A Fruit Fly With a Laser-Shaved Penis Just Can’t Catch a Break | Discoblog

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drosophila220When it comes to peculiar penises, there’s no shortage in the animal kingdom. Just last month DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer documented new research into why many male ducks have such an extravagant spiral-shaped phallus. This week, in a paper (in press) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study of goofy genitalia follows fruit flies.

The male fruit fly has a penis that resembles a medieval weapon, dotted with hooks and spines. Are those barbs there to remove rival sperm, or pierce the female’s genital tract to allow sperm a shortcut, or something else? There was one way to find out: lasers.

Scientists used lasers to shave the extra equipment off male fruit flies’ penises and set them free to try to mate. And, as it turned out, the hooks and spines simply help a male hang onto a female for the whole 10 minutes it take them to mate; without them, he didn’t do so well. From “Not Exactly Rocket Science”:

They found that a partial shave did nothing, but the full treatment significantly reduced the odds of the males mating with females. With the spines, they were virtually guaranteed to mate if a female was around; without them, their chances fell to around 20%. It wasn’t for lack of trying either – all of the shorn males tried to woo a female and almost all tried to mate. They simply failed. They did all the right things – mounting, placing their genitals in the right place – but it was for nought. And if the spineless males were placed in direct competition with a normal one over a female, they almost always lost.

Related Content:
Discoblog: The Strange, Violent Sex Lives of Fruit Flies & Beeltes
80beats: Meet the Sexually Irresistible Fruit Fly
The Loom: Kinkiness Beyond Kinky

Image: Wikimedia Commons / André Karwath


The passage of time (and space) | Cosmic Variance

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A few weeks ago the AMNH posted a video . It has gone viral, with 1.8 million views and thousands of comments. The video helps us develop a healthy perspective, which is a good way to start off the New Year. It is humbling.

A few weeks ago the American Museum of Natural History posted a video showing a voyage from the surface of the Earth to the last-scattering surface (at the “edge” of the Universe). What makes the video unique is that it is based on real data, not an artist’s conception. The thin ellipses represent actual satellites orbiting the Earth; the dots represent the location of actual quasars billions of lightyears away. (No, the Universe is not composed of pie slices of galaxies, as in the movie. They used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is one of our most comprehensive views of the Universe, but which has only surveyed certain areas of the sky.) Perhaps most amazingly, the video has gone viral–with over 1.9 million views and thousands of comments to date.

I was lucky enough to see an (interactive) preview of this video while I was in New York attending the Amaldi meeting. It is a modern retelling of the Powers of Ten video by Charles and Ray Eames (who, as it happens, also designed fabulous furniture; I’ve been lusting after an Eames recliner for years [how many pieces of furniture have their own wikipedia entry?]). The videos help us develop a healthy perspective, which is a good way to start off the New Year. It is humbling, after all, to realize how insignificant we really are. Yes, we have the gall to change our planet, and threaten all living beings on its fragile surface. But, still, in the grand scheme of things, we’re a grain of sand in a vast and beautiful ocean. We’re totally irrelevant. I find this to be oddly reassuring and calming.


Hubble Spies Baby Galaxies That Formed Just After the Big Bang | 80beats

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hubbleGalaxiesBack in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous “deep field” image, which took more than 300 exposures over the course of 10 days to peer deep into the history of the universe and spot more than 1,500 galaxies. A decade and a half later—after failures, upgrades, and the “ultra deep field“—Hubble marches on. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, astronomers announced they’d used the telescope to look deeper into the past than ever before.

The new image captures 7,500 galaxies of all kinds and shapes. The oldest galaxies in the image glow an intense blue, indicating high concentrations of the lighter elements hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode. These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died [National Geographic News].

The ancient galaxies are also tiny by galactic standards, containing just one percent of the mass of our own Milky Way galaxy. But they could play an important role in showing astronomers how galaxies formed as the universe aged. These galaxies started forming just 500 million years after the big bang, which is thought to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. That pushes back the known start of galaxy formation by about 1.5 billion years [National Geographic News].

