Sit down, children, and let me tell you a story:  About 65.5 million years ago, whatever life forms there were present on this planet would have seen a terrible thing; they would have seen the end of the world.  A 10-15 km asteroid impacted the Earth in the Yucatan Peninsula with a force of over a billion times that of the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined.  The asteroid landed in a bed of gypsum, which would have released sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.  There would have been a tremendous blast force, dust clouds, megatsunamis higher than any we’ve ever imagined, and an infrared pulse that would have lasted hours, killing by radiation.  Volcanic eruptions, global firestorms… well, I said it was the end of the world.  Anything specialized to an environment, that was picky about what it ate, or larger than a crocodile pretty much went extinct.  Anything that was small and could eat detritus (that would be non-living organic matter like fecal material and other organic trash) had a better chance.

Artist impression of Chicxulub Impact, NASA/JPL

Moving forward to the present time, in 1978 geophysicists working for the oil industry took a look at a strangely symmetrical crater at Chicxulub.  They read 1960s geological studies that theorized the crater was caused by an ancient impact.  The results of their exploration of the area were published in 1981, coincidentally the same year experimental physicist Luis Alvarez published his hypothesis that the K-T Extinction was caused by an impact.  Well, of course it was.  An international panel of 41 scientists have finally looked over all the evidence and have agreed that the extinction event was caused, at least in part, by the impact.  There were other global troubles at the time, which may or may not have caused some species to go extinct, but the event was definitely tipped over and put on the front burner by the impact.

Chixculub Crater, NASA/JPL

The Chicxulub crater itself is more than 180 km in diameter, which makes it one of the largest confirmed impact craters on Earth.  Material recovered from Chicxulub crater has been identified in part as shocked quartz, tektites, large deposits of iridium, andesite glass, and breccia.  You find these features in association with impacts.  I don’t think anyone really would argue that Chicxulub crater was caused by an impact.  Nothing else could have caused it.  It can’t be reproduced by natural Earth processes, and nothing causes shocked quartz except an impact.

Certainly, not every circular structure on the Earth is an impact crater (cough cough volcano), but this one definitely is from an impact; and when it formed, the world ended. I don’t know how many other times it’s happened here (definitely more than once), but I can tell you it will happen again.

For all you riddlers out there. As you all know by now Roger won the Bonus Riddle and we are starting a new cycle of riddles on Saturday.

I want to give you a heads up that we had an opportunity to give away another great prize.   A&E Entertainment has graciously given us a Blu-ray set of The Universe: Our Solar System.  What we are going to do is run a regular riddle, all the typical rules apply and this is open to everybody. First correct answer gets the loot. To be clear, the winner of this will still be eligible for the next bonus riddle too.

The disks won’t even be on sale until the 24th so here is a chance to be the first on your block to get them.

Here’s a link to the Amazon page, there’s another in the sidebar.

Product Description as seen on Amazon:

THE UNIVERSE: OUR SOLAR SYSTEM takes viewers on an exhilarating voyage through the cosmos. Witness the sun’s birth at the dawn of our solar system, and its death, billions of years in the future; explore the possibility of a human settlement on Mars; and learn about the devastating threats posed by the meteorites, comets, and asteroids that routinely collide with Earth.

From the farthest planets and stars in our solar system, back to the familiar face of our moon, HISTORY brings the mysteries of the heavens down to earth.

DISC 1: Secrets of the Sun / Mars: The Red Planet / The End of the Earth: Deep Space Threats To Our Planet / Jupiter: The Giant Planet / The Moon

DISC 2: Spaceship Earth / The Inner Planets: Mercury & Venus / Saturn: Lord of the Rings / Alien Galaxies / Life and Death of a Star

Good luck!  

One of the major issues which has loomed at the heart of biology since The Origin of Species is why species exist, as well as how species come about. Why isn’t there a perfect replicator which performs all the conversion of energy and matter into biomass on this planet? If there is a God the tree of life almost seems to be a testament to his riotous aesthetic sense, with numerous branches which lead to convergences, and a inordinate fascination with variants on the basic morph of beetles. From the outside the outcomes of evolutionary biology look a patent mess, a sprawling expanse of experiments and misfires.

