The Vanguard by Alex Toth

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The Vanguard © The estate of Alex Toth
Originally printed in Hot Stuff #4, 1977

New Region of Earth's Magnetosphere Discovered

Scientists have discovered a new region of the magnetosphere, the invisible shield of magnetic fields and electrically charged particles that surround and protect Earth from the onslaught of the solar wind.

The northern and southern polar lights – aurora borealis and aurora australis – are the only parts of the magnetosphere that are visible, but it is a critical part of Earth's space environment.

"Although it is invisible, the magnetosphere has an impact on our everyday lives," Chappell said. "For example, solar storms agitate the magnetosphere in ways that can induce power surges in the electrical grid that trigger black outs, interfere with radio transmissions and mess up GPS signals. Charged particles in the magnetosphere can also damage the electronics in satellites and affect the temperature and motion of the upper atmosphere."

The other regions of the magnetosphere have been known for some time. Chappell and his colleagues pieced together a "natural cycle of energization" that accelerates the low-energy ions that originate from Earth's atmosphere up to the higher energy levels characteristic of the different regions in the magnetosphere.

The warm plasma cloak is a tenuous region that starts on the night side of the planet and wraps around the dayside but then gradually fades away on the afternoon side. As a result, it only reaches about three-quarters of the way around the planet. It is fed by low-energy charged particles that are lifted into space over Earth's poles, carried behind the Earth in its magnetic tail but then jerked around 180 degrees by a kink in the magnetic fields that boosts the particles back toward Earth in a region called the plasma sheet. link

Bettie Page: 1923-2008

Legendary ‘50’s pin-up model, Bettie Page, passed away yesterday at 85. Her obituary in the NY Times is here. Mark Evanier has some comments here.

Out of the public eye and largely forgotten by a generation, she came back to notoriety after 30 years when artist and Rocketeer creator, Dave Stevens, “cast” her as the hero’s girlfriend in his laviously illustrated series of Rocketeer stories.

There are still lots of books and video compilations about her that you can pick up.

Dave passed away recently as well but a great new book about him is out now.

A few years ago they made a film about Bettie's life. Here's the trailer from "The Notorious Bettie Page":

Bite Force of The Great White Shark

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ABSTRACT: The notorious jaws of the white shark Carcharodon carcharias are widely feared, yet poorly understood. Neither its bite force, nor how such force might be delivered using relatively elastic cartilaginous jaws, have been quantified or described. We have digitally reconstructed the jaws of a white shark to estimate maximum bite force and examine relationships among their three-dimensional geometry, material properties and function.

We predict that bite force in large white sharks may exceed c. 1.8 tonnes, the highest known for any living species, and suggest that forces may have been an order of magnitude greater still in the gigantic fossil species Carcharodon megalodon.

However, jaw adductor-generated force in Carcharodon appears unremarkable when the predator's body mass is considered. Although the shark's cartilaginous jaws undergo considerably greater deformation than would jaws constructed of bone, effective bite force is not greatly diminished.

Carcharodon was found that the largest great whites have a bite force of up to 1.8 tonnes. By comparison, a large African lion can produce around 560 kg of bite force and a human approximately 80 kg - making the great white's bite more than 20 times harder than that of a human.

UNSW's Dr Steve Wroe, the study's lead author, says the great white is without a doubt one of the hardest biting creatures alive, possibly the hardest.

"Nature has endowed this carnivore with more than enough bite force to kill and eat large and potentially dangerous prey," he says.

"Pound for pound the great white's bite is not particularly impressive, but the sheer size of the animal means that in absolute terms it tops the scales". From the press release.

Three-dimensional computer analysis of white shark jaw mechanics: how hard can a great white bite?. 2008. S. Wroe, et al. J. Zoology 276: 336 – 342.

She Gods of Shark Reef

I Fought The Tyrannosaurus

From Tales of Suspense #5 (Sept. 1959) comes this story illustrated by Steve Ditko:

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Get New Ditko material HERE

The Perfect Imperfect Body

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Having an imperfect body may come with some substantial benefits for some women, according to a new article in the December issue of Current Anthropology.

