I thought I would bump the discussion in an effort to put it back on the daily digest.
As always feel free to copy or link to the other discussions:
The original thread Shipping Container Housing is over 1500 posts long
http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/49244#newcomments
We start
Hi All.
I would like to know what is the relation between radians and mm where radians is the measure of angle of twist. Any help will be good.
“illegal”
reference: Dan Vorhaus, “The New York Times vs. Personal Genomics: Much Ado About Not Very Much”
Ridin' Free through the high plains of Western Colorado!
From Eric Dondero:
His friends call him "Cowboy Bob."
From an old Army buddy:
I have known Bob McConnell since we were infantry company commanders in Viet Nam in 1971-72. He has always been concerned about America and the highest values it can stand for. I have no doubt that he will work hard for the good for our people and country. Bob shows a rock solid independence in his thinking. He has led men in combat... I know Bob will be above the fickle movement of polls, sound bites, and politics -- Tony Witter, Colonel, US Army, (Retired)
His wife Phyllis describes the fundamental tennants of his Western Conservative philosophy:
I fell in love with Bob's spirit, those cowboy virtues and values of independence, hard (hard!) work, and love of the land. When we go into the wilderness or the mountains on horses I totally trust his competence, in any circumstance. He's a man of integrity and conscience who's not afraid of spirited debate.
Why is he running? Just another regular American turned Tea Party Patriot sick and tired of Big Government.
From Bob:
My decision to run for political office for the first time in my life was born in the Tea Party movement. I share your anger at what is happening to our country, and your determination to take our country back.
I am committed to finding Practical Solutions to Real Problems through traditional Republican values; limited Federal government, eliminating the income tax and replacing it with a Fair Tax on consumption, free markets, protecting individual and growing States’ rights, and defending our country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
He is running against fiscal liberal Democrat incumbent John Salazar (brother of the well-known former Governor). Salazar voted Yes on Obama takeover of the Nation's Health Care system, Yes on Obama's stimulus, and Yes on raising the debt ceiling.
On Health Care just passed? From the Durango Herald, March 22:
Steamboat Springs Republican Bob McConnell, who also has entered the race, called the bill a “major federal intrusion in our lives."
"I just think that we're moving in a tragic direction," said McConnell, an emergency medical technician.
He also mentioned the lack of tort reform as a shortcoming.
“The first thing I'll do in Congress is try to get it repealed," he said in a phone interview.
Protecting the American Homeland Highest Priority!
On National Security he's a Pro-Defenser self-described "Ronald Reagan Conservative." (Vietnam War photo of Bob left holding an ice cold Schlitz).
Bob on Islamo-Fascism:
I believe protecting our homeland is the most important responsibility we, the people entrust to the federal government. Do you feel safe knowing that Janet Napolitano is in charge?
Militant Islam is on the rise all over the world. The rallying cry of the World Islamic Front is to murder any American, anywhere on earth.
We, the people gave Congress the power to declare war. The people must demand that Congress get about the business of protecting us.
More from Conservative Outlook:
Bob feels our nation’s #1 priority should be National Defense and feels strongly the TSA should be concentrating on “searching for dangerous people” rather than “searching for weapons.” Because he has a military background, Bob knows well that hands as well as guns, knives, etc. can be weapons. He’s been endorsed by the Combat Veterans for Congress PAC.
Bob's been tearing it up all across western Colorado, gaining media attention, praise from other elected officials, endorsements, and a mass of supporters. However, oddly enough, it's his chosen campaign song that has garnered him the greatest attention.
Click here for what is guaranteed to be the most uplifting, inspiring, country rockin' campaign theme song ever written... Turn it up!!
(Artist - Michael Martin Murphey website)
ILLINOIS 11TH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
Breaking News!!!
Libertarian Republican has learned that a soon-to-be-released poll conducted Sunday and Monday night by Public Opinion Strategies shows the following:
Republican challenger Adam Kinzinger leading freshman Democrat Rep. Debbie Halvorson by a margin of 44%-38%.
Halvorson voted in favor of the health care legislation. This is the first time Kinzinger has been ahead in any polling.
