Sciencey stuff

[Jaglavak]

Warbugs in flight.

[Jaglavak]

Apple fingerprint tech raises privacy questions

After stealing someone's thumbprint, hackers could impersonate you for the rest of your life...

That's a damn good question. If someone had their iPhone stolen and the bad guys were able to get the digital version of their fingerprint, it seems like they would be hacked for life. It's not like just resetting your passwords.

[Tuckerfan]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

Apple fingerprint tech raises privacy questions

That's a damn good question. If someone had their iPhone stolen and the bad guys were able to get the digital version of their fingerprint, it seems like they would be hacked for life. It's not like just resetting your passwords.

According to Apple, the iPhone's fingerprint reader continually updates the hashed file. So, the first time it reads your fingerprint, it records (for example) 10 points, the next time it reads your fingerprint, it adds 10 more points, and so on. This means that the information contained in the hashed data will always be changing. One would expect that if the information never changed, this would be a red flag.

If a hacker gains control of your phone, he or she, can lock you out of your account, and get your credit card info, but you can cancel the card, and presumably, regain control of your iTunes account, etc., by showing up at an Apple Store or your cellphone provider's store, with a photo ID.

Note, Apply may not have thought this all the way through, yet, but will certainly fix the problem after the first case of identity theft using an iPhone and its fingerprint reader. (I make no claims about if they've thought it all out or not.)

[Tuckerfan]

I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on motherfucking Mars!

The ESA wants its operations on other planets to have greater mobility and manoeuvrability. SINTEF researchers are looking into whether snake robots could be the answer.

[Jaglavak]

Uh oh. Looks like NASA has a bit of a Problem.

[Swammerdami]

Most of the posts in this thread are about 21st-century technology, but I have a peculiar fascination with European prehistory. DNA studiees are still in their infancy, but in just a few years I expect the details of a surprising story to emerge. (I might enjoy composing a few paragraphs to summarize what I've gleaned from my readings, but fear interest would be zero. )

[Jaglavak]

In 3000 BC a massive conquest would have to be coming from the Middle East. I've never heard of such a thing, but I'm no historian.

[Chacoguy]

Originally Posted by Heterometrus swammerdami

Most of the posts in this thread are about 21st-century technology, but I have a peculiar fascination with European prehistory. DNA studiees are still in their infancy, but in just a few years I expect the details of a surprising story to emerge. (I might enjoy composing a few paragraphs to summarize what I've gleaned from my readings, but fear interest would be zero. )

I'd like to hear it.

[Jaglavak]

DARPA’s Plan to Flood the Sea With Drones

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Chacoguy

I'd like to hear it.

Okay. I'll write a short essay at a leisurely pace, but first whet appetites by indicating that Western Europe was more advanced than many think:

A 300-ton monolith in Brittany was moved 12 kilometers from its quarry and erected 6700 years ago. A recent SDMB post used the re-erection in 1586 A.D. of the Vatican Obelisk, almost the same mass as Le Grand Menhir Brisé, as a singular achievement almost marking the return of Roman greatness. Yet the menhir was erected in Brittany using only stone tools, by a culture that had only recently even adopted farming.

The walled city of Los Millares (in southern Spain) was built before 3000 BC. (At that time Uruk, capital of Sumeria, was much larger than Las Millares, but a few centuries earlier the largest cities in the world were Cucuteni-Trypillian towns in present-day Ukraine. The fabled city of Troy didn't approach Los Millares' size for centuries. Those towns won't enter my story -- I'll focus on Western Europe -- but should lay to rest the oft-seen assumption that Europe was just a backwater to the advanced Fertile Crescent region.)

[Chacoguy]

Whoa, Cool!

[Swammerdami]

(Rather than trying to construct a coherent essay, maybe it would be simplest for me to just trickle out the relevant facts in a series of unrelated posts.)

The new science which will shed light on Western European prehistory is studies of the human Y-chromosome. One particular haplogroup (R1b) dominates Western Europe: Spain, Portugal, Wales, Ireland, Scotland are each about 75% R1b or more. England, France, Denmark, Germany, Italy are each about 50% R1b. And these R1b chromosomes are mostly in the specific subclade called R1b1a2a1a1-L11.

It's worth emphasizing this very key point. About half of the men in Western Europe can trace their paternal ancestry back to the same specific man -- let's call him "R-L11 Adam." A person has 2^20 19-great grandfathers (ignoring duplications!) but only a single purely patriarchal (Y-chromosome) 19-great grandfather.

