Mariska Hargitays Evolution from 80s Glam to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

As I do with every single celebrity I can whos made an appearance on the show, I first enjoyed Mariska Hargitay when she appeared on Seinfeld in 1993. Like many people have appeared on that show, Hargitay went on to achieve great success as an actress. While her career began well before 1993, the 90s were really the decade that put her into the spotlight. Once she landed the role as Cynthia Hooper on ER she would forever be entrenched in television.

Then in 2000, yes 2000 she began her Law and Order career which shes dominated for 17 years now. In one way or another Hargitays played the role of Olivia Benson for what feels like a lifetime. In honor of Hargitays 20 plus years in the business, Entertainment Weekly just shared this awesome montage video of her evolving over the years.

One thing thats interesting about this video is that this woman has not aged. Seriously. While her hair and style may have changed, her face is undeniably the same.

Nat is the Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of BC Media Group and all its properties. He loves television, movies, fitness, playing piano, and writing great articles. Follow him on Twitter @nathanielberman

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Mariska Hargitay's Evolution from '80s Glam to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - TVOvermind

Chicago Sun-Times

Evolution of baseball from power to speed has left SBs behind ... Chicago Sun-Times The Cubs' Javy Baez tags out the Indians' Francisco Lindor on a stolen-base attempt during Game 5 of the World Series last season at Wrigley Field. | Jamie ... and more »

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Evolution of baseball from power to speed has left SBs behind ... - Chicago Sun-Times

Sunday is International Darwin Day the 208th anniversary of the birth of naturalist Charles Robert Darwin, whose 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, began a controversy that exists to this day.

Sunday also is being proclaimed as Take Darwin to Church Day in various parts of the world. Leaders of the movement, which was initiated by the Council for Secular Humanism, suggest that churches invite science advocates to speak to their congregations.

Darwin has been lauded and maligned over the past 150 years, depending on ones point of view.

Although some religious organizations stridently oppose biological evolution, other groups accept evolution with a twist: they allow for theological considerations.

Theistic evolution, also known as theistic evolutionism or evolutionary creation, allows for the belief that God is the creator of the universe and all life and that evolution is a tool that God used to create human life. That includes astronomical, geological, chemical and biological evolution.

In 2014, Pope Francis suggested a link between evolution and creation. Said Francis: God is not a demiurge or a conjurer, but the Creator who gives being to all things. The beginning of the world is not the work of chaos that owes its origin to another, but derives directly from a supreme Origin that creates out of love. The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it. The evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of Creation, as evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.

A survey conducted by Pew Research last year found that while 98 percent of scientists associated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science believe humans evolved over time, only 62 percent of Americans overall believe that to be the case.

Among those least likely to believe in human evolution, according to the survey, were evangelical Protestants (57 percent) and Mormons (52 percent.)

In 2008, the Church of England acknowledged it was overly defensive when it dismissed Darwins ideas. In its public apology, the church compared its dismissiveness of Darwins theories to its rejection of Galileos astronomical observations in the 17th century.

Over time, a number of myths about Darwin have cropped up. In response to a request by LNP, Josh Fischel, who teaches religion in the philosophy department at Millersville University, debunked five myths about Charles Darwin.

1. Charles Darwin was an atheist.

While he despised the orthodoxy of traditional religious practices, his writings suggest that he was a deist not an atheist.

2. Charles Darwin had a deathbed conversion to religion.

Its untrue. This myth was started by a woman who never had met Darwin, but who sought to profit from telling a story about this end-of-life conversion experience.

3. The existence of humans is the goal of evolution.

Not true. The purpose of evolution, if you will, is more evolution.

4. The common claim that its just a theory implies that its some kind of speculation.

In fact it is a scientific theory. But scientific theories explain, through the gathering of evidence (in this case, from embryology, archaeology, genetics, etc.) observations we make about the natural world.

In fact, evolution is a descriptive scientific theory that helps us to better understand and predicate the nature and origin of life, but makes no pretensions to how we ought to act or what we should strive for as individuals and as a society.

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A primer on Darwin Day: Some religious groups embrace 'Theistic evolution' - LancasterOnline

NEW DELHI: CDs are medieval and cassette players have become outrightly ancient the world over. Once considered a statement, music players on the move have evolved into miniscule devices with humungous storage. Little wonder then that in-car audio too has come a long way since bulky sets mounted onto dashboards. And even the current technology may soon become obsolete.

Automotive giants around the globe are increasingly looking to give drivers and passengers not just a comfortable and luxurious ride but one that is entertaining. In an age of wireless streaming and cloud storage, new-age vehicles are also increasingly becoming 'stay connected' machines.

USB and Aux ports now come as a standard in cars, with only a handful offering CD player options.

Sale of aftermarket audio equipment, therefore, has seen a sharp decline as well. "We have seen a steady fall in people coming in for music players. So, we have reduced stocking these and instead focus on audio enhancers like bass tubes, amplifiers and woofers," says Ajit Tokas, owner of a car equipment shop in Delhi's Karol Bagh. "But even audio enhancers are seeing a fall in demand because not many want to take a chance with a car's electrical which usually come with a warranty," adds the 35-year-old.

Although sale of a plethora of accessories - alloys, sunshades, customised decals etc - have seen a rise, the rapidly-changing in-car audio technology means the onus of entertainment is now increasingly dependent on manufacturers in factories - Apple CarPlay, Android Auto et all.

