Clipmarks | pokkets's Biology collection

Earliest animal footprints uncovered

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:58:08 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Scientists didn't 'know' Pre-Cambrian life was well developed, they just seemed to reach their conclusions with too little evidence

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Scientists have found the oldest fossilised tracks of a tiny legged animal, providing further evidence that complex creatures existed on earth 570 million years ago.

The fossilised trails, thought to belong to a centipede or a leg-bearing worm that lived in the water, were found in sedimentary rocks in Nevada, says Ohio State University geology professor and the study chief author Loren Babcock.

The finding, presented to the Geological Society of America's meeting in Houston, shatters the belief that Pre-Cambrian life on earth was restricted to microbes and simple, multicellular organisms.

The tracks, two parallel rows of small dots, each about two millimetres in diameter, date back to the Ediacaran period - 630 to 542 million years ago.

They suggest that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought.

The Cambrian period (543 to 490 million years ago) saw an evolutionary explosion that produced most of the major animal groups we know today.

Alchemy Laboratories

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:41:03 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman
clipper's remarks: "Thus have I been wishing to reveal to you in this treatise, as far as may be lawful to me, the Stone of the Ancients, that you, too, might possess the knowledge of this highest of earthly treasures for your health and comfort in this valley of sorrow.

I write about it, not for my own good, but for that of posterity, and though my words be few and simple, that which they import is of immeasurable magnitude. Ponder them well, that you also may find the Rock which is the foundation Stone of truth, the temporal blessing, and the eternal reward."

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

Alchemist's Laboratory IN: 'Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae' by Heinrich Khunrath, 1595.

a strange combination of Christianity and magic

An emblem that came to be known as the 'Twelfth Key of Basil Valentine'

the lion transforms the serpent into its own flesh when he devours it, so the philosopher's stone has the power to transmute or transform all imperfect metals into gold

'The second Booke of Distillations, containing Sundrie
excellent Secret remedies of Distilled Waters'

'The Practise of the New and Old Phisicke' by Conrad Gesner, 1599. [source]

Key to the figures (click picture for larger version):

1. An iron hook to clear the grate with

10, a melting furnace

12, a plain glass bell for making spirit of sulphur

Key to the figures (click picture for larger version):

'The Alchemist' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1558
[source or alternative version]

'L'Alchimiste'

by David Teniers (before 1690)

satirical view of an alchemist

(Collection of diverse caricatures)

Satirical broadside on folly

Our choices go to the core of who we are - Accounting for Taste

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 05:59:26 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: "We consume books, movies, music, and visual art primarily to fulfill the internal emotional needs that are fundamental to our personalities. But we also make choices about art based on a desire to carve out identities for ourselves—to articulate the stories of our lives. By the same token, we look for those stories in others"

Clip Source: beinart.org

Clip Source: www.psychologytoday.com

Our choices in books, movies, music, and art go to the core of who we are. What your tastes reveal about you.

Clip Source: www.psychologytoday.com

"Openness correlates to a great range of tastes," explains Stephen Dollinger, a psychologist at Southern Illinois University. "These individuals are more cultured and have a greater conception of what makes great and interesting art."

Less open people, meanwhile, may be stuck on the tastes of their youth, watching nostalgic movies on Nick at Night and listening to classic rock.

Clip Source: www.psychologytoday.com

If our taste preferences reflect our personalities, does this mean we can accurately judge others based on their tastes?

Personality types are not mutually exclusive—most of us are a complex combination of many traits. An open-minded taste hunter, for instance, may also have an extrovert's need to seek sensation.

perhaps we should view the differences in tastes between us and others not as grounds for disagreement, but as opportunities for interpersonal revelation

'Old-boy's club holding back innovation

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:42:24 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: We all now have access to a vast amount of research and data on the net. a Few people would have absolutely no hope, but the networks being created on the web, are places where anyone can comment, or include findings, so the pieces can start coming together more quickly. It isn't what we know that is important. it's what we do with the knowledge

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Anna Salleh

Science needs to break free of its power-brokers and embrace a participatory web-based culture to boost innovation, says one expert.

John Wilbanks, of Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons - says the plethora of machine-generated data, that characterises today's scientific activity, needs the power of open networks to make sense of it properly.

