Weekly Science Headlines

[Kai]

Yeah. Which incidentally is one of the many reasons why prestige goes not to the person that "discovers" a "new" species but to the one that formally describes and names it. That, and a person who writes the description, makes the drawings or pictures, fits the organism into an ecological biological and systematic scheme and publishes it is doing all the work.

[Kai]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/322/5907/1506

Cool Science article I read last night about how branching in and of organs is determined. There are a number of factors involved: the growth cone, which is the branching structure itself, the proteins that induce a growth cone to branch or keep it from branching, and the coordination that has to occur between nerves, vessels and epithelial tissue. Its in some ways quite a bit more simple of a system than I thought it would be.

If you can't see the whole thing, abstract is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/322/5907/1506

[Kai]

Drill for Natural Gas, Pollute Water
from Scientific American

In July a hydrologist dropped a plastic sampling pipe 300 feet down a water well in rural Sublette County, Wy. and pulled up a load of brown oily water with a foul smell. Tests showed it contained benzene, a chemical believed to cause aplastic anemia and leukemia, in a concentration 1,500 times the level safe for people. The results sent shockwaves through the energy industry and state and federal regulatory agencies.   

Sublette County is the home of one of the nation's largest natural gas fields, and many of its 6,000 wells have undergone a process pioneered by Halliburton called hydraulic fracturing, which shoots vast amounts of water, sand and chemicals several miles underground to break apart rock and release the gas.  The process has been considered safe since a 2004 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that it posed no risk to drinking water. ... Today fracturing is used in 9 out of 10 natural gas wells in the United States.

Over the last few years, however, a series of contamination incidents have raised questions about that EPA study and ignited a debate over whether the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing may threaten the nation's increasingly precious drinking water supply.

http://snipurl.com/5t87m 


Your Body Is Mine
from Science News

WASHINGTON—It sounds like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone. A man enters a laboratory, dons a special headset and shakes hands with a woman sitting across from him. In a matter of seconds, he feels like he's inside the woman's skin, reaching out and grasping his own hand.

Strange as it sounds, neuroscientists have induced this phenomenon in a series of volunteers. People can experience the illusion that either a mannequin or another person's body is their own body, says Valeria Petkova of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She and Karolinska colleague Henrik Ehrsson call this reaction the "body-swap illusion."

"Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again," says Petkova, who reported the findings November 17 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

http://snipurl.com/5sbo8


Bugs, Brains and Trivia
from Smithsonian Magazine

Entomology students aren't normally the ones under the microscope, but at the annual Linnaean Games, a national insect trivia competition, they are scrutinized as closely as their own six-legged subjects.

Before a crowd of more than a thousand, the larval scholars—mostly PhD candidates—struggle with categories like "Name That Pest" and "Know Your Bug Families." They tackle current events—this year, expect questions on the emerald ash borer, a beetle poised to wipe out the nation's ash trees—and high culture. Who wrote the poem "My Butterfly?" (Robert Frost.) Who composed "Flight of the Bumblebee?" (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.)

But the ant lion's share of the 16 questions at the championships, held Nov. 18 at the Entomological Society of America's meeting in Reno, Nev., will likely be along the lines of this pop quiz: "Name the family of beetles that has one set of eyes on the top of its body and one set below."

http://snipurl.com/5sbwg


Tunnelling Nanotubes: Life's Secret Network
from New Scientist

Had Amin Rustom not messed up, he would not have stumbled upon one of the biggest discoveries in biology of recent times. It all began in 2000, when he saw something strange under his microscope. A very long, thin tube had formed between two of the rat cells that he was studying. It looked like nothing he had ever seen before.

His supervisor, Hans-Hermann Gerdes, asked him to repeat the experiment. Rustom did, and saw nothing unusual. When Gerdes grilled him, Rustom admitted that the first time around he had not followed the standard protocol of swapping the liquid in which the cells were growing between observations. Gerdes made him redo the experiment, mistakes and all, and there they were again: long, delicate connections between cells. This was something new—a previously unknown way in which animal cells can communicate with each other.

