Yes, I am a month behind on this, but if you haven’t seen Beware the Believers yet, now is your second chance. I’m not sure exactly what side of the Evolution – ID battle the creators of this video support, but don’t miss it. (PZ apparently thinks they are coming down on the side of the good guys – link also has a brief sequel and full credits)
This is why mankind created the Internets
Artists: Sachiko Kodama, Minako Takeno
“In space, if unprotected pieces of metal touch each other, they stick together permanently.”
Tip of the hat to Auxiliary to the World
NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.
“These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, Washington.
The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”
Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.
Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”
Next week he will announce that Bill Dembski will be the new Secretary of Education.
New Scientist has an article about a new painkiller being developed from a substance in human saliva that is non-addictive and more powerful than morphine.
Saliva from humans has yielded a natural painkiller up to six times more powerful than morphine, researchers say.
The substance, dubbed opiorphin, may spawn a new generation of natural painkillers that relieve pain as well as morphine but without the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug.
When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.
[...]
Rougeot and colleagues discovered that opiorphin works in nerve cells of the spine by stopping the usual destruction of natural pain-killing opiates there, called enkephalins.
Opiorphin is such a simple molecule that it should be possible to synthesise it and produce large quantities without having to isolate it from saliva, Rougeot explains. Alternatively, it might be possible to find drugs which trigger patients’ bodies to produce more of the molecule themselves.
What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
Thanks to advances in DNA technology, scientists can now reconstruct new copies of old viruses. Last year United States government scientists reconstructed the virus that caused the influenza epidemic of 1918. Now a team of French scientists has rebuilt a virus that infected our apelike ancestors several million years ago.
I also saw this on New Scientist:
Fathers: watch what you say. It seems dads may have more of an influence on their children’s language development than they might think.
Lynne Vernon-Feagans at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her colleagues sat in on playtime with 92 families with dual incomes, observing how much each parent spoke to their child, the words and sentence structures they used, and the types of questions they asked.
Children whose father’s vocabulary was more varied when they were 2 years old had more advanced language skills at age 3. Surprisingly, the dads spoke less and asked fewer questions than the mothers, suggesting it was not how much they spoke but what they said and how they said it that resonated with their children.
The issue of my amatory consort and I will be guerdoned with an ample lexicon.
The mother’s vocabulary did not seem to have a significant impact on language development. However, because most of the mothers in the study used a large number of words when talking to their children, there could also be a threshold at which a large vocabulary ceases to be an advantage to the child, says Vernon-Feagans. “Perhaps when parents’ vocabulary falls below such a threshold, as is more likely to occur with fathers in this study, children’s later expressive language development may be negatively impacted,” she says (Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2006.08.003).
Men no like words.
This is very cool:
The first known organisms that live totally independently of the sun have been discovered deep in a South African gold mine.
The bacteria exist without the benefit of photosynthesis by harvesting the energy of natural radioactivity to create food for themselves. Similar life forms may exist on other planets, experts speculate.
The bacteria live in ancient water trapped in a crack in basalt rock, 3 to 4 kilometres down. Scientists from Princeton University in New Jersey, US, and colleagues analysed water from the fissure after it was penetrated by a narrow exploratory shaft in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. The shaft was then closed.
[...]
Uranium and other radioactive elements in the rock emit radiation that shatters water molecules, producing high-energy hydrogen gas that is able to cleave chemical bonds.The bacteria exploit this hydrogen gas to turn sulphate (SO4) molecules from the rock into hydrogen sulphide (H2S). It is the energy-trapping equivalent of photosynthesis. The energy of radiation, which makes hydrogen gas energetic enough to form these bonds, replaces the energy of the Sun.
[...]
Other sulphate-eating bacteria have been found in ocean sediments, volcanoes and oil deposits. But all have either received some chemicals produced by photosynthesis, or it has not been clear whether they were trapped and dying, or flourishing.A study of the inert gases in the sample, such as xenon, show that the Mponeng water has been isolated from the surface for 20 million years, says Lin. This shows that the bacteria must live totally “independent from surface photosynthesisâ€.
Stuff like this makes me think that life may be a lot more common than we think.
