The Science Thread

[Bender]

Oh boy...

Scientists have created the world's first synthetic life form in a landmark experiment that paves the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved.

The controversial feat, which has occupied 20 scientists for more than 10 years at an estimated cost of $40m, was described by one researcher as "a defining moment in biology".

Craig Venter, the pioneering US geneticist behind the experiment, said the achievement heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines.

However critics, including some religious groups, condemned the work, with one organisation warning that artificial organisms could escape into the wild and cause environmental havoc or be turned into biological weapons. Others said Venter was playing God.

I don't buy the playing God nonsense one bit, but I do agree that we don't know how to control them. Until we have a method for complete control ideas such as these won't work. I don't think there's really any difference in the ethics behind this.

 

[Tigger]

Yeah, I buy the 'we don't have a clue how this will impact an ecosystem and we're afraid of that' more than playing god, unless god's a degenerate gambler or something...

 

[Bender]

Yeah, I buy the 'we don't have a clue how this will impact an ecosystem and we're afraid of that' more than playing god, unless god's a degenerate gambler or something...

Haha, it reminds me of an old George Carlin bit. It's not like "God" has a great batting average anyway, look at us!  ;D

 

[Tigger]

shifting holes in the magnetosphere

According to NASA, Jack Scudder?a researcher at the University of Iowa?has found "hidden portals on Earth's magnetic field [that] open and close dozens of times each day." Some of them are open for long periods of time.
Scudder says that these portals "create an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun's atmosphere 93 million miles away."

Called X-points or electron diffusion regions, they are located "a few tens of thousands of kilometers from Earth. The portals are created through a process of magnetic reconnection in which lines of magnetic force from both celestial bodies mingle and criss-cross through space. The criss-crossing creates these x-points.

The portals are "invisible, unstable and elusive," opening and closing without any warning. When they open, however, they are capable of transporting energetic particles at high speed from the Sun's atmosphere's to Earth's, causing geomagnetic storms.

 

[WhatIfGodWasALeaf]

John Anthony West was on the Joe Rogan Podcast on June the 9th, very interesting.

I know you'll probably enjoy it Tigger.

 

[maplesyrup]

I'll never even remotely understand the science behind subatomic particles but I remain deeply fascinated by the theology behind the God particle. I gave this a listen last night... Thought it was pretty good;

Higgs Boson & Ancient Texts/ Inverted Spirituality
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/07/16

 

[Tigger]

John Anthony West was on the Joe Rogan Podcast on June the 9th, very interesting.

I know you'll probably enjoy it Tigger.

It was very enjoyable, West is quite blunt and thoughtful... 'plenty of vodka in the freezer'...

Funny, I had just re watched a chunk of his 'Magical Egypt' shows ( I think you can see all eight of them on the youtube ) again marveling at the temple of Luxor and other wonders when a buddy sent a link to the Rogan show you're talking about ( also on the youtube ).

Thanks Wigwal!

 

[Tigger]

I'll never even remotely understand the science behind subatomic particles but I remain deeply fascinated by the theology behind the God particle. I gave this a listen last night... Thought it was pretty good;

Higgs Boson & Ancient Texts/ Inverted Spirituality
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/07/16

Some of that was interesting Sarge, and though I'm a fan of keeping the science separate from religion for the most part, I also acknowledge that some of the greatest thinkers were/are deeply religious people so I'm not against it.

Bohm's extrapolation is something that, in a way, is near and dear to my heart. Humans linear existence, snapshots from second to second, almost deny the notion of a greater whole simply 'existing', without time as we perceive it. It's fascinating and frightening.

However, Bohm's discussion of quantum entanglement is not a new thought by any stretch, Einstein, in a famous battle with Niels Bohr over quantum mechanics, described it as 'spooky action at a distance' in 1935. Funny, Bohr ended up winning that argument in the opinion of the the scientific world but Einstein had actually worked out the trump card for that in 1930 in a thought experiment with the Heisenburg uncertainty principle ( the gist being that you cannot measure both energy and time with a high level of accuracy ), though he didn't recognize it.

Interestingly, Bohr is a central figure in the bizarre set of circumstances that led to the discovery and understanding of nuclear fission. In the biography 'Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam... A Lifetime in Physics' by John Archibald Wheeler, the connected dots cross the ocean and it was Lise Meitner's inspiration during a conversation with her nephew Otto Frisch during a winter sojourn that led to the discovery and initiated the baby steps towards the creation of the first atomic weapon...

