Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in cubbi's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 24th, 2012
11:43 pm	February 2012 in science Lake Vostok, the largest of Antarctica's buried lakes, was reached, after 22 years of drilling, at 3,769.3 meters down, narrowly (in terms of years) beating UK and US, each drilling to their own 15-million year old lake. Speaking of ice, Tyrolean Iceman's genome was sequenced. He had severe arteriosclerosis despite leading the healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle. He also had Lyme. Speaking of arteries, Alex, the world's smartest parrot, died of hardened arteries halfway through the experiment where he had shown that he can recognize and add arabic numerals to the sum of 8. The US government decided to return to allowing (and funding) new nuclear power plants, for the first time since 1978, but nobody wants to build them (except one company with two new reactors). Majorana fermions, which are their own antiparticles, may have been detected. Semptember's faster-then-light neutrinos, on the other hand, turned out to be a timing error, after all. Venus is slowing down pretty fast: the day there in 2007 was 6.5 minutes slower than in 1991. Iron selenide becomes superconductive at high pressure through a new kind of phase transition. In cool biology news, functional cancer-killing nanorobots were made using DNA origami. Also, GPCRs can be docked sideways, by lipids, from within the membrane. 30,000 year old plants from the mammoth steppe ecosystem were brought back to life from permafrost. In 50 - 200 million years in the future, we're going to have a new supercontinent, Amasia, centered on the North Pole, following the neat pattern of orthoversion (each supercontinent forms 90 degrees from the last one) Squids fly not just to avoid predators, it's also easier than swimming. A hot spring archaeon in Kamchatka was caught in the act of diverging into two species. One atom-thick sheet of silica glass was created by mistake, while working on graphene. It appears the hobbits (Homo floresiensis) were not modern human cretins after all. A researcher who happened to be collecting whale poop during 9/11 discovered just how much chronic stress the whales are under because of all the underwater noise from distant ships. Little boys with big chins have small index fingers. Men think that the women in red are interested in sex. And finally, The Ponytail Equation was created, as part of the general theory on the distribution of human hair in a bundle. Current Mood: geeky (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 6th, 2012
5:44 pm	Science in January 2012: from shrooms to worm-eating plants Wow, I'm still so much behind... Can't wait to post about the physics of spilling coffee, but it was in May.. so, back to January: The effects of psychedelic mushrooms on humans were studied with fMRI: they actually shut down parts of the brain, not increase brain activity as many people imagined. Those parts just happen to regulate the flow of information through the brain. The online game FoldIt, a crowdsourced biochemistry experiment which already solved a few real folding problems, now gave us a first win in the area of novel protein design. The only known non-artificial example of a quasicrystal (crystal with the "impossible" 5-fold symmetry, awarded 2011 Nobel Prize), was found, and it was extraterrestrial. Tranquillityite, the last of the moon minerals that has been missing on Earth, was finally found, in small amounts in Australia. Russian probe sent to return soil samples from Phobos failed to leave Earth's orbit and crashed in the Pacific. In math news, there are no 16-clue Sudoku puzzles The human pupils contract not just when we are looking at a bright object, but also when we think we are looking at a bright object, meaning this is not your textbook reflex. The individual words a person hears can be reconstructed directly from brain activity. IBM demonstrated that data storage is possible using antiferromagnetism In ever-graphic biology, boa constrictors stop squeezing their victims when they feel their heart stop The little dance performed by dung beetles on top of their balls of poop is really to correct navigational errors. New world's smallest vertebrate is a 7.7 mm frog from New Guinea, beating the former record-holding 7.9 mm fish from Indonesia. A predatory plant was found that grows sticky underground leaves that trap and digest worms. Fat tissue stem cells were successfully used to restore cut-up and scarred rat penises There is a fungus that eats lead. Planarians (and possibly other flatworms) have no centrosomes, fundamental parts of all (other) animal cells. The ever-ridiculous AIDS-denialists managed to get a paper published, same one that was withdrawn three years earlier, causing two editors to resign. Current Mood: geeky (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
12:57 am	There's no seltzer in Michigan Something we learned during last weekend spent in a Detroit suburb, at Furry Connection North: the word "seltzer" is completely unknown in that state. The one waitress who knew it said "you must be from New York". Also, waze has replaced google maps as my main navigational app. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 29th, 2012
