastructure (blood vessels, etc.) behind the eye. That is not, in fact, how the primate eye is built. Instead, the light sensing cells are at the *back* of the eye and all the other structure of the eye is on top of it. This means that our eyes are less efficient then they otherwise could be. Now, if evolution could take steps backward the primate eye could have been rebuilt over evolutionary time so that it was more efficient (the eyes of cephalopods--squids and the like) are actually built the right way round. But evolution can't take back steps it can *only* work with what it already has.

The other example is the potential for human flight. The reason why we *can't* fly isn't that it is impossible for us to develop wings but that all of the things it would take for us to develop wings are simply not available to our species. Those pathways were closed off millions of years ago and there's no way to go back even though the ability to fly like bats would be mightily helpful to our species. Strawberries and fish haven't shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years. The reason why the fish and the strawberry would never meet isn't that nature doesn't *want* them to but because there's no pathway by which they *could* meet. Not because there's something 'wrong' with it but simply because there's no selective benefit for either the fish or the strawberry to trade genes with one another.

Lastly, there's the issue of commonality of genes. While you look nothing like a banana you share 70% of all your genes with bananas. You are also not much like a fruit fly or a mouse (although you are, obviously, much more closely related to a mouse than a fruit fly) yet the very same gene that tells the developing human body "build eyes here" tells both the developing mouse or fruit fly to "build eyes here". To think about the implications of this try this thought experiment. If we took the gene, called 'eyeless', out of a human being and implanted it in a mouse what kind of eye do you think would grow? If you said "a human eyeball" you're wrong. It doesn't. The gene doesn't specify "grow this kind of eyeball here" instead it specifies "whatever kind of eye is appropriate for this species, it goes here". Do we know this to be true? Yes. How? Because we can and have taken that gene from a fruit fly, inserted it into the genome of a mouse where that gene had been 'knocked out' and pasted it in. Mice grew mice eyes where the gene specified it should. The same thing worked in reverse. A copy of the eyeless gene from a mouse, inserted into a fruit fly, caused the fruit-fly to grow a fruit-fly eye in the specified location.

Was there anything 'mouse-like' about the gene? No. In fact, there's a gene--the HOX gene--that specifies the body plan for almost everything living on the planet that *isn't* a bacteria.

DNA is DNA. There's no such thing as 'fish' DNA which is different from and incompatible with banana DNA. DNA either codes for a protein or tells another strand to start or stop.

I'm not saying we should go full-speed ahead with genetic engineering but I am saying that there is a lot of confusion and, in my mind, needless fear of the technology. I am not, let me be clear, defending Monsanto or any other agribusiness. I am talking solely about the scientific questions of genetic engineering.

At the end of the day, selective breeding and genetic engineering are the same kind of thing. Selective breeding is walking, genetic engineering is ballet.

Cheers
Aj

I do understand the science and technology behind it all Aj, I can even dig deep, and find a way to relate to how you feel about it.

For me, I want more of what I would be likely to find at the Portland Farmer's Market, and less of what I find primarily at places like Fred Meyers. Without going into my whole belief system here, I'll just say in other words, I'd like zero ballet, and a lot more walking when it comes to my food. Personally, I don't believe that because we can do something, means that we absolutely should do that something.

Maybe, just maybe, these pathways don't exist in nature, for a multitude of reasons.

On a side note...

I truly appreciate the thought and care that you put into your response. Though I don't agree with you in this instance (not about the facts you presented, just on how we use science and technology where food is concerned), I frequently do agree with you. On many occasions, you have brought up things that send me diving down a rabbit hole looking for more information, thus expanding my mind.

[dreadgeek]

I do understand the science and technology behind it all Aj, I can even dig deep, and find a way to relate to how you feel about it.

For me, I want more of what I would be likely to find at the Portland Farmer's Market, and less of what I find primarily at places like Fred Meyers. Without going into my whole belief system here, I'll just say in other words, I'd like zero ballet, and a lot more walking when it comes to my food. Personally, I don't believe that because we can do something, means that we absolutely should do that something.

Maybe, just maybe, these pathways don't exist in nature, for a multitude of reasons.

On a side note...

I truly appreciate the thought and care that you put into your response. Though I don't agree with you in this instance (not about the facts you presented, just on how we use science and technology where food is concerned), I frequently do agree with you. On many occasions, you have brought up things that send me diving down a rabbit hole looking for more information, thus expanding my mind.

Thanks for the response. Can I ask you a couple of follow-up questions?

1) Since you agree that a protein is just a protein, why does it matter where it came from? I mean I could understand if the protein were, say, one that causes persons with an allergy to peanuts to have a reaction but provided its *not* one that causes an allergic reaction why does it matter?

2) What do you mean by maybe the pathways don't exist in nature for a multitude of reasons?

This is the deeper question, to me, and the reason I'm a little confused about it is this; it seems to me that the explanation I gave, just to take one for instance, why strawberries never developed anti-freeze on their own is sufficient to explain why that genetic pathway had to wait until we came along to show up in that species. For example, it would be extremely useful if humans could see down into the infrared and up into the ultraviolet. We *know* it's possible because there are other animals that can see into either one but our genome was simply never faced with the correct set of problems that would push us toward being able to do so. It's not that there's some grand design nor is it that there's something *wrong* with being able to see a little farther along the EMF spectrum than we already do, rather it's that not only Homo sapiens but primates as a whole were never in any environment where the selection pressure pushed *any* of us toward being able to see into the IR or the UV parts.

That explanation is sufficient to explain why we can't see UV or IR and there doesn't need to be any other reason. Likewise, the fact that strawberries--because they are flowering plants--never had the problem of "what do you do when your entire life-cycle is spent underneath an ice pack" is sufficient to explain why they never developed anti-freeze. Since strawberries are native to latitudes where winter is, more or less, what those of us living in the temperate zones are used to the long-standing plant solution toward the cold (e.g. produce seeds which can spend the winter underground) and that has been sufficient to preserve strawberry genes down the ages. No other explanation is really required. Why go to the trouble of evolving anti-freeze when the cold that could kill you is only 90 days long and you can just keep your genes in a seed for that period of time? No reason. Just like primates came up with a pretty decent solution for not being able to see well in the darkness--don't be active at night. Hominids came up with an even more elegant solution--fire.

I'm asking these questions of you not because I'm trying to prove some point but because most of the time when I've engaged others in this topic they haven't understood the science and so they've had some rather profound misconceptions about the nature of genes, the nature of proteins, the nature of DNA or they haven't really grasped that, for instance, while fruits *want* to be eaten vegetables, on the whole, *don't*. (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, neither fruits nor vegetables 'want' anything.) So what is the problem with genetic engineering, in general? Not Monsanto's business practices (that's a separate issue) but with genetic engineering specifically?

Why is it unnatural to take a gene that does precisely what we want done and *only* that thing and implant it in a species unnatural when if we simply selectively bred for resistance to cold and got to, more or less, the same protein but it took us a thousand generations (plant not human) to get there it would be natural? It's the same protein, it does the same thing, the only difference is one is a one-step process and the other is a blind, multi-step process with each step along the way having a risk of picking up genes we don't want and which might have deleterious effects.

Thanks for answering. It's a rare treat to be able to ask someone who understands the biology, can do "gene's eye view" thinking, grasps the 'central dogma' of modern molecular biology (that genes code for proteins) and still is opposed to genetic engineering in the terms you've expressed above.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/new-kind-of-supernova-iax-star-explosion_n_2957362.html

There's a new kind of supernova that's been discovered this one when a white dwarf explodes (which, honestly, I didn't think they had the mass to do).

Also there's a storm on Venus that has been going on for six years. That's nothing compared to the hurricane that is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. That storm has been going on since at least the 1600s when Cassini first observed it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/venus-cyclone-atmosphere-superstorm_n_2956653.html?ref=topbar

[Ascot]

It's quite something to think about a storm that's been raging for centuries. I wonder what causes something to become classified as a storm vs. simply being considered an atmospheric condition. Is it that it's different than on most of the rest of the planet?

[Allison W]

This was being discussed when I worked at Whole Foods, specifically introducing cod DNA into tomatoes to make them impervious to cold and what the ramifications would be for people who, for example, adhere to a vegan diet.

Depends on why that person is vegan. If it's for health reasons (which I am led to believe is a very common reason), unless the DNA changes the nutritional content of the tomato in some non-negligible way, it should be completely irrelevant. If it's for reasons of not wanting to harvest sentient life (read: things with a nervous system/motivational system/ability to feel pain/etc.) as a food source, then unless this DNA gives the tomatoes a bloody nervous system or live fish have to be continuously slaughtered for a source of the DNA (depending upon how the original DNA must be obtained this might be the case until you have a seed population of the modified tomato to work with, but after that, you can probably just have the tomatoes reproduce), it should not be particularly relevant.

Now if it's for reasons of religion or spirituality, or just Luddism or thinking there's some kind of magical essence of fish or whatever, I got nuthin'.

PS, slightly related: I am totally looking forward to vat-grown meat one of these days. Meat that does not require the continual harvesting of sentient animals to obtain. Bacon has already been produced from pig stem cells, which is pretty awesome. Now I'm just waiting for the day the tech advances to the point that we can find meat in the supermarket labeled "NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS MEAT." The culture shock alone will be priceless.

[Little Fish]

The whole Monsanto GMO stuff is going to kill off the human race, along with the bees.

I don't think there's anything inherently bad with GMO, to be honest. I expect this will be a very unpopular opinion but, it's mine.

I think the implications for vegans is an interesting one though-

[Corkey]

I don't think there's anything inherently bad with GMO, to be honest. I expect this will be a very unpopular opinion but, it's mine.

I think the implications for vegans is an interesting one though-

Bee hive colony collapse is directly effected by Monsanto's GMO's. Now if one can do with out fruit, nuts, or any other plant pollenated by bees, go for it. Personally I don't like scurvy.

[Little Fish]

Bee hive colony collapse is directly effected by Monsanto's GMO's. Now if one can do with out fruit, nuts, or any other plant pollenated by bees, go for it. Personally I don't like scurvy.

Are you talking about Colony Collapse Disorder?

If so, here's some data from the EPA website:
Why it's happening
There have been many theories about the cause of CCD, but the researchers who are leading the effort to find out why are now focused on these factors:

increased losses due to the invasive varroa mite (a pest of honeybees);
new or emerging diseases such as Israeli Acute Paralysis virus and the gut parasite Nosema;
pesticide poisoning through exposure to pesticides applied to crops or for in-hive insect or mite control;
bee management stress;
foraging habitat modification
inadequate forage/poor nutrition and
potential immune-suppressing stress on bees caused by one or a combination of factors identified above.

Additional factors may include poor nutrition, drought, and migratory stress brought about by the increased need to move bee colonies long distances to provide pollination services.


I think when making broad and sweeping declarative statements, it's most helpful to offer a scientific citation. The best information being the most accurate and thus by definition, evidence based.

[Corkey]

Are you talking about Colony Collapse Disorder?

If so, here's some data from the EPA website:
Why it's happening
There have been many theories about the cause of CCD, but the researchers who are leading the effort to find out why are now focused on these factors:

increased losses due to the invasive varroa mite (a pest of honeybees);
new or emerging diseases such as Israeli Acute Paralysis virus and the gut parasite Nosema;
pesticide poisoning through exposure to pesticides applied to crops or for in-hive insect or mite control;
bee management stress;
foraging habitat modification
inadequate forage/poor nutrition and
potential immune-suppressing stress on bees caused by one or a combination of factors identified above.

Additional factors may include poor nutrition, drought, and migratory stress brought about by the increased need to move bee colonies long distances to provide pollination services.


I think when making broad and sweeping declarative statements, it's most helpful to offer a scientific citation. The best information being the most accurate and thus by definition, evidence based.

I have other date that says it is GMO related. So who you going to base your "truth" on depends on what studies you read and believe. Best not attack others for their understanding of data.

Eta you come in here and state you are going to get flack, well you got it.

[Little Fish]

The gene is in a fish that, if memory serves, lives under one of the ice packs either the Arctic or the Antarctic. It literally evolved a means of keeping its blood from freezing. Like you, I think that it is so amazing and I really wish there were some way to communicate so that the general public would understand that there's no 'essence of fish' that is taken out and put it into a strawberry. Rather, a specific gene that builds a very particular protein, is inserted in another organism which then can build that protein. It's the same protein. It does the same thing. A gene that codes 'for' something codes for that thing not all of the traits of the organism the sequence came from. All living things can transcribe the same DNA because the bases ACGT are the same in fish and in plants and in mammals. It is a sign of the unity of all life on this planet that the gene that says "build eyes here" is the same in the fruit fly, mice and humans.

The fact that the gene originally came from a fish wouldn't trigger a fish allergy because the DNA in the strawberry doesn't 'know' that it came from a fish. It knows that when it gets a signal to start making some protein X, it starts making that protein until some other signal tells it to stop.

Cheers
Aj

Yes. This exactly. Thanks for the reference!--pretty amazing stuff!
(I almost went into genetics *sigh*...)

[Little Fish]

I have other date that says it is GMO related. So who you going to base your "truth" on depends on what studies you read and believe. Best not attack others for their understanding of data.

Eta you come in here and state you are going to get flack, well you got it.

