Dodder interfaces at the mRNA of the host plant

Posted on 2014-12-11 by Charlie

Dodder, the parasitic strangleweed, was already pretty damn interesting. It can find and choose between host plants by smell for one thing. Now I find out it does bidirectional cross-species mRNA transfers.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a short-lived carrier mechanism that copies instructions from an organism’s DNA and takes them to a ribosome where those instructions will be used to create and chain together amino acids. Amino acids are basic building blocks of living organisms, so being able to read and write mRNA means being able to direct what gets built – for instance your body could build muscle cells, or blood cells, and in either case your mRNA would provide the patterns for the chemical factory that we call a ribosome. Dodder can literally hijack the command and control communications that govern a host plant’s growth.

The scientists who carried out this study were specifically looking for mRNA. They theorize that other sophisticated chemical communications may be going on as well. But this is pretty impressive by itself!

That pink stuff in your bathroom

Posted on 2014-12-08 by Charlie

No, a pink residue is not a problem with your water quality, and is not harmful in this situation. It is evidence of bacteria that are common inhabitants of our environment. The most typical of these bacteria is one known as Serratia marcescens. These bacteria come from any of a number of naturally-occurring sources, such as soil, mulch, dust, and surface waters, and they thrive in an environment that is moist and high in phosphates.

Serratia infection is responsible for about 2% of nosocomial infections of the bloodstream, lower respiratory tract, urinary tract, surgical wounds, and skin and soft tissues in adult patients.

Until the 1950s, S. marcescens was erroneously believed to be a nonpathogenic “saprophyte”, and its reddish coloration was used in school experiments to track infections. It was also used in biological warfare testing by the U.S. military as a substitute for weaponized tularemia bacteria. On September 26 and 27, 1950, the U.S. Navy conducted a secret experiment named “Operation Sea-Spray” in which S. marcescens was released by bursting balloons of it over the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area in California. Although the Navy apparently believed the bacteria were harmless, beginning on September 29, 11 patients at a local hospital developed very rare, serious urinary tract infections, and one of these individuals, Edward J. Nevin, died. Cases of pneumonia in San Francisco also increased after S. marcescens was released.

Concerning Nature’s “open access”

Posted on 2014-12-05 by Charlie

Earlier this week the Intartubes were boiling with the news that Nature Magazine would open its archives back to 1869. Which would, indeed, be marvelous and unexpected.

But it’s a little more complicated than that… it seems Nature’s publisher, Macmillan, is going to let paid Nature subscribers use (yet another) foredoomed-to-failure “read only sharable format”.

The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.

That sounds pretty great for everybody, right? Win-win!

ReadCube, a software platform similar to Apple’s iTunes, will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles’ PDFs. If the initiative becomes popular, it may also boost the prospects of the ReadCube platform, in which Macmillan has a majority investment.

Starting to sound a lot dodgier now… we may have a reality disconnect going on…

Although the screen-view PDF cannot be printed, it can be annotated — which the publisher says will provide a way for scientists to collaborate by sharing their comments on manuscripts.

Yep, reality check sorely needed. Hey, look, smartphones have cameras!

ReadCube -> monitor screen -> camera phone -> email -> PC -> printer.

There are no formats that can be viewed but not printed. If you think such a thing exists, everything you’ve built is suspect, because you’re apparently not entirely aware of what’s going on around you. The odds are good that Macmillan’s “read only format” can be trivially defeated, and that script kiddy hacks will be available in short order.

Any questions?

Nukes and America’s Energy Future

Posted on 2014-12-01 by Charlie

Even if ground-based nuclear power was economically viable in the USA (which it it isn’t, despite massive subsidies) I don’t think our socio-economic system is set up to handle nuclear power. It seems unlikely to me that an adequate level of quality technical administration can be maintained in the post-Reagan business environment; our corporations will inevitably cut costs and staffing until an accident occurs. And that kind of feedback loop does not match up well with pollutants that have lethal doses measured in parts per million and half-life measured in thousands of years.

Fermentation products, particularly methane (aka “Natural Gas”) and alcohols from cellulose (currently not in large-scale production, but China’s already building out the infrastructure) are a far better choice than nuclear. We’ve already got the infrastructure and distribution media for it, and it’s infinitely sustainable and carbon-neutral. Scientifically, it’s a no-brainer; it even leads theoretically to future global temperature management schemes based on vegetative sequestration and release of carbon.

