It's not "his" "government": It's the international Judeo-plutocracy

Snowden’s father on ‘Today’ show: "He has betrayed his government"

 

The father of fugitive Edward Snowden told NBC News that he believes his son would return to the United States if he was assured that he would not be jailed before trial or subjected to a gag order.

 

Lonnie Snowden told journalist Michael Isikoff that he has not spoken with his son — who is currently believed to be hiding in a Moscow airport to evade arrest by U.S. authorities — since April.

 

Edward Snowden went into hiding in early June, after information he provided about U.S. data surveillance programs was published by The Washington Post and Guardian newspapers. He has said he revealed the information because he feared the surveillance programs were violating the rights of private citizens. He has been charged with leaking classified documents.

 

The portion of the interview that aired on the “Today” show Friday morning did not explain how the elder Snowden had developed his opinion as to the conditions under which his 30-year-old son might return home.

 

Lonnie Snowden sent a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. with his suggestions about how to get his son to return to this country, Isikoff reported. In the interview, he said he knew his son had broken the law but does not think he committed treason.

 

IT'S NOT "HIS" "GOVERNMENT": IT'S THE INTERNATIONAL JUDEO-PLUTOCRACY

 

“He has betrayed his government, but I don’t believe that he’s betrayed the people of the United States.”

Lake George to become "the smartest lake in the world"

Thomas Jefferson famously called the New York's Lake George "the most beautiful waters I ever saw." Now science will help to keep that natural beauty from dimming. The Fund for Lake George has teamed up with IBM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to roll out a wide range of sensors, robots, weather stations and other technologies to monitor conditions in Lake George, making it "the smartest lake in the world."

 

The sensors will keep track of everything from currents to wind conditions to nitrogen content. "We do not have a complete picture of Lake George scientifically, and we need it," Eric Siy, the executive director of Fund for Lake George, told Weather Underground. Although the lake is in much better shape than many others, it faces a wide range of potential threats, mostly related to human development. Pollution could cloud its famously clear waters, road-salt runoff could affect the salinity of the water, and invasive species such as zebra mussels need to be kept at bay.

 

Keeping the lake clean and safe is essential not just for the region's ecology, but also its economy. Tourism related to the lake brings in an estimated $1 billion a year.

 

Similar technologies have been implemented in other lakes, but this project - dubbed "The Jefferson Project" after the U.S. president - represents the most concentrated effort. "Because in some ways Lake George is small - it's 32 miles long - we have the ability to do a very complete and thorough instrumentation," Sandra Nierzwicki-Bauer, director of RPI's Darrin Fresh Water Institute, told Weather Underground. RPI has already been studying the lake for the past 30 years, but the new sensors will collect 10 times more data than previous systems, and it will be collected on a daily, real-time basis.

 

In addition to a wide variety of sensors, IBM will employ its technology to crunch the data generated on the lake and create computational models to study the impacts on the various conditions that are putting stress on the lake. IBM says this will not just help Lake George, but it will also help establish a model for how similar technologies can help other freshwater lakes.

 

Although the total budget for this project has not been disclosed, it is reportedly in the millions of dollars. All three organizations are contributing financially.

Connecting With Nature Boosts Creativity and Health

A young girl gazes at the desert landscape.

Photograph by John Burchman, National Geographic

 

"I've been arguing for a while that connection to nature should be thought of as a human right," Richard Louv told the crowd assembled in the courtyard of National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Louv was there to inspire the staff about the benefits of spending time outdoors.

 

Louv, the author of the bestsellers Last Child in the Woods (2005) and The Nature Principle (2011) - coined the term "nature-deficit disorder" to describe the loss of connection children increasingly feel with the natural world. Nature-deficit disorder is not a clinically recognized condition, he explains, but rather a term to evoke a loss of communion with other living things. Nevertheless, he argues, nature-deficit disorder affects "health, spiritual well-being, and many other areas, including [people's] ability to feel ultimately alive."

 

The causes of the disorder include loss of open space, increasingly busy schedules, an emphasis on team sports over individualized play and exploration, competition from electronic media, and what Louv and others call a "culture of fear," in which people are afraid to visit natural areas or even go outside due to heavy media coverage of violent events.

 

To dive deeper into Louv's ideas, National Geographic sat down with him for a few questions.

 

To access the entire article, please click here.

Merkel slams Irish bankers for "exposing pseudo-democracy"

 

Transcripts of telephone conversations from 2008 between bankers at Anglo Irish Bank have caused outrage in Ireland and beyond in recent days.

 

In the tapes they made light of the Irish government's decision at the height of the global financial crisis to guarantee their liabilities and talk about demanding "moolah" - slang for money - from the country's central bank.

 

They were also heard singing the pre-war version of the German national anthem, with the words "Deutschland ueber alles."

 

There is no such thing as "democracy": the "politicians" are installed by the money-power, and therefore the "politicians" represent the money-power. The corporate media make-believe that the System is legitimate.

 

Everything else is just window-dressing to make ordinary people think they live in a "democracy."