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Apple: Evolution of in-car audio tech moving at 'speed of sound ... - Times of India

For 600m years, life has been responding to our changing world. Virtually every conceivable environment in every corner of the planet has been occupied as animals and plants have diversified. Environmental shifts and mass extinctions produce new evolutionary opportunities for organisms to exploit as they compete for survival.

But how do organisms grasp these opportunities? Do they evolve new traits in response to the pressures of new environments, or are they able to move into new habitats because they have already evolved the right adaptations? Much of evolutionary study rests on the the former idea being right. Yet a new study of the development of horses is the latest in a growing body of research that suggests the answer to this chicken-egg situation may be more complicated.

The chances of an organisms survival in a new habitat are governed by the areas biological and environmental conditions and whether these are compatible with the organisms basic requirements (its ecological niche). If they are compatible, the organism may be able to persist, adapt and thrive. The more specialised an organisms ecological niche, the harder it may be to move into a new environment.

For example, the caterpillars of the monarch butterfly feed almost exclusively on milkweed. Its hard to imagine the caterpillars successfully colonising a new habitat that doesnt have this vital food source. Another point to consider is that just because an organism can survive in a new environment doesnt necessarily mean it will be able to get there. For example, it would be practically impossible for polar bears to naturally spread from the North Pole to Antarctica.

Much of our understanding of how organisms evolve new traits to occupy new environments and ecological niches comes from the study of adaptive radiations. An adaptive radiation is the evolutionary process by which organisms rapidly diverge from a common ancestor into multiple different forms. There are numerous charismatic examples documented, including: Darwins finches on the Galapogos Islands, cichlid fish in the lakes of East Africa, and Anolis lizards on the Caribbean islands.

From this kind of research it has been shown that adaptive radiations are primarily driven by ecological opportunity, the chance for a species to thrive when its environmental circumstances change. Examples of these opportunities include filling a vacant niche after a mass extinction event when it has fewer competitors or predators, or taking advantage of a newly available resource.

As animals and plants exploit these ecological opportunities, we would expect them to go through rapid physical changes as they adapt to their new environments. The pace of change would then slow over time as the opportunities run out. This prediction has formed the basis of much of evolutionary research, although studies are beginning to question the validity of our assumptions.

The evolution of horses is remarkably well documented in the fossil record and is a textbook example of how evolutionary success is linked to trait evolution. Over the past 50m years, horses have evolved from dog-sized forest dwellers into the modern animals we know.

Along the way they have accumulated numerous environmental advantages, such as teeth adapted for grazing and modified hooves for speed. Although there are only seven species from this adaptive radiation alive today (the horse, donkey, plains zebra, mountain zebra, Grvys zebra, kiang, and onager), fossils of hundreds of extinct species have been unearthed.

Now a new study published in Science has looked at the last 18m years of horse evolution to ask whether the origin of new horse species was linked with rapid physical changes. As you would expect, horse evolution has seen bursts of diversification when there have been new ecological opportunities. These opportunities included increased food availability, which meant larger and more varied populations of horses could be sustained.

Another ecological opportunity horses exploited was being able to migrate from America to Siberia across the Bering land bridge. From there they were able to colonise Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.

But the fossil record shows these bursts of horse diversification didnt follow the rapid evolution of new physical traits such as body size and teeth shape. Horses didnt need to change to be able to colonise the Old World, presumably because they were already adapted to similar grassland habitats in America.

The physical features that distinguish modern horse species in different locations evolved later. They are likely to be a result of short-term responses to extreme environmental conditions and shifts in resource availability.

The results of this latest study not only increase our understanding of the evolutionary history of one of the most successful lineages of mammals on earth, but also adds to our broader knowledge of when and why organisms adapt to their environment. When it comes to evolutions which comes first? question, the answer is probably both.

Luke Dunning, Postdoctoral research associate, University of Sheffield

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How the horse can help us answer one of evolution's biggest questions - Raw Story

MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) When a forest fire threatens your house and you have minutes to run, do you know what you plan to grab besides your family?

The photo albums? Computer hard drive? Tax records? Gun collection? Clean underwear?

The U.S. Forest Service faces a much bigger version of that question, reported the Missoulian (http://bit.ly/2kn0Aa2). When wildfire starts, does it deploy its army of yellow-shirted initial attack forces, or let trees burn? Does it chase every smoke on the horizon or concentrate on defending homes? And who gets a say in the decision?

Jim Hubbard spent years in the Forest Service pondering those questions. During a visit to Missoula, he said we need to start thinking about some new answers - fast.

"We have 17 Type I incident commanders (the most experienced, big-fire team leaders), and every year they say 'I've never seen that before,'" Hubbard said during a presentation at the University of Montana. "Each one of these guys has 25 years-plus experience. That gets our attention."

Part of those debriefings dwell on how wildfires have changed in longer summers, drier landscapes and beetle-killed tree stands. But they also consider how the Forest Service has (or hasn't) been able to get to its year-round land-management duties while the agency's budget has been drained by firefighting costs. They look at how county commissions have guided home-building in fire-prone areas, and what kinds of support might be available from state or local firefighters. And they wonder what the long-term vision of all this work should look like.

Hubbard spent 11 years as deputy chief of the Forest Service in charge of fire and aviation as well as relations with state and private foresters. He also was Colorado's state forester for 20 years.

"We haven't defined our performance-based outcomes yet," Hubbard told the audience at the annual Mike and Mabelle Hardy Fire Management Lecture. That doesn't mean picking a number of acres cleared of hazardous fuels or logged each year. It does mean setting out bigger goals for what risks are worth taking, whose interests are at stake, and what actions are even possible.

