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Friday, March 29, 2013
Motion Capture Without Skintight Suits Will Make Blu-ray Extras Way Less Fun
On the difference between natural history art photography, and natural history photojournalism
Meet?Tetradonia, a pugnacious little rove beetle that eats army ants:
Tetradonia beetle attacking an army ant. Belize.
Any animal specialized to feed on army ants is seriously badass, especially those that are smaller than the ants themselves. I?ve wanted to photograph Tetradonia for years, and this January during the BugShot workshop we happened across this one sniping at the edges of an Eciton hamatum raid.
I managed a single shot. This one. It?s slightly overexposed with too much motion blur. ?I also framed it poorly. I cropped away 50% of the pixels to make a passable composition. Not my best work.
But, the blurry capture is also my only photograph of this animal. Do I upload it to my professional galleries anyway? It won?t look great printed, and I?d feel embarrassed to sell it onwards for, say, a display at a natural history museum.
The question isn?t trivial, as it burrows right to the heart of why I photograph insects. Am I making pretty images? Or am I documenting real natural history?
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=8329a3a2e130d16d39f4da2f14922781
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Thursday, March 28, 2013
New evidence ancient asteroid caused global firestorm on Earth
Mar. 27, 2013 ? A new look at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth's species, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Led by Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the team used models that show the collision would have vaporized huge amounts of rock that were then blown high above Earth's atmosphere. The re-entering ejected material would have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- about the temperature of an oven broiler element -- killing every living thing not sheltered underground or underwater.
The CU-led team developed an alternate explanation for the fact that there is little charcoal found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary some 66 million years ago when the asteroid struck Earth and the cataclysmic fires are believed to have occurred. The CU researchers found that similar studies had corrected their data for changing sedimentation rates. When the charcoal data were corrected for the same changing sedimentation rates they show an excess of charcoal, not a deficiency, Robertson said.
"Our data show the conditions back then are consistent with widespread fires across the planet," said Robertson, a research scientist at CIRES, which is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Those conditions resulted in 100 percent extinction rates for about 80 percent of all life on Earth."
A paper on the subject was published online this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Co-authors on the study include CIRES Interim Director William Lewis, CU Professor Brian Toon of the atmospheric and oceanic sciences department and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and Peter Sheehan of the Milwaukee Public Museum in Wisconsin.
Geological evidence indicates the asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago and carved the Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula that is more than 110 miles in diameter. In 2010, experts from 33 institutions worldwide issued a report that concluded the impact at Chicxulub triggered mass extinctions, including dinosaurs, at the K-Pg boundary.
The conditions leading to the global firestorm were set up by the vaporization of rock following the impact, which condensed into sand-grain-sized spheres as they rose above the atmosphere. As the ejected material re-entered Earth's atmosphere, it dumped enough heat in the upper atmosphere to trigger an infrared "heat pulse" so hot it caused the sky to glow red for several hours, even though part of the radiation was blocked from Earth by the falling material, he said.
But there was enough infrared radiation from the upper atmosphere that reached Earth's surface to create searing conditions that likely ignited tinder, including dead leaves and pine needles. If a person was on Earth back then, it would have been like sitting in a broiler oven for two or three hours, said Robertson.
The amount of energy created by the infrared radiation the day of the asteroid-Earth collision is mind-boggling, said Robertson. "It's likely that the total amount of infrared heat was equal to a 1 megaton bomb exploding every four miles over the entire Earth."
A 1-megaton hydrogen bomb has about the same explosive power as 80 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs, he said. The asteroid-Earth collision is thought to have generated about 100 million megatons of energy, said Robertson.
Some researchers have suggested that a layer of soot found at the K-Pg boundary layer roughly 66 million years ago was created by the impact itself. But Robertson and his colleagues calculated that the amount of soot was too high to have been created during the massive impact event and was consistent with the amount that would be expected from global fires.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Douglas S. Robertson, William M. Lewis, Peter M. Sheehan, Owen B. Toon. K-Pg extinction: Reevaluation of the heat-fire hypothesis. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1002/jgrg.20018
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/k2wC9zxC0PY/130327144249.htm
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Researchers discover how model organism Tetrahymena plays roulette with 7 sexes
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
It's been more than fifty years since scientists discovered that the single-celled organism Tetrahymena thermophila has seven sexes. But in all that time, they've never known how each cell's sex, or "mating type," is determined; now they do. The new findings are published 26 March in the open access journal PLOS Biology.
