spooky_nine

On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called, A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.

Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand. On Monday, NASA released a Sphinxlike press release: "NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." Like a virulent strain of bacteria, speculation exploded over the next three days. "Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn's Moons?" asked Gawker, a Web site that does not often ask questions about astrobiology.

The truth was revealed on Thursday. At NASA's press conference, the scientists described their research, which was just then being posted on the Web site of the journal Science. They had not found life on one of Saturn's moons; instead, they had gone to the arsenic-laced waters of Mono Lake in California and isolated a strain of bacteria they dubbed GFAJ-1.

Back at the lab, they grew the bacteria in a broth of nutrients. When they gradually reduced the supply of phosphate (a molecule composed of one phosphorus atom and four oxygen atoms) and replaced it with arsenate (one arsenic and four oxygen atoms), the bacteria still managed to grow. The scientists examined the DNA of these hardy microorganisms and inferred that it contained arsenic.
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As soon Redfield started to read the paper, she was shocked. "I was outraged at how bad the science was," she told me.

In fact, a scientific understanding of suicide is useful not only for vulnerable gay teens, but for anyone ever finding themselves in conditions favoring suicide. I say “favoring suicide” because there is convincing work—all tracing back to McMaster University’s Denys deCatanzaro’s largely forgotten ideas from the early 1980s—indicating that human suicide is an adaptive behavioral strategy that becomes increasingly likely to occur whenever there is a perfect storm of social, ecological, developmental and biological variables factoring into the evolutionary equation. In short, deCatanzaro has posited that human brains are designed by natural selection in such a way as to encourage us to end our own lives when facing certain conditions, because this was best for our suicidal ancestors’ overall genetic interests.

For good-hearted humanitarians, it may sound rather bizarre, perhaps even borderline insensitive, to hear that suicide is “adaptive.” But remember that this word means a very different thing in evolutionary terms than it does when used in clinical settings. Because natural selection operates only on phenotypes, not human values, even the darkest of human emotions may be adaptive if they motivated gene-enhancing behavioral decisions. It’s not that evolution is cruel, but as a mindless mechanism it can neither care nor not care about particular individuals; selection, after all, is not driven by an actual brain harboring any feelings about, well, anything at all. In no case does this sobering fact come into sharper focus than with the case of adaptive suicide. (I notice a similar reactionary confusion, incidentally, among “New Atheists” who bleat and huff in a Dawkinsian manner whenever they hear mention of the empirically demonstrable fact that religion is adaptive, something I’ll save for another day.)

The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chips to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.

The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.

The proposed curriculum change would prompt teachers to raise doubts that all life on Earth is descended from common ancestry. Texas is such a huge textbook market that many publishers write to the state's standards, then market those books nationwide.

"This is the most specific assault I've seen against evolution and modern science," said Steven Newton, a project director at the National Center for Science Education, which promotes teaching of evolution.

Texas school board chairman Don McLeroy also sees the curriculum as a landmark -- but a positive one.
Dr. McLeroy believes that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. If the new curriculum passes, he says he will insist that high-school biology textbooks point out specific aspects of the fossil record that, in his view, undermine the theory that all life on Earth is descended from primitive scraps of genetic material that first emerged in the primordial muck about 3.9 billion years ago.

He also wants the texts to make the case that individual cells are far too complex to have evolved by chance mutation and natural selection, an argument popular with those who believe an intelligent designer created the universe.

The textbooks will "have to say that there's a problem with evolution -- because there is," said Dr. McLeroy, a dentist. "We need to be honest with the kids."

The vast majority of scientists accept evolution as the best explanation for the diversity of life on earth.

Yes, they say, there are unanswered questions -- transitional fossils yet to be unearthed, biological processes still to be discovered. There is lively scientific debate about some aspects of evolution's winding, four-billion-year path. But when critics talk about exposing students to the "weaknesses" or "insufficiencies" in evolutionary theory, many mainstream scientists cringe.

The fossil record clearly supports evolution, they say, and students shouldn't be exposed to creationist critiques in the name of "critical thinking."

