High-definition images of Earth from the Moon, made by the onboard camera of the moon explorer “KAGUYA”

Annals of Science: Darwin’s Surprise: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

The current edition of the New Yorker magazine has up a story about
endogenous retroviruses in the genomes of humans and other species.
Although researchers have known about such non-functional retroviral
‘fossils’ in the human genome for some time, the large amount of recent
genomic data underscores just how pervasive they are, in a compelling
tale that involves humans, their primate cousins, and a variety of
viral invaders. Some researchers are even bringing back non-functional
viral remnants from the dead by fixing their broken genes.

Via Geoffrey West of Santa Fe Institute:

“As animals get bigger, from tiny shrew to huge blue whale, pulse rates
slow down and life spans stretch out longer, conspiring so that the
number of heartbeats during an average stay on Earth tends to be
roughly the same, around a billion. A mouse just uses them up more
quickly than an elephant.”

It has been known since the 1930s that there is a well defined
relationship between the mass of a species and its rate of metabolism.
The metabolic rate of a species is proportional to its mass raised to
the power of three-quarters. This is just one of many scaling
relationships that involve a quarter or three-quarter power and it
holds true all the way from micro-organisms to blue whales. In fact,
West has found that it even applies to the mitochondria inside cells.

Craig Venter says:

Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn’t matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn’t know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It’s not a question of ‘if’, or ‘how’, but ‘when’, and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.

The World Database of
Happiness is an ongoing register of scientific research on the subjective enjoyment of
life. It brings together findings that are scattered throughout many studies and provides
a basis for synthetic work.

Jurvetson on Tadpole:

Frogs have binocular vision to catch flies. Tadpoles have eyes on the sides of their heads, a common difference between predator and prey.

The eyes move halfway through life, and so the visual system in the frog’s brain needs to be rewired. The nerves from half of the tadpole’s eyes must remap to the other half of the brain to properly process the new overlapping field of view.

The ephrin B gene modulates the axon’s growth cone in the optic chiasm (a crossroads junction of sorts) to achieve binocular vision. The same gene serves the same function in mice, but is silent in fish and chicken, which lack binocular vision.

Via Scientific American: The Expert Mind

A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is said to have answered, “but it is always the correct one.”

He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master’s advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once.

Brain-Computer Interface

Who says we aren’t in the future yet?

“Cerebral electric activity is recorded via the electroencephalogram (EEG): electrodes, attached to the scalp, measure the electric signals of the brain. These signals are amplified and transmitted to the computer, which transforms them into device control commands. The crucial requirement for the successful functioning of the BCI is that the electric activity on the scalp surface already reflects motor intentions, i.e., the neural correlate of preparation for hand or foot movements. The BCI detects the motor-related EEG changes and uses this information, for example, to perform a choice between two alternatives: the detection of the preparation to move the left hand leads to the choice of the first, whereas the right hand intention would lead to the second alternative. By this means it is possible to operate devices which are connected to the computer; such a communication can even be realised via the internet.”

Florida Tropical Fruits:

Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body:

How Hypnosis Works:

According to a Yahoo! News story, half of the world’s human population is infected with Toxoplasma, a parasite shown to alter the brain function of rats, inducing them into behavior that benefits the parasite but is suicidal for the rat. So what affect does it have on humans? I was amazed when I read the article.

Slashdot has a nice discussion on the article. Lots of interesting links from the discussion too. Also, Cecil Adams talks about it.

Still not sure that parasites can manipulate the behavior of host organisms? Consider these other cases:

• The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum forces its ant host to attach to the tips of grass blades, the easier to be eaten. The fluke needs to get into the gut of a grazing animal to complete its life cycle.




• The fluke Euhaplorchis californiensis causes fish to shimmy and jump so wading birds will grab them and eat them, for the same reason.




• Hairworms, which live inside grasshoppers, sabotage the grasshopper’s central nervous system, forcing them to jump into pools of water, drowning themselves. Hairworms then swim away from their hapless hosts to continue their life cycle.

California Creeks:

Bed Bugs:

Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite!:

The Life of Louis Braille:

Fingerprint Identification: An Overview:

In 1953, The National Hurricane Center began naming storms, rather than relying on the old system of map coordinates for identification. Originally, all storms were named for women, but, starting in 1979, men’s and women’s names were alternated.

An international committee of the World Meteorological Organization now creates and maintains the annual lists. Names are used on a six-year rotation, meaning the 2005 list will come up again in 2011. Names of especially damaging and deadly storms are retired. From the 2004 list, Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne—four major hurricanes that struck Florida—will not reappear when the list returns in 2010.

On this year’s list, Franklin and Lee replace Floyd and Lenny, which were retired in 1999.

For 2005, Atlantic tropical storms will be named:

Arlene

Bret

Cindy

Dennis

Emily

Franklin

Gert

Harvey

Irene

Jose

Katrina

Lee

Maria

Nate

Ophelia

Philippe

Rita

Stan

Tammy

Vince

Wilma