Voyager 1 Discovers Bizarre and Baffling Region at Edge of Solar System

A model of the solar system’s edge using recent data. Voyager 1′s latest findings will likely rewrite this image, as soon as scientists figure out exactly what they mean. NASA/JPL/JHUAPL

 

If the solar wind was completely gone, galactic cosmic rays should be streaming in from all directions. Instead, Voyager found them coming preferentially from one direction. Furthermore, even though the solar particles had dropped off, the probe hasn’t measured any real change in the magnetic fields around it. That’s hard to explain because the galaxy’s magnetic field is thought to be inclined 60 degrees from the sun’s field.

 

No one is entirely sure what’s going on.

 

“It’s a huge surprise,” said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University, who was not involved in the work. While the new observations are fascinating, they are likely something that theorists will debate about for some time, she added.

 

“In some sense we have touched the intergalactic medium,” Opher said, “but we’re still inside the sun’s house.”

 

Extending this analogy, it’s almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun’s home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy. Not only were scientists not expecting this foyer to exist, they have no idea how long the probe will stay inside of it. Stone speculated that the probe could travel some months or years before it reaches interstellar space.

 

“But it could happen any day,” he added. “We don’t have a model to tell us that.” Even then, Stone said, Voyager would not have really left the solar system but merely the region where the solar wind dominates.

 

For his part, Krimigis didn’t even want to speculate on what Voyager might encounter next because theorists’ models have so far not worked extremely well.

 

“I’m convinced that nature is far more imaginative than we are,” he said.

 

Spiral Galaxies Far Bigger Than Previously Thought

This Hubble Space Telescope image released by NASA and the European Space Agency on February 28, 2006, shows the spiral galaxy of the Messier 101. (Photo : Reuters)

Spiral galaxies may be much larger and more massive than previously believed, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder reported in a new study conducted using the Hubble Space Telescope.
 

Study leader John Stocke said new observations with Hubble's $70 million Cosmic Spectograph (COS) designed by the university show that normal spiral galaxies are in fact surrounded by halos of gas that can extend to over 1 million light-years in diameter.

In comparison, the current estimated diameter of the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light-years.
 

The material for the galaxy halos was originally ejected from galaxies by exploding stars, a product of the star formation process, Stocke explained.
 

"This gas is stored and then recycled through an extended galaxy halo, falling back onto the galaxies to reinvigorate a new generation of star formation," he said, adding that, in many ways, "this is the 'missing link' in galaxy evolution that we need to understand in detail in order to have a complete picture of the process."
 

Building on earlier studies identifying oxygen-rich gas clouds around spiral galaxies by other scientists, Stocke and his colleagues determined that such clouds contain almost as much mass as all the stars in their respective galaxies.
 

"This was a big surprise," Stocke said. "The new findings have significant consequences for how spiral galaxies change over time."
 

Additionally, the team of researchers discovered giant reservoirs of gas estimated to be millions of degrees Fahrenheit enshrouding the spiral galaxies and halos under examination. The halos of spiral galaxies, in contrast, were just tens of thousands of degrees.
 

Shull, a professor at the university's astrophysical and planetary sciences department and a member of the school's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy emphasized that the study of such "circumgalactic" gas is still in its infancy.

Astronomers find solar system that may teem with life

This artist illustration shows one of three super-Earth exoplanet in orbit around Gliese 667c, a red dwarf star that is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

 

Astronomers believe they have found an alien solar system packed with a record-breaking three potentially habitable worlds.

 

New observations of the star Gliese 667C - about one-third the mass of our sun - is home to between five and seven planets, three of which are classified as super-Earths. All three are larger than our own planet, but smaller than gas giants like Uranus and Neptune.

 

But what makes all the difference is that these super-Earths orbit in what is known as the “Goldilocks Zone” - the region around a star where temperatures are just right for liquid water, a key ingredients in the recipe for life, to exist.

 

“These planets are good candidates to have a solid surface and maybe an atmosphere like the Earth’s, not something like Jupiter,” said study co-author and University of Washington astronomer Rory Barnes in a statement this week.

 

What makes this finding so exciting is that for the first time, astronomers have three potentially rocky or ocean worlds orbiting the same star. And at 22 light-years away from Earth, Gliese 667C and it’s two companion stars are considered relatively close neighbors to our solar system, making them ideal candidates for future extraterrestrial searches for life.

 Artist's Animation of the Gliese 667C system
 

Lock on Life?

 

Since Gliese 667C is so much smaller and cooler than our own sun, it’s habitable zone is much closer in, meaning the super-Earths take anywhere from 20 to 100 days to orbit. Astronomers suspect this indicates the planets are gravitationally more influenced by their parent star than Earth is by the sun.

“The close proximity of these planets in the habitable zone to the host star makes it likely they are ‘tidally locked,’ which in this case means the same hemisphere always faces the star,” Barnes said. “Fortunately, we know that this state can still support life.”

 

These finding were made possible thanks to years of radial velocity measurements of the starlight using some of the world’s largest observatories ; including the Keck  Observatory, in Hawaii, and the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope and Las Campanas Observatory, both in Chile. Radial velocity measures a star’s wobble caused by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets by looking for the telltale shifts in a star’s light spectrum as the planets appear to move away and towards us.  The more massive a planet, and the tighter its orbit, the higher effect it will have on its star. Since these planets were relatively small their signals were hidden in the original data and so a re-analysis and new observations helped to confirm their existence.

