Time for Grown-up Talk Southern Maryland Online That's why new doctors, with average medical school debts of $140000 and medical liability insurance bills to pay, avoid primary care and refuse to set up ... |
Puerto Viejo Bay in Mazatlan, an Endless Ribbon of Shimmering Sand
With its 2.5 miles of shimmering golden sands and gently lapping turquoise waters, Puerto Viejo Bay is perhaps the best choice for a day at the beach in Mazatlan, Mexico. The beach is within walking distance of the center of town and convenient to many of the smaller upscale hotels located in this area. It is also quite near Mazatlan’saquarium, which is worth a visit.
Puerto Viejo Bay Beach
Shaped like a fishhook lying on its side, this endless ribbon is dotted with thatch-roofed beach palapas that serve up mounds of fresh ceviche or fresh grilled fish, washed down with the local cerveza or a lucious fruit smoothie whipped up from fresh-picked fruit. Vendors roam Puerto Viejo Beach, seeking customers for their handicrafts, but graciously disappear at a shake of the head. There is simply no pressure here.
Beach palapa at Puerto Viejo Bay
Most times of the year this beach is virtually deserted. However during carnival, Semana Santa (Holy Week at Easter), and on other holidays, locals from all over the country flock to this beach. Many are poor peasants from the interior who arrive with only the clothes on their back and huge bags of food; they sleep on the beach, swim in their clothes, and grill food over open fires. During these times, barely an inch of sand remains and strolling down Mazatlan’s Puerto Viejo Bay Beach is a feast for the senses.
Photo Credit: Barbara Weibel
Article by Barbara Weibel of Hole In The Donut Travels
Space Policy and Election 2012
Obama's plans for NASA changes met with harsh criticism, Washington Post
"They made a mistake when they rolled out their space program, because they gave the perception that they had killed the manned space program," said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who disagrees with that perception but wants the Obama plan modified. Nelson said the president should declare during the Florida conference that NASA's goal is to send humans to Mars. Nelson noted that the Interstate 4 corridor through Central Florida is critical for national candidates. "I think it has a lot of repercussions for the president. If a national candidate does not carry the I-4 corridor, they don't win Florida," Nelson said."
Keith's note: The buzz at KSC and among the Florida Congressional delegation is that President Obama will hold a "Town Hall" style meeting on 15 April and that he will use that event to announce that he is authorizing one additional space shuttle mission after the four remaining flights currently on the shuttle manifest. This would stretch out employment for shuttle workers by as much as six months - well into the Summer and early Fall of 2011 - just as the 2012 presidential campaign season is starting to fire up.
The question I have to ask is why do this? In so doing it just opens the door to delaying the shut down of the shuttle program initiated by President Bush. If the White House wants to do one additional launch, then why not do three or six? Adding one launch simply buys you six months or so of workforce retention but the end result is still the same. If the intent is to shut down the shuttle program, then NASA should do so and move on to a new way of getting into space. If, on the other hand, the White House wants to develop a true shuttle-derived launch vehicle like the sidemount, one that purposefully uses existing shuttle infrastructure and workforce, then that is another issue. Alas, no one has yet given me a reason to do this other than to keep people employed. While it may be a humane thing to do now that Constellation won't be there with a safety net, this is not the way to try and shift paradigms. Rather, it is a way to stall that shift.
Jurassic Park Science: DNA of Extinct Bird Extracted From Eggshells | 80beats
An international team of researchers has discovered how to extract DNA from fossilized bird eggs–including the eggshell of the enormous elephant bird that went extinct four centuries ago.
In a research breakthrough, scientists were able to isolate DNA from the eggshells of not just the extinct giant moa bird from New Zealand, but also a 19,000-year-old emu from Australia and the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar. The elephant bird’s egg is the largest known bird egg, with 160 times the volume of a chicken’s egg [New Scientist].
The discovery of these birds’ DNA could help scientists understand how they lived, and why they became extinct. The DNA was extracted from desiccated inner membranes in fossil eggshells, found in 13 locations in Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand [PhysOrg], and the work was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
For years scientists have been trying to extract DNA from old eggshells without success, because their approach, scientists admit, was faulty. Charlotte Oskam and Michael Bunce of Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, who isolated the DNA, say researchers (including themselves) were using techniques designed to extract DNA from bone, not eggshells. They even threw out the most DNA-hardy bits of eggshell [New Scientist]. Bunce explains that extracting DNA from bone involves sucking out the bone’s calcium and discarding it.