From Chapter One

"Bohr learned of fission on January 7, just as he and his son Erik were about to board the train in Copenhagen for Gothenburg, the MS Drottningholm's embarkation point. Otto Frisch, a German emigre physicist working at Bohr's University Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, sought out Bohr to inform him of the postulate of fission that he (Frisch) and his aunt, Lise Meitner, had devised in the last week of December to explain puzzling results found by the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in their Berlin laboratory. When Hahn and Strassmann bombarded uranium with neutrons (subnuclear particles with no electric charge), they found evidence that the element barium was created. Since barium is far removed from uranium in the periodic table and has a much lighter nucleus, they could not make sense of this result. Hahn wrote to Meitner in Sweden, describing the puzzle, for she had been his longtime colleague in Berlin before leaving Germany to escape persecution, and was trained in physics. When her nephew Frisch came for a holiday visit, they took a Christmas Eve walk in the woods--he on skis and she on foot--to ponder the Berlin results. Suddenly it became clear to them. The uranium nucleus must be breaking into large fragments, resulting in the nuclei of other elements, including sometimes the nucleus of barium."

Anywho, I linked a note about quantum computers previously, the notion for their development comes directly from this idea. Entangled particles can communicate seemingly faster than light, a particle can seem to exist in two places at once. An actual application of a very, very odd field in physics, one that will revolutionize computing and make the world even scarier.

At this point I don't put any stock in the notion of theology behind the Higgs Boson, the discovery, if verified, just provides a clearer understanding of how particles with mass come into existence. Pretending that we know anything about why it happens, as if 'purpose' can be attributed from what we can perceive, is a guessing game at best.

 

[maplesyrup]

Thanks for sharing... I'm not sold one way or another either but this whole "something from nothing" idea and how it applies to the universe and our existence is something that I'd be interested in doing more reading on. I find it all really fascinating and at the very least, perhaps further research into it will get me more up to speed on the science which as I said, I'm woefully ignorant of at this point.     

 

[Tigger]

It is fascinating and I applaud any attempt at learning more about it.

An aside, I also find it fascinating that the iron in our blood likely contributed to the death of a star...

 

[Tigger]

300,000 year old flint tools found in northern France

The deposits at Etricourt Manancourt in the Picardie region of France documents the history of early European settlements, revealing at least five prehistoric levels, ranging between 300,000 and 80,000 years old.

...

Seven metres deep, the excavation revealed three major climatic cycles through successive glacial and interglacial periods (the Holsteinian the Saalian and Weichselian).
The contents of the 300,000 year layer are perfectly preserved in moist soil conditions and has produced so far several hundred flints including the biface.

 

[Tigger]

Iron Age 'Sacrifice' Is Britain's Oldest Surviving Brain

The oldest surviving human brain in Britain, dating back at least 2000 years to the Iron Age, has been unearthed during excavations on the site of the University of York's campus expansion at Heslington East.

...

York Hospital's sophisticated CT scanner was used to produce startlingly clear images of the skull's contents. Philip Duffey, Consultant Neurologist at the Hospital said: 'I'm amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin. I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition.'

Dr Sonia O'Connor, Research Fellow in Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford added: 'The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare. This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the UK, and one of the earliest worldwide.'

 

[Tigger]

If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was late for work. It was August 1945, and he'd just finished designing a 5,000-ton tanker for his company, Mitsubishi. He was heading to the office to finish up, clear out and head home, and that's when he saw the plane, high up in the sky over Hiroshima. He watched it drop a silvery speck into the air, and instinctively, says science writer Sam Kean, "he dove to the ground and covered his eyes and plugged his ears with his thumbs."

...

So with nowhere to go and desperate to get away from the destruction and the burned bodies, he heard a rumor the railroad might still be working. He decided to head for the train station, which was across a river. The bridges were down. He tried crawling across a logjam of corpses, but couldn't cross, then found a single railroad beam and made it to the other side, where, amazingly, trains were indeed leaving for other cities. He pushed himself onto one heading southwest to his hometown...Nagasaki.

...