11:08 pm	December 2011 in science: from buttercups lighting up your chin to emu bits I know I'm slow, new job and all, but still, let's see what kind of news marked the end of 2011 Hummingbirds generate lift on upstroke (not just downstroke), as suggested back in 1939 but never proven until december. We *just* discovered that elephants have six toes. The sixth toe was dismissed 300 years ago as weird cartilage, but it is real, supports weight, has joints, and is built the same way as the panda's thumb. The 2009 paper linking the XRMV virus to cronic fatigue syndrome was fully retracted. In a rare math article in Science, new correlation analysis was developed, which is awesome at finding bizarre but true trivia that applies to a hundred cases out of ten million. The old Voyager spacecrafts are still discovering new stuff, or, in this case, experimentally proving an old hypothesis about star-forming regions. There's a dense gas cloud three times the mass of the Earth that's rapidly moving straight into the otherwise quiet Saggitarus A* supermassive black hole, it's expected to hit it in 2013 Also in astronomy, have you heard about the bar at the center of our galaxy? In other news, The U.S. Presidents don't age faster than other humans. Rats free each other from cages. Pigeons can count as well as primates. And something I never knew about, buttercups light up human chins and there's some interesting physics behind that effect. Also, the long-standing question of how do ostriches achieve erection was finally solved: it's a lymphatic burst, like in ducks, and nothing like the reptilian and mammalian blood-based setup. If you want pics, Nature News has a close-up. Current Mood: geeky (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
3:51 pm	mini-update I changed jobs a month ago. After many years of resistance, I was finally sucked into Manhattan. I'm enjoying the flurry of activity quite a bit, but it's leaving me with even less free time. I did carve out a few days for the road trip to Atlanta for FWA 2012 last weekend, that was actually pretty good. I always thought it was a full thousand miles from my house, turns out it was only 942. East Midtown is really nice to walk around at lunch time, and it's only 10 minutes by subway to Times Square (unfortunately, both Toys'R'Us and Dave'n'Busters DDRs are in not-so-good shape) and now, back to replacing more drywall in the house... Current Mood: busy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, January 30th, 2012
10:39 pm	November 2011 in science: from metallic hydrogen to jump rope falling behind falling behind falling behind! Metallic lattice was created with density less than air, able to spring back after 50% compression. Metallic hydrogen, predicted long ago, was finally created in a lab. On a diamond anvil. Also in material science, MoS2 became the second single-layer material after graphene stabilized by 3D ripples. In physics, the faster-than-light neutrinos from September, widely doubted in October, were re-measured, taking into account some criticisms, and reproduced. I'm not looking ahead at what happened to this since november, don't give me spoilers. Wavefunctions, the ubiquitous mathematical functions that describe quantum systems, might themselves be real, physical objects. More in quantum physics, the 1988 conjecture "a-theorem" not only withstood the test of time, but, it appears, was quietly proved this year. Astronomers found some pristine gas only containing the products of Big Bang. Foam with perfectly optimal packing of bubbles (Weaire-Phelan foam), calculated in 1994, was shown to exist in real life. In addition, new detailed studies of the physics and math of turning pigeons, swirling wine, flowing ink, jumping frogs, and the aerodynamics of jumping rope were all published last November. Organic chemistry turns to trial and error serendipity for cool new reactions. Powered flight does not evolve from gliding, at least not in bats. Humans become unemotional after sleeping. Also, modern humans have trouble with their teeth because the switch to farming changed the shape of the jaw. Cows do not line themselves up along Earth's magnetic field, despite previous reports. The legendary Sunstone of the Vikings, the device that locates the Sun on an overcast day, may have been discovered and shown to work. Current Mood: bouncy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 16th, 2011