The hormones that make women physically stronger, more competitive and better able to deal with stress also tend to redistribute fat from the hips to the waist.So in societies and situations where women are under pressure to procure resources, they may be less likely to have the classic hourglass figure.Cashdan's hypothesis aims to explain a peculiar observation.

Women around the world tend to have larger waist-to-hip ratios—more cylindrical rather than hourglass-shaped bodies—than is considered optimal.Medical studies have shown that a curvy waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 or lower is associated with higher fertility and lower rates of chronic disease. Studies have also shown that men prefer a ratio of 0.7 or lower when looking for a mate.

The preference makes perfect sense, according to evolutionary psychologists, because the low ratio is a reliable signal of a healthy, fertile woman.But in data that Cashdan compiled from 33 non-Western populations and 4 European populations, the average waist-to-hip ratio for women is above 0.8. If 0.7 is the magic number both in terms of health and male mate choice, why are most women significantly higher?

Androgens, a class of hormones that includes testosterone, increase waist-to-hip ratios in women by increasing visceral fat, which is carried around the waist. But on the upside, increased androgen levels are also associated with increased strength, stamina, and competitiveness. Cortisol, a hormone that helps the body deal with stressful situations, also increases fat carried around the waist.

Trading the benefits of a thin waist for better ability to collect resources may be a good deal in certain societies and situations. link

The Seed of Life Floats Between The Stars

Astronomers have detected a building block of RNA floating within the hot, compact core of a massive star-forming region in the Milky Way. The molecule appears to have formed with all of the other stuff that makes up planets, suggesting that many other worlds are seeded with some of life's ingredients right from birth.

Using the IRAM radio dish array in France, a team of European astronomers has detected glycolaldehyde--a simple sugar that makes up ribose, one of the constituents of RNA--within the core of what appears to be a coalescing disk of dust and gas in a star-forming region called G31.41+0.31, about 26,000 light-years away. The sugar molecule can apparently form in a simple reaction between carbon monoxide molecules and dust grains.

The discovery is significant for two reasons.

1: G31.41+0.31 lies far away from the radiation-filled center of the Milky Way, so if any biological processes start up there, they will have a chance to establish themselves.

2: The abundance of glycolaldehyde in the G31.41+0.31 cloud suggests that the molecule is "common throughout star-forming regions," says astrophysicist and co-author Serena Viti of University College London. The implication is that wherever there is starmaking and planet formation going on, organic building blocks could be assembling as well.

Astrobiologist Michael Mumma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says it's possible that life's building blocks arrive on planets after this violent period has passed. Glycolaldehyde, for example, seems to be located in an area of the star-forming region where it could become part of comets. If so, Mumma says, some of those comets could eventually deliver the sugar to young planets. From Science Now

First detection of glycolaldehyde outside the Galactic Center. 2008. M.T. Beltran et al. Astrophysics

Ancient Climate Change Influenced Modern Octopus Evolution

Download Squid Girl via Cosmo Bells.

Many of the world's deep-sea octopuses evolved from species that lived in the Southern Ocean, according to new molecular evidence. Octopuses started migrating to new ocean basins more than 30 million years ago as Antarctica cooled and large ice-sheets grew.

These huge climatic events created a 'thermohaline expressway' - a northbound flow of deep cold water, providing new habitat for the animals previously confined to the sea floor around Antarctica.

Isolated in new habitat conditions, many different species evolved. Some octopuses lost their defensive ink sacs because there was no need for the defence mechanisms in the pitch black waters more than two kilometres below the surface.

Megaleledon setebos, the closest living relative of the octopuses' common ancestor. Photo: Census of Marine Life

"It is clear from our research that climate change can have profound effects on biodiversity, with impacts even extending into habitats such as the deep oceans which you might expect would be partially protected from it. "If octopuses radiated in this way, it's likely that other fauna did so also, so we have helped explain where some of the deep-sea biodiversity comes from."

The findings form part of the first Census of Marine Life (CoML), set to be completed in late 2010. It aims to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of marine life in the oceans, past, present and future. link

The thermohaline expressway: the Southern Ocean as a centre of origin for deep-sea octopuses. 2008. J. M. Strugnell et al. Caldistics, published on-line Nov. 11, 2008

Sea Urchin Hold Secret of Biomineralization

Used to crush food, for structural support and for defense, the materials of which shells, teeth and bones are composed are the strongest and most durable in the animal world, and scientists and engineers have long sought to mimic them.

