The Best Mentawai Islands Surf Video from my drone, Phyllis June 2014, by Paul Borrud HD – Video

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The Best Mentawai Islands Surf Video from my drone, Phyllis June 2014, by Paul Borrud HD
http://vimeo.com/99275308 In June of 2014, we spent 11 days surfing the Mentawai Islands. The conditions were perfect the entire trip with light offshore winds and plenty...

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The Best Mentawai Islands Surf Video from my drone, Phyllis June 2014, by Paul Borrud HD - Video

Dacia and Tritn seamounts photographed for the first time

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LA GRACIOSA, Canary Islands, Oct. 2 (UPI) -- Just as there are soaring peaks and deep, dramatic canyons and valleys atop dry land, there are also remarkable geological features hiding beneath the surface of the sea -- many of them undocumented.

Recently, scientists with Oceana, an ocean conservation organization, captured the first images of the Dacia and Tritn seamounts off the coast of the Canary Islands. And the maiden photos are spectacular. The full array of photographs can be found on Oceana's Flickr page.

"This has only been a first look at the unknown sea beds to the north of the Canary Islands," Ricardo Aguilar, the Oceana researcher leading the exploratory campaign, said in a press release. "We need to obtain more data and carry out detailed studies in order to establish protection systems to sustain the unique biodiversity of the Dacia and Tritn seamounts."

Aguilar and a team of scientists are working to map these remarkable geological features off the northwest coast of Africa. Dacia and Tritn are, in fact, part of the same mountain chain that forms the Canary Islands. The mountains also form the island of Madeira, and stretch east all the way to the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco. Some of the seamounts are actually active volcanos, which continue to grow. One volcanic mount recently added a new island to the Canary Islands.

In the wake of these initial photos, the researchers are continuing to make dives, documenting additional underwater mountain slopes. Divers have been able to explore the tops of these mountains, witnessing forests of black corals, spectacular glass sponges, as well as a plethora of deep sea fish and sharks. But the mountainsides stretch more than half a mile down. To explore this terrain, researchers are using underwater robots.

"These mountains could be considered as the 'other' Canary Islands, some of which, though now submerged, at one time rose up out of the sea," said Helena lvarez, another marine scientist with Oceana. "Spain should study and protect these seamounts so that, together with Portugal, it could provide Europe with an extensive marine protected area where dozens of seamounts would be home to one of the richest and most diverse faunas on the planet."

2014 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Any reproduction, republication, redistribution and/or modification of any UPI content is expressly prohibited without UPI's prior written consent.

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Dacia and Tritn seamounts photographed for the first time

5 favorite fall hikes in the San Juans and Gulf Islands

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Outdoors enthusiasts tend to think of the San Juans and B.Cs Gulf Islands as a water-recreation paradise, not a hiking destination. Outdoors writer Craig Romano makes the case that these archipelagos are just as majestic by foot as by boat.

To prove his point, he wrote the recently published Day Hiking the San Juans and Gulf Islands (Mountaineers Books, $18.95), with 136 hikes on both the Washington and British Columbia sides of the border.

People dont realize there are so many hiking trails on the islands, he said. You might see only a few parks on an island map, but all the islands have land-trust preserves. They are private, protected land that are usually open to the public.

Most hikes in his guide can be reached by ferry or car. And the few hikes that cant be accessed by ferry can be reached by water taxi.

There are hikes on coastal ledges and bluffs, beaches and coves. Others visit lighthouses, or traverse forests that were old even when George Vancouver sailed into the Salish Sea, Romano said.

Fall is his favorite time to visit since ferry and hotel rates are lower, crowds are sparse and the forecast is often still sunny. Here are his five favorite autumn hikes included in the guide. (Comments are his.)

Turtlehead Summit, Orcas Island, 5.7 miles, 1,295 feet elevation gain, moderate (in level of difficulty)

Stand atop Turtleback Mountains open, grassy head for one shell of a view its one of the best in the San Juans. Thanks to a recent land acquisition by the San Juan Preservation Trust, the prominent and well-recognized Turtlehead (also known as Orcas Knob) is now connected to the Turtleback Preserve, the second-largest green space on Orcas Island. Stare out at a literal sea of islands: San Juan, Shaw, Jones, Spieden and Stuart, in Washington; and Salt Spring, Moresby, Sidney and Vancouver in B.C.