 

At least two to four other planets outside the habitable zone may exist but still need to be confirmed by further observations.

 

The implications of this packed planetary system on the hunt for Earth-like planets could be profound. Barnes and his team believe this discovery may indicate that low mass suns like this red dwarf - many of which populate the Milky Way - may routinely harbor multiple low-mass planets in their habitable zones. This means that there could be many more habitable planets in the Milky Way than we ever thought.

 

The super-Earth study will appear in the July edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Artists Animation of the Orbital Motions of the Gliese 667 System

Reading DNA, backward and forward: MIT biologists reveal how cells control the direction in which the genome is read

MIT biologists have discovered a mechanism that allows cells to read their own DNA in the correct direction and prevents them from copying most of the so-called “junk DNA” that makes up long stretches of our genome.

Only about 15 percent of the human genome consists of protein-coding genes, but in recent years scientists have found that a surprising amount of the junk, or intergenic DNA, does get copied into RNA - the molecule that carries DNA’s messages to the rest of the cell.

Scientists have been trying to figure out just what this RNA might be doing, if anything. In 2008, MIT researchers led by Institute Professor Phillip Sharp discovered that much of this RNA is generated through a process called divergent expression, through which cells read their DNA in both directions moving away from a given starting point.

In a new paper appearing in Nature on June 23, Sharp and colleagues describe how cells initiate but then halt the copying of RNA in the upstream, or non-protein-coding direction, while allowing it to continue in the direction in which genes are correctly read. The finding helps to explain the existence of many recently discovered types of short strands of RNA whose function is unknown.

“This is part of an RNA revolution where we’re seeing different RNAs and new RNAs that we hadn’t suspected were present in cells, and trying to understand what role they have in the health of the cell or the viability of the cell,” says Sharp, who is a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “It gives us a whole new appreciation of the balance of the fundamental processes that allow cells to function.”

Graduate students Albert Almada and Xuebing Wu are the lead authors of the paper. Christopher Burge, a professor of biology and biological engineering, and undergraduate Andrea Kriz are also authors.

Plants 'do maths' to control overnight food supplies

Arabidopsis thaliana: A model plant for scientific experiments

 

Plants have a built-in capacity to do maths, which helps them regulate food reserves at night, research suggests.

UK scientists say they were "amazed" to find an example of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation in biology.

Mathematical models show that the amount of starch consumed overnight is calculated by division in a process involving leaf chemicals, a John Innes Centre team reports in e-Life journal.

Birds may use similar methods to preserve fat levels during migration.

The scientists studied the plant Arabidopsis, which is regarded as a model plant for experiments. 

Overnight, when the plant cannot use energy from sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and starch, it must regulate its starch reserves to ensure they last until dawn.

Experiments by scientists at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, show that to adjust its starch consumption so precisely, the plant must be performing a mathematical calculation - arithmetic division.

"They're actually doing maths in a simple, chemical way - that's amazing, it astonished us as scientists to see that," study leader Prof Alison Smith told BBC News.

"This is pre-GCSE maths they're doing, but they're doing maths."

The scientists used mathematical modelling to investigate how a division calculation can be carried out inside a plant.

During the night, mechanisms inside the leaf measure the size of the starch store. Information about time comes from an internal clock, similar to the human body clock.

The researchers proposed that the process is mediated by the concentrations of two kinds of molecules called "S" for starch and "T" for time.

If the S molecules stimulate starch breakdown, while the T molecules prevent this from happening, then the rate of starch consumption is set by the ratio of S molecules to T molecules. In other words, S divided by T.

"This is the first concrete example in biology of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation," said mathematical modeller Prof Martin Howard, of the John Innes Centre.

The scientists think similar mechanisms may operate in animals such as birds to control fat reserves during migration over long distances, or when they are deprived of food when incubating eggs.

Commenting on the research, Dr Richard Buggs of Queen Mary, University of London, said: "This is not evidence for plant intelligence. It simply suggests that plants have a mechanism designed to automatically regulate how fast they burn carbohydrates at night. Plants don't do maths voluntarily and with a purpose in mind like we do."

Plants 'seen doing quantum physics'

Deep within plants' energy-harvesting machinery lie distinctly quantum tricks

The idea that plants make use of quantum physics to harvest light more efficiently has received a boost.

Plants gather packets of light called photons, shuttling them deep into their cells where their energy is converted with extraordinary efficiency.

A report in Science journal adds weight to the idea that an effect called a "coherence" helps determine the most efficient path for the photons.

Experts have called the work "a nice proof" of some contentious ideas.

Prior work has shown weaker evidence that these coherences existed in relatively large samples from plants.

But the new study has been done painstakingly, aiming lasers at single molecules of the light-harvesting machinery to show how light is funnelled to the so-called reaction centres within plants where light energy is converted into chemical energy.

What has surprised even the researchers behind the research is not only that these coherences do indeed exist, but that they also seem to change character, always permitting photons to take the most efficient path into the reaction centres.

Until very recently, quantum mechanics - a frequently arcane branch of physics most often probed in laboratory settings at the coldest temperatures and lowest pressures - would not have been expected in biological settings.

The fact that plants and animals are extremely warm and soft by comparison would suggest that delicate quantum states should disappear in living things, leaving behaviour explicable by the more familiar "classical physics" that is taught in school.