2:29 pm	October 2011 in science: from Nobels to hacked laws of physics just two months behind! So what happened in October? The 7 billionth human and the Nobel Prize announcements, of course! Chemistry: Daniel Shechtman who discovered quasicrystals, the theoretically impossible (as any crystallography textbook would tell you) crystal structures with five-fold symmetry. Physics: Saul Perlmutter and Adam Reiss and Brian Schmidt who discovered and measured the rate of the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Medicine: Ralph Steinman who discovered dendritic cells (he died 3 days before the announcement, becoming the first posthumous Nobel Prize winner) with Beutler and Hoffman who discovered Toll-like receptors that comprise our innate immune system. But besides that.. For the first time, skin cells were taken from a person with a genetic disease (of the liver), converted to stem cells, the genetic defect was corrected, and healthy liver-like cells were produced (getting an exact lookalike of any cell type from an iPS is the last bit that hasn't been done yet). Speaking of medical sci-fi turning real a medical implant power source was made that can run on both blood glucose and mechanical motion. First evidence found for seasonal migrations among non-avian dinosaurs -- I guess they were migratory before they were birds? More details on what exactly is the job of adult-generated neurons (I hope you all know by now that brain cells regenerate) The way to turn off the annoying side-effect of morphine, itchiness, was discovered (did you know it had that side-effect?) The secret of how the giant pandas are able to digest and sustain themselves on bamboo (their digestive system is carnivorous!), was identified. They still digest less of it than a human would. Hydrogen isotope ratio of water in Kuiper belt comets suggests that they may have been the source of water on Earth. The "probiotic" yoghurts loaded with live bacteria have no noticable effect on gut bacteria in twin studies and only a subtle effect in force-fed mice. Also in debunking news, the independent climate research, curated, monitored, and endorsed by some global warming denialists, turned up identical to the previous analyses, upsetting the deniers. Commercial quantum cryprography systems, considered to be impossible to break due to laws of physics, were successfully broken using fake quantum entanglement. Can we say laws of physics, hacked? (also, I love the "Plug-and-play Eve" from that article) Current Mood: geeky (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 9th, 2011
1:47 pm	September 2011 in science: from bottle-loving beetles to social network for your gut Will I ever be up to date again on these reviews? Time will tell. For now, here's what caught my eye in september The 2011 Ig Nobel awards were announced, honoring the ground-breaking discoveries: yawning in tortoises is not contagious full bladder hurts attention span as much as 24-hour sleep deprivation but can facilitate unrelated impulse control (inhibition spillover is actually a cool theory) color and shape of beer bottle is a turn-on for the male beetles that try to mate with the bottles. dizziness in discus throwers is related to spinning determination of the ideal density of airborne wasabi for waking up the deaf people. The biggest news story of September was of course the seemingly superluminal neutrinos, but besides that: Dinosaur feathers were found preserved in amber, so now we know exactly what they looked like. Speeaking of fossils, something octaradial from 580 Mya is shaking up the ancient metazoan philogeny. Also, a prehistoric preschool finger painting classroom was apparently discovered, from 13k years ago. Now that there is a spacecraft orbiting Mercury, turns out it's pretty interesting. Too bad NASA hates Venus. While on astronomy, gravitational redshifting (another GR prediction) was tested on 8000 galaxies. It works. Part of yeast genome was artificially re-engineered to include a "scrambling system", which lets us delete and rearrange genes on the fly. The Nile crocodile is actually two unrelated species -- and the researchers who found that out got to do DNA sequencing of crocodile mummies. The stomach ulcer bacterium H.pylori purposefully destroys the DNA of host cells it contacts, which is one reason why it is a cancer risk. Speaking of DNA, it's actually as elastic as Nylon. The bacteria that feeds on uranium in contaminated groundwater, is able to reduce it without coming in direct contact and poisoning itself, using special pili. The blind cavefish P.andruzzii, which lives in total darkness, has a circadian clock, but it's 47 hours rather than 24. For the first time, a viral gene was identified that manipulates host behavior, in the mind-altering virus that convinces the infected foliage-eating caterpillar to crawl up on a tree branch. (once there, it melts its body so it drips the virus on the foliage) A microscope was developed so small that it can be implanted in mouse brains to study them during natural activity. Speaking of brains, four basic tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, and umami, are each processed by a different part of the brain. Sour couldn't be found. When teleported (or when stepping into the wrong floor out of an elevator), it takes at least 125 ms for the brain to sort out the confusion because of how place memories work. Like in other species, human males who spend time with their kids, lose testosterone. There is now a social network website for people who want their gut bacteria sequenced. You can find friends with similar microbes and "directly share experiences". If you got this far, here's a glowing kitten for you! (from this research) Current Mood: geeky (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 4th, 2011