Corkey,

You misunderstand me if you think I'm attacking you (or anyone else for that matter) --as I stated above, it's my opinion regarding GMO in general. I offer the comment about scientific citation because that is the academic convention when discussing data and scientific studies. Since I am a trained scientist by profession, I can assure you I do not use words like "truth" to discuss science. Data is either accurate or precise, neither or both.

If you'd like to share your sources regarding the Monsanto GMO studies and bee colonies, I'd very much like to read them. Thank you.

[Corkey]

http://www.naturalnews.com/035610_honey_bees_pesticides_corn_syrup.html

http://www.energygrid.com/ecology/2010/03po-colonycollapse.html

http://solutionsforyourlife.ufl.edu/hot_topics/agriculture/colony_collapse_disorder.html

[dreadgeek]

Bee hive colony collapse is directly effected by Monsanto's GMO's. Now if one can do with out fruit, nuts, or any other plant pollenated by bees, go for it. Personally I don't like scurvy.

Part of the problem with talking about genetic engineering is that there's the science and then there's the business. I, and I think the other few voices here who are actually in favor of genetic engineering, are talking about the *science*. If Monsanto went out of business this very afternoon, it would not change one whit the promise of genetic engineering nor would it change the science behind it. I am not going to defend Monsanto. I am going to defend genetic engineering because the science behind it is extraordinarily sound.

As I said the other day, genetic engineering is the same thing we've been doing since we got the clever idea of trying to domesticate some plants and animals. The primary differences, the only real significant differences, are that we can do very targeted manipulations instead of, quite frankly, kind of stumbling about in the dark *and* we can cross the species barrier. That's it. Other than that, genetic engineering is the same process as breeders use except the traditional way is slow and only slightly better than random natural selection. For example, a while ago a Russian scientist did a truly elegant experiment to test the hypothesis that the domestic dog was closely related to the grey wolf and that humans selected for friendliness towards humans.

To test this, he took foxes (which are still canines) and only allowed those animals that were most friendly to humans to breed. Within startlingly few generations (less than 20) the foxes had floppy ears, more puppy-like behavior, and instead of the more uniform coats of the fox you got the more color-varied coat we see with domesticated dogs. All of these follow-on effects weren't being selected for, those genes just came along for the ride. So in the ways that selection has been done for the last 15000 years or so, lots of genes have come along for the ride.

People think that because one is 'natural' and the other is 'science' that one is better or different than the other but they are really not. Yes, we're taking genes from fish and putting them in strawberries or tomatoes but we're not taking the fish genome, we're taking a specific gene and moving it across the species barrier and that's all. The reason--the ONLY reason--that nature didn't hit upon the solution of anti-freeze for either strawberries or tomatoes is that both species (the wild variant obviously) came up with a solution for dealing with cold, namely seeds. They didn't *need* anti-freeze in the wild because they did not evolve in locations that were cold long enough for resistance to cold to be selected for and seeds did the job. Again, that's the ONLY reason why those species didn't hit on the trick the fish did--they never had the correct problem for which anti-freeze is the solution. Nature is not guided and it has no foresight. It can't see down the road and it can't back up and take a better path when some species hits upon something clever. At no time did nature think "anti-freeze in strawberries would be good, wait on second thought no". There's nothing to do that thinking. Also nature is not exactly concerned with maximizing species. It is simply concerned with genes being passed down generation to generation. Nature doesn't act for the good of the species, it doesn't even act for the good of the individual, nature acts for the good of the genes.

If we want to talk about Monsanto and its business practices that's one subject and I'll likely agree with a lot that is said. But we're talking about genetic engineering specifically, not what Monsanto is doing with it and the idea that there is good, solid, scientific support for an anti-GMO stance simply isn't true.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/are_gmo_foods_safe_opponents_are_skewing_the_scien ce_to_scare_people_.2.html

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

Part of the problem with talking about genetic engineering is that there's the science and then there's the business. I, and I think the other few voices here who are actually in favor of genetic engineering, are talking about the *science*. If Monsanto went out of business this very afternoon, it would not change one whit the promise of genetic engineering nor would it change the science behind it. I am not going to defend Monsanto. I am going to defend genetic engineering because the science behind it is extraordinarily sound.

As I said the other day, genetic engineering is the same thing we've been doing since we got the clever idea of trying to domesticate some plants and animals. The primary differences, the only real significant differences, are that we can do very targeted manipulations instead of, quite frankly, kind of stumbling about in the dark *and* we can cross the species barrier. That's it. Other than that, genetic engineering is the same process as breeders use except the traditional way is slow and only slightly better than random natural selection. For example, a while ago a Russian scientist did a truly elegant experiment to test the hypothesis that the domestic dog was closely related to the grey wolf and that humans selected for friendliness towards humans.

To test this, he took foxes (which are still canines) and only allowed those animals that were most friendly to humans to breed. Within startlingly few generations (less than 20) the foxes had floppy ears, more puppy-like behavior, and instead of the more uniform coats of the fox you got the more color-varied coat we see with domesticated dogs. All of these follow-on effects weren't being selected for, those genes just came along for the ride. So in the ways that selection has been done for the last 15000 years or so, lots of genes have come along for the ride.

People think that because one is 'natural' and the other is 'science' that one is better or different than the other but they are really not. Yes, we're taking genes from fish and putting them in strawberries or tomatoes but we're not taking the fish genome, we're taking a specific gene and moving it across the species barrier and that's all. The reason--the ONLY reason--that nature didn't hit upon the solution of anti-freeze for either strawberries or tomatoes is that both species (the wild variant obviously) came up with a solution for dealing with cold, namely seeds. They didn't *need* anti-freeze in the wild because they did not evolve in locations that were cold long enough for resistance to cold to be selected for and seeds did the job. Again, that's the ONLY reason why those species didn't hit on the trick the fish did--they never had the correct problem for which anti-freeze is the solution. Nature is not guided and it has no foresight. It can't see down the road and it can't back up and take a better path when some species hits upon something clever. At no time did nature think "anti-freeze in strawberries would be good, wait on second thought no". There's nothing to do that thinking. Also nature is not exactly concerned with maximizing species. It is simply concerned with genes being passed down generation to generation. Nature doesn't act for the good of the species, it doesn't even act for the good of the individual, nature acts for the good of the genes.

If we want to talk about Monsanto and its business practices that's one subject and I'll likely agree with a lot that is said. But we're talking about genetic engineering specifically, not what Monsanto is doing with it and the idea that there is good, solid, scientific support for an anti-GMO stance simply isn't true.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/are_gmo_foods_safe_opponents_are_skewing_the_scien ce_to_scare_people_.2.html

Cheers
Aj

I'm not against genetic engineering at all, I am against Monsanto and their practice of using poisons to do the modifications to food and to nature. That is the problem I have with GMO's.

[Little Fish]

Thanks for those links Corkey, I look forward to reading them!

And thank you dreadgeek for your post too, it's important to always tease apart cause and effect, as well as in what context it exists too. I agree with your analogy, today's genetic engineering is merely a refinement of yesterday's advanced animal husbandry. (my apologies to you greadgeek, I'm quite oversimplifying your eloquence)

If anything, I think genetic engineering provides an avenue of precision as a technique unequaled previously in history--my hope is that it will unlock many of our most challenging problems in health / science and in the end, improve our quality of life in the most sacred and profound ways.

[Gráinne]

I was just reading a sample lesson plan in my science educator's magazine using a sandwich (or a picture of one!) to teach the principles of stratigraphy (determining the relative ages of rock layers, fossils and volcanic events using layering and superimposing). It included an opening activity, enquiry, practice, and closing. Figures, I would associate good teaching with food :).

[dreadgeek]

Thanks for those links Corkey, I look forward to reading them!

And thank you dreadgeek for your post too, it's important to always tease apart cause and effect, as well as in what context it exists too. I agree with your analogy, today's genetic engineering is merely a refinement of yesterday's advanced animal husbandry. (my apologies to you greadgeek, I'm quite oversimplifying your eloquence)

If anything, I think genetic engineering provides an avenue of precision as a technique unequaled previously in history--my hope is that it will unlock many of our most challenging problems in health / science and in the end, improve our quality of life in the most sacred and profound ways.

This is last is why I try to explain the science. There's a lot at stake. I'm going to give just one example: Huntington's chorea. There is a gene on chromosome 4 that consists of a single 'word' CAG (you can, in some ways, think of a genome) that repeats over again. On average people have between 6 and 15 repeats. Any number of repeats up to 35 and you're fine. The trouble starts at 39 or higher. Here's Matt Ridley talking about how not only do we know what gene causes it we can predict, based upon the number of repeats at what age you can expect to start showing symptoms.

If you have thirty-nine, you have a 90 percent probability of dementia by the age of seventy-five and will on average get the first symptoms at sixty-six; if forty, on average, you will succumb at fifty-nine; if forty-one, at fifty-four; if forty-two, at 37; and so on until those who have fifty repetitions of the 'word' will lose their minds at roughly twenty-seven years of age. The scale is this: if your chromosomes were long enough to stretch around the equator; the difference between health and insanity would be less than one extra inch. (Matt Ridley -- Genome: Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)

Now, we don't know what the gene is actually there for but one day we will and when we do we will be able to manipulate the genome so that we can simply edit out all repeats above 35. We could test for it pretty much as soon as the woman realizes she is pregnant. When we can, we should.

That's the promise. It would be beyond sin if we turned our back on this technology.

Cheers
Aj

[Toughy]

Literal Genesis Trial: Creationist Gimmicks Versus the Optimism of Education

The Guardian, for reasons I cannot begin to imagine, published an article summarizing the so-called Literal Genesis Trial being promoted by Joseph Mastropaolo. As reported, "A California creationist is offering a $10,000 challenge to anyone who can prove in front of a judge that science contradicts the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-zimmerman/literal-genesis-trial-_b_2961284.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

(this is just for Aj.....cuz it makes her as nuts as it makes me. My dad had a master's in natural sciences....he is probably rolling in his casket)

[Hollylane]

Thanks for the response. Can I ask you a couple of follow-up questions?

1) Since you agree that a protein is just a protein, why does it matter where it came from? I mean I could understand if the protein were, say, one that causes persons with an allergy to peanuts to have a reaction but provided its *not* one that causes an allergic reaction why does it matter?

2) What do you mean by maybe the pathways don't exist in nature for a multitude of reasons?

This is the deeper question, to me, and the reason I'm a little confused about it is this; it seems to me that the explanation I gave, just to take one for instance, why strawberries never developed anti-freeze on their own is sufficient to explain why that genetic pathway had to wait until we came along to show up in that species. For example, it would be extremely useful if humans could see down into the infrared and up into the ultraviolet. We *know* it's possible because there are other animals that can see into either one but our genome was simply never faced with the correct set of problems that would push us toward being able to do so. It's not that there's some grand design nor is it that there's something *wrong* with being able to see a little farther along the EMF spectrum than we already do, rather it's that not only Homo sapiens but primates as a whole were never in any environment where the selection pressure pushed *any* of us toward being able to see into the IR or the UV parts.

That explanation is sufficient to explain why we can't see UV or IR and there doesn't need to be any other reason. Likewise, the fact that strawberries--because they are flowering plants--never had the problem of "what do you do when your entire life-cycle is spent underneath an ice pack" is sufficient to explain why they never developed anti-freeze. Since strawberries are native to latitudes where winter is, more or less, what those of us living in the temperate zones are used to the long-standing plant solution toward the cold (e.g. produce seeds which can spend the winter underground) and that has been sufficient to preserve strawberry genes down the ages. No other explanation is really required. Why go to the trouble of evolving anti-freeze when the cold that could kill you is only 90 days long and you can just keep your genes in a seed for that period of time? No reason. Just like primates came up with a pretty decent solution for not being able to see well in the darkness--don't be active at night. Hominids came up with an even more elegant solution--fire.

I'm asking these questions of you not because I'm trying to prove some point but because most of the time when I've engaged others in this topic they haven't understood the science and so they've had some rather profound misconceptions about the nature of genes, the nature of proteins, the nature of DNA or they haven't really grasped that, for instance, while fruits *want* to be eaten vegetables, on the whole, *don't*. (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, neither fruits nor vegetables 'want' anything.) So what is the problem with genetic engineering, in general? Not Monsanto's business practices (that's a separate issue) but with genetic engineering specifically?

Why is it unnatural to take a gene that does precisely what we want done and *only* that thing and implant it in a species unnatural when if we simply selectively bred for resistance to cold and got to, more or less, the same protein but it took us a thousand generations (plant not human) to get there it would be natural? It's the same protein, it does the same thing, the only difference is one is a one-step process and the other is a blind, multi-step process with each step along the way having a risk of picking up genes we don't want and which might have deleterious effects.

Thanks for answering. It's a rare treat to be able to ask someone who understands the biology, can do "gene's eye view" thinking, grasps the 'central dogma' of modern molecular biology (that genes code for proteins) and still is opposed to genetic engineering in the terms you've expressed above.

Cheers
Aj

I haven't been on much lately, and I just saw this. I'm prone to being succinct in my answers Aj, even more so when I've just arrived home from work. So, I hope that my short answer helps.

Basically, I think that necessary evolution of plants and animals happens in its own time. It is probably my Native American side that recoils from tampering with plants and animals, and changing them by inserting proteins or anything else into them, that would not be possible through a natural evolutionary process or through selective processes.

