Messages

Thats what I thought. Thanks for that.

Oh god, not a blender stick.

Whenever I see one I associate them with mixing water samples from manholes last summer for the internship last summer.

I was going to post something about "the bold traveller" story.  It's amazing the different environments we are finding life in.  I'd love to know how it got that far down in the earth in the first place.

Also, do we actually have quantum computers now?  I thought that they were still 2-5 years away.

The rabies story was interesting too, but I don't have anything interesting to add to it.

About the bold traveler story, I think people see something cool, but then they go off and become idiotic about it. They find this organism that can live in complete isolation, in anoxic conditions and chemosynthetically. Then they go off and talk about it being the key to life on other planets. I look at this organism, and say who cares about other planets, we may have found a relic organism from one of the earliest periods of earths history, leading us ever closer to the supreme question of biogenesis, "How the hell did life come about, anyway?" I feel the same way about the deep ocean vents.

I've heard the rabies story before. If this ends up working, its a confirmation that the earlier cure was not just a fluke. It reminds me of a story I read a couple years ago, about doctors using slow revival methods to bring heart attack patients back from the dead without severe neural trauma.

October 10, 2008

Scientists Explore New Source of Stem Cells
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Scientists have converted cells from human testes into stem cells that grew into muscle, nerve cells and other kinds of tissue, according to a study published Wednesday in the online edition of Nature.

The stem cells offer another potential alternative to embryonic stem cells for researchers who aim to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's by replacing damaged or malfunctioning cells with custom-grown replacements.

Scientists have also derived flexible adult stem cells from skin, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood. The new cells were created from sperm-making cells obtained from testicular biopsies of 22 men. They are theoretically superior to traditional embryonic stem cells because they can be obtained directly from male patients and used to grow replacement tissue that their bodies won't reject, Sabine Conrad of the University of Tuebingen in Germany and her colleagues wrote.

http://snipurl.com/47q4x


Venus Flytraps Caught in Shrinking Natural Habitat
from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Registration Required)

GREEN SWAMP PRESERVE, N.C. (Associated Press)—Laura Gadd pauses at the edge of a pristine savanna, delicately lifting her feet to avoid trampling any venus flytraps hidden underfoot.

Buried below wisps of wire grass, a few of the plants advertise their presence with a single white flower—perched atop a long stem like a flag of surrender. Gadd finds a half-dozen this day, enough to warrant a spray of glue and inconspicuous powder used to identify the plants and track down poachers who pluck them.

... One of nature's most recognized wonders, the venus flytrap's ability to snatch living prey makes it a favorite of elementary school science classes everywhere. ... Booming growth and development along the coast threatens to overrun the few sensitive and thin populations of venus flytraps that still exist in the wild.

http://snipurl.com/44ltu


Malaria Parasites Use "Cloaking Devices" to Trick Body
from National Geographic News

Malaria parasites use elaborate forms of deception, such as molecular mimicry, to fool the human immune system, new gene studies say. The discovery could lead to new vaccines for the disease, which kills millions and is rapidly becoming resistant to treatment.

Gene sequencing of two parasites, Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium knowlesi, comes six years after researchers unraveled the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite that causes the most fatal infections worldwide. Gene sequencing determines the order of chemical building blocks in a species's DNA.

While P. vivax is rarely fatal and causes less severe infections, it accounts for more than a third of about 500 million infections, most of them in Asia.

http://snipurl.com/46qfy


Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives "because we don't really understand how they work." Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential "hydrogen bombs."

And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal."

One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives—exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street.

http://snipurl.com/47ku8


Goldmine Bug DNA May Be Key to Alien Life
from New Scientist

A bug discovered deep in a goldmine and nicknamed "the bold traveller" has got astrobiologists buzzing with excitement. Its unique ability to live in complete isolation of any other living species suggests it could be the key to life on other planets.

A community of the bacteria Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator has been discovered 2.8 kilometres beneath the surface of the Earth in fluid-filled cracks of the Mponeng goldmine in South Africa. Its 60°C home is completely isolated from the rest of the world, and devoid of light and oxygen.

