Tag: science

Epigenetics

epigenetics can work on the scale of hours and 100s of genes, truly massive.

When the No. 2 cichlid saw that he was now No. 1, he responded quickly. He underwent massive surges in gene expression that immediately blinged up his pewter coloring with lurid red and blue streaks and, in a matter of hours, caused him to grow some 20%. It was as if Jason Schwartzman, coming to work 1 day to learn the big office stud had quit, morphed into Arnold Schwarzenegger by close of business.

Earth has fewer species than we think

More and more, biologists are discovering that organisms thought to be different species are, in fact, but 1. A recent example is that the formerly accepted 2 species of giant North American mammoths (the Columbian mammoth and the woolly mammoth) were genetically the same but the 2 had phenotypes determined by environment.

The Lycurgus Cup

this is absolutely amazing.

the Lycurgus Cup is unique. The artisanship this required boggles the mind. The glass makers could not have added such minute amounts of gold and silver just to the glass the cup was going to made out of. These particles are 70 nanometers wide. You can’t even see them with an optical microscope, never mind the human eyeball; you need a transmission electron microscope at least. Experts believe the craftsmen added the minimum possible of the metals and then diluted the glass-melt with more and more glass until they had the proportion right.

5 ka game tokens

The find confirms that board games likely originated and spread from the Fertile Crescent regions and Egypt more than 5 ka ago (Senet from predynastic Egypt is considered the world’s oldest game board). The tokens were accompanied by badly preserved wooden pieces or sticks. Sağlamtimur hopes they’ll provide some hints on the rules and logic behind the game.

Towards Utility Fog

Gershenfeld created a new 3D interlock structure — which is made from tiny, identical, interlocking parts — to chainmail. The parts form a structure that is 10x stiffer for a given weight than existing ultralight materials. But this new structure can also be disassembled and reassembled easily — such as to repair damage, or to recycle the parts into a different configuration.

Courtroom evidence

In the 1970s, Loftus published a series of influential studies about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony. She has been trying to make the implications of her findings known ever since, but only now is her work is beginning to have a real impact. As an expert witness, Loftus has testified on behalf of mass murderers, but that’s the least controversial aspect of her work. Her role in legal cases involving allegations of childhood sexual abuse based on recovered memories has made her the target of lawsuits and death threats, and her research into using false memories to modify behavior is regarded by some as highly unethical. The so-called “memory wars” began in 1990, when Loftus got a call from a lawyer defending George Franklin. Franklin’s daughter accused him of murdering her best friend decades earlier, after apparently recovering long-lost memories of the crime during therapy. “There I was, witnessing the conviction of a man based on nothing more than the claim of a repressed memory.” Intrigued, she scoured the scientific literature and, failing to find any convincing evidence for the claim that traumatic memories can be buried and recovered, testified to that effect in the trial.

Dance your PHD

The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You take a deep breath and launch into the explanation. People’s eyes begin to glaze over… At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form? Now you can.