[dreadgeek]

I haven't been on much lately, and I just saw this. I'm prone to being succinct in my answers Aj, even more so when I've just arrived home from work. So, I hope that my short answer helps.

Basically, I think that necessary evolution of plants and animals happens in its own time. It is probably my Native American side that recoils from tampering with plants and animals, and changing them by inserting proteins or anything else into them, that would not be possible through a natural evolutionary process or through selective processes.





If I can ask you one other follow-up, does that same feeling (I don't know what to call it when you say your Native American side) apply to editing *out* genes? I ask that in the context of the Huntington's chorea example I gave a few days ago. Since we know that any number of repeats above 35 is where things start to go badly and there is *no* benefit to having 39+ repeats of the CAG motif on chromosome 4, editing out all repeats above 35 would prevent people from a rather horrible disease. Are you saying that just as you don't think we should be changing genes except in the long, blind process (which, in my mind, is pretty wasteful) of selection that we shouldn't edit out genes even if doing so would save lives? I'm trying to understand where the line would get drawn.

If inserting genes in is, for lack of any better term, against nature isn't editing genes out also against nature? If we apply the standard consistently (i.e. don't insert anything and don't remove anything) then aren't we condemning people who could otherwise be saved? Admittedly, it is perfectly natural to die of Huntington's. I will not argue that somehow it is unnatural. There are lots of fates that are perfectly natural but that I am glad we can overrule. I'm not ready to condemn people to a horrible disease starting at 27 just because they have 50 repeats of a gene on chromosome 4. There's no evolutionary benefit to Huntington's disease. It is simply one of those things where nothing nature says it *can't* happen so it *does* happen.

So why on Earth does the motif continue to show up in a small portion of the population? Why hasn't it been selected out? Because by the time you reach your late 20s, in the environments in which we evolved, you've already likely had children. Any gene for a disease that can, if you'll excuse the term, hold its horses until *after* you've had at least one child will tend to be able to ride along with the rest of your genome. After you've passed your genes on at least once, nature really doesn't have much use for you. Another way of putting it is that genes that cause diseases that kill you before you have a chance to reproduce are selected out. So all of the low-hanging fruit, from the gene's point of view, was selected out hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. The genes for diseases that we see tend to strike after your early twenties which, in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation) was well into the average person's reproductive career. So diseases like Alzheimer's and Huntington's and heart disease and high blood pressure are all back-loaded toward the end of one's reproductive career. A bunch of fifteen year old people dying is a net-loss from the gene's point of view, particularly in the EEA. A bunch of 45 year old people dying is zero-sum from the gene's point of view. By 45 you've already reproduced a few times, your oldest surviving children are, at that point, adults. From the point of view of nature, you're now superfluous. Thanks for playing. Nice of you to leave some genes around. You're expendable, your genes are not. That's nature for you.

So unless we intervene using technology (selective breeding in humans, needless to say, is a road we should not even contemplate going down) then we're pretty much signing the death warrants of any person unlucky enough to have 39+ repeats of the CAG motif on C-4. That's the natural way. I think we should veto nature because I think it is wrong vis a vis Huntington's.

Cheers
Aj

[Hollylane]

If I can ask you one other follow-up, does that same feeling (I don't know what to call it when you say your Native American side) apply to editing *out* genes? I ask that in the context of the Huntington's chorea example I gave a few days ago. Since we know that any number of repeats above 35 is where things start to go badly and there is *no* benefit to having 39+ repeats of the CAG motif on chromosome 4, editing out all repeats above 35 would prevent people from a rather horrible disease. Are you saying that just as you don't think we should be changing genes except in the long, blind process (which, in my mind, is pretty wasteful) of selection that we shouldn't edit out genes even if doing so would save lives? I'm trying to understand where the line would get drawn.

If inserting genes in is, for lack of any better term, against nature isn't editing genes out also against nature? If we apply the standard consistently (i.e. don't insert anything and don't remove anything) then aren't we condemning people who could otherwise be saved? Admittedly, it is perfectly natural to die of Huntington's. I will not argue that somehow it is unnatural. There are lots of fates that are perfectly natural but that I am glad we can overrule. I'm not ready to condemn people to a horrible disease starting at 27 just because they have 50 repeats of a gene on chromosome 4. There's no evolutionary benefit to Huntington's disease. It is simply one of those things where nothing nature says it *can't* happen so it *does* happen.

So why on Earth does the motif continue to show up in a small portion of the population? Why hasn't it been selected out? Because by the time you reach your late 20s, in the environments in which we evolved, you've already likely had children. Any gene for a disease that can, if you'll excuse the term, hold its horses until *after* you've had at least one child will tend to be able to ride along with the rest of your genome. After you've passed your genes on at least once, nature really doesn't have much use for you. Another way of putting it is that genes that cause diseases that kill you before you have a chance to reproduce are selected out. So all of the low-hanging fruit, from the gene's point of view, was selected out hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago. The genes for diseases that we see tend to strike after your early twenties which, in the EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation) was well into the average person's reproductive career. So diseases like Alzheimer's and Huntington's and heart disease and high blood pressure are all back-loaded toward the end of one's reproductive career. A bunch of fifteen year old people dying is a net-loss from the gene's point of view, particularly in the EEA. A bunch of 45 year old people dying is zero-sum from the gene's point of view. By 45 you've already reproduced a few times, your oldest surviving children are, at that point, adults. From the point of view of nature, you're now superfluous. Thanks for playing. Nice of you to leave some genes around. You're expendable, your genes are not. That's nature for you.

So unless we intervene using technology (selective breeding in humans, needless to say, is a road we should not even contemplate going down) then we're pretty much signing the death warrants of any person unlucky enough to have 39+ repeats of the CAG motif on C-4. That's the natural way. I think we should veto nature because I think it is wrong vis a vis Huntington's.

Cheers
Aj

No, I am not applying that to intervening with technology where humans are concerned. Humans can make choices about their bodies, and about the health and well-being of their children, animals and plants cannot.

Additionally, there is a lot of information available that suggests, that many problems in humans(and in animals and plants) exist, because of the things that humans do to this planet (with science & technology), and what they choose to put into their bodies (food, medication, chemicals..etc).

When I refer to my Native American side, I am referring to how I feel about taking care of this planet, with the belief that everything is connected, and that every thing that we do has an effect on something else. Despite all of the information available, despite the existence of amazing science and technology, I cannot agree with changing plants or animals by inserting anything, or removing anything, in a manner that would not occur naturally. I also adamantly refuse to accept that torturing animals in the name of science, is our right as coinhabitants of this planet.

A simple example of where this has gone wrong, is corn production. The majority of corn produced in the US at this time has very little nutritional value in comparison to the original crop native to this continent, maize. Corn grown today, could not have existed as a wild plant, in its present form. A great film that illustrates perfectly the reasons why I used corn as an example, is the documentary, King Corn.

[Toughy]

I posted this in the Zombie thread....however it does belong here:

from HuffPo

Bats' Oral Sex Helps Prolong Copulation, Scientists Say (VIDEO)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...een&ref=topbar

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-possible-hint-dark-matter-205206362.html


Looking for dark matter.

[dreadgeek]

http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-possible-hint-dark-matter-205206362.html


Looking for dark matter.

You beat me to the punch on this the other day, Corkey. I started working on an explanation and it became a bit more complex. So, I wanted to ask would people find it helpful if I put together a short primer on dark matter, what it is and why it matters?

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

You beat me to the punch on this the other day, Corkey. I started working on an explanation and it became a bit more complex. So, I wanted to ask would people find it helpful if I put together a short primer on dark matter, what it is and why it matters?

Cheers
Aj

Great idea Aj, go for it!

[dreadgeek]

So, I said I'd do this a few days ago. I apologize for the delay:

Science advances not when someone exclaims "Eureka!" but when someone cocks their head and says, "well now, that's unexpected". There are a number of issues that caused astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists to say "well, I wasn't expecting that". I'll only take two because they are the easiest to explain and require no math to get to an understanding.

The first is the concept of gravity lensing. Gravity lensing is caused when the light of a very distant object is warped around an intervening mass like, say, a galaxy. As everyone knows, light moves from point A to point B and, as everyone is aware of from the idea of black holes, light can be affected by gravity. When this happens at astronomical distances what happens is that the object either appears as either a ring (known as an Einstein ring) or it'll appear slightly offset from where the object actually is. Now, if we know the approximate mass of a galaxy (which can be estimated from its size and density of stars) then we can know about how much refraction there should be. The problem then is that astronomers see more lensing than can strictly speaking inferred from the masses in between them and some distant light source. This begs the question of *why* this is happening.

The second concept is the spin of a galaxy. This is a bit more complicated. Think of a spiral galaxy like a solar system writ large. In the center of the galaxy is a hugely massive orbit (a supermassive black hole) and most of the mass of the galaxy is in that bulge in the center. Then there's the spiral arms. Calculating the rotational speed of a galaxy of a given size *should* be a pretty straightforward application of Newton's and Kepler's laws that work very well when applied to solar systems. The basic idea here is that the closer to the gravitational center an object is, the faster it rotates and the farther out it is, the slower it rotates. Except that's *not* what we see. Instead we see a near uniform rotational speed even at the outer extremities of the galaxy--for instance where our solar system is in relation to the rest of the Milky Way. Again, this begs the question of *why*.

Now, the proposed answer is that there is some 'missing' matter that we can't directly observe. This missing matter is called 'dark matter'. Why dark? Because it does not interact strongly with the electromagnetic force (light in all its form and splendor). Ordinary matter (the kind of stuff we and everything we can see) will interact with the electromagnetic force. For instance, someone walking into the room where you currently sit reading this can see you because all of the matter that makes you you is reflecting electromagnetism in the visible portion of the spectrum. Dark matter doesn't do that. Instead if it interacts with light at all it does so very weakly and all evidence, so far, is that it does not interact with it at all.

If this were all that there was to dark matter it would be almost impossible to find but fortunately this isn't the case. Dark matter *does* interact with itself and when it does it splits off into exotic particles that were predicted by physicists who started working on the problem. The experiment aboard the ISS (International Space Station) detected the kinds of particles that the theory predicted which is usually a sign that we're on the right track.

Dark matter and dark energy are *not* the same thing and shouldn't be confused with one another.

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

You're forgiven.
Understood that well, thank you.

[dreadgeek]

So since I mentioned dark energy I thought I would go ahead and talk about this subject as well. There's another problem in cosmology and it is this: the expansion of the Universe isn't slowing down. To understand why this is a problem it's necessary to go back to the very beginning: the Big Bang. So according to the prevailing model, at one point the whole of the Universe was contained in a space about the size of what is called the Planck length (10^-43 or 1 with 43 zeroes in front of it) which is the smallest anything existing can be said to be. For reasons that may forever be beyond our understanding this fantastically small object suddenly became *much* larger. This is the Big Bang. In the first few moments of the Universe spacetime grew hugely. Things settled down after a while, the balance of matter-antimatter tipped in favor of matter and it started to get cold enough for atoms to start to form. After the rapid inflation expansion started to slow down a bit and matter started clumping together to form stars and galaxies and all the rest of the things observable in the Universe.

Now, here's where things get interesting. Gravity is *always* attractive and is caused by the warping of spacetime by the presence of mass. The consequence of this is that what we should see is that over time, the expansion of the Universe should slow down and then, possibly, reverse coming together in a Big Crunch (or as Douglas Adams put it in Restaurant at the End of the Universe, a gnab gib). The problem is that we aren't observing this. In fact, not only has the expansion continued but it is still accelerating. This cries out for explanation.

That explanation is dark energy. *Some* form of energy, that we lack the means to detect at present levels of technology, is pushing the Universe apart. We don't know precisely what it is but there is a damn lot of the stuff whatever it is. This more or less seals the fate of the universe. Eventually what will happen is that all of the galaxies will be so far apart from one another that they will be too faint to see.

How do we know that the galaxies are all rushing away from one another? (on the whole, the Milky Way is going to eventually collide with the Andromeda galaxy because the greater mass of our galaxy is pulling the Andromeda galaxy toward us) We know because of what is called red shift. This is simply the familiar Doppler effect applied to light. When a siren is approaching you the pitch increases and as it speeds away from you the pitch decreases. The same thing happens to light (although we can't detect it because the distances light travels here on Earth can never be far enough to see any kind of shifting) but at the astronomical level stars or galaxies moving away from us have their light shifted toward the red part of the spectrum. The more red shift the farther away you are from the observed object.

Cheers
Aj

[Jean_TX]

Scientists are further investigating a phenomenon called 'dark lightning' : "Dark lightning that is almost invisible within clouds may regularly blast airline passengers with large numbers of gamma rays, scientists find." Although it sounds ominous, the effects on the body may not be dangerous. The full article can be read at http://www.livescience.com/28594-dark-lightning-zaps-airline-passengers.html

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-creature-mixed-human-apelike-traits-183441713.html

Australopithecus sediba, human and apelike creature.

