Female only lizard species that clones itself created in the lab
Arstechnica: Researchers have bred a new species of all-female lizard, mimicking a process that has happened naturally in the past but has never been directly observed.
“It’s recreating the events that lead to new species,” said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place.”
Female-only species that reproduce by cloning themselves—a process called parthenogenesis, in which embryos develop without fertilization—were once considered dead-end evolutionary flukes. But in the last decade, unisexuality has been found in more than 80 groups of fish, amphibian and reptiles. It might not be such a dead end after all.
Best-known among all unisexual species are Aspidoscelis, the whiptail lizards of southwestern North America, of which 7 of 12 species are unisexual. Genetic studies suggest their unisexuality emerged from historical unions of two sexually-reproducing lizards belonging to closely-related species, the hybrid offspring of which possessed mutations needed for parthenogenesis.
In two of the unisexual whiptails, that seems to have been enough; they immediately went all-female. In the other five, it took another round of traditional sexual mating. Those species are so-called triploids, bearing two sets of chromosomes from the original mother species and one from the father.
Full article at Arstechnica
Orson Welles May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985
Welles was born May 6, 1915, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, son of Richard Hodgdon Head Welles (1873, Missouri – December 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) and Beatrice Ives (1882 or 1883, Springfield, Illinois – May 10, 1924, Chicago, Illinois). His family was raised Roman Catholic. Despite his parents’ affluence, Welles encountered many hardships in childhood. In 1919, his parents separated and moved to Chicago.
October 30, 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells brought Welles instant fame. The combination of the news bulletin form of the performance with the between-breaks dial spinning habits of listeners from the rival and far more popular Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy program, was later reported in the media to have created widespread confusion among listeners who failed to hear the introduction, although the extent of this confusion has recently come into question. Panic was reported to have spread (after citation from rumors) among many listeners who believed the news reports of a Martian invasion. The myth of the result created by the combination was reported as fact around the world and disparagingly mentioned by Adolf Hitler in a public speech a few months later. The 1970s “docu-drama” The Night That Panicked America was based on events centering around the production of, and events that resulted from, the program.
In the 1940′s, Welles organized the Mercury Wonder Show, a touring magic and variety act put together to entertain U.S. soldiers going to war. He performed on many television shows and even had a prime time magic special taped (that unfortunately never aired).
Red letter day for Darwin Correspondence Project
The project mapping Charles Darwin’s life and work in the 15,000 letters he wrote or received during his extraordinary lifetime will be completed after a £5 million funding package was announced.
The awards, announced today by Cambridge University Library and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), will ensure the full completion of the definitive, award-winning edition ofThe Correspondence of Charles Darwin.
More than 15,000 currently known letters written by or to Darwin will be published, in full, by 2022. The edition is the work of the Darwin Correspondence Project, widely acknowledged as the greatest editorial project in the history of science, and one of the major international scholarly projects of the past half-century.
It is jointly managed by the University Library and ACLS. By the time the edition is complete, locating, researching, and editing the letters will have taken several teams of scholars more than forty years. Summaries of all known letters are freely available to the public through the Project’s website
More at CAM
Throats and floats
Losing The Voice. The fundamental fear of any touring performer.
After a week in Oxford working and rehearsing 10am-3am for a week, and then shouting every night with barely an evening off, the voice started to suffer. If it packs in, we have to start pulling shows, which is a nightmare to be avoided at all costs.
The first casualty is the signing queue. A few years ago, there were never more than fifteen or twenty people at the stage door, sometimes only four or five. Now there are normally seventy to a hundred lovely people who have decided to hang around in often freezing or rainy weather conditions to say hello and have me scribble illegibly on their programmes and/or chesty-parts. Already I’ve noted with sadness this year that this means I can’t spend the relaxed time I previously enjoyed chatting with people after the show: to get through so many people means something of a conveyor belt of scribbling and asking people to take photos as we go along rather than stop. On top of this, the tour schedule is relentless and with several 6 am starts, so the pressure is on to get back to the hotel and wind down and get what sleep might come my way.
So there were a few nights when I was unable to come out and sign, and there will be a few more on tour, I’m sure. I know it makes no difference to anyone who comes on a rare night that I can’t come out, but rest assured I do make more of an effort than most performers to spend time at stage door after a show. Most, sadly, devise ways to avoid people completely. I hope that in a run of around a hundred and fifty shows I’ll be forgiven a few where health issues dictate I have to sneak away to a warm bed.
Now some of you may remember the chocolate martini fun from last year in Newcastle. This year on arrival, I was greeted by the Mal Maison with Chris (the bar manager’s) latest version of what I now like to think is something of a classic. So top marks to them. The George Shaw exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead (apologies for considering it to be Newcastle on Twitter) was just stunning. It may still be running. Running and stunning. Edinburgh provided the usual bright, lively and gorgeous audiences that it’s known for. The huge Playhouse was packed out every night and was a particular joy. I met up with my pal Richard Wiseman and had an excellent lunch at the Café Royale, which, I decided, is where I would spend every afternoon if I lived in Edinburgh. What a great city. I also bought there my first cravat. After a few weeks of tucking my scarf inside my shirt and quite liking the foppish look, I am now the proud bearer of a spotty, sporty number. It’s my ‘thing’, I’ve decided.