Hubble captured this newest image with its Wide Field Camera 3, a new piece of equipment that the last space shuttle flight to upgrade the telescope installed last year. But unanswered questions remain. The big mystery is the era when ultraviolet light from the youngest stars electrically charged early clouds of interstellar gas, triggering magnetic effects that played a role in later galaxy formation, says astrophysicist Mario Livio…. This “re-ionization” era probably played out just before or during the time when the lives of the early galaxies turned up in the new Hubble images [USA Today]. Hubble’s would-be successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, could help sort out this era’s history when it launches in 2014.

Related Content:
80beats: Prepare to Be Amazed: First Pics from the Repaired Hubble Are Stunning
80beats: Space Shuttle Grabs Hubble, and Astronauts Begin Repairs
80beats: A Hot Piece of Hardware: NASA’s New Orbiter Will Map the Entire Sky in Infrared
Cosmic Variance: Well, That Was Fast, on the upgraded Hubble’s initial data
Bad Astronomy: Hubble’s Back, and Spying on Wailing Baby Stars

Image: NASA


Listen to me speak at the UK h+ meetup

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Thanks to David Wood, I'll be speaking at the UK h+ meetup in London. Predictably, I'm going to be talking about the Friendly AI problem, which, in my opinion, is one of the most important issues of our time. Here's the information:

Suppose that humans succeed in understanding just what it is about the human brain that makes us smart, and manage to port that over to silicon based digital computers. Suppose we succeed in creating a machine that was smarter than us.

What would it do? Would we benefit from it?

This talk will present arguments that show that there are many different ways that the creation of human-level AI could spell disaster for the human race. It will also cover how we might stave off that disaster - how we might create a superintelligence that is benevolent to the human race.

You can RSVP to the event on Facebook: the details are:

Date:
Saturday, 23 January 2010

Time:
14:00 - 16:00

Location:
Room 416, 4th floor (via main lift), Birkbeck College,
Torrington Square WC1E 7HX

City:
London, United Kingdom

You can also use the London Futurists Meetup group.

Ninja cat | Bad Astronomy

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I’ve seen this several times, and it still makes me laugh.

Mrs. BA got me a Flip vidcam for Christmas, and I’ve been following around my cat for days. She doesn’t do anything interesting until I have my back turned. Sigh.

Anyway, you may enjoy this strange video of a cat being either happy or ticked. Maybe it’s Schrödinger’s cat, and it’s both.


That Washington Post Piece on Science Communication and ClimateGate | The Intersection

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Things have been so nuts for me over the past few days, I haven’t even been able to blog my Washington Post Outlook piece from Sunday about the need for better science communication in the wake of the devastating blow dealt by the ClimateGate scandal. The piece has been drawing tons of supportive private emails, as well as lots of online critiques and reactions, and fully 800 plus comments on the Post’s website, many of them from climate deniers.

Anyway, the article starts like this:

The battle over the science of global warming has long been a street fight between mainstream researchers and skeptics. But never have the scientists received such a deep wound as when, in late November, a large trove of e-mails and documents stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia were released onto the Web.

In the ensuing “Climategate” scandal, scientists were accused of withholding information, suppressing dissent, manipulating data and more. But while the controversy has receded, it may have done lasting damage to science’s reputation: Last month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 40 percent of Americans distrust what scientists say about the environment, a considerable increase from April 2007. Meanwhile, public belief in the science of global warming is in decline.

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

A few scientists answered the Climategate charges almost instantly. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, whose e-mails were among those made public, made a number of television and radio appearances. A blog to which Mann contributes, RealClimate.org, also launched a quick response showing that the e-mails had been taken out of context. But they were largely alone. “I haven’t had all that many other scientists helping in that effort,” Mann told me recently.

This isn’t a new problem….

