A flying frog that changes colors, a stick insect that’s a foot and a half long, and a “ninja slug” that shoots “love darts.” These are among the 120 new species discovered or described over the past three years on the lush island of Borneo–the Southeast Asia island divided between Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei.

On Earth Day, the conservation group WWF released a report on some of the recent discoveries in a 54-million-acre nature preserve known as the Heart of Borneo. WWF ecologist Adam Tomasek says that on an average, three new species were found every month.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Slugs?

This colorful green and yellow slug species, named Ibycus rachelae, was discovered atop high mountains in the Malaysian section of Borneo. The slug has a tail three times the length of its head, and it wraps the tail around itself when it is resting. From the Ariophantidae family, this unusual species makes use of so-called ‘love darts’ in courtship. Made of calcium carbonate, the love dart is harpoon-like which pierces and injects a hormone into a mate, and may play a role in increasing the chances of reproduction [Guardian].

Image: Peter Koomen / WWF

There are few more dramatic examples of humanity’s careless treatment of the earth than the Aral Sea.

The Aral’s precipitous decline began in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union began using river water to irrigate the mega-farms it established on the arid steppe. As the river water flowing into the sea slowed to a trickle, the Aral began drying up.

Once a colossal geographic feature—at 26,000 square miles (67,300 square kilometers), it was the fourth largest inland water body on earth in terms of surface area—the Aral shrank to hold just one-tenth of its original volume, becoming a tragic shadow of itself [National Geographic]. Fisheries collapsed, people moved away, towns were abandoned, and the Aral became famous primarily for its ghostly landscapes, with rusting ships lying on sand dunes.

But now scientists report that the northern sector of the Aral is making a recovery, due to a concerted effort from the Kazakh government, the World Bank, and scientists. A dam completed in 2005 raised water levels and decreased salinity, and increased the North Aral’s span by 20 percent. Soon native plants, stifled for years by the saltwater, began to sprout, and migrating birds like pelicans, flamingos, and ducks again began to visit the Aral. Nowadays, “It’s a paradise for birds,” says Russian Academy of Sciences zoologist Nick Aladin, who has been studying the Aral since the 1970s. “It’s a place for pleasure, and it’s an enormous victory” [National Geographic]. Freshwater fish have also returned, leading to hopes of a resuscitated fishing industry. And while the South Aral remains in dire straits, researchers say the tentative revival of the North Aral gives them hope.

Another sea, another headache. Over in the Middle East, several countries are weighing a proposal that could give new life to the dwindling Dead Sea–but that may cause environmental problems of its own.

In the past century, the Dead Sea’s surface area has shrunk by almost a third. The Jordan River, which once fed the super-salty lake, has been tapped for irrigating and drinking water by Israel, Syria, and Jordan; shore-side factories that evaporate the water to extract minerals have exacerbated the problem. Without action, the Dead Sea will continue to shrink. But a proposal being evaluated by the World Bank could revive the lake with a 180-kilometre-long conduit carrying water from the Red Sea 400 metres downhill to the Dead Sea through a canal, pipeline or some combination of the two. The water’s flow would generate electricity to run a desalination plant, providing drinking water for local people [Nature News].

But environmentalists are questioning the wisdom of a so-called Red-Dead connector. Drawing vast quantities of water from the Red Sea could damage the fish and coral there, according to Friends of the Earth Middle East. Green advocates also worry that the Red Sea water will change the chemistry of the salty Dead Sea, making life harder for the sea’s salt-tolerant microorganisms and encouraging blooms of algae that thrive in less salty water. They argue that intensive water conservation programs could improve the flow of the Jordan River and render the expensive Red-Dead canal unnecessary.

Israeli geologist Ittai Gavrieli, who is studying the impacts of the proposed conduit, says the region has a tough decision to make. If nothing is done, the situation will only get worse, but a Red–Dead conduit would carry with it some real risks. The decision to stop the sea’s decline, says Gavrieli, “is a matter of choosing between bad and worse. But the question is, what is bad and what is worse?” [Nature News]

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Return of the Aral Sea offers an in-depth look at the dam that’s helping the North Aral
DISCOVER: Life in the Dead Sea explains how microbes survive in the salty water
DISCOVER: Better Med (or Red) than Dead describes an earlier push for the Red-Dead canal
80beats: Saudi to Use Plentiful Resource (Sunlight) to Produce Scarce Resource (Fresh Water)