[KCBUTCH]

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc1/644603_582163648471317_1102254398_n.jpg

HAD TO SHARE LOVE THIS

[puddin']

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/04/21/177949605/a-wet-towel-in-space-is-not-like-a-wet-towel-on-earth



(solly, don't know how to embed)

[Hollylane]

Earth's core far hotter than thought

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/67243000/jpg/_67243842_c0102776-earth_s_internal_structure,_artwork-spl.jpg

New measurements suggest the Earth's inner core is far hotter than prior experiments suggested, putting it at 6,000C - as hot as the Sun's surface. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22297915)

[Tommi]

Soft Drink Consumption Tied To Increased Type 2 Diabetes Risk. Bloomberg News (4/25, Torsoli) reports, “Just one soft drink consumed daily can raise the risk of diabetes by 22 percent,” according to a study published April 24 in Diabetologia. The study found that “a mere 12 ounces serving size of sugar-sweetened soft drink a day may increase the chance of developing type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease.”

Reuters (4/25, Kelland) reports that researchers analyzed data from some 350,000 individuals in the UK, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Germany who had provided information on the amount of naturally and artificially sweetened soft drinks consumed on a daily basis.

MyHealthNewsDaily (4/25, Rettner) reports, “In the study, people who drank a 12-ounce sugar-sweetened soda daily were 18 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a 16-year period compared with those who did not consume soda.” In addition, “people who drank two sodas daily were 18 percent more likely to have a stroke than those who drank one; those who drank three sodas daily saw the same risk increase compared with those who drank two, and so on.” Notably, “the results held even after the researchers took into account risk factors for type 2 diabetes, such as age and physical activity levels, body mass index (BMI) and the total daily calorie intake.”

MedPage Today (4/25, Petrochko) points out, “Compared with those who consumed lower levels of sugary soft drinks, high-level consumers were more likely to be male, physically active, less educated, smokers, and have a higher waist circumference,” whereas “juice and nectar high consumers were mostly younger, female, physically active, former smokers, and better educated than those with lower juice and nectar consumption.” Even though “soft drink consumption was linked with diabetes incidence, there was no association between diabetes and consumption of juices and nectars.”

[Toughy]

4th-Grade 'Science Test' Goes Viral: Creationism Quiz Claims Dinosaurs Lived With People

The Huffington Post | By Meredith Bennett-Smith
Posted: 04/26/2013 1:48 pm EDT | Updated: 04/26/2013 4:38 pm EDT

Dinosaurs hung out with humans; God created dinosaurs on the sixth day; the "behemoth" described in the Bible's Book of Job actually refers to a brontosaurus. These are some of the unscientific beliefs behind what appears to be a fourth-grade science quiz posted recently online.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/26/4th-grade-science-test-creationism-questions-dinosaurs_n_3163922.html?ref=topbar


no wonder idiots get elected to office.........

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/ancient-sunken-egyptian-city-reveals-1-200-old-201729650.html

Ancient Egyptian city revealed.

[Greyson]

The World's Leading Science Cities

Science and technology are key drivers of economic growth. But where are the world's leading science cities? A new study published in Nature's Scientific Reports ranks the top cities for physics research around the world.

Much has been made of declining U.S. economic and technological dominance and "the rise of the rest" of the world. Their findings indicate that the U.S. has lost substantial ground as the global center for physics. In the 1960s, the U.S. accounted for 85.6 percent of physics papers tracked by the authors; in the past decade, U.S. output has declined to 36.7 percent.

"Physics knowledge was highly localized in a few cities in the eastern and western coasts of the USA and in a few areas of Great Britain and Northern Europe," they write. "In 2009 the picture is completely different with many producer cities in central and southern parts of the USA, Europe and Japan."

The big takeaway: While science is becoming more distributed globally, its production at the highest level remains incredibly concentrated and spiky. Indeed, the world's leading centers of physics have remained essentially the same for the past three decades. While Chinese cities have risen as consumers of scientific knowledge (alongside their economic growth), it remains to be seen if they can become leading producers of it.


Read More:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/05/worlds-leading-centers-physics/5403/

[always2late]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1069834_632087806812234_1262890765_n.jpg

http://bbc.in/1dKDTSd

[dreadgeek]

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpegMod/PIA17041_modest.jpg

I know, it doesn't look scary. It's actually kind of beautiful which is why I'm using it as my current desktop background. But what *is* it? It's a map of orbits of every *known* Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA). In other words, the map of every rock larger than 460 feet that has an orbit that passes uncomfortably close to the Earth. Close, because we're talking about space here, means within 5 million miles. To give you a sense of scale, the Moon is ~250,000 miles from the Earth. Five million seems like a lot of distance but when you consider that when it is at its closest, Venus is 38 million miles away. So we're talking very big numbers. The problem is that Earth has a serious gravitational pull and something within 5 million miles of the Earth is certainly going to be influenced by its gravity. How many objects are we talking about? Around 1,400! That's when it gets scary.

The reason why the size matters is that mass matters. Earth actually gets hit on occasion by fairly small pieces of rock but it's the large pieces that wreak havoc on the planet. That said, nothing in that graphic is in any real serious danger of hitting the planet in the next century. But longer out...? Something around 1,000 feet strikes the Earth approximately every 80,000 years. To give you sense of scale here, the asteroid that most likely blasted a chunk out of the Yucatan peninsula and likely delivered the coup de grace to the dinosaurs was somewhere in the range of 6 miles in diameter. Think Manhattan hitting the Earth.

Image page (http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17041)

Cheers
Aj

[Electrocell]

Brain-eating amoebas: What you need to know


Naegleria fowleri: A look at the brain-eating amoeba and how to avoid it.

Rex Features

A look at brain tissue infected with Naegleria fowleri.
MSN News 3 hr ago | By Heather Smith, MSN News of MSN News





Florida health officials have issued a warning for swimmers after a boy contracted Naegleria fowleri. Here's what you need to know about the deadly amoeba.






The Florida Department of Health has issued a warning for swimmers after a 12-year-old boy in the southwestern part of the state contracted a rare brain infection caused by Naegleria Fowleri (N. fowleri) while knee boarding with some friends in a water-filled ditch. Officials said that high water temperatures and low water levels combine to create the perfect breeding ground for N. fowleri, and warned the public "to be wary when swimming, jumping or diving in freshwater."

This latest case of infection comes less than a month after an Arkansas girl ended up in a hospital, fighting for her life. Here, we look at what it is and how to avoid the sometimes deadly brain-eating amoeba.

What is it?

N. fowleri is an amoeba that lives in warm freshwater, such as ponds, lakes and hot springs. It also thrives in the soil around it. Normally, it eats the bacteria found in these places, but when presented with the opportunity, it will eat brains. There is no evidence of this organism living in salt water. It is an amoeba belonging to the groups Percolozoa or Heterolobosea.

The amoeba invades the body and causes a rare brain infection known as primary amebic meningoencephalitis, or PAM, that eats away at brain tissue and is usually fatal, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

How do you get it?

N. fowleri invades the central nervous system through the nose. From there, the amoeba moves the along olfactory nerve fibers into the brain, where it uses its suckers to devour brain cells. It's difficult to treat because by the time it's been diagnosed, it's already caused significant damage.

N. fowleri is most often caught by people who have been swimming underwater, but it's also thought to be transmitted through inhaling infected dust. Last year, two people died in Louisiana after they used tap water to flush out their sinuses.

Where does it thrive?

Freshwater — especially warm freshwater. Most cases have occurred in Southern or Southwestern states, especially Texas and Florida. It's been known to show up in swimming pools and hot tubs that haven't been properly chlorinated. Last month, a popular water park in Arkansas voluntarily closed after a 12-year old girl who swam there was diagnosed with N. fowleri

How can you avoid them?

N. fowleri infections are very rare — they've only killed 128 Americans between 1962 and 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But you can reduce your risk of catching it by keeping your head out of the water when you're swimming in water that hasn't been chlorinated. If you're flushing your sinuses, be sure to use distilled or recently boiled water.

How is it treated?

N. fowleri is treated with antifungals, antibiotics and steroids. The most recent survivor, a 12-year-old girl infected at an Arkansas water park, was also treated with an experimental breast cancer drug.

——

Join MSN News on social

Share your point of view with us on Facebook

Get the latest news and updates on Twitter

See photos and videos on Tumblr

[dreadgeek]

As Phil Plaitt points out in this article (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/08/22/mars_as_big_as_the_moon_no_just_no.html), every year around this time people start spreading this Internet meme that Mars will look as large as the Moon in the night sky. It's a hoax. It will always be a hoax because Mars *never* gets close enough to Earth to look as large as the Moon. At its closest pass Mars gets within 35 million miles of Earth. At its farthest point (where it is now) it is about 210 million miles from Earth (it's currently on the far side of the Sun from us). Mars is a relatively small planet. It is half the size of Earth. The moon is about half the size of Mars. The moon is just next door (250,000 miles) compared with with the 35 million miles between Earth and Mars at their closest. So in order for this meme to be true, an object only twice the size of our moon would have to appear to be the same size even though Mars is two and a half orders of magnitude farther away from Earth! That's not optically *possible*. With the naked eye Mars can only ever look like a tiny dot in the sky. If it ever *were* in an orbit that would make it look the same size as the Moon that would be a very interesting day on Earth (interesting, here, in the "Oh God, Oh God, we're all gonna die" sense).

So if you see a meme on Facebook telling you that if you go outside sometime in the next week it'll appear as if the planet has two moons, know that someone is pulling your leg because they are.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

It was pointed out to me that 2.5 orders of magnitude might be a little difficult for people to grasp intuitively so to give you a sense of scale I'll use this. I live in Portland, OR but I work in Hillsboro, OR. That's about 20 miles one-way, door-to-door from home to office. One order of magnitude would be ten times that far or 200 miles. That would put me in Grants Pass, OR or just north of Seattle, WA. Two orders of magnitude would be 2000 miles away so that would be in the Detroit, MI region. Two and half orders of magnitude would be 3000 miles or somewhere in northern Maine.

So to understand the scale of distance between the Moon and Earth compared to Mars and Earth, do this; take a city that is around 25 miles from you. Find a city that is ten times that distance (one order of magnitude) away. Now, find a city that is 100 times further away (two orders of magnitude). Now find another city that is half-again as far away (two and half orders of magnitude) and THAT is the ratio of distance scaled down to terrestrial scales. . So, to scale, the Earth is as far away from Mars as Portland, OR is from northern Maine. The Earth is as far away from the Moon as Portland, OR is from Seattle WA.


As Phil Plaitt points out in this article (http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/08/22/mars_as_big_as_the_moon_no_just_no.html), every year around this time people start spreading this Internet meme that Mars will look as large as the Moon in the night sky. It's a hoax. It will always be a hoax because Mars *never* gets close enough to Earth to look as large as the Moon. At its closest pass Mars gets within 35 million miles of Earth. At its farthest point (where it is now) it is about 210 million miles from Earth (it's currently on the far side of the Sun from us). Mars is a relatively small planet. It is half the size of Earth. The moon is about half the size of Mars. The moon is just next door (250,000 miles) compared with with the 35 million miles between Earth and Mars at their closest. So in order for this meme to be true, an object only twice the size of our moon would have to appear to be the same size even though Mars is two and a half orders of magnitude farther away from Earth! That's not optically *possible*. With the naked eye Mars can only ever look like a tiny dot in the sky. If it ever *were* in an orbit that would make it look the same size as the Moon that would be a very interesting day on Earth (interesting, here, in the "Oh God, Oh God, we're all gonna die" sense).

So if you see a meme on Facebook telling you that if you go outside sometime in the next week it'll appear as if the planet has two moons, know that someone is pulling your leg because they are.

Cheers
Aj

[Hollylane]

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/69715000/jpg/_69715377_69715376.jpg
The Tamu massif is comparable in size to Olumpus Mons on Mars
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24007339)
Scientists say that they have discovered the single largest volcano in the world, a dead colossus deep beneath the Pacific waves.

A team writing in the journal Nature Geoscience says the 310,000 sq km (119,000 sq mi) Tamu Massif is comparable in size to Mars' vast Olympus Mons volcano - the largest in the Solar System.

The structure topples the previous largest on Earth, Mauna Loa in Hawaii.

The massif lies some 2km below the sea.

It is located on an underwater plateau known as the Shatsky Rise, about 1,600km east of Japan.

It was formed about 145 million years ago when massive lava flows erupted from the centre of the volcano to form a broad, shield-like feature.

The researchers doubted the submerged volcano's peak ever rose above sea level during its lifetime and say it is unlikely to erupt again.

"The bottom line is that we think that Tamu Massif was built in a short (geologically speaking) time of one to several million years and it has been extinct since," co-author William Sager, from the University of Houston, US, told the AFP news agency.

"One interesting angle is that there were lots of oceanic plateaus (that) erupted during the Cretaceous Period (145-65 million years ago) but we don't see them since. Scientists would like to know why."

Prof Sager began studying the structure two decades ago, but it had been unclear whether the massif was one single volcano or many - a kind that exists in dozens of locations around the planet.

While Olympus Mons on Mars has relatively shallow roots, the Tamu Massif extends some 30 km (18 miles) into the Earth's crust.

And other volcanic behemoths could be lurking among the dozen or so large oceanic plateaux around the world, he thought.

"We don't have the data to see inside them and know their structure, but it would not surprise me to find out that there are more like Tamu out there," said Dr Sager.

"Indeed, the biggest oceanic plateau is Ontong Java plateau, near the equator in the Pacific, east of the Solomons Islands. It is much bigger than Tamu -- it's the size of France."