That involves things as basic as having up-to-date maps showing where houses have been built, where old-growth tree stands remain and where forest activities are planned.

"We need to know what areas to protect, what places are less important," Hubbard said. "If everything is wildland-urban interface, you can't make suppression decisions. You need to hear from the community, the county commissioners, the sheriff. Because we don't want to use unnecessary exposure (of firefighters) that won't get the results we're after."

Hubbard authored what's known as the "Hubbard Letter" in 2012, telling federal fire bosses to launch initial attacks on all public-land fires that summer, including those in designated wilderness

"We expect above-normal, significant fire potential for many areas of the country to result in suppression costs that exceed the 10-year average appropriation," Hubbard wrote at the time.

"Given the unique circumstances we face in 2012, I expect regional forester approval of any suppression strategy that includes restoration objectives. I acknowledge this is not a desirable approach in the long-run."

And five years later, Hubbard confirmed that final opinion before a ballroom full of firefighters.

"Maybe some of that fire needed to run its course," Hubbard said in Missoula. "Let's tear up that Hubbard letter."

Retired Montana State Forester Don Artley was one of those in the room with Hubbard. He echoed the need to be clear about what the big-picture goals should be. Part of that means understanding how fragile those goals are.

"We are making great plans about how we want the landscape to look, and they can all be for naught once a fire starts," Artley said. "If it starts under hot, dry and windy conditions, we can't risk direct action. Other times, it might be best to just monitor the fire's progress. And we need more public acceptance of that process. We used to call it 'let-burn,' and everyone understood that. But the Forest Service was uncomfortable with that wording - it thought it meant we weren't doing anything. Now they talk about 'prescribed natural fire,' and the public says 'What are you talking about?' "

One thing Hubbard was talking about was "unplanned wildfire management." That seemingly self-contradictory phrase grows out of the Forest Service's falling budgets, where district rangers with land treatment projects in the works calculate the probability that a fire might burn something productively. For example, if a low-intensity wildfire runs through a hillside slated for a hazardous-fuels reduction burn, that's one less project the district has to pay for.

"Our scientific ability to predict fire behavior has increased by orders of magnitude every year," said Jeff Jahnke, a retired state forester with experience in Alaska, Colorado and Montana. "So the challenge is, can an incident commander plan the best way to suppress a fire and get resource benefits out of it at the same time?"

Nobody wants to appear to gamble with public safety, even though Hubbard pointed out every time someone drives a car, they gamble on avoiding wrecks. Allowing more prescribed burns might mean days of smoke in a city's airshed during the spring or fall. But it might also mean fewer months of smoke during the summer if those small burns lessen the risk of bigger wildfires.

"If we don't manage unplanned wildfires, we can't get ahead of land treatment," Hubbard said. "You're going to fight fire a little differently in the future. You have to have buy-in."

___

Information from: Missoulian, http://www.missoulian.com

Link:

Wildfire evolution forces Forest Service into new thinking - The Daily Progress

February 10, 2017 Different species of fish, called cichlids, swim in East Africa's Lake Victoria. More than 700 cichlid species have evolved in the Lake Victoria region over the past 150,000 years. Credit: Florian Moser

A University of Wyoming researcher is part of an international team that has discovered how more than 700 species of fish have evolved in East Africa's Lake Victoria region over the past 150,000 years.

Catherine Wagner, a UW assistant professor in the Department of Botany and the UW Biodiversity Institute, describes the phenomenonunparalleled in the animal and plant worldas "one of the most spectacular examples of the evolution of modern biodiversity."

She and fellow researchers from Switzerland's University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology have demonstrated for the first time that the rapid evolution of Lake Victoria cichlidsbrightly colored, perch-like fishwas facilitated by earlier hybridization between two distantly related cichlid species from the Upper Nile and Congo drainage systems.

The research is published today (Friday) in the journal Nature Communications. The first author on the paper, Joana Meier, is a Ph.D. student Wagner co-supervised at the University of Bern. Wagner, along with Meier's other supervisorsLaurent Excoffier and Ole Seehausenare senior authors of the paper.

Wagner says the rapid evolution of the East African cichlids had puzzled researchers, who didn't understand how a single common ancestor could divide into 700 species so quickly. The discovery that the ancestor of these fish species was actually a mixture of two different ancestors from different parts of Africa makes it "much easier to understand how the immense variety of fishes in this region have evolved," she says.

"An analogy is: If you combined the pieces from two very different Lego setssay, a tractor and an airplaneyou could get a much wider variety of possible structures," Wagner says.

The species that evolved exhibit many combinations of colors and are adapted to different habitats, such as sandy bottoms, rocky shores or open watersranging from the clear shallows to the permanent darkness of the turbid depths, according to a media release from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Depending on the species, cichlids may scrape algae from rocks, feed on plankton, crack open snail shells, forage for insect larvae or prey on other fish, including their eggs or scales.

The hybridization event probably took place around 150,000 years ago, whenduring a wet perioda Congolese lineage colonized the Lake Victoria region and encountered representatives of the Upper Nile lineage. Across the large lakes of this region, the hybrid population then diversified in a process known as adaptive radiation, or evolution of multiple new species adapted to different ecological niches.