4:17 pm	August 2011 in science: from antimatter around us to kamikaze E.coli I know it's already november, but I will catch up! There was some cool stuff in astronomy, but first, in chemistry news, Molecular orbitals are now visible with a microscope, the same CO-functionalized STM which showed us individual bonds in pentacene and inspired me to start reading (and sharing) science news. Also, ever-bizarre graphene generates electricity when acidic water flows on top of it. In biggest astronomy news, samples of the first extraterrestrial body since the Moon arrived to Earth from asteroid 25143 Itokawa. They look like chondrite meteorites, except for anomalous space weathering speed, anomalous heat in the past, and other odd features. Speaking of the Moon, early Earth may have had two, which merged to give the deeply asymmetric (did you know?) moon we have now. A belt of antiprotons was discovered around Earth, the most abundant source of antimatter anywhere, so far. Also, two ultracool brown dwarfs were found only five parsecs away. And yes, "ultracool" is an astronomical term. Speaking of ultracool, there is a planet made of diamond orbiting some pulsar at a very close orbit. To fuel the nightmares of general population, killer exploding E.coli was bioengineered: once it senses that the dangerous human pathogen P. aeruginosa is nearby, it fills its own body with a toxin, and bursts, killing 99% of the enemy. Speaking of pathogens, Salmonella was found to use an unnatural aminoacid, (R)-β-lysine, in one of its vital proteins. Speaking of unnatural aminoacids, the first mulricellular organism, much abused worm C.elegans, was genetically modified to produce them - the guys who made it just *had* to give their worms evil "cherry red" glow. Oldest fossil ever discovered, 3.4 billion year old remains of sulfur-powered bacteria, looks way more plausible than the older Apex Chert formations, held as the oldest fossil since the 1980s, which were only shown to be inorganic earlier this year. African crested rat gnaws on a poisonous tree and drenches highly-specialized porous hairs on its flanks with the spit. Anyone who wants to mouth the rat finds those flanks offered, unprotected. It's the first placental mammal ever found to use acquired toxicity (besides humans, african hunters put the same tree sap on arrowheads to kill elephants) Mealybugs have gut bacteria that have even smaller bacteria inside them, and can only survive together. Both bacteria lost so much of their genome, the innermost one is almost an organelle. When a pregnant mouse is starving, the placenta digests its own tissues and recycles the raw materials to feed the fetus during critical stages of brain development. Hyenas can count, just like primates and lions. Complex social life makes anyone good at math, right? The gene was identified that is responsible for people without fingerprints -- there are only four families known on Earth where this mutation is present. And yes, once in a while they try to visit the USA. Current Mood: geeky (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 21st, 2011
4:47 pm	July 2011 in science: disappearing diamonds and soda can acoustics I've been spending too much time with C++ on and off work, gotta remember my roots. Let's see if I can catch up on the past few months of random bits of science news that I thought were interesting! Here's what I was supposed to post about on august 1st: Venerable Archaeopteryx is no longer the first bird, its feathers and other superficially avialan features evolved a bit earlier than what is now considered the first birds. No less venerable turtles, long thought to be older than diapsids (snakes/lizards/birds), were shown to have actually been diapsids all along: they simply lost the characteristic skull holes at one point. For 150 years botanists thought leaf initiation is autonomous. Turns out they were wrong, it is actually light-initiated. Good old carbon can still pack a surprise without being shaped into a fullerene, nanotube, or graphene. Turns out that diamonds quietly evaporate in UV light, mechanism unknown. Lucky Stanford biologist Kobilka (or, technically, his postdoc) got an X-ray structure of an activated GPCR protein (specifically, β2AR) A genetics lab in Boston did something cool: they removed every single TAG codon from E.coli DNA, replacing it with functionally identical TAA, so that in their new E.coli strain,, TAG can code for an artificial amino acid In astronomy, Earth's first Trojan asteroid was discovered, just like the ones orbiting the Sun behind and ahead of Jupiter, Neptune, and Mars. It has a pretty funky orbit. It seems possible that Milky Way's central supermassive black hole consumed a small satellite galaxy, with its own central black hole, just 10 million years ago, this would explain a few unusual features of our galaxy. In physics, turns out a 7 by 7 array of Coca Cola cans makes an awesome acoustic lens. A flexible, transparent Li-ion battery was created, we might have completely see-through electronics one day. Electroception, a common sense among fish, was discovered in a mammal for the first time, the guiana dolphin. Their electrosensing organs are vibrissal crypts - spots on the beak where their ancestors had whiskers. Speaking of dolphins, Shark Bay dolphins in Australia wear sponges on their beaks and teach the young how to do it. The people who live in the north have bigger heads. When playing Rock-Paper-Scissors, humans tie more often than chance if they can see each other, despite trying to win, suggesting that their automatic imitation effect is not voluntary. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