A new study describes how the lowly sea urchin transforms calcium carbonate — the same material that forms "lime" deposits in pipes and boilers — into the crystals that make up the flint-hard shells and spines of marine animals. The mechanism, the authors write, could "well represent a common strategy in biomineralization."

The sea urchin larval spicule is a model system for biominerals, and the first one in which the amorphous calcium carbonate precursor was discovered in 1997 by the same Israeli group co-authoring the current PNAS paper. A similar amorphous-to-crystalline transition has since been observed in adult sea urchin spines, in mollusk shells, in zebra fish bones and in tooth enamel. The resulting biominerals are extraordinarily hard and fracture resistant, compared to the minerals of which they are made.

"The amorphous minerals are deposited and they are completely disordered," Gilbert explains. "So the question we addressed is 'how does crystallinity propagate through the amorphous mineral?'"

“We found that at 40-100 nanometer amorphous calcium carbonate particles aggregate into the final morphology. One starts converting to crystalline calcite, then another immediately adjacent converts as well, and another, and so on in a three-dimensional domino effect. The pattern of crystallinity, however, is far from straight. It resembles a random walk, or a fractal, like lightning in the sky or water percolating through a porous medium," explains Gilbert.

Vampire Moth Discovered

From National Geographic News:

Only slight variations in wing patterns distinguish the Russian population from a widely distributed moth species, Calyptra thalictri, in central and southern Europe known to feed only on fruit.

When the Russian moths were experimentally offered human hands this summer, the insects drilled their hook-and-barb-lined tongues under the skin and sucked blood.
Entomologist Jennifer Zaspel at the University of Florida in Gainesville said the discovery suggests the moth population could be on an "evolutionary trajectory" away from other C. thalictri populations. This is the second population of vampire moths Zaspel and her team have found. They discovered the first in Russia in 2006.

"Based on geography, based on behavior, and based on a phenotypic variation we saw in the wing pattern, we can speculate that this represents something different, something new," Zaspel said.

Robot Ants To Colonize Mars

The first inhabitants of Mars might not be human in form at all, but rather swarms of tiny robots.

European researchers are developing tiny autonomous robots that can co-operate to perform different tasks, much like termites, ants or bees forage collaboratively for food, build nests and work together for the greater good of the colony.

Working in the I-SWARM project, the team created a 100-strong posse of centimetre-scale robots and made considerable progress toward building swarms of ant-sized micro-bots. Several of the researchers have since gone on to work on creating swarms of robots that are able to reconfigure themselves and assemble autonomously into larger robots in order to perform different tasks.

Just as ants may observe what other ants nearby are doing, follow a specific individual, or leave behind a chemical trail in order to transmit information to the colony, the I-SWARM team’s robots are able to communicate with each other and sense their environment. The result is a kind of collective perception.

The robots use infrared to communicate, with each signalling another close by until the entire swarm is informed. When one encounters an obstacle, for example, it would signal others to encircle it and help move it out of the way.

Planet exploration and colonisation are just some of a seemingly endless range of potential applications for robots that can work together, adjusting their duties depending on the obstacles they face, changes in their environment and the swarm’s needs.

Simple, mass production would ensure that the robots are relatively cheap to manufacture. Researchers would therefore not have to worry if one gets lost in the Martian soil. link

I-SWARM robots in action:

Secret of Death Protein Unlocked

Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a previously undetected trigger point on a naturally occurring "death protein" that helps the body get rid of unwanted or diseased cells. They say it may be possible to exploit the newly found trigger as a target for designer drugs that would treat cancer by forcing malignant cells to commit suicide.

The researchers fashioned a peptide (a protein subunit) that precisely matched the shape of the newly found trigger site on the killer protein, which lies dormant in the cell's interior until activated by cellular stress. When the peptide docked into the binding site, BAX was spurred into assassin mode. The activated BAX proteins flocked to the cell's power plants, the mitochondria, where they poked holes in the mitochondria's membranes, killing the cells. This process is called apoptosis, or programmed cell death.