But the new results join the ranks of a field that seems finally to be gaining ground: quantum biology.

The 'Google Earth' of 3D Brain Maps is Here

Meet "Big Brain," the first high-res, 3D digital model of the human brain. It's the result of a huge, 10-year project built from individual scans of 7,400 slices of a single human brain. The project will help scientists learn more about our minds.

The "Big Brain" project is the result of an international team of researchers from Germany and Canada. MIT Technology Review has a great piece up on the project, which goes into just how much work it takes to create a 3D image this detailed:

"Alan Evans, a professor at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and senior author of a paper that reports the results in the journal Science, says his team then took on “the technical challenge of trying to stitch together 7,500 sheets of Saran wrap” into a three-dimensional object using digital image processing. Many slices had small rips, tears, and distortions, so the team manually edited the images to fix major signs of damage and then used an automated program for minor fixes. Guided by previously taken MRI images and relationships between neighboring sections, they then aligned the sections to create a continuous 3-D object representing about a terabyte of data."

An overview video from the research team behind the project gives a good view of just how close this baby can get. At the highest zoom, the map can't show individual cells. But it's detailed enough to learn about the different layers of cells in the brain. A typical MRI scan has a maximum resolution of about a millimeter. By comparison, Big Brain zooms in to 20 micrometers, MIT explains.

Prof. Katrin Amunts from the Julich Research Centre has called it "like using Google Earth. You can see details that are not visible before we had this 3D reconstruction." The map is free to use for scientists across the globe. The team published their model in Science.

 

The Eye of God

     THE EYE OF GOD     



Spectacular Cosmographic Maps Chart Galaxies and Superclusters in Local Universe

Take a trip through our local universe and see the positions and movements of galaxies and clusters with this incredible new video map.

Looking like tiny islands in a vast ocean, the roughly 30,000 galaxies in this detailed map extend out to around 350 million light-years from our own Milky Way. These cosmic objects don’t float alone but tend to group together in clusters of hundreds or superclusters of thousands of galaxies.

Enormous voids containing relatively little material stretch between the dense threads of galactic gas and dust. "The complexity of what we are seeing is overwhelming,” says astronomer Helene Courtois of the University of Lyon in France, lead author of a paper that appeared on arXiv.org on June 1, as she narrates the 17-minute video above.

The research uses a visualization tool called SDvision to reveal the richness of our cosmic neighborhood. It is meant to help astronomers get more of a personal feel for the local universe, said the authors in a paper accompanying the video.

“Maps with names for features promote a familiarity and specificity that contributes to physical understanding,” the authors wrote.

The labels given to features in our cosmic neighborhood – the Fornax cluster, Perseus-Pisces, the Great Wall – sound like they came from some exotic sci-fi or fantasy novel map. (Lest you think the Zone of Avoidance is a celestial forbidden sector, it simply represents areas obscured to astronomers by the light from our Milky Way.)

By understanding the large-scale structure of the cosmos, scientists can get a better handle on dark matter and dark energy, which are the dominant forces affecting the shapes of galactic superclusters. A nice bonus is that those without a scientific background can enjoy the work and be amazed at the physical wonder of our universe.

Distances in the video are given in what might seem an odd unit of measure: kilometers per second, which is usually associated with speed. But as Edwin Hubble observed in the early 1900s, the farther a galaxy is away, the faster it is moving from us. Because defining absolute distances in the universe is a bit tricky, astronomers prefer to tell you how quickly a particular object is moving away from us.

Here, Wired presents some of the highlights from this galactic mapping project but, if you have time for it, the full 17-minute video is a fascinating watch.

 

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

Ethnic cleansing of Whites from North America to continue, say corporatized media

The latest U.S. census figures show that by 2043 Whites in America may no longer be the majority.

That’s because, for the first time in American history, the number of deaths in the White community has outnumbered the number of births, census figures show. On top of that, non-Hispanic Whites are already older than other groups, with a median age of 42 compared with that of Asians, at 34, and of Hispanics, at under 28, The Associated Press reported.

Specifically, the population of Whites who were younger than age 5 stood at 49.9 percent in 2012, AP reported. And in 2012, there were 13 states, as well as the District of Columbia, in which the minority population had surpasses that of Whites in those age 5 or younger, AP reported.

With that trend, the growth of the minority population and simultaneous decline of the White population will continue and tip national scales in the coming years, said Thomas Mesenbourg, the acting director at the Census Bureau, AP reported.

The census figures show that by 2043 Whites will no longer be the most populous group in the nation, AP reported.

“The fast-growing demographic today is now the children of immigrants,” said one immigration expert in an earlier AP report on the trend.

The global Judeo-plutocracy is guilty of war crimes against the White race, genocide being chief among them.

Mountains shape the sound of language, says study (i.e., soil is Blood)

A linguist at the University of Miami found a correlation between languages that contained ejectives and altitude. In this map, dark circles represent languages with ejectives, and clear circles represent languages without.

Where you grew up may influence how you speak. High in the mountains, languages contain short bursts of sound, says a new study. Why? Maybe cliff dwellers needed to keep their throats from drying out. Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami, studied the correlation between languages spoken at high altitudes and the use of distinctive sounds called ejectives — bits of speech produced by air bursts from the back of the throat. “What I think is clear is the correlation is off the charts,” Everett told NBC News. English and European languages lack ejectives. The closest you get is the sound of a hard “k” in “kha”, he explained.