A similar issue has vexed biologists in relation to sex. Why is it that the vast majority of complex organisms take upon themselves the costs of sex? The existence of a non-offspring bearing form within a species reduces the potential natural increase by a factor of two before the game has even begun. Not only that, but the existence of two sexes who must seek each other out expends crucial energy in a Malthusian world (selfing hermaphrodites obviously don’t have this problem, but for highly complex organisms they aren’t so common). Why bother? (I mean in an ultimate, not proximate, sense)

It seems likely that part of the answer to both these questions on the grande scale is that the perfect is the enemy of long term survival. Sexual reproduction confers upon a lineage a genetic variability which may reduce fitness by shifting populations away from the adaptive peak in the short term, but the fitness landscape itself is a constant bubbling flux, and perfectly engineered asexual lineages may all too often fall off the cliff of what was once their mountain top. The only inevitability seems to be that the times change. Similarly, the natural history of life on earth tells us that all greatness comes to an end, and extinction is the lot of life. The universe is an unpredictable place and the mighty invariably fall, as the branches of life’s tree are always pruned by the gardeners red in tooth and claw.

But it is one thing to describe reality in broad verbal brushes. How about a more rigorous empirical and theoretical understanding of how organisms and the genetic material through which they gain immortality play out in the universe? A new paper which uses plant models explores the costs and benefits of admixture between lineages, and how those two dynamics operate in a heterogeneous and homogeneous world. Population admixture, biological invasions and the balance between local adaptation and inbreeding depression:

When previously isolated populations meet and mix, the resulting admixed population can benefit from several genetic advantages, including increased genetic variation, the creation of novel genotypes and the masking of deleterious mutations. These admixture benefits are thought to play an important role in biological invasions. In contrast, populations in their native range often remain differentiated and frequently suffer from inbreeding depression owing to isolation. While the advantages of admixture are evident for introduced populations that experienced recent bottlenecks or that face novel selection pressures, it is less obvious why native range populations do not similarly benefit from admixture. Here we argue that a temporary loss of local adaptation in recent invaders fundamentally alters the fitness consequences of admixture. In native populations, selection against dilution of the locally adapted gene pool inhibits unconstrained admixture and reinforces population isolation, with some level of inbreeding depression as an expected consequence. We show that admixture is selected against despite significant inbreeding depression because the benefits of local adaptation are greater than the cost of inbreeding. In contrast, introduced populations that have not yet established a pattern of local adaptation can freely reap the benefits of admixture. There can be strong selection for admixture because it instantly lifts the inbreeding depression that had built up in isolated parental populations. Recent work in Silene suggests that reduced inbreeding depression associated with post-introduction admixture may contribute to enhanced fitness of invasive populations. We hypothesize that in locally adapted populations, the benefits of local adaptation are balanced against an inbreeding cost that could develop in part owing to the isolating effect of local adaptation itself. The inbreeding cost can be revealed in admixing populations during recent invasions.

First, plants are good models to explore evolutionary genetics. They’re not as constrained as say mammals, or the typical tetrapod, when it comes to barriers to gene flow between distinct taxa. Hybridization is common, and plants can also self-fertilize as well as cross-fertilize, allowing researchers to push the genetic pool in different directions (”selfing” obviously reduces the effective population and is an extreme form of inbreeding, so it’s a good way to purge genetic variation really quickly). In a perfect abstract world of evolution one might imagine Richard Dawkins’ vehicles and replicators as fluid entities which float along a turbid sea of evolutionary genetic parameters, drift, migration, mutation and selection. But reality is constrained to DNA substrate, which have their own parameters such as recombination, modulators such as epigenetics, and numerous ways to express variation through gene regulation. It’s complicated, and stripping the issues down to their pith is easier said that done.

But the broader dynamics here being examined is the generalist-specialist trade-off, which I think is relevant to the two issues I introduced earlier in this post. Specialists are optimized for their own position in the adaptive landscape, but have difficulties when it is perturbed. Generalists always less than maximum fitness in all landscapes, but higher average fitness across them because they can adapt to changes. Specialization is local adaptation of particular lineages, while in the generalist case you can have invasive species in novel environments. They’re obviously facing an adaptive landscape which is at some remove from what any of the introduced genotypes were “optimized” for, so hybridization produces something new for something new.

In the first figure of the paper you see F3 wild barley descended from two parental lineages, ME and AQ. The left panels show seed output as a function of heterozygosity, and the right panels as a function of ME genome content. Remember that in subsequent generations the descendants of hybrids will vary quite a big in genetics and phenotype as the original alleles re-segregate.