"The value of any individual piece of knowledge is about the value of any individual piece of lego," Wilbanks said in a keynote address to the Open Access and Research Conference held in Brisbane last week.

"It's not that much until you put it together with other legos."

He says the ability to connect knowledge brings scientific revolutions. For example Watson and Crick's breakthrough on the structure of DNA involved them reading all the scientific papers on nucleotide bonding and encoding it in the form of a physical model, says Wilbanks.

"For example, we have 45,000 papers about one protein or one gene," says Wilbanks.

Cola, stale chip research win win Ig Nobels

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:19:30 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: What they found about the mechanism of sperm and aids killing makes me wonder if cola can be used on other micro organisms like MRSA. The sperm in the sugar, no doubt with the chemicals in cola acting as a catalyst, cause them to 'Eat themselves to death, through osmosis, and the recognition of sugar opening some cellular gates.

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Maggie Fox

A researcher who determined that Coke explodes sperm, and scientists who discovered that people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly, are some of the winners at this year's Ig Nobel prizes.

Researchers were able to trick people into thinking they were eating fresh potato chips by playing loud, crunching sounds

physicists who found out that anything that can tangle will tangle, and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump further than cat fleas

Awarded by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humour magazine, the prizes are based on published research, some intended to be humourous but often not.

Usually the "honoured" researchers go alone with the joke.

Dr Deborah Anderson of Boston University Medical Center

found cola kills sperm.

"It definitely wouldn't work as a contraceptive because sperm swims so fast

the sugar in cola quickly kills sperm, probably because sperm soak it up

just kind of explode."

it also kills the AIDS virus.

Smell of success in bid to 'build nose'

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:23:46 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Maybe they have trouble quantifying the way our imaginations are triggered by smell, and the value of the associations it can create, with past memories.

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Development of an "artificial nose" is a step closer after US scientists reported finding a way to mass-produce smell receptors in a laboratory.

Scratch and sniff: researchers have found a way to make olfactory receptors in a laboratory

The associate director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Centre for Biomedical Engineering says smell remains a "tantalising enigma".

"Smell is perhaps one of the oldest and most primitive senses, but nobody really understands how it works," Zhang says.

Until now, efforts to understand the molecular basis of smell have been stymied by the difficulty in working with the proteins that detect odours, known as olfactory receptors.

"The main barrier to studying smell is that we haven't been able to make enough receptors and purify them to homogeneity," says co-researcher and MIT doctoral student Brian Cook.

"Now, it's finally available as a raw material for people to utilise, and should enable many new studies into smell research."

Dinosaur's fowl breath seals tie to birds

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:57:53 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Julie Steenhuysen

The discovery of air sacs in a new 10-metre-long, meat-eating dinosaur may seal the connection between birds and dinosaurs and explain how birds' unique breathing system evolved, scientists say.

A drawing of Aerosteon with the body wall removed to show a reconstruction of the lungs (red) and air sacs (other colours)

85-million-year-old meat-eater Aerosteon (Todd Marshall c 2008, courtesy of Project Exploration)

Palaeontologist Dr Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago, says the two-legged predator, pulled from 85-million-year-old rock along the banks of Rio Colorado in Argentina's Mendoza Province, weighed as much as an elephant and likely had feathers.

But writing in the journal Public Library of Science ONE, Sereno says its method of breathing makes this dinosaur stand out.

Instead of lungs that expand and contract, Sereno thinks this beast had air sacs that worked like a bellows, blowing air into the beast's stiff lungs, much like modern birds.

'Chemical equator' keeps southern air clean

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:04:17 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: The virtual map says it all. Now it means the approach to the solution of the pollution problem needs to be tackled in different ways in each hemisphere. Atmospheric pollution is only one problem. More investigation needs to be done into the nature of oceanic pollution. it did make me wonder of the Nuclear Fusion experiments on Mururoa (Aopuni) and Bikini atolls in French Polynesia last Century.
The first nuclear test was conducted on July 2, 1966, code named Aldebaran. France abandoned nuclear testing in the atmosphere in 1974 and moved testing underground in the midst of intense world pressure. A total of 147 underground nuclear tests were conducted at Mururoa and Fangataufa. This practice created much controversy as cracking of the atolls was discovered, A 1979 test conducted at half the usual depth caused a large submarine landslide on the southwest rim of the atoll.
Just somehow seemed relevant

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Michael Reilly

A boundary of air, wrapped like a belt around the earth's equator, is keeping the polluted atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere separate from the relatively pristine south, say UK researchers.