By identifying Tetrahymena's long-unknown mating-type genes, a team of UC Santa Barbara biologists, with research colleagues in the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in the J. Craig Venter Institute, also uncovered the unusual process of DNA rearrangements needed for sex determination in this organism. The discovery has potential human health implications ranging from tissue transplantation to cancer, including allorecognition?the ability of an organism to distinguish its own tissues from those of another?which can be a first line of defense against infection and illness.
In the study, the scientists show that in this multi-sexed, single-celled organism, the sex of the progeny is randomly determined by a series of "cut and paste" genomic recombination events that assemble one complete gene pair and delete all others.
"We found a pair of genes that have a specific sequence which is different for each mating type," said Eduardo Orias, a research professor emeritus and part of the UCSB team. "They are very similar genes?clearly related to one another, going back probably to a common ancestor?but they have become different. And each is different in a specific way that determines the mating type of the cell."
Each unicellular Tetrahymena boasts two nuclei: the 'germline nucleus' and the 'somatic nucleus'. Genetic information for progeny cells is stored in the former, analogous to ovaries or testes in humans, while genes are actively transcribed in the latter, the "working copy" nucleus. The sex of the progeny is determined during mating, when fertilization results in new germline and somatic nuclei that are made using contributions from the germline nucleus of each parent.
The authors found that the germline nucleus contains a tandem array of similarly organized but incomplete gene pairs?one for each mating type (although Tetrahymena have seven sexes, the particular cell line used in this study has just six). In the new somatic nucleus, a single complete gene pair is assembled when DNA segments from each end of this array are fused to one of the six incomplete pairs, and the remaining five are deleted. This precise but random rearrangement leaves the new cell with exactly one gene pair?and one mating type.
"The mating type of the 'parents' has no influence whatsoever on the sex of the progeny," Orias said. "It's completely random, as if they had roulette wheel with six numbers and wherever the marble ends up is what they get. By chance they may have same mating type as the parents?but it's only by chance. It's a fascinating system."
"By understanding this process better in Tetrahymena, what we learn ultimately may be of use in medicine," Orias said. "Tetrahymena has about as many genes as the human genome. For thousands of those genes you can recognize the sequence similarity to corresponding genes in the human genome with the same biological function. That's what makes it a valuable organism to investigate important biological questions."
###
Cervantes MD, Hamilton EP, Xiong J, Lawson MJ, Yuan D, et al. (2013) Selecting One of Several Mating Types through Gene Segment Joining and Deletion in Tetrahymena thermophila. PLoS Biol 11(3): e1001518. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001518
Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org
Thanks to Public Library of Science for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
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Tuesday, March 26, 2013
'Game of Thrones': How well do you know Season 2?
'Game of Thrones' has drawn in lovers of the original George R.R. Martin series and newbies alike during its first two seasons, becoming one of network HBO's most popular shows. Now it returns for a highly anticipated third season on March 31. But before you launch into Season 3, how well do you remember Season 2?
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/cBM7OHkpQ5g/Game-of-Thrones-How-well-do-you-know-Season-2
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Police: No sign of 3rd party in Berezovsky death
LONDON (AP) -- There was no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved in the death of Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled Russian tycoon who went from Kremlin kingmaker to fiery critic, British police said Sunday.
With an investigation under way, police are treating the death of Berezovsky ? who fled to Britain in the early 2000s after a bitter falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin ? as unexplained. But the former oligarch survived assassination attempts and recently faced financial difficulties, prompting speculation as to whether his death was part of a conspiracy ? or suicide.
Police said Sunday it would be wrong to speculate on Berezovsky's cause of death pending the results of an autopsy, but said they had no evidence to suggest anyone else was involved.
"We are at the early stages of the investigation and we are retaining an open mind as we progress," said Detective Chief Inspector Kevin Brown. "The investigation team is building a picture of the last days of Mr. Berezovsky's life, speaking to close friends and family to gain a better understanding of his state of mind."
Police released some details on the circumstances that triggered their investigation into his demise and a subsequent check for hazardous materials at a home he stayed at in Ascot, a town 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of London where Berezovsky's body was found on Saturday.
A call came into police from the local ambulance service at 3:23 p.m. GMT (11:23 a.m. EDT) Saturday saying a man had been found dead, Thames Valley Police said in a statement on Sunday.
The police said an employee of Berezovsky told how he had called an ambulance after becoming concerned for Berezovsky's welfare and forced open a bathroom door locked from the inside to find the tycoon's body on the floor.