Read here, there’s much more….on science communication strategies, how to fight the evolution war, and so forth. In essence, the piece builds on some of the central arguments of Unscientific America, but strained through the new example of ClimateGate, which is surely the number one reason yet that scientists have got to mobilize in the way that we recommended in the book. Hope you enjoy…


Relationship of "4gig" to Broadcast Signal

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Hello,

I work constantly around a variety of antennas from small omnis and yagis to large tv and broadcast antennas, in as such over the last couple of years I have taken quite an interest in the properties, and fundamentals, and mathematics related to them. I have created a fairly decent

Science Fiction/Science Fact: Matter Transportation

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Of all the concepts brought to us by science fiction, matter transportation is one of the more interesting.  It’s right up there with warp drive and time travel.  How convenient would it be to be able to transport matter over distances?  Leaving out the transportation of living biological matter, just think of the energy resources we could conserve and the waste we could avoid if only we could “beam” matter we now move around by boat, plane, truck or train.  Still, you know that if there were matter transporters operating anywhere, someone is going to crawl into one and try to beam himself coast-to-coast.  Many someones.  What are their chances for survival?

http://euvolution.com/futurist-transhuman-news-blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/753ce_USS_Enterprise_%28NCC-1701%29%2C_ENT1231.jpg
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) All rights reserved

In the Star Trek universe (of which I’ve been a fan since 1966), the process of matter transportation is described as the process by which a computer scans a person (storing all the information about the person within seconds), disrupts all the atoms within the body, turns the atoms into energy, shoots the energy to a remote location, converts the energy back into atoms, then reassembles the person exactly as they were in the remote location.

I have a few problems with that.

Leaving out the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle altogether (after all, they DO have a Heisenberg Compensator), the information from just one adult would take up billions of terabytes worth of computer storage.  One terabyte is 1000 gigabytes, as you know.  So, that much disc space would fill about 500 million Empire State Buildings.  Okay, suppose we solve that with DNA computers (and we will, eventually, you know).  The energy involved in turning  just one adult into pure energy is about 41 times the energy released by the largest nuclear device ever detonated on this planet (that would be the Tsar Bomba, 50 Megatons TNT… the bomb that decimated Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons TNT).  Okay, suppose we solve that little issue using the energy from matter/anti-matter conversion, and assume at the same time that we figure out how to contain such a reaction outside of unsurvivable pressures of gravity (I know, that’s a whopping assumption there), is it really “you” that’s reassembled, or a quantum replica?

File:Tsar01.jpg
Tsar Bomba fireball  Historical photograph, all rights reserved

And, by the way, wouldn’t a transporter like that be an immortality machine once your information became part of computer record?  The computer could take any matter and reassemble it back into your 26 year old self.  How would we ever be completely free of the Hitlers of the future?  And why not use transporters as eugenics machines?  Just edit out what you don’t like, and insert what you do.  Ta da.  Your own perfect little world, just for you.

And you know, you KNOW, some doofus is going to clone himself using a transporter.  So, if the replica is “you”, and YOU are “you”, which “you” is you?  Can’t you just imagine the ethical problems waiting to attack our descendants?

Hopefully, by the time our descendants gain the knowledge necessary to transport themselves around, they will also gain the wisdom to use it wisely.

And just think, how great was a show from 1966 that we still love it and pick it apart forty-four years later?  My deepest appreciation to all those involved in the creation, and portrayal, of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Orifice Sizing

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Hello,

Need a help.

I need to size an orifice which can increase my exisiting ΔP from 80 KPA to 100 KPA in 6 inch dia. pipe. Exisitng orifice dia. is 40 mm and max. flow rate is 1730 lpm.

Smoking Banned at Beaches Around the Country

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A new rash of legislation is beginning to affect beaches around the country. On the heels of successfully passing smoking bans in buildings, cities are now turning their eyes to outdoor spaces. According to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation (ANRF), as of January 5, 2010, 92 cities or counties in the U.S. have already banned smoking on their public beaches and many more have restricted smoking to certain areas of the beach.