While the precise course of events in ancestral Lake Victoria has yet to be reconstructed, it is clear that, after a dry period, it filled up again about 15,000 years ago. Descendants of the genetically diverse hybrid population colonized the lake and, within the evolutionarily short period of several thousand years, diverged to form at least 500 new cichlid species, with a wide variety of ecological specializations. The particular genetic diversity and adaptive capacity of Lake Victoria's cichlids is demonstrated by the fact that more than 40 other fish specieswhich colonized the lake at the same timehave barely changed since then.

The study involved sequencing over 3 million sites in the genome of 100 cichlid speciesa task which, until recently, would not have been feasible.

Wagner's study of evolutionary adaptive radiation earned her the 2015 Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize as an outstanding young evolutionary biologist from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Wagner has published a range of papers in top-tier journals, including Nature, Nature Reviews Genetics, Evolution and Molecular Ecology. At UW, she and her lab focus on using genetic and ecological data to study the evolution of biodiversity, primarily in freshwater fish. Her research uses population genetic, genomic, phylogenetic and comparative methods to study diversification, from speciation processes to macro-evolutionary patterns of biodiversity.

Wagner received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2011, and she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology before starting as an assistant professor at UW in 2015. She received her bachelor's degree in biology and geology from Whitman College.

Explore further: Study shows evolution does not always mean more diversification

More information: Joana I. Meier et al, Ancient hybridization fuels rapid cichlid fish adaptive radiations, Nature Communications (2017). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14363

When most cells divide, they simply make more of themselves. But stem cells, which are responsible for repairing or making new tissue, have a choice: They can generate more stem cells or differentiate into skin cells, liver ...

A University of Wyoming researcher is part of an international team that has discovered how more than 700 species of fish have evolved in East Africa's Lake Victoria region over the past 150,000 years.

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Firstly one should throw out the equivocation - speciation being mangled with the implied darwinian evolution. The cichlids are still exactly that. They haven't changed into sharks or squid or anything else.

Secondly, this phenomenon is rapid speciation, exactly as the creationists have long been telling people, given the limited supply of genome from Noah's ark. Now people discover this fact and lo and behold they want to create another senseless oxymoron - "Rapid Evolution", implying that the supposed darwinian stuff has happened.

So the bottom line is that the creationists have just been proven right once again and the evolutionists are grabbing the result which negates their religion and turning it into a support for the mythical darwinian nonsense.

I saw the 1 comment in the last commented list and just knew Fred was spouting his nonsense on this one...

No doubt others have observed that if you accept the reality of the effect of genetics (which you appear to do) and the logical outcome of that - you just stated a senseless oxymoron yourself?

Get help. Quickly.

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Scientists solve fish evolution mystery - Phys.Org

A cautionary tale in evolutionary theory is coming straight from the horses mouth. When ancient horses diversified into new species, those bursts of evolution werent accompanied by drastic changes to horse teeth, as scientists have long thought.

A new evolutionary tree of horses reveals three periods when several new species emerged, scientists report in the Feb. 10 Science. The researchers found that changes in teeth morphology and body size didnt change very much during these periods of rapid speciation.

This knocks traditional notions that rapid diversification of new species comes with morphological diversification as well, says paleontologist Bruce MacFadden of the University of Florida in Gainesville. This is a very sophisticated and important paper.

The emergence of several new species in a relatively short time is often accompanied by the evolution of special new traits. Classic notions of evolution say that these traits such as longer teeth with extensive enamel are adaptive, enabling an animal to succeed in a particular environment. In horses, the evolution of such teeth might permit a shift from browsing on leafy, shrubby trees to grazing on grasses in open spaces with windblown dust and grit.

You cant live on a grassland as a grazer and have short teeth, says MacFadden, an expert in horse evolution. Youll wear your teeth down and thats not a recipe for success as a species.

Similarly, a big change in body size can indicate a move to a new environment. Animals that live in forests tend to be smaller and more solitary than the larger herd animals that live in open grasslands.

Paleontologist Juan Cantalapiedra and colleagues compiled decades of previous work to create an evolutionary tree of 138 horse species (seven of which exist today), spanning roughly 18 million years. The tree reveals three major branchings of new species: a North American burst between 15 million and 18 million years ago, and two bursts coinciding with dispersals into Eurasia about 11 million and 4.5 million years ago.

The researchers expected to see evidence of an adaptive radiation, major changes in teeth and body size that allowed the new horse species to succeed. But rates of body size evolution didnt differ much in sections of the family tree with low and high speciation rates. And rates of change in tooth characteristics were actually lower in sections of the tree with fast speciation rates, the team reports.

Its very tempting to see some change in body size, for example, and say, Oh, thats adaptive radiation, says Cantalapiedra, of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science at the Museum fr Naturkunde in Berlin. But thats not what we see.

Cantalapiedra and his collaborators speculate that during the periods of rapid speciation, the environment was so expansive and productive that there just wasnt a lot of competition to drive the evolution of adaptive traits. Perhaps, for example, North American grasslands were so rich and dense that there was enough energy for various species to evolve without having to develop traits that gave them an edge.

That scenario might be special to horses, says MacFadden, but it might not. Similarly, classic adaptive radiation scenarios might be true in many cases, but as this work shows, not always.