Unprecedented Wealth, Debt Slavery and Conditioned Consciousness (i.e., the Judeo-plutocracy)

Introduction: Seventeen years ago, I read a book called The Evolving Self. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it profoundly affected the direction of my life. Here’s the section of the book that became a splinter in my mind and resonated the most with me: “In order to gain control of consciousness, we must learn how to moderate the biases built into the machinery of the brain. We allow a whole series of illusions to stand between ourselves and reality…. These distortions are comforting, yet they need to be seen through for the self to be truly liberated… to come ever closer to getting a glimpse of the universal order, and of our part in it.” Since reading that, I have dedicated my life to coming “ever closer to getting a glimpse of the universal order, and of our part in it.” After years of research and analysis, I’ve come to hard-fought, battle-tested conclusions that I’ve been sharing with people to great effect, and will share with you now. This will not be for the faint of heart. It will hit hard and we don’t have much time, so let’s get right down to it. At this point, if you spend much time researching power politics or the distribution of wealth, resources and basic necessities, it seems evident and undeniable, dare I say, “common sense,” that we, in fact, live in a neo-feudal society built on debt and mental slavery. That may sound like over-the-top rhetoric, and it obviously sounds extreme to propagandized and conditioned minds, and yes, it is extreme. However, it is the unfortunate reality of the present situation. The facts are there for the rational and unbiased mind to absorb and comprehend. If you take a few minutes of your time and read this through, it will easily be proven. We will look at how the system works, and then, hopefully, we will begin the process of evolving society together, as grandiose as that may sound. Let’s start by giving some context and perspective on present circumstances by breaking down some economic data. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

To access the rest of the article, click here.

Scientists Decode Massive Genome to Fill Gap in the "Tree of Life"

Phytoplankton bloom in the Barents Sea. The milky blue color is likely caused by E. huxleyi, which can grow abundantly up to 50 meters below the ocean surface. The alga’s blooms tend to be triggered by high light levels during the 24-hour sunlight of Arctic summer. (Photo : NASA)

 

The White Cliffs of Dover have long served as an iconic feature of the England landscape, inspiring songs and movies as well as countless photographs. To scientists, however, they represent much more than a striking backdrop: as a massive conglomeration of the single-celled photosynthetic alga known as Emiliania huxleyi, the cliffs are a monument to the coccolithophore that serves as the basis of most food chains.

Though miniscule in size, phytoplankton biomass exceeds that of all marine animals combined and is constantly affecting climate processes, such as lowering ocean temperatures by reflecting sunlight and through carbon metabolism. Furthermore, its versatility contributes to primary production of organic compounds from carbon dioxide or adds to its emissions make "Ehux" a critical player in the marine carbon cycle.

Given its importance, scientists at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) went ahead and sequenced the Ehux genome, allowing them to compare its sequences with those from other algal isolates.

Part of the third most abundant group of phytoplankton, the Ehux strain was isolated from the South Pacific and is the first reference genome for coccolithophores. Due to the complexities and size of the genome, the project ended up taking longer than planned: originally estimated to be about 30 million bases, the genome ended up being closer to 141 million.

 

evolutionary transubstantiation

Fractal Patterns Spontaneously Emerge During Bacterial Cell Growth

Using a combination of genetic, microscopy and computational tools, Cambridge scientists created a system for examining the development of multicellular bacterial populations. After marking bacteria by inserting genes for different coloured proteins, the researchers used high resolution microscopes to examine the growth of bacterial populations in detail. They discovered that as bacteria grow the cell populations naturally form striking and unexpected branching patterns called fractals. (Credit: Jim Haseloff Lab)

 

Scientists have discovered highly asymmetric and branched patterns are the result of physical forces and local instabilities. The research has important implications for understanding biofilms and multicellular systems.

Despite bacterial colonies always forming circular shapes as they grow, their cells form internal divisions which are highly asymmetrical and branched. These fractal (self-similar) patterns are due to the physical forces and local instabilities that are a natural part of bacterial cell growth, a new study reveals. The research, published in the scientific journal ACS Synthetic Biology, has important implications for the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Using a combination of genetic, microscopy and computational tools, Cambridge scientists created a system for examining the development of multicellular bacterial populations. After marking bacteria by inserting genes for different coloured proteins, the researchers used high resolution microscopes to examine the growth of bacterial populations in detail. They discovered that as bacteria grow the cell populations naturally form striking and unexpected branching patterns called fractals. The scientists then used large-scale computer models to explore the patterning process.

They showed that as each bacterium grows in a single direction, lines or files of cells are formed, but these files are unstable to small disturbances. As large numbers of cells push and shove against each other, mechanical instability leads to buckling and folding of cell files. This is repeated as the cells continue to grow and divide, leading to the formation of rafts of aligned cells arranged in self-similar branching patterns, or fractals.

These microscopic fractal patterns emerge spontaneously from physical interactions between the large number of cells within the population. This was tested by looking at the interactions between twin cell populations and a mutant bacterium that has a round shape (where this behaviour is not observed).