The takeaway is that in novel environments genetic variation seems to result in increased fitness. Why? One concept which one has to introduce is heterosis, whereby crosses between homogeneous lineages produce more fitness offspring. One reason this may be is that there is overdominance, where heterozygotes have greater fitness than the homogyzotes. This is the case with sickle-cell malaria disease. Another reason may be that in the original parental lineages there was a higher fraction of alleles which were deleterious in homozygote genotypes. In plain English, inbreeding resulted in genetic drift which cranked up the proportion of alleles implicated in recessively express negative phenotypes. The authors argue though that in the context local adaptation is strong enough to be a barrier against too much gene flow between the parental wild barely lineages, so the deleterious alleles are less likely to be masked. Only in a novel environment when that benefit was removed from the equation could the negative consequences of inbreeding come to the fore in the total calculus.

Figure 2 shows the results of experiments which examine the fitness of white campion, a European species which has been introduced in North America. In the left panel are crosses between native European lineages, with distance between parental lineages on the x-axis. In the right panel you have the same experiment, but with North American variants, which are products of introductions from various regions of Europe. The plants were grown in a “common garden,” to show how all the genotypes performed when environment was controlled.

As you can see moderate levels of hybridization entailed a benefit in the European variants, but not the North American variants. Hybridization between variants which were too distant did produce outbreeding depression in the European case, suggesting perhaps that disruption of co-adapted gene complexes resulted in a greater fitness cost than the masking of deleterious alleles due to inbreeding. One can make the inference from these data that the introduced white campion lineages are already hybridized, the barriers to crossing being removed by a disruption of the adaptive landscapes which each native lineages was optimized for.

Here are the authors from the discussion talking about invasions of exotic species:

Provided that multiple introductions from different source populations have occurred, the benefits of admixture become freely available to introduced populations that do not yet show a pattern of local adaptation. Because the benefits are potentially large, admixture may play an important role during early invasions. Native populations often show evidence of inbreeding depression…and one instant reward of admixture in the introduced range is the release of this genetic burden. Such heterosis effects can contribute significantly to the establishment and early success of invasive species…When tested together in a common garden experiment, invaders can show enhanced fitness-related traits compared with populations from their native range…If there is evidence of admixture, the effects of heterosis might be a default explanation for such observations, perhaps providing a null expectation against which other explanations (such as trait evolution) need to be tested.

What have plants to do with life as a whole? I assume much. Plants differ in the details, but compared to other complex multicellular organisms in regards to evolutionary genetics they’re quite liberated. By this, I mean that their modes of reproduction and promiscuity in hybridization make them more of an ideal “frictionless” test case of evolutionary biology and the power of the classical parameters. Perhaps given enough time natural selection would produce the ideal replicator to rule them all, to drive all others to extinction. But that day is not this day. And that day may never come because the universe is far too protean and erratic. Life is varied, on the phenotypic and genotypic level, and the exogenous processes of climate and geology continue to warp and reshape the adaptive landscape. And more subtly, but just as critically, life is always in an endless race with itself, as pathogens co-evolve with their hosts, and predators figure out how to outfox their prey. Life warps its own adaptive landscapes, and the innovation of one branch may lead to extinction of others as well as the proliferation of new branches.

More prosaically and anthropocentrically what does this say about us? Humans are an expansive species, and over the past 500 years different lineages have been hybridizing promiscuously. New genotypes have arisen in altered landscapes, and our pathogens are also riding the high tide of globalization onward and upward. We are ourselves a “natural experiment.”

Image Credit: Olivia Munn by Gage Skidmore

Link hat tip: Dienekes.

Citation: Verhoeven KJ, Macel M, Wolfe LM, & Biere A (2010). Population admixture, biological invasions and the balance between local adaptation and inbreeding depression. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society PMID: 20685700

What do you think they are? I’m canvassing opinions for a possible project.

(Note: The question is asked from the premise that global warming is real and human caused, not that it is itself a lie. Contrarian/denialist answers may be fun, but they won’t be of use to me.)

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Meet the cyborg cell. By attaching probes with nano-hairpin connectors to living cells, researchers have measured electrical currents from inside. They hope the probes will provide a useful way to monitor cells’ health.

A team at Harvard University conducted the study, which appears in Science. Though other probes can measure the currents in electrical impulse-producing cells–such as beating heart cells–none have given researchers the precision of measuring from inside. The probes designed in this study allowed researchers to successfully measure the electric pulses from cultured chicken heart cells’ beating.

One of the team’s challenges was getting the wires to kink into the hairpin shape–a difficult maneuver using traditional nanowire-making techniques. They noted if they stopped the wire as it formed, they could force it to bend.