Dylan Chivian of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, studied the genes found in samples of the fluid to identify the organisms living within it, expecting to find a mix of species. Instead, he found that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory.

http://snipurl.com/47vm0


Scientific Journals: Publish and Be Wrong
from the Economist

In economic theory the winner's curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.

The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false.

This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished. In Public Library of Science (PloS) Medicine, an online journal, John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, and his colleagues, suggest that a variety of economic conditions, such as oligopolies, artificial scarcities and the winner's curse, may have analogies in scientific publishing.

http://snipurl.com/47v8v


Only One Person Has Survived Rabies without Vaccine—But How?
from Scientific American

Four years after she nearly died from rabies, Jeanna Giese is being heralded as the first person known to have survived the virus without receiving a preventative vaccine. But Giese (pronounced Gee-See) says she would gladly share that honor with others if only doctors could show that the treatment used to save her could spare other victims as well.

"They shouldn't stop 'till it's perfected," said Giese, now 19, during a recent interview about physicians' quest to refine the technique that may have kept her alive. Giese's wish may come true. Another young girl infected with rabies is still alive more than a month after doctors induced a coma to put her symptoms on hold, just as they did with Giese.

Yolanda Caicedo, an infectious disease specialist at Hospital Universitario del Valle in Cali, Colombia, who is treating the latest survivor, confirmed reports in the Colombian newspaper El País that the victim is an eight-year-old girl who came down with symptoms in August, about a month after she was bitten by an apparently rabid cat.

http://snipurl.com/47vgk


Nearly 300 New Marine Species Found Near Australia
from National Geographic News

Scientists have found 274 new species of corals, starfish, sponges, shrimps, and crabs 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) beneath the surface of Australia's Southern Ocean.

"We know very little about the deep sea," said lead scientist Nic Bax, a marine biologist with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Hobart, Tasmania. "Finding out how much live coral is down there, and how large those communities are, is very exciting." 

Some of the corals were found to be about 2,000 years old, said Bax. CSIRO made the discoveries in two separate voyages to marine reserves located 100 to 200 nautical miles off the southern coast of Tasmania, Australia.

http://snipurl.com/47vso


'Unbreakable' Encryption Unveiled
from BBC News Online

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables. Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today.

These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack, but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time. But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable.

http://snipurl.com/47vwo


Cosmic Eye Telescope Used to Spot Distant Galaxy
from the Telegraph (UK)

Scientists have used a "cosmic eye" to "look back in time" and glimpse a galaxy formation similar to the Milky Way which could give clues to the formation of the Universe. Using a technique that employs gravity from a galaxy in the foreground as an enormous zoom lens, researchers were able to see into the distant Universe.

The cosmic eye allowed scientists to observe a young star-forming galaxy, which lies about 11 billion light years from Earth, as it appeared just two billion years after the Big Bang.

Teams from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US and Durham and Cardiff Universities in the UK believe their findings show for the first time how the galaxy might evolve to become a spiral system like the Milky Way.

http://snipurl.com/47wfk

Starch, I believe.

Yes, starch.

Gluten = protein

starch = carbohydrate

I think the funniest thing about this thread is that this sort of thing happens all the time around here.

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

It would be infinitely easy to become a polyglot if you simply read, understand and remember the stuff posted here.

Simply amazing.

That was sweet! 

There is a reason the officials are on top: it is because scum floats.

I like that like especially.

October 9, 2008

Mercury Flyby Reveals Bright Craters, Long Rays
from National Geographic News

A new look at the solar system's innermost planet is revealing bright young craters and an extensive pattern of rays, suggesting that Mercury undergoes weathering processes like those on the moon.

NASA's MESSENGER ... spacecraft turned toward Earth in the wee hours of Tuesday morning and began transmitting images and data from its second planetary flyby.

A previous flyby in January was the first in a series of maneuvers designed to position MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury in 2011. That encounter imaged 20 percent of the planet's surface that had never been seen before. The latest images represent the first spacecraft views of the northern portion of Mercury, encompassing another 30 percent of the surface missed during previous missions.

http://snipurl.com/46lml


A Gift From the '70s: Energy Lessons
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

The presidential candidates claim to see America's energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They've revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.

