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Post by auroralaura on Feb 8, 2011 17:46:29 GMT 4
I'd like to dedicate this article to Dan: www.ottawacitizen.com/life/British+scientists+claim+vaccine+breakthrough/4238019/story.html?cid=megadrop_storyBritish scientists claim flu vaccine breakthrough AFP February 7, 2011 LONDON — Scientists in Britain have successfully tested a vaccine which could work against all known flu strains, the Guardian newspaper reported Monday. The new vaccine, developed by scientists at Oxford University, differs from traditional treatments by targeting proteins inside the flu virus rather than proteins on the flu's external coat. The two proteins within the virus are similar across strains and less likely to mutate, meaning new vaccines would not have to be developed for each new strain of the illness. Traditional vaccines stimulate the body to produce antibodies to fight the flu, whereas the new treatment, developed by a team led by Sarah Gilbert, boosts the production of T-cells, which identify and kill infected cells. "Fewer of the people who were vaccinated got flu than the people who weren't vaccinated," said Gilbert. "We did get an indication that the vaccine was protecting people, not only from the numbers of people who got flu but also from looking at their T-cells before we gave them flu. "The volunteers we vaccinated had T-cells that were activated, primed and ready to kill." If successfully developed, the new vaccine could prevent outbreaks such as the recent swine flu pandemic, which cost the government £1.2 billion in vaccine preparation. © Copyright (c) AFP ------------- That's pretty cool! Now, I really need them to come up with one for the cold and those pesky sinus infections! AL
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Post by auroralaura on Feb 11, 2011 4:08:14 GMT 4
www.therecord.com/news/world/article/483829--foot-bone-shows-lucy-walked-liked-a-humanBy Randolph E. Schmid, Thu Feb 10 2011 Foot bone shows Lucy walked liked a human WASHINGTON — A team of researchers got a first look at a foot bone from famous fossil Lucy who lived 3 million or more years ago, and concluded this ancestor was fully comfortable with life on the ground, rather than in the trees. Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, and colleagues, report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science that the discovery shows that ancient Australopithecus afarensis had feet similar to modern humans.Lucy is the poster girl for her group of ancient hominins. The study of her other bones showed she was able to stand upright. But no foot bones were found with her skeleton, so researchers have puzzled over whether she walked like modern people or was a blend of ground- and tree-dweller. The new discovery shows these relatives “were fully humanlike and committed to life on the ground,” Ward said in a telephone interview from Africa. “It lays to rest the idea that they were a compromise.” The new bone, discovered with other A. afarensis bones at Hadar, Ethiopia, is a metatarsal, one of the long bones connecting the toes to the base of the foot. It shows that Lucy’s kin had arches stiffening their feet like modern people, as opposed to apes whose feet are more flexible for grasping tree branches. This was an important step in evolution, Ward explained. “This shows our early ancestor walked like we would walk. They were not shuffling, they were walking upright, which is a key feature of our branch of the family tree.“Now that we know Lucy and her relatives had arches in their feet, this affects much of what we know about them, from where they lived to what they ate and how they avoided predators,” said Ward, a professor of integrative anatomy. “The development of arched feet was a fundamental shift toward the human condition, because it meant giving up the ability to use the big toe for grasping branches, signalling that our ancestors had finally abandoned life in the trees in favour of life on the ground.” Richard Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, called the report “an impressive paper for just one bone.” “Every once in a while you do get one piece of the puzzle that helps you fill in something. This bone really fills in a missing piece,” said Potts, who was not part of the research team. “Where this article is a game-changer, to me, is that it correctly notes that there has been this discussion about whether Lucy’s species had compromised two-legged walking. This shows that it wasn’t compromised walking,” said Potts. That doesn’t mean A. afarensis did not climb trees, he added. It was probably a very adaptable creature, using trees when they were available but being quite comfortable on the ground. A. afarensis still retained the well-muscled arms that would have been useful in trees, Potts noted. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian museum was welcoming artifacts of Australopithecus sediba, another human ancestor who lived in Africa about 2 million years ago, a million years after Lucy and her relatives. The previously unknown A. sediba was first reported last year, and casts of those skeletons arrived at the museum Thursday, donated by the University of Withingyersrand in South Africa. The arrival means that researchers will be able to study the casts at the Smithsonian, and they will also be on display to the public, Potts said. The Associated Press ________________ AL ~Visiting the Smithsonian is on my "Bucket List" Title and lyrics:
Julian's drawing
Lennon's son, Julian, showed his father a nursery school drawing he called "Lucy - in the sky with diamonds", depicting his classmate, Lucy O'Donnell. Julian said, "I don't know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings, but I obviously had an affection for Lucy at that age. I used to show dad everything I'd built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea..."[9][10][11] Lucy Vodden née O'Donnell, in a BBC radio interview in 2007, said, "I remember Julian and I both doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant... Julian had painted a picture and on that particular day his father turned up with the chauffeur to pick him up from school."[12] Vodden died of the immune system disease lupus in 2009.[13]
Lennon was surprised at the idea that the song title was a hidden reference to LSD.[3]
“ It was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until someone pointed it out, I never even thought of it. I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? It's not an acid song. The imagery was Alice in the boat. ” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_in_the_Sky_with_Diamonds
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Post by satchmo on Feb 20, 2011 2:19:20 GMT 4
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Post by ninathedog on Feb 21, 2011 9:41:12 GMT 4
Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, deadBy Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Science Writer – Sat Feb 19, 8:53 pm ETWASHINGTON – Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor. That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012. At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't. "There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil. "Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."The head of the agency in charge of the health of the Gulf said Saturday that she thought that "most of the oil is gone." And a Department of Energy scientist, doing research with a grant from BP from before the spill, said his examination of oil plumes in the water column show that microbes have done a "fairly fast" job of eating the oil. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Terry Hazen said his research differs from Joye's because they looked at different places at different times.