About a decade ago, the N.Y. Times caused some excitement when it pointed out that Genghis Khan is the agnatic ancestor of 7% of Central and Northern Asia. But R-L11 Adam is the agnatic ancestor of 50% of Western Europe.

When and Where did R-L11 Adam live? It would seem that at least the "When" part should be easy, with hundreds of complete genome sequences now available on-line for comparison. Unfortunately there doesn't quite seem to be a consensus on Y-chromosome mutation rate calibration. But as analysis continues, and ancient skeletons are tested, I expect to see exciting books and papers in the near future.

One thing that is clear: The R1b1a2a1a1-L11 suddenly branched out into several dozens of subclades. You have to believe there was a "race of Kings" with Princes somehow traveling outward, procreating vigorously, and building an "Empire." (It was certainly a Y-chromosome empire! It seems likely that religion, language, material culture, etc. might also have expanded, to some extent, as these "Princes" expanded their empires.)

The subclades of R-L11 can be divided into four major clades. These correspond, fairly closely, with four regions: the area of the Nordic Bronze Age, the area of the Urnfeld Bronze Age, and two areas (Iberia/Gascony and Brittany/Ireland/Britain) of the Atlantic Bronze Age. (Obviously the three regions of Western Europe Bronze Age might be relevant interaction zones without bronze.)

Circa 3300 BC is sometimes used as a ballpark guess for the date of R11-Adam. This does seem startlingly late and some would put it much earlier ... though some put at least some of the subclades much later still. In another post I'll mention evidence from ancient skeletons that may make 3300 BC look reasonable.

The expansion of R-L11 was the "conquest" I referred to earlier. These men didn't impregnate a huge percentage of West Europe's women because of their good looks! They must have imposed powerful political and military control, similarly to the way Genghis Khan's chromosome spread.

[Glazer]

Yes. Keep it coming. Good work.

[Pere]

Um... I think it's a mistake to interpret wide genetic distribution as evidence of a literal, military-type conquest. It's not just Genghis and Charlemagne and so forth who seeded continents... at certain points back in time, everybody then alive is either a common ancestor to a given geographic population (or, far enough back, all of us)--or to no living humans at all.

[Chacoguy]

.

[Jaglavak]

3000 BC was about the time of the development of large city-states, mostly in Sumeria and Egypt. Europe was pretty much mud huts at that point but there were still a lot of people around. It is vanishingly unlikely that one man's genes could be spread around that far without some serious pursuasion. He would have had to be around in 50,000 BC to cut a swath like that just by chance. I'm not sure how much of this I buy at this point but it sure is interesting.

[Pere]

Remarkable as it is, mathematical geneticists* say it is not just possible and likely for "one man," but for most men then living, if you go back far enough. How far? Given random mating, this theoretical point can be achieved much, much more recently than 3000 BC. Of course people don't mate randomly, so it 'takes longer.' But still.

Being a member of a conquering army--or a well-traveled trader or adventurer, or whatever--presumably ought to help the odds of any particular man being one of the 'fortunate' portion. But for populations as a whole, the dynamic still exists even if nobody ever travels beyond the next mud-hut village to find a mate.

Genes like to spread. As long as they don't inhibit their organism's prospects of survival or reproduction, they will spread.


* Like Joseph T. Chang, author of "Recent common ancestors of all present-day individuals," Advances in Applied Probability, 1999. If you'd prefer to have the math of the modeling interpreted for you, read "The Tasmanian's Tale" and "Eve's Tale," chapters by Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong in The Ancestor's Tale, 2004.

[Swammerdami]

In order to be properly amazed by the prodigious procreations of "R-11 Adam" and his sons and sons' sons, etc., it is important to keep in mind the difference between descendant and agnatic descendant.

Let's clarify with an over-simplified example. Let's assume that every person has two children total, one boy and one girl. Only the boy will carry Mr. A's (its father's) Y chromosome. After two generations, Mr. A has four grandchildren, two of them boys, but only one of the boys will carry Mr. A's Y-chromosome. (The other boy gets his Y-chromosome from Mr. A's son-in-law.) After three generations -- eight great-grandchildren, four of them boys, only one has Mr. A's Y-chromosome.

