The whole 3D thing is like so early 2010, right? Video artist Don Whitaker has already moved on, using a software script to convert ocean footage into what he imagines a 4th dimensional perspective might be. Sober viewing is encouraged. More »
Ecologists recently took to the highways of North Dakota on the hunt for genetically modified canola. Along 3,000 miles of interstate, state, and county roads, they found it: 86 percent of the 406 road-side plants they collected showed evidence of modification.
Sager announced these results at this week’s Ecological Society of America meeting.
The scientists behind the discovery say this highlights a lack of proper monitoring and control of GM crops in the United States…. “The extent of the escape is unprecedented,” says Cynthia Sagers, an ecologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who led the research team that found the canola. [Nature]
Though Sager does not believe that the modified canola will overtake North Dakota, she thinks the study is important for understanding how and to what extent a genetically modified crop can spread.
“We found the highest densities of plants near agricultural fields and along major freeways…. But we were also finding plants in the middle of nowhere–and there’s a lot of nowhere in North Dakota.” [BBC]
Specifically, the team looked for traces of a genetic modification that makes the crop resistant to herbicides. There are two manufacturers of these modified plants: Roundup Ready crops have a bacterial gene that gives them resistance to the weed-killer Roundup (glyphosate), and Liberty Link crops are resistant to glufosinate. At least two of the plants Sager found showed cross-breeding between the two varieties.
It was during a pit stop in Cavalier County that the two had an idea. “We looked through the windshield and there were these beautiful yellow flowers blooming,” Sagers recalled. They recognized the plant as canola, and wondered if it was a genetically modified variety. The duo had test strips that would detect proteins present in genetically modified canola. They walked across the parking lot, documented the plant and then tested it. Sure enough, it was a genetically modified variety resistant to herbicides. [NPR]
Despite that large percentage of GM plants in Sager’s study, many ecologists agree that the canola itself–as a domesticated plant–should not cause concern. Sampling by the road means that the plants likely resulted from trucks spreading the seed; some samples came from herbicide-sprayed areas (meaning the modified percentage is higher); and most of the plants, given their usually pampered lives, aren’t likely to survive in competition with wild plants.
Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at the University of California, Riverside says that GM corn and soybeans have not made strongholds off the farm, and notes that they’re grown more often than GM canola.
“They are super-domesticated and they just don’t really like to go wild.” [New York Times]
Though GM canola might appear next to roads, Linda Hall, a researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada, says she also believe the plant is unlikely to compete in more wild terrains.
“It’s pretty spoiled — it’s used to growing in well-fertilized, clean seedbeds without competition, so it does not do well if it is having to compete with other plants.” [NPR]
Related content:
80beats: Genetically Modified Salmon May Soon Land on Your Dinner Plate
80beats: Genetically Modified Tomatoes Can Last 45 Days on the Shelf
80beats: GM Corn & Organ Failure: Lots of Sensationalism, Few Fact
80beats: India Says No to Genetically Modified Eggplants
80beats: GM Cotton in China Drives Off One Pest, But Another Sneaks In
Image: flickr / Paraflyer
iPhone 4 owners will soon be smiling more, with a new option to initiate FaceTime conversations via email unlocked in the latest iOS beta. This could allow video chatting with other FaceTime-compatible devices, such the perhaps-impending front camera iPod touch. More »
The Antennae Galaxies. Click for slightly larger. Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI
Here’s a Chandra release of the Antennae Galaxies. The compilation of the colliding galaxies is a collaborative effort by Chandra, Hubble and the Spitzer Space telescopes. I’ve included the press release below, but there is also a video on the Chandra site and you can access more and larger images including desktops so be sure to have a look.
A beautiful new image of two colliding galaxies has been released by NASA’s Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red).
The collision, which began more than 100 million years ago and is still occurring, has triggered the formation of millions of stars in clouds of dusts and gas in the galaxies. The most massive of these young stars have already sped through their evolution in a few million years and exploded as supernovas.
The X-ray image from Chandra shows huge clouds of hot, interstellar gas that have been injected with rich deposits of elements from supernova explosions. This enriched gas, which includes elements such as oxygen, iron, magnesium and silicon, will be incorporated into new generations of stars and planets. The bright, point-like sources in the image are produced by material falling onto black holes and neutron stars that are remnants of the massive stars. Some of these black holes may have masses that are almost one hundred times that of the Sun.
The Spitzer data show infrared light from warm dust clouds that have been heated by newborn stars, with the brightest clouds lying in the overlap region between the two galaxies. The Hubble data reveal old stars in red, filaments of dust in brown and star-forming regions in yellow and white. Many of the fainter objects in the optical image are clusters containing thousands of stars.
The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms,” seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision.
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI
How to Install Primavera3.1 in windows7?