‘Derren Brown? Who’s that?’, people will ask. ‘The cravat guy’, others will answer.
Getting to Scarborough with our massive set and trying to get it into that theatre for the show time caused the same problems we had in Grimsby. The show went up very late again. It’s hugely embarrassing when this happens, and enormous, heartfelt apologies to those people who had to ask for refunds due to time restrictions. We have a harsh tour timetable and a walloping, time-demanding set which are not very compatible, and when we meet a theatre which is tricky to set up in, we do everything we can with all the tireless extra crew we have summoned, but have now twice been unable to make the start time. It was a real testament to the ladies and gents of Scarborough that they were still a hugely delightful, lively audience after that horrendous wait. Last night there also brought a series of odd outbursts from a lady in the stalls who then had to be asked to leave… a bit of drama, all rather exciting.
We’re now in Sheffield, after another horrendous ‘get-in’ and realising that one of our major props had been severely damaged the night before on the way out of Scarborough. These setbacks caused us to start a little late and Coops to confide it was probably the worst day of his working life, but we got there in the end and the show went well. Today I am writing with Iain, my co-writer, on next year’s TV projects. Finally, I am this morning visited by a mysterious flatulence of Wagnerian magnitude; the length, breadth and depth of which is pleasantly pervading the breakfast foyer of my hotel. Sadly, having arisen quite late, I am eating alone: my generosity is passing unnoticed. Perhaps I’ll come out to sign tonight only to be sent straight back in by the queue.
Truly stunning video of how hummingbirds drink
New high-speed videos of hummingbirds overturn nearly two centuries of conventional wisdom on how they drink.
Researchers previously thought tube-like channels in their tongues sucked up fluid by capillary action. But the new analysis shows that their tongues actually trap nectar by curling around it.
Via WIRED
Sony hacked, details from millions of users stolen – AGAIN!
REUTERS: Sony disclosed on Monday hackers had stolen the names, addresses and passwords of nearly 25 million more users than previously known less than a day after the Japanese company apologized for one of the worst break-ins in Internet history.
Sony’s latest revelation comes after Sony No. 2 Kazuo Hirai announced measures had been put in place to avert another Playstation-type cyberattack, hoping to repair its tarnished image and reassure customers who might be pondering a shift to Microsoft’s Xbox.
The Japanese electronics company said it discovered the break-in of its Sony Online Entertainment PC games network also led to the theft of 10,700 direct debit records from customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain and 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers.
Full Story at REUTERS
Mr Wang’s 100 Terabit internet connection
THINK your broadband internet connection is fast? Two separate research groups have just lapped the field, setting a world record by sending more than 100 terabits of information per second through a single optical fibre. That’s enough to deliver three solid months of HD video- or the contents of 250 double-sided Blu-ray discs.
This marks “a critical milestone in fibre capacity”, says Ting Wang at NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey.
Such lab results are far beyond today’s commercial needs. Total capacity between New York and Washington DC, one of the world’s busiest routes, is only a few terabits per second, says Tim Strong, of Telegeography Researchin Washington. But “traffic has been growing about 50 per cent a year for the last few years”, he adds. With bandwidth-hungry video-streaming and social media growing relentlessly, network planners are always searching for ways to expand capacity.
Today’s fibre optics use several tricks to enhance bandwidth. Like the radio band, the optical spectrum can be sliced into many distinct channels that can simultaneously carry information at different frequencies. The laser light is pulsed on and off rapidly, with each pulse further sliced up into different polarities, amplitudes and phases of light, each of which contains a bit of information. The trick is to pack all these signals together in one fibre so that they hit the receiver as one pulse without interference.
Left handed people are more affected by fear
Psychologists found that people who watched an eight minute clip from a scary movie suffered more symptoms associated with post traumatic stress if they were left handed than if they were right handed.
When asked to recall events from the film clip, taken from near the tense climax of thriller Silence of the Lambs, left handed volunteers gave more fragmented accounts filled with more repetition than their right handed counterparts.
This effect is common in people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The scientists now believe their results could provide new insights into how people develop post traumatic stress and the way the brain deals with fear.
Dr Carolyn Choudhary, who led the research at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, said: “The prevalence of post traumatic stress disorder is almost double in left handers compared to right handers.
Monkeys show signs of advanced memory powers
Ben Basile of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, placed five rhesus monkeys in front of a touchscreen that briefly showed a blue square and two red ones. After an interval of up to 2 minutes, the blue square reappeared in a different place, and the monkeys had to replicate the pattern in its new position by tapping the screen to place red squares.
Their success rate was significantly better than chance, showing for the first time that they are able to recall things from memory. This is more advanced than recognising a familiar object, and could be a precursor to long-term memory.