The name Tamu comes from Texas A&M University, where Prof Sager previously taught before moving to the University of Houston.

[Hollylane]

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/69683000/jpg/_69683890_69678690.jpg
A crater lake at the summit threatens to create dangerous mud flows in the event of an eruption

Scientists from the UK, US and North Korea have joined forces to monitor the volcano responsible for one of the largest eruptions in history.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23981001)
The volcano straddles the border between North Korea and China, and has been largely dormant since erupting a little over a thousand years ago.

Despite being at the top of the list of big eruptions, Mount Paektu remains obscure and enigmatic.

Details of the collaborative effort have been outlined in Science journal.

The international group of geologists has begun working on the volcano following a spate of recent earthquake activity that could indicate it is waking from slumber.

Surprisingly, the volcano is relatively unknown in the West, not helped by the fact that it takes a confusing array of names. In China it is known variously as Tianchi or Changbaishan, but its Korean name is Baegdu-san or Mount Paektu, while the Japanese call it Hakuto-san.

Around two thirds of the volcano lies in North Korea, with the remainder is in Chinese territory, and an estimated 30,000 tourists visit its Chinese flank each day, around twice the number visiting Mount Fuji in Japan.

In 940 AD, the volcano exploded in a huge eruption, known as the "millennium eruption" that threw ash vast distances. Measurements of ash deposits from that eruption measured in Japan indicate that this was one of the two largest known volcanic eruptions on Earth since that period, matched only by the Tambora eruption in Indonesia, in 1815 AD.

Dr James Hammond from Imperial College London, and Prof Clive Oppenheimer from the University of Cambridge have begun a collaborative study with North Korean scientists, aiming to understand the structure of the subterranean magma chamber lying beneath the volcanic mountain.

Explaining the origins of the project, Dr Hammond told BBC News: "The whole region is quite worried about the volcano because it has shown signs of activity, so the North Koreans put a lot of effort into watching it, and basically said 'do you want to come to Korea, could you bring some equipment?'"

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/69691000/jpg/_69691718_69678692.jpg
UK seismometers, deployed on the volcano's flanks, will reveal its structure and activity

The team has deployed a set of seismometers that can record earth tremors associated with the movement of magma beneath the volcano.

Organising a scientific collaboration in North Korea has not been without logistical and bureaucratic hurdles, but Dr Hammond continued: "What made it possible was having great people involved who were passionate about doing this, at all levels, from the scientists on the ground to those higher up where the decisions get made."

The study will help scientists understand why the volcano is there, which is something of a geological mystery, and why rock is melting at its heart, possibly stoking a future threat.

"This project is not about monitoring the volcano or predicting when the eruption will happen, but is about understanding what happened during the millennium eruption and also looking at what its state is now, using geophysical techniques. This will help us understand what is driving the volcano," Dr Hammond explained.

Prof James Gill, from University of California, Santa Cruz, has been working on the Chinese side of the volcano for some years, but is not involved in the new study. He told BBC News: "The volcano has erupted big time in the past, and were it to happen again, the Chinese, South Korean and Japanese economies could all be affected.

"There was a crisis in 2002-2005 when the seismicity picked up, the gas chemistry of the fumaroles changed, the volcano inflated, and it might have erupted. It may still be dangerous.

"The North Korean underground nuclear test site is only 70km or so away, so when the last test took place, the South Koreans were concerned that this might set off the volcano.

"One of the world's biggest volcanoes is sat in a backwater of the Cold War."

Prof Gill described some of the difficulties of carrying out field work at a militarised border, sampling rocks under armed escort. The new collaboration with the North Koreans is something of a landmark in current scientific co-operation with the isolated state.

This is not the only volcano that Prof Oppenheimer and Dr Hammond have worked on in difficult circumstances. They have previously studied volcanoes that straddle the border of Eritrea and Ethiopia. Like Mount Paektu, that investigation also ran into challenges due to the local political situation, but underlines the fact that natural hazards pay no attention to political differences.

[Smiling]

I am certainly not a scientist, but holy crap; I can see a lot of possibilities in this discovery! Absolutely incredible....


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-09/hu-sli092513.php

Seeing light in a new light

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter

Harvard and MIT scientists are challenging the conventional wisdom about light, and they didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to do it.

Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have managed to coax photons into binding together to form molecules – a state of matter that, until recently, had been purely theoretical. The work is described in a September 25 paper in Nature.

The discovery, Lukin said, runs contrary to decades of accepted wisdom about the nature of light. Photons have long been described as massless particles which don't interact with each other – shine two laser beams at each other, he said, and they simply pass through one another.

"Photonic molecules," however, behave less like traditional lasers and more like something you might find in science fiction – the light saber.

"Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other," Lukin said. "What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules. This type of photonic bound state has been discussed theoretically for quite a while, but until now it hadn't been observed.

"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers," Lukin added. "When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."

To get the normally-massless photons to bind to each other, Lukin and colleagues, including Harvard post-doctoral fellow Ofer Fisterberg, former Harvard doctoral student Alexey Gorshkov and MIT graduate students Thibault Peyronel and Qiu Liang couldn't rely on something like the Force – they instead turned to a set of more extreme conditions.

Researchers began by pumped rubidium atoms into a vacuum chamber, then used lasers to cool the cloud of atoms to just a few degrees above absolute zero. Using extremely weak laser pulses, they then fired single photons into the cloud of atoms.

As the photons enter the cloud of cold atoms, Lukin said, its energy excites atoms along its path, causing the photon to slow dramatically. As the photon moves through the cloud, that energy is handed off from atom to atom, and eventually exits the cloud with the photon.

"When the photon exits the medium, its identity is preserved," Lukin said. "It's the same effect we see with refraction of light in a water glass. The light enters the water, it hands off part of its energy to the medium, and inside it exists as light and matter coupled together, but when it exits, it's still light. The process that takes place is the same it's just a bit more extreme – the light is slowed considerably, and a lot more energy is given away than during refraction."

When Lukin and colleagues fired two photons into the cloud, they were surprised to see them exit together, as a single molecule.

The reason they form the never-before-seen molecules?

An effect called a Rydberg blockade, Lukin said, which states that when an atom is excited, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree. In practice, the effect means that as two photons enter the atomic cloud, the first excites an atom, but must move forward before the second photon can excite nearby atoms.

The result, he said, is that the two photons push and pull each other through the cloud as their energy is handed off from one atom to the next.

"It's a photonic interaction that's mediated by the atomic interaction," Lukin said. "That makes these two photons behave like a molecule, and when they exit the medium they're much more likely to do so together than as single photons."

While the effect is unusual, it does have some practical applications as well.

"We do this for fun, and because we're pushing the frontiers of science," Lukin said. "But it feeds into the bigger picture of what we're doing because photons remain the best possible means to carry quantum information. The handicap, though, has been that photons don't interact with each other."

To build a quantum computer, he explained, researchers need to build a system that can preserve quantum information, and process it using quantum logic operations. The challenge, however, is that quantum logic requires interactions between individual quanta so that quantum systems can be switched to perform information processing.

"What we demonstrate with this process allows us to do that," Lukin said. "Before we make a useful, practical quantum switch or photonic logic gate we have to improve the performance, so it's still at the proof-of-concept level, but this is an important step. The physical principles we've established here are important."

The system could even be useful in classical computing, Lukin said, considering the power-dissipation challenges chip-makers now face. A number of companies – including IBM – have worked to develop systems that rely on optical routers that convert light signals into electrical signals, but those systems face their own hurdles.

Lukin also suggested that the system might one day even be used to create complex three-dimensional structures – such as crystals – wholly out of light.

"What it will be useful for we don't know yet, but it's a new state of matter, so we are hopeful that new applications may emerge as we continue to investigate these photonic molecules' properties," he said.

[dreadgeek]

"Scientists working with data from a large particle accelerator in Europe are now almost certain they have pinned down the elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs Boson," NPR's Joe Palca tells our Newscast Desk.


Congrats to Peter Higgs on his Nobel Prize for postulating the Higgs boson. This was announced today and thought I'd post a quick follow-up to your post, Corkey.

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/black-hole-indigestion-captured-giant-radio-telescope-photos-161159470.html


Black hole ingestion captured by radio telescope.

[Martina]

I follow this guy's blog -- Sean Carroll. He's a theoretical physicist. Used to be at Caltech. I don't think he's anywhere now. Not sure.

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/

Anyway, he had a good article about the Nobel in the NYTimes recently.

No Physicist is an Island (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/opinion/no-physicist-is-an-island.html?_r=0)

[Kelt]

When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose Too (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/end-abx/all/1)

This week, health authorities in New Zealand announced that the tightly quarantined island nation — the only place I’ve ever been where you get x-rayed on the way into the country as well as leaving it — has experienced its first case, and first death, from a strain of totally drug-resistant bacteria...

[ProfPacker]

My mother took DES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol

and I have begun to find studies (as it was given from the 1940's-1971 and beyond off label) because the off spring of the women who were given the drug are now old enough to follow regarding the higher incidence of autoimmune disease, reproductive issues (structural and getting pregnant), mood disorders such as bi polar and depression and finally because of the timing of when it was introduced to the mother (week 8 through the birth) variances in the neurobiology regarding the influx and time of hormones in the brain on gender expression, sexuality and (at this point) in DES sons, more incidences of transitioning.

I am as much interested in the impact of the drug on automimmune diseases and mood disorders as gender expression because my sister and ex (who are one day apart in age) have suffered similar trajectories (mine has been a little different) the were born in 1952 and I was born in 1949 and there might have been different dosing and different strenghts because of the similarities in their reproductive organs being affected, their autoimmune, etc.

Neither of them is as masculinized in id as I am but interestingly, because there have also been studies regarding hormones and handedness, we are all left handed. I am getting more and more into the neurobiology of the brain, etc. as I teach human behavior and development and include more current literatire.

So I was just curious if anyone knows if their mother took DES and if they have an autoimmune diseases. For my sister this has been difficult to correlate and she is very sick with lupus and one large study in Sweden has found a correlation.

Thank you in advance if you should decide to respond

[*Anya*]

The biodegradable burial pod that turns your body into a tree

By Paula Erizanu, CNN

Updated 7:44 AM ET, Wed May 3, 2017


(CNN) Your carbon footprint doesn't end in the grave.

While you rest in peace, the wood, the synthetic cushioning and the metals generally used in traditional coffins -- as well as the concrete around reinforced graves -- continue to litter the earth.

"A lot of energy also goes into producing these materials, which are used for a very short time and then buried. They're not going to break down very fast," says Jennifer DeBruyen, an Associate Professor of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science at the University of Tennessee.

Italian designers Raoul Bretzel and Anna Citelli might have a solution. They call it Capsula Mundi -- "world's capsule" in Latin -- and it's an egg-shaped, organic casket that's suitable for ashes, too.

Once buried, they say, the biodegradable plastic shell breaks down and the remains provide nutrients to a sapling planted right above it.

Bretzel and Citelli believe that death is as closely related to consumerism as life. Their goal? To create cemeteries full of trees rather than tombstones, reduce waste, and create new life out of death.

The idea for the Capsula Mundi came in 2003, when the pair saw tons of furniture trashed at the end of Milan's famous design fair, "Salone del Mobile."

"It was a big competition to design new things, but almost nobody cared about future impact or whether anyone would actually use these things", Bretzel said.

"We started thinking about projects that could have an environmental aspect. Death is part of our life but at design fairs nobody cares about that because it's one side of our life that we don't want to look at. We don't like to think of death as part of life."

The science behind it
The designers are launching the first version of their product, which is for ashes only. A later model will be suitable for bodies, to be encapsulated in the fetal position.

Bacteria in the soil first break down the bio-plastic, then the ashes gradually come into contact with the soil, without changing its chemical balance too dramatically.

While the burial of ashes may be environmentally friendly, cremation has its critics: "It's a very energy-demanding process," says DeBruyen.

On top of that, older dental fillings can release polluting mercury, which is why some crematoriums have installed mercury filters.

Although sowing a seed on top of the Capsula may sound like an attractive concept, Jacqueline Aitkenhead-Peterson, Associate Professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University, suggests more mature trees should be used.

"Because the body will purge within a year in a buried environment, the nutrients are released into the soil quite quickly, so a decently sized tree planted on top would be key. Capturing these nutrients is also important to protect groundwater," she said.

But would it really benefit the environment? DeBruyen seems to think so: "The problem with traditional burials is that they're completely anaerobic. The remains are buried deep and sealed in a coffin. There's a lot of incomplete degradation."

"These pods may help maintain some oxygen flow into the system. The other thing they bring to the whole system is carbon [from the starch-based bioplastic]. One of the constraints and challenges with decomposing a human body is that it's very nitrogen rich. And so, the microbes that are trying to break down all that nitrogen need some carbon to balance it out."


https://i2.cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/170424132824-capsula-mundi-three-eggs-exlarge-169.jpg

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/world/eco-solutions-capsula-mundi/index.html

[*Anya*]

SCIENCE

In the Bones of a Buried Child, Signs of a Massive Human Migration to the Americas

Carl Zimmer. JAN. 3, 2018

The girl was just six weeks old when she died. Her body was buried on a bed of antler points and red ocher, and she lay undisturbed for 11,500 years.