Joye's research was more widespread, but has been slower in being published in scientific literature.
In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles. Some of the locations she had been studying before the oil spill on April 20 and said there was a noticeable change. Much of the oil she found on the sea floor — and in the water column — was chemically fingerprinted, proving it comes from the BP spill. Joye is still waiting for results to show other oil samples she tested are from BP's Macondo well. She also showed pictures of oil-choked bottom-dwelling creatures. They included dead crabs and brittle stars — starfish like critters that are normally bright orange and tightly wrapped around coral. These brittle stars were pale, loose and dead. She also saw tube worms so full of oil they suffocated. "This is Macondo oil on the bottom," Joye said as she showed slides. "(These are) dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads." Joye said her research shows that the burning of oil left soot on the sea floor, which still had petroleum products. And even more troublesome was the tremendous amount of methane from the BP well that mixed into the Gulf and was mostly ignored by other researchers. Joye and three colleagues last week published a study in Nature Geoscience that said the amount of gas injected into the Gulf was the equivalent of between 1.5 and 3 million barrels of oil. "The gas is an important part of understanding what happened," said Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco told reporters Saturday that "it's not a contradiction to say that although most of the oil is gone, there still remains oil out there."Earlier this month, Kenneth Feinberg, the government's oil compensation fund czar, said based on research he commissioned he figured the Gulf of Mexico would almost fully recover by 2012 — something Joye and Lubchenco said isn't right. "I've been to the bottom. I've seen what it looks like with my own eyes. It's not going to be fine by 2012," Joye told The Associated Press. "You see what the bottom looks like, you have a different opinion." NOAA chief Lubchenco said "even though the oil degraded relatively rapidly and is now mostly but not all gone, damage done to a variety of species may not become obvious for years to come."Lubchenco Saturday also announced the start of a Gulf restoration planning process to get the Gulf back to the condition it was on Apr. 19, the day before the spill. That program would eventually be paid for BP and other parties deemed responsible for the spill. This would be separate from an already begun restoration program that would improve all aspects of the Gulf, not just the oil spill, but has not been funded by the government yet, she said.
The new program, which is part of the Natural Resources Damage Assessment program, is part of the oil spill litigation — or out-of-court settlement — in which the polluters pay for overall damage to the ecosystem and efforts to return it to normal. This is different than paying compensation to people and businesses directly damaged by the spill.
The process will begin with public meetings all over the region. news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110220/ap_on_sc/us_sci_oil_spill_lingers
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Post by ninathedog on Feb 25, 2011 1:25:54 GMT 4
Creation of Antimatter by Thunderstorms is featured today on "Who Knew?" whoknew.news.yahoo.com/Don't miss the interesting video at the very end of the following: Thunderstorms Make Antimatterscience.nasa.gov/science-newsJan. 11, 2011: Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed inside thunderstorms in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected. "These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. An artist's concept of antimatter spraying above a thunderhead.
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Post by forevernyt on Mar 2, 2011 22:38:22 GMT 4
Hi All, I just found this article and I was wondering if this is legit? Is there anyone who can verify if this is true and viable? viewzone2.com/verichipx.htmlIt's an article about a gentman named Bob Boyce who apparently has invented a way for a self charging hydrogen battery. He now has terminal cancer (if he hasn't passed away already) determined to be caused by a RFID chip that was unknowingly implanted in him. I sound like such a conspiracy nut when I write like this.
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Post by dan on Mar 6, 2011 8:32:25 GMT 4
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/05/6198177-life-in-meteorites-study-stirs-debate"The Journal of Cosmology's editor-in-chief, Rudy Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a note accompanying Hoover's study that 100 experts were invited to critique the research, and that any commentaries would be published beginning Monday. The overall tone of the commentaries is likely to be skeptical: Lynn Rothschild, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said many biologists were "very concerned" about the claims. More than one expert wondered why the research merited any news coverage at all.""Most astrobiologists might be willing to go along with that broad conclusion. However, Hoover's specific claims could well end up in the same sort of limbo that surrounds the claims made 15 years ago about microfossils inside a meteorite from Mars.