Dr. Jim Haseloff, from the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study, said: "Vivid biological patterns emerge from even subtle interactions. Similar phenomena are seen in the emergence of order in economic, social and political systems.

"The behaviour of large populations can be hard to predict, but the work has resulted in the validation of fast and accurate computer models that provide a test bed for reprogramming of multicellular systems."

Synthetic Biology is a new field that brings engineering principles to biology to reprogram living systems using DNA. It is has the potential to create a new generation of sustainable technologies, with the prospect of new forms of materials and energy produced by biological feedstocks and recycling of waste. As synthetic biologists are starting to reprogram the behaviour of large populations of cells in order to explore new forms of self-organisation and function, this study will have important implications for their research.

Astrobiologists find Martian clay contains chemical implicated in the origin of life

Researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI) have discovered high concentrations of boron in a Martian meteorite. When present in its oxidized form (borate), boron may have played a key role in the formation of RNA, one of the building blocks for life. The work was published on June 6 in PLOS One.

The Antarctic Search for Meteorites team found the Martian meteorite used in this study in Antarctica during its 2009-2010 field season. The minerals it contains, as well as its chemical composition, clearly show that it is of Martian origin.

Using the ion microprobe in the W. M. Keck Cosmochemistry Laboratory at UH, the team was able to analyze veins of Martian clay in the meteorite. After ruling out contamination from Earth, they determined boron abundances in these clays are over ten times higher than in any previously measured meteorite.

"Borates may have been important for the origin of life on Earth because they can stabilize ribose, a crucial component of RNA. In early life RNA is thought to have been the informational precursor to DNA," said James Stephenson, a UHNAI postdoctoral fellow.

RNA may have been the first molecule to store information and pass it on to the next generation, a mechanism crucial for evolution. Although life has now evolved a sophisticated mechanism to synthesize RNA, the first RNA molecules must have been made without such help. One of the most difficult steps in making RNA nonbiologically is the formation of the RNA sugar component, ribose. Previous laboratory tests have shown that without borate the chemicals available on the early Earth fail to build ribose. However, in the presence of borate, ribose is spontaneously produced and stabilized.

 

evolutionary transubstantiation

Opportunity rover finds traces left by 'water you can drink' on ancient Mars

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU

This panorama from NASA's Opportunity rover, made on June 1, shows Solander Point rising up on the Martian horizon. Mission managers plan to get the solar-powered rover to a north-facing slope on Solander Point by August, so that it can shelter there during the Martian winter.

 

Nearly 10 years after its launch, NASA's Opportunity rover has found its first evidence that Mars once had non-acidic water - the kind of water that could easily sustain the life we typically see on Earth.

"This is water that you can drink," Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, principal investigator for Opportunity's long-lived Mars mission, told reporters Friday.

The water isn't there anymore, but the minerals left behind bear an aluminum-rich chemical signature that suggests they were formed through interaction with neutral-pH water. That's different from the previous evidence that Opportunity found, pointing to more acidic water. Some extreme forms of life on Earth could tolerate that environment, but it wouldn't have been as friendly an environment for prebiotic chemistry - the chemistry that's thought to have given rise to life on Earth.

 

The newly announced findings, based on X-ray analysis of a rock nicknamed Esperance, add to similar evidence of neutral water that was found on the other side of the Red Planet by NASA's bigger and more capable Curiosity rover. Taken together, they flesh out the story of a planet that was friendly to life's conditions early in its existence but became colder, drier and less hospitable as it lost its global magnetic field and much of its atmosphere.

Comet impacts may have spurred life on Earth, study suggests: evolutionary transubstantiation

The impact of comets crashing into Earth's surface may have provided the energy to create simple molecules that formed the precursors to life, a new study suggests. That conclusion, to be published in the June 20 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry A, was based on a computer model of such an impact's effect on a comet crystal initially made up of water, carbon dioxide and other simple molecules." Comets carry very simple molecules in them," said study co-author Nir Goldman, a physical chemist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. "When a comet hits a planetary surface, for example, that impact can drive the synthesis of more complicated things that are prebiotic - they're life-building." The notion that life-building molecules were carried to Earth via comets or asteroids, a hypothesis known as panspermia, has been around for decades. But the idea that the comet impact itself could have created the molecules is newer. When the Earth was young, comet bombardments may have brought 22 trillion pounds (10 trillion kilograms) of carbon-based material to the planet every year, Goldman said. That would have provided a rich source for the building blocks of life to form. In a separate recent study, scientists zapped a mini-comet in the lab to prove that precursor molecules could form far from Earth. To test their hypothesis, Goldman and his colleagues used a computer model to simulate a single comet crystal of hundreds of molecules. Comets are mostly "dirty snowballs," Goldman said, so the simulated crystal started with mostly water molecules, but also included methanol, ammonia, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The researchers then simulated the effects of the crystal hitting the Earth's surface at various angles, from crashing into it directly to making a glancing blow. They followed the chemical changes in the crystal for about 250 picoseconds, about the amount of time the system needed to reach a steady state, where the proportion and type of chemicals in the system is stable. The huge jolt from the impact provided the energy needed to make complicated chemicals."Certain conditions were a sweet spot for complexity," Goldman told LiveScience. For instance, at pressures of about 360,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level and temperatures of 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,538 degrees Celsius), the molecules in the crystals formed complex species called aromatic rings. These types of circular, carbon-based molecules could have been precursors to the letters in DNA. At higher pressures, the molecules produced methane, formaldehyde and some long-chain carbon molecules." Every time there was an impact hard enough to get chemical reactivity, it produced interesting stuff," Goldman said. As a follow-up, Goldman and his colleagues want to test different initial chemical concentrations in the comet to see how that affects the formation process. The findings are fascinating, said Ralf Kaiser, a physical chemist who studies astrochemistry at the University of Hawaii at Manoa." It opens another pathway to explain how these biological, or precursor, molecules can be formed," Kaiser, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. The team has shown that such precursor molecules "absolutely could be formed this way, no question," Kaiser said. But it's not all or nothing: Some molecules could have been carried here by comets from outer space, while some formed on impact, and still others formed completely from home-grown materials. The tricky question is to determine what percentage of life's building blocks arose during each process, Kaiser said.

