Gahan Wilson's Strange Beliefs of Children

© Gahan Wilson
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Barren Seafloor Teeming With Microbial Life

Once considered a barren plain with the odd hydrothermal vent, the seafloor appears to be teeming with microbial life.

“A 60,000 kilometer seam of basalt is exposed along the mid-ocean ridge spreading system, representing potentially the largest surface area for microbes to colonize on Earth,” said USC geomicrobiologist Katrina Edwards.

The scientists found higher microbial diversity on the rocks compared with other vibrant systems, such as those found at hydrothermal vents. Even compared with the microbial diversity of farm soil—viewed by many as the richest—diversity on the basalt is statistically equivalent.

These findings raise the question of where these bacteria find their energy.

With evidence that the oceanic crust supports more bacteria compared with overlying water, the scientists hypothesized that reactions with the rocks themselves might offer fuel for life. Back in the lab, they calculated how much biomass could theoretically be supported by chemical reactions with the basalt. “It was completely consistent,” Edwards said.

This lends support to the idea that bacteria survive on energy from the crust, a process that could affect our knowledge about the deep-sea carbon cycle and even evolution.

For example, many scientists believe that shallow water, not deep water, cradled the planet’s first life. They reason that the dark carbon-poor depths appear to offer little energy, and rich environments like hydrothermal vents are relatively sparse.

But the newfound abundance of seafloor microbes makes it theoretically possible that early life thrived—and maybe even began—on the seafloor. “Some might even favor the deep ocean for the emergence of life since it was a bastion of stability compared with the surface, which was constantly being blasted by comets and other objects,” Edwards suggested. link

Abundance and diversity of microbial life in ocean crust. 2008. Cara M. Santelli, et al. Nature 453: 653-656.

Today In History: Patent for “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”

In 1987, a patent for "keeping a head alive" was issued to Chet Fleming (U.S. No. 4,666,425). A cabinet provides physical and biochemical support for an animal's head severed from its body.

Oxygenated blood and nutrients are circulated by means of tubes connected to arteries and veins that emerge from the neck. A series of processing components removes carbon dioxide and add oxygen to the blood. If desired, waste products and other metabolites may be removed from the blood, and nutrients, therapeutic or experimental drugs, anti-coagulants, and other substances may be added to the blood.

After being thoroughly tested on research animals, the patent suggests it might also be used on humans suffering from various terminal illnesses. From Today In Science History.

The Cadmus Seed

From Shocking Tales Digest Magazine #1, October, 1981, comes a cautionary tale of genetic cloning by Jack Kirby. Not sure where it was originally published.

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XMM-Newton Discovers Part of Missing Universe

ESA’s orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has been used by a team of international astronomers to uncover part of the missing matter in the universe.

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10 years ago, scientists predicted that about half of the missing ‘ordinary’ or normal matter made of atoms exists in the form of low-density gas, filling vast spaces between galaxies.

All the matter in the universe is distributed in a web-like structure. At dense nodes of the cosmic web are clusters of galaxies, the largest objects in the universe. Astronomers suspected that the low-density gas permeates the filaments of the web.

The low density of the gas hampered many attempts to detect it in the past. With XMM-Newton’s high sensitivity, astronomers have discovered its hottest parts. The discovery will help them understand the evolution of the cosmic web.

Only about 5% of our universe is made of normal matter as we know it, consisting of protons and neutrons, or baryons, which along with electrons, form the building blocks of ordinary matter. The rest of our universe is composed of elusive dark matter (23%) and dark energy (72%).

Small as the percentage might be, half of the ordinary baryonic matter is unaccounted for. All the stars, galaxies and gas observable in the universe account for less than a half of all the baryons that should be around.

Astronomers using XMM-Newton were observing a pair of galaxy clusters, Abell 222 and Abell 223, situated at a distance of 2300 million light-years from Earth, when the images and spectra of the system revealed a bridge of hot gas connecting the clusters.

From Physorg News.

The Science Behind Iron Man

Celeste Biever and Rowan Hooper at New Scientist discuss the real world science featured in the new (Ma8, 2008) movie:

1. Superhero skin – An ‘Iron Man’ suit does not exist but portions of a wearable exoskeleton does.

2. Flying machines - SoloTrek was a flying exoskeleton that was apparently capable of travelling more than 200 kilometres. (The project shut down after a crash in 2002.) UK inventor and pilot Stuart Ross reckons his Rocketbelt packs enough power to lift him 2500 metres in the air and plans to test fly the latest model this year.

3. Friendly bots - In the movie, Stark has a friendly robot to help him build his armour. It looks too clever to be true, but in fact it is highly reminiscent of AUR. Built last year by MIT scientists, AUR is a robotic desk lamp that calculates where you are looking and moves its flexible neck to shine light on that spot.

