Slashdot Mirror

Also, a study at the University of Arizona in 2011 found a 100 year megadrought that coincided with the Roman Warm Period. Many deniers think that a warming world is a good thing - but they better not live in the US Southwest

http://uanews.org/story/ua-sci...

Sorry, that link is only tangentially relevant to the issue of climate vs. evolution speed (haste makes waste, D'oh!)

I should really link to this...

http://uanews.org/story/ua-study-evolution-too-slow-to-keep-up-with-climate-change

Climate change is 10,000 times faster than evolution. That's OVER NINE THOUSAAAND! I knew it was ten-something...

"Many vertebrate species would have to evolve about 10,000 times faster than they have in the past to adapt to the rapid climate change expected in the next 100 years, a study led by a University of Arizona ecologist has found."

The rate of change we are facing could put more than half of all species in danger of extinction. And because this rate of change is so unnaturally fast (unprecedented), this assessment is more than likely "conservative" (i.e. erring on the side of irresponsibility so as not to appear "alarmist"). You may want to read Prof. Peter Ward's book on greenhouse extinction events, "Under A Green Sky".

Incidentally, the Great Dying wiped out about 90% of all life (by biomass). What TFA indicates is that the alternative theory that the event was driven by a change in the ocean is probably untrue; The extinction event was probably driven by the release of greenhouse gasses which had the side effect of changing most of the ocean chemistry.

Well, I don't understand why Slashdot didn't publish a link to their actual press release which is much more informative than medicaldaily.com's 5 paragraph paraphrasing. Their press release explains, that they are basically stimulating the mosquitos' own immune response and metabolism by playing around with the mosquitos' biological production of Akt signalling enzyme, it seems like were hoping to reduce mosquitos' life span by manipulating metabolic functions, and they got other interesting results:

Specifically, they engineered a piece of genetic code acting as a molecular switch in the complex control of metabolic functions inside the cell. The genetic construct acts like a switch that is always set to "on," leading to the permanent activity of a signaling enzyme called Akt. Akt functions as a messenger molecule in several metabolic functions, including larval development, immune response and lifespan.

I saw this a few weeks ago when it was emailed to all the students at UA. Here is a video of the guy who made it, and it shows the robot walking around. The video mentions that IBM bought it from him. http://uanews.org/node/29644

Link:http://uanews.org/node/18022
VIDEO:http://uanews.org/node/18073

Link:http://uanews.org/node/18022
VIDEO:http://uanews.org/node/18073

I'm partial to the Geany code editor. It has all of the features I need, seems to support just about every language you'd like (both in terms of highlighting and running), and still seems very light-weight.

For designing graphical interfaces, it doesn't get any easier than GLADE. No auto-generated code, just an XML file that can be loaded by any language that has a port of libglade, and like that, you have a GUI for your programme.

Both can be found in the package manager, but here are their websites if you're interested.

Geany: http://uanews.org/node/16426
Glade: http://glade.gnome.org/

I tossed off that phrase maybe a little too casually as a figure of speech, but certainly the people on the project have been working overtime. Some background here.

This has also been picked up by the major media.

On a side note, the HiRISE team is now posting new large images on the HiRISE Website every week on Wednesday. (A file size and format warning is needed. The full super high resolution photo of the Opportunity landing site is 677 MBytes in JP2 format)

Of course, there are some pics that I wouldn't mind a little more investigation on. I happen to be interested in something I call Gulliver's Golf Ball, something that looks like a perfect sphere, roughly 200 meters across.

As far as I can see the submitter did not provide a link to the actual press release announcing the details so here it is.

The Steward Observatory Mirror Lab had an open house yesterday for observatory personnel, which I attended.

The spin-cast oven is huge. In these pictures, you only see the top portion of it, it actually fills the floor below as well. I believe this is the only large spin-cast mirror facility in the world. The idea behind spin-casting is that, by spinning the molten glass as it is slowly cooled, you automatically get a paraboloid top surface. This makes the final shaping of the mirror much easier, since the first-order shape is already there.

Actually, in the case of the GMT, it will use seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis. The off-axis mirrors will obviously have a more complicated surface than a typical on-axis paraboloid. The mirror being cast now is an off-axis mirror; it is a proof-of-concept that they can grind an eight-meter chunk of glass to an off-axis paraboloid shape with a surface RMS of 20 nanometers (!).

In a few months when the mirror has cooled and solidified, it will be removed from the oven, cleaned, ground, and eventually, polished. The stress-lap polisher is very impressive. It has a network of stress actuators above it, which can dynamically change the shape of the polisher's surface as it travels across the mirror.

It's interesting that the "Aggie Daily News" was chosen as the linked story, which makes it sound like UT Austin and Texas A&M are the major players in the GMT, along with a handful of other, unnamed institutions. In fact, the Carnegie Institute is the impetus behind the project, and the U of Arizona is providing the mirrors. I think this UA News article is much more informative.