The time has come. The time is here at last. Now is the time to gather around and take a well deserved hiatus from the politics of the day. Science talk is here. New discoveries, new takes on old knowledge, and other bits of news are all available for the perusing in today's information world. Over the fold are selections from the past week from a few of the many excellent science news sites around the world. Today's tidbits include a brilliant young gentleman, the last refuge of the Neanderthal, mycological wonders, and cognitive linguistics. Gather yourselves around. Pull up that comfy chair and bask in the sunshine. There is plenty of room for everyone. Get ready for one more session of science education and entertainment.
possum is away this week at a graduation ceremony. I hope you'll pardon a provisional pressman, palantir, a poor proxy for possum probably, but game to try.
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It is with great sadness and nostalgia I note the final flight of the shuttle Endeavor (STS-134). Atlantis‘s final flight (STS-135) in June will mark the end of an era that spanned half of my life. Let‘s hope the US does not remain Earthbound for long.
The countdown has begun anew for NASA's last launch of the space shuttle Endeavour on Monday (May 16).
Endeavour and its six-astronaut crew will try again to lift off after a power glitch forced NASA to call off an earlier launch attempt April 29. The space shuttle is scheduled to blast off at 8:56 a.m. EDT (1256 GMT) from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
In the ensuing two weeks engineers checked out the issue and replaced a broken switchbox and wiring that had caused a problem with heaters used to protect the shuttle's hydraulic power system.
You may, as I do, find conversation with human beans to be somewhat less than stimulating and at other times infuriating. I'm sure you've experienced as much here on the Daily Pod. Now, however, we may have members from an alternative pod who would, I'm sure, provide some fascinating conversation.
A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins.
Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between "bring the surfboard to the man" and "bring the man to the surfboard", for example.
But communication in most of these early experiments was one-way, says Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida. "They create a system and expect the dolphins to learn it, and they do, but the dolphins are not empowered to use the system to request things from the humans," she says.
Of course, there are people that you'd just love to talk to, especially if they're young and talented. Young Marshall Zhang has a very bright future ahead of him.
A promising discovery has been made that could one day help in the fight against cystic fibrosis -- and the researcher behind it is just 16 years old.
Toronto-area high school student Marshall Zhang took first place this week at a national science contest for developing what could become a new drug cocktail to treat patients with CF, a genetic disorder that affects the lungs and digestive system.
Zhang, a Grade 11 student in Richmond Hill, Ont., used the Canadian SCINET supercomputing network at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto to identify how two compounds interacted with a protein on a mutant gene that's responsible for most cases of CF, called Delta F508.
There‘s no sense worrying about the fungus among us, they‘re everywhere. Mushrooms (yum), yeast (mmmmm beer), and now a new clade was found hiding among the fungus. The cryptomycota may be as diverse as their well known cousins.
The fungus kingdom contains diverse eukaryotic organisms, including the yeast that we add in fermentation to make beer, the mold that grows on old bread, and the mushrooms that we eat. While we are familiar with many types of fungi, scientists are still trying to fill out the fungal tree of life. Mainly, researchers are unsure about the limits of fungal diversity and how different fungi relate to one another evolutionarily.
A recent paper in Nature suggests that scientists have been unaware of a large fraction of organisms in the fungus kingdom. Lead author Meredith Jones and her colleagues report the discovery of a new clade, an entirely new branch on the fungal tree of life. They named this new clade cryptomycota, which roughly translates to “hidden from the kingdom Fungi.” The new group appears to be extremely diverse; the authors estimate that the biodiversity of the cryptomycota clade might be similar to that of the entire known fungus kingdom.
Jones and her team first discovered the cryptomycota clade by aligning DNA sequences from published fungal phylogenies with DNA sequences in GenBank, the NIH database of all publicly available DNA sequences. This initial work was followed by increased genetic sampling and analysis, which told them that the cryptomycota clade is likely most closely related to the Rozella genus from the chytrid division of the fungus kingdom, which is generally composed of simple organisms.
I‘m terribly sorry, I was totally wrong. There is reason to be worried about the fungus among us if you‘re an ant (with video).
A parasitic fungus has the ability to take over the mind and body of an ant before leading it to its final resting place at the most opportune time, an astonishing study has revealed.
The fungus, a species of Ophiocordyceps, was found living in carpenter ants in Thailand's rain forest, controlling their nervous system so they became a vessel with one purpose: helping the fungus reproduce.
As the fungus spreads through the ant's body it begins to act irregularly before it eventually dies with its jaws clamped around the vein of a leaf in a place perfect for the parasite to thrive, it was found.
It is quite possible that Neanderthals may have hung on longer than previously postulated—hidden away in a remote sub-arctic refuge.
A hardy band of Neanderthals may have made a last stand for their species at a remote outpost in subarctic Russia, a newfound prehistoric "tool kit" suggests.