The initial evidence was the subject of dramatic news conferences and huge headlines, but as time went on, doubts about the findings grew. Today, few astrobiologists see the Mars meteorite as containing any conclusive evidence for the existence of past or present Martian life."Update for 6 p.m. ET: Rocco Mancinelli, senior research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, weighed in with this e-mailed critique of Hoover's paper: "As a microbiologist who has looked at thousands of microbes through a microscope, and done some of my own electron microscopy, I see no convincing evidence that these particles are of biological origin.
"The techniques used may not have been appropriate for these types of analyses. It is stated that the implements were flame-sterilized, with no details of how this was performed. Were the implements placed in the flame of a Bunsen burner? If so, sometimes soot can get on them at the microscopic level. The usual procedure for flame sterilization is to dip the implements in ethanol then burn the ethanol off. Yet, these would be inappropriate for this type of analysis. You need to have everything clean and then bake at 550 degrees C overnight. These missing details would cause me to question not just about the photos, but the elemental analyses as well. I am also disturbed about the lack of nitrogen. There should be more. There are many technical flaws in this paper."I am not suggesting this one is, most likely contamination by poor technique, but the first fraud out of the Lunar Lab, WE CAUGHT FIRST, 15 years ago started EAGLES DISOBEY. Color me very skeptical. D--------------------------------------------------------------------------- cosmology.com/NASA Scientist Discovers Evidence of Ancient Alien Life March 5, 2011 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Journal of Cosmology, 2011, Vol 13, In press JournalofCosmology.com February-March 2011 Infinity, Patterned Symmetry, Pythagoras, and the Black Hole at the Edge of the Universe Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D., 1. REPEATING PATTERNS ARE THE LAW OF NATURE & THE COSMOS --------------------------------------------------------------------------- These "new" ideas, fit for modern peer review are shocking! G-d, until I may begin writing! D
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Post by dan on Mar 6, 2011 9:20:18 GMT 4
Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, deadBy Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Science Writer – Sat Feb 19, 8:53 pm ETWASHINGTON – Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor. That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012. At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't. "There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil. "Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."The head of the agency in charge of the health of the Gulf said Saturday that she thought that "most of the oil is gone." And a Department of Energy scientist, doing research with a grant from BP from before the spill, said his examination of oil plumes in the water column show that microbes have done a "fairly fast" job of eating the oil. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Terry Hazen said his research differs from Joye's because they looked at different places at different times.
Joye's research was more widespread, but has been slower in being published in scientific literature.
In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles. Some of the locations she had been studying before the oil spill on April 20 and said there was a noticeable change. Much of the oil she found on the sea floor — and in the water column — was chemically fingerprinted, proving it comes from the BP spill. Joye is still waiting for results to show other oil samples she tested are from BP's Macondo well. She also showed pictures of oil-choked bottom-dwelling creatures. They included dead crabs and brittle stars — starfish like critters that are normally bright orange and tightly wrapped around coral. These brittle stars were pale, loose and dead. She also saw tube worms so full of oil they suffocated. "This is Macondo oil on the bottom," Joye said as she showed slides. "(These are) dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads." Joye said her research shows that the burning of oil left soot on the sea floor, which still had petroleum products. And even more troublesome was the tremendous amount of methane from the BP well that mixed into the Gulf and was mostly ignored by other researchers. Joye and three colleagues last week published a study in Nature Geoscience that said the amount of gas injected into the Gulf was the equivalent of between 1.5 and 3 million barrels of oil. "The gas is an important part of understanding what happened," said Ian MacDonald of Florida State University. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco told reporters Saturday that "it's not a contradiction to say that although most of the oil is gone, there still remains oil out there."Earlier this month, Kenneth Feinberg, the government's oil compensation fund czar, said based on research he commissioned he figured the Gulf of Mexico would almost fully recover by 2012 — something Joye and Lubchenco said isn't right. "I've been to the bottom. I've seen what it looks like with my own eyes. It's not going to be fine by 2012," Joye told The Associated Press. "You see what the bottom looks like, you have a different opinion." NOAA chief Lubchenco said "even though the oil degraded relatively rapidly and is now mostly but not all gone, damage done to a variety of species may not become obvious for years to come."Lubchenco Saturday also announced the start of a Gulf restoration planning process to get the Gulf back to the condition it was on Apr. 19, the day before the spill. That program would eventually be paid for BP and other parties deemed responsible for the spill. This would be separate from an already begun restoration program that would improve all aspects of the Gulf, not just the oil spill, but has not been funded by the government yet, she said.
The new program, which is part of the Natural Resources Damage Assessment program, is part of the oil spill litigation — or out-of-court settlement — in which the polluters pay for overall damage to the ecosystem and efforts to return it to normal. This is different than paying compensation to people and businesses directly damaged by the spill.
The process will begin with public meetings all over the region. news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110220/ap_on_sc/us_sci_oil_spill_lingers This is not coming as a surprise to us, either from the standpoint of oil having dropped (which was confirmed and reported here by earlier work in Operation Gulf Eagle 2010, by Brian's (Owl's) work to get samples to me), but also the political overtones. (We know much more than we can say. ) It depends, at this moment with who one speaks, referencing the idea of "recovery." While NOAA has been saying dates like 2012, the WH has been throwing around 2014, etc. I know people have been financially injured through that (BP's) horrible "event"...and they should be fully compensated. The question is where fully is fully or...? Where is the "bar" today, and how easily we find it changing by the day.
