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Dangerous new plant disease linked to genetically engineered crops and pesticides


ABC.net.au
Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:51 UTC
Image

A US scientist is concerned GM crops and the pesticide glyphosate could be causing a dangerous plant disease.
US scientists claim to have discovered a dangerous new plant disease linked to genetically modified crops and the pesticides used on them.

The research, which is yet to be completed, suggests the pathogen could be the cause of recent widespread crop failure and miscarriages in livestock.

Emeritus Professor Don Huber from Perdue University says his research shows that animals fed on GM corn or soybeans may suffer serious health problems due to the pathogen.

"They're finding anywhere from 20 per cent to as much as 55 per cent of those [animals] will miscarriage or spontaneously abort," he said.

"It will kill a chicken embryo for instance in 24-48 hours."

Professor Huber says it isn't clear yet whether it is the GM crops or the use of the pesticide glyphosate that causes the pathogen. But he says his research shows both the pesticide and the GM crops also reduce the ability of plants to absorb nutrients from the soil that are necessary for animal health.

"If you have the [GM] gene present there is a reduced efficiency for the plant to use those nutrients.

"When you put the glyphosate out then you have an additional factor to reduce the nutrient availability to the crop," he said.
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Info

New Video Released of Mars' Mystery Moon, Phobos


The Daily Galaxy
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 22:27 UTC

Earlier this month, ESA's Mars Express performed a special manoeuvre to observe an unusual alignment of Jupiter and the martian moon Phobos. The impressive images have now been processed into a movie of this rare event. The origin of Phobos (which means "fear" in ancient Greek), is a mystery, but three theories are considered plausible.

The first is that the moon is a captured asteroid; the second is that it formed in-situ as Mars formed below it, and the third is that Phobos formed later than Mars, from debris flung into martian orbit when a massive meteorite struck the Red Planet. A fourth, far more radical and controversial (although thoroughly intriguing) theory is one that has been kicking around for decades: that Phobos is a artificial object in Mars orbit -in short, a 1.5-mile-long, extremely ancient spacecraft.

In a new development, scientists say they have uncovered firm evidence that Mars's largest moon, the mysterious Phobos, is made from rocks blasted off the Martian surface in a catastrophic event, solving a long-standing puzzle. It has been suggested that both Phobos and Deimos could be asteroids that formed in the main asteroid belt and were then "captured" by Mars's gravity.

An alternative theory suggests that Phobos could have been formed from the remnants of an earlier moon destroyed by Mars's gravitational forces. However, this moon might itself have originated from material thrown into orbit from the Martian surface.
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Laptop

Spam epidemic has reached ebooks, shocking no one

Katherine Gray
tecca.com
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 16:47 UTC
Image
© kodomut

There are a lot of truly excellent books available on e-readers. From current best sellers to the classics, you can broaden your intellectual horizons, learn new things, enjoy brilliant literature... and slog through that bane of our online existence: spam. Yes, spam has come to ebooks, in particular Amazon's Kindle e-reader. It was inevitable, really, especially given that the companies behind e-readers have gone out of their way to make the platforms accessible to independent authors and self-publishers.

Using what's known as Private Label Rights or PLR, the literary infiltrators take cheap information and reformat it into something vaguely resembling a book. There are even kits you can buy that let you create "books" without actually writing a single word, which perpetuate the ebook spam. Other even less-scrupulous ebook creators are simply copying and pasting text from someone else's book and selling it as their own.

Amazon is aware of the issue, but has yet to come up with a good way to keep the spammers off the Kindle. Interestingly, Barnes and Noble's Nook e-reader doesn't seem to have nearly as big a problem with spammers, presumably because their audience isn't quite as large and their system not quite as friendly to self-publishers.

It should be noted that not all independent authors and publishers are creating this ebook spam; far from it. There are thousands of very well-written and produced independent books out there, and the industry should be applauded for enabling that functionality. Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of dross that must be sifted through to find the gold.
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Star

Star Shooting Intense Water Jets Into Space Spotted By Herschel Telescope


The Huffington Post
Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:33 UTC
Image
© NASA
A star shooting water is almost an oxymoron.

But a young sun-like star seems to have been spotted 750 light-years from Earth doing just that, as researchers have apparently discovered, according to PopSci. Their findings indicate that the proto-star is shoot water from its poles at about 124,000 miles per hour.

Essentially, it's creating water bullets that it shoots deep into interstellar space, according to National Geographic. This star is no more than 100,000 years old, and is located in the northern constellation Perseus.

The star was found by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, which was able to see through a dense layer of gas that surrounded it. According to PopSci, the telescope picked up the light signature of both hydrogen and oxygen which are coming together as liquid water before vaporizing near the massive jets of gas that spew from the the star's poles.
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Meteor

Asteroid Vesta: Surface of Huge Asteroid Has Mysterious Dark Spot


Space.com
Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA/Reuters
Asteroid Vesta in front of a background of stars, as seen on May 11. Vesta is 330 miles in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. A mysterious dark spot has been found on its surface, but the asteroid is not yet in focus.
Asteroid Vesta has been coming into focus as NASA's Dawn probe comes in for close-up photos, but a mysterious dark spot has scientists scratching their heads.