Gerdes and Rustom, then at Heidelberg University in Germany, called the connections tunnelling nanotubes. Aware that they might be onto something significant, the duo slogged away to produce convincing evidence and eventually published a landmark paper in 2004.

http://snipurl.com/5sckf


Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with feasts "for my soul that is in this stele."

University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.

Circumstantial evidence, archaeologists said, indicated that the people at Sam'al, the ancient city, practiced cremation. The site is known today as Zincirli (pronounced ZIN-jeer-lee). Other scholars said the find could lead to important insights into the dynamics of cultural contact and exchange in the borderlands of antiquity where Indo-European and Semitic people interacted in the Iron Age.

http://snipurl.com/5sd0e 


Less Stress May Help Cancer Patients Live Longer, Study Finds
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

Psychological counseling, muscle relaxation and other strategies for reducing stress in breast cancer patients can cut their risk of death from the disease by more than half, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Cancer.

The study also found that psychological interventions reduced the risk that tumors would come back by 45%. Even when tumors returned, patients who received the counseling had six more cancer-free months compared with those who did not.

The researchers, led by psychology professor Barbara Andersen of Ohio State University, focused on stress reduction as a primary reason why patients appeared to benefit from group counseling sessions. But other scientists said there still wasn't enough evidence to support that idea.

http://snipurl.com/5se26


Great Pyramid Mystery to Be Solved by Hidden Room?
from National Geographic News

A sealed space in Egypt's Great Pyramid may help solve a centuries-old mystery: How did the ancient Egyptians move two million 2.5-ton blocks to build the ancient wonder?

The little-known cavity may support the theory that the 4,500-year-old monument to Pharaoh Khufu was constructed inside out, via a spiraling, inclined interior tunnel—an idea that contradicts the prevailing wisdom that the monuments were built using an external ramp.

The inside-out theory's key proponent, French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, says for centuries Egyptologists have ignored evidence staring them in the face. "The paradigm was wrong," Houdin said. "The idea that the pyramids were built from the outside was just wrong. How can you resolve a problem when the first element you introduce in your thinking is wrong?"

http://snipurl.com/5t8tw


Big Hop Forward: Scientists Map Kangaroo's DNA
from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)

SYDNEY, Australia (Associated Press)—Taking a big hop forward in marsupial research, scientists say they have unraveled the DNA of a small kangaroo named Matilda. And they've found the Aussie icon has more in common with humans than scientists had thought. The kangaroo last shared a common ancestor with humans 150 million years ago.

"We've been surprised at how similar the genomes are," said Jenny Graves, director of the government-backed research effort. "Great chunks of the genome are virtually identical."

The scientists also discovered 14 previously unknown genes in the kangaroo and suspect the same ones are also in humans, Graves said.

http://snipurl.com/5tb1z


EPA Moves to Ease Air Rules for Parks
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing new air-quality rules that would make it easier to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas, even though half of the EPA's 10 regional administrators formally dissented from the decision and four others criticized the move in writing.

Documents obtained by The Washington Post show that the administration's push to weaken Clean Air Act protections for "Class 1 areas" nationwide has sparked fierce resistance from senior agency officials. All but two of the regional administrators objecting to the proposed rule are political appointees.

The proposal would change the practice of measuring pollution levels near national parks, which is currently done over three-hour and 24-hour increments to capture emission spikes during periods of peak energy demand; instead, the levels would be averaged over a year. Under this system, spikes in pollution would no longer violate the law.

http://snipurl.com/5wu4w


Doctors Transplant Windpipe with Stem Cells
from USA Today

LONDON (Associated Press)—Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs.

"This technique has great promise," said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.

If successful, the procedure could become a new standard of treatment, said Genden, who was not involved in the research. The results were published online Wednesday in the medical journal, The Lancet.

http://snipurl.com/5wuhh

[Kai]

December 16, 2008

Hard Task for New Team on Energy and Climate
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

WASHINGTON—The team President-elect Barack Obama introduced on Monday to carry out his energy and environmental policies faces a host of political, economic, diplomatic and scientific challenges that could impede his plans to address global warming and America's growing dependence on dirty and uncertain sources of energy.

