Jack Kirby Explains The Origin of Mankind

The Eternals created by Jack Kirby & © Marvel Comics

Jack Kirby retold the origin of the Earth and the evolution of Mankind more than once in his career as he introduced his wild new concepts to the comic book reading world. Here’s his take from ‘The Eternals’:

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Jack explains what it's all about:

Read it all in the next issue of, "THE ETERNALS!"

Read Jack's "Origin of Homo mermanus"

The Hardness of Squid Beaks

Abstract: The beak of the Humboldt squid Dosidicus gigas represents one of the hardest and stiffest wholly organic materials known. As it is deeply embedded within the soft buccal envelope, the manner in which impact forces are transmitted between beak and envelope is a matter of considerable scientific interest

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Challengers of the Unknown © DC Comics

Here, we show that the hydrated beak exhibits a large stiffness gradient, spanning two orders of magnitude from the tip to the base. This gradient is correlated with a chemical gradient involving mixtures of chitin, water, and His-rich proteins that contain 3,4-dihydroxyphenyl-L-alanine (dopa) and undergo extensive stabilization by histidyl-dopa cross-link formation.

These findings may serve as a foundation for identifying design principles for attaching mechanically mismatched materials in engineering and biological applications.

The Transition from Stiff to Compliant Materials in Squid Beaks. 2008. Ali Miserez et al. Science 319: 1816-1819.

Living Upside-Down Shapes Spiders for Energy Saving

Art by Frank Cho

Researchers investigating spider species which live, feed, breed and ‘walk’ in an upside-down hanging position have found that their lifestyle drives a shape in spiders that confers high energy efficiency, as in oscillatory pendulums.

The great majority of land animals evolved legs capable of supporting the weight of their whole bodies, enabling them to move around with their heads above their feet. However, many spider species found it more convenient to literally turn their world upside down. They spend most of their lives hanging suspended by their legs, and ‘walk’ by swinging under the influence of gravity.

One of the focal questions was the evolutionary importance of ‘bridging’ – the technique many spiders use to move between remote plants by building their own silk bridges, which they cross by ‘walking’ suspended upside-down from them. Earlier research by other authors indicated that for monkeys this suspensory way of locomotion might be a more energetically efficient way of transportation than ‘regular’ walking on the ground.

“We discovered that spiders that live upside-down have evolved disproportionately longer legs relative to ‘normal’ spiders, which enables them to move faster while bridging than while ‘normally walking’ on the ground. Particularly ‘clumsy’ walkers are larger spiders, because their long legs – otherwise so convenient for bridging – do not allow an easy lifting of their relatively large body mass” says Dr. Jordi Moya-Laraño from Spain, the principal investigator on this project.





These results have implications for the evolution and ecology of spiders. For example, small spiders that hang from their webs should be able to leave their webs in search for prey by walking on the ground, as found in some tiny spiders, something that large spiders will be unable to do efficiently. link

Ref: Morphological Evolution of Spiders Predicted by Pendulum Mechanics. 2008. Jordi Moya-Laraño et al. PLOS One e1841.

New Organic Molecule Discovered in Space

Art by Vaughn Bode and Larry Todd

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn have detected for the first time a molecule closely related to an amino acid: amino acetonitrile. The organic molecule was found in the "Large Molecule Heimat", a giant gas cloud near the galactic centre in the constellation Sagittarius.

The « Large Molecule Heimat » is a very dense, hot gas clump within the star forming region Sagittarius B2. In this source of only 0.3 light-year diameter, which is heated by a deeply embedded newly formed star, most of the interstellar molecules known to date have been found, including the most complex ones such as ethyl alcohol, formaldehyde, formic acid, acetic acid, glycol aldehyde (a basic sugar), and ethylene glycol.

Starting from 1965, more than 140 molecular species have been detected in space, in interstellar clouds as well as in circumstellar envelopes. A large fraction of these molecules is organic or carbon-based. A lot of attention is given to the quest for so-called "bio"-molecules, especially interstellar amino acids. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and therefore key ingredients for the origin of life, have been found in meteorites on Earth, but not yet in interstellar space.

