I don't normally go for techno...
Nope, still not back, but at least I'm trying to give y'all some love in the meantime.
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Or, the thoughts of several frustrated intellectuals on Sociology, Gaming, Science, Politics, Science Fiction, Religion, and whatever the hell else strikes their fancy. There is absolutely no reason why you should read this blog. None. Seriously. Go hit your back button. It's up in the upper left-hand corner of your browser... it says "Back." Don't say we didn't warn you.
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The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful "amens." It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.
A New Hampshire couple has pulled their son out of his local high school after the teen was assigned a book that refers to Jesus Christ as a "wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist."
Aimee Taylor says her oldest son, 16-year-old Jordan Henderson, was required to read "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," this fall for Bedford High School's personal finance class.
The book is a first-person account of author Barbara Ehrenreich's attempts to make ends meet while working minimum wage jobs in Florida, Maine and Minnesota.
...
Taylor asked her son to show her what was so bad about the book and after he pointed out a few controversial excerpts she decided to read it in full.
"I finished the book that night, I could not put it down because I was just mortified by the take on this book as well as the language, and the Jesus Christian bashing was unbelievable to me, and that it was in our school was just amazing to me," she said.
...
Assistant Superintendent Chip McGee told the Union Leader that the district still plans to evaluate the personal finance class to see if "Nickel and Dimed" can be replaced with a less controversial book and will require teachers to notify parents from now on before assigning the book and offer an alternative should they object.
But Taylor says that's not enough.
"We've eliminated Christmas, we've eliminated all these things because we don't want to step on anyone's toes but here we're going to hand out this book? … This is anti-God, anti-religion, it's racial, I mean it crosses a wide spectrum of very touchy and very insulting issues to most human beings and I think that even with a parental consent it's not enough. They need to boot that book out of there," Taylor said.
The Taylors, who have since begun home schooling their son at his request, plan to attend the Dec. 13 Bedford School Board meeting to ask that the book be yanked entirely so taxpayers are no longer forced to pay for it. They have five other children, including a freshman at Bedford High School.
Labels: Drek is Amazed, economics, news, religion, sociology, teaching
On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.
...
As soon as Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. "I was outraged at how bad the science was," she told me.
Redfield blogged a scathing attack on Saturday. Over the weekend, a few other scientists took to the Internet as well. Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case. "It would be really cool if such a bug existed," said San Diego State University's Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, "none of the arguments are very convincing on their own." That was about as positive as the critics could get. "This paper should not have been published," said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.
None of the scientists I spoke to ruled out the possibility that such weird bacteria might exist. Indeed, some of them were co-authors of a 2007 report for the National Academies of Sciences on alien life that called for research into, among other things, arsenic-based biology. But almost to a person, they felt that the NASA team had failed to take some basic precautions to avoid misleading results.
"This Paper Should Not Have Been Published": NASA claims new discovery of arsenic-based life proves the possibility of life on other planets. Others are so critical that they say that the paper should not have been published. The authors are distributing press releases and doing friendly interviews, but refusing to address any of the criticisms because they say that would be inappropriate. There is a lot of gullibility for anything promoting extraterrestrial life.
Labels: conservapedia, Drek is Amused, news, science, space
Madison County Superior Court 2 Commissioner George G. Pancol told The Herald Bulletin that his decision was based on the children's best interest and that Indiana law requires courts to determine whether divorced parents can agree on education, religious upbringing and other issues.
"The case law requires me to make a decision whether or not the parties can communicate effectively about these matters and others concerning their children," he said. "I have never rendered a decision concerning custody on the basis of one of the parents' religious beliefs."
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Perhaps it was those restrictions that made Hedy an inventor, or perhaps it was just her intellectual curiosity. Either way, Hedy was inventing things, big and small, right up until she died. There were many utilitarian, small inventions, like a box of tissues that had its own pocket to store used tissues in. And then there was the showstopper: With musician George Antheil, she patented the 'secret communication system' in 1942. The frequency hopping, spread-spectrum invention allowed its users to manipulate radio frequencies. The earliest one used a piano roll to guide the hopping between frequencies. In World War II, it was used to keep torpedoes from being detected or manipulated by enemy forces.
Decades later on, the wide spectrum aspect of the invention formed the basis for the communications boom. Cell phones, Wi-Fi, the modern world as we know it, it all flowed from the original patent that Hedy came up with to fight Nazis.