For as honest as people can be, I have only met a few people who declare AND I BELIEVE THEM AT THE SAME TIME that they have: ENOUGH. I'm one of those few. I would say I feel it a restricted "club" but I see it as too odd to even say that about it.
All this said, economically, right must be done.
Personally, the Team is VERY HAPPY about the more near shore realities, which were made possible by the bravery of Brian and Ann, and the cleanup efforts our team did, on beach sites.
Right now, we remain at a standstill for the possible reuse of Isis-P in a more contained area, due to our other duties. Right now: NO TIME. NO PERSONNEL AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL ASSIGNED. Samples from the Pacific Northwest. Some of the oxygen samples are conflicting. The nature of the problem rests with faster trends and the fact that we CANNOT stop one prime candidate being Climate Change's contributing factor: the winds. Project ARGGO is moving forward, slowly, that is the reality of building something real, but it IS moving forward.
This is a war. In every sense of the word. We will not win all the battles, but we will not stop fighting.
DanKnew this would happen...oh...it's okay. We've been asked if this was (a) when Isis-P was deployed in the Pacific and (b) whether this is "the very wind" I posted about, above?
(a) Yes. This is when the Teams deployed in the Pacific. We have paid some dues.
(For the record, given what I will discuss just below, I found that experience...the frontal winds...much more enriching to me personally than writing an email...and contained intrinsic worth! Therein resides its supremacy over some "wind" I have recently "read." Just for what it's worth.
(b) No, not "really." When we discuss the winds contributing to the hypoxia/anoxia (Dead Zones) we are really discussing the disturbing changes that climatologists and meteorologists and the like are observing in many places worldwide, with WEATHER PATTERNS. The believed contributory agent, among some extremely technical issues, is the possible displacement patterns of upper water, allowing colder water to upwell.
One writer ACTUALLY asked 'When we are going to put an end to the wind problems?' DISCLOSURE! DISCLOSURE!
Oh, G-d.
Look...we control an extremely powerful Group. There is no doubt about it. We have created several pieces of equipment that have been "experimentally" deployed to see if any observable changes (to the positive) could be effected. We have some data to give us hope that we have done just that, but the amount of positive change, albeit it may have assisted in the protection of some areas, is NOT sufficient for us to say we have THE solution. I know...a few of the writers would almost "die for" me to lie...(I suggest you do not take an MMPI-2 RF...as the stats will defeat you handily...quickly so...)...but they are not going to get what they want! I am not going to lie and say "we have huge confidence at this point that we can deploy and it WILL work."[/i] While we said we couldn't set by and let it happen...AND DIDN'T...I am still a scientist. (On a totally separate subject...from the betatesting..."ISIS-B" (public)...and the "ISIS-P" ( Maj people only - SO FAR) as we have been using it? I have VERY HIGH confidence! There is every possibility that we should have been thinking toward "Isis" as what we are now doing, than how we started? In fact, Marcia and I have a certain piece of information that such is "highly probable." I think the important thing is that we are using what we know to do, to ACT TO HELP.) We also have high hopes because of known data, for ARGGO...and it is underway...as aforedescribed. As Marcia has mentioned...when it is done...IT WILL BE DEPLOYED. As the Project Leader, THAT IS MY DECISION. I am not waiting for puffed up "chalk talkers" to give their opinions first. Their descriptions, even modeling is wonderful! I am watching and I haven't been anyway convinced they will model OUR way out of world petroleum demand and the politics around it, the natural cycles, and the time it would take to repair us from the anthropocentric damages. So, we are making the decisions when it is finished. Yes, when that time comes, Eagles Disobey will cover the activation of the device. As for stopping the winds? I don't have the power to stop the winds, I have only heard and read about ONE man who is said did that and HE is certainly not me. I will wait for those arguing about stopping the winds to show us all how, before I am willing to give them enough credence to engage them in any real discussion. Thank you. The HONEST fight goes on! Dan[/b][/color]
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Post by nodstar on Apr 5, 2011 17:35:37 GMT 4
Epic Discovery: China's National Radio-Astronomy Observatory Announces Monitoring of 'Dark' Satellite in Orbit Around Saturn -"Transmitting the Universal Genetic Code"[/size] April 01, 2011 www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/04/china-announces-monitoring-of-dark-satellite-in-orbit-around-saturn-transmitting-genetic-code.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29Saturn-dragon-storm China's Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) announced Thursday that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been monitoring signals from a previously unknown "dark" satellite in orbit around Saturn for the past 90 days. According to government officials, the signals appear to be the first verified transmission from an alien civilization. China's leading astrobiologist, Dr. Xi Chang, a graduate of MIT, told Xinhua that "the sigal repeats itself continuosly in 2 minute long sequences and appears to be the four bases of the genetic code A,G, U and C that ribosomes must convert mRNA sequences into proteins and the twenty different amino acids that proteins are comprised of." Dr. Rosie Redfield, the newly appointed director of the Astrobiology Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, confirmed China's dicovery this morning. In a press release Redfield said that "China's discovery has monumental consequences, and has been shared with the world's premier sciemtific instituions for vetting and peer review. If confirmed this will be the first proof of extraterrestrial life in the universe and confirmation that our DNA basis for life may be universal throughout the known universe." Mary+Voytek+_SXv1RXz-87m "The genetic code," Redfield (left), explained, "allows an organism to translate the genetic information found in its chromosomes into usable proteins . Stretches of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are built from four different nucleotide bases, while proteins are made from twenty unique subunits called amino acids . This numerical disparity presents an interesting problem: How does the cell translate the genetic information in the four-letter alphabet of DNA into the twenty-letter alphabet of protein? The conversion code is called the genetic code. "The information transfer from DNA to protein, called gene expression , occurs in two steps. In the first step, called transcription , a DNA sequence is copied to make a template for protein synthesis called messenger ribonucleic acid -messenger RNA, or mRNA. During protein synthesis, ribosomes and transfer RNA (tRNA) use the genetic code to convert genetic information contained in mRNA into functional protein. Formally speaking, the genetic code refers to the RNA-amino acid conversion code and not to DNA, though usage has expanded to refer more broadly to DNA. Biol_02_img0198 "Mathematics reveals the minimum requirements for a genetic code. The ribosome must convert mRNA sequences that are written in four bases—A, G, U, and C—into proteins, which are made up of twenty different amino acids. A one base to one amino acid correspondence would code for only four amino acids (4 1 ). Similarly, all combinations of a two-base code -for example, AA, AU, AG, AC, etc.- will provide for only sixteen amino acids (4 2 ). However, blocks of three RNA bases allow sixty-four (4 3 ) combinations of the four nucleotides, which is more than enough combinations to correspond to the twenty distinct amino acids. So, the genetic code must use blocks of at least three RNA bases to specify each amino acid. This reasoning assumes that each amino acid is encoded by the same size block of RNA." Redfield added that NASA expects a more detailed press conference to be held at the White House later today or tomorrow, pending announcement from the Obama administration. Dr. Dimitri Kardashev of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told The Daily Galaxy that "This discovery comes as no surprise to me. It was always just a matter of time. The Earth is only some four billion years old. Our universe is some 14 billion years old. There may be millions of advanced technological civilizations that are billions of years older than ours. Keep in my that the radio was only invented 120 years ago. Quantum computers and singularity are at most two or three gereration distant. The technologies of ET civilizations a million years old and older are beyond our comprehension." Sir Martin Rees, a leading Cambridge University cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain’s Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England, said: “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.” If verified, China's startling annoucement means you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical thingytail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components. That's all. The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants. The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once. The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play. And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round. It's no accident that we see stars in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that stars exists in order to make us."It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table," Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale -A Pilgramage to the Dawn of Evolution, "and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars." China's discovery puts an end to the questions of whether DNA is inevitable as the foundation for the coding of life, or has life started with DNA in only one place in the solar system and then spread among the livable habitats through panspermia. Microbial life can land on and seed another planet, thereby not requiring that you have to create life from scratch multiple times and in multiple places. It is the relentless shifting and mutating of DNA, says Dennis Overbye of The New York Times, that generates the raw material for evolution to act on and ensures the success of life on Earth and beyond. Dr.Paul Davies co-director of the Arizona State University Cosmology Initiative "that some sections of junk DNA seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at least 300 million years." China's epic announcement may shows that DNA the cosmic code for life in the universe, or is it possible that there's are alien, unknown foundations? At the Galaxy, we place our chips on DNA. Case6 The Daily Galaxy staff assumes that China is using supercomputers similar to those at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in the USA where Sukanya Chakrabarti has developed a mathematical method uncover “dark” satellites. When she applied this method on a more vast scale to our Milky Way galaxy, Chakrabarti discovered a faint satellite might be lurking on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth, approximately 300,000 light-years from the galactic center. The technique involves an analysis of the cold atomic hydrogen gas that comprise the outskirts of a large spiral galaxy’s disk. This cold gas is gravitationally confined to the galactic disk and extends much further out than the visible stars—sometimes up to five times the diameter of the visible spiral. This gas can be mapped by radio telescopes. With the help of NERSC systems, she successfully validated her method by analyzing the radio observations of the Whirlpool Galaxy, which has a visible satellite one-third of its size, and NGC 1512, which has a satellite one-hundredth its size. Her calculations correctly predicted the mass and location of both of the known satellite galaxies. The headquarters of China's NAOC are situated in the northern suburbs of Beijing on the site of the former Beijing Astronomical Observatory. The National Astronomy Observatory of China (NAOC, the acronym was officially claimed as standing for National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences) was founded on April 25, 2001 through the merging of four CAS observatories, three CAS observing stations and one CAS research centre.