Amino acetonitrile (NH2CH2CN)

The simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), has long been searched for in the interstellar medium but has so far not been unambiguously detected. Since the search for glycine has turned out to be extremely difficult, a chemically related molecule was searched for, amino acetonitrile (NH₂CH₂CN), probably a direct precursor of glycine.

"Finding amino acetonitrile has greatly extended our insight into the chemistry of dense, hot star-forming regions. I am sure we will be able to identify in the future many new, even more complex organic molecules in the interstellar gas. We already have several candidates!" says Karl Menten, director at the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. link

Just as long as they don't find, "The Green Slime"....!

Fear that Freezes the Blood in Your Veins

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"The blood froze in my veins" or "My blood curdled" – these common figures of speech can be taken literally, according to the latest studies. For it turns out that intense fear and panic attacks can really make our blood clot and increase the risk of thrombosis or heart attack.

Earlier studies showed that stress and anxiety can influence coagulation.A Bonn-based research team around Franziska Geiser (from the Clinic and Policlinic for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy) and Ursula Harbrecht (from the Institute of Experimental Haematology and Transfusion Medicine) have been the first to conduct a very careful examination of coagulation in patients with anxiety disorders.

In the coagulation system two mechanisms operate that are indispensable to life and normally work in opposite directions, each counterbalancing the other. First, coagulation involves a thickening of the blood so that a plug can form and prevent excessive bleeding from damaged vessels. Second, there is "fibrinolysis", a process that keeps the blood fluid and breaks down clots. In the case of the anxiety-disorder patients, however, the researchers observed through close analysis of the blood an activation of coagulation accompanied by an inhibition of fibrinolysis. For these types of patients, the coagulation system goes out of balance as the coagulation tendency rises – possibly with dangerous consequences. In extreme cases the imbalance can lead to blockage of a coronary artery.

The increased coagulation tendency could, says Franziska Geiser, be the "missing link" that explains why anxiety patients have a statistically higher risk of dying from heart disease by a factor of 3 or 4. link

Sterankos' Batman

The Jam & Batman's Theme Song:

Neanderthals The Result of Genetic Drift

New research adds to the evidence that chance, rather than natural selection, best explains why the skulls of modern humans and ancient Neanderthals evolved differently. The findings may alter how anthropologists think about human evolution.

The study builds on findings from a study he and his colleagues published last year in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which the team compared cranial measurements of 2,524 modern human skulls and 20 Neanderthal specimens. The researchers concluded that random genetic change, or genetic drift, most likely account for the cranial differences.



In their new study, Weaver and his colleagues crunched their fossil data using sophisticated mathematical models -- and calculated that Neanderthals and modern humans split about 370,000 years ago. The estimate is very close to estimates derived by other researchers who have dated the split based on clues from ancient Neanderthal and modern-day human DNA sequences.



The close correlation of the two estimates -- one based on studying bones, one based on studying genes -- demonstrates that the fossil record and analyses of DNA sequences give a consistent picture of human evolution during this time period.



"A take-home message may be that we should reconsider the idea that all morphological (physical) changes are due to natural selection, and instead consider that some of them may be due to genetic drift," Weaver said. "This may have interesting implications for our understanding of human evolution." link

Close correspondence between quantitative-and molecular-genetic divergence times for Neandertals and modern humans. 2008. T. D. Weaver et al. PNAS, published on-line March 17, 2008.

Lobby cards from, "Creatures That Time Forgot".

Premiered This Day (1968): Barbarella

From the Jean-Claude Forest Home Page:

Jean-Claude Forest created the character of Barbarella for V-Magazine in 1962, at the request of its editor, Georges H. Gallet, who was already familiar with Forest's work as France's premier science fiction cover artist and had commissioned an illustrated version of Catherine L. Moore's classic story Shambleau in 1955.

