It's a good day for nerds.

[Trolldor]

You misinterpreted my statement. I was surprised at the level of interest little people showed in astronomy.

[Ronja]

You misinterpreted my statement. I was surprised at the level of interest little people showed in astronomy.

Why surprised? It is fascinating stuff in its own right, and also far enough (so to speak) to allow for all kinds of stimulating speculation.

[Trolldor]

... I can't tell if that was a brilliant reply or you took me seriously.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Everytime I read something like this I get a little excited, but what hits me secondarily is how little people give a shit.

TMH, I used to post hundreds of these links, and mostly they never got a response. But people read them. More care than speak.

I do a lot of that. Usually there is nothing really to add - unless the article is complete bollocks! I tend to read most of them though.

Ed Zachery. Interesting, but not really the place to expand on them. Something to read when there's no new Pawiz threads available.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Volcanic Eruptions May Have Wiped Out Neandertals

Clues to the group's disappearance are found in layers of volcanic ash in a cave in the northern Caucasus Mountains that preserve a long record of Neandertal occupation preceding those layers and none afterward

By Kate Wong December 7, 2010 2

A cave in the northern Caucasus Mountains may hold a key to the long-standing mystery of why the Neandertals, our closest relatives, went extinct. For nearly 300,000 years the heavy-browed, barrel-chested Neandertals presided over Eurasia, weathering glacial conditions more severe than any our own kind has ever faced. Then, starting around 40,000 years ago, their numbers began to decline. Shortly after 28,000 years ago, they were gone. Paleo­anthropologists have been debating whether competition with incoming modern humans or the onset of rapidly oscillating climate was to blame for their demise. But new findings suggest that catastrophic volcanic eruptions may have doomed the Neandertals—and paved the way for modern humans to take their place.

Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Archimedes Coins "Eureka!" in the Nude--and Other Crazy Ah-Ha Moments of Science

Is the classic mad scientist stereotype more myth than reality? A new book dives into the history of some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs--and the big brains behind them

By John Monahan December 7, 2010 3

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from They Called Me Mad: Genius, Madness and the Scientists Who Pushed the Limits of Knowledge by John Monahan (on sale December 7 from Berkley). In it Monahan takes the reader from Archimedes archetypical "Eureka!" moment to J. Robert Oppenheimer's fraught findings.

His genius shone like a beacon throughout the Hellenistic world, and his dazzling mathematical insights and wondrous inventions continue to fascinate us to this day. Unfortunately much of his actual life is obscured by the mists of time. In the absence of facts, a body of legend has grown, punctuated by secondhand and thirdhand accounts of varying accuracy. Galileo venerated him. The Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes for mathematicians bears his image. The tenth-century Islamic geometer Abk Sahl al-Kkh+ was so impressed by his works that he called him the “imam of mathematics” (Hirshfeld, 2009). He is credited with calculating pi and the volume of the universe, discovering principles of buoyancy, inventing water pumps, and building war engines capable of grinding the Roman army to a halt. Not to mention inventing what may have been the world’s first death ray. The name of this legendary genius, perhaps the greatest mathematician and inventor of all time, is Archimedes.

Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Zoo Illogical: Ugly Animals Need Protection from Extinction, Too

Zoos have helped save endangered species that have lost their habitats with captive breeding and other programs, but are they only saving the poster-species that zoo-goers find aesthetically pleasing?

By Rose Eveleth | December 8, 2010

Zoos are like fancy hotels, albeit without the fluffy pillows and individually packaged soaps, or so says Daniel Frynta, an ecologist at Charles University in Prague. Only the "richest" animals get to check in. And if an endangered species gets a room, he says, it might just survive.

Frynta defines a rich animal as one that we humans find appealing. And, he says, we have very specific taste: It's got to be big. It's got to be cute. It's got to behave or look humanlike. If a critter is colorful, we like it. We also like it when zoo denizens play and speak and travel in family groups. Those animals, he says, get to stay in zoos. "Poor" animals—that is ugly ones—stay outside where their habitats are quickly being destroyed.