The business end of the transistor sits on the pin’s bent tip and penetrates the cell. The two arms of the hairpin, which serve as electrical contacts, do not penetrate the cell deeply so minimise damage. In general, it is difficult to control the shape of nanowires, which are grown gradually on a substrate. But last year, [Charles M.] Lieber’s team reported that if you stop and restart this growth process, you can introduce a 120º kink. By kinking their wire twice in quick succession, the team created the sharp hairpin bend that they required. [Nature News]

The team also camouflaged the probe’s tip (which can be smaller than the diameter of a virus particle) with a lipid coating–fooling the cell into letting it inside.

The Harvard cell probes, described today in the journal Science, are three-dimensional, V-shaped silicon nanowires with transistors at their tips. They’re flexible and coated with two layers of lipid molecules, just as a cell is. When the transistor tip, which is about the size of a virus, encounters a cell, the cell pulls it inside. Lieber’s group found that the tips can also be removed gently, with no ill effects to the cell. They’ve used the transistor probes to take electrical measurements in single cells and are now using them to measure electrical activity in the groups of adjacent cells that form tissues. [Technology Review]

The team hopes that eventually such devices will prove useful in medical monitoring, and is planning tests to see if similar devices will work with neurons.

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Images: Science / AAAS

August has been quite the success story for the use of crowdsourcing—farming out work to willing humans or bored computers—to make scientific discoveries. Last week a study showed how citizen scientists helped unravel the structure of proteins by playing a video game. Today, a study in Science documents a newly discovered pulsar—newly discovered by the computers of amateurs, that is.

This find was the first of its kind for Einstein@Home, a project that uses the downtime of a network of volunteer computers to hunt for gravity waves and radio signals. (The more famous SETI@Home uses computer free time to seek out alien signals.) The idling PC of Chris and Helen Colvin of Ames, Iowa, detected the signature of the pulsar now called J2007 for short, which was confirmed by a computer in Germany owned by Daniel Gebhardt.

Pulsars are interesting objects: These rotating stars emit a beam of radiation that is only visible to us when the beam flashes past Earth, a phenomenon called the lighthouse effect. And the newfound pulsar seems particularly interesting.

It turns out that J2007, located in the Milky Way in the constellation Vulpecula, is not just any radio pulsar. Most pulsars are neutron stars that spin on their axis about once a second and have strong magnetic fields. In contrast, the J2007 neutron star spins 41 times a second, and has a weak magnetic field. This type of fast-spinning pulsar is usually associated with a binary-star system — but J2007 seems to be sitting out in space by itself [MSNBC].

Initially, program director Bruce Allen says, Einstein@Home sought gravity waves: ripples in space caused by massive objects, theorized in the early 20th century by Einstein. But after finding no significant signals, Allen turned part of the program over to seeking radio signals from pulsars, hoping to give the volunteers something to get excited about.

When the pulsar was spotted, Allen says, it took a while to get the excitement across to the Colvins. He tells MSNBC that they thought his emails were spam, so he had to send a certified letter to get their attention. Once he did, though, the Iowa couple was walking on air.

Helen Colvin says that she and Chris loaded Einstein@Home after a period of running SETI@Home because it seemed more likely to get a result some day. Still, she is surprised to own the computer that actually found something. “It was a bit like winning the lottery,” she says. “The odds aren’t in your favour” [Nature].

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons (Crab Nebula pulsar)

Though it might work for The DaVinci Code, apparently citing the bible doesn’t fly in a scientific journal. Virology Journal apologized yesterday for publishing a paper titled “Influenza or not influenza: Analysis of a case of high fever that happened 2000 years ago in Biblical time,” which attempts to diagnosis “a woman with high fever cured by our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Yesterday, journal editor Robert F. Garry apologized for the paper’s publication and announced that Virology will retract the piece. The blog Retraction Watch, where we found this story, posted a response from the paper’s lead author, Ellis Hon:

“As an article for debate, there was no absolute right or wrong answer, and the article was only meant for thought provocation. Neither was it meant to be a debate on the concept of miracles. My only focus at the time of writing was ‘what had caused the fever and debilitation’ that was cured by Jesus.”

The piece, which appeared in the journal’s “Case Report” section, had a reference list including The Holy Bible (New King James Version) and the Fahrenheit temperature scale. The authors cite the cure’s speed and the woman’s quick recovery in making their diagnosis.