Archaeologists discovered her in an ancient burial pit in Alaska in 2010, and on Wednesday an international team of scientists reported they had retrieved the child’s genome from her remains. The second-oldest human genome ever found in North America, it sheds new light on how people — among them the ancestors of living Native Americans — first arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

The analysis, published in the journal Nature, shows that the child belonged to a hitherto unknown human lineage, a group that split off from other Native Americans just after — or perhaps just before — they arrived in North America.

“It’s the earliest branch in the Americas that we know of so far,” said Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the new study. As far as he and other scientists can tell, these early settlers endured for thousands of years before disappearing.

The study strongly supports the idea that the Americas were settled by migrants from Siberia, and experts hailed the genetic evidence as a milestone. “There has never been any ancient Native American DNA like it before,” said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study.

The girl’s remains were unearthed at the Upward Sun River archaeological site in the Tanana River Valley in central Alaska. Ben A. Potter, an archaeologist at the University of Alaska, discovered the site in 2006.

It was apparently home to short-lived settlements that appeared and disappeared over thousands of years. Every now and then, people arrived to build tent-like structures, fish for salmon, and hunt for hare and other small game.

In 2010, Dr. Potter and his colleagues discovered human bones at Upward Sun River. Atop a hearth dating back 11,500 years were the cremated bones of a 3-year-old child. Digging into the hearth itself, archaeologists discovered the remains of two infants.

The two infants were given names: the baby girl is Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay (“sunrise girl-child,” in Middle Tanana, the dialect of the local community), and the remains of the other infant, or perhaps a fetus, is Yełkaanenh T’eede Gaay (“dawn twilight girl-child”).

The Healy Lake Village Council and the Tanana Chiefs Conference agreed to let scientists search the remains for genetic material. Eventually, they discovered mitochondrial DNA, which is passed only from mother to child, suggesting each had different mothers. Moreover, each infant had a type of mitochondrial DNA found also in living Native Americans.

That finding prompted Dr. Potter and his colleagues to begin a more ambitious search. They began collaborating with Dr. Willerslev, whose team of geneticists has built an impressive record of recovering DNA from ancient Native American bones.

Among them are the 12,700-year-old Anzick Child, the oldest genome ever found in the Americas, and the Kennewick Man, an 8,500-year-old skeleton discovered in a riverbank in Washington State. Questions over his lineage provoked a decade-long legal dispute between scientists, Native American tribes and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Living Native Americans descend from two major ancestral groups. The northern branch includes a number of communities in Canada, such as the Athabascans, along with some tribes in the United States like the Navajo and Apache.

The southern branch includes the other tribes in the United States, as well as all indigenous people in Central America and South America. Both the Anzick Child and Kennewick Man belonged to the southern branch, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues have found.

So he was eager to see how the people of Upward Sun River might be related. But the remains found there represented a huge scientific challenge.

The search for DNA in the cremated bones ended in failure, and Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues managed to retrieve only fragments from the remains of Yełkaanenh T’eede Gaay, the youngest of the infants.

But the researchers had better luck with Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay. Eventually, they managed to put together an accurate reconstruction of her entire genome. To analyze it, Dr. Willerslev and Dr. Potter collaborated with a number of geneticists and anthropologists.

Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay, they discovered, was more closely related to living Native Americans than to any other living people or to DNA extracted from other extinct lineages. But she belonged to neither the northern or southern branch of Native Americans.

Instead, Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay was part of a previously unknown population that diverged genetically from the ancestors of Native Americans about 20,000 years ago, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues concluded. They now call these people Ancient Beringians.

Beringia refers to Alaska and the eastern tip of Siberia, and to the land bridge that joined them during the last ice age. Appearing and disappearing over the eons, it has long been suspected as the route that humans took from Asia to the Western Hemisphere.

There has been little archaeological evidence, however, perhaps because early coastal settlements were submerged by rising seas. Thanks to her unique position in the Native American family tree, Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay has given scientists a clear idea how this enormous step in human history may have happened.

Her ancestors — and those of all Native Americans — started out in Asia and share a distant ancestry with Chinese people. In the new study, the scientists estimate those two lineages split about 36,000 years ago.

The population that would give rise to Native Americans originated somewhere in northeast Siberia, Dr. Willerslev believes. Archaeological evidence suggests they may have hunted for woolly rhino and other big game that ranged over the grasslands.

“It wasn’t such a bad place as we kind of imagine it or as we see it today,” he said. In fact, Siberia appears to have attracted a lot of genetically distinct peoples, and they interbred widely until about 25,000 years ago, the researchers determined.

About a third of living Native American DNA can be traced to a vanished people known as the ancient north Eurasians, known only from a genome recovered from the 24,000-year-old skeleton of a boy.

But the flow of genes from other Asian populations dried up about 25,000 years ago, and the ancestors of Native Americans became genetically isolated. About 20,000 years ago, the new analysis finds, these people began dividing into genetically distinct groups.

First to split off were the Ancient Beringians, the people from whom Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay descended. About 4,000 years later, the scientists estimate, the northern and southern branches of the Native American tree split.

According to Ripan Malhi, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois and a co-author of the new study, these genetic results support a theory of human migration called the Beringian Standstill model.

Based on previous genetic studies, Dr. Malhi has argued that the ancestors of Native Americans did not rush across Beringia and disperse across the Americas. Instead, they lingered there for thousands of years, their genes acquiring increasingly distinctive variations.

But while the new study concludes early Native Americans were isolated for thousands of years, as Dr. Malhi had predicted, it doesn’t pinpoint where.

“The genetics aren’t giving us locations, with the exception of a few anchor points,” said Dr. Potter.

Indeed, while the co-authors of the new study agree on the genetic findings, they disagree on the events that led to them.

“Most likely, people were in Alaska by 20,000 years ago, at least,” said Dr. Willerslev. He speculated that the northern and southern branches split afterward, about 15,700 years ago as the ancestors of Native Americans expanded out of Alaska, settling on land exposed by retreating glaciers.

Dr. Potter, however, argues that the lineage that led to Native Americans started splitting into three main branches while still in Siberia, long before reaching Alaska.

Pointing to the lack of archaeological sites in Beringia from 20,000 years ago, he believes it was too difficult for people to move there from Asia at that time. “That split took place in Asia somewhere — somewhere not in America,” Dr. Potter said.

If he is right, the mysterious earliest settlers of this hemisphere didn’t arrive in a single migration. Instead, the Ancient Beringians and the ancestors of the tribes we know today took separate journeys. “Even if there was a single founding population, there were two migrations,” he said.

But these scenarios all depend on timing estimated from changes in DNA, which “can be very sensitive to errors in the data,” Dr. Reich cautioned. More tests are required to be confident that the Ancient Beringians actually split from other Native Americans 20,000 years ago, he said.

NOTE: Long article, rest at link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/science/native-americans-beringia-siberia.html

[*Anya*]

PUBLIC RELEASE: 8-SEP-2017

A Female Viking Warrior

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

War was not an activity exclusive to males in the Viking world. A new study conducted by researchers at Stockholm and Uppsala Universities shows that women could be found in the higher ranks at the battlefield.

Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who led the study, explains: "What we have studied was not a Valkyrie from the sagas but a real life military leader, that happens to be a woman".

The study was conducted on one of the most iconic graves from the Viking Age. It holds the remains of a warrior surrounded by weapons, including a sword, armour-piercing arrows, and two horses. There were also a full set of gaming pieces and a gaming board. "The gaming set indicates that she was an officer", says Charlotte, "someone who worked with tactics and strategy and could lead troops in battle".

The warrior was buried in the Viking town of Birka during the mid-10th century. Isotope analyses confirm an itinerant life style, well in tune with the martial society that dominated 8th to 10th century northern Europe.

Anna Kjellström, who also participated in the study, has taken an interest in the burial previously. "The morphology of some skeletal traits strongly suggests that she was a woman, but this has been the type specimen for a Viking warrior for over a century why we needed to confirm the sex in any way we could."

And this is why the archaeologists turned to genetics, to retrieve a molecular sex identification based on X and Y chromosomes. Such analyses can be quite useful according to Maja Krezwinska: "Using ancient DNA for sex identification is useful when working with children for example, but can also help to resolve controversial cases such as this one".

Maja was thus able to confirm the morphological sex identification with the presence of X chromosomes but the lack of a Y chromosome.

Jan Storå, who holds the senior position on this study, reflects over the history of the material: "This burial was excavated in the 1880's and has served as a model of a professional Viking warrior ever since. Especially, the grave-goods cemented an interpretation for over a century". It was just assumed she was a man through all these years. "The utilization of new techniques, methods, but also renewed critical perspectives, again, shows the research potential and scientific value of our museum collections".

The study is a part of the ongoing ATLAS project, which is a joint effort by Stockholm University and Uppsala University, supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) and Vetenskapsrådet (The Swedish Research Council), to investigate the genetic history of Scandinavia.

###

More information

The article "A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics" is published in American Journal of Physical Anthropology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23308/full


Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Dept. Archaeology, Uppsala, Phone: 46-(0)8-519 55 724, 46-(0)70-371 07 17, E-mail: charlotte.hedenstierna-jonson@arkeologi.uu.se
Anna Kjellström, Dept. Archaeology & Classic Studies, Stockholm University, Phone 46-(0)73-756 50 91
Maja Krezwinska, Dept. Archaeology & Classic Studies, Stockholm University, Phone 46-(0)8-16 49 72

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-09/su-aoa090817.php

[*Anya*]

Speaking of Science

NASA lost contact with a satellite 12 years ago. An amateur just found its signal.

By Avi Selk January 31 at 6:31 PM

NASA confirmed an incredible discovery Tuesday — that an amateur radio astronomer, on the hunt for a classified government satellite, stumbled upon signals from a spacecraft that had been thought lost 12 years earlier, raising hope that NASA can resurrect a mission that changed our understanding of the “invisible ocean” around the Earth.

1. Lost

IMAGE was a machine designed to “see the invisible,” as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it.

It was a squat and boxy thing, like many satellites, with a long technical name — Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration — that obscured its plain and noble purpose: to map the roiling sphere of electric gas around the Earth that protects us from the sun, and which we had never seen in full before.

Before IMAGE launched in 2000, humans had known only for a few decades that a magnetosphere surrounded the planet. In an essay before the launch, the mission's lead investigator, James L. Burch, called it an “invisible ocean . . . where nothing tangible — no snow or sand or tree or even a cloud — records titanic currents and pulses.”

The sphere shields our planet from the sun's harsh winds while letting through its light. Like an ocean, its plasma ripples and flows in a solar wind. But also like an ocean, it is prone to storms — solar disruptions so violent they can knock out satellites and even power grids on Earth.

IMAGE was built, Burch wrote, to send home images of the global magnetosphere for the first time in history and help predict those storms.

For five years, it astonished us.

The satellite beamed back pictures of an enormous solar storm in the summer of 2000 and allowed scientists to essentially live-stream “weather” in space. The sphere around the Earth proved to be a much stranger place than had been thought. IMAGE discovered that the Earth spits out jets of its own atmosphere to defend itself from space storms — like a squid shooting ink — the Dallas Morning News wrote in 2002. It discovered cracks in the Earth's magnetic field, tracked down the source of mysterious radiation and imaged 100,000-volt charged particles whipping around the circumference of the globe.

And in the last month of 2005 — on the same day the U.S. president addressed the nation from the Oval Office, promising an end to a still-young Iraq War — IMAGE stopped sending pictures. The satellite had suddenly gone invisible itself.

The scientists tried to figure out why. A tripped breaker in the radio was their best guess. But without a radio, they couldn't tell it to turn itself back on.

After a month of silence from IMAGE, NASA published a news release that declared the satellite's mission a great success — one that was now over.

“The craft's power supply subsystems failed,” the agency wrote, “rendering it lifeless.”

NASA was wrong. IMAGE was not dead, but it would circle Earth for more than a decade before a man with no professional astronomy training — one who did not always accept the official explanation of events — heard its call.

2. Contact

The 21st century moved into its second decade, and space exploration changed. New machines were sent into orbit, and some of them, like IMAGE, were lost too.

In the first month of 2018, an unknown government agency used a private company to launch a secret satellite, code-named “Zuma.” It was nothing like IMAGE; it was a machine intended to be invisible to most of the world.

And it failed immediately.

No one has said publicly what, exactly, went wrong during the Jan. 7 launch, whether Zuma crashed back into an ocean or simply died in space. Its fate and purpose have become a mystery of the new Space Age — and all of this bothered Scott Tilley very much.

Tilley is a 47-year-old electrical engineer who lives on the west coast of Canada. His hobby is radio astronomy. In a sense, it's also his cause.

“Space is not owned by anybody,” Tilley told The Washington Post. “Anybody should be able to look up and know those little dots moving across the night sky are not bombs.”

Secret military satellites and classified orbits bother him, so he has banded together with a small group of fellow amateurs across the world to to track down every satellite whose operators don't want it to be seen.

Maybe Zuma was in pieces at the bottom of an ocean, Tilley thought. But maybe not. So he began to scan. He used no telescope, listening instead for radio signals out there, in the invisible ocean.

When Tilley caught a signal after a week of searching, on Jan. 20, he almost ignored it. Whatever it was, it was orbiting much higher than Zuma was supposed to be. There are hundreds of active satellites in space, most of which didn't interest him. “I didn't think of it much more,” he wrote on his blog.