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Horse evolution bucks evolutionary theory - Science News

TechCrunch

Samsung's Chromebook Pro highlights the category's continued evolution TechCrunch Chromebooks hit a key milestone last May, outselling Macs in the US for the first time ever, by IDC's account. It was a pretty big win for a category oft maligned at launch for its relative lack of functionality. And while the devices are, perhaps, not ... and more »

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Samsung's Chromebook Pro highlights the category's continued evolution - TechCrunch

/FILM

VOTD: Watch the Evolution of Keanu Reeves' Acting Career /FILM Keanu Reeves has had a broad range of praise and criticism in his career. He's been downright awful, surprisingly good, gleefully stupid endlessly charming, creepy as hell and a total badass throughout several roles in his career. While Keanu Reeves ... Check Out the Evolution of Keanu Reeves in MoviesTVOvermind all 21 news articles »

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VOTD: Watch the Evolution of Keanu Reeves' Acting Career - /FILM

A hidden reference to the TV show allows you choose the way Eevee evolves.

By Matthew Reynolds Published 10/02/2017

How to evolve Eevee has proven to be one of the bigger talking points in Pokmon Go so far.

In the classic Pokmon games, Eevee can evolve into different elemental varieties based on the use of special items, its happiness level, moves it has available and even the time of day.

With the addition of Candy in Pokmon Go, the way you evolve Pokmon is much simpler, and as such, you cannot use the tried-and-tested method of using one of three elemental stones to turn Eevee into Flareon, Jolteon and Vaporeon. (Some are better than others depending on the situation - find out which you should get first with our Best Pokmon in Pokmon Go page, and our Pokmon Go Type Chart for their relative strengths and weaknesses.)

Once you have caught enough Eevees to evolve one - our pages on finding Pokemon by location, finding which Pokemon hatch from which eggs and locating Pokmon nests near you can help - a neat trick discovered by fans of the game on Reddit will get you the evolution you need.

If you choose to evolve Eevee without any meddling - by feeding it 25 Eevee candy - then it'll turn to one of the above three types at random. However, users have discovered a trick that allows you to target Flareon, Jolteon or Vaporeon, by renaming it in one of the following ways:

Why Sparky, Rainer and Pyro? These are the names of the Eevee brothers from the Pokmon television show, who meet with Ash and the gang in episode 40 to show off their respective Eevee evolutions:

Once you have called your Eevee into one of the above names, you should quit and reload the app to double check the name change has taken place, which is important considering the servers can lean to be on the unreliable side.

Once you've double checked the new name is indeed in place, then evolve the Eevee as you would any other Pokmon by feeding it Candy, and it should take the form of your chosen type.

You can see the trick in action below - and once you're done, you might be interested in reading about other secrets and Easter eggs in Pokemon Go too:

Note that while plenty of users have had success with this method - and that it's been confirmed by developer Niantic itself at this year's San Diego Comic Con - there are a handful of cases where it hasn't worked every time. Some say the trick will only work on the first time you evolve the creature, while others might have caught fowl of server issues not renaming their successfully first time, so be sure to check before you try.

Want more help with Pokmon Go? Read our Pokmon Go tips, tricks, cheats and guides for insights on how to improve your skills, including triggering the Eevee evolution with names for Vaporeon, Jolteon and Flareon, distances for both hatching Eggs at 2km, 5km and 10km and for the Buddy system, where to find Pokmon Go nests in London and beyond, as well as recent updates including new baby Pokmon, finding Ditto and the the seasonal Valentine's Day event update.

If you want to get your hands on one of Eevee's many other evolution in Pokmon Go, you can't just yet.

Unfortunately you can't get all of these evolutions in Pokmon Go right now.

Pokmon Go only features Pokdex entries from the Kanto region - in other words, the original 151 creatures from Red, Blue and Yellow - which means Eevee can only evolve into Flareon, Jolteon and Vaporeon for now.

It'll be interesting to see how game expands to cover more creatures in time, and if so, if there are any tricks required to access these other elemental types.

Original post:

Pokmon Go Eevee evolution: How to evolve Eevee into Vaporeon, Jolteon and Flareon with new names - Eurogamer.net

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Rupert Sheldrake is a fascinating member of the scientific world. His TED talk below,calledThe Science Delusion,was controversially censored by the TED community after being aired.

If you have studied any area of science on your own or in school, you may have noticedthere are many differing beliefs in the scientific world. For nearly every theory or fact, there appears to be an opposing one, or many. While this statement seems impossible given that science is supposed to be based on evidencethatproduces provable theories, it is adelusion not to realize that much of what is strictly believed in the scientific world is only believed because it has already been accepted by the mainstream and therefore no longer questionedmuch like what takes place within religion. This is not to say that there arent amazing scientists out there coming up with profound findings and adding powerful contributions to all fields. I simply wish to highlight the factthat, inthe mainstream world,science is stuck, or, perhaps more accurately, we have put a freeze on certain areas of science.

How can science be stuck? You are missing the point of science! Science is not a thing, its a method!

While I totally agree that science is a method, what I am suggestingin this article is that many of the theories we have come tobelievethat science as a pillared institution has produced have been scientifically proven to be incorrect, yet we continue to go along with them. This happens because, in many cases, we are no longer using the scientific method as it is meant to be used. Rather than progressing to the stage in the method where we are supposed to go back and a redevelop a hypothesis after evidence proves the the initial theory wrong, we instead get stuck in maintaining our initial belief because otherfactors likemoney, fear, ego, and pride get in the way.