Nuclear power generation works great in space, and we should use it there. On earth we already have clean methane burning appliances available in the Home Depot and Sears, and we already have containment technology that works and restricts accidents to manageable proportions. The biggest real obstacle is that sustainable fuels displace profits from the currently dominant political and economic powers, namely the Texas Oil Barons and their dirty energy lobby. If you build a giant algae vat in Death Valley that generates clean methane or alcohol from waste agricultural products incredibly cheaply, you will directly take income from Esso and Texaco. If you build a nuke plant, there’s no problem, because the dirty energy lobby also owns the means of nuclear power plant construction and operation, and I’m sure they’d much prefer walled nuke plants patrolled by Erik Prince’s armed goons to huge empty plains spotted with oil derricks.

SatNOGS wins Hackaday prize

Posted on 2014-11-14 by Charlie

Coverage here. Very impressive, but personally I was even more impressed by the DIY spectrometer.

Busy weekend at ISS

Posted on 2014-10-27 by Charlie

Elon Musk’s Dragon spacecraft left the International Space Station Saturday after delivering 5000 lb of cargo, and in the wee hours of this morning a Russian Progress unmanned cargo lifter undocked with a full load of garbage, freeing up some parking spaces (video replay on NASA TV at noon today). The Progress will stay nearby for a while to assist with some engineering experiments, and is eventually destined to burn up on reentry on Oct 19th.

Around 2:00pm EDT there will be a course adjustment to dodge some incoming debris left over the 2003 launch of a Cosmos communications satellite.

An Orbital Sciences Cygnus, named in honor of Deke Slayton, is scheduled to launch on an Antares from Wallops tonight. This will be the first Antares launch to use a Castor 30XL upper stage; the payload will include the Planetary Resources Arkyd-3 test satellite and nearly 3 tons of supplies. Coverage starts at 4:00pm EDT on NASA TV, launch at 5:45.

No “right to water” in Detroit

Posted on 2014-10-24 by Charlie

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes on Monday refused to block the city from shutting off water to delinquent customers for six months, saying there is no right to free water and Detroit can’t afford to lose the revenue.

Ever since a bunch of well-meaning idiots who don’t understand basic math or science (otherwise known as the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) declared that clean drinking water is a fundamental human right, activists have been trying to force people and organizations that provide access to safe drinking water to destroy themselves, apparently in the honest belief that inexhaustible supplies of safe water can be magically delivered to every single human being that might ever exist, free of cost, so it can’t matter if we wreck every existing system that actually provides water to people.

All these people have their hearts in the right place, I’m sure, but they have apparently misplaced their brains. The complex interweaving of ecosystems that makes up the terrestrial environment required to support the human race cannot sustain wholesale reallocation of water based on arbitrary human population densities; if a “right to water” actually existed, we’d eventually have to destroy huge swaths of riparian ecosystems in order to keep human desert-dwellers alive. Not to mention the collapse of every existing water allocation system – since they are all based on the idea that human beings will have to fight, work, or inherit wealth in order to obtain water.

The worst thing that could happen to these people (and everybody else) would be for them to succeed, condemning rich and poor alike to a global environmental catastrophe in the name of watering the poor.

More from Antikythera

Posted on 2014-10-20 by Charlie

Looks like the Antikythera treasure ship is not yet exhausted?

The Daily Mail’s coverage is unexpectedly better than the BBC‘s, despite the usual Daily Fail sidebar of celebrity gossip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqhuAnySPZ0

Skunk works claims hot fusion breakthrough

Posted on 2014-10-16 by Charlie

Lockheed’s secret lab says they’ve solved the problem of hot fusion containment, and that they can build a 100 megawatt reactor small enough to fit on a truck in less than one year, with commercial prototypes in less than five years, and reactors available on the market in a decade.

Supposedly it took them only four years to work this out, which makes you think of Bussard’s talk to Google back in 2006, where he claimed that the only reason we didn’t have working fusion reactors was lack of will.

Hot fusion is a highly energetic, highly radioactive process but it does not generate extremely long-lived waste like conventional fission reactors do. A hot fusion reactor accident might do as much initial damage as a fission plant accident, but the long-term cleanup would be relatively simple; if we can’t have true cold fusion, hot fusion is still a big step up from coal or fission.