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Post by auroralaura on Apr 8, 2011 21:01:26 GMT 4
www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/04/08/science-new-particle-tevatron.htmlSign of new particle could point to novel physics Evidence of a new particle at a U.S. particle collider may point to a new force previously unknown to physics. The evidence comes in the form of an unexpected peak in data collected at the Tevatron particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. The collider accelerates protons and antiprotons close to the speed of light, then smashes them head-on into each other, producing signals that might point to new particles produced in the collision. The peak is linked to the production of a particle called a W boson and two cones of particles called hadronic jets. The new peak "might be explained by a new, unknown particle that is not predicted by the Standard Model, the current standard theory of the fundamental laws of physics," wrote Elizabeth Clements, senior science communicator for Fermilab, in a blog post Thursday. That's because the characteristics of the particle show it is definitely not a Higgs boson or a supersymmetric particle — particles that might be expected under the Standard Model. Instead, it is consistent with some new proposed models of physics that predict the existence of new fundamental interactions between particles "beyond those known today." The Collider Detector at Fermilab group, a collaboration of scientists who study high-energy particle collisions, announced their discovery on Wednesday. It has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters and posted on the arXiv online archive. However, it has not yet been peer-reviewed. The researchers are also waiting for experiments at other particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, to look for the same peak under similar conditions. "Their results will either refute or confirm our result," the blog post said. It is possible that the peak is not caused by a particle. Another possibility is that the method used to find peaks from the data is incorrect. That method uses a theory based on standard particle physics processes to predict what the data would look like if there were no new unknown particle. That is compared to the data researchers actually collect. "That possibility, albeit less glamorous, would still have important implications. Those calculations use theoretical tools that are generally regarded as reliable and well understood, and form the basis of many other predictions in particle physics," the blog post said. "Questioning these tools would require us to challenge our understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, the foundation of particle physics." ----- AL
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Post by caspa on Apr 9, 2011 12:25:46 GMT 4
Epic Discovery: China's National Radio-Astronomy Observatory Announces Monitoring of 'Dark' Satellite in Orbit Around Saturn -"Transmitting the Universal Genetic Code" [/size] April 01, 2011www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/04/china-announces-monitoring-of-dark-satellite-in-orbit-around-saturn-transmitting-genetic-code.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29Saturn-dragon-storm China's Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) announced Thursday that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory has been monitoring signals from a previously unknown "dark" satellite in orbit around Saturn for the past 90 days. According to government officials, the signals appear to be the first verified transmission from an alien civilization. China's leading astrobiologist, Dr. Xi Chang, a graduate of MIT, told Xinhua that "the sigal repeats itself continuosly in 2 minute long sequences and appears to be the four bases of the genetic code A,G, U and C that ribosomes must convert mRNA sequences into proteins and the twenty different amino acids that proteins are comprised of." Dr. Rosie Redfield, the newly appointed director of the Astrobiology Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, confirmed China's dicovery this morning. In a press release Redfield said that "China's discovery has monumental consequences, and has been shared with the world's premier sciemtific instituions for vetting and peer review. If confirmed this will be the first proof of extraterrestrial life in the universe and confirmation that our DNA basis for life may be universal throughout the known universe." Mary+Voytek+_SXv1RXz-87m "The genetic code," Redfield (left), explained, "allows an organism to translate the genetic information found in its chromosomes into usable proteins . Stretches of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are built from four different nucleotide bases, while proteins are made from twenty unique subunits called amino acids . This numerical disparity presents an interesting problem: How does the cell translate the genetic information in the four-letter alphabet of DNA into the twenty-letter alphabet of protein? The conversion code is called the genetic code. "The information transfer from DNA to protein, called gene expression , occurs in two steps. In the first step, called transcription , a DNA sequence is copied to make a template for protein synthesis called messenger ribonucleic acid -messenger RNA, or mRNA. During protein synthesis, ribosomes and transfer RNA (tRNA) use the genetic code to convert genetic information contained in mRNA into functional protein. Formally speaking, the genetic code refers to the RNA-amino acid conversion code and not to DNA, though usage has expanded to refer more broadly to DNA. Biol_02_img0198 "Mathematics reveals the minimum requirements for a genetic code. The ribosome must convert mRNA sequences that are written in four bases—A, G, U, and C—into proteins, which are made up of twenty different amino acids. A one base to one amino acid correspondence would code for only four amino acids (4 1 ). Similarly, all combinations of a two-base code -for example, AA, AU, AG, AC, etc.