Dead Racists Society

Maybe:

The soil on Mars may contain microbial life, according to a new interpretation of data first collected more than 30 years ago.

The search for life on Mars appeared to hit a dead end in 1976 when Viking landers touched down on the red planet and failed to detect biological activity.

But Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said on Friday the spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface.

His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin.

That is roughly comparable to biomass levels found in some Antarctic permafrost, home to a range of hardy bacteria and lichen.

"It is interesting because one part per thousand is not a small amount," Houtkooper said in a telephone interview.

"We will have to find confirmatory evidence and see what kind of microbes these are and whether they are related to terrestrial microbes. It is a possibility that life has been transported from Earth to Mars or vice versa a long time ago."

Awesome news on the reproductive science front:

The first baby created from an egg matured in the lab, frozen, thawed and then fertilised, has been born.

Until now it was not known whether eggs obtained in this way could survive thawing to be fertilised.

...

Canadian researchers told a fertility conference in Lyon three others were expecting babies by the same process.

Why is this important?

The advance spares women from taking risky fertility drugs that can cause a rare, yet deadly condition - ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS).

...

The findings hold particular hope for patients with cancer-related fertility problems.

Chemotherapy can cause infertility and, therefore, some women with cancer opt to have their eggs collected and frozen before they start their cancer treatment.

But not all women will want or be able to delay having chemotherapy to undergo ovarian stimulation.

Certain tumours, including some breast cancers, can grow if the woman takes drugs to stimulate the ovaries, for example.

Although one of the doctors involved cautioned that the technique hadn't yet been tried on women with cancer.

I just read this, which is a summation of an interesting study done on childhood development of color recognition. I'm not going to talk about the whole thing (except to say that I, too, had the same idea for a prank as he did), just this one paragraph that really stood out at me:

A large body of research has shown that adults categorize colors into eleven basic categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey. These categories have been tested extensively, even across cultures, and found to be readily identifiable by all adults. When asked to name colors across a wide spectrum of possibilities, most people use the basic color categories to describe even the colors that fall on the border between two categories.

This brings up something interesting about Russian that I had noticed but not really considered before my Comparative Mythology professor pointed it out. He was discussing how we tend to naturally divide things into categories, especially into binary categories: left & right, up & down, black & white, male & female, dead & alive, human & not human. And when we find things that don't fit in either category, we get rather distressed. Consider how much opposition to gay rights comes from the belief that gay men aren't truly "masculine" -- they don't fit neatly into the perceived categories of "male" and "female". Or abortion -- a fetus isn't quite "human", but it's not quite "not human" either.

But I digress. In the course of this brief discussion, he brought up an interesting fact about Russian: they have two words for what we would consider "blue". There's синий ("cee-nee") and there's голубой ("gah-loo-boy"), which translate respectively to "blue" and "light blue." As my Mythology professor drilled home to me: to us, these are fairly arbitrary distinctions, as "light blue" is just a subset of "blue"; but to Russians, these are two completely different colors. So my Russian textbook has not eleven basic colors, but twelve -- the eleven mentioned above, plus "light blue." I really do have to wonder how cross-cultural these color studies actually are. I suppose if limited to just those eleven choices a Russian could decide that something they'd normally call голубой fits more with "blue" than any of the other categories, but still.

It's recently been discovered that some female sharks are capable of parthenogenesis:

Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.

The joint Northern Ireland-U.S. research, being published Wednesday in the Royal Society's peer-reviewed Biology Letter journal, analyzed the DNA of a shark born in 2001 in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb. The shark was born in a tank with three potential mothers, none of whom had contact with a male hammerhead for at least three years.

The baby was killed within hours of its birth by a stingray in the same tank. Analysis of its DNA found no trace of any chromosomal contribution from a male partner.

Shark experts said this was the first confirmed case in a shark of parthenogenesis, which is derived from Greek and means "virgin birth."

Asexual reproduction is common in some insect species, rarer in reptiles and fish, and has never been documented in mammals. The list of animals documented as capable of the feat has grown along with the numbers being raised in captivity — but until now, sharks were not considered a likely candidate.

...

Before the study, many shark experts had presumed that the Nebraska birth involved a female shark's well-documented ability to store sperm for months. This seemed the most plausible scenario even though the sharks had arrived at the Nebraska zoo as immature pups.

The lack of any paternal DNA in the baby shark ruled out this possibility.

"This phenomenon has now been demonstrated in all major vertebrate groups except for mammals. Birds do it, reptiles do it, amphibians do it, fishes do it, and now sharks are known to do it," said Bob Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., who was not involved in the project.

New evidence for dark matter:

A team of scientists say they have found the most convincing evidence so far that the mysterious stuff known as dark matter really exists: a gigantic ring of invisible material left over from the ancient collision of galaxy clusters.

Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope stumbled on the ring — about 2.6 million light years across — while studying the galaxy cluster CI 0024+17, which is about 5 billion light years from Earth.

Although scientists have found evidence of dark matter previously, this is the first time dark matter has been found to assume a structure different from the surrounding visible matter.

...

Previous observations of the Bullet Cluster, 3.4 billion light years away in the constellation Carina, using Hubble and the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory showed dark matter being pulled apart by the hot gas of the two clusters. But the dark matter was imprinted with the shape of the visible matter.

The dark matter ring in CI 0024+17 does not follow any of the cluster's contours.

The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose

--Haldane's Law

A study was published recently on the "coevolution of male and female genital morphology in waterfowl". That is, it has long been recognized that there is a wide amount of variation in penises among those species of birds that have them. But no-one, until now, had bothered to look at the genitalia of the females of the species. The results are very interesting.

In some species of ducks, a female bonds for a season with a male. But she is also harassed by other males that force her to mate. "It's nasty business. Females are often killed or injured," Dr. Brennan said.

Species with more forced mating tend to have longer phalluses. That link led some scientists to argue that the duck phallus was the result of males' competing with one another to fertilize eggs.

"Basically, you get a bigger phallus to put your sperm in farther than the other males," Dr. Brennan said.

Dr. Brennan realized that scientists had made this argument without looking at the female birds. Perhaps, she wondered, the two sexes were coevolving, with elaborate lower oviducts driving the evolution of long phalluses.

To test this idea, Dr. Brennan traveled to Alaska. Many species of waterfowl breed there, with a wide range of mating systems. Working with Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska and his colleagues, she caught and dissected 16 species of ducks and geese, comparing the male and female anatomy.

If a male bird had a long phallus, the female tended to have a more elaborate lower oviduct. And if the male had a small phallus, the female tended to have a simple oviduct. "The correlation was incredibly tight," Dr. Brennan said. "When you dissected one of the birds, it was really easy to predict what the other sex was going to look like."

Some of these elaborations included spirals in the vagina, anywhere from none to eight full 360° twists, and up to three pouches near the cloaca where sperm can be deposited, but that don't function for sperm storage.

Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then expel it. "It only makes sense as a barrier," she said.

To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced matings. "To me, it means these females are successful with this strategy," she said.

Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. "The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus," she said.

Other scientists have documented a similar coevolution of genitals in flies and other invertebrates. But Dr. Brennan's study is the clearest example of this arms race in vertebrates.

"It's rare to find something so blatantly obvious in the female anatomy," Dr. Brennan said. "I'm sure it's going on in other vertebrates, but it's probably going in ways that are more subtle and harder to figure out."

The paper is available for free on-line.
( A portion of the paper under the cut )

Scientists are developing devices that can read brain-waves... for incorporation into toys.

A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber. But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game — a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb — portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play.

Technology from NeuroSky and other startups could make video games more mentally stimulating and realistic. It could even enable players to control video game characters or avatars in virtual worlds with nothing but their thoughts.

Adding biofeedback to "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," for instance, could mean that only those players who muster Zen-like concentration could nail a put. In the popular action game "Grand Theft Auto," players who become nervous or frightened would have worse aim than those who remain relaxed and focused.

NeuroSky's prototype measures a person's baseline brain-wave activity, including signals that relate to concentration, relaxation and anxiety. The technology ranks performance in each category on a scale of 1 to 100, and the numbers change as a person thinks about relaxing images, focuses intently, or gets kicked, interrupted or otherwise distracted.

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While NeuroSky's headset has one electrode, Emotiv Systems Inc. has developed a gel-free headset with 18 sensors. Besides monitoring basic changes in mood and focus, Emotiv's bulkier headset detects brain waves indicating smiles, blinks, laughter, even conscious thoughts and unconscious emotions. Players could kick or punch their video game opponent — without a joystick or mouse.

"It fulfills the fantasy of telekinesis," said Tan Le, co-founder and president of San Francisco-based Emotiv.

The 30-person company hopes to begin selling a consumer headset next year, but executives would not speculate on price. A prototype hooks up to gaming consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.

...

CyberLearning is already selling the SmartBrain Technologies system for the original PlayStation, PS2 and original Xbox, and it will soon work with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The EEG- and EMG-based biofeedback system costs about $600, not including the game console or video games.

Kids who play the race car video game "Gran Turismo" with the SmartBrain system can only reach maximum speed when they're focused. If attention wanes or players become impulsive or anxious, cars slow to a chug.

I'm already imagining an Avalon-style RPG.

Geez.... Scientists have created a map of dark matter distribution in the universe:

Dark matter, the ubiquitous yet ethereal stuff filling the cosmos, has been mapped three-dimensionally for the first time by a team of astronomers using a fleet of orbiting and ground-based telescopes. Implementing techniques not even dreamed of when dark matter was first postulated, they have created a map two degrees on a side (roughly 15 times the area of the full Moon) and 6 billion light years deep. The Cosmic Evolution Survey, or COSMOS, reveals the spatial distribution of dark matter stretching back to a time when the Universe was half its present age.