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Hello again all. Just a quick update with my reaction to what today's NASA press conference actually said. Due to my sometimes-exceptionally-poor time management skills, I didn't get to see the press conference myself, but I've been following the news coverage, and I skimmed the Science paper announcing the results.
To summarize: the researchers collected bacteria from mud at the bottom of Mono Lake and brought them into the lab. They put them into petri dishes containing arsenic but no phosphorous, then transferred the microbes to new petri dishes until the phosphorous level was down to nearly zero. The bacteria thrived. When the researchers looked at important biological molecules in the bacteria (DNA and ATP), they saw that where you would normally find phosphorous, there was arsenic. This is the first time anyone has found an organism where one of the six major biological elements ("CHNOPS") were swapped out for another element. It shows that the possibilities for life are not as narrow as we previously thought.
Professional science writers have explained it more clearly than I just did. Here are a few examples from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, Wired (with an awesome analogy in the lede), LiveScience, and, of course, Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy (which is actually not bad).
Places you might not think to look for science articles, which shows how widely-covered this result include: Fox News, and hyperbolic as usual, Al-Jazeera (with video), and The Sun.
My quick-hit reactions:
1a) Of the possibilities I mentioned, #2 comes closest. It's different than I expected, and slightly less impressive. I had expected them to announce the discovery of life that incorporates arsenic in its DNA/RNA/ATP in the wild. Instead, it was a lab-based discovery.
1b) If I'm understanding correctly, the arsenic-incorporating bacteria evolved from the wild bacteria through artificial selection introduced by the researchers reducing the amount of phosphorous in their environment and increasing the amount of arsenic. Evolution = awesome.
1c) But that evolution likely would have never happened without the "head start" of the bacteria living in an arsenic-rich environment in Mono Lake.
2a) It's not accurate to say this is "arsenic-based life." Rather, it's life that looks biochemically just like the rest of life on Earth, just with most of the phosphorous atoms switched out for arsenic.
2b) Therefore, my possibility #3 is not true. These bacteria are a branch of the same tree of life as everything else is, and have already been placed into a Family in the Linnean classification system. We're still waiting for a genus-species name for them (as in Canis familiaris or Alces alces). May I suggest Horta californius?
3a) All that said, this is the closest example yet to "life as we don't know it." It's a fairly small substitution from the rest of life, but the shift from "life can only exist if it contains mostly the CHNOPS elements" to "hey, that could totally be CHNOAsS instead" is a profound one. (Although CHNOAsS would be a particularly unfortunate acronym.) If As can substitute for P, what else could be switched out?
3b) ...although, it should be noted that the bacteria still prefer "eating" phosphorous to eating arsenic. If you put phosphorous in the petri dish, they'll gobble up all the phosphorous and switch to arsenic only when they have to.
4) Switching carbon for silicon would be harder, because carbon and silicon are chemically more different than arsenic and phosphorous.
5) Picking up on one of the things a friend of mine wrote, an obvious implication is that these bacteria would be a great way to clean up arsenic spills. Consider that arsenic is a deadly poison to us, but is actually food to the bacteria. It's as if some actual intelligent aliens from another planet were looking for a species to clean up a highly toxic pecan pie spill. I'd totally volunteer for that job.
6a) As for the astrobiology implications, another of my buddies had another very insightful comment. He says: I was just telling [someone] something the other night actually, my long-time complaint about "what's this 'planets that can support life' business anyway? Life evolves to the environment, not the other way around." And here we are!
6b) That's obvious when you think about it, and it suggests that life could be even more common in the universe than we ever thought.
Science may make the research paper available to the public, outside their subscription firewall, tomorrow. There are actually two papers, both short. One is the full research report, written by the team and intended for biochemists. The other is a more journalistic article, written by a science writer for all practicing scientists, including non-biologists.
Lastly, I should have mentioned earlier, please forward this or my previous E-mail to any family, friends, co-workers, drinking buddies, or frenemies that you think might be interested. The more people hear about cool science, the better.
Actually, someone's thoughtful forwarding of yesterday's E-mail led to a friend-of-a-friend E-mailing me, which means I got to meet a cool person also. They also told me that their kidneys were stolen by a man with a hook for a hand that called in sick to work on 9/11. (That last part is a joke - see the third paragraph of this article).
