For more lighthearted biological names that you ever dreamed were possible, check out Curiousities of Biological Nemenclature
My personal favourite (relevent, too!) is "Tyrannasorus rex Ratcliffe and Ocampo, 2001 (Miocene hybosorid scarab from Dominican amber) The dinosaur is spelled Tyrannosaurus." Tyrant King beetle?
OK, so life is difficult to define (but we know it when we see it!). But things all life known to date share are the use of DNA / RNA / proteins to encode and transmit the information needed to construct copies of the original. So I think viruses have a good claim to being alive. Further, it is pretty generally agreed that viruses have evolved from more complex intracellular parasites (and there are many of those, and none of them are considered not to be alive). And they are still evolving - just look at the current bird flu scare. Is it possible to evolve from "alive" to "not alive"?
Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001
on
Alien Rain Over India
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Paul Davies published a book on this a couple of years ago. He believes that Earth may well have been seeded with life from Mars, and we are the last surviving Martians. He's got a reasonable amount of data to support it, too.
For what it's worth, here's a meta-analysis saying exactly that: Psychological Science
The abstract:
"Research on exposure to television and movie violence suggests that playing violent video games will increase aggressive behavior. A metaanalytic review of the video-game research literature reveals that violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children and young adults. Experimental and nonexperimental studies with males and females in laboratory and field settings support this conclusion. Analyses also reveal that exposure to violent video games increases physiological arousal and aggression-related thoughts and feelings. Playing violent video games also decreases prosocial behavior."
I haven't studied the topic in depth, but the research does appear to be there
We've already had one. After a huge global effort, the World Health Organization announced the eradication of smallpox in 1980. It was supposed to be the first victory in the war against infectious disease. Of course, it turned out to be the only victory, and even it was undermined by the fact that the US and Russia (and heaven knows who else!) kept stocks "just in case".
The interesting thing is that this one and only victory was won by immunization, not by drugs. Maybe the development of hordes of new anti-resistance drugs is not the way to go after all?
These guys are talking about human evolution way before the megafauna extinctions. In the article thet mention Australopithecus afarensis, which is 3.2 million years old; a ccording to the Australian Museum's Tim Flannery
"the Megafauna became extinct up to 50,000 years ago in Australia and New Guinea, around 10,900 years ago in North (and presumably South) America, about 1500 years ago in Madagascar, and between 900 and 600 years ago in New Zealand. This pattern closely follows the current chronology of human expansion around the world."
Maybe it's because we developed those social skills early on that we became so dangerous more recently?
Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan which has cats as its definitive host. It has a wide range of intermediate hosts, and is capable of infecting all warm-blooded vertebrates, including humans. Toxoplasma lives inside the epithelial cells lining the intestine of its feline host. Eggs are shed with the faeces, and can survive in soil for several months. Toxoplasma cells can also penetrate work their way out of the intestine and infect almost any other cell type, eventually forming cysts in the host's brain, liver and muscles. Intermediate hosts are infected either by eating food or water contaminated with infected cat faeces; by eating undercooked meat from other intermediate hosts containing Toxoplasma cysts; or, in the case of some unfortunates, via the placenta from an infected mother.
Back to the rats. Rats are easily infected with Toxoplasma, and have been the subject of a lot of experimentation. Infection tends to lead to the establishment of Toxoplasma cysts in the brain, and alteration of the rat's behaviour. Infected rats tend to be more active and less afraid of novelty, both of which behaviours are likely to place the rat at increased risk of predation by cats. The changes go further than that, however. Rats are inherently, and understandably, afraid of the odour of cats. Even lab rats which have not been exposed to cats for generations will avoid areas marked with cat urine. Toxoplasma infected rats do not, however, share this aversion; in fact, rats tested in pens marked with different types of scent (rat urine, cat urine, rabbit urine and water) actually seemed to be suicidally attracted to the cat-scented areas . The infected rats appeared to be completely healthy in all other ways.