I have been researching many areas of science, world events, health, etc. over the past sixyears. I did not learn what I know in school, as I left before completing any degrees, and I wholeheartedly believe that my lack of formal education has been a gift in many ways. Very often we can get stuck on the idea that what we have learned in school is absolute Truth. Its prestigious, so it cant be wrong, right? Heck, we paid thousands of dollars for it so it MUST be true. Yet the more I look at the uneducated peoplewho are making scientific discoveries in the world, the more I see educated people becoming livid at their presumption, as if their findings simply couldnt be truebecause they didnt jump through the same hoops.I have heard the statement Its pseudo-science just about anytime a belief is challenged. A new finding requires many peer reviews for it to be taken seriously, but preexisting mainstream beliefs require none and can be written on a cereal box yet still taken for absolute fact. We have a major challenge on our hands in that we truly struggle tokeep our emotions out of how we view and perceive our world. This is not our nature, but simply our egos taking hold of the situation.

Rupert Sheldrake outlines 10 dogmas he has found to exist within mainstream science today. He states that when you look at each of these scientifically, you see that they are not actually true.

1. Nature is mechanical or machine like

2. All matter is unconscious

3. The laws or constants of nature are fixed

4. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same

5. Nature is purposeless

6. Biological heredity is material

7. Memories are stored inside your brain

8. Your mind is inside your head

9. Psychicphenomenalike telepathy is not possible

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works

One of the biggest problems cancer patients face is that their doctors aren't telling them everything they need to know and patients don't know the right questions to ask.

Our friend (and 13-year cancer survivor) Chris Wark just finished creating a free guide for cancer patients and their loved ones called 20 Questions For Your Oncologist.

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Banned TED Talk: Rupert Sheldrake The Science Delusion - Collective Evolution

She was famous for being the first person to be famous for being famous Tara Palmer-Tomkinson at her birthday party in 1998. Photograph: Brendan Beirne/REX/Shutterstock

Just over 20 years ago, the society magazine Tatler put Tara Palmer-Tomkinson on its cover, along with fellow socialite Normandie Keith, and proclaimed them the It girls. What does it say about us that we care so much about them? asked the coverline. Their rise, and the rise of Palmer-Tomkinson in particular, always seemed to be about something bigger than the enduring fascination with beautiful young women in paparazzi-friendly dresses. They came at the end of the grunge years, and their privileged lifestyles reflected the start of Londons economic boom, but at the same time their rise seemed to mark the end of the old order.

It was the beginning of the end of the Sloanes, as international bankers and Russian oligarchs started buying up swaths of west London and pricing out the younger generation of English old-money families. It was probably the beginning of the end of going out. Palmer-Tomkinson was famous for her party-going, an idea that seems almost as old-fashioned as if shed been a 20s flapper; now people stay in with Netflix. More than half the UKs nightclubs have closed since 2005, and people have swapped alcohol and cigarettes for Fitbits.

And it came at the tail end of deference to the upper classes. Newspapers were impressed by the raft of society girls connections to the royals, but nobody I knew was. Palmer-Tomkinson was compelling because she seemed like enormous fun, but if you grew up in the 90s, you never thought she or the others (Tamara Beckwith, Keith and later Lady Victoria Hervey) were cool. Even while they were having their moment, the society It girls already seemed old-fashioned. They were naughtier than many of the debutantes of earlier decades, but definitely of the same type. They went out with ridiculous posh men and rarely seemed to leave west London, unless it was for a skiing holiday or a cruise on someones yacht. (Compare that with current aristo It girl Cara Delevingne, whose quirky edge and global Instagram reach means her poshness isnt quite so defining.)

But Palmer-Tomkinson was also the beginning of a huge cultural shift that not many of us could have imagined at the time. She wasnt the first society It girl the 30s and 50s especially had witnessed the rise and fall of extravagant, glittering socialites. But she was, says Wendy Holden, the journalist and novelist who ghostwrote her column in the Sunday Times, famous for being the first person to be famous for being famous. In the 90s, that was considered an insult.

Being called talentless, that is the worst, Palmer-Tomkinson said in a 2012 interview. I can recite every line of Shakespeare. Ive got a really good brain. Of course, I havent earned [fame] and I didnt feel I was worth it, and going to all those endless parties, it made me feel worth a pile of shit. Had Palmer-Tomkinson emerged now, she would never have had to justify herself. Instead, she paved the way for reality TV, Paris Hilton, any number of YouTube and Instagram stars and, of course, the reigning champions of self-promotion, the Kardashians. Criticising them is pointless. These are all cultural fixtures now.

Ellis Cashmore, visiting professor of sociology at Aston University and author of Celebrity Culture, recently discussed Kim Kardashian with a group of sixth-formers. I said: Is she talented? And there was no criticism at all that she was just famous for being famous. They listed what they believed were her talents, such as what she does to attract publicity and the art of the selfie. She cant sing or dance or act, which we, over the 20th century, have decided to call talents, he says. But now we are in a transitional phase where people do different things, which are not talents that are immediately recognisable to older generations.

Palmer-Tomkinson, he says, prefigured this. The development has been so accelerated over the past 15 years. Now, he says, we dont even query why theyre there in the first place. We dont even think about the fact they are present on Instagram or Twitter, which makes them occupy space in our lives. And it has been professionalised social media accounts are carefully crafted, agents and publicists work to extend the longevity of even the most fleeting reality TV stars. There is a clear end goal: to monetise their fame.

Palmer-Tomkinson, by contrast, never seemed calculating. She seemed big-hearted and genuine, fragile and someone who had stumbled into fame and its trappings because it seemed fun, not because of how much money she could make from it. She had this amazing life anyway, she had all these friends, she was having lots of fun, says Holden. Also the persona we created for her was not entirely serious, otherwise no reader was going to sympathise with her. It had to be funny. We made her almost into a comic figure, but I think she could see the point of that, and had lots of funny things to contribute to it.