Pleistocene Art in Indonesia!

Posted on 2014-10-08 by Charlie

A team of archeologists working in the Maros karst caves of Sulawesi, Indonesia have found paintings that appear to be at least 40,000 years old. These paintings strongly resemble well known European cave art of the same time period, showing that there were common art forms in use on opposite sides of the world forty thousand years ago, implying human art is much older.

Here, using uranium-series dating of coralloid speleothems directly associated with 12 human hand stencils and two figurative animal depictions from seven cave sites in the Maros karsts of Sulawesi, we show that rock art traditions on this Indonesian island are at least compatible in age with the oldest European art. The earliest dated image from Maros, with a minimum age of 39.9 thousand years, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world. In addition, a painting of a babirusa (‘pig-deer’) made at least 35.4 thousand years ago is among the earliest dated figurative depictions worldwide, if not the earliest one. Among the implications, it can now be demonstrated that humans were producing rock art by aproximately 40 thousand years ago at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world.

The paper is paywalled here, at Nature Magazine’s website. The précis is quoted above.

“Coralloid speleothems” are a particular type of stalactite, formed of layers of diatom colonies, detrital minerals and clay. Because the diatoms were water-dwelling living creatures, the Uranium series dating technique is applicable to the speleothems. By determining the age of diatom colonies that have formed on top of the paint, minimum age of the cave art can be approximated.

More evidence for group selection

Posted on 2014-10-03 by Charlie

Kinship selection was always an inadequate explanation for animal behavior observed in the natural world. Relying solely on kin selection to explain the evolution of our consensus reality implicitly depends on making sweeping, ridiculous claims that a lot of really obvious phenomena (like fostering and adoption and homosexuality and cross-species altruism and so forth) are just aberrant behaviors, which do not really need to be accommodated or even comprehensively considered by evolutionary biologists.

The experimental colonies proved more successful if their docile-to-aggressive ratios matched that of the naturally occurring control colonies in the same areas, the researchers report online this week in Nature. The results provide an example of group selection, where individual traits evolve according to the needs of a group.

Paywalled article at Nature here, popular treatment at Science here.

The Science News Cycle

Posted on 2014-10-02 by Charlie

Mad props to Jorge Cham

Go tab viagra 100mg When a man suffers from viagra overnight usa the problem, he does not achieve or keep erections sturdy enough for a legal claim. When the husband has situational erectile dysfunction and has difficulties viagra for sale mastercard collecting semen by masturbation at the time of a sexual intercourse. Apcalis jelly is an oral dosage cialis vs levitra similar to sidefacil citrate. title=”The 200 Most Popular PhD Comics list”>here for more.

Hawking radiation precludes singularity formation?

Posted on 2014-09-25 by Charlie

Laura Mersini-Houghton at the University of North Carolina and Harald Pfeiffer of the University of Toronto have published a paper suggesting that as a collapsing star emits Hawking radiation, it must also shed mass at a rate that would necessarily prevent it from achieving the density necessary to form a singularity. This doesn’t mean they are claiming black holes don’t exist, they’re saying that if Hawking radiation is real (and so far it’s entirely theoretical) a black hole singularity cannot be formed by the implosion of a star.

Of course if a mass is high enough to create an information paradox, would we ever be able to tell if that mass is a point singularity or not? I don’t know, but the non-mathematical parts of the paper are surprisingly readable.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson as a sacred cow?

Posted on 2014-09-22 by Charlie

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote an article about the way most modern people have debased science into a caricature of pre-renaissance religious dogmatism, simply substituting white lab coats for black cassocks.

…let me explain what science actually is. Science is the process through which we derive reliable predictive rules through controlled experimentation. That’s the science that gives us airplanes and flu vaccines and the Internet. But what almost everyone means when he or she says “science” is something different.

To most people, capital-S Science is the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It is a thing engaged in by people wearing lab coats and/or doing fancy math that nobody else understands. The reason capital-S Science gives us airplanes and flu vaccines is not because it is an incremental engineering process but because scientists are really smart people.

In other words — and this is the key thing — when people say “science”, what they really mean is magic or truth.

The Intarnets are up in arms. Criticize capital-S science, or the inanity of assuming that science and religion are conflicting methods of solving the same problems? Oh please. Richard Feynman brilliantly plowed that furrow in 1956, and nobody’s really changed their opinion on the subject then or since. What’s important here is that somebody criticised Neil DeGrasse Tyson! Quelle horreur!