An additional finding:
Voters in the district are unhappy with the job President Obama is doing, as 45% approve of the job he is doing, and 52% disapprove. Nearly four in ten voters (38%) strongly disapprove of the job the President is doing.
Ken Spain of the NRCC commented on the results:
"If passing a government takeover of healthcare was supposed to solve all of the Democrats’ political problems, then this November is going to come as an horrific surprise. This is a classic swing seat that seemed to have trended away from Republicans in 2008 and was compounded by the fact that Illinois’ home state senator was running a winning campaign at the top of the ticket. Clearly, that is not the case any longer."
Libertarian Republican featured Kinzinger's campaign back in early February (article - A Fierce Fighter for Taxpayer's Rights)
Former Libertarian Party of Illinois board member and current Republican Liberty Caucus of IL member Jeff Wartman of Chicago was one of Kinzinger's earliest supporters. In a separate article at LR back in July, Wartman noted:
I'm working on Adam's campaign and proud to see a pro-defense, pro-freedom candidate enter this race against the nanny-stater and Pelosi-clone Debbie Halvorson. Adam is an Iraq war Veteran and former McLean County Board Member.
The fight against the liberal Democrats starts in races like this one, and Adam needs support if he's going to win.
You can help Kinzinger at electadam.com
Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the original moonwalkers, is now working on other moves as a contestant on the show “Dancing with the Stars.” He’s been rehearsing his steps for more than five hours per day."My primary motivation for joining the show is to help bring NASA and the U.S. human spaceflight program to the front of popular consciousness. Until there's a spectacular success or failure, the space program is not on everyone's lips," Aldrin says. "’Dancing with the Stars’ has an audience of millions of followers and it would be great if those viewers became supporters of our space program. I’m hoping that all of my old friends and colleagues in the space community can tune in and cast their vote for the octogenarian on the dance floor!"
During the show’s March 22nd season premiere, Aldrin received a surprise message from more than 220 miles above the Earth. Fellow astronauts recorded a message to wish him good luck from aboard the International Space Station.
The International Space Station, a joint project of five space agencies, is the largest and most complicated spacecraft ever built. Upon completion of assembly later this year, the station’s crew and its U.S., European, Japanese and Russian laboratory facilities will expand the pace of space-based research to unprecedented levels. Nearly 150 experiments are currently under way on the station, and more than 400 experiments have been conducted since research began nine years ago. These experiments already are leading to advances in the fight against food poisoning, new methods for delivering medicine to cancer cells and the development of more capable engines and materials for use on Earth and in space.
Learn more about the space station and even learn when it’s flying over your city by visiting the Space Station section.
To learn more about Buzz’s new endeavor, visit his website.
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In this image streaks of dark basaltic sand have been carried from below the ice layer to form fan-shaped deposits on top of the seasonal ice. The similarity in the directions of the fans suggests that they formed at the same time, when the wind direction and speed was the same. They often form along the boundary between the dune and the surface below.
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NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now in its seventh year on Mars, has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location. Software uploaded this winter is the latest example of NASA taking advantage of the twin Mars rovers' unanticipated longevity for real Martian test drives of advances made in robotic autonomy for future missions.
Now, Opportunity's computer can examine images that the rover takes with its wide-angle navigation camera after a drive, and recognize rocks that meet specified criteria, such as rounded shape or light color. It can then center its narrower-angle panoramic camera on the chosen target and take multiple images through color filters.
"It's a way to get some bonus science," said Tara Estlin of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. She is a rover driver, a senior member of JPL's Artificial Intelligence Group and leader of development for this new software system.
The new system is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or AEGIS. Without it, follow-up observations depend on first transmitting the post-drive navigation camera images to Earth for ground operators to check for targets of interest to examine on a later day. Because of time and data-volume constraints, the rover team may opt to drive the rover again before potential targets are identified or before examining targets that aren't highest priority.
The first images taken by a Mars rover choosing its own target show a rock about the size of a football, tan in color and layered in texture. It appears to be one of the rocks tossed outward onto the surface when an impact dug a nearby crater. Opportunity pointed its panoramic camera at this unnamed rock after analyzing a wider-angle photo taken by the rover's navigation camera at the end of a drive on March 4. Opportunity decided that this particular rock, out of more than 50 in the navigation camera photo, best met the criteria that researchers had set for a target of interest: large and dark.