"We will be teaching nonsense in the science classroom," said David Hillis, a biology professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Polls show many Americans are skeptical of or confused by evolution; in a recent survey by Gallup, 39% said they believe the theory, 25% said they didn't, and 36% had no opinion.

The Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that challenges evolution, cites a recent Zogby poll that found a strong majority of Americans supports letting teachers explore both "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution. Otherwise, students see only "cherry-picked evidence that really amounts to propaganda," said John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

The Texas school board will vote after taking public testimony in a three-day meeting that starts Wednesday. Dr. McLeroy leads a group of seven social conservatives on the 15-member board. They are opposed by a bipartisan group of seven, often joined by an eighth board member considered a swing vote, that support teaching evolution without caveats.

Neither side is confident of victory. All members of the board have come under enormous pressure in recent months, especially three Republicans who support teaching evolution without references to "weaknesses." The state Republican Party passed a resolution urging the three to back Dr. McLeroy's preferred curriculum. A conservative activist group put out a news release suggesting all three were in the pocket of "militant Darwinists."

One of the three, former social-studies teacher Pat Hardy, said she has received thousands of impassioned calls and emails.

Ms. Hardy says she intends to stand firm for evolution, but she has learned not to predict what her colleagues might do. Curriculum standards critical of evolution won preliminary approval in January, but several board members said later that they hadn't understood the issues.

"Anything can happen," Ms. Hardy said.

CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- It may seem obvious that men perceive women in sexy bathing suits as objects, but now there's science to back it up.

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.

The research was presented this week by Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses," she told CNN.

Although consistent with conventional wisdom, the way that men may depersonalize sexual images of women is not entirely something they control. In fact, it's a byproduct of human evolution, experts say. The first male humans had an incentive to seek fertile women as the means of spreading their genes.

"They're not fully conscious responses, and so people don't know the extent to which they're being influenced," Fiske said. "It's important to recognize the effects."

The participants, 21 heterosexual male undergraduates at Princeton, took questionnaires to determine whether they harbor "benevolent" sexism, which includes the belief that a woman's place is in the home, or hostile sexism, a more adversarial viewpoint which includes the belief that women attempt to dominate men.

In the men who scored highest on hostile sexism, the part of the brain associated with analyzing another person's thoughts, feelings and intentions was inactive while viewing scantily clad women, Fiske said.

Men also remember these women's bodies better than those of fully-clothed women, Fiske said. Each image was shown for only a fraction of a second.

Protons will be skirting around the 27-km Large Hadron Collider by the end of September, say CERN officials, with the first proton collisions expected four or five weeks later.

The lab will take the unusual step of running its brand new €3 billion machine throughout the winter - with a short break around Christmas "to allow people not to get divorced!" says CERN's director for research and computing, Sergio Bertolucci.

With winter energy prices, that will add about €8 million to the LHC's electricity bill - about 40% of its annual cost. But physicists on the LHC's four giant experiments will reap the rewards by late 2010, when they should have collected enough data at a collision energy of 10 TeV to rival the Tevatron at Fermilab, perhaps seeing signs of new fundamental particles.

The latest startup schedule is eerily similar to last year's, when the LHC fired upMovie Camera on 10 September. Just nine days later, an electrical fault ruptured its liquid-helium plumbing, putting the machine out of commission.

CERN is now installing an early-warning system to detect nano-ohm rises in resistance in the superconducting wires that power the LHC's bending magnets. It is also fitting all magnets with additional pressure relief valves to reduce collateral damage in case of a similar incident. Half of the valves will be in place this year.

The startup date is likely to please thousands of physicists who have had to deal with several slips in the LHC timetable in the last few years. "The schedule is aggressive," says CERN's director of accelerators and technology Steve Myers, "but we have a machine that's just raring to go."

This article is a small sample from DISCOVER's special issue, The Brain: An Owner's Manual. The issue will be on sale through late June, only at newsstands.


“Can machines think?” In 1950 mathematician Alan Turing pondered this question and invented an elegant game to answer it: Let a human chat via Teletype with a computer and another human; if the person can’t determine which is the computer, then it meets Turing’s standards for “thinking.” In recent years Turing’s game has taken on a life of its own in cyberspace, thanks to artificial intelligence inventors worldwide who have produced dozens of “chatbots” that anyone can talk to.