4. Cunning computing – 'Pepper' Potts real-time translation program.

READ THE SECRET ORIGINS OF IRON MAN AT DIAL B FOR BLOG!:

Northern Lights Glimmer With Unexpected Trait

An international team of scientists has detected that some of the glow of Earth’s aurora is polarized, an unexpected state for such emissions. Measurements of this newfound polarization in the Northern Lights may provide scientists with fresh insights into the composition of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the configuration of its magnetic field, and the energies of particles from the Sun, the researchers say.

If observed on other planets, the phenomenon might also give clues to the shape of the Sun’s magnetic field as it curls around other bodies in the solar system.

At the north and south magnetic poles, many charged particles in the solar wind —a flow of electrically charged matter from the Sun—are captured by the planet’s field and forced to plunge into the atmosphere. The particles strike atmospheric gases, causing light emissions.

Lilensten and his colleagues observed weak polarization of a red glow that radiates at an altitude of 220 kilometers. The glow results from electrons hitting oxygen atoms. The scientists had suspected that such light might be polarized because Earth’s magnetic field at high latitudes funnels the electrons, aligning the angles at which they penetrate the atmosphere.

Fluctuations in the polarization measurements can reveal the energy of the particles coming from the Sun when they enter Earth’s atmosphere, Lilensten notes. The intensity of the polarization gives clues to the composition of the upper atmosphere, particularly with regard to atomic oxygen. link

Ref: Polarization in aurorae: A new dimension for space environments studies. 2008. Jean Lilensten et al. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L08804

Mysterious Striped Currents In Our Oceans

Between 1992 and 2003, scientists collected data from more than 10,000 drifting ocean buoys, which they tracked with satellites. The buoys’ movements were influenced mainly by known global currents, which are driven by wind and by differences in the temperature and salinity of seawater.

SubHuman © M. Ryan & M Schultz

But it emerged that something else had been subtly influencing the buoys’ paths. It turned out that there were alternating strips of water running eastward or westward, a bit like parallel moving sidewalks. Niiler recalls his reaction: “My God, we’ve never seen these before.”

Satellite measurements showed that the interfaces between adjacent currents were alternately associated with slight peaks and troughs in sea level. When the team looked at this variation globally, they found that the 150-kilometre-wide bands covered pretty much every ocean.

They recorded currents flowing in opposite directions at around 40 metres per hour. The flows extend right down to the ocean floor, and the boundaries between currents are alternately associated with peaks and troughs in temperature as well as sea level. This suggests that they influence processes such as nutrient and energy flow around the oceans, but this has yet to be proven, says Niiler.

What causes the striped flows remains a puzzle. “They are a fascinating new aspect to the ocean’s circulation, but the jury is still out on the mechanisms leading to their formation,” says Geoff Vallis of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University.

He points out that similar patterns exist in atmospheric flows on other planets, for example, Jupiter. Whether similar effects are at play here is unclear, he says. link

Ref: Maximenko, N. A., O. V. Melnichenko, P. P. Niiler, and H. Sasaki (2008), Stationary mesoscale jet-like features in the ocean. Geophys. Res. Lett., in press.

This Day In History: Nerve Gas Outbreak

In 1968, a sudden outbreak of startling sheep deaths in Skull Valley, Utah, was attributed to a nerve gas sprayed earlier by the Army on the nearby Dugway Proving Grounds. The investigation made by the National Communicable Disease Center was hampered by the Army's initial denial of responsibility and slowness to provide adequate gas samples for independent agencies to check. The debacle led to an overhaul of procedures concerning development of chemical weapons at Dugway. link.

“Contamination” trailer – music by Goblin:

Before The Big Bang

Until very recently, asking what happened at or before the Big Bang was considered by physicists to be a religious question. General relativity theory just doesn’t go there – at T=0, it spews out zeros, infinities, and errors – and so the question didn’t make sense from a scientific view.

But in the past few years, a new theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) has emerged. The theory suggests the possibility of a “quantum bounce,” where our universe stems from the collapse of a previous universe. Yet what that previous universe looked like was still beyond answering.

Physicists have now developed a simplified LQG model that gives an intriguing answer: a pre-Big Bang universe might have looked a lot like ours.

“The significance of this concept is that it answers what happened to the universe before the Big Bang,” Singh told PhysOrg.com. Our study shows that the universe on the other side is very classical as ours.”

“This means that the twin universe will have the same laws of physics and, in particular, the same notion of time as in ours,” Singh said. “The laws of physics will not change because the evolution is always unitary, which is the nicest way a quantum system can evolve. In our analogy, it will look identical to its twin when seen from afar; one could not distinguish them.”