"It found exactly the target we would want it to find," Estlin said. "This checkout went just as we had planned, thanks to many people's work, but it's still amazing to see Opportunity performing a new autonomous activity after more than six years on Mars."
Opportunity can use the new software at stopping points along a single day's drive or at the end of the day's drive. This enables it to identify and examine targets of interest that might otherwise be missed.
"We spent years developing this capability on research rovers in the Mars Yard here at JPL," said Estlin. "Six years ago, we never expected that we would get a chance to use it on Opportunity."
The developers anticipate that the software will be useful for narrower field-of-view instruments on future rovers.
Other upgrades to software on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, since the rovers' first year on Mars have improved other capabilities. These include choosing a route around obstacles and calculating how far to reach out a rover's arm to touch a rock. In 2007, both rovers gained the know-how to examine sets of sky images to determine which ones show clouds or dust devils, and then to transmit only the selected images. The newest software upload takes that a step further, enabling Opportunity to make decisions about acquiring new observations.
The AEGIS software lets scientists change the criteria it used for choosing potential targets. In some environments, rocks that are dark and angular could be higher-priority targets than rocks that are light and rounded, for example.
This new software system has been developed with assistance from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project and with funding from the New Millennium Program, the Mars Technology Program, the JPL Interplanetary Network Development Program, and the Intelligent Systems Program. The New Millennium Program tests advanced technology in space flight. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
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Picture yourself in a movie theater waiting for the main attraction to begin and the scent of popcorn wafts through the air. The screen lights up with coming attractions and you see a "movie trailer" that you think is really cool. That's what the latest promotional video for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is like, but instead of a coming Hollywood blockbuster, it is about the future of space astronomy.This new 90 second video produced at NASA hurls the viewer through space and asks if you can imagine seeing 13 billion years back in time, see the first stars, galaxies evolve and solar systems form. That's what the Webb telescope is going to show us after it launches in four years.
The movie trailer also shows some of the technological highlights included in the Webb space telescope, and creates excitement for the mission.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the next-generation premier space observatory, exploring deep space phenomena from distant galaxies to nearby planets and stars. The telescope will give scientists clues about the formation of the universe and the evolution of our own solar system, from the first light after the Big Bang to the formation of star systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth.
The video was created by Michael McClare, Senior Producer in the multi-media group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. McClare said,"It struck me that the perfect way to highlight the Webb Telescope’s mission is with a movie trailer-like production. The challenge is creating something that grabs the viewer right away. Then, in the next 90-seconds explain the mission's science goals, tease its revolutionary technology and hopefully, elicit interjections like, 'Cool!' and 'Wow!' for this incredible endeavor. It’s only the first of series of media features planned. I’m excited to be part of this extraordinary mission and some of that excitement found its way into the movie trailer."
It took a super-computer to create the science parts of the movie trailer and a collaborative "movie-making" effort. Those visuals were based on theoretical super-computer models and NASA worked with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to create them.
People do not need to run to the theater to see the movie trailer they just need to get on the Internet. The video is available in various formats, High Resolution DVCPro HD, High Resolution Photo JPG, QuickTime format (720 H.264), MPEG-4 (1280x720 29.97) and h264. Mov format. All of these will be available at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio Web site: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/, or at the James Webb Space Telescope mission Web Site: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov.
This "movie trailer" has a lot of production behind it, in terms of designing and building the telescope. In fact, this effort is multinational because the Webb telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
The movie trailer had its debut at the American Astronautical Society's Robert H. Goddard Memorial Symposium, in Greenbelt on March 11 and will air for all time on the Internet for all to enjoy. The Webb telescope's "major motion picture" begins when it launches in 2014!