The Big bang theory is on the mark, shows earths most powerful telescope

The moments just after the Big Bang happened more like the theory predicts, an international team of scientists using the most powerful telescope on Earth has discovered.

The research has solved cosmological problems that have haunted particle physicists and astrophysicists over the last two decades.

One of the most important problems in physics and astronomy was the inconsistency between the lithium isotopes previously observed in the oldest stars in our galaxy, which suggested levels about two hundred times more Li-6 and about three to five time less Li-7 than Big Bang nucleosynthesis predicts.

This serious problem in the understanding of the early Universe has invoked exotic physics and fruitless searches for pre-galactic production sources to reconcile the differences.

The team, led by Karin Lind of the University of Cambridge, has proven the decades-old inventory relied on lower quality observational data with analysis using several simplifications that resulted in spurious detections of lithium isotopes.

The required data can only be obtained with the largest telescopes on Earth such as the Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii equipped with the powerful High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES) spectrograph to disperse the stellar light into its constituent colours and absorption features.

The study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"Comet factory" discovered around young star, 400 light years away

This artist's impression shows the dust trap in the system Oph-IRS 48. The dust trap provides a safe haven for the tiny rocks in the disc, allowing them to clump together and grow to sizes that allow them to survive on their own. (ESO/L. Calcada) 

In a vast disc of gas and dust particles circling a young star, scientists have found evidence of a hypothesized, but never-before seen, dust trap that may solve the mystery of how planets form.We know planets that orbit stars are abundant throughout our galaxy, and likely throughout the universe as well, but until recently, scientists weren't exactly sure how those planets came to be.

The working theory is that they grew over time as tiny bits of dust collided and stuck together - eventually forming comets, rocky planets, and the cores of gaseous planets over millions of years.

But there is a problem with that theory: Once these tiny bits of dust grow to the size of pebbles or boulders, they are likely to either smash into each other and break apart, or spiral toward their central star where their growth is inhibited.

Theoretical astronomers had hypothesized that the flat discs of dust and gas that often surround young stars might occasionally contain dust traps - an area in the disc where the gas is more dense and can create a barrier that keeps more substantial bits of dust from falling toward the star.

Van Der Marel said this particular dust trap is not likely to create planets because of its location in the disc, but it could create comets as large as .6 miles across. Van Der Marel describes it as "comet factory."

This computer simulation shows how a vortex can form when a massive planet is interacting with a disc around a young star. It shows how the gas density evolves when there is a planet, with a mass ten times that of Jupiter, located at 20 times the Earth-Sun distance from the central star. A large-scale vortex is created at the outer edge of the gap, which can live for more than 1000 of the planet's orbits. This vortex can trap millimeter-sized particles over million years timescales and explain the high contrast structure observed with ALMA in the disc around Oph-IRS 48.

More information:http://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1...

NASA's Spitzer Sees Milky Way's Blooming Countryside

Stars Shoot Jets in Cosmic Playground

Dozens of newborn stars sprouting jets from their dusty cocoons have been spotted in images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Bubbles Within Bubbles

This infrared image shows a striking example of what is called a hierarchical bubble structure, in which one giant bubble, carved into the dust of space by massive stars, has triggered the formation of smaller bubbles.

 

Life and Death Intermingled

In what may look to some like an undersea image of coral and seaweed, a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is showing the birth and death of stars.

 

Galaxies in Hiding

There are nearly 200 galaxies within the marked circles in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

PASADENA, Calif. -- New views from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show blooming stars in our Milky Way galaxy's more barren territories, far from its crowded core.

The images are part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (Glimpse 360) project, which is mapping the celestial topography of our galaxy. The map and a full, 360-degree view of the Milky Way plane will be available later this year. Anyone with a computer may view the Glimpse images and help catalog features.

We live in a spiral collection of stars that is mostly flat, like a vinyl record, but it has a slight warp. Our solar system is located about two-thirds of the way out from the Milky Way's center, in the Orion Spur, an offshoot of the Perseus spiral arm. Spitzer's infrared observations are allowing researchers to map the shape of the galaxy and its warp with the most precision yet.

While Spitzer and other telescopes have created mosaics of the galaxy's plane looking in the direction of its center before, the region behind us, with its sparse stars and dark skies, is less charted.