The implications of this research are enough to send a frisson of fear down the spine of anyone, devoted parasitologist or otherwise. Toxoplasma infection is common amongst humans. It has been estimated that 30% of the global human population may be infected, with prevalence in specific countries ranging from 22% in the UK to 84% in France. Can the parasite affect human behaviour in the way in which it affects that of rats? The answer appears to be "yes".
One manner in which this happens is via direct damage to the host's brain and central nervous system. Babies born to mothers infected with Toxoplasma early in fetal development can suffer from widespread disease, including mental retardation . Infection later in development can lead to a persistant infection with no apparent symptoms, with the parasite forming cysts in the brain. With any luck the immune system can keep the parasite under control; depression of the immune system, however, can result in its reactivation, with consequent neurological or psychiatric effects.
It has also been suggested that prenatal exposure to toxoplasmosis can increase an individual's susceptibility to schizophrenia , but because of the difficulty of experimenting in this area, there is little supporting evidence , although it is interesting to note that several of the drugs used in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder inhibit the replication of Toxoplasma .
Does the manipulation hypothesis hold in humans? If it does, it must be only as a non-adaptive side effect of the ability to manipuate hosts such as mice and rats, since, as Joanne Webster points out in a fascinating review article on the subject , humans are rarely preyed upon by cats. There does appear to be some evidence that human personality traits are affected by Toxoplasma infection, but the one study that has specifically looked for an effect is less than wholly convincing. Flegr and Hrdý, found that men with chronic Toxoplasma infections had a greater tendency to disregard rules and were more suspecting, jealous and dogmatic than non-infected controls . However, the number of males tested was only 195, of whom 56 were infected, and the effect disappeared entirely if the male and female subjects were analyzed together. This research provides a fascinating, if somewhat disturbing, hint of an effect, but it seems safe to say that most of us are more than mere parasite-controlled robots.
Email headers are not hard to spoof. I have several times sent myself spam about things which I would have expected myself to have known that I didn't want to buy...
A quick search of PubMed returns 72 references to "phage therapy", the first of which is "Phage therapy: Facts and fiction." in the International Journal of Medicalmicrobiology. I haven't read any of them, but there are also titles such as "Use of bacteriophage in the treatment of experimental animal bacteremia from imipenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa.(Int J Mol Med.)", "Bacteriophage therapy to reduce Campylobacter jejuni colonization of broiler chickens. (Appl Environ Microbiol.)", and "Bacteriophage Esc-A is an efficient therapy for Escherichia coli 3-1 caused diarrhea in chickens. (J Gen Appl Microbiol.)", all from 2005. So I think you could conclude that it's anactive research area and producing results.
Yes, they developed better image processing programs. From the Nature article: "The SAVR software package was used to reconstruct the three-dimensional maps assuming icosahedral symmetry for both data sets. The icosahedral symmetry was further relaxed to C1 symmetry to generate the reconstruction without symmetry imposition using a set of newly developed programs within the EMAN package. "
Very nice work, but I wish university press release writers would resist the urge to consider all readers as idiots who can only understand science if it's dumbed down/sensationalized!
This has already been tried, in Australia. In fact, the law won an IgNobel prize for John Keogh and the Australian Patent Office for patenting the wheel in the year 2001. Apparently he did it to demonstrate that the new patent laws were pointless. I have no idea if his patent has ever been challenged in court!
That being said, if we must have them, let's focus on pure education -- facts, repetition, useful classes: how to read, write and perform basic math. At most, some basic scientific theory might be OK.
Education is not facts and repitition. Education should be about teaching children how to learn, and giving them the basic tools and support to go out and learn what they need/want/love to know. Young children have this drive built in; one of the problems with our current educational paradigm is that we take active youngsters and make them sit still behind desks for hours on end listening to adults repetitively telling them facts. People with an enquiring mind are far less likely to fall for belief-based ideas like ID. Once you start reading and looking critically at the world around you, evolution makes a lot of sense.
Real education is definately a task for skilled teachers, who can inspire enthusiasm and curiosity. Without them you go back to the disastrous no-discipline open-plan mess that was all-too-often education in the 70s.
