Sonic Youth Gossip - All Things Science Here!!!

Sonic Youth Gossip (http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/index.php)

- Non-Sonics (http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/forumdisplay.php?f=5)

- - All Things Science Here!!! (http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/showthread.php?t=8736)

Birds May Refine Their Songs While Sleeping

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conten.../282/5397/2163

(a '98 article, a little out of date, but interesting nonetheless)

Hmm...weird article Tokolosh..

Bump. This is to good of a thread to let die.

Moths Drink the Tears of Sleeping Birds
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ng-birds-.html

Quantam Computer? (dissapointingly short)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...ur-breath.html

(thanks to Hip Priest who led me to this site, which I frequently visit and enjoy)

The DNA so dangerous it does not exist

* 03 January 2007
* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* Linda Geddes

Could there be forbidden sequences in the genome - ones so harmful that they are not compatible with life? One group of researchers thinks so. Unlike most genome sequencing projects which set out to search for genes that are conserved within and between species, their goal is to identify "primes": DNA sequences and chains of amino acids so dangerous to life that they do not exist.

"It's like looking for a needle that's not actually in the haystack," says Greg Hampikian, professor of genetics at Boise State University in Idaho, who is leading the project. "There must be some DNA or protein sequences that are not compatible with life, perhaps because they bind some essential cellular component, for example, and have therefore been selected out of circulation. There may also be some that are lethal in some species, but not others. We're looking for those sequences."

To do this, Hampikian and his colleage Tim Anderson, also at Boise, have developed software that calculates all the possible sequences of nucleotides - the "letters" of DNA - up to a certain length, and then scans sequence databases such as the US National Institutes of Health's Genbank to identify the smallest sequences that aren't present. Those that don't occur in one species but do in others are termed "nullomers", while those that aren't found in any species are termed primes.

Hampikian's team is deliberately searching for the shortest absent sequences in order to minimise the possibility that absent sequences are missing simply due to chance. So far they have found 86 sequences of 11 nucleotides long that have never been reported in humans.

They have also identified more than 60,000 primes of 15 nucleotides in length and 746 protein "peptoprime" strings of five amino acids that have never been reported in any species. "These represent the largest possible set of lethal sequences," says Hampikian, who expects the numbers to shrink as more sequence information is added to the database. He is presenting his results at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing in Maui, Hawaii, this week.

Whether these sequences have any biological significance in living organisms is not yet known - the next step is to test 20 of the peptoprimes in bacteria and human cells to see whether they have any effect such as causing death or provoking an immune reaction.

Hampikian believes the applications of his work could be wide-ranging. He has already received a $1 million grant from the US Department of Defense to develop a DNA "safety tag" that could be added to voluntary DNA reference samples in criminal cases to distinguish them from forensic samples. Such tags would not necessarily have to consist of lethal sequences, but could be based on primes that would be easy to detect using a simple kit.

Further down the line there is the possibility of constructing a "suicide gene" to code for deadly amino acid primes. It could be attached to genetically modified organisms and activated to destroy them at a later date if they turned out to be dangerous, Hampikian suggests.

spiders on drugs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc
In the 1960s, Dr. Peter Witt gave drugs to spiders and observed their effects on web building.

Fuck science. Let's teach kids intelligent design!

C'mon, some things are complicated... so....

THERE'S A GOD!!!

I mean, duh.

Fucking science.

Everything you always wanted to know about nanotechnology...
But were too afraid of quantum spookiness to ask.
By Alan H. Goldstein

Atoms function as light-trappers and transporters

* 18:00 07 February 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Tom Simonite

A pulse of light can be stopped, transported, and restarted again using a cloud of super-cold atoms, US researchers have shown. The technique could ultimately be used for advanced computing devices or gravity detectors.

The experiments demonstrate physicists' increasing ability to manipulate light. Being able to control it in this way could be useful for optical or quantum computers, the team suggests.

"The first time I read this paper, I didn't believe it," says Michael Fleischhauer, a theoretical physicist at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. "Even though theory tells us it should be possible, actually doing it is something else."

Naomi Ginsberg, Sean Garner and Lene Hau of Harvard University, US, used a method first developed in 2001 to imprint a pulse of laser light onto a collection of sodium atoms cooled to just above absolute zero. (These sodium atoms were a form of matter known as a Bose–Einstein condensate – (see Creation of new state of matter takes Nobel Physics Prize.)

When the pulse hits the atoms its features are transferred into small oscillations of positive and negative charge. These oscillations are short-lived, but a control laser can be used to turn them into longer-lasting spin states in some of the atoms.