A NASA spacecraft has captured new video of the huge asteroid Vesta ahead of a planned rendezvous with the space rock in July, revealing an odd, dark spot that has astronomers buzzing.

NASA's Dawn probe will arrive in orbit around Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, on July 16. The spacecraft has been taking photos of Vesta with its framing camera since May to help prepare for the close encounter.

The new video is actually a series of 20 photographs taken during a 30-minute period on June 1, when Dawn was about 300,000 miles (483,000 kilometers) from the giant space rock. The images, which capture about 10 percent of a full rotation, reveal several intriguing features on the 330-mile-wide (530-km) Vesta. [Watch the new asteroid Vesta video]
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Bizarro Earth

Tsunami lit up the heavens


Science News
Sat, 18 Jun 2011 04:03 UTC
Japan's recent monster earthquake did more than jolt the island nation and send a tsunami racing across the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds of kilometers overhead, that tsunami also lit up the atmosphere in celestial glowing ripples.
Tsunami lit the skies
© Jonathan Makela/Univ. of Illinois
In this image taken by a camera in Hawaii, large-scale, glowing atmospheric ripples wash over the Hawaiian Islands (outlined in blue) following the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The red line is the tsunami’s location on the ocean surface.
In the first picture of its kind, scientists photographed these "airglow" ripples as they washed over Hawaii hours after the quake. The report will appear in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters.

"It's just total serendipity that we got this measurement," says team leader Jonathan Makela, a space scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's a really neat example of how the environment is coupled together."

When the magnitude-9.0 quake ruptured the seafloor off eastern Japan on March 11, it displaced water that started rushing outward as a tsunami. Over the open ocean those waves were just centimeters high, but that small shift was enough to displace the air above the water's surface. The result: dense waves of atmospheric particles propagating upward.
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Chalkboard

Academic Authoritarians, Language, Metaphor, Animals, & Science

Ray Peat
Raypeat.com
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:00 UTC
Authoritarians
A few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of "flexibly adaptive" ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They "suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions." (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004).

In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.

For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of "mental maps," and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, "go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left." He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me.
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Blackbox

Scientists record 'death rattle' of star hitting black hole

Margaret Munro
Ottawa Citizen
Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:54 UTC
Image
© Mark Garlick, University of Warwick handout
Artist's impression of the aftermath of star being consumed by a massive black hole in a galaxy 3.8 billion light years away. It blasted jets of energy from the black hole, one of which pointed directly at our own galaxy, enabling scientists to study and reconstruct the cosmic drama.
In late March, NASA's Swift satellite picked up a blast of gamma rays screaming past Earth.

Astronomers rushed to take a closer look, using powerful telescopes from Hawaii to the Canary Islands to check out the high-energy jet coming from a distant galaxy in the constellation Draco.

They initially speculated a collapsing star created the blast. Now they report that it appears a star the size of the sun was shredded by a massive black hole. Its "death rattle" was a high-energy flash or jet pointed straight at the Earth.

"This is a very strange one," says Nicholas Law, at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, a member of the international team that describes the cosmic drama in two reports published Thursday by the journal Science.
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Info

Humans Evolving Slower Than Expected

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:26 UTC
Human Genome
© LiveScience

Humans might be evolving slower than scientists had thought, according to a new analysis of the genomes of two families, but there is a huge variance between people.

The researchers, reporting their findings June 12 in the journal Nature Genetics, based their measurement of evolution speed on the number of new mutations that occur during one generation in each of the families. A slower mutation rate means we probably separated from chimpanzees evolutionarily longer ago than previously thought, the researchers say, adding that the finding may have medical implications, if some groups of people are more mutation-prone than others.

"This makes us think about what are the underlying mechanisms of these mutations, other than just a random process," said study researcher Philip Awadalla, of the University of Montreal in Canada. "Why are there differences in the rate or accumulation of mutations in individuals?"

The mutations rate seems to be highly variable, Awadalla said, and could be affected by aging and environmental exposure to toxins, among other factors.
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Pumpkin

Scientists genetically engineer female 'Frankenstein' goats in male bodies to create 'human' breast milk


UK Daily Mail
Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:38 UTC
Image
© Alamy
Transgender: Nanny goats are being born inside the bodies of billy goats as a result of a bizarre genetic engineering project in New Zealand
Genetic engineers are deliberately breeding transgender goats to see if their milk is similar to that produced by humans.

The goats being created are effectively a female trapped in a male's body, complete with the full male anatomy.

The company behind them wants to see if their milk contains the same proteins as human breast milk - with a view to one day possibly selling it in stores.

The goats have been christened 'goys', a mixture of 'girl' and 'boy' and 15 have been bred at the research facility in New Zealand.

Critics have however already called for the breeding programme to be closed down amid concerns the scientists are 'playing God'.

Comment: Twice in one week?!

Chinese Scientists Genetically Modify Dairy Cows to Produce Human Breast Milk

This is too much...




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