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Ötzi enjoyed a very high-fat diet

Jeff Glorfeld
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 21:04 UTC
Ötzi, the Iceman
© Andrea Solero/AFP/Getty Images
Ötzi, the Iceman, tattooed and full of goat fat.
Imagine you're out for an evening of pizza and beer and on the way home you're flash-frozen into a block of ice, only to have hordes of scientists thaw you out a few thousand years later and systematically delve into every conceivable aspect of your long-lost life.

Such has been the fate Ötzi, also known as the Iceman, whose frozen body was discovered in 1991 by a pair of German tourists hiking in the southern Tyrol on the border between Austria and Italy. Ötzi's corpse was found at an elevation of 3210 metres above sea level, where it had rested undisturbed for more than 5300 years.

In the latest examination, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology say their in-depth analysis of his stomach contents reveals much about his dietary habits. Among other things, they say, his last meal was heavy on fat.

When Ötzi was discovered, what was at first thought to be the corpse of some unfortunate modern-day climber was eventually revealed to be that of oldest naturally preserved ice mummy.

Since then, study of Ötzi, his clothing and the tools and weapons he carried have revealed much about life in the Copper Age, or Eneolithic Period.

Much has been written, for example, about his more than 50 tattoos.

Researchers led by Frank Maixner, of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies, in Bolzano, Italy, used highly detailed biological analysis to reconstruct the Iceman's last meal. They found that he had a "remarkably high proportion of fat in his diet".
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Microscope 1

Slime molds are able to remember - but do they really learn?

Katia Moskvitch
Quanta Magazine
Mon, 09 Jul 2018 16:35 UTC
slime mold
© Audrey Dussutour, CNRS
Despite its single-celled simplicity and lack of a nervous system, the slime mold Physarum polycephalum may be capable of an elementary form of learning, according to some suggestive experimental results.
Evidence mounts that organisms without nervous systems can in some sense learn and solve problems, but researchers disagree about whether this is "primitive cognition."

Slime molds are among the world's strangest organisms. Long mistaken for fungi, they are now classed as a type of amoeba. As single-celled organisms, they have neither neurons nor brains. Yet for about a decade, scientists have debated whether slime molds have the capacity to learn about their environments and adjust their behavior accordingly.

For Audrey Dussutour, a biologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research and a team leader at the Research Center on Animal Cognition at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, that debate is over. Her group not only taught slime molds to ignore noxious substances that they would normally avoid, but demonstrated that the organisms could remember this behavior after a year of physiologically disruptive enforced sleep. But do these results prove that slime molds - and perhaps a wide range of other organisms that lack brains - can exhibit a form of primitive cognition?

Comment: Other interesting instances of apparent learning:

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Gear

Researchers couple artificial atom to acoustic resonator to simulate light-based quantum systems


MIPT
Wed, 11 Jul 2018 13:47 UTC
Researchers from Russia and Britain have demonstrated an artificial quantum system, in which a quantum bit interacts with an acoustic resonator in the quantum regime. This allows the familiar effects of quantum optics to be studied on acoustic waves and enables an alternative approach to quantum computer design, which is based on acoustics and could make quantum computers more stable and compact. The paper reporting the results was published in Physical Review Letters.

Resonator 1
© Elena Khavina/MIPT Press office and the researchers
Figure 1. Schematic of the chip. The resonator is a Fabry-Perot cavity formed by two Bragg gratings, each consisting of 200 parallel stripes (shown in yellow) separated by half the acoustic wavelength. The wavelength is equal to 0.98 micrometers, or 980 nanometers. There are two interdigital transducer (IDT) ports - a receiver and a transmitter - and a qubit (transmon) inside the resonator. SQUID is the part of the transmon sensitive to weak magnetic fields.
"We are the first to demonstrate an interaction between a qubit and a surface acoustic wave resonator in the quantum regime. Previously, resonators of this kind were studied, but without a qubit. Likewise, qubits with surface acoustic waves were studied, but those were running waves, without a resonator. The quantum regime was demonstrated on bulk resonators, but this didn't go far, perhaps due to difficulties in fabrication. We used a planar structure fabricated with existing technologies," says Aleksey Bolgar, researcher at MIPT's Artificial Quantum Systems Lab, where the study was conducted.
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Ice Cube