Continuing on, the number of descendants Mr. A will have is, by generation, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ... etc. But the number of agnatic descendants (those who have inherited Mr. A's Y-chromosome) will not grow: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ...

After 45 generations the number of descendants is enormous -- this is why we say every European is a descendant of Charlemagne. But the number of agnatic descendants will be much smaller -- exactly 1 in our simplified example or, most likely, zero in a real-world scenario. This is why, as far as anyone knows, genealogists agree Charlemagne has zero agnatic descendants despite that he has billions of non-agnatic descendants.

For a man 5000 years ago to be ancestral to half of Europe isn't odd at all -- indeed if one goes back to the "Identical ancestors point" anyone then living with now-living descendants is ancestral to the entire planet!

But the statistics of agnatic descent are totally different. (Recall the difference between the nominal growth series 2,4,8,16,32,64,... and 1,1,1,1,1,1,...)

There were about 1.8 million men living in 5500 BC. We'd expect each to be the agnatic ancestor of about 2000 men(*), on average, alive today. Instead one of them (R-L11 or his agnatic ancestor) is the agnatic ancestor of hundreds of millions. (* - this ignores that the 1.8 million men will include 3 generations or so; i.e. a man, his father and his grandfather will all be agnatic ancestors of the same set. But the essential point is clear.)

("Agnatic ancestor" means father's father's father's father's ... father's father. No women allowed!)

Sorry if I've repeated and tried to re-explain this definition to the point of pedantry. It is important to understand the distinction between ancestor and agnatic ancestor. The way R-L11's "Race of Kings" procreated so prodigiously really is remarkable. ... And this "conquest" was a male operation. Study geographic charts of mtDNA haplogroup distribution and charts of Y-chromosome distribution to see that their movement statistics are quite different.


(I want to keep telling this story, albeit all out of order, but I have other duties. For one thing a man from the IRS keeps asking when I'm going to answer his letters. )

[Pere]

I'm sorry, but seeing the "Chromosomal Adam" (or the equivalent but noncontemporaneous "Mitochondrial Eve"*) of any given population as supremely significant strikes me as a major misreading. Those particular lines of inheritance happen to be much easier to find in the living record, but that doesn't mean that the individuals so designated did anything particularly notable. To quote Dawkins on this specific point--

First, it is important to understand that Eve and Adam are only two out of a multitude of MRCAs that we could reach if we traced our way back through different lines. They are the special-case common ancestors that we reach if we travel up the family tree from mother to mother to mother, or father to father to father respectively, but there are many, many other ways of going up the family tree: mother to father to father to mother, mother to mother to father to father, and so forth. Each of these possible pathways will have a different MRCA.

In 3000 BC there were likely many living who would become ancestors to as many, or more, of today's Europeans as whoever the most 'successful' patrilineal-only guy of the time was.


* Everyone gets their mitochondria only from their mothers.

[Pere]

My very cursory search for Heterometrus' possible sources, using phrases from his posts, yields little. One search gave this thread as the top result.

So, Het, are you in fact the primary exponent of this "Race of Kings" theory? When are you publishing? Or can you direct us to your predecessors. Thanks.

[Swammerdami]

(I'd have started an independent thread for this if I'd known there'd be response. Is it too late to unfold it?)

I plan four more posts including this one:

• This post. (Sources and disclaimers)
• Very brief summary of early European Neolithic, 7000 BC - 4750 BC
• Comments on Y-chromosome haplogroups other than R1b1a2a1a1-L11
• Very brief summary of late European Neolithic, 4750 BC - 2500 BC

Since the dates 7000 BC and 2500 BC for the beginning and end of Europe's Neolithic are very fuzzy, some will be happy to take it as further evidence of my stupidity that I bifurcate the dates in the exact middle at 4750 BC! But this does work well for the story as I tell it. And it seems nifty to start the "late" Neolithic just before the erection of Le Grand Menhir Brisé. BTW, rereading Cunliffe just now I see he shows the weight of that menhir as 348 tonnes, making it perhaps even more massive than the Vatican Obelisk whose re-erection is treated as an important Renaissance accomplishment. (The discrepancy of the Menhir's weight may derive from whether its smaller pieces are included since, after all, that Menhir is ... Brisé !)