Barbarella was published in book for by Eric Losfeld's publishing company Le Terrain Vague in 1964, became an immediate runaway bestseller and was soon translated in a dozen countries, including by Grove Press in the United States. Not long after, it was adapted into a 1968 motion picture, produced by Dino de Laurentiis, directed by Roger Vadim, and starring Jane Fonda, for which Forest acted as design consultant.

A Forest Barbarella design from the abandoned Nelvana animation project:

Dave Stevens (1955-2008)

Dave Stevens passed away today. Best known for creating and illustrating "The Rocketeer", Dave was a exquisite artist who specialized in 'good girl' art.

Marc Evanier has some nice words about him HERE.

All images from The Grand Comic Book Database.

The Search for A Primordial Dimension

Virgil Finley from goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com

The universe as we currently know it is made up of three dimensions of space and one of time, but researchers are exploring the possibility of an extra dimension.

“The idea we’re exploring is that the universe has an imperceptibly small dimension (about one billionth of a nanometer) in addition to the four that we know currently,” Kavic said. “This extra dimension would be curled up, in a state similar to that of the entire universe at the time of the Big Bang.”

The group is looking for small primordial black holes that, when they explode, may produce a radio pulse that could be detected here on Earth. These black holes are called primordial because they were created a fraction of a second after the beginning of the universe.

A Virginia Tech group is preparing to set up an Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array radio telescope in Montgomery County to search the sky for these radio pulses from explosions up to 300 light years away. They have a similar telescope in southwestern North Carolina that has been looking for events for several months. link

Diffractive Hygrochromic Effect of the Strongest Creature in the World!

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The Hercules Beetle is remarkable, not only for its strength, able to carry up to 850 times its own weight, the protective outgrowth of the insects’ exoskeleton, also changes from green to black as its surrounding atmosphere gets more humid.

Researchers from the University of Namur in Belgium have used the latest imaging techniques to study the shell of the beetle - a scanning electronic microscope to determine the structure responsible for the colour and a spectrophotometer to analyze how the light interacts with this structure.

The light interferes with the structure to produce the green colour of the shell. When water penetrates through the widely-open porous layers, it destroys the interferences phenomenon leading to a black colouration.

As to why the beetle changes colour, question marks also remain. Some have suggested that it is to do with protection – it becomes more humid at night and is therefore good for cover to turn black. Others have suggested that it is to do with warmth absorption at night. Questions remain.

Marie Rassart, who did the research at the University of Namur, said, “The sort of structural behaviour displayed by the Hercules Beetle could be an important property for ‘intelligent’ materials’. Such materials could be put to work as humidity sensors. This could be useful for example in food processing plants to monitor the moisture level.” link

Diffractive hygrochromic effect in the cuticle of the hercules beetle Dynastes Hercules. 2008. M Rassart et al 2008 New Journal of Physics: (14pp).

Steranko Interviews Conan The Barbarian

Story & Art © Steranko
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From an old issue of Jim Steranko's Mediascene comes this 'interview' with Conan.

Discovered This Day: The Former Planet Pluto

In 1930, the planet Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, the only planet to be found by an American astronomer, after three decades of work at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Before Tombaugh was born, Percival Lowell had searched unsuccessfully for Pluto, a ninth planet whose gravity would explain deviations in the positions of Uranus and Neptune. In his will he decreed that the hunt should continue. That meant using a telescope to photograph tiny pieces of the sky by night, then and sifting through the millions of star images by day for one dim dot that moved. When Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher hired him, a Kansas farmboy, Clyde Tombaugh threw himself into the search in Apr 1929. From Today In Science History.

The above picture captures the true colors of Pluto as well as the highest surface resolution so far recovered. Although no spacecraft has yet visited this distant world, the New Horizons spacecraft launched early this year is expected to reach Pluto in 2015. The above map was created by tracking brightness changes from Earth of Pluto during times when it was being partially eclipsed by its moon Charon. Pluto's brown color is thought dominated by frozen methane deposits metamorphosed by faint but energetic sunlight. The dark band below Pluto's equator is seen to have rather complex coloring, however, indicating that some unknown mechanisms may have affected Pluto's surface. Info from HERE

More info HERE.

