New Carnivorous Sponges Discovered

COTU © DC Comics

Nine new species of carnivorous sponges (Cladorhiza segonzaci, Chondrocladia koltuni, C. lampadiglobus, Asbestopluma agglutinans, A. (Helophloeina) formosa, Abyssocladia huitzilopochtli, A. inflata, A. dominalba and A. naudur) are described.

Eight of the sponges were collected from the French IFREMER manned submersible Nautile near active hydrothermal sites of the East Pacific Rise and of the North Fiji and Lau Basins, one from the Russian submersible Mir 2 in the Northwest Pacific near Bering Island, and one from the US submersible Alvin south of Easter Island. Their life conditions are described from direct observations from the submersibles. Some remarks are presented on the taxonomy of Cladorhizidae and more generally of carnivorous Poecilosclerida. The study suggests a very high degree of diversity in the deep Pacific carnivorous sponges.

New carnivorous sponges (Porifera, Poecilosclerida) collected from manned submersibles in the deep Pacific. 2006. J. Vacelet. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 148: 553–584.

DNA Nanobots Unleashed!

Scientists have developed a DNA cassette through which a nanomechanical device can be inserted and function within a DNA array, allowing for the motion of a nanorobotic arm. The results mark the first time scientists have been able to employ a functional nanotechnology device within a DNA array.

He added that the results pave the way for creating nanoscale “assembly lines” in which more complex maneuvers could be executed.

The Zeroids!

The results are based upon a previously developed device that eables the translation of DNA sequences, thereby potentially serving as a factory for assembling the building blocks of new materials. The invention has the potential to develop new synthetic fibers, advance the encryption of information, and improve DNA-based computation.

The new cassette-like device can control sequences or insertion sequences that would allow the researchers to manipulate the array or insert it at different locations. They visualized their results by atomic force microscopy (AFM), which permits features that are a few billionths of a meter to be visualized. Link

Operation of a DNA Robot Arm Inserted into a 2D DNA Crystalline Substrate. 2006. B. Ding and N. C. Seeman. Science 314: 1583 – 1585.

Warning! Robotic Bjork ahead…:

Flowing Water On Mars

The discovery of bright deposits on Mars could indicate that liquid water has recently flowed on a few locations on the planet.


Art © Frazetta

It has been an established fact for several years now that water exists on Mars. However, the big question is how much of it – if any – is in liquid form. The newly discovered deposits were identified by comparing different images of the same area taken by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MOC camera), over a period of few years. The images suggest that water may have flowed there sometime within the past seven years.


Photo: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

ESA’s Mars Express has found large reservoirs of water underground using its radar experiment MARSIS. All are frozen, with the largest in Mars's polar regions. Such frozen underground lakes might be driven to temporarily thaw and flow across the surface by changes in temperature, caused by changes in illumination from the Sun or, possibly, by local variations in the underground pressure.


Art © Frank Cho

Visit Scenic Barsoom:

100 Million Year Old Bee Found In Amber

The discovery of a 100-million-year old bee embedded in amber, perhaps the oldest bee ever found, pushes the bee fossil record back about 35 million years.



Scientists have long believed that bees first appeared about 120 million years ago -- but previous bee fossil records dated back only about 65 million years. Danforth and Poinar's fossil provides strong evidence for a more remote ancestry. The fact that the bee fossil also has some wasp traits suggests an evolutionary link between wasps and bees.

In a related study, published in the Oct. 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Danforth and colleagues examined early bees' structures in combination with bee DNA, producing the largest molecular and morphological study to date on bee family-level phylogeny -- the evolutionary development and diversification of a species. Their goal was to examine the early evolutionary pattern of bees and how their evolution relates to the evolution of flowering plants.



Until now, many researchers believed the most primitive bees stemmed from the family Colletidae, which implies that bees originated in the Southern Hemisphere (either South America or Australia). However, the work of Danforth and his group suggests that the earliest branches of the bee's evolutionary tree originate from the family Melittidae. That would mean that bees have an African origin and are almost as old as flowering plants, which would help explain a lot about the evolutionary diversification of these plants. link


Invisible Kid and Chameleon Boy © DC Comics

A Fossil Bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese Amber. 2006. G. O. Poinar. Science 314: 614.

When Dinosaurs Bikinis Ruled The Earth

Posters

Watch the Trailer for “When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth”.

Vaughn Bodé’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea: Part 3

Back in the 60’s Vaughn Bodé illustrated a number of classics that had been rewritten for “reading challenged” kids. The books were published by Frank E. Richards and sold exclusively to schools.

Because these books are almost impossible to find at reasonable prices I’ll be posting all the illos from the best book of the bunch, “Jules Verne’s ’20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” in eight installments.

Read: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Science Levitates Bugs

“What will happen if a living animal is put into the acoustic field? Will it also be stably levitated?", asked researcher Wenjun Xie, a materials physicist at Northwestern Polytechnical University.