Image: NASA, showing the Aral Sea

Perhaps. Matt Stone & Trey Parker have put out a statement. I watched it online yesterday and I thought the bleeps were part of the “in joke.” I’ll spoil the episode for you by noting that it wasn’t even Muhammad in the bear a suit. Additionally I don’t get why people are that that scared, the threats were made by a group that’s very close to literally being in a basement. On the other hand, remember during the Salman Rushdie affair that translators were killed, so perhaps there’s reason that a corporation would want to stay on the safe side (one could imagine civil lawsuits if someone did get hurt against the corporation).

On final thing, the South Park episode in question depicted Moses as a dull artificial intelligence, Buddha as a cocaine junkie and Jesus as a habitual viewer of internet pornography (at least that’s Buddha’s accusation, which Jesus does not deny, rather, he minimizes its equivalence with a drug habit. I think Jesus’ logic is spot on, and am leaning toward Brit Hume’s dismissal of Buddhism on account of this interaction). There are of course Jewish,* Christian and Buddhist extremists in world. But most people judge that Jews, Christians and Buddhist are less liable to take violent action to defend the dignity of their faith than extremist Muslims. I think that’s probably a valid assessment, and I think that points to the fact that not all religions can be made equivalent in the nature and numbers of violent radicals. Why that is is a different question.

* Because Judaism is operationally coterminous with an ethnicity, at least by self-conception, I have seen some attempts to accuse those who have anti-Jewish religious views as anti-Semites. In general anti-Semites have anti-Jewish attitudes in regards to the religion, but the inverse is not always so. Some Muslims have started imitating that strategy, accusing plain anti-religious folk like Richard Dawkins of being an Islamophobe as if he is racist.

What on Earth could have created a hole like this in the roof of a house in Cartersville, Georgia?

Why, nothing. Nothing on Earth, that is. Because here’s the culprit:

Yowza. That’s a stony meteorite, and in March 2009 it came screaming down out of the sky and punched that hole! The cube is one centimeter (about a half inch) on a side, and is used for scale. What a great specimen! And it weighs in at 294 grams — more than half a pound — so it’s hefty. It must’ve been moving at quite a clip when it smacked that house, probably a couple of hundred kilometers per hour.

And if you want to see it for yourself, and live near Atlanta, now’s your chance: The Tellus Science Museum will have the rock on display — together with the roof and ceiling under it that get whacked — starting tonight at 6:00 p.m. as part of their Earth Day event.

I wonder if it’ll still be on display when Dragon*Con rolls around…

And if you’re wondering about the post title, then this might help. Given the museum’s location, it seemed appropriate.

Cupp, unsupported. S. E. Cupp, sellout, or really, really, confused. That’s how you describe an atheist who accepts evolution, and, who defends the teaching of Creationism in science classes (as a conservative I’m skeptical that she’s a down-the-line majoritarian).

The Red Bias. Red as the color of success?

Of Yeast and Men. Reviews the recent attempt to finding QTLs of small effect via “Extreme QTL Mapping.” What may be doable in yeast may be harder in men.

Claim Jumper: World’s Unhealthiest Restaurant. Is it me, or do these casual dining chains which are oriented toward value always brightly lit? And their food is always super-vivid in their coloring. Contrast with higher end steak houses.

The Apple Secrecy Machine. Secrecy wouldn’t matter if the products weren’t useful.

If you wanted dangerous, you got it.

One week ago today, in response to heavy criticism for killing the Constellation program begun under his predecessor, President Obama presented his revised vision for NASA: To build a new heavy lift spacecraft that will go beyond low Earth orbit and land on an asteroid by around 2025. This goal is far more ambitious than going back to the moon. Space experts say such a voyage could take several months longer than a journey to the moon and entail far greater dangers. “It is really the hardest thing we can do,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said [AP].

NASA doesn’t know which of the nearby asteroids it might pick for a visit, but the main candidates are around 5 million miles from Earth. The moon, by contrast, is a little less than a quarter-million miles away. The asteroids are about a quarter-mile across; the moon is more than 2,000 miles in diameter. And a trip to an asteroid could take 200 days, as opposed to the Apollo 11 lunar round-trip, which required little more than a week. That means NASA may have to devise new radiation shields and life-support systems for the asteroid-bound astronauts.