How Snakes Hear

It is often believed that snakes cannot hear. This presumption is fed by the fact that snakes lack an outer ear and that scientific evidence of snakes responding to sound is scarce. Snakes do, however, possess an inner ear with a functional cochlea.

Batman and Copperhead © DC Comics

Now scientists have evidence that snakes use this structure to detect minute vibrations of the sand surface that are caused by prey moving. Their ears are sensitive enough to not only “hear” the prey approaching, but also to allow the brain to localize the direction it is coming from.

Any disturbance at a sandy surface leads to vibration waves that radiate away from the source along the surface. A snake can detect these small ripples and if it rests its head on the ground, the two sides of the lower jaw are brought into vibration by the incoming wave. These vibrations are then transmitted directly into the inner ear by means of a chain of bones attached to the lower jaw. This process is comparable to the transmission of auditory signals by the ossicles in the human middle ear. The snake thus literally hears surface vibrations.

The extraordinary flexibility of the lower jaw of snakes has evolved because being able to swallow very large meals is a big advantage if food is in short supply and competition fierce. Moreover, the separation of the sides of the lower jaw also allowed this very interesting form of hearing to develop. press release

Auditory Localization of Ground-Borne Vibrations in Snakes. 2008. P. Friedel et al. Physical Review Letters, 100, 048701.

Galaxy NGC 11312: Cosmic Fossil

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of the galaxy NGC 1132 which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil – the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant but fuzzy giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies.

Image:NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.

The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132, seen in this latest image from Hubble, belongs to a category of galaxies called giant ellipticals. NGC 1132, together with the small dwarf galaxies surrounding it, are dubbed a “fossil group” as they are most likely the remains of a group of galaxies that merged together in the recent past.

The origin of fossil group systems remains a puzzle. The most likely explanation is that they are the end-products of a cosmic feeding frenzy in which a large cannibal galaxy devours all of its neighbours. A less likely explanation is that they may be very rare objects that formed in a region or period of time where the growth of moderate-sized galaxies was somehow suppressed, and only one large galaxy formed.

Many galaxies reside in groups that are gravitationally bound together, including our own Milky Way, which is part of the Local Group. Sometimes gravity makes galaxies collide and eventually merge into one single galaxy. There is strong evidence that the Milky Way is one such cannibal that has snacked on numerous smaller galaxies during its lifetime, inheriting their stars in the process. Scientists are keenly studying the environment surrounding galaxies such as NGC 1132 using space telescopes like Hubble, and they try to trace the history of the formation these galaxies by analysing their properties.


NGC 1132 is located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. press release

Mummy Lice Migrate Arounrd The World

Lice from 1,000-year-old mummies in Peru may unravel important clues about a different sort of passage: the migration patterns of America’s earliest humans.

DNA sequencing found the strain of lice to be genetically the same as the form of body lice that spawns several deadly diseases, including typhus, which was blamed for the loss of Napoleon’s grand army and millions of other soldiers, he said.

The discovery of these parasites on 11th-century Peruvian mummies proves they were infesting the native Americans nearly 500 years before Europeans arrived, Reed said.

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“This definitely goes against the grain of conventional thought that all diseases were transmitted from the Old World to the New World at the time of Columbus,” he said.

It came as a surprise to Reed and his research team that the type of lice on the mummies was of the same genetic type as those found as far away as the highlands of Papua, New Guinea, instead of the form of head lice that is widespread in the Western Hemisphere, Reed said. This latter version, the bane of many school children, accounts for more than half the cases of lice that appear in the United States, Canada and Central America, he said. ” link

Molecular Identification of Lice from Pre‐Columbian Mummies. 2008. Didier Raoult et al. Journal of Infectious Diseases electronically published 6 February 2008.