The movie trailer is available in various formats at:
› svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?10565
For more information about the Webb Telescope, visit:
› http://www.jwst.nasa.gov
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Forty-five years ago, 27-year old Heinz Erzberger arrived at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. armed with a new doctorate in mathematics and engineering. In 1973 Erzberger began the work that revolutionized air traffic management by using a new approach for the decisions made by air traffic controllers, using math and physics as part of the analysis.Erzberger's research focused on using mathematics and physics to create a set of algorithms, which have been used for more than 14 years and are still being used today by the FAA to control air traffic. The significance of his work was recognized by the National Academy of Engineering when Erzberger was recently elected as a new member.
"It's a wonderful honor to be a member of this prestigious group. I'm very humbled by it all," said Erzberger.
Focusing on aircraft safety, fuel efficiency, and on-time arrivals, Erzberger began automating the nation’s air traffic control system. "I took all of the data and formulated it into compact analytical logic. There were many wonderful Eureka moments. As things fall into place, a lot of times it’s surprising to find the answer turns out to be so simple," said Erzberger.
As is everything with aeronautics, safety is of utmost importance. "The safety of the passengers is always the most important,” said Erzberger but he also understood the importance of being environmentally responsible decades before it became fashionable to be so. "I made sure not to waste anything – that the planes weren't flying around waiting."
Over the years, Erzberger’s enthusiasm for his work has never weakened. "You don’t get something done if you don't have a passionate interest in it," Erzberger commented.
Much of the air traffic management research currently being done is a spinoff of Erzberger's work. "It was really the tip of the iceberg for what is potentially possible. The outgrowth of this work resulted in many new innovations," said Erzberger.
Erzberger's current research focuses on algorithms for the Next Generation air traffic management system. NextGen, as it is called, will use software to detect and resolve conflicts between aircraft. "It is the most challenging of all the problems we have tackled so far," said Erzberger.
However, it isn't all about the work. Sitting in his office, Erzberger motions towards the open door.
"There are so many people up and down those hallways who are working on projects I can relate to," Erzberger observed. "What really makes it a pleasure is to be able to mentor younger colleagues who are at the beginning of their research careers. That really is the most satisfying part of my life." Erzberger lives in Los Altos Hills, Calif.
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Dear all
I want to ask one thing that if we fill the oil in transformer up to 3/4 level ,and now the level in conservator is showing full level from last 8 to 9 day ,what will be the reason
Inspired by Ayn Rand to lead a Worldwide Liberty movement
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former libertarian youth leader. In the early 1990s he re-launched Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS), which had been active for some time in the 1960s and 70s as an alternative to the hard leftist SDS. Shapiro was also active with the Libertarian Party of Florida, and served for a time as an Intern at Libertarian Party national headquarters in DC. Additionally, he was active early on during the formative years of the Republican Liberty Caucus.
Shapiro had been largely inspired to libertarianism through the writings of pro-liberty philosopher Ayn Rand. His mother had been a fellow traveler in the famous philosopher's circles in the 1960s. A large portrait of Rand served as the centerpiece of the den of his parents' Palm Beaches area home.
Libertarian Mission accomplished in Iraq
Last week Shapiro was asked by Fox News to pen a commentary on George W. Bush and the War in Iraq; "At Last, Misson Accomplished In Iraq." Excerpt from Fox:
Today marks the seven-year anniversary of the Iraq War.
A few months after American forces finally crossed into the border of the oppressed nation, President Bush told the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’ that, “Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."
He was right.
Since America launched Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19, 2003, we have... ended the genocide and torture of the Ba’ath Party, brought Saddam Hussein to justice, established a budding democratic society...
Certainly the transformation of an Iraq enslaved by the sadistic cruelty of the Ba’ath Party into a free society is a watershed event and one that represents a whole new era in the history of the Middle East. A free Iraq has, in fact, become a beacon of inspiration to the region.
That’s why, as Bush accurately predicted, the people of the oppressed Islamic "Republic" of Iran finally found the courage to resist the tyranny of Ahmadinejad when he stole the election last year. -- After all, seeing freedom in practice in a neighboring country is a lot more powerful than simply hearing about it overseas from banned news reports and books that occasionally find their way into the black market of Tehran.