Species in zoos are often protected from total extinction because they are commonly the subjects of captive breeding programs in which staffers entice animals to mate and reproduce offspring that can then be released into the wild or shared with other zoos. Although it's hit or miss, captive breeding represents the last hope for survival for many species. The Hawaiian crow and the Seychelles giant tortoise only exist in zoos, for example. The Arabian oryx was once extinct in the wild, but captive breeding programs allowed for the release of individuals back into their native habitat. And zoos often fund conservation programs that happen outside their walls. "The record is imperfect," says Nate Flessness, science director at the International Species Information System, "but zoos are the only ones doing anything."


Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Microbe gets toxic response

Researchers question the science behind last week's revelation of arsenic-based life.

December 7, 2010

By Alla Katsnelson

Days after an announcement that a strain of bacteria can apparently use arsenic in place of phosphorous to build its DNA and other biomolecules--an ability unknown in any other organism--some scientists are questioning the finding and taking issue with how it was communicated to non-specialists.

Many readily agree that the bacterium, described last week in Science and dubbed GFAJ-1 (F. Wolfe-Simon et al. Science doi:10.1126/science.1197258; 2010), performs a remarkable feat by surviving high concentrations of arsenic in California's Mono Lake and in the laboratory. But data in the paper, they argue, suggest that it is just as likely that the microbe isn't using the arsenic, but instead is scavenging every possible phosphate molecule while fighting off arsenic toxicity. The claim at a NASA press briefing that the bacterium represents a new chemistry of life is at best premature, they say.

"It's a great story about adaptation, but it's not ET," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

At the press briefing, Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., who was invited to the event to offer outside comment, used the analogy of a steel chain with a tinfoil link to illustrate that the arsenate ion said to replace phosphate in the bacterium's DNA forms bonds that are orders of magnitude less stable. Not only would the organism's DNA have to stay together in spite of the weaker bonds, says Benner, but so would all the molecules required to draw arsenate from the environment and build it into the genetic material. Co-authors of the paper, including Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, have countered that the arsenate bonds could be reinforced by specialized molecules, or that arsenic-based life simply has a higher turnover for molecular disintegration and assembly than does conventional life.

The big problem, however, is that the authors have shown that the organism takes up arsenic, but they "haven't unambiguously identified any arsenic-containing organic compounds," says Roger Summons, a biogeochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "And it's not difficult to do," he adds, noting that the team could have directly confirmed or disproved the presence of arsenic in the DNA or RNA using targeted mass spectrometry.

Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Jump-Starting the Orbital Economy

Why NASA's plan to get out of the manned spaceflight business may (finally) make space travel routine

By David H. Freedman | December 8, 2010

Two years ago deceased Star Trek actor James “Scotty” Doohan was granted one last adventure, courtesy of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. SpaceX, a privately funded company based in Hawthorne, Calif., had been formed in 2002 with the mission of going where no start-up had gone before: Earth orbit. In August 2008 SpaceX loaded Doohan’s cremated remains onto the third test flight of its Falcon 1, a liquid oxygen- and kerosene-fueled rocket bound for orbit. Yet about two minutes into the flight Doohan’s final voyage ended prematurely when the rocket’s first stage crashed into the second stage during separation. It was SpaceX’s third failure in three attempts.

Well, what did you expect? sneered old NASA hands, aerospace executives and the many others who hew to the conventional wisdom that safely ushering payloads and especially people hundreds of kilometers above Earth is a job for no less than armies of engineers, technicians and managers backed by billions in funding and decades-long development cycles. Space, after all, is hard. A small, private operation might be able to send a little stunt ship wobbling up tens of kilometers, as entrepreneur-engineer Burt Rutan did in 2004 to win the X-Prize. But that was a parlor trick compared with the kinds of operations NASA has been running over the years with the space shuttle and International Space Station. When you’re going orbital, 100 kilometers is merely the length of the driveway, at the end of which you’d better be accelerating hard toward the seven kilometers a second needed to keep a payload falling around Earth 300 kilometers up.

Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Carnivore crossing: How predator species dominated mammal diversity on the Kuril Islands

Island animals have been an endless source of wonder and fascination for biologists for centuries, and often capture public awe as well. It is always fascinating to picture miniature elephants and gigantic rabbits adrift on dots of land in a vast ocean, flowers with unimaginable types of fruit, or communities in which "terror birds" have replaced mammals as the apex predators. These collections of bizarre and unique creatures also serve as valuable laboratories for discerning just what determines the composition and structure of natural communities.