- will provide for only sixteen amino acids (4 2 ). However, blocks of three RNA bases allow sixty-four (4 3 ) combinations of the four nucleotides, which is more than enough combinations to correspond to the twenty distinct amino acids. So, the genetic code must use blocks of at least three RNA bases to specify each amino acid. This reasoning assumes that each amino acid is encoded by the same size block of RNA." Redfield added that NASA expects a more detailed press conference to be held at the White House later today or tomorrow, pending announcement from the Obama administration. Dr. Dimitri Kardashev of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told The Daily Galaxy that "This discovery comes as no surprise to me. It was always just a matter of time. The Earth is only some four billion years old. Our universe is some 14 billion years old. There may be millions of advanced technological civilizations that are billions of years older than ours. Keep in my that the radio was only invented 120 years ago. Quantum computers and singularity are at most two or three gereration distant. The technologies of ET civilizations a million years old and older are beyond our comprehension." Sir Martin Rees, a leading Cambridge University cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain’s Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England, said: “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.” If verified, China's startling annoucement means you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical thingytail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components. That's all. The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants. The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once. The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play. And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round. It's no accident that we see stars in the sky, says famed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins: they are a vital part of any universe capable of generating us. But, as Dawkins emphasizes, that does not mean that stars exists in order to make us."It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table," Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale -A Pilgramage to the Dawn of Evolution, "and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars." China's discovery puts an end to the questions of whether DNA is inevitable as the foundation for the coding of life, or has life started with DNA in only one place in the solar system and then spread among the livable habitats through panspermia. Microbial life can land on and seed another planet, thereby not requiring that you have to create life from scratch multiple times and in multiple places. It is the relentless shifting and mutating of DNA, says Dennis Overbye of The New York Times, that generates the raw material for evolution to act on and ensures the success of life on Earth and beyond. Dr.Paul Davies co-director of the Arizona State University Cosmology Initiative "that some sections of junk DNA seem to be markedly resistant to change, and have remained identical in humans, rats, mice, chickens and dogs for at least 300 million years." China's epic announcement may shows that DNA the cosmic code for life in the universe, or is it possible that there's are alien, unknown foundations? At the Galaxy, we place our chips on DNA. Case6 The Daily Galaxy staff assumes that China is using supercomputers similar to those at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in the USA where Sukanya Chakrabarti has developed a mathematical method uncover “dark” satellites. When she applied this method on a more vast scale to our Milky Way galaxy, Chakrabarti discovered a faint satellite might be lurking on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth, approximately 300,000 light-years from the galactic center. The technique involves an analysis of the cold atomic hydrogen gas that comprise the outskirts of a large spiral galaxy’s disk. This cold gas is gravitationally confined to the galactic disk and extends much further out than the visible stars—sometimes up to five times the diameter of the visible spiral. This gas can be mapped by radio telescopes. With the help of NERSC systems, she successfully validated her method by analyzing the radio observations of the Whirlpool Galaxy, which has a visible satellite one-third of its size, and NGC 1512, which has a satellite one-hundredth its size. Her calculations correctly predicted the mass and location of both of the known satellite galaxies. The headquarters of China's NAOC are situated in the northern suburbs of Beijing on the site of the former Beijing Astronomical Observatory. The National Astronomy Observatory of China (NAOC, the acronym was officially claimed as standing for National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences) was founded on April 25, 2001 through the merging of four CAS observatories, three CAS observing stations and one CAS research centre. [/quote] APRIL 1ST. We hear the signal helps the spaghetti grow. ;D F
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Post by nodstar on Apr 9, 2011 12:59:05 GMT 4
Hi Everyone .. My apologies for the above article, there was no intent to misinform, just another misstep on my part. Once this reply has been read I suggest the original post be deleted. Thanks for pointing out the hoax. love to you all Nodstar
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Post by galaxygirl on Apr 9, 2011 23:00:04 GMT 4
www.technewsworld.com/story/Cosmic-Fireworks-Erupt-When-Black-Hole-in-Dragons-Belly-Swallows-Star-72239.html?wlc=1302374775Cosmic Fireworks Erupt When Black Hole in Dragon's Belly Swallows StarBy Katherine Noyes TechNewsWorld 04/09/11 5:00 AM PTWaves emanating from a brilliant explosion in the constellation Draco (Latin for "dragon") -- about 3.8 billion light years from Earth -- are continuing to be observed long after scientists expected the event to stop. The best explanation at the moment is that the black hole at Draco's center swallowed a star, creating the spectacular cosmic light show.A mysterious cosmic blast in the constellation Draco has astronomers scrambling to try to understand its cause, so unlike is it to anything ever observed before.
Rather than the short-lived gamma-ray bursts typically associated with the death of a massive star -- most last no more than a few hours -- this explosion continues more than a week later to emanate pulses of high-energy cosmic radiation for an effect that's brighter, longer lasting, and more variable than scientists have ever seen."We know of objects in our own galaxy that can produce repeated bursts, but they are thousands to millions of times less powerful than the bursts we are seeing now," said Andrew Fruchter, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "This is truly extraordinary."
NASA's Swift, the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have teamed up to study the phenomenon. Currently, they believe that the unusual blast was most likely created when a star wandered too close to its galaxy's central black hole.
'Gamma-Ray Burst 110328A'
Swift's Burst Alert Telescope discovered the phenomenon in the constellation Draco on March 28 when it erupted with the first in a series of powerful X-ray blasts. The satellite determined a position for the explosion, now known as "gamma-ray burst (GRB) 110328A," and informed astronomers worldwide.