Once you get there, it’s no picnic either. You can’t actually land on an asteroid because it has so little gravity. Astronauts would have to somehow tether themselves to the rock to keep from floating away. (DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait cheered this bit of science fact in the 1998 disaster movie Deep Impact, in which the heroes encounter this problem while visiting a comet.)

Despite the challenge, there are several great reasons to go. The chemical composition of asteroids can give scientists clues about era of the planets’ formation, roughly four and a half billion years ago. And on a practical level, an asteroid mission would be a Mars training ground, given the distance and alien locale. “If humans can’t make it to near-Earth objects, they can’t make it to Mars,” said MIT astronautics professor Ed Crawley [AP].

And then there’s the heroic Hollywood angle: If we can land on an asteroid, we might also be able to blow one up, or nudge one into a new trajectory. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has identified more than 1,000 “potentially hazardous asteroids.” … Sometimes they come really close — in March 2009 an asteroid passed by Earth at a distance of just about 49,000 miles [ABC News]. Our planet has taken enormous hits from asteroids throughout its geological history, including the 6-mile-wide asteroid that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

But if humans master the art of asteroid-handling, saving the planet from death from the skies might jump from fodder for terrible movies to reality. That “would demonstrate once and for all that we’re smarter than the dinosaurs and could therefore avoid what they didn’t”, White House science adviser John Holdren said [New Scientist].

So there it is, your ultimate response to people who whine that we shouldn’t spend money on space exploration: We must prove, once and for all, that we’re tougher than T. rex.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Science and the Fiction, in which the Bad Astronomer tackles the good and bad of sci-fi science.
DISCOVER: What To Do Before the Asteroid Strikes
80beats: Obama’s Space Speech: We’ll Go To Mars in this Lifetime
80beats: European Spacecraft Buzzes Past an Asteroid, Takes Pictures
Bad Astronomy: Obama lays out bold and visionary revised space policy

Image: NASA

Joe Romm is now coming to our Harvard Kennedy School event. And Joy Moore of Seed/ScienceBlogs will be there to represent one key powerhouse of the science blogosphere. It's all on the website, which has been newly updated. And so has the poster. Check it all out.

In 2007, James Randi took the stage at TED and apparently had a pretty good time (I still hear stories about it). The folks at TED just put the video up, and it’s a hoot.

I’ll note that Randi was 79 when this was filmed. Could you do this well now? There’s a reason his middle name is "Amazing".

Pity the poor scientists–no matter how hard they try to convince the public that science is one of the few things you can trust in this crazy, mixed-up world, public faith in science is still tough to come by.

A new study (pdf) conducted at the University of Maryland examined people’s belief in extrasensory perception (ESP), the supposed paranormal phenomenon of mind-reading. The study not only found that people tend to disregard the views of the scientific community when it comes to paranormal activity, it also showed that they’re inclined to disagree with the scientists.

For the study, the researchers had 160 college students watch a video of a person performing brilliantly on a card-guessing exercise. What the students didn’t know is that the player was discreetly being fed all the answers. To the viewers, it appeared that she was either extremely lucky or had some sort of sixth sense, writes online magazine Miller McCune.

After watching the video, the students were asked a series of questions, including if they believed in ESP and if they thought that the woman in the video had extrasensory powers.

Miller McCune writes:

The participants were broken up into four groups. Those in Condition One were informed that 25 percent of the public believes in ESP, but the scientific community rejects the concept. Those in Condition Two were told that more than 90 percent of the public believes in ESP, but the scientific community considers it bogus.

Those in Condition Three were told that 25 percent of the public believes in ESP, and the scientific community is becoming more open to the idea. Those in Condition Four were informed that more than 90 percent of the public believes in ESP, and the scientific community is beginning to warm to the possibility it is real.

The scientists found that individuals were more likely to report belief in ESP when they were told that a greater percentage of the public believed in it. But, the researchers wrote, “We found no effects indicating that science rejecting a claim led individuals to be less likely to believe the claim.” In fact, those students who were told that scientists dismiss ESP were more likely to declare that the phenomenon is real.

The researchers say there are several possible explanations for this odd result. It might be, they say, that people see paranormal activity as a matter of belief and not evidence. Or it could be that when it comes to psychic coolness, people placed more faith in their peers’ opinions than in those of scientists. But there’s a final, more ominous interpretation, say the researchers: “The findings may result from a decreasing trust in the institution of science.”

