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Weekly News Roundup: A Klingon Dad, Russian Space Bloggers, & Black Market Fat

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:04:44 +0000

• Gardak! To learn about children and language, Dad speaks to son only in ...

Found: Dino-Munching Crocodiles Who Swam in the Sahara

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:25:55 +0000

A thrilling set of ancient crocodile fossils have been unearthed in ...

Sirius Stargazing

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:00:31 +0000

I have few regrets in life, but if there’s one, it’s that I ...

Answered: All Your Nagging Questions About Testicle Location

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:45:48 +0000

As you’ve probably heard, a man’s testicles hang down because ...

Think Tech: The Best Gadgets to Buy This Month

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:50:00 -0600

Big Picture: The Banks That Prevent—Rather Than Cause—Global Crises

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:45:00 -0600

Every year farmers in flood-prone areas of Southeast Asia lose millions of tons of rice to high water that kills their crops. That colossal waste may soon be a thing of the past: SUB1A, a gene discovered by researchers with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the University of California, allows rice plants carrying the gene to live completely submerged for two weeks. Flood-resistant rice turned up among the 110,000 types of seed stored at the institute. It produced disappointingly low yields, but scientists were able to transfer the gene into more bountiful varieties. These have shown promising results in tests by growers in India and Bangladesh over the past two years.

This rice success story would not have been possible without the trove of genetic diversity tucked away in the IRRI’s vaults. As the world faces new agricultural challenges—shifting climate, bugs and diseases that have developed resistance to old defenses—such genetic resources are likely to become increasingly valuable. Fortunately, the IRRI is one of more than 1,000 organizations around the world (including the USDA, the International Potato Center in Peru, the Millennium Seed Bank in the U.K., and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway) cataloging and preserving crop genes. Most plant species grown for food have an associated bank that stores thousands of samples: seeds of landraces, wild relatives, and varieties that are rare, old, or adapted to very specific environments. The banks ensure that it will be possible to develop new varieties in the future.

Ripped From the Journals: The Biggest Discoveries of the Week

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:16:28 +0000

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 17 When is a ...

NASA wants your junk

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:31:17 +0000

While driving in Los Angeles recently, I was surprised to see this out my ...

Star Trek-Style “Phaser” Paralyzes Worms With a UV Blast

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:09:34 +0000

Feel like teaching a lesson to that pinhead-sized worm that’s been ...

Beam Circulating in LHC Again!

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:43:19 +0000

09:37 PST: Like many of my colleagues, I’ve been eagerly awaiting ...

DISCOVER-Reading NFL Star Shares Views on LHC, ROS Suppression, Etc

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:12:14 +0000

Pop quiz: Which former NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year is (literally) a ...

ZOMG! Get These iPhone Apps Right Meow!

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:45:44 +0000

It’s Friday at last. So to help you goof off and avoid work, we ...

Did Texas Ban All Marriages?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:39:25 +0000

It reads like an Onion piece or maybe something John Oliver would ...

IBM’s Billion-Neuron Simulation Can Match a Cat’s Brainpower

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:52:56 +0000

An artificial brain as powerful as a human’s remains a distant goal, ...

Nerds rule: followup

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:15 +0000

Aha! The video I mentioned the other day featuring Watchmen advisor Jim ...

Ray Comfort’s Anti-Darwinian Travesty

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:44:45 +0000

Sheril posted yesterday about the outrageous (and breathtakingly arrogant) ...

Spores in Mastodon Dung Suggest Humans Didn’t Kill Off Ancient Mammals

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:00:53 +0000

A fungus found within ancient mammoth dung is providing scientists with ...

Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:00:38 +0000

In the latest installment of “science ruins your guilty ...

The Best of Science Culture This Month

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:55:00 -0600

On Comfort’s ‘Origin of Species’

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:29:12 +0000

By now you’ve surely heard about evangelist Ray Comfort’s plan ...

A Conversation on the Existence of Time

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:27:07 +0000

You know, other people talk a lot about time, too — it’s not ...

Cosmospresso

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:25:36 +0000

You know what "galaxy" means in Latin Greek, don’t you? Yeah, ...

So Long, Colostomy Bag: British Man Gets Remote-Controlled Sphincter

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:15:40 +0000

Briton Ged Galvin survived that vicious car wreck that nearly took his ...

New Guinean Cannibals Evolved Resistance To Mad Cow-Like Disease

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:24:59 +0000

Members of a tribe in Papua New Guinea has evolved resistance to a ...

Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Connect

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:05:00 -0600

We often think if ourselves as Robinson Crusoes sitting on separate islands, we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individual freedom and liberty, but Homo sapiens is remarkably easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by its fellows. This is precisely where empathy and sympathy start—not in the higher regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s situation. It began much more simply, with the synchronization of bodies: running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn. Most of us have reached the incredibly advanced stage at which we yawn even at the mere mention of yawning—as you may be doing right now!—but this is only after lots of face-to-face experience. Yawn contagion, too, works across species. Virtually all animals show the peculiar “paroxystic respiratory cycle characterized by a standard cascade of movements over a five- to ten-second period,” which is the way the yawn has been defined. I once attended a lecture on involuntary pandiculation (the medical term for stretching and yawning) with slides of horses, lions, and monkeys—and soon the entire audience was pandiculating. Since it so easily triggers a chain reaction, the yawn reflex opens a window onto mood transmission, an essential part of empathy. This makes it all the more intriguing that chimpanzees yawn when they see others do so. Yawn contagion reflects the power of unconscious synchrony, which is as deeply ingrained in us as in many other animals. Synchrony may be expressed in the copying of small body movements, such as a yawn, but also occurs on a larger scale, involving travel or movement. It is not hard to see its survival value. You’re in a flock of birds and one bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to figure out what’s going on: You take off at the same instant. Other wise, you may be lunch.