Disclaimer: I am most definitely not an expert. I'm reporting my gleanings from several books and websites. There are many journal articles, websites and message-boards (of varying reliability) devoted to the intriguing and rapidly growing field of reconstructing prehistory from DNA evidence. My favorite sources include

• Europe between the oceans, a fine book by Barry Cunliffe.
• Wikipedia !
• Dienekes' Anthropology Blog with links to many scholarly articles as well as Diokenes' own speculations. I'm not sure how reliable his speculations are, but he's certainly far FAR more expert than I am.
• Another link I wanted to mention is http://www.buildinghistory.org/dista...cientdna.shtml , which provides a list of ancient skeletons whose DNA has been analyzed. (Unfortunately, that link redirects to another site which doesn't load for me. Looking at Jean Manco's homepage, the new website, www.ancestraljourneys.org/ , seems to belong to her also. I don't know why it doesn't load for me. The old page is available at archive.org ... but the archived version must be missing some css or something: it doesn't display correctly.)

Warning: There will be no "piece of cheese" at the end of the maze solution visible to the mystery I try to describe in these posts. I'll bet an excitment book appears sometime in the next decade revealing much of a fascinating story about European prehistory based on DNA data, but the data and analysis isn't quite there yet. ... Still, there might already be enough clues for good guesswork!

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Pere

I'm sorry, but seeing the "Chromosomal Adam" (or the equivalent but noncontemporaneous "Mitochondrial Eve"*) of any given population as supremely significant strikes me as a major misreading. Those particular lines of inheritance happen to be much easier to find in the living record, but that doesn't mean that the individuals so designated did anything particularly notable....

In 3000 BC there were likely many living who would become ancestors to as many, or more, of today's Europeans as whoever the most 'successful' patrilineal-only guy of the time was.

I'm sorry, but you are simply wrong. The "Genghis Y-chromosome" wasn't that of an arbitrary random stableboy; it was the chromosome of the Great Khans. As a Y-chromosome lineage passes through many centuries, there will be eras where it was just a matter of chance which lineage would emerge after some bottleneck millennia later. But the Y-chromosome that suddenly expanded 5000 years ago or so to dominate Western Europe was not the chromosome of a random shepherd or stableboy. There had to have been a special phenomenon. (How similar it was to the expansion of Genghis' chromosome I won't speculate.)

If there's something peculiar about the term "Race of Kings" pretend I use a better term. BTW, speaking of better terms, I prefer Swammi or Swammerdami if you want to give me a shorter nickname.

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Pere

This is of course correct, but only as far as it goes.

What Dawkins overlooks here is that the agnatic and uterine lineages tell very different stories. Whatever the difference between men and women regarding migration or procreation modes, that difference will be amplified(*) when we look back 200 generations to the Copper Age. Compare maps showing mtDNA and Y-chromosome distributions if this isn't clear. You'll see a sharp division of Y-haplogroups in Central Europe, near the division separating Slavic speakers from Western European languages. The mtDNA map will be much smudgier.

Women's child-bearing is limited, but in some societies successful men will have huge procreative success. This is clearly visible in the "Genghis" DNA evidence. A similar effect has been noted with the O'Neill Kings of Ireland. That the effect is present with "R-L11" should not be in dispute; to the contrary the R-L11 procreative success was astounding.

There is one rarish Y-haplogroup in Europe whose distribution seems to match Phoenician colonies closely. Another matches the 5th-century migrations of the Alan tribe. The Y-haplogroups of India show, not surprisingly, very strong correlations with caste.

(* -- If this isn't clear, recall that the Y-haplogroup reflects father's father's father's father's ... while mtDNA reflects mother's mother's mother's mother's ... That's x^200, for any x representing a quantitative ratio of father-vs-mother modality.)

[Pere]

Originally Posted by Heterometrus swammerdami

But the Y-chromosome that suddenly expanded 5000 years ago or so to dominate Western Europe was not the chromosome of a random shepherd or stableboy. There had to have been a special phenomenon.

What evidence is there of a special phenomenon for this line? So far you've really only pointed to the distribution of the chromosome itself. But, the math suggests, if we had easy genetic flags for other lines besides the two sex-specific ones, we would see all kinds of mosaics of distributions of other MRCA's descendants. Each line's precise distribution would be unique (or universal), while overlapping thousands of others, including your King Adam's.

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Pere

What evidence is there of a special phenomenon for this line?

The rapid expansion itself. (This in turn is clear from the rapid fanout in the clading diagram.)