It does feel like a different time now, where to be a celebrity is to be a brand. This also means, especially for young women in the public eye, fame is largely on their terms with an Instagram account, they dont, like Palmer-Tomkinson did, have to rely on being interesting to newspaper and gossip magazine editors (and she was never more interesting to the tabloids than when she was self-destructing). Many of the people who become famous now are those who engineer it, via TV or social media, and carefully craft it. The element of randomness, the sudden elevation of a funny, spirited posh girl who never particularly asked for it, says Cashmore, has largely disappeared.

While theres no doubt she enjoyed it, Tara definitely took being famous less seriously than people do now, says Holden. I cant imagine her operating 10 social media accounts at once, for instance. I dont think she could have been bothered, and who could blame her?

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From Tara Palmer-Tomkinson to Cara Delevingne: the evolution of the It girl - The Guardian

Submitted by Aurora1 on Thu, 02/09/2017 - 8:58am

A letter to the editor published in the paper a few weeks back caught my attention and made me feel a need to respond to some misinformation. The letter focused on the upcoming solar eclipse and the writers belief that there is a higher power involved with such a perfect event. I have never had an issue with an individuals beliefs involved with religion or any other out-of-this-world assumptions. Instead, the driving force for my response is based clearly on the facts that were tossed to the side as if they were never true to begin with. Here is the statement word for word, which falls into a logical fallacy known as begging the question: How can evolution explain how everything in our universe simply evolved from nothing and then set itself in such order we can now time events to the second? It cant. Lets start at the beginning of this statement with evolution and evolving from nothing. This is where I first noticed the incorrect portions of the writers comment. To begin, evolution is not the belief that the universe evolved from nothing. This is a common misconception that comes from those who think evolution is a myth. A simple definition I found for evolution is that its the gradual development of something, especially from a simple form to a more complex form. The basic definition itself points out that evolution literally has to start with something and not nothing as the writer wanted to argue. Also, the basic denying of evolution has never really sat well with me when this gets brought up as the thousands of peer-reviewed articles and research papers have proved this is a fact and cannot be denied. Those who want to argue that it is a theory need to take on a clearer view of definitions as our everyday use of the word gets mixed in with the scientific term. For something in science to become an actual theory it takes many, many years of research and peer-reviews to confirm empirical evidence of such claims. Its not just a guess like some of us may use the word in everyday life. What the writer might be looking for instead of evolution is the term abiogenesis, which is the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter. Although its not literally coming from nothing, sometimes these ideas get mixed up when trying to shortcut the information laid out. By the way, abiogenesis has been proven and is a basic understanding to the origin of life on Earth. The second part of the original statement focusing on how the universe set itself up in a way that allows timed events to the second is just as easily explained. The answer is math. Thats really it. The idea of tracking the sun and stars has been around for the majority of human civilization. In all honesty, people hundreds of years ago could have calculated the solar eclipse almost as accurately as we can, the only real difference is that little help from our trusty computer friends. I wouldnt be doing the statement justice if I didnt also focus on how things are in such order as well. Since there are too many examples Ill just be as honest as I can, we have order because there has to be. If the laws of physics werent the same every time we tested them, in the same environment, then we wouldnt be here today. In addition to that they wouldnt be called laws if there wasnt some type of permanency attached. Without order, the universe wouldnt be the way it is and it would honestly never become anything at all. You can start with something small like water and if two hydrogen molecules didnt always become water with one oxygen molecule then life just couldnt exist which includes humans. The reason people see this order as creation and not a natural process is because we are living in the results of life and not the precursor of it. When we look back at evolution its easy to see that the journey to where we are now had a lot of specific stopping points that all fell into place, which put us where we are today. If we look at it on the other end of the spectrum, at the beginning of life, the possibilities are endless and where we are is just many of those little possibilities coming together to create an intelligent life form ready to learn about the ways of its own existence. TRAVIS BLASE can be reached at features@hamilton.net

Continued here:

Evolution gives rhyme its reason - Aurora News Register

Science Daily

Deeper origin of gill evolution suggests 'active lifestyle' link in early vertebrates Science Daily As a result, since the mid-20th century it was thought that the ancient jawed and jawless lines evolved gills separately after they split, an example of 'convergent evolution' -- where nature finds the same solution twice (such as the use of ... and more »

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Deeper origin of gill evolution suggests 'active lifestyle' link in early vertebrates - Science Daily

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Orangutan squeaks reveal language evolution, says study - BBC ... BBC News Scientists who spent years listening to the communication calls of one of our closest ape relatives say their eavesdropping has shed light on the origin of human ... Orangutan 'kisses and squeaks' reveal evolution of languageMetro Study Says Orangutan Squeaks Reveal Language EvolutionPublicist Report - Market Research News by Market.Biz (press release) all 5 news articles »

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Orangutan squeaks reveal language evolution, says study - BBC ... - BBC News

Science Daily

Chimpanzee feet allow scientists a new grasp on human foot ... Science Daily An investigation into the evolution of human walking by looking at how chimpanzees walk on two legs is the subject of a new research paper. and more »

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Chimpanzee feet allow scientists a new grasp on human foot ... - Science Daily

February 9, 2017 Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Credit: NIH/NIAID

Antibiotic resistance is a major and growing problem worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is rising to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading globally, threatening our ability to treat common infectious diseases. But how these bacterial resistance mechanisms occur, and whether we can predict their evolution, is far from understood.