I hate to be a party pooper, but I have doubts about this whole article. I spent many years working in image analysis (not that long ago!) and the claims they make seem extreme to me. Granted, they give no technical details, so I can't give a proper opinion. One point that worries me, though, is the reference to "chromofours (or acne-causing bacteria)". To the best of my knowledge there is no such thing. Google returns no hits; Google scholar returns no hits; dictionary.com returns no hits. There is such a thing as a 'chromophore', but it's not just a typo because a chromophore is 'A chemical group capable of selective light absorption resulting in the coloration of certain organic compounds.' Not a type of bacterium. Anyone know what they could be referring to? I think the article's just company puffery.
That's what your immune system is for! Seriously, have you ever heard of anyone getting sick from a keyboard? There's a really scary tendancy these days to think that all bacteria are evil, and if one ever comes near you you'll die horribly. In fact, there are more baacterial cells in and on the human body than there are human ones. Everything you touch is covered in bacteria. Most of them are harmless, some are beneficial (you couldn't live without your gut flora), and a few are pathogenic, but even pathogenic ones are unlikely to exist on a keyboard in sufficient numbers to harm a healthy adult.
Over-use of anyibacterials encourages the spread of resistance, and may even lead to conditions such as asthma.
They store everything, every little variant of every gene that they can find in any species. And it's not just stamp collecting; modern genetics is becoming more and more reverse genetics. This means that instead of using the traditional "knock out a gene and see what happens to the mouse" approach, scientists studying a particular condition identify regions of the genome that appear to be different in patients with the condition (using markers like single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)), find a gene in that vicinity, sequence it and then compare that sequence with all of those in the databases to try and figure out what it codes for. It's a hugely powerful technique, and totally dependant upon having a comprehensive database.
I don't know if you noticed, but the author of the Guardian piece is Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, a publication which looks at genuine research in a mocking sort of way. They award the IgNobel Prizes for research which "cannot or should not be respeated". Abrahams books are absolutely classic.
Believe it or not, women actually read slashdot, check out the Reg, and have a long list of tech sites bookmarked. Some of us can even write code, so long as we have a really pretty IDE to do it in, and are at no risk of breaking our fingernails.
Lovelock has always been a drama que^H^H fearlessly outspoken scientific maverick. The Gaia hypothesis was considered pretty outrageous when he proposed it in the mid 1960s, and it dodn't become mainstream(ish) until Weak Gaia was introduced. Most people would agree that the world is a complex, interlocking, dynamic system, but some of us draw the line at a loving (or vengeful) Mother Goddess. And with a new book coming out, what does he have to lose by cranking up the hysteria? It's just like the good old days.
It's a corollary of Godwin's Law: "As any slashdot discussion about science grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Intelligent Design approaches 1"
The abstract of the paper in question:
"We solve the Kato problem for divergence form elliptic operators whose
heat kernels satisfy a pointwise Gaussian upper bound. More precisely, given
the Gaussian hypothesis, we establish that the domain of the square root of a
complex uniformly elliptic operator L = div(A) with bounded measurable
coefficients in Rn is the Sobolev space H1(Rn) in any dimension with the
estimate Lf2 f2. We note, in particular, that for such operators,
the Gaussian hypothesis holds always in two dimensions."
No, I don't understand it, either! Something tells me this is one of those classic problems that you just can't explain in words of one syllable...
Slashdot Mirror
This explains a lot about the general quality of blogs...and my students' assignments. Have you ever heard of editing?
For more lighthearted biological names that you ever dreamed were possible, check out Curiousities of Biological Nemenclature
My personal favourite (relevent, too!) is "Tyrannasorus rex Ratcliffe and Ocampo, 2001 (Miocene hybosorid scarab from Dominican amber) The dinosaur is spelled Tyrannosaurus." Tyrant King beetle?
You're doing better than a lot of us, then :)
OK, so life is difficult to define (but we know it when we see it!). But things all life known to date share are the use of DNA / RNA / proteins to encode and transmit the information needed to construct copies of the original. So I think viruses have a good claim to being alive. Further, it is pretty generally agreed that viruses have evolved from more complex intracellular parasites (and there are many of those, and none of them are considered not to be alive). And they are still evolving - just look at the current bird flu scare. Is it possible to evolve from "alive" to "not alive"?
