Science
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Consortium for the Barcode of Life |
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Color-coded genetic sequences serve as "DNA barcodes" for a hermit thrush (far left), an American robin, a bumblebee and a honeybee. The gray bars stand for genetic differences.
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DNA fingerprinting isn't just for humans anymore: The "barcodes of life" are being read in other species as well, and they're being used to crack down on smugglers, track down disease carriers and trace the effects of climate change.
About 350 experts from 50 countries will be meeting in Mexico over the next week to discuss the rising number of applications for the technology. One of the major items on the agenda is to seal a global deal to extend the DNA barcode system to plants.
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Years after the controversial presidential election in 2000, election activists are still struggling to work the bugs out of balloting systems. The butterfly ballot may be ancient history, but changes in voting practices have brought in a whole new slate of challenges.
"U.S. elections really are a mess," said Arlene Ash, a biostatistician at Boston University who has made a study of statistical issues in elections. She said that was an astounding reality for "a country which has prided itself on industrial quality control and really getting technology right."
Tuesday may be an off-year Election Day, but the occasion serves as a good time to consider how far we've come since the year 2000, and how far we have yet to go.
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For decades, the cost of doing space science has been astronomically high, but all that will change when suborbital spacecraft start flying. Off-the-cuff calculations suggest doing low-cost research on commercial rocket ships could easily add up to $100 million a year.
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Sam Gosling / UT-Austin |
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These two dorm rooms reveal strikingly different personalities. "You could look at
either and be horrified," University of Texas psychologist Sam Gosling jokes.
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Your personality is on display in all the stuff you leave behind, but sometimes it takes a skilled "snoopologist" to know what to look for.
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UW-Madison |
Anthropologist John Hawks makes a study of skulls.
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Our skulls and our genes show that we're still evolving, but not always in the ways you might expect.
For example, the typical human head has actually been getting smaller over the past few thousand years, reversing the earlier evolutionary trend. Meanwhile, East Asians are becoming lighter-skinned - and appear to have more sensitive hearing than their ancestors did 10,000 years ago.
John Hawks, an anthropologist and blogger at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, points to such trends as evidence that "recent evolution is real."
Hawks delved into a few of his favorite scientific tales over the weekend in Austin, Texas, at the annual CASW New Horizons in Science meeting.
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Maximilien Brice / CERN |
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A worker is dwarfed by components of the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector
during construction in an underground chamber beneath the French-Swiss border.
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Is the future trying to save us from ourselves? A series of scientific papers that have been kicking around for a couple of years suggest that if the Large Hadron Collider ever were to find something that shattered the cosmos, the future universe might protect itself by sending a backward-causality wave to break the LHC, or at least warn us.
Sure enough, the LHC is broken - leading The New York Times' Dennis Overbye to wonder half-jokingly whether there was something to the claim after all.
Does that sound spooky? What if I told you that the idea of going back in time to derail out a world-ending particle collider goes back even farther, to a novel written about the fate of the long-canceled Superconducting Super Collider? And that the author of that book is a physicist who has been conducting research into ... backward causality?
To quote the actor Keanu Reeves, who has appeared in a couple of time-travel sagas himself: "Whooooa!" And just in time for Halloween!
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KUSA |
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A balloon soars through Colorado skies during Thursday's drama.
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Anyone familiar with the physics of lighter-than-air lift would probably have suspected that 6-year-old Falcon Heene was not inside the balloon-lofted contraption that riveted the TV-watching population for several hours on Thursday. It's better to be safe than sorry, though - even if the false alarm is followed by a nationwide round of second-guessing.
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Reuters |
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British biologist Richard Dawkins is the author of the new book "The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution."
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Biologist Richard Dawkins is turning down the atheist rhetoric as he promotes "The Greatest Show on Earth," his new book about the evidence for evolution. But don't you dare suggest that he's going soft on religion.
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Frans de Waal |
Click for video: A female chimp shares a watermelon with two juveniles, one of
which is her offspring. Click on the image to watch a video from Emory University.
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Is empathy a uniquely human trait? Research released just today indicates that human culture rather than raw genetics is the prime factor behind altruism on a wide scale - that is, the sentiment that moves us to respond to tragedies involving people we don't even know.
But we're not the only species that exhibits fellow feeling. The impulse to cooperate is as much a part of evolutionary biology as the impulse to compete. You might not realize that, however, if all you know about evolution is that it's survival of the fittest.
In his latest book, "The Age of Empathy," Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal presents fresh evidence that our empathethic behavior is rooted in hard-wired habits that can be seen among chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal world, as well as in far-removed species such as mice.
For decades, de Waal has conducted eye-opening research into how monkeys and apes find ways to share their food, share affection and mirror each other's behavior. His studies of chimps have pointed to the origins of our language and our moral code as well. When it comes to getting along with each other, de Waal makes it clear we could learn a thing or two from the chimps.
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Chris Reardon / NGT |
Henry Ian Cusick portrays Charles Darwin in "Darwin's Darkest Hour."
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This year serves as a double anniversary for Charles Darwin: It's been 200 years since the birth of the naturalist, as was noted widely back in February.
Now there's a second wave of books and broadcasts that serve to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's masterwork, "On the Origin of Species."
The tangled genesis of that work is the focus of "Darwin's Darkest Hour," a two-hour docudrama premiering tonight on PBS.
The show features a little more star power and a little less laboratory time than you usually see in a science documentary on public TV, and that's because the "Nova" / National Geographic production team went with a scripted approach that's reminiscent of a Jane Austen adaptation.
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