Let me make some meta-comments:

Swammerdami is smarter than most people assume. I've won significant mathematics contests, published books and peer-reviewed papers (though unrelated to the issues here), have been awarded 30+ U.S. patents, and so on. I've read and thought much about the population statistics we're discussing here.

But I'm very bad at communicating with people. I would ask you, Pere, to do us a favor. Reread my posts, but this time making the assumption not that I'm wrong, but that I'm right and do a poor job articulating convincingly. Make that effort, perhaps reaching your own "Aha!" moment, and rephrase my truth in a clearer, more convincing way. Or phrase specific questions, and I will try to answer.

[Pere]

Originally Posted by Heterometrus swammerdami

The rapid expansion itself.

That shows that people were on the move. But it does not, of itself, show that they were conquering all before them. Nor does it show that this one line necessarily moved more rapidly or widely than all others in the region.

You acknowledge,

Originally Posted by Heterometrus swammerdami

For a man 5000 years ago to be ancestral to half of Europe isn't odd at all

For any European alive then, with any living descendants today, there will be many lines of descent connecting them to their many modern progeny, yes? However only one of those lines, at most, will be a gender-specific one. I trust everyone is with me to this point.

So--
How do you know that one line, which happens to be readily identifiable, is more prevalent than any of the others? How do you know that there aren't mixed-gender lines of equal age ancestral to 60 or 70% of modern Europeans?

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Pere

How do you know that one line, which happens to be readily identifiable, is more prevalent than any of the others? How do you know that there aren't mixed-gender lines of equal age ancestral to 60 or 70% of modern Europeans?

If you're saying that there's interesting information that is not readily available, I certainly agree. In my discussion of agnatic ancestry I focus solely on ... (wait for it) agnatic ancestry. Do you want me to explain why that can be of great interest to prehistoric reconstruction? Are you unclear why the sudden dominance of R1-L11 seems astounding and interesting?

BTW: Please Google "Identical Ancestor Point." The long-ago figure is to include the Americas, Australia, etc. Restricted to Europe, 3000 BC already is an Identical Ancestry Point almost certainly, so "oodles" of "mixed-gender lines" are ancestral to 100% of modern Europeans!

[Jaglavak]

Originally Posted by Heterometrus swammerdami

Continuing on, the number of descendants Mr. A will have is, by generation, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ... etc. But the number of agnatic descendants (those who have inherited Mr. A's Y-chromosome) will not grow: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ...

After 45 generations the number of descendants is enormous -- this is why we say every European is a descendant of Charlemagne. But the number of agnatic descendants will be much smaller -- exactly 1 in our simplified example or, most likely, zero in a real-world scenario.

There were about 1.8 million men living in 5500 BC. We'd expect each to be the agnatic ancestor of about 2000 men(*), on average, alive today.

Help out an ignorant slut over here. If the Y chrom descendent path looks like 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ..., how does each of the 1.8 million men from 5500 BC get to be an ancestor to 2000 people today?

Even for a totally ruthless sociopath there is a physical upper limit. Say he can get it up three times a day, he did that for 30 years with a different woman each time, and on average 1 in 20 women got pregnant. That works out to around 1600 kids, or about 800 boy kids with his Y chrom. It seems like you would need several hundred guys like that to leave the kind of genetic mark you are talking about. And for that you would need an army of several hundred thousand to stomp all the outraged husbands, and it seems like they would leave a major genetic footprint too.

[Pere]

Originally Posted by Heterometrus swammerdami

In my discussion of agnatic ancestry I focus solely on ... (wait for it) agnatic ancestry. Do you want me to explain why that can be of great interest to prehistoric reconstruction?

It is interesting, certainly. I see no reason to believe that it tells anything like the specific story you have suggested above.

Restricted to Europe, 3000 BC already is an Identical Ancestry Point almost certainly, so "oodles" of "mixed-gender lines" are ancestral to 100% of modern Europeans!

It isn't (Europe isn't isolated enough), but to the extent that it approaches that, this reinforces my point. Why should we be so impressed that one man's agnatic line should be ancestral to half of Europe when other men and women of his day are ancestral to even more Europeans?

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

Help out an ignorant slut over here. If the Y chrom descendent path looks like 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ..., how does each of the 1.8 million men from 5500 BC get to be an ancestor to 2000 people today?