In the new study, the researchers figured out that the DNA was stuck in the eggshell’s calcium carbonate matrix–which they then proceeded to draw out. Because eggshells attract fewer bacteria than bone, researchers say their DNA samples from ancient eggs are less likely to be contaminated.
With this new method of extracting bird DNA in hand, scientists are hopeful that they can piece together the story of how these ancient birds lived, evolved, and went extinct. For example, the elephant bird, which weighed about 900 pounds and stood ten feet tall, became extinct at the same time that humans colonized the island of Madagascar, but there have been no signs that the birds were hunted by humans. Says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson: “There’s not even evidence that they ate the eggs — even though each one could make omelets for 30 people” [BBC]. By studying the elephant bird’s genetics, scientists can look for clues about the bird’s physiology and diet that may help them understand what made the giant avian go the way of the dodo. But the researchers caution that so far, the new technique allows for the extraction of only a tiny amount of DNA–just 250 base pairs, the “rungs” on the ladder-like genetic code, and this is less than a fraction of one percent of the bird’s genome [PhysOrg].
So can we expect these extinct birds to be brought back to life like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Says Bunce: “We can reassemble the genome to get an idea of what an extinct species looked like. But (resurrecting it) is still in the realm of science fiction. It’s completely hypothetical, and frankly not a debate I really want to have.” [PhysOrg].
Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Jack Horner’s Plan to Bring Dinosaurs Back to Life
Image: PhysOrg
Rumor: Cisco Prepping New Flip Video Cameras [Cisco]
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Cisco is prepping a new line of Flip video cameras to be announced next month at the NAB conference in Vegas. Makes sense! No details on the models themselves, unfortunately. [Silicon Alley Insider] More »
Trunnion Pipe Supports
Hi all, can someone please tell me what are the advantages of using a trunnion pipe support? I guess that since it is welded on the pipe, it will prevent pipe movements in any directions, but then why would you use a trunnion instead of an anchor?
Thank you!
How Much Until Doctors Approve of 23andMe?
Commenter “AnneW” at Genetic Future writes about Dr. Steven Murphy’s alleged claims against 23andMe:
…Prove us wrong Steve. How many doctors need to offer/endorse/whatever a test before you like it? How many publications in what journals? What is your criterion if anything?
Posted by: AnneW | March 5, 2010 4:09 PM
“AnneW,” how many doctors need to offer/endorse/whatever a test before you dismantle your doublespeak?
3. Description of What the Services Are and Are Not: 23andMe Service Is For Research and Educational Use Only. We Do Not Provide Medical Advice, And The Services Cannot Be Used For Health Ascertainment or Disease Purposes
Nobody bashes Steve but me. Cut the bullshit.
Swages vs. Reducers
Hi all, I would like to ask what is the differences between a swage and a reducer? When and why would you chose one over the other?
Because to me, both of them achieve the same tasks, the only differences I see is that swage is machined and reducer is formed?
Thanks!
Long Beach OKs medical pot ordinance – Contra Costa Times
Long Beach OKs medical pot ordinance Contra Costa Times LONG BEACH - Medical marijuana collectives will have to grow their weed within the city limits and will face greater school buffer zones under an ordinance ... |
Free Energy and the Meaning of Life | Cosmic Variance
When we think about the “meaning of life,” we tend to conjure ideas such as love, or self-actualization, or justice, or human progress. It’s an anthropocentric view; try to convince blue-green algae that self-actualization is some sort of virtue. Let’s ask instead why “life,” as a biological concept, actually exists. That is to say: we know that entropy increases as the universe evolves. But why, on the road from the simple and low-entropy early universe to the simple and high-entropy late universe, do we pass through our present era of marvelous complexity and organization, culminating in the intricate chemical reactions we know as life?
Yesterday’s book club post referred to a somewhat-whimsical vision of Maxwell’s Demon as a paradigm for life. The Demon takes in free energy and uses it to maintain a separation between hot and cold sides of a box of gas — a sustained departure from thermal equilibrium. But what if we reversed the story? Instead of thinking that the Demon takes advantage free energy to help advance its nefarious anti-thermodynamic agenda, what if we imagine that the free energy is simply using the Demon — that is, the out-of-equilibrium configurations labeled “life” — for its own pro-thermodynamic purposes?
Energy is conserved, if we put aside some subtleties associated with general relativity. But there’s useful energy, and useless energy. When you burn gasoline in your car engine, the amount of energy doesn’t really change; some of it gets converted into the motion of your car, while some gets dissipated into useless forms such as noise, heat, and exhaust, increasing entropy along the way. That’s why it’s helpful to invent the concept of “free energy” to keep track of how much energy is actually available for doing useful work, like accelerating a car. Roughly speaking, the free energy is the total energy minus entropy times temperature, so free energy is used up as entropy increases.
Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy increases, the history of the universe is the story of dissipation of free energy. Energy wants to be converted from useful forms to useless forms. But it might not happen automatically; sometimes a configuration with excess free energy can last a long time before something comes along to nudge it into a higher-entropy form. Gasoline and oxygen are a combustible mixture, but you still need a spark to set the fire.
This is where life comes in, at least according to one view. Apparently (I’m certainly not an expert in this stuff) there are two competing theories that attempt to explain the first steps taken toward life on Earth. One is a “replicator-first” picture, in which the key jump from chemistry to life was taken by a molecule such as RNA that was able to reproduce itself, passing information on to subsequent generations. The competitor is a “metabolism-first” picture, where the important step was a set of interactions that helped release free energy in the atmosphere of the young Earth. You can read some background about these two options in this profile of Mike Russell (pdf), one of the leading advocates of the metabolism-first view.
I was reading a bit about this stuff because I wanted to move beyond the fairly simplistic sketch I presented in my book about the relationship between entropy and life. So I did a little research and found some papers by Eric Smith at the Santa Fe Institute. Smith has taken quite an academic path; his Ph.D. was in string theory, working with Joe Polchinski, and now he applies ideas from complexity to questions as diverse as economics and the origin of life.
On Saturday I was on a long plane ride from LA to Bozeman, Montana, via Denver. So I had pulled out one of Smith’s papers and started to read it. A couple sat down next to me, and the husband said “Oh yes, Eric Smith. I know his work well.” This well-read person turned out to be none other than Mike Russell, featured in the profile above. Here I was trying to learn about entropy and the origin of life, and one of the world’s experts sits down right next to me. (Not completely a coincidence; Russell is at JPL, and we were both headed to give plenary talks at the annual IEEE Aerospace Conference.)
So I explained a little to Mike (now we are buddies) what I was trying to understand, and he immediately said “Ah, that’s easy. The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” (See figure above, taken from one of Eric Smith’s talks.)
That might be something of a colorful exaggeration, but there’s something fascinating and provocative behind the idea. An extremely simplified version of the story is that the Earth was quite a bit hotter in its early days than it is today, and the atmosphere was full of carbon dioxide. At high temperatures that’s a stable situation; but once the Earth cools, it would be energetically favorable for that CO2 to react with hydrogen to make methane (and other hydrocarbons) and water. That is to say, there is a lot of free energy in that CO2, just waiting to be released.
The problem is that there is a chemical barrier to actually releasing the energy. In physicist-speak: the Earth’s atmosphere was caught in a false vacuum. There’s no reaction that takes you directly from CO2 and hydrogen to methane (CH4) and water; you have to go through a series of reactions to get there. And the first steps along the way constitute a potential barrier: they consume energy rather than releasing it. Here’s a plot from one of Russell’s talks of the free energy per carbon atom of various steps along the way; it looks for all the world like a particle physicist’s plot of the potential energy of a field caught in a metastable vacuum. (Different curves represent different environments.)
Here is the bold hypothesis: life is Nature’s way of opening up a chemical channel to release all of that free energy bottled up in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the young Earth. My own understanding gets a little fuzzy at this point, but the basic idea seems intelligible. While there is no simple reaction that takes CO2 directly to hydrocarbons, there are complicated series of reactions that do so. Some sort of membrane (e.g. a cell wall) helps to segregate out the relevant chemicals; various inorganic compounds act as enzymes to speed the reactions along. The reason for the complexity of life, which is low entropy considered all by itself, is that it helps the bigger picture increase in entropy.
In ordinary statistical mechanics, we say that high-entropy configurations are more likely than low-entropy ones because there are simply more of them. But that logic doesn’t quite go through if you can’t get to the high-entropy configurations in any straightforward way. Nevertheless, a sufficiently complicated system can bounce around in configuration space, trying various different possibilities, until it hits on something that looks quite complex and unlikely, but is in fact very useful in helping the system as a whole evolve to a higher-entropy state. That’s life (as it were). It’s not so different from other cases like hurricanes or turbulence where apparent complexity arises in the natural course of events; it’s all about using up that free energy.