That means that our universe today, roughly 13.7 billion years after the bounce, would share many of the same properties of the pre-bounce universe at 13.7 billion years before the bounce. In a sense, our universe has a mirror image of itself, with the Big Bang (or bounce) as the line of symmetry.

Ultimately, Corichi and Singh’s model might even tell us what a future universe would look like. Depending on how fast our present universe is accelerating – which will ultimately determine its fate – there’s a possibility that a generalization of the model would predict a re-collapse of our own universe.

Ref.: Quantum bounce and cosmic recall. 2008. Corichi, Alejandro, and Singh, Parampreet. In press, Physical Review Letters.

Oldest Human Coprolite Found

Human mitochondrial DNA from dried excrement recovered from Oregon's Paisley Caves is the oldest found yet in the New World -- dating to 14,300 years ago, some 1,200 years before Clovis culture.

The Paisley Caves are located in the Summer Lake basin near Paisley, about 220 miles southeast of Eugene on the eastern side of the Cascade Range. The series of eight caves are wave-cut shelters on the highest shoreline of pluvial Lake Chewaucan, which rose and fell in periods of greater precipitation during the Pleistocene.

Clovis culture began sometime between 13,200 and 12,900 years ago. Skeletal remains dating to Clovis culture have proven elusive, leaving researchers with little hard evidence beyond tell-tale cultural components such as the distinctive fluted Clovis points and other tools.

Exactly who these people living in the Oregon caves were is not known. At this point, we know they most likely came from Siberia or Eastern Asia, and we know something about what they were eating, which is something we can learn from coprolites. We're talking about human signature.

“Had the human coprolites at the Paisley Caves not been analyzed for DNA and subjected to rigorous dating methodology,” he added, "the pre-Clovis age of the artifacts recovered with the megafaunal remains could not have been conclusively proven. In other words, the pre-Clovis-aged component of this site could very well have been missed or dismissed by archaeologists.” link

Ref: DNA from Pre-Clovis Human Coprolites in Oregon, North America. 2008. M. T. P. Gilbert et al. Science, published on-line April 3.

Is DNA Repair a Substitute For Sex?

Bdelloid rotifers seem to get along just fine without sex. What’s more, they have done so over millions of years of evolution, resulting in at least 370 species. These hardy creatures somehow escape the usual drawback of asexuality – extinction!

Bdelloid rotifers have been able to give up sex and survive because they have evolved an extraordinary efficient mechanism for repairing harmful mutations to their DNA.

In animals that do have sex, DNA repair is accomplished during meiosis, when chromosomes pair up (one from the father, one from the mother) and “fit” genes on one chromosome can serve as templates to repair damaged genes on the other chromosome. The bdelloid, though, always seems to reproduce asexually, by making a clone of itself. How then, does it cope with deleterious mutations?

Scientists demonstrated the enormous DNA repair capacity of bdelloid rotifers by zapping them with ionizing radiation (gamma rays), which has the effect of shattering its DNA into many pieces. “We kept exposing them to more and more radiation, and they didn’t die and they didn’t die and they didn’t die,” says Mark Welch. Even at five times the levels of radiation that all other animals are known to endure, the bdelloids were able to continue reproducing.

Philodina roseola

The bdelloids’ DNA repair capacity probably evolved due to a different environmental adaptation – tolerance of extreme dryness. Bdelloids, which live in ephemeral aquatic habitats such as temporary freshwater pools and on mosses, are able to survive complete desiccation (drying out) at any stage of their life cycle. They just curl up and go dormant for weeks, months, or years, and when water becomes available, they spring back to life. Desiccation, like ionizing radiation, breaks up the rotifers’ DNA into many pieces. Presumably, the same mechanisms they use to survive desiccation as part of their life cycle also protect them from ionizing radiation.

Extreme Resistance of Bdelloid Rotifers to Ionizing Radiation.2008. Gladyshev, E., and M. Meselson . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105 (13): 5139-5144.

Evidence for degenerate tetraploidy in bdelloid rotifers. 2008. Mark Welch, D.B., J.L. Mark Welch and M. Meselson. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 105 (13): 5145-5149.

Died This Day: Hermann Rorschach

Watchmen & Rorschach © DC Comics

Rorschach (Nov. 8, 1884 - April 2, 1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist who devised the inkblot test that bears his name and that is widely used clinically for diagnosing psychopathology. His secondary-school nickname was Kleck, meaning "inkblot," because of his interest in sketching.

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In 1917, he learned of Szyman Hens, who had studied the fantasies of his subjects using inkblot cards. Rorschach began in 1918 using 15 accidental inkblots, asking patients, "What might this be?" He knew the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli. The subjective responses of his subjects enabled him to distinguish among them on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. His published results (1921) drew little interest until after his death. link

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