Miller McCune writes that the news is particularly worrisome for climatologists–whose warnings about global warming’s dire effects are increasingly being pooh-poohed by a cynical public.

Related Content:
The Intersection: Are Americans Becoming More Distrustful of Science?
Discoblog: UFO Sightings: The Shapes They Are A-Changing
Discoblog: How To Chat With an Alien: The Official Guide
80beats: Damage to One Brain Region Can Boost “Transcendent” Feelings
80beats: Pick a Number. Now, a Brain Scan Will Reveal What It Is.

Image: iStockphoto

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a compilation video from NASA of some of the views from the new Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO.  This spacecraft will return about 1.5 terrabits of data per DAY!

Visit the SDO website for more information on the mission.

It seems obvious that thinking about something will help you to remember it better, but it might be more surprising to know that this process works even more efficiently when we’re asleep. Erin Wamsley from Harvard Medical School has shown that people who are trained to navigate a virtual maze learn the best route through it more quickly if they dream about their experiences.

The last decade of research has clearly shown that sleep is one of the best aide memoires that we have. During this nightly time-out, our brain can rehearse information that it has picked up during the day and consolidate them into lasting memories. Wamsley’s new study supports that idea but it also shows that dreaming while you nap can strengthen our memories even further.

She asked 99 volunteers to learn the layout of a complex virtual maze so that they could reach a specific landmark after being dropped at a random starting point. Five hours later, they were tested again. Those who had stayed awake in the intervening time beat their previous times by 26 seconds, but those who had had a 90-minute nap improved by a whopping 188 seconds.

But those who dreamt about the task fared even better. Wamsley either asked her recruits directly about whether they dreamt about the labyrinth, or asked them to give an open-ended report of everything that was going through their mind while they were asleep. Either way, those who had thought about the maze during their short nap improved far more than those who didn’t. They also beat those who mentally replayed their training again while awake. These striking results suggest that there’s something special about the mental rehearsals that happen during dreaming sleep.

However, the dreams weren’t straightforward replays of previous experiences. When the volunteers described their dreams, they didn’t mention specific objects, locations or routes through the maze. Instead, some talked about isolated parts of their experience, like the music or the prospect of a re-test. Others discussed tangential memories, like other mazes or being stuck in a bat cave (heh). Interestingly, scientists have found the same thing in rodents. A sleeping rat will show similar brain activity to its prior bout of wakefulness, but the two patterns won’t quite match up.

It’s a very exciting set of results. We know that forcefully repeating pieces of information can make them stick in our minds. But this study shows that we can do even better through a passive unintentional process where the material to be learned is only tangentially referenced!

Wamsley doesn’t think that dreams themselves improve our memory – they’re a side effect of processes that do this. While our bodies lie still, our brain is busily working away processing the day’s memories. The brain doesn’t simply replay those memories, as the volunteers’ descriptions show. Instead, Wamsley thinks that it works the old into the new, slowly integrating parts of our recent experiences into our more established memory networks. Dreams, then, are like the tip of a mental iceberg – the visible sign of a tremendous body of work going on behind-the-scenes.

Certainly, people who dreamt about the maze at all included those who found the training most difficult. It seems that their initial difficulties meant that their brains were more likely to continue processing the information they learned after they nodded off. Based on this idea, it’s tempting to suggest that the best time to study intensely is just before you go to sleep, or that a quick nap after an afternoon swotting session is a good idea.

Reference: Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.027

More on sleep:

• Memories can be strengthened while we sleep by providing the right triggers
• Sleeping on it – how REM sleep boosts creative problem-solving
• The point of sleep, or, Do fruit flies dream of six-legged sheep?
• Even without practice, sleep improves memory of movements
• Portable brain activity-recorder shows that sloths aren’t all that sleepy

This week, YouTube began trying to obliterate one of the most popular internet memes of all time, the Downfall parodies featuring an enraged Adolf Hitler, after a copyright claim by the German production house that owns the movie’s rights.

The parody videos all use a clip from the 2004 German film Downfall about Hitler’s final days. In the clip, Hitler–played by actor Bruno Ganz–lashes out at his staff when he is told that he cannot win the war. As with any foreign film, the movie came with subtitles.