Smoking

Proponents of smoke-free beaches point to butts discarded by smokers as a reason to approve the ban

Many beachfront tourist destinations have smoke-free beaches. Communities along the New Jersey shore led the way with the first legal bans in 2001. In California, numerous beaches from San Diego to Los Angeles are smoke-free. In 2009, Maine became the first State to ban smoking on all its beaches and began promoting tourism with the slogan “Breathe easy. You’re in Maine.”

Now it appears that New Hampshire, which already has laws banning indoor smoking in public buildings, grocery stores, public conveyances, hospitals, restaurants and bars, may become the next state to join the ban on beach smoking. Elected officials sponsoring the NH legislation point primarily to the dangers of secondhand smoke as justification for the measure, but also are concerned about the issue of litter and fire hazards in outdoor spaces.

ANRF points out that the trash created by cigarette butts tossed on the ground is a significant environmental problem and a leading source of pollution in parks and beaches, since they contain the same chemicals and toxins as the cigarettes themselves. Filters are considered a particular problem, as they are made from cellulose acetate, a non-biodegradable plastic that can degrade into tiny pieces but never completely disappears. They are hazardous and highly toxic to fish, birds, plus pets and young children if ingested. Opponents of the ban insist that the State’s motto: “Live Free or Die,” should protect their right to smoke on the beach.

Photo Credit: shnnn on Flickr

Article by Barbara Weibel at Hole In The Donut Travels

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5 Technologies going bye bye in this decade?

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I read with interest a twitter post by @Blaine_5 @Genomicslawyer and a few other of my friends.....


It turns out there is this theory that what we use often isn't the best or the most elegant, but it works. Sometimes this turns out to be a rube goldberg machine that we just can't shake. Much like healthcare and insurance billing........

Sometimes we see the errors in our way quickly and adjust course. Sometimes we don't. It all depends on who is putting money into things and what the priorities of the society are at the time.

Think about all the archaic things we still use and do. I think about these every day as I see patients and interact with a system that has been doing some of the same things since the dark ages........

Foxglove anyone????

Seriously. But that will change with blogs and social networks that allow us to cut most things to pieces very quickly. Engineers are very good at this rapid changes, priests not so much, somewhere in between lie most people.

Stephen Friend has decided to put one of these critiques out there. His 5 things that will be gone in 10 years.....

1. GWAS

"Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) analysis isn’t going to last long as a major driver of biologic insight. Within the next one to two years, people will wake up to “ITEGS”—”It’s the entire genome, stupid.” Technologies are poised to allow analysis of variations in thousands to even hundreds of thousands of people. Do not be surprised when all the people with a disease such as Huntington’s are analyzed for DNA alterations across their entire genome. Groups such as Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative are already preparing for this world." Courtesy XConomy


I freaking love it! ITEGS or better yet ITGS! I wholeheartedly agree that this is the platform which will work when combined with technologies to assess methylation status RNA function and expression and combined with.........

Phenotypic data such as a physical exam, vital signs and PEDIGREE!!!! Which is why in the end, even the most complex interpretation machine will have a problem without someone to give these other data points. Will it be the clinician or machine which hears the heart murmur? We already know machines outperform in this realm.

But I agree, the boondoggle known as DTC Genomics and research based on SNP scans is a novelty, but there will be better options for discovery.

Why would you pump money down the DTC rabbit hole, unless you are in love with their "logic gates" for processing the genotypic data. Which IMHO should actually all be open source to assure the best and most timeliness. Why let this genome interpretation software be a one trick pony, we know open source works well, why mess with it?

2. Proteomics as the end solution.

I think this line puts it best

"The next wave of insights will be in the hands of those that can build network models of what went wrong in the disease states."

Uh, paging Dr Lee Hood? Can you hear me Lee?