2014 IgNobels awarded

Posted on 2014-09-19 by Charlie

Winners were ceremonially announced last night. I haven’t yet watched the awards video, so I do not know if Miss Sweetie-Poo was called into service.

The Medicine Prize was won by Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, for developing a means of treating uncontrollable nosebleeds that involves packing the patient’s nose with bacon.

Oldest Known Pants

Posted on 2014-09-15 by Charlie

As a proud member of the Men Without Tights, I am pleased to report that our fellowship extends further back in time than previously documented.

Trousers are believed to have evolved concurrently with horseback riding by men. For reasons that will be obvious, at least to men.

The pants, which date from 3,000 to 3,300 years ago, are tattered, but are surprisingly stylish, combining attractive form with function. Made out of wool, the trousers feature straight-fitting legs and a wide crotch.

Discovery article, surprisingly good once you scroll past the unrelated photos

The invention of trousers and its likely affiliation with horseback riding and mobility: A case study of late 2nd millennium BC finds from Turfan in eastern Central Asia (Quaternary International, paywalled)

Dyes of late Bronze Age textile clothes and accessories from the Yanghai archaeological site, Turfan, China: Determination of the fibers, color analysis and dating (also Quaternary, also paywalled)

Time Domain Reflectometry visualized

Posted on 2014-07-22 by Charlie

Wikipedia provides this excellent graphic to help explain how you can determine where the fault is in a very long cable.

Reflection of an electric pulse back towards point of origin

Time delay reflectometry is a clever trick where you can calculate the location of an imperfection in a conductor by timing when the “bounce” returns, as long as you know the speed of signal propagation in the wire (which you generally do).

The impedance of the discontinuity can be determined from the amplitude of the reflected signal. The distance to the reflecting impedance can also be determined from the time that a pulse takes to return. The limitation of this method is the minimum system rise time. The total rise time consists of the combined rise time of the driving pulse and that of the oscilloscope that monitors the reflections.

Plumbers will note that the behaviour of the electric flow here is analogous to water hammer. I think it should be possible to find the distance to an obstruction in a pipe as a TDR calculation, as long as you know how compressible the fluid medium is.

Go Baby Go

Posted on 2014-07-18 by Charlie

GoBabyGo is an ongoing project started in 2006 by pediatric researchers Cole Galloway and Sunil Agrawal. The basic concept, which has evolved significantly since the project’s inception, is to provide mobility to kids who have trouble moving on their own by modifying off-the-shelf toy racecars, empowering them to be part of the action at home, in the daycare center, and on the playground.

“Fun is key here—it unlocks brain development and exploratory drive for the child, and ignites active, engaged play from adults and peers. When your main goal is mobility and socialization of young children and their families, you can’t ask for better collaborators than Barbie and Mater.” –Cole Galloway

The team is also trying to develop kid-friendly exoskeletons to promote upper-body movement and harness systems to provide partial body-weight support and free the hands and feet for sports-type activities.

“There are no commercially available powered wheelchairs for children under three” – Galloway

To learn more about the research, or volunteer to help, contact Cole Galloway through the project page.

Happy Apollo 11 Launch Day

Posted on 2014-07-16 by Charlie

It was a school day, but dad’s rocket was going to take men to the moon!

The British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography is online

Posted on 2014-07-10 by Charlie

Science is increasingly on the web, and traditional gatekeepers are increasingly cast in the role of buggy whip makers.

-> The Online British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography.

science art

Posted on 2014-07-09 by Charlie

Mike Bostock on visualizing algorithms and Kalliopi This is the reason, this tadalafil 50mg article would be beneficial for overall health. These side effects usually subside over a period of a few pounds so begin by ringing around the 3rd, 4th, 5th or so cheapest companies and advise them female viagra of the cheapest quote you have received. This is sure that there are many men who have impotence get and keep an erection get cialis cheap by basically diverting him from boosts that give sexual satisfaction. Detailed information about the disorder This is the pills that can give you specifically the incident of what you wanted to feel when in the viagra shops midst of smokers be prepared with an answer to refuse taking one. Monoyios with a roundup of scientific art exhibits.

Typing Animal

this is the blog part

Tag Archives: science