Over the years, fun-seekers have replaced the original English subtitles with absurd substitutes. So instead of ranting about the war, the subtitles express Hitler’s rage over Kanye West’s famous outburst, his toilet being clogged, or the collapse of the real estate market. The satirical videos have been hugely popular over the years, with some clips racking up hundreds of thousands of views. But the clips apparently didn’t just generate a lot of laughs, they also irritated the company that owns the rights to the film, prompting the company to ask YouTube to take them off the site.

The company, Constantin Films, also noted that they had received complaints from Jewish groups about the distasteful nature of the spoofs. Indeed, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Associated Press that the league was “delighted” at this piece of news.

“We find them offensive,” said Foxman of the videos. “We feel that they trivialize not only the Holocaust but World War II. Hitler is not a cartoon character.”

Some have argued that since the videos are parodies, they are protected under “fair use,” the legal doctrine that holds that the use of copyright-protected works for purposes such as parody and education may be considered “fair,” writes the Associated Press. However, YouTube’s content policy also specifies that if a copyright holder asks, they will remove the material from the site.

The site is also blocking people from uploading new Downfall parodies. TechCrunch reports that when someone tried to upload a new Hitler spoof on the missing iPhone 4G, they got the following message:

“This video contains content from Constantin Film, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.“

Meanwhile, even as YouTube sweeps its site for the parodies, there are so many of them out there, that you can still watch a few of them easily.

Related Content:
80beats: Italian Court Convicts Google Execs for Hosting Illegal Video
Discoblog: Movie & Music Trade Groups Suggest Orwellian Measures to Stop Piracy
Discoblog: Sweet Blogger O’ Mine, You’re Under Arrest
DISCOVER: The Intellectual Property Fight That Could Kill Millions

On this Earth Day, NASA’s focused on the sun. It just released the first images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), launched in February to study our star in breathtaking detail at a rate of 60 images per minute. The new pictures include the evolution of this loop. Known as a prominence eruption, the loop was born from a relatively cold cloud of plasma, or charged gas, tenuously tethered to the sun’s surface by magnetic forces. Such clouds can erupt dramatically when they break free of the sun’s unstable hold [National Geographic].

Scroll through the gallery for a few more blazing wonders.

Images: NASA

I don’t have any deep ethical insight, but this sort of stuff is interesting because there are a lot of samples out there I assume being used from a time before consent was as formalized. Sounds like the scientists probably oversold the practical applications of their research…like they would to a grant committee. Tribe Wins Fight to Limit Research of Its DNA:

“Did you have permission,” she asked during the question period, “to use Havasupai blood for your research?”

The presentation was halted. Dr. Markow and the other members of the doctoral committee asked the student to redact that chapter from his dissertation.

But months later, tribe members learned more about the research when a university investigation discovered two dozen published articles based on the blood samples that Dr. Markow had collected. One reported a high degree of inbreeding, a measure that can correspond with a higher susceptibility to disease.

Ms. Tilousi found that offensive. “We say if you do that, a close relative of yours will die,” she said.

Another article, suggesting that the tribe’s ancestors had crossed the frozen Bering Sea to arrive in North America, flew in the face of the tribe’s traditional stories that it had originated in the canyon and was assigned to be its guardian.

Listening to the investigators, Ms. Tilousi felt a surge of anger, she recalled. But in Supai, the initial reaction was more of hurt. Though some Havasupai knew already that their ancestors most likely came from Asia, “when people tell us, ‘No, this is not where you are from,’ and your own blood says so — it is confusing to us,” Rex Tilousi said. “It hurts the elders who have been telling these stories to our grandchildren.”

I guess I have more sympathy with the idea that you might have some implied property right to how your genetic information is used than I do with being offended because your primitive beliefs might be overturned (there is no way that American Indian land claims are based on paleoanthropology in any practical terms). Creationism is primitive too, and many evangelical Christians are “offended” at the idea that they might share common descent from apes. So?

Genomics Law Report has more commentary.

When I was a kid, I used to haul my 25 cm ’scope out to the end of the driveway every clear night to observe. In the summer, one of my favorite targets was the Lagoon Nebula: it’s bright, easy to find, and even with the frakkin’ streetlight I had to peer past, details in the vast gas cloud were easy to spot.