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The COSMOS team made their map of dark matter by exploiting a peculiar characteristic of gravity: its ability to warp space. Einstein postulated that gravity bends space like a bowling ball placed in the middle of a bed distorts the mattress. Light moving through empty space travels in a straight line, but if it passes by a mass, the gravity will bend the light's path. How much the path bends depends on how much mass there is and how it's distributed.

That is how scientists can detect dark matter. Mass (both visible and invisible) twists, bends, and warps the light from distant galaxies on its way from there to here. The visible mass can be measured in several ways, and by subtracting the visible component from the total mass, researchers are able to find the location and quantity of dark matter.

...

The result is nothing less than profound: a three-dimensional map millions of light years across and billions deep, showing the location of trillions of solar masses of invisible ethereal stuff that only decades ago was a complete mystery.

Even glancing at the map reveals insights into the Universe. The left hand side represents matter that is close to us, and the right side is farther away. We see more distant matter as it was farther in the past, so in a sense we have a time machine that lets us understand the Universe as it was 6 billion years ago. In the past, dark matter formed huge structures spanning hundreds of millions of light years across. But in more recent history, these enormous blobs have broken into smaller, scattered clumps. This shows that over time, the gravity of the big structures made them collapse into an array of smaller ones—just as modern theories of cosmology have predicted.

COSMOS verifies theory's next prediction, too: Once dark matter condensed into smaller blobs, its gravity would increase, drawing in more dark matter and normal matter. Eventually, the normal matter would gather near clumps of dark matter, so wherever we see large amounts of dark matter today, we should also see normal matter. The survey confirms this; the visible matter detected lies roughly along the same positions as the dark matter.

Of course, as the article points out, this only covers around 1/10,000th of the sky, and it still doesn't tell us what dark matter is.

But still... wow.

What's more dangerous than Giant Killer Bees from Mars?

Robotic Killer Bees from Israel

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, according to an Israeli newspaper.

The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said on Friday.

I suppose if Uncle Frank's proposal ever got off the ground, we'd have Giant Robotic Killer Bees Sent to Mars by a Jew, which would clearly combine the most vicious talents of the other bees.

Uri Geller is seeking an "heir" on TV:

A reality television show being produced in
Israel, where Geller grew up, will feature 10 contestants vying for the title of "heir" to the world-famous celebrity psychic.

"The format will be something like 'American Idol'. We will keep the performances that are most riveting and amazing," Geller told Reuters Wednesday, adding that viewers with "intuitive powers" will also be invited to call in and compete.

The last paragraph is kind of odd:

"This is not a show where people have to prove to me that they are for real," Geller said, adding that he has no plans to retire. "I just want to be amazed."

So... it doesn't matter whether they're "real" psychics or not, as long as what they do looks impressive? That seems to scream "scam artist" to me.

I just pray that James Randi will be one of the judges!

Oh, and remember the proposed invisibility cloak from May? Well, there's apparently been some success on that front:

U.S. and British scientists said on Thursday they had found a way to hide an object from microwave radiation in a first step towards making a what they hope will be an invisibility cloak.

Such a device could be used to elude radar, but the researchers, like many scientists, are not working with any particular goal in mind but hope its uses will become apparent later.

"It's not quite Harry Potter," said David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina, referring to the child's fictional character who can conceal himself in a magical cloak.

"It's not exactly perfect -- we can do better -- but it demonstrates the mechanism, the way the waves swirl around the centre region where you want to conceal things," he said.

I just have to add that when I was first reading this, I glanced over the phrase "David Smith of Duke University" and read that as "David Duke." I was rather puzzled as to why they interviewed him for this article.

The first cloak was a two-dimensional version and researchers have already started work on a three-dimensional version. They also want to broaden the range of wavelengths that it can block, although making something invisible to the human eye would present a much greater challenge.

"It is very unlikely that we could do it with this technology in the visible (spectrum)," Smith said. It would have to be scaled down to nanotechnology levels, but the metals involved behave differently on that scale, he said.

But this just confuses me:

In a very speculative application, he added, "one could imagine 'cloaking' acoustic waves, so as to shield a region from vibration or seismic activity."

Um, what? This material seems to bend electromagnetic waves around it--how would that help with vibrations?

Introducing smell-o-vision!

Scientists ponder invisibility cloak

Imagine an invisibility cloak that works just like the one
Harry Potter inherited from his father. Researchers in England and the United States think they know how to do that. They are laying out the blueprint and calling for help in developing the exotic materials needed to build a cloak.