When the control laser is switched off, the atoms drift due to recoil from its beam, carrying the information from the original pulse with them. Previous experiments have shown that turning the control laser back on, before the atoms have drifted too far, allows the light pulse to be recovered.

Ginsberg and colleagues positioned a second Bose-Einstein condensate 160 micrometres away from the first. They allowed excited atoms from the first condensate to drift over, then hit them with the control laser. The original light pulse is reconstructed – a process that depends on the presence of both excited and unexcited atoms.

This is the first demonstration of one of the basic statements of quantum mechanics, called "indistinguishability", explains Fleischhauer. In the Harvard experiment, the indistinguishable nature of atoms in the two Bose-Einstein condensates allows the original light pulse to be recovered. The quantum waveform is the same whichever cloud the atoms inhabit.

The experiment "points to a number of avenues in classical and quantum information processing", write the Harvard team in the journal Nature. "As a messenger atom pulse that embodies the incident light travels in free space it can be independently trapped – potentially for minutes".

Fleischhauer agrees: "You can imagine a network in which photons are used to transfer information, before that information is stored in atoms."

He also told New Scientist that it might even be possible to transport single photons of light using single atoms. "That would be very impressive to see and might allow more powerful information processing," he says.

Brilliant story:

Huge 'Ocean' Discovered Inside Earth

Scientists scanning the deep interior of Earth have found evidence of a vast water reservoir beneath eastern Asia that is at least the volume of the Arctic Ocean.

The discovery marks the first time such a large body of water has found in the planet’s deep mantle.

The finding, made by Michael Wysession, a seismologist at Washington State University in St. Louis, and his former graduate student Jesse Lawrence, now at the University of California, San Diego, will be detailed in a forthcoming monograph to be published by the American Geophysical Union.

The pair analyzed more than 600,000 seismograms—records of waves generated by earthquakes traveling through the Earth—collected from instruments scattered around the planet.

They noticed a region beneath Asia where seismic waves appeared to dampen, or “attenuate,” and also slow down slightly. “Water slows the speed of waves a little,” Wysession explained. “Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

Previous predictions calculated that if a cold slab of the ocean floor were to sink thousands of miles into the Earth’s mantle, the hot temperatures would cause water stored inside the rock to evaporate out.

“That is exactly what we show here,” Wysession said. “Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water.”

The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water [image]. “It would still look like solid rock to you,” Wysession told LiveScience. “You would have to put it in the lab to find the water in it.”

Although they appear solid, the composition of some ocean floor rocks is up to 15 percent water. “The water molecules are actually stuck in the mineral structure of the rock,” Wysession explained. “As you heat this up, it eventually dehydrates. It’s like taking clay and firing it to get all the water out.”

The researchers estimate that up to 0.1 percent of the rock sinking down into the Earth’s mantle in that part of the world is water, which works out to about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.

“That’s a real back of the envelope type calculation,” Wysession said. “That’s the best that we can do at this point.”

Wysession has dubbed the new underground feature the “Beijing anomaly,” because seismic wave attenuation was found to be highest beneath the Chinese capital city. Wysession first used the moniker during a presentation of his work at the University of Beijing.

“They thought it was very, very interesting,” Wysession said. “China is under greater seismic risk than just about any country in the world, so they are very interested in seismology.”

Water covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface and one of its many functions is to act like a lubricant for the movement of continental plates.

“Look at our sister planet, Venus,” Wysession said. “It is very hot and dry inside Venus, and Venus has no plate tectonics. All the water probably boiled off, and without water, there are no plates. The system is locked up, like a rusty Tin Man with no oil.”

I read about this. pretty crazy stuff. Imagine if the whole thing collapsed above this ocean and the continent sank under it? shiiiiiit. talk about atlantis!

That's unbelievable! A very interesting read. Thanks.

say hello to the Big Bang....

Schwarzschild wormhole

The Schwarzschild metric admits negative square root as well as positive square root solutions for the geometry.

The complete Schwarzschild geometry consists of a black hole, a white hole, and two Universes connected at their horizons by a wormhole.

The negative square root solution inside the horizon represents a white hole. A white hole is a black hole running backwards in time. Just as black holes swallow things irretrievably, so also do white holes spit them out. White holes cannot exist, since they violate the second law of thermodynamics.

General Relativity is time symmetric. It does not know about the second law of thermodynamics, and it does not know about which way cause and effect go. But we do.
The negative square root solution outside the horizon represents another Universe. The wormhole joining the two separate Universes is known as the Einstein-Rosen bridge.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/0...rss_topstories

There is ice in the south pole of Mars.