Most chatbots rely on fairly simple tricks to appear lifelike. Richard Wallace, creator of the top-ranked chatbot ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), has handwritten a database of thousands of possible conversational gambits. Type a comment to ALICE, and it checks the phrase and its key words for a response coded to those words. In contrast, Jabberwacky, another top-rated Internet bot produced by Rollo Carpenter, keeps track of everything people have said to it, and tries to reuse those statements by matching them to the writer’s input. Neither chatbot has long-term memory, so they respond only to the last sentence written.

Nonetheless, these simple gambits can produce surprisingly intelligent-seeming conversations. That’s because they rely on a trick of human psychology: We humans tend to attribute much more intelligence to the systems than is actually there. If it seems partly aware, we assume it must be fully so. Some users have chatted with ALICE and Jabberwacky online for hours, apparently not knowing—or perhaps not caring—that they’re fake.

But could one chatbot fool another chatbot? What would one say to another in private? To find out, we arranged a conversation between these two chatbots. To get each snippet of chat rolling, we seeded it by posing a question from one bot to the other. After that, they were on their own. What follows is the unaltered text of what each said—the sound of two machines talking.

Brazilian and US scientists are looking into using spider venom as a possible treatment for male impotence.

Their investigation follows reports that men bitten by the Phoneutria nigriventer experienced priapism - long and painful erections.

A two-year study has found that the venom contains a toxin, called Tx2-6, that causes erections.

Further tests are being carried out in the US before the substance can be approved for human use.

The results, from the Medical College of Georgia, are expected in a month's time.

The bite of Phoneutria nigriventer, known as the Brazilian wandering spider, is potent and can be deadly in some cases.

The Brazilian and US researchers interviewed men who claimed their sex lives had improved after a spider attack.

The relevant toxin identified in the venom has been tested successfully on other animals.

So far, scientists believe that combining a version of the spider's venom with an existing drug for erectile dysfunction - such as Viagra, Cialis or Levtra - could produce better results.

"SCIENTISTS are conducting experiments to change the sexuality of 'gay' sheep in a programme that critics fear could pave the way for breeding out homosexuality in humans.
The technique being developed by American researchers adjusts the hormonal balance in the brains of homosexual rams so that they are more inclined to mate with ewes.
It raises the prospect that pregnant women could one day be offered a treatment to reduce or eliminate the chance that their offspring will be homosexual. Experts say that, in theory, the 'straightening' procedure on humans could be as simple as a hormone supplement for mothers-to-be, worn on the skin like an anti-smoking nicotine patch.
The research, at Oregon State University in the city of Corvallis and at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, has caused an outcry. Martina Navratilova, the lesbian tennis player who won Wimbledon nine times, and scientists and gay rights campaigners in Britain have called for the project to be abandoned.
Navratilova defended the 'right' of sheep to be gay. She said: 'How can it be that in the year 2006 a major university would host such homophobic and cruel experiments?' She said gay men and lesbians would be 'deeply offended' by the social implications of the tests.
But the researchers argue that the work is valid, shedding light on the 'broad question' of what determines sexual orientation. They insist the work is not aimed at 'curing' homosexuality."

"Research Shows That a Certain Cat Parasite Impacts Our Behavior and Mood

Aug. 9, 2006 — - Kevin Lafferty is a smart, cautious, thoughtful scientist who doesn't hate cats, but he has put forth a provocative theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale.

His phone hasn't stopped ringing since he published one of the strangest research papers to come out of the mill in quite awhile.

The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, has been transmitted indirectly from cats to roughly half the people on the planet, and it has been shown to affect human personalities in different ways.

Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be more warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.

Other researchers have linked the parasite to schizophrenia. In an adult, the symptoms are like a mild form of flu, but it can be much more serious in an infant or fetus. Oxford University researchers believe high levels of the parasite leads to hyperactivity and lower IQ in children.

Lafferty, who is a parasite ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is an expert on the role parasites play in the ecology of other animals."