Researchers have previously shown that one way bacteria can survive antibiotics is to evolve a "timer" that keeps them dormant for the duration of antibiotic treatment. But the antibiotic kills them when they wake up, so the easy solution is to continue the antibiotic treatment for a longer duration.

Now, in new research published in the prestigious journal Science, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem report a startling alternative path to the evolution of resistance in bacteria. After evolving a dormancy mechanism, the bacterial population can then evolve resistance 20 times faster than normal. At this point, continuing to administer antibiotics won't kill the bacteria.

To investigate this evolutionary process, a group of biophysicists, led by Prof. Nathalie Balaban and PhD student Irit Levin-Reisman at the Hebrew University's Racah Institute of Physics, exposed bacterial populations to a daily dose of antibiotics in controlled laboratory conditions, until resistance was established. By tracking the bacteria along the evolutionary process, they found that the lethal antibiotic dosage gave rise to bacteria that were transiently dormant, and were therefore protected from several types of antibiotics that target actively growing bacteria. Once bacteria acquired the ability to go dormant, which is termed "tolerance," they rapidly acquired mutations to resistance and were able to overcome the antibiotic treatment.

Thus, first the bacteria evolved to "sleep" for most of the antibiotic treatment, and then this "sleeping mode" not only transiently protected them from the lethal action of the drug, but also actually worked as a stepping stone for the later acquisition of resistance factors.

The results indicate that tolerance may play a crucial role in the evolution of resistance in bacterial populations under cyclic exposures to high antibiotic concentrations. The key factors are that tolerance arises rapidly, as a result of the large number of possible mutations that lead to it, and that the combined effect of resistance and tolerance promotes the establishment of a partial resistance mutation on a tolerant background.

These findings may have important implications for the development of new antibiotics, as they suggest that the way to delay the evolution of resistance is by using drugs that can also target the tolerant bacteria.

Unveiling the evolutionary dynamics of antibiotic resistance was made possible by the biophysical approach of the research team. The experiments were performed by a team of physicists, who developed a theoretical model and computer simulations that enabled a deep understanding of the reason behind the fast evolution of resistance that were observed.

Explore further: Bacteria in estuaries have genes for antibiotic resistance

More information: "Antibiotic tolerance facilitates the evolution of resistance," Science, science.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaj2191

An international group of researchers, including Professor Michael Gillings from Macquarie University, have reported that pollution with antibiotics and resistance genes is causing potentially dangerous changes to local bacteria ...

The growth of bacteria can be stimulated by antibiotics, scientists at the University of Exeter have discovered.

A new study led by scientists at the University of Oxford has found that small DNA molecules known as plasmids are one of the key culprits in spreading the major global health threat of antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotics do not easily eradicate the gut bacteria Escherichia coli, as some bacteria survive treatment in a dormant state. Once treatment is stopped, these dormant cells can become active again and recolonize the body. ...

It's thought that antibiotic resistance is associated with a fitness cost, meaning that bacteria that develop antibiotic resistance must sacrifice something in order to do so. Because of this, proper use of antibiotics should ...

The ability of microorganisms to overcome antibiotic treatments is one of the top concerns of modern medicine. The effectiveness of many antibiotics has been reduced by bacteria's ability to rapidly evolve and develop strategies ...

Endangered penguins are foraging for food in the wrong places due to fishing and climate change, research led by the University of Exeter and the University of Cape Town has revealed.

(Phys.org)A team of researchers at Ancestry, the people behind Ancestry.com, has used genotype data gathered from user kit samples and family tree information to create maps of post-colonial North American migration patterns. ...

A team of Universit Laval researchers has cast into doubt a tenet of evolutionary biology according to which organisms with more than one copy of the same gene in their genome are more resilient to genetic perturbations. ...

Antibiotic resistance is a major and growing problem worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is rising to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and new resistance mechanisms ...

Conservationists need to adopt a critical shift in thinking to keep the Earth's ecosystems diverse and useful in an increasingly "unnatural" world.

An international team of scientists, including quinoa breeding experts from Wageningen University & Research, published the complete DNA sequence of quinoa the food crop that is conquering the world from South America ...

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Bacteria sleep, then rapidly evolve, to survive antibiotic treatments - Phys.Org

If you haven't played The Sandbox Evolution [Free] and you're at all into world creation-y god games, you need to set aside some time this morning to solve that problem. The game has been updated like crazy since it was first released, and it's getting even more content, this time with the addition of Pac-Man of all things, and players will have the ability to both include things from the Pac-Man universe inside of their own crafted worlds- Including just creating and playing your own Pac-Man mazes.

Here's some .gifs that show the things you're going to be able to do:

And as seen here, even the ghosts and other Pac-Man level pieces are available inside of the editor:

For more information on the update which is scheduled to hit on February 15th, take a look at the thread in our forums.

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Pac-Man is Coming to 'The Sandbox Evolution' Next Week - Touch Arcade

'Goldilocks' genes that tell the tale of human evolution hold clues to variety of diseases Science Daily The implication here is that wider variations in the number of gene copies may evolve and persist in benign CNVs, but not in disease-linked CNVs -- the effects would be too physiologically serious to be passed on by an individual to his/her children ... and more »

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'Goldilocks' genes that tell the tale of human evolution hold clues to variety of diseases - Science Daily