The team, led by Dr Jacqueline Hamilton of the University of York, have dubbed the peculiar wall of air the "chemical equator."

Colours indicate carbon monoxide concentrations. Red is polluted air and blue clean air (Glenn Carver, Cambridge University)

And while scientists have known about the feature for decades, Hamilton's team has just discovered an odd new wrinkle in its behavior.

Typically, where the northern and southern tropical trade winds come together they form a region of stormy updrafts called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

Instead of mixing, the trade winds rise from the ocean or land surface high into the stratosphere, where they diverge again.

keeping the pollutant-laden northern air dirty and the southern air clean.

Genetic 'defect' linked to narcolepsy

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:42:17 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: What does also seems worth investigating , is the fact that the condition appears in late adolescence or early adulthood. Why no earlier?

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Scientists in Japan have identified a genetic mutation linked to narcolepsy, a disease that can cause someone to doze off in mid-sentence or behind the wheel of a car.

Other symptoms of the condition, which shows up in late adolescence or early adulthood, include excessive daytime drowsiness, vivid hallucinations on the threshold of sleep, and the sudden, temporary loss of muscle control, often triggered by emotional shock.

A team of researchers led by Professor Katsushi Tokunaga at the University of Tokyo compared the genetic profiles of persons with and without the sleep-inducing disease.

The research appears in the latest issue of Nature Genetics.

The prevalence of the disease varies widely in different countries. In Europe and the United States, narcolepsy is as common as Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, affecting on average one in every 2500 people.

But in Japan the frequency is four times higher, while in Israel only one in half-a-million people have the condition.

China targets space Station, moon

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:29:59 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: I'm still not sure if they Know what to do about the Van Allen Belt. It's particularly Radioactive

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

China has set its sights on a trip to the moon and an orbiting space station after completing a historic mission that included the country's first space walk.

China laid out the ambitious targets after the return to earth of its third human mission into space, a 68-hour voyage hailed as a major boost to its space ambitions.

"We believe that as long as we can make further progress in science and technology, we can achieve the dream of a manned space flight to the moon in the near future," says Wang Zhaoyao, spokesman for China's space programme.

China is aiming to build a long-term orbiting space facility in 2020, followed by a lunar mission at an undetermined date, says Wang.

He adds that China's plans called for new missions from 2011 aimed at developing the knowledge - such as docking technologies - required for long-term space habitation.

These would ultimately build up to a lunar mission, he says, although he did not give a date.

The boy with the incredible brain-Savant autism

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:09:59 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Clip 2 What is particularly unusual about Daniel is That he can explain what is happening in his Brain
It is a Florid Example of Synesthesia

Clip Source: au.youtube.com

[Video]

The boy with the incredible brain-Savant autism

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:06:15 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Clip 1

Clip Source: au.youtube.com

[Video]

Our Future is ours to write

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:51:42 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: The grand Unified Theory of Time Space, and Existence.
We all have a choice. The choice between Light and Darkness.
The Darkness is ignorance, division, fear, and oppression, hunger and need.,
The light is knowledge, understanding, acceptance, unity, compassion, empathy, faith, hope, and Love.
There is a reason we fear the darkness.
It will kill us.
But only if we believe it is so.
When we allow in the light, the Darkness has no substance, and so ceases to exist.
So our fears can be relieved, and replaced with hope.
The Future is ours to write.

Clip Source: au.youtube.com

Higher Light Central Sun 2012 ET Pleiadian Ascended Masters

Angelic Human Race

05:39

Added

End Poverty. Be the Generation

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 01:15:11 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: Not all spirits are positive Not all spirits have hope, all spirits can receive hope, learn hope, become hope. our hopes become our dreams, our dreams become our realities

Clip Source: au.youtube.com

[Video]

Appreciate food

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:47:36 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

Added: 9 months ago
Views: 2,778

02:45

Clip Source: www.new.facebook.com

[Video]