Image courtesy Wenjun Xie

From Live Science:

Xie and his colleagues employed an ultrasound emitter and reflector that generated a sound pressure field between them. The emitter produced roughly 20-millimeter-wavelength sounds, meaning it could in theory levitate objects half that wavelength or less.

After the investigators got the ultrasound field going, they used tweezers to carefully place animals between the emitter and reflector. The scientists found they could float ants, beetles, spiders, ladybugs, bees, tadpoles and fish up to a little more than a third of an inch long in midair. When they levitated the fish and tadpole, the researchers added water to the ultrasound field every minute via syringe.

The levitated ant tried crawling in the air and struggled to escape by rapidly flexing its legs, although it generally failed because its feet find little purchase in the air. The ladybug tried flying away but also failed when the field was too strong to break away from.

The editors at Live Science note that acoustic levitation has been used for many years. Watch a video of a micro-gravity experiment for a NASA-related project done in 1987 by David Deak:

The Temperature At The Earth's Core

link

For the first time, scientists have directly measured the amount of heat flowing from the molten metal of Earth's core into a region at the base of the mantle, a process that helps drive both the movement of tectonic plates at the surface and the geodynamo in the core that generates Earth's magnetic field.

The boundary between the core and the mantle lies half-way to the center of the Earth, at a depth of 1,740 miles (2,900 kilometers). Seismologists are able to probe the structure of this region by studying its effects on seismic waves generated by earthquakes. The new temperature measurements were obtained by relating seismic observations to a recently discovered mineral transformation that occurs at the ultrahigh pressures and temperatures prevailing near the core-mantle boundary.

link

The temperature at the upper boundary of the lens, where the phase transition from perovskite to postperovskite occurs, is around 2,500 kelvins (4,000° F). At the lower boundary, where the reverse transition occurs, the temperature is around 3,500 kelvins (5,800° F). These two points gave the researchers a temperature gradient from which they calculated the heat flow, or thermal flux: about 80 million watts per square meter. Extrapolating to the entire surface of the core gave a total heat flow of about 13 trillion watts. link

A Post-Perovskite Lens and D'' Heat Flux Beneath the Central Pacific. 2006. T. Lay et al. Science 314: 1272-1276.

Space Voyagers: The Delta Brain by Alex Nino

Legardary comic book artist Alex Nino recently returned to the medium after too-long an absence with a book called God the Dyslexic Dog. I’m not sure what’s it’s about (other than god as a ‘dyslexic dog’—a point made in just about EVERY panel) but anything with his art in it is worth picking up (despite a mess of a colouring and printing job that pretty much obscures Nino’s fine pen line).

Nino’s name may not have a high recognition factor but he got his start in NA in the 70’s as one of many Philipino artist’s picked up by DC when they exponentially expanded their line and needed new talent fast. Nino never had a ‘name’ book, never did a superhero that I know of, doing mostly SF and horror short stories, back-ups, and stories for Eerie, Creepy and the other anthology mags that flourished for a while. His art is best described as early Walt Simonson on hallucinogens filtered through that fluid style of the best of the Philipinos, e.g. Nestor Redondo – who’s short lived book ‘Rima, The Jungle Girl’ is worth picking up from the 5 cent bins for the gorgeous art and Nino’s bizarre SF back-up story (see below). Hurrah for anyone with enough sense to have him drawing stories again.

Space Voyagers © DC Comics
CLICK EACH PAGE TO ENLARGE AND READ

Patented This Day: Barbed Wire

In 1874, the first U.S. patent for barbed wire was issued to Joseph F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois (No. 157,124). Having filed his application on 27 Oct 1873, Glidden began manufacturing on 1 Nov 1873, in DeKalb. The barbs were cut from sheet metal and were inserted between two wires which were twisted considerably more than with today's common design.

Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. link

Vaughn Bodé’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea: Part 2

Back in the 60’s Vaughn Bodé illustrated a number of classics that had been rewritten for “reading challenged” kids. The books were published by Frank E. Richards and sold exclusively to schools.

Because these books are almost impossible to find at reasonable prices I’ll be posting all the illos from the best book of the bunch, “Jules Verne’s ’20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” in eight installments.

Read: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Born This Day: August Möbius

Nov 17, 1790 – Sept. 26, 1868.

Art © Möebius (not Möbius)

Möbius was a German astronomer, mathematician and author. He is best known for his work in analytic geometry and in topology, especially remembered as one of the discoverers of the Möbius strip, which he had discovered in 1858. A Möbius strip is a two-dimensional surface with only one side.



The ‘other’ Möebius

Through The Möebius Strip:

Sold This Day in 1849: The 1st Bowler Hat

In 1849, the first bowler hat was sold by Lock & Co. of St. James's, London, to William Coke of Holkham, Norfolk for twelve shillings. He had placed an order intending for the hat to protect him from low-hanging branches when he was out shooting. On this day, he travelled to London to take delivery, and tested it by putting it on the floor and stamping on it.