Acknowledging that a succession of presidents and Congresses had failed to make much progress on the issues, Mr. Obama vowed to press ahead despite the faltering economy and suggested that he would invest his political capital in trying to break logjams.

... Shortly after Mr. Obama spoke, transition officials confirmed that he would select Senator Ken Salazar, a first-term Democrat from Colorado, as interior secretary. Mr. Salazar's appointment will complete the team of environmental and energy officials in the new administration. The most pressing environmental issue for the incoming team will almost certainly be settling on an effective and politically tenable approach to the intertwined issues of energy security and global warming.

http://snipurl.com/8f3wv


Uncertainty Clouds Transition at NASA
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

These are awkward times at NASA, which may or may not have a new leader soon and may or may not be on the verge of building a brand-new moon rocket.

There has been a kerfuffle about a tense discussion in the headquarters library between NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and the leader of President-elect  Barack Obama's transition team for the agency. There have been reports of cost overruns and delays in major NASA missions. Someone leaked an e-mail in which Griffin referred to a Bush administration "jihad" against the space shuttle. A former NASA official blasted the agency in an op-ed column. The comments posted on space blogs are full of rancor, accusations and anxiety.

Hovering over everything are cosmic quantities of uncertainty, a real problem in an agency in which missions are planned many years in advance, broad strategies take decades to implement and the engineering is customized down to the last bolt.

http://snipurl.com/89fwo


Hawaii's Honeyeater Birds Tricked Taxonomists
from Science News

Five species of Hawaiian birds have made fools of taxonomists for more than 200 years, thanks to a fine bit of evolutionary illusion-making.

O'o and kioea birds, now extinct, specialized in feeding on flower nectar using long, curved bills and split tongues tipped with brushes or fringe. Since Captain Cook's expedition introduced the birds to western science, they have been classified in the honeyeater family with similar-looking nectar sippers living in New Guinea and Australia.

DNA from museum specimens of the Hawaiian species shows that the birds weren't a kind of honeyeater at all, according to Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Instead the Hawaiians' resemblance to the western Pacific birds offers a new and dramatic example of how evolution within different lineages can converge on similar forms for similar jobs, he and his colleagues report online December 11 in Current Biology.

http://snipurl.com/89lxf


New Study Firmly Ties Hormone Use to Breast Cancer
from USA Today

SAN ANTONIO (Associated Press)—Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.

Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.

Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women. It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

http://snipurl.com/89hk9 


Obesity 'Controlled by the Brain'
from BBC News Online

Seven new gene variants discovered by scientists suggest strongly that obesity is largely a mind problem.

The findings suggest the brain plays the dominant role in controlling appetite, and that obesity cannot easily be blamed on metabolic flaws. Two international studies, published in Nature Genetics, examined samples from thousands of people for the tiniest genetic changes.

Many of the seven key variants seem to be active in the brain. This suggests that the brain's impact on appetite and eating behaviour may be more important that any genetic variation which alters the body's ability to lay down or burn up fat.

http://snipurl.com/89i0n


Darwin's Living Legacy—Evolutionary Theory 150 Years Later
from Scientific American

When the 26-year-old Charles Darwin sailed into the Galápagos Islands in 1835 onboard the HMS Beagle, he took little notice of a collection of birds that are now intimately associated with his name. The naturalist, in fact, misclassified as grosbeaks some of the birds that are now known as Darwin's finches.

After Darwin returned to England, ornithologist and artist John Gould began to make illustrations of a group of preserved bird specimens brought back in the Beagle's hold, and the artist recognized them all to be different species of finches.