In his new book, The Violinist's Thumb, Sam Kean (a Radiolab regular), describes what happened next. In the short run, DNA damage creates radiation sickness, (headaches, vomiting, internal bleeding, peeling skin, anemic blood) and all that happened to Mr. Yamaguchi. He found his wife and 2-year-old son, rested for a day (or rather, went in and out of consciousness), and then, on Aug. 9, he headed to Mitsubishi offices in Nagasaki to hand in his assignment. When he arrived, he told his boss about the strange new bomb that had evaporated parts of Hiroshima, but the boss, writes Sam, didn't believe him.

"You're an engineer," he barked. "Calculate it. How could one bomb...destroy a whole city?" Famous last words. [At that moment] a white light swelled inside the room. Heat prickled Yamaguchi's skin, and he hit the deck of the ship engineering office. "I thought," he later recalled, "the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima."

What are the sheer odds of surviving those two horrible events? Yamaguchi died at age 93 of stomach cancer, his wife ( who survived the Nagasaki bombing ) at age 88 of kidney and liver cancer, their children, according to the article, show no signs of lasting DNA damage.

 

[Tigger]

An interesting footnote to Lise Meitner's influence on the atomic age, she was contacted by Leo Szilard prior to the experimentation with uranium that led her and her nephew to the first true notion of atomic energy, something that likely stuck with her. ( today we don't think of a woman in this role as being anything special, when she was born there were no women in her field )

In fact, Leo had the idea around 1933 in stark reaction to popular musings from the scientific world, though he didn't have any idea what element would be the culprit, he grasped that neutrons were the key to creating a chain reaction and a subsequent energy output ( the first to realize this ) and openly disagreed with 'Lord' Earnest Rutherford who said that the idea of creating energy from the transmutation of elements was a dubious idea.

Szilard would have been the pioneer everyone remembers if he had access to the experiments that Meitner did, I have no doubt, instead he's remembered more for his forward thinking of the Nazi regime as early as 1931.

"Many...people took a very optimistic view of the situation. They all thought that civilized Germans would not stand for anything really rough happening. The reason that I took the opposite position was... [because] I noticed that Germans always took a utilitarian point of view.

They asked,?Well, suppose I would oppose this thinking, what good would I do?...I would just lose my influence.?...You see, the moral point of view was completely absent, or very weak....And on that basis I reached in 1931 the conclusion that Hitler would get into power, not because the forces of the Nazi revolution were so strong, but rather because I thought that there would be no resistance whatsoever"

 

[hockeyfan1]

​

If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was late for work. It was August 1945, and he'd just finished designing a 5,000-ton tanker for his company, Mitsubishi. He was heading to the office to finish up, clear out and head home, and that's when he saw the plane, high up in the sky over Hiroshima. He watched it drop a silvery speck into the air, and instinctively, says science writer Sam Kean, "he dove to the ground and covered his eyes and plugged his ears with his thumbs."

...

So with nowhere to go and desperate to get away from the destruction and the burned bodies, he heard a rumor the railroad might still be working. He decided to head for the train station, which was across a river. The bridges were down. He tried crawling across a logjam of corpses, but couldn't cross, then found a single railroad beam and made it to the other side, where, amazingly, trains were indeed leaving for other cities. He pushed himself onto one heading southwest to his hometown...Nagasaki.

...

In his new book, The Violinist's Thumb, Sam Kean (a Radiolab regular), describes what happened next. In the short run, DNA damage creates radiation sickness, (headaches, vomiting, internal bleeding, peeling skin, anemic blood) and all that happened to Mr. Yamaguchi. He found his wife and 2-year-old son, rested for a day (or rather, went in and out of consciousness), and then, on Aug. 9, he headed to Mitsubishi offices in Nagasaki to hand in his assignment. When he arrived, he told his boss about the strange new bomb that had evaporated parts of Hiroshima, but the boss, writes Sam, didn't believe him.

"You're an engineer," he barked. "Calculate it. How could one bomb...destroy a whole city?" Famous last words. [At that moment] a white light swelled inside the room. Heat prickled Yamaguchi's skin, and he hit the deck of the ship engineering office. "I thought," he later recalled, "the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima."