It had been made for Lock & Co. by Thomas and William Bowler, felt hat makers on Southwark Bridge Road, London. This accounts for the name by which the hat is now known, although Lock's still refer to the style as a Coke after their first customer who bought it. link

Dark Energy Existed In Infant Universe

Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, researchers have discovered that dark energy, a mysterious repulsive force that makes the universe expand at an ever-faster rate, is not new but rather has been present in the universe for most of its 13-billion-year history.

Dark energy was already accelerating the expansion of the universe at least as long as 9 billion years ago. This picture of dark energy would be consistent with Albert Einstein's prediction, nearly a century ago, that a repulsive form of gravity emanates from empty space.

Hubble's new evidence is important, because it will help astrophysicists start ruling out competing explanations that predict that the strength of dark energy changes over time.

image

In addition, the researchers found that the exploding stars, or supernovae, used as markers to measure the expansion of space today look remarkably similar to those which exploded 9 billion years ago and are just now seen by Hubble. This is an important finding, say researchers, because it gives added credibility to the use of these supernovae as tools for tracking the cosmic expansion over most of the universe's lifetime. link

The Evolution of Wasp Brains

A new study suggests that brain and behavior relationships may have changed in a profound way as larger, more complex insect societies evolved from smaller, simpler ones.

Researchers found that a key region in the brains of a primitively social paper wasp is better developed in dominant females than in subordinate ones.

In the new study, O'Donnell and colleagues from the University of Texas studied the brain development of the primitively social wasp Mischocyttarus mastigophorus in the tropical cloud forest near Monteverde, Costa Rica.

The work is important because O'Donnell said social insects are a great model for understanding the design of brains and the relationship between brain design and social complexity. "And it has implications for human society because the evolution of our own society may affect brain development. Social behavior places pretty heavy demands on the human brain." link

The Wasp Woman:

The Milky Way Shaped Life On Earth

Frenzied star-making in the Milky Way Galaxy starting about 2400 million years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth. According to new results published by Dr. Henrik Svensmark the variability in the productivity of life is closely linked to the cosmic rays that rain down on the Earth from exploded stars. They were most intense during a baby boom of stars, many of which blew up.

Art © Darwyn Cooke

'The odds are 10,000 to 1 against this unexpected link between cosmic rays and the variable state of the biosphere being just a coincidence, and it offers a new perspective on the connection between the evolution of the Milky Way and the entire history of life over the last 4 billion years,' Dr Svensmark comments.

Svensmark looked at the long record of life's bounty given by counts of heavy carbon atoms, carbon¹³, in sedimentary rocks. When bacteria and algae in the ocean grow by taking in carbon dioxide they lock up C¹² causing the sea to become enriched in C¹³. Variations in C¹³ therefore record how much photosynthetic growth [biological productivity] was in progress when the marine shell-makers were alive.

image

The biggest fluctuations in productivity coincided with high star formation rates and cool periods in Earth's climate. Conversely, during a billion years when star formation was slow, cosmic rays were less intense and Earth's climate was warmer, the biosphere was almost unchanging in its productivity.

Most likely, the variations in cosmic radiation affected biological productivity through their influence on cloud formation. Hence, the stellar baby boom 2.4 billion years ago, which resulted in an extraordinarily large number of supernova explosions, had a chilling effect on Earth probably by increasing the cloud cover. link

Vaughn Bodé’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Part 1

Back in the 60’s, while he was finishing off his degree at Syracuse University, Vaughn Bodé illustrated a number of classics that had been rewritten for “reading challenged” kids. The books were published by Frank E. Richards and sold exclusively to schools.

Today these books are going for increasingly ridiculous prices on the secondary market. So, until some bright bulb decides to republish the illustrations from these books in one big compendium, I’ll be posting all the illos from the best book of the bunch, Jules Verne’s ’20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’ in eight installments.

I’ve taken the liberty to start each posting with one of the colour plates but otherwise everything is in order of appearance in the book. Enjoy!

All art © the estate of Vaughn Bodé

Read: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

Born This Day: Barbie’s Father

St. Barbie © Mark Ryden

Jack Ryan (Nov 12, 1926 - Aug 12, 1991) held 1000 patents including the Barbie doll for Mattell, Hot Wheels and military missles. Jack Ryan invented the joints that allowed Barbie to bend at the waist and the knee.

Poison Ivy © DC Comcs from HERE.

Before he designed the very first Barbie, Ryan worked at the Pentagon as an engineer designing Sparrow and Hawk missiles. Mattel hired him for his "space-aged savvy" and knowledge of materials. Ryan also brought the pull-string, talking voice boxes for Mattel's dolls to the company. link

Invisible Woman © Marvel Comics from HERE.

Barbie Lives!