The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants—the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.

As a rule, it's not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in "Terrestrial Energy," his history of the hard-soft debate.

http://snipurl.com/46ltt


Blood Test Finds Coronary Disease
from the (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer

A simple blood test could soon replace expensive and invasive exams to detect coronary artery disease. The test, announced Wednesday by doctors at Duke, is being developed after the discovery of genetic markers that show the presence and intensity of blockage in coronary artery disease, said a Duke cardiologist who co-authored research on the link.

Such a blood test could save millions of dollars annually by allowing some patients to avoid risky procedures in which catheters are inserted into patients' arteries.

"I think it is a big deal," Dr. William E. Kraus, a Duke cardiologist, said in an interview Wednesday. "What we want is a test that tells us the status of your disease today and if what you have is heart disease." Kraus' research was published in the medical journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics.

http://snipurl.com/47jpz


Plunge in Markets Brings Another Kind of Depression
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

A Porter Ranch man who murdered his family and killed himself last weekend as he faced financial ruin is the latest and most extreme case of a wave of distress washing over the American psyche.

... The tragic case of the Rajaram family is at the bleakest edge of the economic turmoil that is rattling Americans' emotional well-being. Worries about home foreclosures, job losses and plunging stock prices have sparked a surge in mental health problems.

"The closest I have seen to this in the last 10 to 20 years is the spike after 9/11," said Richard Chaifetz, chief executive of ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based company that coordinates mental health referrals for employers. "But this is more geographically dispersed and is not going to get better in a month."

http://snipurl.com/46lwo


Studies Lift Hopes for Great Lakes Wind Turbine Farms
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

CHICAGO—Picture 100,000 wind turbines rising from the Great Lakes off Michigan's shores, casting spinning shadows on the water and producing electricity for the entire Upper Midwest.

This surreal image is conjured by a study released last Tuesday by the Michigan State University Land Policy Institute. It analyzed wind potential in the Great Lakes and found that 100,000 turbines off Michigan's coasts could produce 321,000 megawatts of energy.

That scenario, however, is highly unlikely because of the cost and environmental and other considerations. But wind power advocates hope it is a starting point for development of the world's first freshwater, offshore wind farms—in the Great Lakes.

http://snipurl.com/46m20


Pentagon Researches Alternative Treatments
from USA Today

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon is seeking new ways to treat troops suffering from combat stress or brain damage by researching such alternative methods as acupuncture, meditation, yoga and the use of animals as therapy, military officials said.

"This new theme is a big departure for our cautious culture," Dr. S. Ward Casscells, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for health affairs, told USA TODAY.

Casscells said he pushed hard for the new research, because "we are struggling with" post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) "as we are with suicide and we are increasingly willing to take a hard look at even soft therapies."

So far this year, the Pentagon is spending $5 million to study the therapies. In the previous two years, the Pentagon had not spent any money on similar research, records show.

http://snipurl.com/46m9d


Great Balls of Fire
from Nature News

A space rock a few metres across exploded over northern Sudan early in the morning of Tuesday 7 October. The small asteroid mostly disintegrated when it collided with Earth's atmosphere, but fragments may have reached the surface.

Such an event happens roughly every three months. But this is "the first time we were able to discover and predict an impact before the event," says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The story began on Sunday evening, when astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, discovered the incoming object, dubbed 2008 TC3. By the next morning, three organizations—NASA's NEO office, the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and NeoDys in Pisa, Italy—confirmed that the asteroid was racing towards Earth.

http://snipurl.com/46mfy


University: Stem-Cell Study Used Falsified Data
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

MINNEAPOLIS (Associated Press)—The University of Minnesota has concluded that falsified data were used in a 2001 article published by one of its researchers on adult stem cells. The school is asking that the article be retracted.

The conclusion follows an 18-month investigation into research published by stem-cell expert Dr. Catherine Verfaillie. The investigation clears Verfaillie of misconduct but points to a former graduate student, Dr. Morayma Reyes, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington.