Quantum Teleportation and Memory in Tandem Achieved

Brainiac 5 & Superman © DC Comics

In research that may be a key step toward real-life quantum communication—the transmission of information using atoms, photons, or other quantum objects—researchers created an experiment in which a quantum bit of information is transported across a distance of seven meters and briefly stored in memory. This is the first time that both quantum memory and teleportation, as the information transfer is known, have been demonstrated in a single experiment.

In the present research an unknown quantum state of a photonic qubit is transferred into quantum memory via teleportation and is stored by two clusters of rubidium atoms. Each cluster contains approximately one million atoms, collected by a magneto-optical trap. The teleported photonic qubit can be stored in memory and read out up to eight microseconds (millionths of a second) before the state is lost.

This setup does have some serious problems. The quantum memory duration is very short and the probability that the photon will be teleported is low. Therefore, the researchers say that “significant improvements” need to be made before the scheme could be used in practical applications. link

Memory-built-in quantum teleportation with photonic and atomic qubits. 2008. Yu-Ao Chen, et al. Nature Physics advance online publication, 20 January 2008.

The top-left diagram shows the structure and the initial populations of atomic levels for the two ensembles. At Bob's site, the anti-Stokes fields emitted from U and D are collected and combined at PBS1, selecting perpendicular polarizations. Then the photon travels 7 m through the fibres to Alice's site to overlap with the initial unknown photon on a beam splitter (BS) to carry out the BSM. The results of the BSM are sent to Bob through a classical channel. Bob then carries out the verification of the teleported state in the U and D ensembles by converting the atomic excitation to a photonic state. If the state | + is registered, Bob directly carries out a polarization analysis on the converted photon to measure the teleportation fidelity. On the other hand, if the state | - is detected, the converted photon is sent through a half-wave plate via the first-order diffraction of an AOM (not shown). The half-wave plate is set at 0° serving as the unitary transformation of . Then the photon is sent through the polarization analyser to obtain the teleportation fidelity.

NASA to Beam Beatles' 'Across the Universe' Into Space

For the first time ever, NASA will beam a song -- The Beatles' "Across the Universe" -- directly into deep space at 7 p.m. EST on Feb. 4.

The transmission over NASA's Deep Space Network will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding and the group's beginnings. Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe.

The transmission is being aimed at the North Star, Polaris, which is located 431 light years away from Earth. The song will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney expressed excitement that the tune, which was principally written by fellow Beatle John Lennon, was being beamed into the cosmos.

"Amazing! Well done, NASA!" McCartney said in a message to the space agency. "Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul." link

Finding the Door to a Parallel Universe

If there were a portal linking us to a parallel universe or some other region of space, how would we spot it? One suggestion is that it will give itself away by the curious way it bends light.

The existence of wormholes linking different regions of space was suggested in 1916 by the Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm as a possible solution to equations of general relativity, which Einstein had published that year. They have since become accepted as a natural consequence of general relativity, which predicts that matter entering one end of a wormhole would instantly emerge somewhere else, so long as the wormhole is somehow propped open.

Though no direct evidence for wormholes has been observed, this could be because they are disguised as black holes. Now Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, is suggesting a possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart. His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called “phantom matter”, which has been proposed to explain how wormholes might stay open. Phantom matter has negative energy and negative mass, so it creates a repulsive effect that prevents the wormhole closing.

According to Shatskiy’s calculations, the way phantom matter deflects light would give the wormhole a signature that astronomers could look out for. The gravity of an object with a positive mass, such as an ordinary black hole, focuses light rays passing close to it as if it were a giant concave lens – an effect known as gravitational lensing. Phantom matter’s negative mass would have the opposite gravitational lensing effect to normal matter, making any light passing through the wormhole from another universe or point in space-time diverge, and emerge from it as a bright ring. Meanwhile, any stars behind it would shine through the middle. Shatskiy suggests that his idea might offer a way for future space-based observatories such as Russia’s planned Millimetron Project to look for wormholes at the centre of large galaxies.

link From NEW SCIENTIST MAGAZINE ISSUE: 2 FEB 2008

Krupp Artist Self-Portrait Buttons

Some of the goodies that Denis Kitchen was selling 30+ years ago!




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