9:58 am	Quest completed It's common for those who went through the U.S. Immigration to post the dates on which important milestones of the process occurred. Sorry if the names of these documents and events mean nothing to most readers. (background: I lived the decadent life of a Silicon Valley programmer in 2001, but immigration plans were cut short by the demise of the dot-com bubble; this was a reboot when jobs started coming back) 07/31/2002 IAP-66 approved, valid 8/20/2002 - 8/19/2005 10/30/2002 Entered USA (incorrectly stamped as "9/30/2002". WTF, JFK?) 10/30/2002 J1 (No HRR) status begins 10/23/2003 DS-2019 (formerly IAP-66) updated, valid 9/30/2002 - 8/19/2005 04/12/2004 I-129 filed 04/23/2004 I-129 approved, valid 10/1/2004 - 10/1/2007 10/01/2004 J1 status terminated, H1B status begins 03/25/2007 marital status changed 05/30/2007 filed I-130, I-485, I-131, I-765 concurrently 07/03/2007 biometrics appointment 08/14/2007 I-131 approved 08/24/2007 AP received, valid to 8/13/2008 (never got to use it) 08/26/2007 AOS interview 09/14/2007 I-765 approved 09/20/2007 EAD card received 10/01/2007 H1B status expired, EAD status begins 02/26/2008 I-130 approved, I-485 approved 03/07/2008 conditional PR card received 12/30/2009 I-751 filed 01/29/2010 biometrics appointment 04/01/2010 I-797 received 05/11/2010 response to I-797 filed 05/26/2010 I-751 approved 06/15/2010 PR card received 02/07/2011 N-400 filed 03/03/2011 biometrics appointment 06/02/2011 naturalization interview 07/25/2011 sworn in as citizen That was actually relatively fast. Current Mood: accomplished (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 1st, 2011
3:29 pm	June 2011 in science: from prune fingers to loudest penis ever. Wow a LOT of cool stuff was in the news last month! I had to trim a lot, sorry if this is biology-heavy. Two-slit experiment was modified to obtain the trajectories of photons using "weak" measurement of momentum *and* strong measurement of position, despite the uncertainly principle. Familiar table salt can crystallize in a funny "hopper-like" shape when it happens on water surface. The first multicellular organism was found in deep subsurface of Earth which was thought to be microbe-only zone, it's a nematode named Halicephalobus mephisto Finally there is an explanation for why our fingers prune up when wet! This is not some dumb osmotic side-effect at all. A human kidney cell with green fluorescent protein was turned into a living laser. Humans have the protein that senses magnetic fields and it works, we just don't know how to use it. The nicotine receptor that turns off hunger and makes tobacco smokers lose weight was identified, in mice. Ketamine, an anesthetic and hallucinogen known also as fast-acting antidepressant in very low doses, was studied, and its mechanism of action is now known. It's a totally new regulatory pathway, nothing like SSRI. LSD, the much more famous drug, has found a medical use too, it stops cluster headaches. Police dogs distinguish identical twin children from each other, reliably, by scent alone, even if they live in the same home eating same food. The screw, famous human invention, was found in nature: weevil legs are shaped and are used as screws. Flap-running in birds is 10% more efficient than flying (I would have thought more! Also, I love the terminology there, "wing-assisted incline running (WAIR) and controlled flapping descent (CFD)") Everybody thought penguins hunt at dawn because they can't see in the dark, but they can. They are just afraid of it. The hairs on bat wings were suspected to be important in flight, but finally someone Nair'ed the wings of a few bats and tested. Yes, they are flight sensors. The familiar (to us, Europeans) water spider, Argyroneta aquatica does not just keep a bubble of air underwater to use as breathing space as I was taught in school. The "bell" is an artificial gill, which extracts oxygen from water. And finally, the world's loudest animal in relation to its size is Micronecta scholtzi, a tiny bug that produces a 99.2 dB sound by, imagine it, rattling its penis against its abdomen. Current Mood: bouncy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