The university blames Verfaillie for "inadequate training and oversight," and says it has asked for a retraction of the published article, which appeared in the journal Blood. Reyes said it was an honest error and there was no intent to deceive.

http://snipurl.com/46pzh


Newly Discovered Fungus Strips Pollutants from Oil
from New Scientist

A humble fungus could help oil companies clean up their fuel to meet tightening emissions standards. The fungus, recently discovered in Iran, grows naturally in crude oil and removes the sulphur and nitrogen compounds that lead to acid rain and air pollution.

Worldwide, government are imposing increasingly severe limits on how much of those compounds fuels can contain. Oil producers are searching for more efficient ways to strip sulphur and nitrogen from their products.

The standard way to "desulphurise" crude oil involves reacting it with hydrogen at temperatures of 455°C and up to 204 times atmospheric pressure (roughly 21 million pascals or 3000 psi). It achieves less than perfect results. Micro-organisms able to metabolise sulphur and nitrogen have the potential to achieve the same endpoint under more normal conditions.

http://snipurl.com/46qc5


St. Louis Festival Brings Out Science's Cool Side
from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)

ST. LOUIS (Associated Press)—From medicine cabinets to the fermented beer in the fridge, Americans are surrounded by science all the time. The St. Louis Science Center is launching a festival this week to help people better understand, and enjoy, the ways that science plays a role in everyday lives. St. Louis was chosen from about 20 American cities to host SciFest, which is based on a popular English gathering called the Cheltenham Science Festival.

"There's this potpourri for the intellectually stimulated," said Doug King, president and chief executive of the St. Louis Science Center. Most presentations are an hour long, and scientists will tackle topics from the latest developments in stem cell science to the physics of rock guitar—using riffs from Vivaldi to Queen to illustrate points.

... Presentations will be interactive, with scientists giving demonstrations, engaging audiences in the conversation and keeping their talks at a relatable level, he said. Topics include everything from University of Texas professor and author Diandra Leslie-Pelecky on the "Physics of NASCAR" to Harvard physicist Giovanni Fazio on the birth and death of stars.

http://snipurl.com/47k1s

That looks amazing.

Also, lol scientology. 

If you want, I can get an ex-director of Brookhaven Labs in NY to give his opinion on this.

Sure, that would be cool.

My opinion of it is that its bunk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hfPPB5_zUw
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78r-fkZ2x8Q
Take your pick.

And some ramblings (http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/evollawa.txt:

Perhaps the reason so many people continue to reject the notion of
evolution is that it seems contrary to ordinary experience.  Things left
to chance just don't get done.  Random changes in anything simply do not
produce higher levels of organization and complexity.  Rather, all
complex machines and devices with which we are familiar are the result
of intelligent design and manufacture.  Random changes can only destroy
them.

   None the less, the essential claim of evolution is that random change
and natural selection do make simple things spontaneously transform into
more complex things without recourse to intelligent purpose or design.
The famous evolutionist Julian Huxley has defined evolution as a
"directional and essentially irreversible process occurring in time,
which in its course gives rise to an increase of variety and an
increasingly high level of organization in its products."  In his book
_Evolution in Action_, says that nowhere in the process of evolution "is
there any trace of purpose, or even of prospective significance."
Huxley says that evolution is driven solely by "blind physical forces"
engaged in what he calls a great "chaotic jazz dance of particles and
radiations."

UNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!


Don't have time right now. Must destroy later. 

A controversial concept called the electromagnetic drive, or Emdrive for short has been called impossible. But one company believes the concept is viable and has worked for several years on building demonstration models. The Emdrive is a reactionless propulsion system that supposedly generates thrust by converting electrical energy via microwaves. If it works it could provide an almost endless supply of thrust for satellites and possibly other spacecraft. But no detectable energy emanates from the device, and most scientists say the Emdrive violates the well-established principle of the conservation of momentum. Satellite Propulsion Research, Ltd. (SPR), the company working on the drive now says researchers from China have confirmed the theory behind the Emdrive, and they should have a trial engine ready to test by the end of this year.

http://www.universetoday.com/2008/10/09/is-the-impossible-emdrive-possible/