Under the rule of Saddam Hussein women were frequently and lawfully raped in custody as a means of punishing their family members, prisoners were placed in acid baths, dismembered, electrocuted and confined in coffin sized boxes for unbearably long periods of time. Women were lawfully beheaded without trials as part of "honor-killings" and children as young as 10-years old were trained to use weapons in the "Saddam Cubs" youth paramilitary organization.
None of Saddam Hussein’s unspeakable cruelties would have ended and none of the great strides toward freedom would have been accomplished without the courage and conviction of President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their administration, our coalition forces allies and the brave soldiers who fought for a free Iraq. All of these people are heroes for ending one of the greatest political and human rights tragedies in recent history, and for helping Iraq become the newest state-member of the Free World.
Today’s free Iraq is a testament to the courage and conviction of both the American and Iraqi people who never gave up and never acquiesced to the cowardice of the detractors who accepted failure.
Honor Freedom and oppose Worldwide Totalitarianism
Today Shapiro head the nationwide movement known as Honor Freedom. The group lists an impressive number of members including libertarian media tycoon Andrew Breitbart, Lt. Col. Robert ’Buzz’ Patterson USAF and Bradley A. Blakeman.
From their website:
President Bush was the right leader at the right time. He proudly led us in the aftermath and response to the attacks on America on September 11th, 2001. Although al-Qaeda declared war on America on our own soil in New York City, Bush successfully shifted the battle to our enemies on foreign lands which made us safer on our own.
HONOR FREEDOM is an organized campaign of Americans who want to correct the historical record about President Bush while showing support for oppressed people in totalitarian countries. It is a movement of Americans who want to reach out to one another as a support system in a society where it has become politically incorrect to support traditional American ideals and the cause of freedom.
The website features a Myth busters list which answers critics of the War in Iraq such as Myth #1 "The War in Iraq was an invasion, not a liberation," and Myth # and "President Bush lied about Saddam Hussein having the capability of building weapons of mass destruction" and also the Myth that Hussein had not ties to Al Qaeda.
Another great review of the Tangled Bank, this time from Bioscience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences:
“In the best of all worlds, every educated American could and should read this book, and as a result, would have a much richer understanding of evolution as a force directly affecting our lives.”
(NB–Even if you don’t live in the U.S., you may want to check it out!)
Do we need to check standard flanges(ASME B16.5) as per appendix-2 of Section Viii Div.1, what if the standard flange fails as per PVElite in Bolt area requirements or bolt spacing, shall we consider it safe only because it is within the pressure temperature rating, also do we need to consider corr
In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000-year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins–even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news.
In Nature today, Svante Paabo and his colleagues published a paper describing how their work in a place known as the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. There are lots of hominid bones and tools indicating people lived in the cave, off and on, for 125,000 years. There’s good evidence of Homo sapiens in the region for at least 40,000 years, and Paabo and his colleagues have also isolated 30,000-year old DNA from Siberian sites that is similar to the DNA from Neanderthals in Europe.
The scientists succeeded in fishing out human-like DNA from the pinky bone, and so far they’ve sequenced its mitochondrial DNA–that is, the DNA that is housed in mitochondria, sausage-shaped, fuel-producing structures in our cells. The majority of our DNA, which sits in the nucleus of cells, comes from both our mother and father. But mitochondrial DNA comes all from Mom. When the scientists compared the pinky DNA to DNA of humans and Neanderthals, they got something of a shock. If you line up the mitochondrial DNA from any given living human to any other living human, you might expect to find a few dozen points at which they are different. Compare human mtDNA to Neanderthal DNA, and you’ll find about 200 differences. But when the scientists compared the Denisova DNA to a group of human mitochondrial genomes, they found nearly 400 differences. In other words, their DNA was about twice as different from ours than Neanderthal DNA.
The scientists then used the DNA to draw a family tree. Here’s the figure from the paper, which you can also see here for full-size viewing.
The Denisova mitochondrial DNA has been passed down, mother to child, on a lineage of hominids that’s separate from the one that produced mitochondria in Neanderthals and in living humans. Paabo and his colleagues estimated the age of common ancestor from which all the mitochondria evolved, based on the mutations in each branch. They concluded that common ancestor lived 1 million years ago. Below is a simple tree that shows the timing more clearly, from an accompanying commentary in Nature.