What is this? Some sort of spider, sent down from space? Nope, it's a ceiling lamp, where the socket is actually the light bulb. Come on in, and I'll show you: More »
If there’s a certain smell or sound that instantly brings back traumatic memories, it could be because those memories are stored—at least in part—in brain regions associated with the input of your senses, according to a study this week in Science.
Neuroscientist Benedetto Sacchetti went looking in rat brains for the neural connections between the senses and intense memories.
Each sense, including sound, smell and vision, has a primary and a secondary sensory cortex area in the brain. The primary cortex sends sensory information to the secondary cortex, which then connects to emotional and memory areas of the brain [Science News].
In the experiments, Sacchetti and colleagues first trained their test rats to connect the painful memory of an electric shock with a particular sight, sound, or smell. Once trained, the rats froze in fear upon hearing, seeing, or smelling the signal. Then the scientists damaged that secondary sensory cortex for the sense in question. Afterward the rats happily ignored the signal, their brains apparently no longer able to connect the sensation to the traumatic memory.
How, though, can we know that the rats became brave because they lost the particular connection between one sound and one memory?
In all these experiments, rats with lesions were still able to form new fear memories, suggesting that the sensory cortices are needed to store, but not create, emotional memories [LiveScience].
Neuroscientist Norman Weinberger countered that the study can’t say whether these secondary cortices are the sole areas connected to strong, emotional memories. Memory is difficult to restrain.
“What is the big story of the 21st century is that primary and even secondary cortices appear to be sites that are likely to store memories,” Weinberger says. “And there’s no part of the brain which is immune from memory storage of some kind” [Science News].
Related Content:
80beats: The Chemistry of Instinct: Here’s What Makes Mice Freeze in Fear
80beats: Study: The Brains of Storytellers And Their Listeners Actually Sync Up
DISCOVER: The Brain: The 4 Stages of Fear, Attacked-By-a-Mountain-Lion Edition
DISCOVER: The Brain: The Primitive, Complicated, Essential Emotion Called Fear
Image: flickr / perpetualplum
I had purchased a Razor electric dirtbike 2 yrs ago. Its been ridden/charged every day successfully. 3 months ago we purchased the next larger one (1st one is either 350 watts/amps? The 2nd one is 500 watts/amps) All of a sudden when we get home to ride them, BOTH are not charged. Both were plu
1 when is a patent no longer yours? 2 why should you keep paying to keep what is yours? 3 if you don,t file a patent but build it is it yours are the one who copys it for a patent? 4 not all of us has the money to file must less keep paying after its done so they can take it?
I've been advised my 15 year old pellet stove is beyond repair because the motors are hard if not impossible to get and the electronic controls or blower would be likely to go next making the whole process expensive. I'm thinking about converting my pellet stove to vented gas logs (or nonvented) if
I just hooked up a new encoder I bought recently and I noticed I was getting twice the PPR I am supposed to be getting. Upon closer Investigation on a scope, I see that during a transition from a high to a low state, there is a very quick spike from low to high, just before where the actual tran
In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in the data for the rich identified with that party. As I have observed, even in New York City, one of the citadels of cultural liberalism, the wealthy tend to be more Republican. The only precinct in Manhattan with more Republicans than Democrats is in the Upper East Side across from Central Park.
But there is more granular nuance here. In Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State he reports data which shows that though Democratic leaning states tend to be wealthier, on average within those states the wealthy tend to vote Republican. Another detail is that the correlation between income and voting Republican is weaker within Democratic leaning states, but very stark in Republican states. Even when you control for race in states like Mississippi this remains the case. Gelman’s data and analysis tends to rebut the argument in What’s the Matter with Kansas?.
And yet going back to the aggregate, there’s still more to be said. As noted in the comments there is actually data to suggest that the modal Republican is middle class, while Democrats have a more varied socioeconomic coalition. Quite often middle class Republicans tend to be above average in income and wealth, but are not necessarily college educated. By contrast, the lower classes lean strongly Democratic. The upper classes are more polarized. So one model using the aggregate Democrat and Republican coalitions is that the former are an alliance between the lower class, minorities, knowledge professionals and liberal wealthy, and the latter are a coalition between the middle class, the business class, and the conservative wealthy.
Below are some data from the GSS. The survey was taken in 2006, and had a variable which inquired into household wealth. I looked at voting for Bush, Republican identification, and liberal and conservative orientation, for whites. As one ascends education, intelligence, an wealth, the ideological landscape becomes more polarized, so I thought that showing “one half of the equation” was misleading in the last case. I added the tick-marks for confidence intervals since the sample sizes get small as you go up the class ladder.
Note: The previous post brought out a lot of empty and baseless (aside from one’s own self-worth) commentary in people, some of which I did not publish. I understand that political posts tend to bring the retard out in people, but try to keep it under control unless you want to waste time tapping away at a keyboard and not having anything to show for it. Having your comment published is not a right. Here’s a link to the GSS ANES browsers.
