Six servings of Thanksgiving factology, courtesy of DiscoverBlog
Tag Archives: science
Once again, in lieu of actual content
Posted in blogging, cool links, science!
Tagged blogging, cool links, science
In lieu of actual content
An absolutely marvelous time-lapse video of the Earth, taken from the ISS.
Gacked from Bad Astronomy.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Posted in cool links, science!
Tagged cool links, science
Cool link of the day
How deep is the Mariana Trench? An infographic, courtesy of the inestimable Ed Yong.
Be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom.
Weather and climate
There’s a difference:
What’s the Difference Between Weather and Climate?
02.01.05
The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere “behaves” over relatively long periods of time.
When we talk about climate change, we talk about changes in long-term averages of daily weather. Today, children always hear stories from their parents and grandparents about how snow was always piled up to their waists as they trudged off to school. Children today in most areas of the country haven’t experienced those kinds of dreadful snow-packed winters, except for the Northeastern U.S. in January 2005. The change in recent winter snows indicate that the climate has changed since their parents were young.
If summers seem hotter lately, then the recent climate may have changed. In various parts of the world, some people have even noticed that springtime comes earlier now than it did 30 years ago. An earlier springtime is indicative of a possible change in the climate.
Read the rest over here at nasa.gov, the place that gave us rockets and the scientists who design them.
It’s in reference to this. Short form: an early snowstorm in the Northeast does not belie the fact of global climate change. Such snowstorms may in fact be linked to climate change over the Arctic:
Summary
While 2009 showed a slowdown in the rate of annual air temperature increases in the Arctic, the first half of 2010 shows a near record pace with monthly anomalies of over 4°C in northern Canada. There continues to be significant excess heat storage in the Arctic Ocean at the end of summer due to continued near-record sea ice loss. There is evidence that the effect of higher air temperatures in the lower Arctic atmosphere in fall is contributing to changes in the atmospheric circulation in both the Arctic and northern mid-latitudes. Winter 2009-2010 showed a new connectivity between mid-latitude extreme cold and snowy weather events and changes in the wind patterns of the Arctic; the so-called Warm Arctic-Cold Continents pattern.
But Al Gore is fat, so what the fck ever.
Someday…
…I want to see the Northern Lights, and a night sky as star-filled as this one.
Aurora Borealis in Finnish Lapland 2011 from Flatlight Films on Vimeo.
How Pig Guts Became the Next Bright Hope for Regenerating Human Limbs
Longish, but all kinds of amazing.
The strange sensation in his right thigh muscle began as a faint pulse. Slowly, surely, it was becoming more pronounced. Some people would have thought it impossible. But Corporal Isaias Hernandez could feel his quadriceps getting stronger. The muscle was growing back.
Plant RNAs Found in Mammals
When I was working out the Janiverse and trying to formulate some handwavy justification for human-idomeni hybridization, I considered that the influence of a new environment–simple exposure to the air, soil, and water of other worlds–would begin to nudge humans and idomeni toward some combination state by affecting metabolism, gene mutation, etc. Change would be glacially slow, but if the two races shared the same environments long enough, they would eventually, eventually, blend to form a single race. John Shroud sped up the process, Jani’s continued exposure to idomeni environments flipped on genetic switches that he had turned off, and the results played out over the course of five books. I never worked out the grand master template for it all–I’m not sure whether humans and idomeni developed naturally from a single ancestor or were designed by some elder race that also left behind the Gateways. I only developed enough backstory to move Jani’s immediate tale forward.
Then I poke around online when I should be doing other things, and I find stuff like this and realize that I could have done a lot more with the genetics/environmental influence slice of the tale.
MicroRNAs from common plant crops such as rice and cabbage can be found in the blood and tissues of humans and other plant-eating mammals, according to a study published today in Cell Research. One microRNA in particular, MIR168a, which is highly enriched in rice, was found to inhibit a protein that helps removes low-density lipoprotein (LDL) from the blood, suggesting that microRNAs can influence gene expression across kingdoms.
And then there’s this post from Ed Yong’s blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Japanese people have special tools that let them get more out of eating sushi than Americans can. They are probably raised with these utensils from an early age and each person wields millions of them. By now, you’ve probably worked out that I’m not talking about chopsticks.
The tools in question are genes that can break down some of the complex carbohydrate molecules in seaweed, one of the main ingredients in sushi. The genes are wielded by the hordes of bacteria lurking in the guts of every Japanese person, but not by those in American intestines. And most amazingly of all, this genetic cutlery set is a loan. Some gut bacteria have borrowed their seaweed-digesting genes from other microbes living in the coastal oceans. This is the story of how these genes emigrated from the sea into the bowels of Japanese people.***
The heavier weight science would have pushed the story in a different direction; it might have morphed into that grand, sweeping, multigenerational tale that I’ve always dreamed of writing. Maybe I didn’t trust myself enough to get things right, or found the socio-political effects of hybridization more interesting at the time. I think that now, the same ingredients would combine to make a very different tale.
I also think that given these discoveries, the existence of GMO’s in the food chain make me a helluva lot more uncomfortable than they did, say, this morning.
Now, it’s late. Gaby just came in from outside. She must have been hunting through the weeds for some critter or other because the hair on one side of her face is matted with sticky seeds and I have no idea how in hell I’m going to pick them out.
***(Yong’s post made it into The Best American Science Writing of 2011, and if you aren’t already following him on Twitter or subscribed to his blog’s RSS feed, you should right that wrong immediately. Just saying.)
Someday soon…
…we may conclude that Philip K Dick wrote nonfiction.
Reading another person’s mind is impossible. But it is now possible to see what’s going on in there visually, thanks to scientists at the University of California-Berkeley, who on Thursday announced they had managed to decode the brain signals of three individuals into watchable movies. YouTube movies, to be exact.
The scientists used MRI to record the brain activity of subjects as they watched movie trailers.
Then, the team took the recorded brain signals and ran them through a database of 18-million-seconds of random YouTube clips, but specifically didn’t include clips of the trailers that the subjects had been watching in the first place.
Berkley’s computer program was able to pick out new clips visually similar to the subjects’ brain imagery and mash them together into composites, creating eerie, hallucinatory new movies that replicate with startling accuracy the exact scenes that subjects saw in the trailers, frame-for-frame.
Confessions of a prosocial psychopath
This is really interesting. It’s 15 minutes long, but it’s worth listening to.
If you learned something like this about yourself, how do you think you’d react?
About This Video
Neuroscientist James Fallon is a self-styled “hobbit scientist.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk to the press and don’t go out of your area of expertise. But when a fascinating new brain scanner enters the lab, Fallon can’t resist. He ends up breaking both rules, and learns a lot more about himself than he bargained for. WSF teams up with what The Wall Street Journal calls “New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket,” The Moth, for an innovative series of unpredictable storytelling.
The Vexing Mental Tug-of-War Called Morality
An interesting article about the possible roles that logic and instinct play in moral decision-making.
You arrive at the hill early, eager to cheer the cyclists racing past. the sun is bright, the people on both sides of the road are in high spirits, and speculation about the race passes through the crowd in waves. A hot dog vendor has positioned his cart up the hill, and the aroma of simmering meat wafts by, summoning your best memories of summer. Suddenly shouts erupt. The racers are approaching. You lean forward and see a blur of colors at the summit. Then you notice something wrong. The hot dog vendor has stepped away to make change, and someone has jostled his cart off its moorings. It is rolling downhill toward the road, gathering speed, and poised to kill dozens of cyclists unless someone shoves the cart across the road—but that would kill three spectators instead. What should one do?
Read and find out what some people thought….