No matter how you slice it, this is very exciting. All the mitochondrial DNA from living humans is believed to date back just 150,ooo years. That doesn’t mean that we all descend from a single “Eve.” There were other woman around at the time, and they passed down their own mitochondria. But those lineages eventually hit dead ends. In some cases, women only had sons. In others, they never had children. Eventually, all the mitochondrial DNA in the human population could be traced to only one of the women alive at the time.
All the Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA also shares a relatively recent common ancestor of its own–probably thanks to the same process. And now, for the first time, scientists have found hominid mitochondrial DNA that comes from a far more ancient split.
So–how to explain this? A couple possibilities present themselves.
1. The DNA belongs to a species of hominid that’s neither human nor Neanderthal.
This is the most interesting, most science-fictionish possibility.
Our hominid ancestors evolved into upright apes in Africa some six million years ago. By about 1.9 million years ago, some of those hominids had made their way out of Africa and strolled all the way to Indonesia. They go by the name of Homo erectus, and they stuck around Asia for quite a long time–some would argue they were still around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals appear to have evolved from another wave out of Africa, which spread to Europe and Siberia several hundred thousand years ago. Meanwhile, our own ancestors appear to have stayed put in Africa. The oldest fossils of anatomically modern humans come from Africa 200,000 years ago, for example, and studies on human DNA find that African lineages are the oldest.
The Denisova DNA split too recently from our own to have been carried by H. erectus, the first globe-trotting hominids. But paleoanthropologists have found a fair number of other hominid fossils in Europe and Asia that might belong to more recent waves out of Africa. (Here, for example, is a report on hominids in Europe 1.2 million years ago.) So perhaps there was at least one other wave aside from H. erectus, the expansion of Neanderthals, and the spread of modern humans. If that’s true, this new discovery also means that this wave produced a long lineage of hominids that survived long enough to live alongside humans. We coexisted with yet another species of hominid–along with Neanderthals, H. erectus, and those lovable hobbits, Homo floresiensis–for thousands of years. Our current solitude is a recent fluke.
If #1 turns out to be true, then this DNA deserves a species name of its own. But for now, Paabo and his colleagues have refrained from giving it one. Instead, they’ve nicknamed the source of the DNA “X-woman.” Why the reticence? Probably because of possibility #2…
2. The DNA comes from the finger of a Neanderthal or a human–thanks to a love that dare not speak its name. Imagine, if you will, that an early Neanderthal male takes a morning constitutional in search of woolly rhinos when, gadzooks, he meets up with a fetching X-woman hominid. For whatever reason, the two of them decide to have an interspecies tryst, and X-woman gets pregnant. She gives birth to a girl carrying Neanderthal and X-woman DNA in her nucleus–and nothing but X-woman DNA in her mitochondria. Somehow this girl becomes a part of Neanderthal society; she has Neanderthal children of her own, and they continue to carry the X-woman mitochondrial DNA.
Remember that in every generation, nuclear DNA gets mixed up. Half of the DNA a child carries in the nucleus comes from its father, half from its mother. And with the generation of new eggs and sperm, chromosomes from each parent get chopped up and shuffled back into new combinations. So over generations, the X-woman DNA might gradually dwindle away from the Neanderthal gene pool–but some Neanderthals might still carry X-woman mitochondria, handed down from mother to daughter to grand-daughter.
(It’s also possible that the interbreeding male in this scenario was a human–although just in terms of timing, that’s less likely, since Neanderthals were out of Africa sooner than we were.)
One reason to take this possibility seriously is the fact that other primate species regularly mix up their DNA in just this way. Mongoose lemurs expanded into the range of brown lemurs, for example, and mitochondrial DNA ended up jumping the species barrier. In many cases, the species were separated by a million years or so, just like the Denisov DNA and human/Neanderthal DNA. (This is why it’s hard to use DNA-barcoding to tell closely related primates apart.) Another reason to take this possibility serious is lies in our own genomes. Some scientists have made a forceful case for the presence of ancient non-human DNA in the gene pool of living humans.