The employee was the only person in the house when Berezovsky's body was discovered, police said. Members of the ex-oligarch's family arrived at the home while the paramedic was on scene.
After a paramedic declared Berezovsky dead and left the scene, a device measuring the paramedic's exposure to radiation was triggered, police said. This is why chemical and radiations experts were called to examine the home, they said.
"Officers found nothing of concern in the property and we are now progressing the investigation as normal," a statement from police said earlier, adding that the majority of the cordon put in place around the property has now been lifted.
Berezovsky ? who had survived a number of assassination attempts ? amassed a fortune through oil and automobiles during Russia's chaotic privatization of state assets following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Once a member of Russian President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle, Berezovsky fell out with Yeltsin's successor, Putin, and fled Britain in the early 2000s to escape fraud charges that he said were politically motivated.
He became a strident and frequent critic of Putin, accusing the leader of ushering in a dictatorship, and accused the security services of organizing 1999 apartment house bombings in Moscow and two other Russian cities that became a pretext for Russian troops to sweep into Chechnya for the second war there in half a decade.
Putin's spokesman acknowledged Sunday that the Russian president considered Berezovsky an enemy.
"We know for certain that he spared no expense in support of processes, within Russia and beyond, that could be said to have been directed against Russia and Putin," spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on the independent cable television channel Rain. "He definitely was Putin's opponent, and unfortunately not only his political opponent, but most likely in other dimensions as well."
In recent years, Berezovsky fended off legal attacks that often bore political undertones ? and others that bit into his fortune.
Russia repeatedly sought to extradite Berezovksy on a wide variety of criminal charges, and the tycoon vehemently rejected allegations over the years that he was linked to several deaths, including that of slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya and ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.
Berezovsky won a libel case in 2010 against a Kremlin-owned broadcaster that aired a show in which it was suggested he was behind the poisoning of Litvinenko, who had fled Russia with Berezovsky's help after accusing officials there of plotting to assassinate political opponents.
He took a hit with his divorce from Galina Besharova in 2010, paying what was at the time Britain's largest divorce settlement. The figure beat a previous record of 48 million pounds ($73.1 million) and was estimated as high as 100 million pounds, though the exact figure was never confirmed.
Last year, Berezovsky lost a multibillion-pound High Court case against fellow Russian Roman Abramovich and was ordered to pay 35 million pounds ($53.3 million) in legal costs.
Berezovsky had claimed that Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football Club, cheated him out of his stakes in the oil group Sibneft, arguing that he blackmailed him into selling the stakes vastly beneath their true worth after he fell from Putin's good graces.
But a judge threw out the case in August, ruling that Berezovsky was a dishonest and unreliable witness, and rejected Berezovsky's claims that he was threatened by Putin and Alexander Voloshin, a Putin ally, to coerce him to sell his Sibneft stake.
It also recently emerged that Berezovsky ran up legal bills totaling more than 250,000 pounds in just two months of a case against his former partner, Elena Gorbunova, with whom he had two children and who claimed the businessman owed her millions.
Earlier this week, The Times of London newspaper reported that Berezovsky was selling property ? including an Andy Warhol portrait of the former Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin ? to settle his debts and pay expenses owed to lawyers.
News of Berezovsky's death has prompted conspiracy theories along with speculation as to his state of mind, given his recent financial setbacks.
Ilya Zhegulev, a journalist with the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, said he spoke with Berezovsky the day before he died and discussed the tycoon's decision to flee Russia in 2000.
The journalist quoted Berezovsky as saying that during his years in London life had lost meaning.
"I no longer want to be involved in politics," Zhegulev quoted Berezovsky as saying in a story published Saturday on the Forbes.ru website.
He said Berezovsky told him that he wanted nothing more than to return to Russia. The former oligarch said he had changed his views on Russia, saying he now understood that it should not look to Europe as a model.
"I had absolutely, idealistically imagined that it was possible to build a democratic Russia. And idealistically imagined what democracy was in the center of Europe. I underestimated the inertia of Russia and greatly overestimated the West. This took place gradually. I changed my understanding of Russia's path," he quoted Berezovsky as having said.
___
AP writer Lynn Berry in Moscow contributed to this report. Cassandra Vinograd can be reached at http://twitter.com/CassVinograd
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/police-no-sign-3rd-party-160914806.html
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Monday, March 25, 2013
'Amazing': Obama turns tourist in ancient city of Petra
Larry Downing / Reuters
U.S. President Barack Obama ended his Middle East trip with a visit to the ancient city of Petra, Jordan, Saturday.