So that turned into another very long, very geeky E-mail. Hope you enjoyed reading it at least 1/42 as much as I enjoyed writing it. :)
-Drek's awesome friend, whose DNA still contains boring old phosphorous
Labels: biology, Drek is Amazed, evolution, science, space
Hi friends-interested-in-space,
I don't normally send mass E-mails, but something very cool is happening tomorrow (Wednesday) that I wanted to share with all of you. NASA is holding a press conference at 2 PM Thursday to announce something that, in their words, "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life."
The press conference will be airing live on NASA TV here.
If you're able to multitask at work, this could be a cool thing to watch. If not, it should be all over the science news by Thursday evening.
Internet rumors that they are announcing the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system are sadly not true. But NASA has announced the lineup of scientists speaking at the press conference, and some Google sleuthing by me and other space geeks suggests what the discovery will be. Most likely, scientists studying a lake in the California desert have discovered a type of bacteria that uses arsenic instead of phosphorous in its biochemistry. More information on the research is available via the London Times, as well as via a paper by one of the scientists on the panel, Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), describing the context of the research. This will give all the technical details if you have a background in biochemistry.
Oh, and here is the lake.
So that is the context, but there is still some suspense. The suspense is - how exactly does this bacteria use arsenic? And what does this mean for the search for extraterrestrial life? There are three possibilities, ranging from "hey, that's really cool" to "OMG, that totally revolutionizes our understanding of life."
Remember that arsenic and phosphorous are chemically very similar, but phosphorous is a key ingredient of every cell in the body, and arsenic is a deadly poison.* This leads to the three possibilities:
1) These bacteria are similar to, and evolved from, other bacteria; but have evolved the ability to use arsenic to keep themselves alive. This would merit a "hey, that's really cool," because something that's a deadly poison to everything else on Earth would be food to these creatures. But that's not the really exciting possibility...
2) It's also possible that, rather than just metabolizing arsenic, these bacteria are in a real sense made of arsenic. Meaning that, in molecules where other organisms (from bacteria to humans) have phosphorous, these bacteria would have arsenic.*** That would make them different from every other species on the planet.
3) If they do announce possibility (2), there could be something even more exciting in store. Evolution can produce a wide variety of adaptations, but it's hard to imagine evolution making such a basic structural change through natural selection based on mutations. That means that these bacteria could have formed from the inorganic primordial ooze independently from everything else on the planet - a second "creation event," if you like. Instead of being our evolutionary "cousins," they would be strangers. But even if this is objectively true, how would we prove it?
So what does this mean for astrobiology, the search for extraterrestrial life?
If they announce that they have discovered possibilities (2) or (3), it has major implications. We've looked all over the solar system for life, but we've always been looking for "life as we know it." These humble bacteria could be the first example of "life as we don't know it." There could be lots of possible ways to make life work. Non-DNA-based life? Life that doesn't have cells? The sky's the limit. Here is a very readable paper outlining the possibilities, but these are just the possibilities we can imagine.
The press conference is intended to support a paper in the journal Science, coming out tomorrow. Lastly. for those of you who are science fiction fans, I realized that the Star Trek original series episode "Devil in the Dark" [SPOILER ALERT] features the "Horta," an intelligent, misunderstood creature in which molecules in Earth-based life that contain carbon instead contain silicon, the element below carbon in the periodic table. If tomorrow we hear about possibility (2), then it's the same principle but with arsenic instead of phosphorous. [END SPOILER ALERT]
So, in summary, this is way cool. Thanks for reading as I geek out on it. I'll be watching tomorrow if I'm not in meetings, and you should too. If you do, send me a Gmail or Facebook chat.
Enjoy!
-Drek's Awesome Friend
Labels: Drek is Amazed, evolution, NASA, news, space
Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.
That startling notion, proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia, goes against the standard theory of cosmology known as inflation.
The researchers base their findings on circular patterns they discovered in the cosmic microwave background, the ubiquitous microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The circular features indicate that the cosmos itself circles through epochs of endings and beginnings, Penrose and Gurzadyan assert. The researchers describe their controversial findings in an article posted at arXiv.org on November 17.
The circular features are regions where tiny temperature variations in the otherwise uniform microwave background are smaller than average. Those features, Penrose said, cannot be explained by the highly successful inflation theory, which posits that the infant cosmos underwent an enormous growth spurt, ballooning from something on the scale of an atom to the size of a grapefruit during the universe’s first tiny fraction of a second. Inflation would either erase such patterns or could not easily generate them.
Labels: astronomy, Drek is Amazed, news, physics