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During this full moon (01/10/09), our celestial neighbor will appear bigger than at any other time this year. You got to figure, if the moon is going to ruin perfectly good star gazing, it may as well do it with some fashion.
Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics | Tagged: Celestial, Moon, Stars | Leave a comment »
So John McCain is at it again. Not satisfied with the sending of his inept running mate out into the big evil world of science and reality a few months back, McCain has decided to wade in to the pool himself – and he’s just as over his head as Palin was.
On Wednesday, McCain himself grabbed for the fruit-fly swatter at a press conference to unveil his new anti-earmark legislation.
After a long takedown of research into lobsters by the University of Maine that involves a “Lobster Cam,” McCain, a Senator from Arizona, turned on the fruit flies, saying, “also, there’s one in Paris that — yes — $212,000 for Olive Fruit Fly research in Paris, France.”
It’s pretty well established how important fruit fly research is in science. Given his lack of familiarity with the field, his election would have been as devastating to science as the past 8 years. But now he has decided to pick on lobster research, in my home state, no less. Personally, I’m not a fan of these sea cockroaches. However, I do enjoy the boost they give to the Maine economy. McCain apparently does not. He apparently believes citing a lobster cam shows how much of a MAVERICK!!! he is about pork-barrel spending. The truth is much more interesting.
This research by the University of Maine is done through its Lobster Institute, an organization devoted to the health of the Maine lobster industry. It is through this organization, not the $188,000 grant, that the lobster cam is funded. The grant money, on the other hand, goes toward “research of microbial diseases that devastate lobster stocks”.
I don’t know about any other readers, but I personally prefer politicians from Arizona to stay out of vital sectors of my state’s economy. More importantly, I prefer them to stay out of science if it is only utter ignorance they are able to profess.
Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: earmarks, fruit flies, Lobster Institute, Maine, McCain, Palin, Pork barrel, UMO, University of Maine | 2 Comments »
Origins research is beginning to really heat up (hilarious pun intended). One team of researchers is working with RNA (but then again, who isn’t?)
A new molecule that performs the essential function of life – self-replication – could shed light on the origin of all living things.
If that wasn’t enough, the laboratory-born ribonucleic acid (RNA) strand evolves in a test tube to double itself ever more swiftly.
“Obviously what we’re trying to do is make a biology,” says Gerald Joyce, a biochemist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. He hopes to imbue his team’s molecule with all the fundamental properties of life: self-replication, evolution, and function.
By building a molecule that can self-replicate, Joyce’s team has shown a pretty solid principle of how scientists believe life began: begin with something simple which makes copies of itself, then…
Not content with achieving one hallmark of life in the lab, Joyce and Lincoln sought to evolve their molecule by natural selection. They did this by mutating sequences of the RNA building blocks, so that 288 possible ribozymes could be built by mixing and matching different pairs of shorter RNAs.
What came out bore an eerie resemblance to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest: a few sequences proved winners, most losers. The victors emerged because they could replicate fastest while surrounded by competition, Joyce says.
As Joyce notes, this isn’t truly life. It’s a very promising experiment, however, and that’s where the excitement lay. By inducing mutations, evolution began to take place. It’s so simple a child can understand it.
Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: California, darwin, Evolution, Gerald Joyce, La Jolla, Michael Robertson, natural selection, R3C, RNA world, Scripps Research Institute, Tracey Lincoln | 2 Comments »
Astronomers have detected a lour roar from faraway space.
ARCADE’s mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.
“The universe really threw us a curve,” Kogut said. “Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.”
Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.
Other radio galaxies also can’t account for the noise – there just aren’t enough of them.
“You’d have to pack them into the universe like sardines,” said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. “There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.”
The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.
For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.
“We really don’t know what it is,”said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
…
“This is what makes science so exciting,” Seiffert said. “You start out on a path to measure something – in this case, the heat from the very first stars – but run into something else entirely, some unexplained.”
Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics | Tagged: Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Alan Kogut, and Diffuse Emission, ARCADE, Astrophysics, California, Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, Dale Fixsen, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Karl Jansky, Maryland, Michael Seiffert, NASA, Palestine, Pasadena, Texas | 4 Comments »
Steve Jones has, according to media reports, made the claim that human evolution has stopped, or is at least slowing down in the West. At times we see conflicting statements from Jones himself over this.
I really just know about snails, and the beauty of evolution is that it gives biology a structure, so the rules that apply to snails or to fruit flies to some extent apply to ourselves. Obviously there’s much more that applies to us. But if you ask the simple Darwinian question about natural selection, inherited differences in the ability to pass on genes (which is only part of the evolutionary argument) it’s pretty clear to me that at least for the time being and at least in the developed world, natural selection has stopped or at least slowed down.
