ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Ninety-eight percent chimp? Try
ninety-five
percent, based on a technique that finds more kinds of differences. The
old number is based only on single-base substitutions; Roy Britten, one of
the developers of the old comparison technique, compared newly published chimp
DNA data with data on humans, looking for insertions and deletions.
"We're not any more different than we were," says Britten. "But we see a bit more divergence than before because insertions and deletions are taken into account. It almost triples the difference.The new number is from a small sample--not even one percent of the human, or chimp, genome, but it seems to be a reasonably typical sample.
An aquarium is trying to figure out if it has
parthenogetic
sharks. Other, less likely, possibilities are that the mother stored sperm
for six years (that being the last time she could have been near a male shark), or that
she's a chimera, with male as well as female tissue. Genetic testing may
answer the question:
[Parthenogenesis] is very common in snails and water fleas, but becomes more unusual in higher vertebrates."It's kind of rare, but how much do we really know about the reproductive habits of bamboo sharks?" Sweet said. "It may be happening out in nature all the time, and we don't know it."
I will not forward anything to "everyone I know", but this
emergency
contraception information is worth passing along, so here it is.
[via Follow Me Here]
Suicide rates
go up under
right-wing governments, after controlling for factors ranging from the state
of the economy to the easy availability of sedatives. The researchers suggest
that, in addition to the lack of help for poverty, right-wing ideologies encourage
people to blame themselves for lost jobs and other problems.
Left wing governments tend to be more "inclusive" and community based, [researcher Mary Shaw] says, decreasing the isolation felt by people down on their luck. Shaw's team calculates that over the past century, 35,000 extra suicides occurred when the Tories were in power."Britain's Conservative Party declined to comment on the findings."
The data analyzed so far are from Australia and the United Kingdom; the researchers want to look at US numbers.
The
Sahara Desert is
shrinking, and the Sahel is re-greening: fewer sand dunes, more trees and grass.
Local farmers report up to 70 percent higher yields of millet and sorghum.
The causes are uncertain--more rain, or better water-retention practices, might
be responsible. Either way, refugees are returning home.
Deja vu, with a touch of comp.risks:
Uncounted
votes found in Florida--in touchscreen machines that initially reported no votes.
It shouldn't take four days to double-check machines that reported no votes.
But this is Florida, where the people in charge of counting votes are more interested
in not being blamed than in counting the votes.
One- and two-euro coins
violate EU guidelines for
nickel content.
In a sweaty palm, each coin is like a tiny battery, Nestle's team shows. When sweat gets between the two different alloys of the central pill and outer ring of 1- and 2-euro pieces, metal ions flow between them. This makes the coins corrode, releasing nickel ions, which can set off itching and redness in up to 30% of the population.Technically, the directive doesn't apply to coins--and vending machines like nickel.
The World Trade Center had an
automated
system designed to prevent panic if something small went wrong. It appears not to
have been designed to cope with a real emergency:
Over the years, the recording, a female voice, was dubbed "Inga" by the officers. "Under routine circumstances, if a sprinkler was loose or something like that, Inga would come on automatically and tell people to return to their offices," Alam said.This wasn't the South Tower safety supervisor, making what would normally have been a reasonable judgment, that damage to the North Tower wasn't a reason to leave South Tower. This "don't panic" was triggered by the damage to the building where the voice was telling people to stay at their desks. [This link may only be good through 17 September]"But on Sept. 11, Inga came on and a lot of people listened to that and went back to their offices," she said. "When tenants called me on the intercom, I told them to ignore it, and take stairway A. You could hear her [the recording] in the background, telling them, please go back in your office."
Nancy Joyner, 44, of Jersey City, a security supervisor who worked for two decades in the trade center, also said that she heard the recording. "Whenever there is smoke, sometimes the alarm will trigger, and that's when you heard Inga," Joyner said. "That day, the recording came on."
Edward Gorey's old home has been turned into a
museum
Sunday, some astronomers will be using Jupiter and quasars to test
the speed
of gravity. Relativity theory says it should be the speed of
light, but nobody's had a way to verify this before.
Linda Winer is
distressed
about advertising, dubious corporate name changes and alleged celebrity "interviews"
(already a pretty fluffy area) that are really ads for cell phones and prescription drugs.
A newly discovered species of
Amazonian bee farms
scale insects for sugars and wax. Unlike aphid-farming ants, Schwarzula
keeps the insects in its own nest.
Researchers looking at the late Cretaceous climate of Alberta think that at
least half the dinosaurs may have
died out because
of much colder, drier weather before the asteroid delivered the final blow.
What's striking about
this study
isn't that it found that stretching before exercise doesn't reduce the risk
of injury: it's that the authors found a grand total of eight English-language
papers on the topic in Medline and four other databases. This is advice we've been
getting for thirty-odd years, I'd sort of assumed someone had studied how effective it is.
The stated conclusion is
Stretching before and after exercising does not confer protection from muscle soreness and stretching before exercise does not seem to confer a practically useful reduction in the risk of injury.
I'm still stretching after I work out: not only is there even less information on that, but there's no suggestion that it does any harm. And I'm certainly going to keep stretching between sets: that definitely helps, though some of the benefit may just be that it takes time, and thus gives me a bit of a rest.
Even one case
of mitochondrial DNA being inherited from the father is enough to complicate a lot
of evolutionary biology, particularly the molecular clock.
In the specific person being studied,
Muscle biopsies showed that about 90 per cent of his mitochondria came from his father. However, the mitochondria in his blood, hair roots and fibroblasts came entirely from his mother.Weird and perhaps important things are going on here.
"Secret Court Says
F.B.I. Aides Misled Judges in 75 Cases". The decision was issued--secretly--in
May, and just made public yesterday.
the court rejected a secret request made by the Justice Department this year to allow broader cooperation and evidence-sharing between counterintelligence investigators and criminal prosecutors. The court found that the request was "not reasonably designed" to safeguard the privacy of Americans.I suspect that the FBI and Justice Department expected the court to act as a rubber stamp; I'm pleasantly surprised that it hasn't been, at least not always. [Registration required, the usual drill]
Captive-born dolphins
imitate the
whistles that the trainers use, perhaps because they learn that the
other dolphins will respond to this call.
The Canadian government is
backing
off from medical marijuana, influenced both by the U.S. government and by doctors
who argue that it hasn't been clinically tested. The Health Minister says no cannabis
will be distributed until clinical trials--which have not begun--are completed.
"110
Stories", a poem by John M. Ford.
Copyright 2002 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page or my online journal.