The tenets of biogeography put forth by MacArthur and Wilson (1963) are well known and fairly ingrained in the fabric of research on island biodiversity and community composition: species diversity decreases as a function of an island’s isolation, and increases as a function of an island’s total area. The number of species represents equilibrium between immigration (determined by distance from nearby land masses) and extinction rate (determined by island size, which often determines resource abundance and habitat heterogeneity).

There is also a related phenomenon, however, which has gotten much less attention over the decades. In Carlquist’s (1966) comprehensive discussion of issues relating to dispersal and establishment in island systems, he discusses the issue of "disharmony": island species composition is often biased towards species that can travel to and propagate themselves on islands successfully. Disharmony, in a nutshell, means that insular assemblages include only a subset of the species found on the mainland. We often see this manifested in island communities with few, or even zero, non-volant mammal species, with carnivorous mammals being especially poorly represented due to the difficulty of sustaining their substantial appetites on the limited resources of a small land mass, not to mention getting their bulky bodies across stretches of ocean in the first place.

Principles such as compositional disharmony, and the "Island Rule" regarding gigantism and dwarfism on islands, often make for interesting case studies, because no two sets of islands are the same. But as with all areas of life, the main source of excitement comes when a "rule" is broken. Such are the novel cases that serve as exceptions to a principle (for example, an otherwise strictly marine mammalian taxa inhabiting a freshwater lake in Siberia), or even indicate that the principle itself may not be as solid as previously thought (see Meiri et al. 2007 for a re-evaluation of the Island Rule). These instances are often extremely informative about the processes and factors involved in a phenomenon. Not to mention just plain cool.

Which brings us to the Kuril Islands, an archipelago in the northwestern Pacific that stretches from just south of the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Japanese island of Hokkaido. These islands have been an ongoing point of contention between Japan and Russia since the end of World War II, resulting in a diplomatic tug-of-war over rightful ownership of this frigid and storm-swept chain of volcanic activity (Russia refers to the southern stretch of the archipelago as the Southern Kurils, while Japan calls them its Northern Territories).

Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Microbe gets toxic response

Researchers question the science behind last week's revelation of arsenic-based life.

December 7, 2010

By Alla Katsnelson

Days after an announcement that a strain of bacteria can apparently use arsenic in place of phosphorous to build its DNA and other biomolecules--an ability unknown in any other organism--some scientists are questioning the finding and taking issue with how it was communicated to non-specialists.

Many readily agree that the bacterium, described last week in Science and dubbed GFAJ-1 (F. Wolfe-Simon et al. Science doi:10.1126/science.1197258; 2010), performs a remarkable feat by surviving high concentrations of arsenic in California's Mono Lake and in the laboratory. But data in the paper, they argue, suggest that it is just as likely that the microbe isn't using the arsenic, but instead is scavenging every possible phosphate molecule while fighting off arsenic toxicity. The claim at a NASA press briefing that the bacterium represents a new chemistry of life is at best premature, they say.

"It's a great story about adaptation, but it's not ET," says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

At the press briefing, Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla., who was invited to the event to offer outside comment, used the analogy of a steel chain with a tinfoil link to illustrate that the arsenate ion said to replace phosphate in the bacterium's DNA forms bonds that are orders of magnitude less stable. Not only would the organism's DNA have to stay together in spite of the weaker bonds, says Benner, but so would all the molecules required to draw arsenate from the environment and build it into the genetic material. Co-authors of the paper, including Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, have countered that the arsenate bonds could be reinforced by specialized molecules, or that arsenic-based life simply has a higher turnover for molecular disintegration and assembly than does conventional life.

The big problem, however, is that the authors have shown that the organism takes up arsenic, but they "haven't unambiguously identified any arsenic-containing organic compounds," says Roger Summons, a biogeochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "And it's not difficult to do," he adds, noting that the team could have directly confirmed or disproved the presence of arsenic in the DNA or RNA using targeted mass spectrometry.

Balance of article at URL above.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Rare monk seal colony found in the Mediterranean

Ancient rock art's colours come from microbes

Colossal pliosaur fossil secrets revealed by CT scanner

Urban marmosets avoid pet threat

'Ghostly' Saharan cheetah filmed in Niger, Africa