3. Biomarker signatures as commercially viable robust markers akin to cholesterol or estrogen receptor positivity for breast cancer.

Ah yes, there's a biomarker for that! I have seen this with PSA, CA125, 9p21.3, I could go on and on. The data and patient population required to really, really get something out of this is in the order of hundreds of thousands of participants. Not even a tiny Island nation going into default could save this model!

4. Indications for drugs determined by Pharma trials......

Yes, I agree. The real next step is to determine WHO should get the drug, not WHAT should get the drug......Pharmacogenomics is going to be a real game changer over the next decade. MARK MY WORDS.

But his 5th I disagree with.

He states the large hunter gatherer approach such as Framingham will not exist. I think he is dead wrong here. There is no doubt in my mind, nation states will yearn to harness genetic technology and cures for diseases in a whole new light and fashion.

Genomics will be one of the new arms races once terrorism and hunger and pestilence and civil unrest and malaria and TB and poverty and crime are eliminated. It will start when we can use the genome to profile for medications and only go further...........This hunter gatherer approach is the best way to do such trials and only governments have the capital to perform them.

The Sherpa Says: The decade is upon us. With birth pangs we will see new technologies destroy the old in Genomics and Personalized Medicine.

The Fed and the Next Bubble

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David Leonhardt has a terrifice piece in today's New York Times on the Fed's quest for more power.   His key point:

The fact that Mr. Bernanke and other regulators still have not explained why they failed to recognize the last bubble is the weakest link in the Fed’s push for more power. It raises the question: Why should Congress, or anyone else, have faith that future Fed officials will recognize the next bubble?

A related point is that, even without additional power, the Fed could have sounded an alarm about the housing bubble rather than chanting, "All is well."  Imagine how different the last few years might have been if in 2004 the Fed's testimony before Congress had been,

"Housing prices are growing at an unprecedented rate.  While the U.S. has never had a large nationwide decline in housing prices, it has also have had such a huge nationwide increase in prices, so all bets are off. Consumers and banks are becoming obscenely levered.  Fannie and Freddie are issuing mortgages to every borrower with a pulse.  This situation is scaring our pants off!

Additional notes about Olsen’s book

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In this week’s issue of The Space Review I reviewed By Any Means Necessary!, a book by Greg Olsen in large part about his trip to the ISS as a private citizen in 2005. The book is broadly an autobiography, from his childhood to his post-flight activities, but it is largely centered around his efforts to get into space.

One interesting thing about the book is that it is published not by a conventional publisher but by Olsen’s own company, GHO Ventures, which he set up several years ago to manage his investments. That may make it a little difficult to find in brick-and-mortar bookstores; it’s also not available on the web sites of Barnes and Noble and Borders, but is available on Amazon.com. Interestingly, the copy I ordered from Amazon stated at the back that it was printed in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 19th—three days after I ordered it. The quality of the book, though, is quite good, indistinguishable from books released by large publishers.

An issue that came up in the comments of the review was Olsen’s hopes that his flight would, in effect, pay for itself through research he would perform on the mission. He doesn’t go into great detail about this in the book, but does discuss his (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to get an export license for an infrared camera his company, Sensors Unlimited, had developed that he wanted to take to the station. (He needed the license since he was training in Russia and launching from Kazakhstan.) He also wanted to perform some gallium arsenide crystal growth experiments using the “glovebox” on the station, but the glovebox “became unavailable”, he writes in the book. (Chris Faranetta, in the review’s comments, states that the glovebox furnace was broken and would not be repaired “due to concerns over the crew handling materials that contained arsenic”; there were also concerns about getting export approvals for the materials that Olsen wanted to fly.)

As I note in the review, Olsen is the first space tourist to write a book about his flight to space, but he won’t be the only one for long. Anousheh Ansari is working on My Dream of Stars with co-author Homer Hickham, of Rocket Boys fame. That book is being published by Palgrave Macmillan with a release date of March 2.