The keys are special manmade materials, unlike any in nature or the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. These materials are intended to steer light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation around an object, rendering it as invisible as something tucked into a hole in space.

...

Scientists not involved in the work said it presents a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.

"This is very interesting science and a very interesting idea and it is supported on a great mathematical and physical basis," said Nader Engheta, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Engheta has done his own work on invisibility using novel materials called metamaterials.

Pendry and his co-authors also propose using metamaterials because they can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation — radio waves and visible light, for example — in any direction.

A cloak made of those materials, with a structure designed down to the submicroscopic scale, would neither reflect light nor cast a shadow.

Instead, like a river streaming around a smooth boulder, light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation would strike the cloak and simply flow around it, continuing on as if it never bumped up against an obstacle. That would give an onlooker the apparent ability to peer right through the cloak, with everything tucked inside concealed from view.

Wouldn't that mean that the wearer couldn't see anything, if it were completely enshrouding him?

More information available here.

The Universe Before It Began:

Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing the universe to "bounce" apart. This big bounce is what we now know as the Big Bang. The group published its analysis in the April 12th issue of Physical Review Letters.

...

Loop quantum gravity also predicts a small repulsive component of gravitational force, which is a non-factor in other theories. At most densities, even the extremely high density of an atom's nucleus, this component has no significant effect. But as density increases, approaching 10⁷⁵ times the nuclear density, this repulsion begins to dominate. According to the Ashtekar's equations, this appears to be what happened to the universe before ours: As it collapsed, it became so dense that gravity started to, in a sense, work backwards, birthing our universe.

Singh, Ashtekar's postdoc, noted that the group's conclusions are eerily similar to findings published by Princeton researcher Paul Steinhardt two weeks ago. Using string theory, Steinhardt concluded that the universe may be cyclic, with each crunch leading to a bounce.

Songbirds may be able to learn grammar:

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

"This is a car. It's been specially chosen to be destroyed because it's old, it's white, but more importantly, because it's French."

Smell-o-vision comes to the big screen:

Japanese cinema audiences will soon be able to enjoy a completely different sensory experience.

A new service from a major telecommunications company, NTT Communications Corp, will synchronise seven different smells to parts of the movie The New World, starring Colin Farrell.

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Cinemas will be able to download from the internet different scent sequences for other films, Suzaki said.

The company began a similar service for homes in Japan last year. Owners of the $US620 home version can download different programs to emit smells to accompany a horoscope reading or work as aromatherapy.

Owners must keep refilling the machine with fragrant liquids. NTT Communications would not disclose how many machines it has sold.

I came across this awesome article showing how quantum mechanics are apparently connected to the series of prime numbers. Nothing overly technical--in fact, I'd prefer if the author had gone into more detail--but a fascinating read nonetheless.

God didn't intend for humans to engage in all these unnatural sexual acts like sodomy and fellatio and other words that Debora won't recognize and should not ever, ever look up.

No, this is how God intended sex to be:

Drosophila seminal fluid has the property of reducing the female's interest in remating, increasing her rate of egg-laying, and is also mildly toxic. Artificial selection in the lab can produce females that are resistant to the effects, and males that produce more and more potent semen to overcome their resistance, to the point where the line of "super potent" males, when crossed to unselected females, kill their partners with their ejaculations.

Gadget Lets Authors Sign Books From Afar:

Margaret Atwood has had enough of long journeys, late nights and writer's cramp. Tired of grueling book tours, the Booker Prize-winning Canadian author on Sunday unveiled her new invention: a remote-controlled pen that allows writers to sign books for fans from thousands of miles away.

...

"I think of this as a democratizing device," said Atwood, whose appearances draw hundreds of fans willing to stand in long lines for a word and an autograph.

"You cannot be in five countries at the same time. But you can be in five countries at the same time with the LongPen."

...

Atwood set up a company with Gibson and several others to produce the device, naming the firm Unotchit — pronounced "you no touch it."

They plan to lease the gadget, rather than sell it, renting it out to publishers for one-time signing events or tours. Atwood hopes publishers will use it to promote lesser-known authors and to bring author signings to small towns and small countries that usually aren't on the book tour circuit.

Publishers are intrigued by the idea. Both Bloomsbury and Atwood's other British publisher, Virago, invested in the project.

"This creates the possibility of an entirely new book-promotion event that will inject new life into the marketing of books and authors' relationship with their readers," said Bloomsbury's Newton.

Dejan Papic of Atwood's Serbian publisher, Laguna, said the device could help bring international authors — at least virtually — to his small, poor, European country.

"We are not always in a position to invite international authors and pay their costs," he said.

...

Atwood said the gadget had applications — from education to law — beyond the traditional book tour. It can already sign hockey sticks; Gibson and his team are working on basketballs.

Japanese Device Uses Laser Plasma to Display 3D Images in the Air