The Bible describes that when Jesus touched the woman, the fever retreated instantaneously. This implies that the disease was probably not a severe acute bacterial infection (such as septicemia) or subacute endocarditis that would not resolved instantaneously.

Playing it safe, the authors also note that other possibilities could include drug fever and poisoning, but demonic possession is definitely out:

One final consideration that one might have is whether the illness was inflicted by a demon or devil. The Bible always tells if an illness is caused by a demon or devil (Matthew 9:18-25, 12:22, 9:32-33; Mark 1:23-26, 5:1-15, 9:17-29; Luke 4:33-35, 8:27-35, 9:38-43, 11:14). The victims often had what sounded like a convulsion when the demon was cast out. In our index case, demonic influence is not stated, and the woman had no apparent convulsion or residual symptomatology.

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Image: flickr / Dan Germain

The US astronomical community is anxiously awaiting tomorrow’s press conference on the release of the “Astro2010 Decadal Survey”. Now, the astronomical community has press releases all the time, but almost all are about communicating scientific results or images to the general public. Tomorrow’s is different. What we learn will shape the next ten years of investment in astronomical infrastructure, and set the course of much of scientific innovation in the ten years after that.

For close to half a century, the astronomical community has gone through an extremely productive exercise in navel gazing, producing exhaustive reports once a decade to lay out our priorities as a field. These reports are the result of a year long process of consultation, analysis, and lobbying. Through the National Academy of Sciences, the community organizes a series of committees to evaluate every aspect of US astronomical research. They try to identify scientific areas that are ripe for breakthroughs, and then to match these areas with specific technological investments in astronomical tools (primarily telescopes, but also increasingly computational and theoretical resources). The committees then do their best to rank these investments into a prioritized list.

The process of making a prioritized list is relatively horrific, since it involves choices between extremely different, non-overlapping projects. For example, if you’ve spent your life understanding optical and near-infrared spectra of galaxies, you’ll be rooting for a gigantic ground based telescope — most competing projects will be of little utility for your research. However, as a field, we are forced to face up to the fact that sometimes the best way to move forward on an astrophysical topic is not necessarily where we, as individuals, have chosen to do so. We also have to recognize that what may interest us personally may not be the most important question in the field. For example, I’m a nearby galaxy kind of girl, but I’d be a fool not to recognize that extrasolar planets are far more “ripe” for dramatic results. Finally, accepting these facts is not equally easy for all individuals, and many people are willing to go the mattresses for their preferred outcome. One hopes for good behavior, but people will be people.

The reason the process is so high-stakes is that the ranking that comes out of the Decadal Survey is taken very, very seriously. The upper administration of NASA and the National Science Foundation take these recommendations as commandments (i.e. don’t bother seeking funding for the satellite telescope that was ranked 15th). Ever more seriously, congressional staffers read these reports, making Congress extremely unlikely to finance anything but a top ranked project. (The few times that earmarks have been laid out for specific projects, it’s been Seriously Frowned Upon by the community, and by any administrator who has based their planning on the ranked list). Frankly, this is great, even if it’s hard. We wouldn’t want anyone else to make these decisions but us, as hard as it is to sometimes see your favorite project nudged out by something you are far less interested in.

So, the big things to look for in the news tomorrow are the first ranked ground-based project (i.e. NSF funded) and the first ranked space-based project (NASA funded). In the current funding climate, and with the growing costs of building competitive facilities, the community is unlikely to get more than one major initiative rolling — if that. This decadal report is unlikely to make the mistakes of the last one, which can best be described as being equivalent to asking a 3 year old whether they’d prefer a bathtub full of ice cream or a pony. This round, there was much more attention paid to cost, so that the committee could make realistic decisions.

Frankly, it’s a bit of a scary time. The situation reminds me a bit too much of the Superconducting Supercollider. The funding levels needed to make big advances are at a point where we really can’t afford more than one major initiative a decade. That puts us in the unfortunate position of having a single point failure. Say we back one big project. Suppose that the one big project goes over budget (as cutting edge facilities frequently do) to the point where it gets cancelled, 10-15 years from now. Then, we’re left with nothing, and young astronomers start looking for jobs in Europe.

Scientists have cranked through the numbers and determined that no matter how you mangle a Rubik’s Cube, if you’re doing it right you can theoretically solve the puzzle in 20 moves or fewer. By doing it right, we mean doing it like a supercomputer: Researchers tapped Google’s spare computing power to burn through the Cube’s 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 starting positions.