By Steve Holland, Reuters
PETRA, Jordan -- President Barack Obama marveled at the sights of Jordan's ancient city of Petra on Saturday as he wrapped up a four-day Middle East tour by setting aside weighty diplomatic matters and playing tourist for a day.
The visit followed a trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories that was capped by Obama's brokering of a rapprochement between Israel and Turkey, but which offered little more than symbolic gestures toward Middle East peacemaking.
Before heading to Petra, Obama used his stop in Jordan to ratchet up criticism of Syrian President Bashar Assad, but he stopped short of promising military aid to Syrian rebels to help end a two-year-old civil war that has claimed 70,000 lives.
President Obama receives applause from a crowd in Jerusalem Thursday by challenging groups that reject Israel.
U.S. officials privately voiced satisfaction with the results of Obama's first foreign trip of his second term, but the president's aides had set expectations so low that it was not hard to proclaim it a mission accomplished.
Shifting into sightseeing mode on Saturday, Obama flew by helicopter to Petra and took a walking tour of the restored ruins of a city more than 2,000 years old which is half-carved into sandstone cliffs.
Ordinary tourists had been cleared out for the president's visit, and guards with assault weapons dogged his every step.
"This is pretty spectacular," the president, wearing sunglasses, khaki trousers and a dark jacket, said as he craned his neck to look up at the Treasury, a towering rose-red fa?ade cut into a mountain. "It's amazing."
The U.S. president arrived in Jordan on Friday after an unexpected diplomatic triumph in Israel, where he announced a breakthrough in relations between Israel and Turkey after a telephone conversation between the countries' prime ministers.
President Barack Obama on Thursday urged the Israeli people to put themselves in the shoes of Palestinians and recognize their "right to self-determination, their right to justice." NBC's Chuck Todd reports.
Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu apologized on behalf of his country for the killing of nine Turkish citizens in a 2010 naval raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, and the two feuding U.S. allies agreed to normalize ties.
The 30-minute call was made in a runway trailer at Tel Aviv airport, where Obama and Netanyahu huddled before the president boarded Air Force One for a flight to Jordan.
The rapprochement could help Washington marshal regional efforts to contain spillover from the Syrian civil war and ease Israel's diplomatic isolation in the Middle East as it faces challenges posed by Iran's nuclear program.
Larry Downing / Reuters
Obama, left, looks at the Treasury while he receives a tour of the ancient historic and archaeological site of Petra on Saturday.
During his visit, Obama appeared to have made some headway in easing Israelis' suspicions of him, calming their concerns about his commitment to confronting Iran and soothing his relationship with the hawkish Netanyahu.
Obama attempted to show Palestinians he had not forgotten their aspirations for statehood but he left many disappointed that he had backtracked from his previous demands for a halt to Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank.
The president offered no new peace proposals but he promised his administration would stay engaged while putting the onus on the two sides to set aside mutual distrust and restart long-dormant negotiations - a step the president failed to bring about in his first term.
Muhammad Hamed / Reuters
Members of the U.S. Secret Service Counter Assault Team survey a path after Obama walked through it during his tour of the ancient historic and archaeological site of Petra on Saturday.
After visiting both Israel and the West Bank, President Obama met with King Abdullah of Jordan, a country facing some very turbulent times of its own, post Arab Spring. But there may be no stronger Arab ally to the U.S. and Israel than Jordan. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.
As Obama's critics were complaining that his Middle East trip was heavy on symbolism and lacking in substance, the last-minute move toward Israeli-Turkish reconciliation gave his aides a chance to tout a tangible achievement.
On the last leg of his trip, Obama promised further humanitarian aid in talks with Jordan's King Abdullah, a close ally, as the economically strapped country grapples with a refugee crisis caused by Syria's civil war.
Obama also used the opportunity to underscore U.S. wariness about arming rebels fighting to overthrow Assad, despite pressure from Republican critics at home and from some European allies to do more.
He warned that a post-Assad Syria could become an "enclave" for Islamist extremism and insisted it was vital to help organize the Syrian opposition to avoid that, but he stopped short of announcing any new concrete steps.
Related:
Obama lays stone from MLK memorial on grave of Israeli PM slain for trying to make peace
Obama appeals to Israelis: Give justice to the Palestinians
Obama: 'Still time' for diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute
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