... Darwin's famed finches play a continuing role in providing answers. The scientist had assumed that evolution proceeded slowly, over "the lapse of ages," a pace imperceptible to the short lifetime of human observers. Instead the finches have turned into ideal research subjects for studying evolution in real time because they breed relatively rapidly, are isolated on different islands and rarely migrate.

http://snipurl.com/89mav


Airborne Laser Lets Rip on First Target
from New Scientist

Imagine swarms of aircraft patrolling the skies, zapping missiles, aircraft or even satellites in low Earth orbit with invisible, ultrapowerful laser beams. Such laser battles in the sky may not be such a long way off, after a megawatt laser weapon was fired from an aircraft for the first time.

Although the Airborne Laser (ABL) was fired from a stationary plane at a target on the ground just a few metres away, the test marked a milestone for the weapon, developed by aerospace firms Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.

The laser was 12 years in the making and cost $4.3 billion, putting it vastly over budget. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) calls it the answer to "rogue states" or terror groups who equip themselves with intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as Scuds. Yet the ABL may soon be used to shoot down a much wider range of devices—including aircraft—and is just one of a number of laser weapons now being readied for military use.

http://snipurl.com/89mvn 


Lost Species Slowly Emerge from the Greater Mekong
from the Times (London)

Striped rabbits, bright pink millipedes laced with cyanide and a spider bigger than a dinner plate are among a host of new species discovered in a remote wildlife hotspot.

The Greater Mekong is described as one of the last scientifically unexplored regions of the world and it abounds in life seen nowhere else in the world.

So little is known about the ecology of the region that previously unknown animals and plants have been turning up at a rate of two a week for a decade. At least 1,068 new species were identified in the Greater Mekong from 1997 to 2007 along with several thousand tiny invertebrates.

http://snipurl.com/89pr8


Enceladus Has 'Spreading Surface'
from BBC News Online

A US space agency (Nasa) probe has witnessed a moon of Saturn do something very unusual and Earth-like.

Pictures of the icy satellite Enceladus suggest its surface splits and spreads apart—just like the ocean floor on our planet splits to create new crust. The information was released at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The data from the Cassini spacecraft is said to strengthen the idea that Enceladus harbours a sub-surface sea. "Bit by bit, we're accumulating the evidence that there is liquid water on Enceladus," said Carolyn Porco, team leader of the Cassini imaging group and one of the senior scientists on the mission.

http://snipurl.com/8fav4 


FDA Will Continue To Study Bisphenol A
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

The Food and Drug Administration, criticized by its own scientific advisers for ignoring available data about health risks posed by a chemical found in everyday plastic, said yesterday it has no plans to amend its position on the substance but will continue to study it.

The agency has been reviewing its risk assessments for bisphenol A, a chemical used to harden plastic that is found in a wide variety of products, from baby bottles to compact discs to the lining of canned goods. The chemical, commonly called BPA, mimics estrogen and may disrupt the body's carefully calibrated endocrine system.

BPA is found in the urine of more than 90 percent of the U.S. population, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scientists believe it is most easily ingested after leaching from plastic containers into food and drink. In September, the first large study of BPA in humans found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A had higher rates of heart disease, diabetes and liver abnormalities.

http://snipurl.com/8fb8s

[Kai]

December 15, 2008

Mood Mixed as Climate Summit Ends
from BBC News Online

The UN climate summit has ended with delegates taking very different views on how much it has achieved. Western delegates said progress here had been encouraging, but environment groups said rich countries had not shown enough ambition.

Developing nations were angry that more money was not put forward to protect against climate impacts. The meeting is the halfway point on a two-year process aimed at reaching a deal in Copenhagen by the end of 2009.

As envisaged at last year's conference in Bali, that agreement is supposed to have two major elements—an expanded Kyoto Protocol-style deal committing industrialised countries to deeper emission cuts in the mid-term, perhaps by 2020, and a longer-term agreement encompassing all countries.

http://snipurl.com/7yyk7


Study of Tumor Recurrence May Change Drug Guidelines
from the New York Times (Registration Required)

A particularly fast-growing form of breast cancer should be treated aggressively after surgery even when tumors are very small, according to new research that could alter treatment for one in five women diagnosed with breast cancer.

The research, reported Friday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, focuses on the 15 percent to 20 percent of women with breast cancer who test positive for an amplification of the HER2 gene, which is typically among the most aggressive forms of the disease.