But I kinda wish I had access to a 1.5 meter telescope. Their view is a wee bit better:

Wow! Click to embiggen, or grab yourself a ginormous 2000×2000 pixel image if your current desktop is boring. Compared to this, I bet it is.

This image of the Lagoon was taken using the European Southern Observatory 1.5 meter Danish telescope in La Silla, Chile. It’s actually kinda sorta true color, using filters that mimic the sensitivity of the human eye.

If you could find a nice dark spot away from city lights, the Lagoon is actually bright enough to spot with your unaided eye, which is quite a feat considering it’s 40 quadrillion kilometers away — that’s 40,000,000,000,000,000 if you like your zeroes. Even from moderately light-polluted skies it’s easy in binoculars.

The Lagoon is one of those giant star-forming regions I’ve written so much about. And it’s big: a hundred light years across, and busily forming lots and lots of stars.

A wider view of it shows why it’s such a great target for small telescopes. It’s bright, colorful, and has lots of cool swirls and shock waves that accentuate its shape. It’s also located between us and the center of the galaxy — think of it like being towards downtown of a big city when you live in the suburbs — so that whole area of the sky is lousy with gorgeous, interesting things to see.

That also makes these objects great targets for large telescopes, because then we can see all kinds of incredible details. The more of these we study, the better we understand the environment where stars are born, including the Sun. There’s lots of science here… but when I look at images like this, I can’t help but think of that poor dorky teenager (me!) struggling mightily to get that giant, heavy telescope positioned just right so he could see a few wisps of gas gazillions of kilometers away.

All I can do is mentally smile and give him a virtual decades-later pat on the back. Keep at it, kid. It’ll pay off. I promise.

Image credit: ESO/IDA/Danish 1.5 m/ R. Gendler, U.G. Jørgensen, K. Harpsøe

I didn’t know Oliver Wendell Holmes thought the odors of boxwoods “carry us out of time into the abysses of the unbeginning past.” I didn’t know that the necks of daffodils bulge when their ova are fertilized. At least, I didn’t know such things before my wife Grace started to garden, and then to chronicle her experiences in a new blog. I think it’s delightful, but don’t take my spousal word for it–check it out!

There’s a lot of circumstantial evident that mtDNA haplogroup U5 was brought to Europe by the first anatomically modern populations. Though this haplogroup is extant around frequencies of ~10% in modern European populations, with the highest proportions in northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the east Baltic region, extractions of DNA from hunter-gatherer remains in northern Europe yield very high proportions of this lineage. This is not totally surprising, in the early aughts Bryan Sykes wrote a book, The Seven Daughters of Eve, and correctly pointed out that the coalescence for the U5 lineages is very deep in Europe, suggesting that it has had a lot of time to diversify. Sykes’ main thesis though was that most of the genetic heritage of Europe predates the expansion of Neolithic farmers within the last 10,000 years. The rough implication was that ~80% of the ancestry of modern Europeans could be derived from people who were resident within the modern boundaries of the continent of Europe during the last Ice Age.

But Ancient DNA extractions and more thorough analyses of modern population variation are muddling the picture somewhat. Some of the lineages which were presumed to be Paleolithic, such as R1b, may not be so. But the fact remains that we do know that modern humans began to settle Europe within the last 40,000 years, and extirpated the Neandertals within 10,000 years of their initial arrival. Unless those initial populations were totally replaced, there has be a very ancient lineage which dates to the Paleolithic, and in particular the Ice Age. U5 is the mtDNA lineage which is the best candidate, and its frequencies within modern European populations may be a clue to who the real “aboriginals” are. For example, the Sami have very high frequencies of U5, which may be ironic in light of theses that the Finnic populations of the Baltic are hybrids between populations from eastern Eurasia and native Scandinavian groups (the other group which high frequencies of U5 are Basques).