4:05 pm	May 2011 in science: from quantum computers to wet bats I'm running behind again, barely found time to skim the last month's news. Still, a few interesting things happened: D-Wave Systems, the company that built and sold (to Lokheed) the first quantum computer, faced criticism and had to prove that their computer is indeed quantum. In astronomy, the data from the 2004's ambitious Gravity Probe B were finally published: it measured the contraction of spacetime around Earth (2.8 cm in 40,000 km orbit) and Earth's frame-dragging effect, unfortunately with less precision than an earlier experiment that simply observed a few satellites, but still conclusively confirming General Relativity. In slightly scifi news, our galaxy is apparently teeming with free-floating, homeless, wandering planets, which outnumber the stars. The two micron all sky survey (2MASS) produced an awesome 3D map of the known Universe up to 380 million light-years (the article iteself here) In more groundbreaking news, the Central Dogma of Biology was shaken by the discovery of widespread non-random mismatches between DNA and RNA sequences in humans. Another surprise, a new fungal phylum (!) was discovered, in an Exeter university pond. These organisms apparently exist everywhere and possibly double in size the known fungal tree of life. In good news, the Antarctic ozone hole is finally recovering, 22 years after the ban of CFCs. In human behavior, we are more likely to notice someone in a crowd if we recently heard negative gossip about them. Positive and neutral have no effect. World's first professor of Alternative Medicine, Edzard Ernst, was actually an honest person who used science to study effects (or lack thereof, as in case of homeopathy) of alternative remedies. But will the others be similar? The oldest evidence for dogs in the New World was found, and that dog served as food for a human. In cuter biology news, harbor seals are able to "see" shapes and sizes of moving objects in water entirely through microscopic motions of water felt through the whiskers. Also, wet bats don't fly simply because they get tired, raindrops (previously hypothesized) don't actually matter. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 29th, 2011
4:02 am	The beach season is open! Current Mood: bouncy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
5:49 pm	April in science After all the April Fools jokes were said and done, here are some of the things that were actually discovered last month: For the first time, the way to fold a rigid tall shopping bag was found. Seriously. True-color holograms, visible in white light, were finally created. We still don't know how bicycles stay upright: as both gyroscopic and caster effects were definitively ruled out. Chimps were filmed giving birth for the first time (how has everyone been so tactful until now?) and it turns out their newborn babies face backwards (occupit anterior), which was long thought to be a human-only characteristic. Long-suspected and now shown by DNA testing, humans in the US get leprosy from armadillos, the only other animal on Earth that can even host the leprosy bacteria. A mollusk called chiton or "coat of mail shell" is the first animal discovered to have aragonite lenses in its eyes, able to see equally well in water and air. Ever-inventive organic chemistry came up with a fun hypervalent catalyst that inserts nitrogen in unactivated alkanes at room temperature, metal-free. Speaking of inventive, fire ants are able to link their bodies to form live waterproof rafts, which is how their colonies survive floods. Speaking of the dangers of swimming, the probability to escape the dreaded "downing machine" (a specific kind of hydraulic jumps found in rivers) was studied in detail. Also in the water, the biggest-ever assemblage of humpback whales was seen feeding on the krill that has no more place to hide in this century's warmer, ice-free Antarctic bays. The researches had to reprogram their software that couldn't handle so many whale sightings. Speaking of feeding, the herbivores are hypsodonts because they bite the dust, when eating grass, which wears teeth down. While I'm on about animals, female dogs are either much smarter than the males, or at least trust their eyes more: they notice when their toys change size. As if anyone doubted, the bird species that live in the human cities are not just there by chance. They are exactly the birds with the largest brain/body mass ratio. Speaking of birds, only the dinosaurs with good sense of smell survived the K-T extinction to become known as birds. The mallard duck, famous for the explosive erection of its oversize spiraling genitalia, has another peculiarity: duck semen is antibacterial. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