First, snail evolution is quite beautiful. Second, we see here that Jones is referring to natural selection, not evolution. Some sort of argument can be made that there is much less selection pressure on humans in Western nations than there was in the past. Of course, that wouldn’t be a very satisfying argument since natural selection is still ‘weeding out’ people with certain diseases and predispositions. It’s just that some of them, depending upon their economic situation as well as their particular affliction, happen to have reduced overall selection pressure on their alleles. But even then, there are people with diseases which will kill them before they get a chance to reproduce.
At any rate, this whole argument becomes rather moot because Jones also goes on to specifically speak of evolution rather than just one of its mechanisms. In fact, his talk is titled “Human Evolution is over”. He is wrong. Even if we were to ignore all the problems involved with making an argument that natural selection is over in humans (in the West), the evolution-is-over argument still does not fly because evolution is not simply selection. Genetic drift and mutation are two other major mechanisms. While he seems to ignore drift, Jones does, however, argue that there are fewer mutations in the population. His argument goes like this.
Men are fathering children at far younger ages than they did in the past. Given the fact that mutations accumulate in a person over time, these young men have fewer mutations than older men. Thus, subsequent generations are inheriting fewer and fewer mutations.
Okay, the first question which comes to mind is “So what?” The mutation rate of younger fathers is still, by far, substantial enough to maintain the continuing of human evolution. There is no shortage of mutations in each and every person at birth. Jones probably was born with around 100 mutations. You, too.
The second thing which comes to mind is to wonder why Jones would first make this age-mutation argument, but then go on to argue this.
Similarly, child survival rates, abysmal in antiquity, have dramatically improved in much of the world, cutting natural selection pressures.
In other words, more people live to reproductive age. This means there are more people reproducing, which means more mutations. His argument is dreadfully weak.
One wonders why such a quality scientist would make such a poor proposition.
Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: Evolution, Mutations, natural selection, steve jones | 2 Comments »
Great news. Al Franken is going to be declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate race today. That means one less backward-thinking Republican destroying the increasing morality of the U.S.
Now if only Rick Warren could go away.
Filed under: News | Tagged: Al Franken, Minnesota, Norm Coleman, Rick Warren, Senate | Leave a comment »
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2008) — Retroviruses are the worst sort of guest. Over eons, these molecular parasites have insinuated themselves into their hosts’ DNA and caused a ruckus. The poor hosts can’t even be rid of the intruders by killing them, because they stubbornly remain after death.
As much as eight percent of the human genome is littered with a “fossil record” of extinct retroviruses that we have inherited from our ancestors — human and otherwise — who were the original victims of the viruses. That record allows scientists to study what may have killed these ancient viruses, providing clues for fighting those that plague us today, like HIV.
Now researchers from Rockefeller University have revived two groups of long-dead primate retroviruses to study whether defensive proteins that have rapidly evolved in humans and other primate species could kill them. They found that one protein, called TRIM5α, was disappointingly useless. But by scrutinizing the remnants of the extinct viruses found in the reference genomes of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, investigators discovered unmistakable signs that a different protein — APOBEC3 — was likely the exterminator. The research was published in PLoS Pathogens.
“It’s a little like finding a fossilized skeleton with a spear through its head. You can be fairly sure of how that individual died,” says Paul Bieniasz, an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. “In this case, we can even do tests to show that the spear wasn’t put there after the individual died. The DNA evidence is clear on that point.”
The investigators reanimated parts of retroviruses that had worked their way into the DNA of old-world primates within the past few million years. They know the rough timeline because the viruses are not found in humans, who diverged from chimps about six million years ago. The goal is to explain why these ancient viruses did not cross over into humans as HIV has and to identify what in humans has defended against them.
Working with pieces of the extinct retroviruses preserved in primate DNA, the researchers compelled a related modern retrovirus, found in mice, to produce the same proteins as its ancient relatives. Bieniasz, postdoctoral fellow David Perez-Caballero and graduate fellow Steven Soll found that one defensive protein — TRIM5α — did not stop the hybrid viruses from infecting other cells, contrary to another lab’s recent findings. Analyzing many of the DNA “fossils” of the retroviruses, however, the researchers found unique mutations that would have caused the viruses to stop reproducing, mutations that are caused by APOBEC3. They showed that the mutations responsible for inactivating the retroviruses varied in both a virus- and species-dependent manner.
So far, the Bieniasz lab has established that APOBEC3 is involved in fighting the retroviruses but not that it singularly killed all of them, or that it is necessarily responsible for preventing the viruses from crossing into humans, who have APOBEC3 proteins of their own.
That’s what the researchers would like to show next, but it doesn’t come easy. “When you’re dealing with something that happened millions of years ago, it’s tough to demonstrate an extinction event in the laboratory,” Soll says.
Filed under: Evolution | Tagged: Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, APOBEC3, Bieniasz lab, David Perez-Caballero, Laboratory of Retrovirology, Paul Bieniasz, Rockefeller University, Steven Soll, TRIM5α | Leave a comment »
For the Sake of Science 