Variables:
Row – wealth(r:1-3″Less than $40 K”;4-5″$40 – $75 K”;5-6″$75 – $150 K”; 7″$150 – $250 K”;8″$250 – $500 K”;9″$500 – $ 1 million”;10-12″More than 1 million”)
Column – PRES04 partyid(r:0-2″Democrat”;3″Independent”;4-6″Republican”) polviews(r:1-3″Liberal”;4″Moderate”;5-7″Conservative”)
Select – race(1)
The Reinventing Media session at Techonomy this morning had a somewhat different tone than many of the others here: It was tinged with sadness. There is a lot of hurt in the media world today, a lot of pain. And…the Internet did it.
The traditional print media industry has been decimated by the growth of the web, which has undermined the business models of newspapers and magazines. And this is surely no unmitigated good, despite the massive amounts of information now freely available—because it means that despite the many advantages of online content, quality and professionalism often suffer.
As Scientific American VP and Publisher Bruce Brandfon put it at today’s session, “Information wants to be free, but it needs to be very expensive.” Otherwise, the best reporting, the best analyses, the journalistic endeavors that maintain the highest standards, may not be able to compete with less valuable but more sensationalized content. Information, Brandfon continued, “needs curators.” You can’t make it a full democracy, or you run the risk of being overwhelmed with misinformation and lowest-common-denominator fare.
To be sure, there are some major media innovators out there who have found ways to make it work in this upended landscape. People like Paul Steiger, editor in chief of Pro Publica, an online investigative reporting outlet that has managed to not only fund itself and thrive but break some very big stories—like this one about the state of California hiring nurses who’d already been sanctioned in other states. Pro Publica has alreadywon a Pulitzer prize for its work, partners regularly with traditional media organizations for its investigations, and has a healthy operating budget of more than $ 10 million per year.
And yet Steiger himself recognized the woes of the media industry…read on…
You know what’s cool? This:
I love this song. And yeah, that’s me doing the voiceover for it. You should buy Geo’s album "Trebuchet", too. It has that song and lots of other cool ones, too.
This isn't the first multi-touch DJing we've seen, but something about watching this guy navigate his transparent control station—a homebrew touchscreen running a Traktor Pro controller called Emulator—really makes me want to do the robot. [PabloMartin via Engadget] More »
Keith's note: Word has it that Andrew Hunter is moving from ESMD to become the second Deputy CFO.
It was a shame that Droid X didn't launch with Android 2.2, but owners won't have long to wait for Froyo: a Motorola employee let slip that it'll be deployed by early September. More »
These stunning macro shots of eyes by Suren Manvelyan show detail that I didn't even know existed. We've got some pretty complex machinery onboard, don't we? [Photography Served via Boing Boing] More »
While web site Jailbreakme.com offers a one-click jailbreak for your iOS devices via mobile Safari, it also exposes a major security vulnerability. As it turns out, jailbreaking your iDevice may provide additional security options that make jailbreaking a more secure option. More »
As the Large Hadron and the Tevatron Colliders compete to find the suspected mass-giving particle known as the Higgs boson, another competition has already begun: who should get credit when/if they find it? Six physicists came up with the theoretical mechanism to describe how the boson would work, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences can only split a Nobel Prize three ways.
Here are the contenders: Robert Brout and François Englert in Belgium, Peter Higgs in Scotland, and Tom Kibble in London with Gerald Guralnik and Carl R. Hagen in the United States. Each group published their papers at almost the same time (all in 1964) and devised their descriptions independently.
As Nature News reports, the debate arose after a web advertisement for a meeting last week on the Higgs mentioned only Brout, Englert, and Higgs. Though Kibble, Guralnik, and Hagen were last to publish and cited the other physicists’ papers, the three recently shared an American Physical Society award with the other trio in part for the describing the boson’s mass-giving technique: the so-called Englert-Brout-Higgs-Guralnik-Hagen-Kibble mechanism.
Given that the Nobel also can’t be awarded posthumously, that may leave something else for the six to consider, CERN physicist John Ellis said to Nature News:
“The first three in the Nobel queue probably feel quite relaxed—all they have to do is stay alive until the the particle is discovered…. The ones just behind them may understandably be quite nervous.”
Related content:
Discoblog: I Swear: Subatomic Particles Are Singing to Me!
Discoblog: World Science Festival: What if Physicists Don’t Find the Higgs Boson?
Discoblog: LHC Shut Down By Wayward Baguette, Dropped by Bird Saboteur
Discoblog: Will the LHC’s Future Cancel Out Its Past?
80beats: Fermilab Particle Physicists Wonder: Are There 5 Higgs Bosons?
Image:Wikimedia / Winners of the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics (L to R Kibble, Guralnik, Hagen, Englert, and Brout — Higgs also won but not pictured)
