Evolutionist up a tree

Creationism and Evolution

Spore!

Spore is finally finished, but we'll have to wait another six long months until it ships. Read a recent review here. Don't worry; I'm excited too.

Recipe for Artificial Life

The Recipe

1. A container
2. A storage of genetic information
3. A metabolism

ETA: 3-10 years according to the AP. Let's hope they do a little more research. (link)

Schrodinger's LOLcat

Duke

I'm finally back at Duke and am finally settled in. Finally. Finally? Yes.

Sometimes I just get caught on a word.

I'll be updating more frequently and with more worldly content in the next few days.

Biltmore Commercialism

Continuing our meandering vacation, my family stopped at the Biltmore Estate nestled in the mountains near Asheville, NC.

Biltmore House is a French Renaissance-inspired chateau near Asheville, North Carolina, built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1888 and 1895. It is the largest privately-owned home in the United States, at 175,000 square feet. Still owned by Vanderbilt's descendants, it stands today as one of the most prominent remaining examples of the Gilded Age. (wikipedia)

The whole experience is overwhelmed by a condescending commercialism. The estate is currently owned by a private corporation, not a trust or non-profit of any kind. Admission is 45$, more than twice the price of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and contains half the culture. There is a point along the unguided tour at which you must stop and have your photo taken where you can pick it up later for fee a la Disney World attractions. After finishing our tour of the house, we wandered outside near the stables which have been converted to series of elaborate giftshops which boast memorabilia printed with "Biltmore House, largest house in America (tm)." If I'm ever wealthy enough to build a larger home and do so, I'm going to sue them over their trademark. And last but not least, Lowe's is the official home improvement store of Biltmore Estates.

What a lovely little diddy of American commercialism's overreach.

The Luray Caverns

Well, the lighting conditions inside the Luray Caverns were very hard to navigate with a camera. I wasn't able to take any pictures I was happy with. Please, take this professional shot I found online in lieu of any awful photos I took.

Calculus Cookie and Road Trip

If you chuckle at this miracle of shelving, you obviously paid attention in calculus class.

So this week I'm returning to Duke University. My family and I are taking a road trip through Pennsylvania, West Virginia (yes we made it out alive - thank you for your concern), Virginia, and North Carolina, maybe even Tennessee somewhere in between. Our first stop is the Luray caverns which we will see tomorrow, and then we will visit all the wonderful sites and sights of Asheville, NC.

We ate in Red Robin. Insteresting. They had two televisions on either side of the restaurant so that our family didn't have to waste time communicating while we ate. Instead we could watch the Simpsons and Everyone Loves Raymond. In he bathroom there was a television also opposite from the urinals. To my surprise there was a mirror above each urinal angled to face the television screen. I normally micturate for less than 30 seconds so the mirror had little utility, but I can see how impressed men with prostate problems must be with the installation.
Please, pardon this blog's first instance of scatological humor.

Tomorrow, look forward to my first batch of cavern photos.

This week in originality

From CuringDeath.com:

"A promising new line in anti-cancer therapy by blocking the molecular motors involved in copying genetic information during cell division is being pursued by young Dutch researcher Dr. Nynke Dekker in one of this year's EURYI award winning projects sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and the European Heads of Research Councils (EuroHORCS). Dekker and her team are trying to stop tumor development by interfering with the molecular motors that copy DNA during cell division. This will cut off the genetic information flow that tumours need to grow, and could complement existing cancer therapies, while in the longer term bringing the promise of improved outcomes with greatly reduced side effects."

Remembers kids, part 2

Sandy Hook at Night

Ladies?

The one, the only: xkcd.

Out of Asia?

Out of Africa, the theory that modern humans evolved in Africa before leaving, has been the mantra of anthropologists for nigh a decade now. That idea might need some qualification though. After analyzing nearly 5,000 ancient tooth samples from the genus Homo (Humans are Homo sapiens), researchers led by Maria Martinón-Torres at the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain cast doubt on the second great migration out of Africa. Their article, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, stresses the importance of early humanity's move across Eurasia. (link via Scientific American)

Let's hope the media realizes there was still a great deal of genetic drift and gene flow. We're still one people.

Up and down

Very crazy day. Market up, market up, market down, market up. I'm visiting today with my uncle who works at Morgan Stanley in algorithmic trading. It's amazing how their product is a self-fulfilling prophecy: create more information for the customer, the customer will make more trades, make more commissions. That seems like a perfectly sound business plan to me.

Are there any other ways you can do that?

Pharmaseuticals? Create drugs that solve one problem, cause others in the general population when their excreted, create new drugs to fix all the new problems you inadvertently created? It can't seriously work that way though.

Remember kids

New/Old Bacteria from Melting Ice

Organisms always get trapped in an ice cap as it is forming. The unwitting bacterium can be locked away for aeons never to be heard from again. Or not. A group of scientists with an ice sample over 8 million years old were able to find one type of bacterium in it that they were able to thaw out and grow in a culture. The bacteria exhibited extremely sluggish reproductive behavior, doubling once every seventy days. (In contrast, the cancer cells I worked with this summer double every day.) They attribute the slow growth to the cosmic radiation that was able to scramble the microbe's DNA for so long a period. (link via New Scientist).

Now imagine the thinning ice caps, and the fact that more microbes like this one will be spilling into the sea. Seems like the earth created another unwitting compensatory mechanism to deal with warming periods. And if not, atleast it's pretty cool to see the old become new again.

Sugar more addictive than cocaine

First spotted on Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge of ScienceBlogs:

This PLoS paper from researchers at the University Bordeaux shows that when rats where given a mutually exclusive choice between saccharin and heroine, they overwhelmingly chose saccharin, a common sugar substitute.

First sentence of the conclusions:
"Our findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals."

The researchers hypothesize further that the relatively sugar-poor diets of our ancestors sensitized the brain to trace amounts of sweet tastants. In our modern day society, where sugar-rich diets are common, the "supranormal reward signal in the brain [has] the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction."

Sorry Caroline. You're addicted to cotton candy.

Did I hear that right?

Steps to understand the McGurk effect:

1. watch this video. Ask yourself if you heard that right? Chances are you didn't.
   
2. play this video again with your eyes shut
   
3. say "holy shit."
   

The McGurk effect highlights the combination of both auditory and visual cues in speech recognition. This clip was produced by overlaying the sound of "ba" over a video of someone saying "ga." The perceived speech should sound like a combination somewhere between the two: "da." If you close your eyes, there is no incorrectly matched video to confuse your brain and only the spoken "ba" can be heard. Cool, no?

The End of an Era

Goodnight lab bench.
Goodnight so soon?
Goodnight oxidative stress.
Goodnight moon.

Wee planets

My new favorite group on flickr is Wee planets. The group take 360 degree panoramas and skews them to look like small planets, more like dwarf planets. The fictitious planets look much closer in size to those of Le Petit Prince than any true dwarf planet. No baobabs so far, but I'm still looking.