It wasn't long before dozens of telescopes focused on the spot and observed that a small, distant galaxy appeared very nearby. A deep image taken by Hubble on Monday pinpoints the source of the explosion at the center of this galaxy, which lies 3.8 billion light-years away.'Every Spiral Galaxy Has a Black Hole'
Most galaxies, including our own, contain central black holes with masses millions of times that of the sun; those in the largest galaxies can be a thousand times larger.
"Every spiral galaxy has a black hole at the center of it," Paul Czysz, professor emeritus of aerospace engineering at St. Louis University, told TechNewsWorld. "At the center of our galaxy, there's a lot of stars circulating around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way."
Just as the sun keeps the planets traveling around it in a stable position, so these black holes hold together their spiral galaxies and prevent them from falling apart, Czysz explained.
The star at the heart of this particular explosion was probably destroyed by a black hole less massive than that of our Milky Way, which has a mass four million times that of our sun, NASA notes.
Assuming that's what happened, intense tidal forces would have torn it apart, producing powerful blasts of gamma rays and X-rays produced by matter moving near the speed of light in a particle jet that forms as the star's gas falls toward the black hole.5 Times Brighter
Astronomers have detected stars destroyed by supermassive black holes before, but none have shown the X-ray brightness and variability seen in GRB 110328A, according to NASA.
In fact, the source has repeatedly flared, and has brightened by more than five times since April 3.
"Normally, when you get a neutron star exploding, it's like a flash," Czysz explained.
In this case, however, it's not so much like a flash but an ongoing destruction process whereby it goes through a series of events but then eventually stops, he said.The constellation Draco sits between the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper, Czysz pointed out.
Its name is the Latin word for "dragon," but to see the shape of that mythical animal in its S-shaped pattern of stars, he added, "you have to have the imagination of the ancients."
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Post by dan on Apr 11, 2011 5:50:52 GMT 4
Hi Everyone .. My apologies for the above article, there was no intent to misinform, just another misstep on my part. Once this reply has been read I suggest the original post be deleted. Thanks for pointing out the hoax. love to you all Nodstar Noddy, you are one of the most honest, loving, straightforward, and grounded people I have met in my short 47 years walking (sometimes limping ;D) on this earth. You have no reason to apologize. They presented it as a Science News article, and you posted it. Eagles Disobey, which has many things on its team's "collective" mind caught it and responded with the correction. It's just that simple. They started it, you spotted it and posted it, and we framed it correctly. You have a greater personal responsibility than this forum, which you have been tending. Any post saying that some universal code has been broadcast is enough to catch one's attention. It caught yours! It caught the Team's! Due to the gravity of the Team's responsibilities, I may not even need to say this but, they are PROHIBITED from posting jokes between the Team's members, or even carrying them out on April 1st.
You, Noddy, have been in the midst of something very important, and frankly if anyone accuses you of willingly posting a falsehood, then they will have to face the repercussions of me picking up a phone to defend a friend. Trust me, in days where I am tolerating little games from some of these miscreants, they would wish that not!
You are one hell of a great Admin, so let is slide like water off a duck's back! In the Team's description of YOU, YOU ARE "HELLA GOOD!" ;D
Love, Dan (+ Marcia and the whole Team)
The dedication voted on by the entire team, and even Brian, who was called and reached in the air over Libya, for the vote.
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Post by nodstar on Apr 12, 2011 15:45:40 GMT 4
Hi Everyone .. My apologies for the above article, there was no intent to misinform, just another misstep on my part. Once this reply has been read I suggest the original post be deleted. Thanks for pointing out the hoax. love to you all Nodstar Noddy, you are one of the most honest, loving, straightforward, and grounded people I have met in my short 47 years walking (sometimes limping ;D) on this earth. You have no reason to apologize. They presented it as a Science News article, and you posted it. Eagles Disobey, which has many things on its team's "collective" mind caught it and responded with the correction. It's just that simple. They started it, you spotted it and posted it, and we framed it correctly. You have a greater personal responsibility than this forum, which you have been tending. Any post saying that some universal code has been broadcast is enough to catch one's attention. It caught yours! It caught the Team's! Due to the gravity of the Team's responsibilities, I may not even need to say this but, they are PROHIBITED from posting jokes between the Team's members, or even carrying them out on April 1st.
You, Noddy, have been in the midst of something very important, and frankly if anyone accuses you of willingly posting a falsehood, then they will have to face the repercussions of me picking up a phone to defend a friend. Trust me, in days where I am tolerating little games from some of these miscreants, they would wish that not!
You are one hell of a great Admin, so let is slide like water off a duck's back! In the Team's description of YOU, YOU ARE "HELLA GOOD!" ;D
Love, Dan (+ Marcia and the whole Team)
The dedication voted on by the entire team, and even Brian, who was called and reached in the air over Libya, for the vote. Hey Dan .. I just arrived back here at my personal headquarters Several hours ago .. I want to thank you all for such uplifting kindness especially since we're all under varying amounts of pressure. THANK YOU .. to the entire TEAM .. I am always mindful of the knights on the ground both male and female. My deepest respects lotsa love to you all Nod PS thanks for the kewwwl song
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