"We identified a switch that turns BAX on, and we believe this discovery can be used to develop drugs that turn on or turn off cell death in human disease by targeting BAX," said Walensky, who is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Ref: BAX activation is initiated at a novel interaction site. 2008. Evripidis Gavathiotis et al. Nature 455: 1076-1081.

Tomb of the Blind Dead

Single Species Ecosystem At The Earth's Core

The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 km beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat.

D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. Living alone, D. audaxviator must build its organic molecules by itself out of water, inorganic carbon, and nitrogen from ammonia in the surrounding rocks and fluid. During its long journey to the extreme depths, evolution has equipped the versatile spelunker with genes – many of them shared with archaea, members of a separate domain of life unrelated to bacteria – that allow it to cope with a range of different conditions, including the ability to fix nitrogen directly from elemental nitrogen in the environment.



It’s genome contains everything needed for the organism to sustain an independent existence and reproduce, including the ability to incorporate the elements necessary for life from inorganic sources, move freely, and protect itself from viruses, harsh conditions, and nutrient-poor periods by becoming a spore.

Dylan Chivian coined the name “audaxviato” from a phrase found in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, in a message – "Conveniently in Latin," says Chivian -- deciphered by Verne's protagonist, Professor Lidenbrock, which reads in part, "descende, Audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges." It means "descend, Bold traveler, and attain the center of the Earth." link

Environmental genomics reveals a single-species ecosystem deep within the Earth. D. Chivian et al.. 2008. Science 322.

Mighty Peking Man

"At first glance, the Shaw Brothers' 1977 demi-epic Mighty Peking Man might seem like the usual substandard big-monkey-on-the-loose shenanigans. But truly, this is the greatest reworking of the archetypal man-woman-ape love triangle since the original King Kong threw down the gauntlet in 1933." from StompTokyo.com.

The High Pitched Sound of Love

Black Canary © DC Comics

A pair of scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) asked 69 women to make voice recordings when they were at high and low fertility points in their menstrual cycle. The closer a woman was to ovulation, the more she raised her pitch, the investigators found.

The increase in tone was only slight -- it wasn't Minnie Mouse on helium -- but the peaks were enough to be picked up by the voice decoder and presumably by the male ear, as well. The difference was the greatest on the two days preceding ovulation, when fertility within the cycle is the highest.

Curiously, this distinction only occurred when the volunteer, among the sentences she was asked to speak, introduced herself: "Hello, I'm a student at UCLA."

The scientists suggest the pitch change happens because men are lured to a more "feminine" voice in a woman -- and women respond to the instinct.

Sexual signals and reproductive fitness are strongly associated with voice, which is why women are often drawn to men with the husky voice of the supposed alpha male.

"Men prefer higher pitch relative to lower pitch in the same women, and these judgements are affected by cues of social interest in the speech," say the duo, Greg Bryant and Martie Haselton of the university's Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture.

Previous research has found changes to body scent, an increase in flirtation, a shift towards more fashionable dress styles and a preference for more "masculine" men when women are in mid-cycle. Last year, investigators found that lap dancers earned more tips when they were fertile.

Conversely, a vocal shift towards hoarseness has been found at the time of menstruation. link

Giant Tornadoes Seen Erupting From the Sun

Image courtesy NASA

A solar storm on the sun's surface was shown to twist, like a tornado does on Earth, in images from NASA's STEREO satellite taken on April 9, 2008.

This twisting also occurs in solar jets, which produce tornado-like events close to the sun's poles, new satellite data has found. "These solar tornadoes are almost a thousand times faster than a terrestrial tornado and are very big," said Spiros Patsourakos, a researcher at George Mason University.

That twist comes from the sun's magnetic field, said Etienne Pariat, also of George Mason University.

"The magnetic field lines act like a spring, which expands and jumps outward," said Pariat, who has used computer simulations to model the forces producing the jets. The forces originate in the solar interior, he added, where the sun's rotation twists the magnetic field. "But the twist cannot be stored, so it must be ejected."

TV Tornado © 1967 World Distributors

Scientists have known since the 1990s that jets of gas wider than North America were erupting from the sun's poles, but it is only now that they discovered these jets are rotating. Advanced viewing technologies have enabled scientists to study these phenomena in unprecedented clarity. link

Tornado Twins © DC Comics

Gahan Wilson Gets "Old"

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