Today, a targeted therapy called Herceptin, made by the biotech company Genentech, has greatly improved the odds for women with HER2-positive cancer. Recent studies show the drug reduces the recurrence of these cancers by about half.

http://snipurl.com/7yz9d


Atomic John
from the New Yorker

The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret.

The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb ...

But the most accurate account of the bomb's inner workings ... has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree.

http://snipurl.com/7z22s


New Rule Expands DNA Collection to All People Arrested
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)

Immigration and civil liberties groups condemned a new U.S. government policy to collect DNA samples from all noncitizens detained by authorities and all people arrested for federal crimes.

The new Justice Department rule, published Wednesday and effective Jan. 9, dramatically expands a federal law enforcement database of genetic identifiers, which is now limited to storing information about convicted criminals and arrestees from 13 states.

Congress authorized the expansion in 2005, citing the power of DNA as a tool in crime solving and prevention.

http://snipurl.com/83yes


The Remedist: John Maynard Keynes
from the New York Times Magazine (Registration Required)

... Today, [John Maynard] Keynes is justly enjoying a comeback. For the same "intellectual edifice" that [Alan] Greenspan said has now collapsed was what supported the laissez-faire policies Keynes quarreled with in his times.

Then, as now, economists believed that all uncertainty could be reduced to measurable risk. So asset prices always reflected fundamentals, and unregulated markets would in general be very stable.

By contrast, Keynes created an economics whose starting point was that not all future events could be reduced to measurable risk. There was a residue of genuine uncertainty, and this made disaster an ever-present possibility, not a once-in-a-lifetime "shock." Investment was more an act of faith than a scientific calculation of probabilities. And in this fact lay the possibility of huge systemic mistakes.

http://snipurl.com/83xka


The Living Dead and the Afterlife
from the Times (London)

... [Near Death Experiences] are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming—survivors frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they experience—that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece of the action.

Their problem is that the human mind is unreachable. We can't see what's going on in there. Even if we could rush cardiac-arrest patients into an MRI scanner, we'd only see lights in the brain. We wouldn't know what they meant.

But now NDEs are to be scientifically investigated in a US and UK study involving 25 hospitals. This is co-ordinated by Dr Sam Parnia at Southampton University and is designed to find 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrests—"clinical death"—who tell such stories.

http://snipurl.com/83zow


T. Rex, Other Dinosaurs Had Heads Full of Air
from National Geographic News

Dinosaurs were airheads—and that's not just because they had tiny brains, a new study says.

New 3-D scans of the skulls of Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs reveal the creatures had more empty space inside their heads than previously thought. These air spaces made the skulls light but strong and could have helped dinosaurs breathe, communicate, and hunt.

The extra room may even have paved the way for flight in some species. "Air is a neglected system that is actually an important contributor to what animals do," said study co-author Lawrence Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio University in Athens.

http://snipurl.com/840ef


Stock Market Game May Predict Eco Disasters
from New Scientist

Stock markets could forecast the availability of water more accurately than the best computer models used by environmental scientists. That's the idea behind the launch of an online market which invites "traders" to gamble on future water levels in dams in Australia.

The Australian Knowledge Exchange works by giving traders A$100,000 (US$65,000) play money and 1000 stocks in each of five reservoirs in New South Wales. The stocks pay out each month according to the level of the dam. If the dam is full, they are worth $100. Traders can profit by buying stocks for less than their final value, or by selling them for more.

The online market is the brainchild of a team from the government agency CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in Canberra, Australia, and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

http://snipurl.com/840t3


Tools with Handles Even More Ancient
from Science News

In a gripping instance of Stone Age survival, Neandertals used a tarlike substance to fasten sharpened stones to handles as early as 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

Stone points and sharpened flakes unearthed in Syria since 2000 contain the residue of bitumen—a natural, adhesive substance—on spots where the implements would have been secured to handles of some type, according to a team led by archaeologist Eric Boëda of University of Paris X, Nanterre.