What are the sheer odds of surviving those two horrible events? Yamaguchi died at age 93 of stomach cancer, his wife ( who survived the Nagasaki bombing ) at age 88 of kidney and liver cancer, their children, according to the article, show no signs of lasting DNA damage.

An absolutely fascinating read.  The fact that Mr. Yamaguchi lived long enough (before succumbing to cancer), and that his children showed no DNA damage is incredible. 

DNA, it seems, has an extraordinary talent for mending itself...

That alone, is self-explanatory.

 

[GhostofPotvin29]

Pretty depressing the reality of it.

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-results-turn-sceptic-let-the-evidence-change-our-minds-20120730-23769.html

 

[Tigger]

It is a bit depressing. The planet's human population has increased by about 6 billion in the last 200 years and we're party animals, looking at 10 billion by the end of this century.

Nothing a couple chunks of comet couldn't help slow down, like my previous post about the Younger Dryas boundary hypothesis.

Anywho, this was interesting...

Plastic-Eating Underwater Drone Could Swallow the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

A new underwater drone concept could seek and destroy one of the ocean?s most insidious enemies, while earning a profit for plastics recyclers. This marine drone can siphon plastic garbage, swallowing bits of trash in a gaping maw rivaling that of a whale shark.

Industrial design student Elie Ahovi, who previously brought us the Orbit clothes washer concept, now presents the Marine Drone, an autonomous electric vehicle that tows a plastic-trapping net. The net is surrounded by a circular buoy to balance the weight of the garbage it collects. It discourages fish and other creatures from entering its jaws via an annoying sonic transmitter, and it communicates with other drones and with its base station using sonar.

 

[sucka]

I don't think the population will ever get that high.  I mean, about a 1/3 of the world's pop is in India and China.  Most places everywhere is seeing natural population increase slowing or even declining.  I don't think you can extrapolate historical growth in the 2 most populous countries, China and India, due to the 1 child policy and improving economic conditions.  GDP doesn't mean squat if you've got billions of people to feed.  I think these two countries view their large populations as burdens, (moreso in China) and will see decreases in the decades to come.  I think it'll hit a peak of 8-9 billion with a top heavy elderly mix and then rapidly settle much lower.  That would be a nice scenario environmentally.

 

[Tigger]

I think it's a good bet that it'll get close to 10 billion, and though things could change over the next 88 years to help to curb those numbers, it seems less likely to me.

Looking at page 5 of chapter one of 'The State of World Population 2011' from the United Nations there's a graph that suggests roughly 9.8 billion.

However, when you say 'that would be a nice scenario environmentally', I would only agree if somehow everyone in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia suddenly decided to live a lot more like the Amish then they do. Those 4 represent roughly 20% of the world's population while using 80% of it's resources. That is unsustainable.

Additionally, in places that use less currently, demand causing impact to the environment is increasing... and it takes a lot less per person on that side of the ledger to have a profound impact.

Right now it takes 1.5 years to balance the carbon budget for each year of consumption and that's been going on since 1980 and showing no signs of slowing down.

None of that even touches how we're affecting the Earth in terms of waste products.

I mean, when I say over population is a problem it is but it goes hand in hand with levels of consumption, waste and types of energy usage.

Sure, 8 billion Mennonites would probably be fine.

 

[Tigger]

Gorilla Youngsters Seen Dismantling Poachers' Traps?A First

Just days after a poacher's snare had killed one of their own, two young mountain gorillas worked together Tuesday to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home, according to conservationists on the scene.

"This is absolutely the first time that we've seen juveniles doing that ... I don't know of any other reports in the world of juveniles destroying snares," said Veronica Vecellio, gorilla program coordinator at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund's Karisoke Research Center, located in the reserve where the event took place.

...

On Tuesday tracker John Ndayambaje spotted a trap very close to the Kuryama gorilla clan. He moved in to deactivate the snare, but a silverback named Vubu grunted, cautioning Ndayambaje to stay away, Vecellio said.

Suddenly two juveniles?Rwema, a male; and Dukore, a female; both about four years old?ran toward the trap.

As Ndayambaje and a few tourists watched, Rwema jumped on the bent tree branch and broke it, while Dukore freed the noose.

The pair then spied another snare nearby?one the tracker himself had missed?and raced for it. Joined by a third gorilla, a teenager named Tetero, Rwema and Dukore destroyed that trap as well.