13,000 year old clues of deluge and abrupt ice age found in Arctic

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Phys.org
Wed, 11 Jul 2018 13:52 UTC
eastern Beaufort Sea
© Lloyd Keigwin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
In 2013, a team of researchers set sail to the eastern Beaufort Sea in search of evidence for the flood near where the Mackenzie River enters the Arctic Ocean, forming the border between Canada's Yukon and Northwest territories. From aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Healy in ice-covered waters, the team gathered sediment cores from along the continental slope east of the Mackenzie River. Above, the piston corer is shown in horizontal position, with the gravity corer hanging vertically ready to be launched.
A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) found the fingerprint of a massive flood of fresh water in the western Arctic, thought to be the cause of an ancient cold snap that began around 13,000 years ago.

"This abrupt climate change-known as the Younger Dryas - ended more than 1,000 years of warming," explains Lloyd Keigwin, an oceanographer at WHOI and lead author of the paper published online July 9, 2018, in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The cause of the cooling event, which is named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) that flourished in the cold conditions in Europe throughout the time, has remained a mystery and a source of debate for decades.

Comment: While this study confirms that there was a great flood in the region, the scientists assumption of melting glaciers isn't supported by their findings. This deluge of water, talked about in many myths all over the world, could have come about through the disruption of former lakes due to geological shifts or due to epic rainfall. What is interesting is that the ice age coincided with a disruption and weakening of oceanic circulation - which is exactly what we're seeing today:

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Car Black

This Honda lawn mower can reach speeds up to 150mph

Matthew Rocco
Fox Business
Tue, 10 Jul 2018 13:26 UTC
Honda Mean Mower V2
© Honda
Honda Mean Mower V2
What did Honda's super-fast Mean Mower need? More power, of course.

The Japanese manufacturer, also known for its cars, jets, motorcycles and marine engines, wants to reclaim its title for making the fastest lawn mower in the world. The original Mean Mower could hit 130 mph and set a Guinness Book record at 116.575 mph in 2014. The current record-holder, a modified Viking mower made by a Norwegian group, hit a top speed of 134 mph a year later.

Honda's U.K. division and Team Dynamics are working on Mean Mower V2 and targeting a top speed of 150 mph. The new riding mower, a modified Honda HF 2622 lawn tractor, will have almost double the power of the original Mean Mower, using a 999cc four-cylinder motorcycle engine that generates more than 190 horsepower at 13,000 rpm.

And yes, the Mean Mower will still cut grass. The previous model was able to mow the lawn at speeds up to about 15 mph. Mean Mower V2 will sport carbon-fiber blades powered by electric motors.

Comment: For those days when you've got too much lawn and not enough time.

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Bug

Australian scientists perform experiment successfully wiping out over 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes

Jessie Yeung
CNN
Tue, 10 Jul 2018 11:56 UTC
Aedes aegypti mosquito
© Marvin Recinos / AFP / Getty Images
An Aedes aegypti mosquito in a laboratory at the University of El Salvador, in San Salvador.
In an experiment with global implications, Australian scientists have successfully wiped out more than 80% of disease-carrying mosquitoes in trial locations across north Queensland.

The experiment, conducted by scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and James Cook University (JCU), targeted Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and Zika.

In JCU laboratories, researchers bred almost 20 million mosquitoes, infecting males with bacteria that made them sterile. Then, last summer, they released over three million of them in three towns on the Cassowary Coast.

The sterile male mosquitoes didn't bite or spread disease, but when they mated with wild females, the resulting eggs didn't hatch, and the population crashed.
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People 2

The 4 genetic traits that helped humans conquer the world - With thanks to interbreeding

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Wed, 11 Jul 2018 08:49 UTC
tibetans mountain

Modern Tibetans have Denisovan genes that may help them cope with altitude
Red hair isn't all we got from Neanderthals. Without DNA gleaned from extinct human species our ancestors might never have survived Earth's extremes

Dozens of genes found in humans today have been traced to Neanderthals and Denisovans. They made their way into the human species when some of our direct ancestors mated with ancient lineages that are now extinct.