Even for a totally ruthless sociopath there is a physical upper limit. Say he can get it up three times a day, he did that for 30 years with a different woman each time, and on average 1 in 20 women got pregnant. That works out to around 1600 kids, or about 800 boy kids with his Y chrom. It seems like you would need several hundred guys like that to leave the kind of genetic mark you are talking about. And for that you would need an army of several hundred thousand to stomp all the outraged husbands, and it seems like they would leave a major genetic footprint too.

The 1,1,1,1,1 sequence was to demonstrate a very basic trend for the simplest case. It assumed (among other over-simplifications) Zero Population Growth.

Do you dispute the claim that 34.8% of Mongol males have Genghis Khan's(*) Y-chromosome? (Along with millions of other males in Central and Northern Asia.) BTW (although I won't hunt for cites via Google) the procreative power of the Mongol Khans was amazing. Some visitors were amazed to see a vast encampment populated by a Khan's harem and children. (And the Khans were noted for ... "extra-haremical" activities as well!)

(* - Strictly, by "bearers of Genghis Y-chromosome" we should mean agnatic descendants of Qaydu Khan. This includes, for example, Tamerlane who genealogists believe to be Genghis' agnatic cousin.)

I ask about Genghis to clarify whether you disagree with the principle that one man can, over many generations, procreatively dominate a group like Genghis did, or agree with scientists about Genghis but think my claim about "R-L11 Adam" to be wrong.

If your point is that it staggers the imagination that R-L11 Adam and his progeny could (procreatively) dominate Western Europe as they did, I agree with you! I find it amazing and don't know where to start seeking explanation. Wholesale slaughters? An imposed caste system where the children of a huge underclass were not given the means to thrive? I don't know.

But the genetic evidence is clear. More than 50% of Western Europeans are agnatic descendants of R-L11 Adam. Dating that "Adam" is key: the farther back he's pushed, the less amazing the success of R-L11 will seem. Until/unless that haplogroup origin can be dated reliably, we're fumbling in the dark. One data point: Several ancient European skeletons have had their DNA tested. No instance of R-L11 has turned up before 3100 BC.

[Jaglavak]

Not disputing anything at this point, just trying to follow the math. Can you give us a simplified math example assuming population growth?

[Swammerdami]

Originally Posted by Jaglavak

Not disputing anything at this point, just trying to follow the math. Can you give us a simplified math example assuming population growth?

I'm not sure what you mean. The number of sons a given man has might be 0, 1, 2, 3, ... but the mean will be 1.10 for 10% per-generation population growth. (Growth is much higher on a frontier, much lower in times of plague.)

Because of the high variability, many lines will die out, while others expand.

What we can say is that, assuming isolation and ignoring the "blurring" effect of multiple living generations, over a long period during which the population goes from 2 million males to 200 million males an average man will have 100 agnatic descendants. But, no man is likely to have exactly 100 descendants. Instead you might have 1000 males averaging 200,000 agnatic descendants each (withe some having far more and some far less) and 1,999,000 males having zero living agnatic descendants each.

[Jaglavak]

Ah. Gotcha. I am following along.


On a completely separate but still sciency subject, Rat Park.

[rayh]

Circular Rainbow

[eleanorigby]

Originally Posted by rayh

Circular Rainbow

Love this!

[Tuckerfan]

Scientist compares new form of matter to a lightsaber!!!!

"It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to light sabers," Lukin added. "When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies."

They're talking about using it for boring shit like quantum computers and holographic images, but they admit that they have no idea what the full applications of the technology could be used for. We know they have to say shit like that, so they can get grant money, but can you imagine any self-respecting scientist with a lab full of gear capable of making the forerunner of a lightsaber sitting there and thinking, "I think I'll get the guys together and go to the bar tonight. Building a lightsaber is just silly."? Nah, me either.

[Jaglavak]

Down the hatch!

Bottled mucus may help gut disease

[Wolf Larsen]

The 10,000 year clock has a cool new video up showing the winder and some of the escapement gearing running.

[Tuckerfan]

Foot cream kills HIV.

A common drug that dermatologists prescribe to treat nail fungus appears to come with a not-so-tiny side effect: eradicating HIV.
In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox completely eradicate infectious HIV from cell cultures, but unlike today's most cutting-edge antiviral treatments, the virus doesn't bounce back when the drug is withheld. This means it may not require a lifetime of use to keep HIV at bay.
The same group of researchers had previously shown that Ciclopirox -- approved by the FDA and Europe's EMA as safe for human use to treat foot fungus -- inhibits the expression of HIV genes in culture. Now they have found that it also blocks the essential function of the mitochondria, which results in the reactivation of the cell's suicide pathway, all while sparing the healthy cells.

