Metal Men Facts #7

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From Metal Men #7, © DC Comics

1933: 1st Full-Length Animated Film Premieres

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In 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney's first full-length (83 minutes), animated film opened in Los Angeles, California. Using the story adapted from Brothers Grimms' Fairy Tales, it was the first commercially successful film of its kind.

Taking two years and $1.5 million to create, it was released for its premiere during Christmas of 1937. Disney had to mortgage his house to pay for the film's production. This followed within a span of just 12 years since the first black and white talking Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie (1928). link

From 1933, The Fleischer Bros. present Betty Boop's "Snow White" featuring Cab Calloway:

Jump-Starting Evolution

With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology's most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

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RNA, the single-stranded precursor to DNA, normally expands one nucleic base at a time, growing sequentially like a linked chain. The problem is that in the primordial world RNA molecules didn't have enzymes to catalyze this reaction, and while RNA growth can proceed naturally, the rate would be so slow the RNA could never get more than a few pieces long.

New research found that under favorable conditions (acidic environment and temperature lower than 70 C), pieces ranging from 10-24 in length could naturally fuse into larger fragments, generally within 14 hours.

The RNA fragments came together as double-stranded structures then joined at the ends. The fragments did not have to be the same size, but the efficiency of the reactions was dependent on fragment size (larger is better, though efficiency drops again after reaching around 100) and the similarity of the fragment sequences.

Thor © Marvel Comics

The researchers note that this spontaneous fusing, or ligation, would a simple way for RNA to overcome initial barriers to growth and reach a biologically important size; at around 100 bases long, RNA molecules can begin to fold into functional, 3D shapes. press release

Ref: Nonenzymatic RNA Ligation in Water. 2008. S. Pino, et al. J. Biol. Chem. 283: 36494-36503

Why Viking Lander/Mars? by Ray Bradbury

Art © Alex Nino


© Ray Bradbury
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Originally presented in Star*Reach #6 (1976). Bradbury had read the then new poem at the 1976 San Diego Comic Con a week after the landing of Viking I on Mars. Shortly thereafter Alex Nino agreed to illustrate the poem for publisher Mike Friedrich.

Martian Carbonates Suggest Past Life on Mars

A research team has found evidence of a long-sought carbonates that shows Mars was home to a variety of watery environments, including regional pockets of neutral or alkaline water.

Recent observations from the Mars Phoenix lander has pointed to a period when clay-rich minerals were formed by water, followed by a drier time, when salt-rich, acidic water affected much of the planet. The presence of carbonates indicates that Mars had neutral to alkaline waters when the minerals formed in the midlatitude region more than 3.6 billion years ago.

“Primitive life would have liked it,” said Bethany Ehlmann, “It’s not too hot or too cold. It’s not too acidic. It's a ‘just right’ place.’

The carbonates showed up in the most detail in two-dozen images beamed back by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, an instrument aboard the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Scientists found the mineral near a trough system called Nili Fossae, which is 667 km long, at the edge of the Isidis impact basin. Carbonates were seen in a variety of terrains, including the sides of eroded mesas, sedimentary rocks within Jezero crater and rocks exposed on the sides of valleys in the crater’s watershed. The researchers also found traces of carbonates in Terra Tyrrhena and in Libya Montes.

The carbonates may have been formed by slightly heated groundwater percolating through fractures in olivine-rich rocks. Or, they may have been formed at the surface when olivine-rich rocks were exposed and altered by running water. Yet another theory is the carbonates precipitated in small, shallow lakes. Either way, such environments would have boded well for primitive life forms to emerge.

“We know there’s been water all over the place, but how frequently have the conditions been hospitable for life?” Mustard said. “We can say pretty confidently that when water was present in the places we looked at, it would have been a happy, pleasant environment for life.” press release

Ref: Orbital Identification of Carbonate-Bearing Rocks on Mars. 2008. Bethany L. Ehlmann, et al. Science 322: 1828 - 1832

Dragonella by Wally Wood

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Heroes, Inc. (Presents Cannon) was self published by Wally Wood in 1969. Working with Steve Ditko and Ralph Reese, Wood produced three new strips for the book including the first appearance of “Cannon”. This is Dragonella’s first and only adventure. It’s notable for letting Wally indulge in some medieval scenery including a riff on Prince Valiant.

Dragonella by Ron Whyte & Wally Wood, 1969. © estate of Wally Wood

The Evolution of Superstition

Both Images from The Horror of It All

Abstract: Superstitious behaviours, which arise through the incorrect assignment of cause and effect, receive considerable attention in psychology and popular culture. Perhaps owing to their seeming irrationality, however, they receive little attention in evolutionary biology.

Here we develop a simple model to define the condition under which natural selection will favour assigning causality between two events. This leads to an intuitive inequality—akin to an amalgam of Hamilton's rule and Pascal's wager—-that shows that natural selection can favour strategies that lead to frequent errors in assessment as long as the occasional correct response carries a large fitness benefit.

It follows that incorrect responses are the most common when the probability that two events are really associated is low to moderate: very strong associations are rarely incorrect, while natural selection will rarely favour making very weak associations.

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Extending the model to include multiple events identifies conditions under which natural selection can favour associating events that are never causally related. Specifically, limitations on assigning causal probabilities to pairs of events can favour strategies that lump non-causal associations with causal ones.

We conclude that behaviours which are, or appear, superstitious are an inevitable feature of adaptive behaviour in all organisms, including ourselves.

Article: The evolution of superstitious and superstition-like behaviour.2008. K. Foster and H. Kokko. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276: 1654.