The Ural Mountains site "may be one of the last [refuges] of the Neanderthals, and that would be very exciting," said study leader Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at France's Université de Toulouse le Mirail.
Neanderthals dominated Europe for some 200,000 years until modern humans began moving into the region about 45,000 years ago. The two human species likely shared space for a while, but it's a mystery what happened during that period, how long it lasted, and why Homo sapiens prevailed in the end.
Even further back, on the super-continent of Pangaea, it seems reptilian and mamalian species preferred separate living arrangements as well.
More than 200 million years ago, mammals and reptiles lived in their own separate worlds on the supercontinent Pangaea, despite little geographical incentive to do so. Mammals lived in areas of twice-yearly seasonal rainfall; reptiles stayed in areas where rains came just once a year. Mammals lose more water when they excrete, and thus need water-rich environments to survive. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Aggregating nearly the entire landmass of Earth, Pangaea was a continent the likes our planet has not seen for the last 200 million years. Its size meant there was a lot of space for animals to roam, for there were few geographical barriers, such as mountains or ice caps, to contain them.
Yet, strangely, animals confined themselves. Studying a transect of Pangaea stretching from about three degrees south to 26 degrees north (a long swath in the center of the continent covering tropical and semiarid temperate zones), a team of scientists led by Jessica Whiteside at Brown University has determined that reptiles, represented by a species called procolophonids, lived in one area, while mammals, represented by a precursor species called traversodont cynodonts, lived in another. Though similar in many ways, their paths evidently did not cross.
I‘m sure golfers won‘t be able to wait for the new cheaper drivers made possible by this CalTech research
Stronger than steel or titanium—and just as tough—metallic glass is an ideal material for everything from cell-phone cases to aircraft parts. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new technique that allows them to make metallic-glass parts utilizing the same inexpensive processes used to produce plastic parts. With this new method, they can heat a piece of metallic glass at a rate of a million degrees per second and then mold it into any shape in just a few milliseconds.
"We've redefined how you process metals," says William Johnson, the Ruben F. and Donna Mettler Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. "This is a paradigm shift in metallurgy." Johnson leads a team of researchers who are publishing their findings in the May 13 issue of the journal Science.
"We've taken the economics of plastic manufacturing and applied it to a metal with superior engineering properties,” he says. "We end up with inexpensive, high-performance, precision net-shape parts made in the same way plastic parts are made—but made of a metal that's 20 times stronger and stiffer than plastic.” A net-shape part is a part that has acquired its final shape.
It looks like Noah Chomsky has had one of his seminal theories—in linguistics, (I wouldn‘t dare bring politics into this august forum)—confirmed by cognitive scientists from Johns Hopkins University.
Parents know the unparalleled joy and wonder of hearing a beloved child’s first words turn quickly into whole sentences and then babbling paragraphs. But how human children acquire language-which is so complex and has so many variations-remains largely a mystery. Fifty years ago, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky proposed an answer: Humans are able to learn language so quickly because some knowledge of grammar is hardwired into our brains. In other words, we know some of the most fundamental things about human language unconsciously at birth, without ever being taught.
Now, in a groundbreaking study, cognitive scientists at The Johns Hopkins University have confirmed a striking prediction of the controversial hypothesis that human beings are born with knowledge of certain syntactical rules that make learning human languages easier.
“This research shows clearly that learners are not blank slates; rather, their inherent biases, or preferences, influence what they will learn. Understanding how language is acquired is really the holy grail in linguistics,u201d said lead author Jennifer Culbertson, who worked as a doctoral student in Johns Hopkinsu2019 Krieger School of Arts and Sciences under the guidance of Geraldine Legendre, a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, and Paul Smolensky, a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the same department. (Culbertson is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester.)
Other Worthy Stories of the Week
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Today we have one final story to go along with possum‘s usual feature—breathtaking astronomical pictures. It is a subject your humble host knows a bit about its history. The Crab Nebula has piqued the interest of astronomers with it‘s recent gamma-ray superflares.
The famous Crab Nebula supernova remnant has erupted in an enormous flare five times more powerful than any flare previously seen from the object. On April 12, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope first detected the outburst, which lasted six days.
The nebula is the wreckage of an exploded star that emitted light which reached Earth in the year 1054. It is located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. At the heart of an expanding gas cloud lies what is left of the original star's core, a superdense neutron star that spins 30 times a second. With each rotation, the star swings intense beams of radiation toward Earth, creating the pulsed emission characteristic of spinning neutron stars (also known as pulsars).
NASA picture of the day. For more see the
NASA image gallery or the
Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive.
![Crab Nebuala](http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/ll54/palantirin/crab-2.jpg)
This composite image was assembled from 24 individual exposures taken with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, NASA, Public Domain