In any case, that is why U5 is of some interest, though the “golden age” of mtDNA & Y studies is probably in the past. A new paper in PLoS one surveys central and eastern European groups, , The Peopling of Europe from the Mitochondrial Haplogroup U5 Perspective:

It is generally accepted that the most ancient European mitochondrial haplogroup, U5, has evolved essentially in Europe. To resolve the phylogeny of this haplogroup, we completely sequenced 113 mitochondrial genomes (79 U5a and 34 U5b) of central and eastern Europeans (Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians and Belorussians), and reconstructed a detailed phylogenetic tree, that incorporates previously published data. Molecular dating suggests that the coalescence time estimate for the U5 is ~25–30 thousand years (ky), and ~16–20 and ~20–24 ky for its subhaplogroups U5a and U5b, respectively. Phylogeographic analysis reveals that expansions of U5 subclusters started earlier in central and southern Europe, than in eastern Europe. In addition, during the Last Glacial Maximum central Europe (probably, the Carpathian Basin) apparently represented the area of intermingling between human flows from refugial zones in the Balkans, the Mediterranean coastline and the Pyrenees. Age estimations amounting for many U5 subclusters in eastern Europeans to ~15 ky ago and less are consistent with the view that during the Ice Age eastern Europe was an inhospitable place for modern humans.

The simple reality is that much of northern Europe was not habitable during the Last Glacial Maximum, so naturally hunter-gatherers would rapidly expand to settle the new territory as it became accessible. This may be why the Basques have a more diverse array of U5 lineages than the Sami, northern populations are sampled from the diversity of the southern. But after the expansion it may be that the original genetic substrate of Paleolithic Europe was heavily overlain by agriculturalists, and it is only in the far north and east than the Paleolithic populations persisted because of ecological parameters. This is why I suspect that a deeper analysis of northeast European genetics will give us some clues as to the demographic process of the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture.

How about a little trivia for your Thursday?  I tend to pick up interesting “factoids”, and I’m not usually particular about the subject matter.  I’m like a crow, picking up shiny little bits to take back to my nest.  There’s something satisfying about little bits of information.

Candid Pic of Marian

Starting at about $1,000 US, you can have some of your cremated remains blasted into space, either into orbit around the Earth, to the Moon, or shot into deep space.

Many scientists believe the Stradivarius violins have a purer tone because the wood used in making them was denser because of the Maunder Minimum ca 1645-1750.  That’s a period of low sun spot activity believed to be associated with colder temperatures on Earth.

More than 50 trillion ( that’s 50,000,000,000,000) solar neutrinos pass through your body every second.  There’s no place you can go to get away from them, they can pass through miles of lead.  That’s not the cool part; some scientists believe they can also pass through time.

AMANDA-II map of Northern Hemisphere neutrino sky

The Earth is moving at about 66,700 mph as it travels around the Sun.

On the average, a meteorite strikes a human about once every 9,300 years.

A potentially disastrous meteorite strike occurs on Earth about every 100,000 years.  We’re overdue.

The largest meteorite (still intact) found on Earth is the Hoba meteorite in Nambia, Africa.  It was found in 1920, and weighs about 60,000 kg.  It crashed about 80,000 years ago.

Hoba Meteorite - Image: Basilicofresco (Flickr) some rights reserved

Some of the largest asteroids have their own moons.  The asteroid Ida was the first discovered to have a moon, Dactyl.  You just HAVE to see that:

Ida and her moon, Dactyl - Image NASA/JPL, taken by Galileo on 082893

The International Space Station has been continuously occupied since the first crew boarded, November 2, 2000.

The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica (remember Lake Vostok?  Exobio?), -126.9 Fahrenheit.

The air temperature around a bolt of lightning is about 30,000 Celsius.  That’s about 5 times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

This makes a nice wallpaper if you need a new one.

Had enough?  Okay, here’s a neat one for you:  The word “Google” comes from the term “googol”, which is a number 1 followed by 100 zeros.  I’m not going to write that out, but if you REALLY want to see it, I’ll put it in the comments.

I’d be interested in hearing any factoids you’ve found interesting (blog-related, of course), or science-related trivia questions.  I’m insatiable.

Marian at work

Okay, I got wa-a-a-a-a-ay behind today, and looking over my post (intended for this evening), I think I’ll hold it until tomorrow.  It still needs work.  Since I’ll be up most of tonight trying to catch up on “things”, I should be able to work on it all night.

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.

Rats.

The shuttle Discovery and crew will remain is orbit for another 24 hours.  The clouds at KSC just would not cooperate, just as we got to the Go/No Go decision, they decided not to land today and hope for better conditions tomorrow.

The NOAA weather forecast:

Tonight: A 20 percent chance of showers before midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 61. Northeast wind between 5 and 10 mph.

Tuesday: A 30 percent chance of showers after 2pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 75. East wind around 10 mph.