Paul Davies published a book on this a couple of years ago. He believes that Earth may well have been seeded with life from Mars, and we are the last surviving Martians. He's got a reasonable amount of data to support it, too.
Psychological Science
The abstract: "Research on exposure to television and movie violence suggests that playing violent video games will increase aggressive behavior. A metaanalytic review of the video-game research literature reveals that violent video games increase aggressive behavior in children and young adults. Experimental and nonexperimental studies with males and females in laboratory and field settings support this conclusion. Analyses also reveal that exposure to violent video games increases physiological arousal and aggression-related thoughts and feelings. Playing violent video games also decreases prosocial behavior."
I haven't studied the topic in depth, but the research does appear to be there
The interesting thing is that this one and only victory was won by immunization, not by drugs. Maybe the development of hordes of new anti-resistance drugs is not the way to go after all?
Maybe it's because we developed those social skills early on that we became so dangerous more recently?
Back to the rats. Rats are easily infected with Toxoplasma, and have been the subject of a lot of experimentation. Infection tends to lead to the establishment of Toxoplasma cysts in the brain, and alteration of the rat's behaviour. Infected rats tend to be more active and less afraid of novelty, both of which behaviours are likely to place the rat at increased risk of predation by cats. The changes go further than that, however. Rats are inherently, and understandably, afraid of the odour of cats. Even lab rats which have not been exposed to cats for generations will avoid areas marked with cat urine. Toxoplasma infected rats do not, however, share this aversion; in fact, rats tested in pens marked with different types of scent (rat urine, cat urine, rabbit urine and water) actually seemed to be suicidally attracted to the cat-scented areas . The infected rats appeared to be completely healthy in all other ways .
The implications of this research are enough to send a frisson of fear down the spine of anyone, devoted parasitologist or otherwise. Toxoplasma infection is common amongst humans. It has been estimated that 30% of the global human population may be infected, with prevalence in specific countries ranging from 22% in the UK to 84% in France. Can the parasite affect human behaviour in the way in which it affects that of rats? The answer appears to be "yes". One manner in which this happens is via direct damage to the host's brain and central nervous system. Babies born to mothers infected with Toxoplasma early in fetal development can suffer from widespread disease, including mental retardation . Infection later in development can lead to a persistant infection with no apparent symptoms, with the parasite forming cysts in the brain. With any luck the immune system can keep the parasite under control; depression of the immune system, however, can result in its reactivation, with consequent neurological or psychiatric effects.
It has also been suggested that prenatal exposure to toxoplasmosis can increase an individual's susceptibility to schizophrenia , but because of the difficulty of experimenting in this area, there is little supporting evidence , although it is interesting to note that several of the drugs used in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder inhibit the replication of Toxoplasma . Does the manipulation hypothesis hold in humans? If it does, it must be only as a non-adaptive side effect of the ability to manipuate hosts such as mice and rats, since, as Joanne Webster points out in a fascinating review article on the subject , humans are rarely preyed upon by cats. There does appear to be some evidence that human personality traits are affected by Toxoplasma infection, but the one study that has specifically looked for an effect is less than wholly convincing. Flegr and Hrdý, found that men with chronic Toxoplasma infections had a greater tendency to disregard rules and were more suspecting, jealous and dogmatic than non-infected controls . However, the number of males tested was only 195, of whom 56 were infected, and the effect disappeared entirely if the male and female subjects were analyzed together. This research provides a fascinating, if somewhat disturbing, hint of an effect, but it seems safe to say that most of us are more than mere parasite-controlled robots.
Email headers are not hard to spoof. I have several times sent myself spam about things which I would have expected myself to have known that I didn't want to buy...