"We sometimes call this flyover country," said Barbara Whitney, an astronomer from the University of Wisconsin at Madison who uses Spitzer to study young stars. "We are finding all sorts of new star formation in the lesser-known areas at the outer edges of the galaxy."

Whitney and colleagues are using the data to find new sites of youthful stars. For example, they spotted an area near Canis Major with 30 or more young stars sprouting jets of material, an early phase in their lives. So far, the researchers have identified 163 regions containing these jets in the Glimpse 360 data, with some of the young stars highly clustered in packs and others standing alone.

Robert Benjamin is leading a University of Wisconsin team that uses Spitzer to more carefully pinpoint the distances to stars in the galaxy's hinterlands. The astronomers have noticed a distinct and rapid drop-off of red giants, a type of older star, at the edge of the galaxy. They are using this information to map the structure of the warp in the galaxy's disk.

"With Spitzer, we can see out to the edge of the galaxy better than before," said Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, who presented the results Wednesday at the 222nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Indianapolis. "We are hoping this will yield some new surprises."

Thanks to Spitzer's infrared instruments, astronomers are capturing improved images of those remote stellar lands. Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are helping fill in gaps in the areas Spitzer did not cover. WISE was designed to survey the entire sky twice in infrared light, completing the job in early 2011, while Spitzer continues to probe the infrared sky in more detail. The results are helping to canvas our galaxy, filling in blanks in the outer expanses where not much is known.

Glimpse 360 already has mapped 130 degrees of the sky around the galactic center. Four new views from the area looking away from the galactic center are online at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/search_grid.php?sort=date&category=universe.

Members of the public continue scouring images from earlier Glimpse data releases in search of cosmic bubbles indicative of hot, massive stars. Astronomers' knowledge of how massive stars influence the formation of other stars is benefitting from this citizen science activity, called The Milky Way Project. For instance, volunteers identified a striking multiple bubble structure in a star-forming region called W39. Follow-up work by the researchers showed the smaller bubbles were spawned by a larger bubble that had been carved out by massive stars.

"This crowdsourcing approach really works," said Charles Kerton of Iowa State University at Ames, who also presented results. "We are examining more of the hierarchical bubbles identified by the volunteers to understand the prevalence of triggered star formation in our galaxy."

For more information about the Milky Way project and to learn how to participate, visit: http://www.milkywayproject.org.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.

 

The cosmos is a living organism

First Glimpse of Moving Starlight

The entire cosmos is filled with light that has never been seen. Every star in every galaxy that’s ever existed in our universe has emitted starlight. Curious as it may sound, almost all of that light is still traveling through the cosmos. Yet remarkably enough, a group of researchers has managed to get a glimpse of this starlight as it’s still traveling. This sea of photons, some newly created, some fantastically ancient, which surrounds everything is known as Extragalactic Background Light (or EBL for short). In a similar way to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - the leftover radiation from the big bang - measuring the EBL is rather important in cosmology. Most recently, new research published by Alberto Dominguez, together with six co-authors, gives the best measurement ever made of this background light, showing how the EBL has varied over the past 5 billion years! By looking at the EBL over the past 5 billion years, cosmologists can learn about how galaxies change as the Universe ages. Whether or not ancient galaxies work the same way as modern ones is very important to our understanding of the Universe. As it happens, the kinds of galaxies observed in the Universe today are responsible for most of the extragalactic background light over all time. Because there’s still a lot out there in the Universe which we don’t fully understand, it also sets a limit on any other light sources which we may not yet know about. Observations like these do wonders for our understanding of the Universe and the way in which it works. It’s exciting to know that no matter how much we learn, there’s seemingly always more to be discovered out there. And perhaps most of all, we can learn all of this from the humble photons which are all around us. Though it’s not exactly light reading, the research paper for this work is available to read online at arXiv, in case you’d like to know more about the technical details.

 

matter becomes Spirit through evolution

 

White South Africans accused of wanting to survive

A community living southeast of South Africa's capital Pretoria is being accused of trying to preserve itself. "Kleinfontein is a cultural community," explains its spokeswoman Marisa Haasbroek, "if you are not an Afrikaaner you cannot live here." Afrikaaners are white South Africans of mostly Dutch descent. The private settlement has made headlines in recent weeks after it was exposed by a local newspaper. Haasbroek defends its existence saying residents simply want to live among their own kind. The 50-year-old mother of two tells CNN she moved to Kleinfontein six years ago shortly after her car was stolen in the city center. "I was just sick of crime," she says. "My parents-in-law were already living here and they told us Kleinfontein is safe," Haasbroek, her engineer husband and their children packed their belongings and moved to the "whites only" enclave. "We are trying to preserve our own identity," Haasbroek says. "We are swamped by people who are not like us. We are a minority like the people of Tibet in China and like the Palestinians. But we don't want our own state. We respect the laws of South African and we want to remain here." Orania and Kleinfontein represent about 2,000 people, a tiny minority of the overall Afrikaaner community in South Africa. Haasbroek says crime and affirmative action have left them feeling left out of the so-called "Rainbow Nation." We don't really feel welcomed in the new South Africa so we are saying, just give us a little bit of independence." They already run their own school and they build their own infrastructure. They want to be recognized as a self-contained municipality - something the local government has said will not happen.