Even given Google’s processing power, the team–which included a mathematician, a Google engineer, a math teacher, and a programmer–could not solve the problem using brute force alone. They had to take all the starting positions and divide them into more manageable chunks, 2.2 billion smaller groups called “corsets,” which Google’s computers could solve simultaneously.

“The primary breakthrough was figuring out a way to solve so many positions, all at once, at such a fast rate,” says Tomas Rokicki, a programmer from Palo Alto, California, who has spent 15 years searching for the minimum number of moves guaranteed to solve any configuration of the Rubik’s cube. [New Scientist]

Though smaller, these 2.2 billion groups also each had about 20 billion starting positions.

The subproblems were small enough to fit in the memory of a modern PC. But it would take an Intel four-core, 2.8-GHz Nehalem chip-based desktop computer 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 years, to perform the calculation. So the team turned to the impressive computing power that Google has to solve the problem. (Google won’t disclose exactly what kind of computing resources it offered to the group.) [Wired]

Mathematicians have slowly whittled down the believed minimum number of moves to solve the Cube from any starting position, the so called “God’s number,” since the Cube’s creation in 1974 by Hungarian Erno Rubik. Many believed that 20 was the answer for some time, but no one had run through the starting positions to prove it.

[Team member Morley] Davidson said this was “pure religion” as no-one had managed to crunch their way through all configurations. “We were secretly hoping in our tests that there would be one that required 21,” he said. [BBC]

Still, the researchers suggest, don’t expect the confidence boost of a known 20-move maximum to help you solve the Cube any faster.

There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves. [Team website]

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Image: flickr / kirtaph

The Pavlovsk Experimental Station, near St. Petersburg, Russia, was founded in the 1920s. About 90 percent of the plants grown there occur nowhere else, making the collection an island of agricultural biodiversity. And the station soon may be knocked over to make way for a housing development.

The station’s operators at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry lost a court ruling this week, so the land upon which all those plants sit will be given to the Russian Housing Development Foundation. The plant scientists bought themselves an extra month with an instant appeal, but the situation looks grim.

“We expected to lose,” agrees Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust in Rome, who has spent months campaigning against the station’s destruction. “Our real hope lies with President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, who could both override the decision of the courts. At least the higher appeal will give us time to mobilize more people and hopefully get through the gates of the Kremlin,” he adds [Nature].

Pavlovsk station is home to more than 5,000 different varieties of plants, including kinds of berry, cherry, and pear that exist no place else. But with Folwer’s hopes for the station’s salvation dimming, the pertinent question seems to be: Why not just move?

The problem, he says, is that we’re talking about whole plants and not just seeds. Fowler says the plants in the collection are difficult to grow and can’t be stored in a seed bank, like the famous one now operating in the Svalbard Islands of Norway that stores the seeds of important crops in case of Armageddon. Workers would have to uproot the plants, and Fowler says there’s no other suitable location in Russia, so the station’s keepers would have to try to move their collection abroad—if that’s even possible.

Most of the unique fruit plant strains do not reproduce asexually, and are pollinated by other strains, so their seeds do not necessarily yield adult plants that mirror the characteristics of the parent plant…. ”It’s a valuable and unique collection of strains, and its loss would be a serious blow to agriculture,” agreed Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden [The Scientist].

Expect the Pavlovsk scientists to keep up the fight as long as they can: They have a history of taking their plants personally.

The Pavlovsk facility earned a special place in Russian history during the World War II siege of the city, then called Leningrad, when 12 scientists chose to starve to death rather than eat the precious seeds [Los Angeles Times].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons (N.I. Vavilov, institute founder)

The next couple of nights bring us one of the best meteor showers of the year: the Perseids. It peaks around mid-August — this year the peak is tonight, Thursday August 12 — when the Earth plows through the debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle. This year should be pretty good, as the Moon sets early, and won’t interfere with seeing fainter meteors.

If you don’t think the Perseids will be cool, then watch this:

Love it! Want more info?

Back in 2007 I wrote up a brief guide on how to observe the Perseids, and it’s still pretty much apropos of the shower this year (just replace "Sunday" with whatever day you’re observing). The most important things: the later you go out, the better since the shower really peaks after midnight; you need a clear view of as much of the sky as possible; and you don’t need any equipment, but I recommend a lounge chair to lie back on.

Other sites are covering this as well, of course:

- Wanna chat about the meteors? NASA is hosting a live chat Thursday night/Friday morning (Aug 12/13)!
- Universe Today
- Tom’s Astronomy Blog
- Astropixie

So get out there and enjoy the shower!