Mount Warburton Pike, Saturna Island, 3.4 miles, 515 feet elevation gain, moderate

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5 favorite fall hikes in the San Juans and Gulf Islands

DNA 'bias' may keep some diseases in circulation, Penn biologists show

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2-Oct-2014

Contact: Katherine Unger Baillie kbaillie@upenn.edu 215-898-9194 University of Pennsylvania @Penn

It's an early lesson in genetics: we get half our DNA from Mom, half from Dad.

But that straightforward explanation does not account for a process that sometimes occurs when cells divide. Called gene conversion, the copy of a gene from Mom can replace the one from Dad, or vice versa, making the two copies identical.

In a new study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, University of Pennsylvania researchers Joseph Lachance and Sarah A. Tishkoff investigated this process in the context of the evolution of human populations. They found that a bias toward certain types of DNA sequences during gene conversion may be an important factor in why certain heritable diseases persist in populations around the world.

Lachance is a postdoctoral fellow at Penn in Tishkoff's lab and will be starting his own lab at Georgia Tech in January. Tishkoff is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the Perelman School of Medicine's Department of Genetics and the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology.

The study pins on the question of why humans have a genetic predilection for certain diseases. Some reasons have become clear to scientists. The Amish, for example, have a higher risk of several genetic diseases due in part to a phenomenon called founder effects, whereby certain genes rise to prevalence in populations that originated with a relatively small number of individuals.

Other genetic diseases can become relatively common if some aspect about them is advantageous.

"The classic example is sickle-cell anemia," Lachance said. "It's an evolutionary trade-off because people with one copy of a sickle-cell mutation are highly protected from malaria."

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DNA 'bias' may keep some diseases in circulation, Penn biologists show

DNA 'bias' may keep some diseases in circulation, biologists show

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It's an early lesson in genetics: we get half our DNA from Mom, half from Dad.

But that straightforward explanation does not account for a process that sometimes occurs when cells divide. Called gene conversion, the copy of a gene from Mom can replace the one from Dad, or vice versa, making the two copies identical.

In a new study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, University of Pennsylvania researchers Joseph Lachance and Sarah A. Tishkoff investigated this process in the context of the evolution of human populations. They found that a bias toward certain types of DNA sequences during gene conversion may be an important factor in why certain heritable diseases persist in populations around the world.

Lachance is a postdoctoral fellow at Penn in Tishkoff's lab and will be starting his own lab at Georgia Tech in January. Tishkoff is a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with appointments in the Perelman School of Medicine's Department of Genetics and the School of Arts & Sciences' Department of Biology.

The study pins on the question of why humans have a genetic predilection for certain diseases. Some reasons have become clear to scientists. The Amish, for example, have a higher risk of several genetic diseases due in part to a phenomenon called founder effects, whereby certain genes rise to prevalence in populations that originated with a relatively small number of individuals.

Other genetic diseases can become relatively common if some aspect about them is advantageous.

"The classic example is sickle-cell anemia," Lachance said. "It's an evolutionary trade-off because people with one copy of a sickle-cell mutation are highly protected from malaria."

Less is known, however, about gene conversion events, which became the focus of Lachance and Tishkoff's study. Previously, researchers have found that during gene conversion DNA is more likely to be retained and copied if the allele that differs contains either a guanine (G) or a cytosine (C) nucleotide. Conversely, the DNA is more likely to be converted, or replaced, if the allele contains an adenine (A) or thymine (T).

"This bias is very small," Lachance said. "It's like a very slightly weighted coin. But over generations and across huge amounts of the genome, flipping the coin over and over again, we thought we would start to see an effect at the population level.

To see if this genetic preference, known as the GC bias, was having an effect, Lachance and Tishkoff analyzed the genomic sequences of 25 people -- five from each of five groups representing diverse populations. They identified 7.5 million single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, which are mutations involving a single nucleotide, and grouped them according to whether a change represented a shift from a G or C to an A or T or the reverse.

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DNA 'bias' may keep some diseases in circulation, biologists show