6:14 pm	Science in March uh-oh, april is over soon, and I haven't yet reported on all the cool stuff from march! Long Island's own John Milnor of Stony Brook University won the 2011 Abel Prize, the new math Nobel. He already won the other two math nobels - Fields Medal and Wolf Prize - decades ago. Milnor made many awesome and bizarre advancements in differential topology (which he created), group theory, and holomorphic dynamics. Speaking of bizarre, everyone's favorite slimy corpse-eater hagfish was shown to eat through skin and gills, the first vertebrate to be known to do so. If you can even call hagfish "vertebrate". The dried-up sludge produced by the classic Miller's origin-of-life experiment in 1958 was reanalyzed using modern instruments, and was shown to contain even more building blocks of life that Miller could find -- 23 amino acids, including six that contained sulfur. The previously unknown xenon dioxide, XeO2 was synthesized and proposed to be the compound behind the mystery of why only 10% of primordial xenon is actually observed in the Earth atmosphere. Also in chemistry, fun controllable lipid bilayer vesicles were made which reversibly grow and disappear depending on pH. The long-awaited spring rains arrived to Titan, Saturn's moon (they were expected because of all the erosion seen on its surface by the Huygens lander in 2005) Speaking of probes, the MESSENGER spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury, the first spacecraft to do so. A northamerican prehistoric culture was discovered in Texas, adding 15,000 stone tools to the emerging theory that Clovis did not march from asia in full glory, developing unique novel tools on the way, but evolved from an earlier, more primitive culture, that did. In more useful news, mature and proven fully functional mammalian sperm was grown in vitro, using only newborn mouse tissue fragments, both fresh and cryopreserved. Until last month, the only sperm grown in vitro was for some type of fish. Speaking of fish, for the first time, fish were conclusively shown to be used as a vehicle for seed dispersal by plants. A GPCR bound and stabilized to its agonist without a G-protein was shown by X-ray. There are symbiotic bacteria in mammals that help us fight flu. The first drug for lupus passed clinical trials and was approved, with more hot on its tail. Oldest flowering plant was found, pushing back the time of their appearance by a couple million years, to early Cretaceous, making their rapid diversification less of a puzzle. The mid 19th century classification of worms between wigglers and nonwigglers turned out to be supported by genome data, despite having been questioned for over a century. And for everyone's favorite March story, the exact difference in genome responsible for the smooth penis of humans vs. spiny penis of chimps was discovered during whole-genome comparisons. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Monday, March 28th, 2011
4:54 pm	Совещание Originally posted by alex_aka_jj at Совещание Петров пришел во вторник на совещание. Ему там вынули мозг, разложили по блюдечкам и стали есть, причмокивая и вообще выражая всяческое одобрение. Начальник Петрова, Недозайцев, предусмотрительно раздал присутствующим десертные ложечки. И началось. — Коллеги, — говорит Морковьева, — перед нашей организацией встала масштабная задача. Нам поступил на реализацию проект, в рамках которого нам требуется изобразить несколько красных линий. Вы готовы взвалить на себя эту задачу? — Конечно, — говорит Недозайцев. Он директор, и всегда готов взвалить на себя проблему, которую придется нести кому-то из коллектива. Впрочем, он тут же уточняет: — Мы же это можем? Начальник отдела рисования Сидоряхин торопливо кивает: — Да, разумеется. Вот у нас как раз сидит Петров, он наш лучший специалист в области рисования красных линий. Мы его специально пригласили на совещание, чтобы он высказал свое компетентное мнение. — Очень приятно, — говорит Морковьева. — Ну, меня вы все знаете. А это — Леночка, она специалист по дизайну в нашей организации. ( Леночка покрывается краской и смущенно улыбается. Она недавно закончила экономический, и к дизайну имеет такое же отношение, как утконос к проектированию дирижаблей... ) Current Mood: geeky (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 25th, 2011
10:27 am	C++ fun As I'm prowling SO and YA posting answers to C++ questions, I make up things that I like to keep, sometimes. For example, students on YA often ask how to implement basic sort algorithms -- selection sort and insertion sort so I came up with these (and posted them to RosettaCode): template<typename FwdIter> void selection_sort(FwdIter beg, FwdIter end) { for(FwdIter i = beg; i != end; ++i) std::iter_swap(i, std::min_element(i, end)); } and template<typename RndIter> void insertion_sort(RndIter beg, RndIter end) { for(RndIter i = beg; i != end; ++i) std::rotate(std::upper_bound(beg, i, *i), i, i+1); } test run: https://ideone.com/jws0L (do YOU know about http://ideone.com ?) I wish other programming languages were as expressive when it comes to algorithms! Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Monday, March 7th, 2011