I don't understand it either :)
A quick search of PubMed returns 72 references to "phage therapy", the first of which is "Phage therapy: Facts and fiction." in the International Journal of Medicalmicrobiology. I haven't read any of them, but there are also titles such as "Use of bacteriophage in the treatment of experimental animal bacteremia from imipenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa.(Int J Mol Med.)", "Bacteriophage therapy to reduce Campylobacter jejuni colonization of broiler chickens. (Appl Environ Microbiol.)", and "Bacteriophage Esc-A is an efficient therapy for Escherichia coli 3-1 caused diarrhea in chickens. (J Gen Appl Microbiol.)", all from 2005. So I think you could conclude that it's anactive research area and producing results.
Very nice work, but I wish university press release writers would resist the urge to consider all readers as idiots who can only understand science if it's dumbed down/sensationalized!
This has already been tried, in Australia. In fact, the law won an IgNobel prize for John Keogh and the Australian Patent Office for patenting the wheel in the year 2001. Apparently he did it to demonstrate that the new patent laws were pointless. I have no idea if his patent has ever been challenged in court!
Education is not facts and repitition. Education should be about teaching children how to learn, and giving them the basic tools and support to go out and learn what they need/want/love to know. Young children have this drive built in; one of the problems with our current educational paradigm is that we take active youngsters and make them sit still behind desks for hours on end listening to adults repetitively telling them facts. People with an enquiring mind are far less likely to fall for belief-based ideas like ID. Once you start reading and looking critically at the world around you, evolution makes a lot of sense.
Real education is definately a task for skilled teachers, who can inspire enthusiasm and curiosity. Without them you go back to the disastrous no-discipline open-plan mess that was all-too-often education in the 70s.
I hate to be a party pooper, but I have doubts about this whole article. I spent many years working in image analysis (not that long ago!) and the claims they make seem extreme to me. Granted, they give no technical details, so I can't give a proper opinion. One point that worries me, though, is the reference to "chromofours (or acne-causing bacteria)". To the best of my knowledge there is no such thing. Google returns no hits; Google scholar returns no hits; dictionary.com returns no hits. There is such a thing as a 'chromophore', but it's not just a typo because a chromophore is 'A chemical group capable of selective light absorption resulting in the coloration of certain organic compounds.' Not a type of bacterium. Anyone know what they could be referring to? I think the article's just company puffery.
Over-use of anyibacterials encourages the spread of resistance, and may even lead to conditions such as asthma.
They store everything, every little variant of every gene that they can find in any species. And it's not just stamp collecting; modern genetics is becoming more and more reverse genetics. This means that instead of using the traditional "knock out a gene and see what happens to the mouse" approach, scientists studying a particular condition identify regions of the genome that appear to be different in patients with the condition (using markers like single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)), find a gene in that vicinity, sequence it and then compare that sequence with all of those in the databases to try and figure out what it codes for. It's a hugely powerful technique, and totally dependant upon having a comprehensive database.
I don't know if you noticed, but the author of the Guardian piece is Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, a publication which looks at genuine research in a mocking sort of way. They award the IgNobel Prizes for research which "cannot or should not be respeated". Abrahams books are absolutely classic.
Believe it or not, women actually read slashdot, check out the Reg, and have a long list of tech sites bookmarked. Some of us can even write code, so long as we have a really pretty IDE to do it in, and are at no risk of breaking our fingernails.
Lovelock has always been a drama que^H^H fearlessly outspoken scientific maverick. The Gaia hypothesis was considered pretty outrageous when he proposed it in the mid 1960s, and it dodn't become mainstream(ish) until Weak Gaia was introduced. Most people would agree that the world is a complex, interlocking, dynamic system, but some of us draw the line at a loving (or vengeful) Mother Goddess. And with a new book coming out, what does he have to lose by cranking up the hysteria? It's just like the good old days.
Correctly used apostrophes. In two sequential words. In a slashdot post. Must be an AMD marketing sock puppet!
It's a corollary of Godwin's Law: "As any slashdot discussion about science grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Intelligent Design approaches 1"
No, I don't understand it, either! Something tells me this is one of those classic problems that you just can't explain in words of one syllable...
(Man) + Woman = !Baby