Still, even if this scenario turned out to be right, it would mean that a previously unknown X-woman hominid line expanded out of Africa and lived in Asia until relatively recently. Whether that lineage could be rightly considered a separate species of its own is tricky. (For more on that trickiness, see my article, “What is a Species?” from Scientific American.)
I can imagine other possible interpretations, but I’m not sure how plausible they really are. I’ve sent out some queries to some experts, and will add anything interesting I get back [Update: See the end of the post]. Fortunately, it may be possible to rule some possibilities out in just a few months. Paabo and company are busily churning out the sequence of the nuclear DNA from the Denisova pinky. It’s conceivable that the nuclear DNA will be a lot more like human DNA, or a lot more like Neanderthal DNA–making it likely that the fossil belongs to a hybrid. But if the nuclear DNA is just as exotic as the mitochondria, then perhaps the finger bone really does belong to a distinct species that lived 40,000 years ago–a species, it’s worth pointing out, that left its bones behind in the same layer of sediment where Russian scientists have dug up tools and ornaments made of stone and antler.
The possibility of a highly intelligent Siberian Other will have to dance in our heads until more studies come out.
Update: After I posted this, the paleoanthropologist John Hawks offers an alternative explanation on his blog. I followed up with a few questions via email, and based on his post and his reply, here’s my quick distillation:
Maybe the X-woman was not a separate species at all.
Wind back the clock to a million years ago. In Africa, there’s a population of hominids that will eventually give rise to Neanderthals and humans. The Neanderthal lineage expands out across Europe and Asia. They take with them a wide diversity of mitochondria. Most of the studies on Neanderthal DNA have focused on European Neanderthals–and have thus only captured a limited sample of that diversity. Now, in Siberia, Paabo and his colleagues have moved so far from the areas they had studied before that they’re finally getting to other branches of Neanderthal mitochondria.
In this scenario, Neanderthals play a role similar to that of Africans in the diversity of living humans. In Africa, you can find people with genes belonging to very old lineages. The Khoisan bushmen of southern Africa, for example, have genes that branched off from all other human lineages long ago. In other words, the genes of other Africans share a closer ancestor with genes from people out of Africa. Likewise, some Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is more like human DNA than it is to the Neanderthal DNA found in the Denisova pinky.
I’ll post more replies as they come in.
Reference: Krause et al., “The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia” Nature, doi:10.1038/nature08976
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As the case of human rights activist, Evgeniy Zhovtis, comes under consideration by the Kazakhstani Supreme Court, Freedom House urges the relevant legal authorities to carefully review reports by international monitors of serious procedural flaws in last year's trial.
Jay-Z Short Documentary 'NY-Z' Premieres Online MTV.com Where have you seen Jay-Z perform? Who else owns the Garden like him? Let us know in the comments below, or upload a video to Your.MTV.com! |
Google must follow Chinese rules or leave China Daily There is also no freedom for an Internet company to upload novels without notifying the writers and paying them. Does Google have such freedom in the United ... |
The bill prohibits Oklahoma courts from utilizing laws from other nations. The practical effect is aimed at Sharia Law. For example, courts in the United Kingdom have been giving increasing deference to Muslim rules and restrictions outlined in the Koran. Oklahoma legislators have sought to put a halt to any such consideration in the States' judicial system.
"The proposed amendment would prohibit all Oklahoma courts from considering the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, even in cases of first impression."
The vote in the House was 91 to 2. Both "no" votes came from Democratic Party legislators. The bill now advances to the Senate.
House Joint Resolution 1056 was sponsored by state Rep. Rex Duncan.
From TopConservativesBlog.com:
"Unfortunately, some judges in other states and on the federal bench have begun to cite international law in their court decisions, effectively undermining our own democratic system of government," said Duncan, a Sand Springs Republican and attorney who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. "Our nation’s laws were developed through a democratic process and should not be undermined by haphazard reliance on foreign rulings developed in autocratic societies. Oklahoma court decisions should be based on the U.S. Constitution, Oklahoma Constitution, and our state and national laws – period."
The proposed amendment declares that courts "shall not consider international law or Sharia Law."
(H/t BareNakedIslam)