But as he continued to scan for Zuma, he came across the signal again — stronger this time — and out of curiosity checked it against a standard catalogue.

The signal matched for IMAGE. But IMAGE was supposed to be dead.

Tilley had to Google the old satellite to find out what it was, as it had been all but forgotten on Earth. Eventually, he came across a decade-old NASA report on the mission's failure.

“Once I read through the failure report and all the geeky language the engineers use, I immediately understood what had happened,” Tilley told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. News.

Then he rushed to contact NASA himself.

3. Answers

That old news release announcing the death of IMAGE had not actually been the end of its story on Earth. A week later, in early 2006, NASA quietly convened a board of experts to pore over the satellite's entire data set and figure out what went wrong.

They worked for months. When their final report was released, the board still figured IMAGE had tripped a power breaker and essentially bricked itself, like a bad iPhone.

But they had come up with a theory for how the satellite might be fixed. Or rather how it might fix itself.

IMAGE was solar-powered and designed so that if its battery ever drained enough, it would try to reset its computer and flip the breaker back. The board thought this was most likely to happen in late 2007, when IMAGE's orbit would put it in the Earth's shadow from the sun — from the satellite's point of view, a deep eclipse.

But the theory didn't pan out. When NASA tried to the contact IMAGE after the eclipse, it remained as silent as ever, so the agency closed down the mission for good.

And then, a decade later, Tilley found the machine chirping away.

After his discovery, another independent astronomer, Cees Bassa, looked for IMAGE's signal in years of old data. He hypothesized that while the 2007 eclipse didn't manage to reset the satellite, another one did the trick, probably sometime between 2014 and 2016.

“Most likely the battery efficiency degraded such over the IMAGE lifetime that during the less deep eclipses the battery drained sufficiently to lead to the reset and bring the transmitter aboard IMAGE back to life,” Bassa wrote.

NASA hasn't confirmed that. In fact, the agency was initially skeptical that the signal Tilley found actually came from IMAGE.

After Tilley contacted NASA last week, scientists trained antennas at the Goddard Space Flight Center on the object. Initial tests showed its orbit, frequency, oscillation and spin rate all matched their old, lost satellite.

Even so, NASA was cautious in its public updates, writing Sunday that it still wanted to analyze the signal's encoded data before it could be sure.

Meanwhile, astronomers amateur and professional were getting excited. “The team is collectively holding their breath,” Patricia Reiff, an investigator on the original mission, told Science Magazine.

On his blog, Tilley quoted from an email sent to him by Burch, the lead investigator on the IMAGE mission, who wrote so many years ago of a machine to map an invisible sea.

“Very excited,” Burch wrote to Tilley.

Confirmation finally came Tuesday. It came couched in the technical jargon of space science and was no less momentous for it.

“On the afternoon of Jan. 30, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, successfully collected telemetry data from the satellite,” NASA wrote. “The signal showed that the space craft ID was 166 — the ID for IMAGE.

“The NASA team has been able to read some basic housekeeping data from the spacecraft, suggesting that at least the main control system is operational.”

Translation: There is hope that IMAGE will one day tell us more about the “ocean” it's been adrift in for more than 12 years.

“I really hope the scientists who built this thing and put it in space are able to repurpose this and put it back into action,” Tilley told CBC News. “And we get the benefit of all the beautiful science coming home.”

He was named nowhere in NASA's news release, except as an anonymous “amateur astronomer.”

But that's fine. He found the thing, when the professionals might have left it in the dark forever.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/31/nasa-lost-contact-with-a-satellite-12-years-ago-an-amateur-just-found-its-signal/?utm_term=.23c5942aa485&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1

[FireSignFemme]

My mother took DES:
I was just curious if anyone knows if their mother took DES and if they have an autoimmune diseases. For my sister this has been difficult to correlate and she is very sick with lupus and one large study in Sweden has found a correlation.
Thank you in advance if you should decide to respond

I was exposed to DES, I don't have Lupus/any other autoimmune disease (as far as I know) nor does anyone else I've known who was exposed to it.

[*Anya*]

Sprawling Maya network discovered under Guatemala jungle

2 February 2018

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/736/cpsprodpb/1481B/production/_99859938_mixmayanpic.png

A split image with one side showing an aerial look on Mayan ruins in Guatemala's northern jungle, and the other side showing a digital landscape that strips away the forest canopy to reveal structures under the ground. WILD BLUE MEDIA/CHANNEL 4

* The Maya city of Tikal was found to be just a fraction of an immense hidden metropolis.
* Researchers have found more than 60,000 hidden Maya ruins in Guatemala in a major archaeological breakthrough.
* Laser technology was used to survey digitally beneath the forest canopy, revealing houses, palaces, elevated highways, and defensive fortifications.

The landscape, near already-known Maya cities, is thought to have been home to millions more people than other research had previously suggested. The researchers mapped over 810 square miles (2,100 sq km) in northern Peten. Archaeologists believe the cutting-edge technology will change the way the world will see the Maya civilisation.

"I think this is one of the greatest advances in over 150 years of Maya archaeology," said Stephen Houston, Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Brown University. Mr Houston told the BBC that after decades of work in the archaeological field, he found the magnitude of the recent survey "breathtaking". He added, "I know it sounds hyperbolic but when I saw the [Lidar] imagery, it did bring tears to my eyes."

Most structures are believed to be stone platforms for pole-and-thatch homes. Results from the research using Lidar technology, which is short for "light detection and ranging", suggest that Central America supported an advanced civilisation more akin to sophisticated cultures like ancient Greece or China. "Everything is turned on its head," Ithaca College archaeologist Thomas Garrison told the BBC. He believes the scale and population density has been "grossly underestimated and could in fact be three or four times greater than previously thought".

How does Lidar work?
Described as "magic" by some archaeologists, Lidar unveils archaeological finds almost invisible to the naked eye, especially in the tropics. It is a sophisticated remote sensing technology that uses laser light to densely sample the surface of the earth. Millions of laser pulses every four seconds are beamed at the ground from a plane or helicopter. The wavelengths are measured as they bounce back, which is not unlike how bats use sonar to hunt. The highly accurate measurements are then used to produce a detailed three-dimensional image of the ground surface topography.

Revolutionary treasure map
The group of scholars who worked on this project used Lidar to digitally remove the dense tree canopy to create a 3D map of what is really under the surface of the now-uninhabited Guatemalan rainforest. "Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy," Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist, told National Geographic. "We'll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we're seeing."

The Lidar images have surprised surveyors
Archaeologists excavating a Maya site called El Zotz in northern Guatemala, painstakingly mapped the landscape for years. But the Lidar survey revealed kilometres of fortification wall that the team had never noticed before. "Maybe, eventually, we would have gotten to this hilltop where this fortress is, but I was within about 150 feet of it in 2010 and didn't see anything," Mr. Garrison told Live Science.

While Lidar imagery has saved archaeologists years of on-the-ground searching, the BBC was told that it also presents a problem. "The tricky thing about Lidar is that it gives us an image of 3,000 years of Mayan civilisation in the area, compressed," explained Mr Garrison, who is part of a consortium of archaeologists involved in the recent survey. "It's a great problem to have though, because it gives us new challenges as we learn more about the Maya."

Hidden insights
Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million. "With this new data it's no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there," said Mr Estrada-Belli, "including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable."

Most of the 60,000 newly identified structures are thought to be stone platforms that would have supported the average pole-and-thatch Maya home. The archaeologists were struck by the "incredible defensive features", which included walls, fortresses and moats. They showed that the Maya invested more resources into defending themselves than previously thought, Mr Garrison said.

One of the hidden finds is a seven-storey pyramid so covered in vegetation that it practically melts into the jungle. Another discovery that surprised archaeologists was the complex network of causeways linking all the Maya cities in the area. The raised highways, allowing easy passage even during rainy seasons, were wide enough to suggest they were heavily trafficked and used for trade.

"The idea of seeing a continuous landscape, but understanding everything is connected across many square miles is amazing," said Mr Houston. "We can expect many further surprises," he added.

The Lidar survey was the first part of a three-year project led by a Guatemalan organisation that promotes cultural heritage preservation. It will eventually map more than 5,000 sq miles (14,000 sq km) of Guatemala's lowlands.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-42916261

[*Anya*]

This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe

By Carl Zimmer FEB. 5, 2018

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/13/science/13SCI-ZIMMER/13SCI-ZIMMER-master768.jpg

The marbled crayfish is a mutant species that clones itself, scientists report. The population is exploding in Europe, but the species appears to have originated only about 25 years ago.

Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake.

Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles.

“It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.”

Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science.

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

“We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species,” said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study.

The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as “Texas crayfish” in 1995.

The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time.

Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterward, so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond.

As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce.

In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America.

Ten years later, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues set out to determine the entire genome of the marbled crayfish. By then, it was no longer just an aquarium oddity.

For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko.

Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar.

Sequencing the genome of this animal was not easy: No one had sequenced the genome of a crayfish. In fact, no one had ever sequenced any close relative of the crayfish.

Dr. Lyko and his colleagues struggled for years to piece together fragments of DNA into a single map of its genome. Once they succeeded, they sequenced the genomes of 15 other specimens, including marbled crayfish living in German lakes and those belonging to other species.

The rich genetic detail gave the scientists a much clearer look at the freakish origins of the marbled crayfish.

It apparently evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which lives only in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia.

The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell — whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can’t tell.

Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two.

Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn’t suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA.

It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones.

Now that their chromosomes were mismatched with those of slough crayfish, they could no longer produce viable offspring. Male slough crayfish will readily mate with the marbled crayfish, but they never father any of the offspring.

In December, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues officially declared the marbled crayfish to be a species of its own, which they named Procambarus virginalis. The scientists can’t say for sure where the species began. There are no wild populations of marble crayfish in the United States, so it’s conceivable that the new species arose in a German aquarium.

All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko’s team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats — from abandoned coal fields in Germany to rice paddies in Madagascar.

In their new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the marbled crayfish has spread across Madagascar at an astonishing pace, across an area the size of Indiana in about a decade.

Thanks to the young age of the species, marbled crayfish could shed light on one of the big mysteries about the animal kingdom: why so many animals have sex.

Only about 1 in 10,000 species comprise cloning females. Many studies suggest that sex-free species are rare because they don’t last long.

In one such study, Abraham E. Tucker of Southern Arkansas University and his colleagues studied 11 asexual species of water fleas, a tiny kind of invertebrate. Their DNA indicates that the species only evolved about 1,250 years ago.

There are a lot of clear advantages to being a clone. Marbled crayfish produce nothing but fertile offspring, allowing their populations to explode. “Asexuality is a fantastic short-term strategy,” said Dr. Tucker.

In the long term, however, there are benefits to sex. Sexually reproducing animals may be better at fighting of diseases, for example.

If a pathogen evolves a way to attack one clone, its strategy will succeed on every clone. Sexually reproducing species mix their genes together into new combinations, increasing their odds of developing a defense.

The marbled crayfish offers scientists a chance to watch this drama play out practically from the beginning. In its first couple decades, it’s doing extremely well. But sooner or later, the marbled crayfish’s fortunes may well turn.

“Maybe they just survive for 100,000 years,” Dr. Lyko speculated. “That would be a long time for me personally, but in evolution it would just be a blip on the radar.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html

[cathexis]

This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe

By Carl Zimmer FEB. 5, 2018

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/02/13/science/13SCI-ZIMMER/13SCI-ZIMMER-master768.jpg

The marbled crayfish is a mutant species that clones itself, scientists report. The population is exploding in Europe, but the species appears to have originated only about 25 years ago.

Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake.

Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles.

“It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.”

Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science.

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

“We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species,” said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study.

The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as “Texas crayfish” in 1995.

The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time.

Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterward, so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond.

As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce.

In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America.

Ten years later, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues set out to determine the entire genome of the marbled crayfish. By then, it was no longer just an aquarium oddity.

For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko.

Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar.

Sequencing the genome of this animal was not easy: No one had sequenced the genome of a crayfish. In fact, no one had ever sequenced any close relative of the crayfish.

Dr. Lyko and his colleagues struggled for years to piece together fragments of DNA into a single map of its genome. Once they succeeded, they sequenced the genomes of 15 other specimens, including marbled crayfish living in German lakes and those belonging to other species.

The rich genetic detail gave the scientists a much clearer look at the freakish origins of the marbled crayfish.

It apparently evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which lives only in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia.

The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell — whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can’t tell.

Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two.

Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn’t suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA.

It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones.

Now that their chromosomes were mismatched with those of slough crayfish, they could no longer produce viable offspring. Male slough crayfish will readily mate with the marbled crayfish, but they never father any of the offspring.

In December, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues officially declared the marbled crayfish to be a species of its own, which they named Procambarus virginalis. The scientists can’t say for sure where the species began. There are no wild populations of marble crayfish in the United States, so it’s conceivable that the new species arose in a German aquarium.

All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko’s team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats — from abandoned coal fields in Germany to rice paddies in Madagascar.

In their new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the marbled crayfish has spread across Madagascar at an astonishing pace, across an area the size of Indiana in about a decade.

Thanks to the young age of the species, marbled crayfish could shed light on one of the big mysteries about the animal kingdom: why so many animals have sex.