Obviously there is a lot missing to this story, and much of it is an absence of complete understanding on my part, although some of it is that we simply don’t know everything about life as yet. For one thing, even if you are a metabolism-first sympathizer, at some point you have to explain the origin of replication and information processing, which plays a crucial role how we think about life. For another, it’s a long road from explaining the origin of life to getting to the present day. It’s true that we know of very primitive organisms whose goal in life seems to be the conversion of CO2 into methane and acetate — methanogens and acetogens, respectively. But animals tend to produce CO2 rather than consume it, so it’s obviously not the whole story.
No surprise, really; whatever the story of life might be, there’s no question it’s a complicated one. But it all comes down to the elementary building blocks of Nature doing their best to fulfill the Second Law.
Transform Your Hoodie Into a Laptop Bag In Ten Seconds [How To]
New Comments
Let us say I get following message into my mail box.
There was a new comment by Ron (replying to DDjames) in a discussion that you subscribed to:
Is IC Piston Engine Really Less Than 1% Efficient? (http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/50754?frmtrk=cr4sd#newcomments)
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Hot Tubs and GFCI Breakers
Years ago before GFCI Breakers, Hot tubs away from the main house needed to have a seperate Ground conductor going to a Ground Plate or Ground Rod independant of the bond conductor entering with the power cable from the main panel.
Once the GFCI breaker was manadatory for a hottub was intro
Tobacco Fights Toxins? GM Tobacco Plants Disarm Harmful Pond Scum | Discoblog
The tobacco plant is considered a villain of the plant world because of the harmful effects of smoking it. But now a genetically engineered tobacco plant is enjoying a moment of redemption, as scientists have discovered that tweaking a certain gene in one tobacco plant strain allows the plant to produce antibodies that disarm toxic pond scum.
Treehugger reports:
The pond scum in question is microcystin-LR (MC-LR), which makes water unsafe for drinking, swimming and fishing in many parts of the world. Upon ingestion it can cause serious liver damage, with some studies indicating a connection to causing liver and colorectal cancers.
To counter this harmful algae, lead scientist Pascal Drake inserted genes into the tobacco plants to produce an antibody to the algae. The antibody was produced in the tobacco plant’s leaves and secreted from its roots into the growth medium. When the toxin from the algae was added to the medium, the antibody immediately latched on to it.
Discovery News reports:
“Binding to the pollutant might reduce its bioavailability,” Drake said. “It might make it less dangerous and less likely to be taken up by animals and humans.”
The scientists say this is the first example of a transgenic plant making an antibody that can fight an environmental toxin. But they note that for this research to be useful in the field, they would have to genetically tweak aquatic plants instead of tobacco plants.
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Image: Flickr/Christian Haugen
Case-mate Hug Review: A Wireless iPhone Charging Pad That Actually Works Well [Review]
Wireless charging has been around—even for the iPhone—for years, but it wasn't until the last 12 months that it's been refined to be as good as standard wired charging. Case-mate's Hug is our favorite iPhone charging pad. More »
Oil Levels and Motor Noise in 6-Cycle 2005 Ram 1500
How can I fix this noise. when I start my Ram 1500 year 2005,the motor sounds like no oil on it,but after 10 seconds the noise disappear and the motor works very smooth...
Best Regards.
Comparative Effectiveness Research is a Must – TopNews United States
 TopNews United States | Comparative Effectiveness Research is a Must TopNews United States Dr. Danny McCormick of Harvard Medical School in Boston said, “Most of the comparative effectiveness studies we reviewed simply tested whether medication ... Few Studies Compare the Efficacy of Medical TreatmentsScientific American Medical studies often don't compare existing treatmentsLos Angeles Times (blog) Few US studies compare one drug to another: reportReuters Scientific Frontline -ModernHealthcare.com -BusinessWeek all 36 news articles » |
Earthing a Telecommunications Tower
Hi All
I am busy with the earthing design of a 60m telecommunication tower. I am using copper for the entire earthing. The area is 19x13m. the tower has 3 foot foundations of 3.8x3.8. I have assumed earth resistance of 2ohm and soil resistivity of 100ohm/m. The ps i have assumed as 3000ohm/
1991 Ford Pickup – Water from Tailpipe
I have an old Ford pick up 1991 with an inline 6 (4.9) EFI. I know its old but I have water running out the tail pipe wheb its warming up I have to add antifreeze every 3 weeks about 1/2 gallon and yesterday I fired it up and it sounded like a deisel but it quit after a few minutes and has not made
Dress Yourself, Linux Users [Linux]
A t-shirt-stuffed Linux store has opened for business, the proceeds from which support the Linux Foundation. But since Linux users are such penny-pinchers, $18 is probably more than they'll pay for a single garment of clothing. [LinuxStore via CrunchGear] More »