[Chacoguy]

This is so far out that it makes my head spin.

[Tuckerfan]

There are giant, people murdering wasps in Asia.

It's no secret that Earth has got a lot of problems and, if you live here, you already know that I am talking about wasps. There are so many wasps here. Each one is a problem. According to recent reports out of China, 21 people have died as a result of wasp stings over the past three months in the province of Shaanxi alone. It might be time to just pack up our bags and return to the moons we came from. Might be time to turn Earth over to the wasps.

The wasps that have been killing people aren't just any old wasps. They're thought to be Vespa mandarinia, or, "Asian giant hornets." Asian giant hornets are the largest hornets in the world. They're the Asia of hornets, in fact. The average one grows to 2.2 inches in length, which is small compared to a car but TERRIFYINGLY HUGE when you consider it is a wasp the size of a meatball. If you never want to feel peace again, you can check out an image of four (dead) queen hornets—which are even bigger than workers and males—here, with a hand to give them scale.

(Oh, and they've apparently been discovered in Illinois.)

[Wolf Larsen]

I see anything like that and I'm breaking out the Raid and not stopping until the can is empty.

[Glazer]

Good you stay here and spray. I'm outta here.

[Chacoguy]

I hate you so much.

[Muffin]

Originally Posted by Tuckerfan

(Oh, and they've apparently been discovered in Illinois.)

Was there mistaken identification in Illinois -- Sphecius speciosus cicada killer wasp? Conflicting reports.

[Tuckerfan]

Today's weather, partly cloudy with highs in the 1500F degree range.

Scientists have created the first-ever cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system.

Although the roughly Jupiter-size Kepler-7b lies far closer to its star than scorching-hot Mercury does to the sun, astronomers using NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have determined that clouds exist high up in the western portion of the exoplanet's atmosphere.

"By observing this planet with Spitzer and Kepler for more than three years, we were able to produce a very low-resolution 'map' of this giant, gaseous planet," study lead author Brice-Olivier Demory, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "We wouldn't expect to see oceans or continents on this type of world, but we detected a clear, reflective signature that we interpreted as clouds."

Another private sector supply ship docks with the ISS.

A new commercial spacecraft built to haul cargo to the International Space Station for NASA made its debut delivery to the orbiting lab early Sunday (Sept. 29), capping a major test flight for its builder Orbital Sciences Corp., which described the space rendezvous as "epic."

The robotic Cygnus spacecraft was captured by space station astronauts using the outpost's robotic arm at 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) as the two spacecraft sailed over the Indian Ocean. The orbital arrival, which occurred one week later than planned due to a software data glitch, appeared to go flawlessly.

SpaceX launches a new version of their Falcon 9 rocket.

The private spaceflight company SpaceX launched the first of its new-and-improved Falcon 9 rockets from the California coast Sunday (Sept. 29), an ambitious test flight that also marked the company's first flight from the West Coast.

The unmanned next-generation Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from SpaceX's launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) carrying a Canadian satellite to track space weather into orbit along with three small satellites.

"It was an amazing flight," SpaceX's Falcon 9 product manager John Insprucker said in a launch webcast. "There's tons of data coming back and it looks like it was a picture-perfect flight. Everything was looking good right down the middle of the track."

[eleanorigby]

TrexTailboneFound!


What happened to our dinosaur guy? I think he got married a ways back, but is he around? (and I'm sorry I'm blanking on his user name).

[Glazer]

Honeymoons not over yet. He still hasn't come up for air.

[Chacoguy]

Originally Posted by eleanorigby

TrexTailboneFound!


What happened to our dinosaur guy? I think he got married a ways back, but is he around? (and I'm sorry I'm blanking on his user name).

@Dirx

[Jaglavak]

Well it looks like the smart guys have found alien life - maybe. During a recent meteor shower they sent a balloon up to 85,000 ft to take samples of the atmosphere and found these little guys. The jury is still out as to whether they came along with the space rocks or somehow got up there from Earth.


And here's one for Solfy. At Cornell, a lady named Daina Taimina is illustrating non-Euclidean geometry for her students by crocheting models of hyperbolic space. Sure, why not.
Oh, here's the rest of them.