9:51 am	February 2011 in science As we all know, computer science had its moment of glory when IBM's computer Watson defeated top level human contestants in Jeopardy, despite making a few errors himself. Although this was mainly a natural language processing victory, maybe general AI research could get some funding now? Also, those new-fangled X-ray lasers are useful for something cool: they can obtain x-ray diffraction patterns from non-crystalline macromolecules or even whole living cells, in the brief moment before they explode, or can be used to gently probe nanoscale crystals without damaging them. Does this mean membrane proteins will finally be subject to study? In less applicable physics, laser emission was turned back in time, creating a perfect absorber of a laser beam. Also, LHC is consistently NOT detecting the gluinos, squarks, neutralino, and other predictions of SUSY (the supersymmetry theory of particle physics), which is making some physicists rather tense. That Nature News post gathered some kooky comments, too. A fresh neutron star was found that is cooling as we're observing it, at a rate that confirms the superfluid neutron matter theory. One of the few opponents of the dark matter theory, a guy named Stacy, came up with a nice experimental argument for modified Newtonian dynamics A cute new theory for cosmological constant treats the entire Universe as a wave function, which means different histories for different observers. They claim to be testable, too. Back on Earth, 10-100 km below the surface, the most common form of sulfur is S3-, the trisulfide anion, unlike previously assumed oxoanions. A stable compound of iron in oxidation state +5, a four-coordinated iron(V) nitride complex, was studied spectroscopically and chemically in the hunt for nitrogenase's mechanism of action. Like most normal people I didn't even know iron +4 formed stable compounds, let alone +5. The last remnants of the old theory that birds can't be dinosaurs because their fingers are 2,3,4 while all other dinosaurs have 1,2,3 receives another experimental blow, from embryology, where the theory originated. Drosophila can smell the difference between hydrogen and deuterium, and can even be conditioned to selectively avoid the common or the deuterated isotope, which is pretty incredible, since the shape of odorant molecules is the same. The mechanism of flea jump, for which were two competing hypotheses since 1967, was finally experimentally resolved. Wolves follow a human gaze when a human looks at something afar or even around a barrier, something domesticated dogs don't do. Current Mood: geeky (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 25th, 2011
11:56 am	January 2011 in science. Can you say "sex shapes sperm" ten times fast? I missed this one, but since december we know how to obtain high-resolution 17O NMR using what they called "quadrupole central transition" NMR technique. Another advance of chemical physics that hit the news last month, ortho-water was produced in a new apparatus which can select spin isomers of light molecules (until now the only spin isomers ever studied in bulk were ortho and para hydrogen) And even cooler, muonium and muonic helium were made and tested in chemical reactions. Surprisingly, experimental observations matched theory despite the expected fragility of Born-Oppenheimer approximation for these pseudoatoms. Astronomers found a new oldest/farthest candidate galaxy ever, beating october's record by 100M light years and pushing the limit of how far we can see into Reionization Also, the mass of the heaviest supermassive black hole in the known universe has been corrected from 6.4 to 6.6 billion solar masses. It's so big and so (relatively) close, there's hopes we can actually see it. To the joy of astronomy enthusiasts everywhere, Sloan released its new 1.2 trillion pixel color map of the night sky. (also, navigate it) In before Google Sky copies it! Now in biology, a study of human hugging added more evidence to the hypothesis that we perceive life in 3-second windows of "now" or "present", along with many other higher mammals. Cuing newly encoded memories during sleep by olfactory or auditory stimuli strengthens these memories (can we start calling Memory Reconsolidation Hypothesis "theory" already? Everyone seems to be relying on it now.) A provocative and probably not very robust study said that people's friends may not only have similar traits, but actually resemble each other on a genotypic level, even at the level of specific alleles and nucleotides. And even more new things we've learned about humans last month, female tears contain a scent that makes men less sexually aroused. In more fundamental biology, the third acetyl-CoA metabolic pathway was identified in a Dead Sea microbe Haloarcula marismortui. Until last month, only the textbook glyoxylate cycle and the recently discovered ethylmalonyl-CoA pathway were known. Also cool (at least to me, a structural biology postdoc in the past), is the first ever structure of activated GPCR. Speaking of microbes, about one third of wild slime molds (like the trisexual one I mentioned in the last post) as if they weren't immensely cool already, are farmers. They don't finish eating when the food is abundant and take favorite food bacteria along for migrations, to set up new food crops. They are single-cell organisms that do agriculture! finally, PNAS last month published the work on sperm cell shapes of promiscuous hermaphroditic flatworms, where the sperm cells grew hard bristles and "dreadlocks" in species that practice postcopulatory self-sucking (to remove inferior partner's sperm from the receiving orifice), and remained smooth and slick for the species that don't have orifices and engage in hypodermic copulation. And now I'm officially caught up! Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)