The process of attaching a tool to a handle is known as hafting. The Neandertals likely found the bitumen in nearby tar sands, the team reports.

http://snipurl.com/841gr 


Carbon Nanotube Clothing Could Take Charge in an Emergency
from Scientific American

A soldier is badly wounded on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq by a roadside explosive. As he lies beside his vehicle, unable to reach his radio to contact his unit on his location and condition, blood from the wound seeps into his shirt. Luckily, its fibers are coated with cylindrical, nanosize carbon molecules that contain antibodies able to detect the presence of albumin, a protein common in blood.

The shirt senses that its wearer is bleeding and sends a signal through the shirt's carbon nanotubes ... that activates an emergency radio-frequency beacon on the soldier's belt. This distress call is picked up by a nearby patrol that rushes to the aid of their wounded comrade.

This may be the stuff of science fiction, but ongoing development of fabrics coated with carbon nanotubes and other nanoscale substances could someday make such smart clothing a reality, says Nicholas Kotov, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

http://snipurl.com/842o5

[Telarus]

Good roundup. I enjoyed the 'Tunneling Nanotube' and the 'Hawaiian Birds' stories, thanks Kai!

[Vene]

This is just awesome.
Scripps scientists develop first examples of RNA that replicates itself indefinitely

A few years after Tracey Lincoln arrived at Scripps Research from Jamaica to pursue her Ph.D., she began exploring the RNA-only replication concept along with her advisor, Professor Gerald Joyce, M.D., Ph.D., who is also Dean of the Faculty at Scripps Research. Their work began with a method of forced adaptation known as in vitro evolution. The goal was to take one of the RNA enzymes already developed in the lab that could perform the basic chemistry of replication, and improve it to the point that it could drive efficient, perpetual self-replication.

"This is the only case outside biology where molecular information has been immortalized," says Joyce.

But the main value of the work, according to Joyce, is at the basic research level. "What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts." He is quick to point out that, while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not themselves a form of life.

[Kai]

http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2009/01/prehistoric_venomous_mammal_ca.php

Solenodon species finally caught on video. This is one of two species in the Carribean that are the last of a lineage dating back to the time of the dinosaurs. The species today are very similar to what they would have been like 65 million years ago. Plus, its another one of those venomous mammals, like the Platypus, although unlike the platypus its a live bearer. More or less, it looks like a giant rat tailed shrew and reminds me of a ROUS. One of those animals you ordinarily would only see dead (like the Giant squid), so seeing it alive and filmed is pretty awesome.

[Nast]

http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2009/01/prehistoric_venomous_mammal_ca.php

Solenodon species finally caught on video. This is one of two species in the Carribean that are the last of a lineage dating back to the time of the dinosaurs. The species today are very similar to what they would have been like 65 million years ago. Plus, its another one of those venomous mammals, like the Platypus, although unlike the platypus its a live bearer. More or less, it looks like a giant rat tailed shrew and reminds me of a ROUS. One of those animals you ordinarily would only see dead (like the Giant squid), so seeing it alive and filmed is pretty awesome.

It's also ADORABLE!

[Telarus]

Good photo spread here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/3901029/Mount-Mabu-Mozambique-Scientists-discover-new-forest-with-undiscovered-species-on-Google-Earth.html

[Kai]

Good photo spread here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/3901029/Mount-Mabu-Mozambique-Scientists-discover-new-forest-with-undiscovered-species-on-Google-Earth.html

I love this sort of shit.

[Kai]

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2009/01/tafkami-walks.html

A really bizarre amoeboid that moves by walking. It extends a pseudopod forward and latches to the substrate, pulls itself up over the pseudopod until that is behind it, and then stretches out a new one releasing the old one.

People also have no clue where to place it taxonomically. No mitochondria either.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This picture cracks me up:

[Triple Zero]

mmmmmmmm chameleon pringle

[Kai]

http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2009/01/climbing_catfish_found_named.php Climbing catfish!

http://www.livescience.com/health/080118-super-contacts.html Electronic contacts!