Interbreeding like this happened in Africa and in Eurasia, producing many human hybrids - you can read more about them here. Recent genetic decoding has revealed that it partly accounts for differences in our physical appearance - things like skin and hair colour - and affects our health.

Some of this "undead" DNA even helped us survive in places we were otherwise ill-equipped for. Here are four examples.

Comment: While interbreeding and genetics provide us with the potential for certain traits, it seems the role epigenetics plays in triggering them is also crucial:

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Microscope 2

Mitochondrial transplant: Dying organs restored to life in novel experiments

Gina Kolata
The New York Times
Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:01 UTC
Kate Bowen with infant
© Katherine Taylor for The New York Times
Kate Bowen with her infant, Georgia, in the intensive care unit at Boston Children's Hospital. Doctors tried to revive the baby's heart with an infusion of one billion mitochondria.

An unusual transplant may revive tissues thought to be hopelessly damaged, including the heart and brain.

When Georgia Bowen was born by emergency cesarean on May 18, she took a breath, threw her arms in the air, cried twice, and went into cardiac arrest.

The baby had had a heart attack, most likely while she was still in the womb. Her heart was profoundly damaged; a large portion of the muscle was dead, or nearly so, leading to the cardiac arrest.

Doctors kept her alive with a cumbersome machine that did the work of her heart and lungs. The physicians moved her from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was born, to Boston Children's Hospital and decided to try an experimental procedure that had never before been attempted in a human being following a heart attack.

Comment: Wow! It never ceases to amaze the self-healing properties of the body. Taking ones' own mitochondria and injecting it into a damaged part and they go right to work, knowing exactly where to go and what to do is truly astonishing!

See also:

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Beaker

The Neanderthals and Denisovan hybrids who kept extinct humans' DNA alive

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Wed, 20 Apr 2016 15:54 UTC
human denisovan
Neanderthals, Denisovans and other extinct humans live on inside our cells - but what was life like for the hybrid humans who carried their genes?

Until about five years ago, one feature united the ancient human species that once walked the Earth: all were well and truly extinct. The Denisovans vanished from Eurasia around 50,000 years ago and the Neanderthals some 10,000 years later, leaving only Homo sapiens. Others went the same way much earlier, leaving just a few fossils - if that - to tell their story. But we now know these species are not entirely gone. Traces of them are buried within my cells and yours.

By having sex with our direct ancestors, ancient human species made sure they left a genetic legacy that survives to this day, one with a greater significance than previously suspected. People of non-African descent inherit between 2 and 4 per cent of their DNA from Neanderthals; indigenous Melanesians get 3 to 4 per cent of theirs from Denisovans; and some hunter-gatherer groups in central Africa get a small proportion from species we haven't even identified yet - we just know they existed. Crucially, recent studies have revealed that if you combine all the ancient DNA in living humans, you could recover a sizeable chunk of the original genomes. A study published this year suggests about 10 per cent of the Denisovan genome is still "alive", mainly in people from Papua New Guinea. It also suggests that about 40 per cent of the Neanderthal genome can be put together from the bits living people carry. Joshua Akey of the University of Washington in Seattle thinks that figure may creep up with more research.

Comment:

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X

African weather station near airport - How many more of these 'all time record highs' are bogus?

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Sat, 07 Jul 2018 12:00 UTC
wapo tweet
From the "anything hot goes" department and the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang comes this pronouncement of an all-time high temperature record that may be little more than wishful thinking, much like the recent all time high in Scotland that turned out to bepolluted by an idling vehicle producing hot exhaust near the temperature sensor.


Comment: See:


It started with this tweet Friday 07/06/18: (h/t to Mike Bastasch of the Daily Caller).

The WaPo article says:

Comment: Mainstream science these days is all about confirmation bias and prostituting reality for 'research' grants:

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