Only about 1 in 10,000 species comprise cloning females. Many studies suggest that sex-free species are rare because they don’t last long.

In one such study, Abraham E. Tucker of Southern Arkansas University and his colleagues studied 11 asexual species of water fleas, a tiny kind of invertebrate. Their DNA indicates that the species only evolved about 1,250 years ago.

There are a lot of clear advantages to being a clone. Marbled crayfish produce nothing but fertile offspring, allowing their populations to explode. “Asexuality is a fantastic short-term strategy,” said Dr. Tucker.

In the long term, however, there are benefits to sex. Sexually reproducing animals may be better at fighting of diseases, for example.

If a pathogen evolves a way to attack one clone, its strategy will succeed on every clone. Sexually reproducing species mix their genes together into new combinations, increasing their odds of developing a defense.

The marbled crayfish offers scientists a chance to watch this drama play out practically from the beginning. In its first couple decades, it’s doing extremely well. But sooner or later, the marbled crayfish’s fortunes may well turn.

“Maybe they just survive for 100,000 years,” Dr. Lyko speculated. “That would be a long time for me personally, but in evolution it would just be a blip on the radar.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html

Wonder if anyone has done research (scientific or kitchen) to see if they are edible by humans.
If we could predate on this exploding mutant species, sounds like they just discovered a very much needed new protein source.

[gaea]

This is last is why I try to explain the science. There's a lot at stake. I'm going to give just one example: Huntington's chorea. There is a gene on chromosome 4 that consists of a single 'word' CAG (you can, in some ways, think of a genome) that repeats over again. On average people have between 6 and 15 repeats. Any number of repeats up to 35 and you're fine. The trouble starts at 39 or higher. Here's Matt Ridley talking about how not only do we know what gene causes it we can predict, based upon the number of repeats at what age you can expect to start showing symptoms.

(Matt Ridley -- Genome: Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)

Now, we don't know what the gene is actually there for but one day we will and when we do we will be able to manipulate the genome so that we can simply edit out all repeats above 35. We could test for it pretty much as soon as the woman realizes she is pregnant. When we can, we should.

That's the promise. It would be beyond sin if we turned our back on this technology.

Cheers
Aj

Aj,

I have Huntington's it is called HUntingtons Disease, my CAG repeat is 40, i am interested in speaking with you perhaps because it seems you are knowledgeable about huntington's disease. I am 6th generation.

Gaea

[Orema]

What New Science Techniques Tells Us About Ancient Women Warriors
Recent studies show that man was not always the hunter.

By Annalee Newitz
Mx. Newitz is a contributing Opinion writer for the New York Times
Jan. 1, 2021

https://i.postimg.cc/VsFWgFZr/02newitz-super-Jumbo.jpg
Claire Merchlinsky

Though it’s remarkable that the United States finally is about to have a female vice president, let’s stop calling it an unprecedented achievement. As some recent archaeological studies suggest, women have been leaders, warriors and hunters for thousands of years. This new scholarship is challenging long-held beliefs about so-called natural gender roles in ancient history, inviting us to reconsider how we think about women’s work today.

In November a group of anthropologists and other researchers published a paper in the academic journal Science Advances about the remains of a 9,000-year-old big-game hunter buried in the Andes. Like other hunters of the period, this person was buried with a specialized tool kit associated with stalking large game, including projectile points, scrapers for tanning hides and a tool that looked like a knife. There was nothing particularly unusual about the body — though the leg bones seemed a little slim for an adult male hunter. But when scientists analyzed the tooth enamel using a method borrowed from forensics that reveals whether a person carries the male or female version of a protein called amelogenin, the hunter turned out to be female.

With that information in hand, the researchers re-examined evidence from 107 other graves in the Americas from roughly the same period. They were startled to discover that out of 26 graves with hunter tools, 10 belonged to women. Bonnie Pitblado, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, told Science magazine that the findings indicate that “women have always been able to hunt and have in fact hunted.” The new data calls into question an influential dogma in the field of archaeology. Nicknamed “man the hunter,” this is the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles: Men hunted, and women gathered. Now, this theory may be crumbling.

While the Andean finding was noteworthy, this was not the first female hunter or warrior to be found by re-examining old archaeological evidence using fresh scientific techniques. Nor was this sort of discovery confined to one group, or one part of the world.

Three years ago, scientists re-examined the remains of a 10th-century Viking warrior excavated in Sweden at the end of the 19th century by Hjalmar Stolpe, an archaeologist. The skeleton had been regally buried at the top of a hill, with a sword, two shields, arrows and two horses. For decades, beginning with the original excavation, archaeologists assumed the Viking was a man. When researchers in the 1970s conducted a new anatomical evaluation of the skeleton, they began to suspect that the Viking was in fact a woman. But it wasn’t until 2017, when a group of Swedish archaeologists and geneticists extracted DNA from the remains, that the sex of the warrior indeed proved to be female.

The finding led to controversy over whether the skeleton was really a warrior, with scholars and pundits protesting what they called revisionist history. Although the genetic sex determination thus was indisputable (the bones of the skeleton had two X chromosomes), these criticisms led the Swedish researchers to examine the evidence yet again, and present a second, more contextual analysis in 2019. Their conclusion again was that the person had been a warrior.

The naysayers raised fair points. In archaeology, as the researchers admitted, we can’t always know why a community buried someone with particular objects. And one female warrior does not mean that many women were leaders, just as the reign of Queen Elizabeth I was not part of a larger feminist movement.

Challenges to “man the hunter” have emerged in new examinations of the early cultures of the Americas as well. In the 1960s, an archaeological dig uncovered in the ancient city of Cahokia, in what is now southwestern Illinois, a 1,000-to-1,200-year-old burial site with two central bodies, one on top of the other, surrounded by other skeletons. The burial was full of shell beads, projectile points and other luxury items. At the time, the archaeologists concluded that this was a burial of two high-status males flanked by their servants.

But in 2016 archaeologists conducted a fresh examination of the grave. The two central figures, it turned out, were a male and a female; they were surrounded by other male-female pairs. Thomas Emerson, who conducted the study with colleagues from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois, alongside scientists from other institutions, said the Cahokia discovery demonstrated the existence of male and female nobility. “We don’t have a system in which males are these dominant figures and females are playing bit parts,” as he put it.

Armchair history buffs love to obsess about mythical societies dominated by female warriors, like Amazons and Valkyries. Let’s be clear. These findings don’t reveal an ancient matriarchy. But neither do they reaffirm the idea of societies in which men dominate completely. What they indicate is a lot more mundane and relatable: Some women were warriors and leaders; many weren’t. There was inequality, but it wasn’t absolute, and there were a lot of shifts over time. When it comes to female power, and gender roles, the past was as ambiguous as the present.

Annalee Newitz (@annaleen), a science journalist and a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the forthcoming “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/opinion/women-hunter-leader.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

[PlatinumPearl]

9I0UYXVqIn8
Team is targeting 9:15 p.m. EST for tonight's Falcon 9 launch.


SpaceX is targeting 9:15 p.m. EST on Thursday, January 7 for launch of the Turksat 5A mission from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There is a back-up opportunity available on Friday, January 8, with a four-hour launch window opening at 8:28 p.m. EST, or 01:28 UTC on January 9.

Falcon 9’s first stage booster previously supported launch of GPS III Space Vehicle 03 and two Starlink missions. Following stage separation, SpaceX will land Falcon 9’s first stage on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Falcon 9’s fairing is also flight-proven: one half previously supported the GPS III Space Vehicle 03 mission and the other flew aboard the ANASIS-II mission.

[PlatinumPearl]

Astronauts Harvest Radish Crop on International Space Station

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/radish_harvest_kate_rubins.jpg?itok=4ublnVsg
On Nov. 27, 2020, NASA astronaut and Expedition 64 Flight Engineer Kate Rubins checks out
radish plants growing for the Plant Habitat-02 experiment that seeks to optimize plant growth
in the unique environment of space and evaluate nutrition and taste of the plants. Credits: NASA


https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/side_image/public/thumbnails/image/radishes_in_aph.jpg?itok=A5G36ykl
Photo documentation of the Plant Habitat-02 investigation aboard the International Space Station on
Nov. 30, 2020. Plant Habitat-02 uses the Advanced Plant Habitat to cultivate radishes, a model plant that
is nutritious and edible and has a short cultivation time. This research could help optimize plant growth in
the unique environment of space, as well as evaluation of nutrition and taste of the plants. Credits: NASA


By Linda Herridge
NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center
(Editor's Note: This feature was updated on Dec. 11, 2020)

On Nov. 30, 2020, NASA astronaut Kate Rubins harvested radish plants growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) aboard the International Space Station. She meticulously collected and wrapped in foil each of the 20 radish plants, placing them in cold storage for the return trip to Earth in 2021 on SpaceX’s 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission.

The plant experiment, called Plant Habitat-02 (PH-02), is the first time NASA has grown radishes on the orbiting laboratory in the APH. NASA selected radishes because they are well understood by scientists and reach maturity in just 27 days. These model plants are also nutritious and edible, and are genetically similar to Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage that researchers frequently study in microgravity.

“Radishes are a different kind of crop compared to leafy greens that astronauts previously grew on the space station, or dwarf wheat which was the first crop grown in the APH,” said Nicole Dufour, NASA APH program manager at Kennedy Space Center. “Growing a range of crops helps us determine which plants thrive in microgravity and offer the best variety and nutritional balance for astronauts on long-duration missions.”

The structure of the experiment will allow NASA to identify the optimum balance of care and feeding needed to produce quality plants. While growing inside the habitat, the radishes required little maintenance from the crew.

Unlike previous experiments in NASA’s APH and Vegetable Production System (Veggie), which used porous clay material preloaded with a slow-release fertilizer, this trial relies on precisely defined quantities of provided minerals. Such precision allows for a better comparison of nutrients provided to and absorbed by the plants.

The chamber also uses red, blue, green and broad-spectrum white LED lights to provide a variety of light to stimulate plant growth. Sophisticated control systems deliver water, while control cameras and more than 180 sensors in the chamber allow researchers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to monitor the plant growth as well as regulate moisture levels, temperature, and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration.

The study’s principal investigator, Karl Hasenstein, a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, has conducted plant experiments with NASA since 1995. From this project, Hasenstein hopes to learn how space conditions like weightlessness affect plant growth, and how well the light response and metabolism resembles “Earth-grown” plants.

“Radishes provide great research possibilities by virtue of their sensitive bulb formation,” Hasenstein said. “We can grow 20 plants in the APH, analyze CO2 effects, and mineral acquisition and distribution.”

The team has set up a control population of plants in the ground control plant habitat unit in the International Space Station Environmental Simulator (ISSES) chamber inside Kennedy’s Space Station Processing Facility. Radishes have been growing under nearly identical conditions in the ISSES since Nov. 17, and researchers will harvest the control crop Dec. 15 for comparison with the radishes grown on station.

This historic harvest does not mean the experiment is over, Dufour added.

“The APH has two science carriers, so shortly after the first harvest, the second carrier will be used to repeat the experiment by planting another set of radish seeds,” she said. “Replicating the plant experiment increases the sample size and improves scientific accuracy.”

The researchers credit two partner organizations with helping make the mission a success.

Hasenstein highlighted the contracted support team from Techshot. Teams from this mission, integration, and support contractor helped shape the payload from the beginning and guided it through the path to space. Project scientists also assist the principal investigator with the experiment and made it possible for researchers to interact with payloads even when they aren’t at the center.

Likewise, Dufour cited Sierra Nevada Corporation’s team in Madison, Wisconsin, for remotely monitoring the telemetry from the APH flight unit and helping tweak performance parameters. She said their dedication contributed to the success of the flight implementation.

With plans to explore the Moon and someday Mars, NASA knows astronauts will need to grow their own food to support long-duration missions far from home. As part of the Artemis program, NASA plans to establish sustainable exploration on and around the Moon by the end of the decade.

“It’s a privilege to help lead a team that is paving the way to the future of space crop production for NASA’s exploration efforts,” Dufour said. “I’ve worked on APH since the beginning, and each new crop that we’re able to grow brings me great joy because what we learn from them will help NASA send astronauts to Mars and bring them back safely.”

The Biological and Physical Sciences (BPS) Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington provides funding for Veggie, the APH, and related investigations.


UT0K3GmNV7E&feature=emb_logo




Source: nasa.gov
Website: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/astronauts-harvest-radish-crop-on-international-space-station
Date: December 11, 2020

[PlatinumPearl]

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of Transporter-1 rideshare mission with 143 spacecraft

T3bl4IhCf18

[PlatinumPearl]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHlMyvBvVTE&ab_channel=NASA
Spot the Station Over the Super Bowl


The International Space Station’s orbital path will take it within sighting range of Tampa,
Florida at 7:15 p.m. EST on Sunday, Feb. 7. Weather permitting, the sighting opportunity
will be about the same time two football teams will be competing to win Super Bowl LV.

[PlatinumPearl]

LuITORqYgoE&ab_channel=ABC7
NASA releases first images taken by Mars Perseverance rover after historic landing.

[PlatinumPearl]

YXyzgTvZUFw
WATCH LIVE: Blue Origin Launch William Shatner into Space on Jeff Bezos New Shepard Rocket

[Kätzchen]

J1cNaFG1VII?si=wFbZygRVanENG0HU


:listening: