07.26.11
Posted in Evolution at 10:24 am by nemo
Turtles Next to Lizards On Family Tree, Discovery Based On microRNAs Shows
ScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — Famous for their sluggishness, turtles have been slow to give up the secrets of their evolution and place on the evolutionary tree. For decades, paleontologists and molecular biologists have disagreed about whether turtles are more closely related to birds and crocodiles or to lizards. Now, two scientists from the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and their colleagues from Dartmouth College and Harvard and Yale Universities have developed a new technique using microRNAs for classifying animals, and the secret is out. Turtles are closer kin to lizards than crocodiles.
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Posted in General at 10:23 am by nemo
Mitochondria Share an Ancestor With SAR11, a Globally Significant Marine Microbe
ScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — Billions of years ago, an astounding evolutionary event occurred: certain bacteria became obliged to live inside other cells, thus starting a chain of events that resulted in what is now the mitochondria, an organelle found in all eukaryotic cells. A recent study by researchers at the University of Hawaii — Manoa (UHM) and the Oregon State University (OSU) provides strong evidence that mitochondria share a common evolutionary ancestor with a lineage of marine bacteria known as SAR11, arguably the most abundant group of microorganisms on Earth.
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Posted in General at 10:21 am by nemo
Eat, Prey, Rain: New Model of Dynamics of Clouds and Rain Is Based On a Predator-Prey Population Model
ScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — What do a herd of gazelles and a fluffy mass of clouds have in common? A mathematical formula that describes the population dynamics of such prey animals as gazelles and their predators has been used to model the relationship between cloud systems, rain and tiny floating particles called aerosols. This model may help climate scientists understand, among other things, how human-produced aerosols affect rainfall patterns.
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Posted in General at 10:20 am by nemo
Climate Change to Increase Yellowstone Wildfires DramaticallyScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — An increase in wildfires due to climate change could rapidly and profoundly alter the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, according to a new study authored by environmental engineering and geography Professor Anthony Westerling of the University of California, Merced.
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Posted in General at 10:19 am by nemo
Dolphins’ ‘Remarkable’ Recovery from Injury Offers Important Insights for Human Healing
ScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — A Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) scientist who has previously discovered antimicrobial compounds in the skin of frogs and in the dogfish shark has now turned his attention to the remarkable wound healing abilities of dolphins.
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Posted in General at 10:18 am by nemo
Under Cover of “Crisis”
By MICHAEL HUDSON
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson07262011.html
You know that the debt face-off is as staged as melodramatically as a World Wrestling Federation exhibition when Obama makes the blatantly empty threat that if Congress does not “tackle the tough challenges of entitlement and tax reform,” there won’t be money to pay Social Security checks next month. In his debt speech last night (July 25), he threatened that if “we default, we would not have enough money to pay all of our bills – bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits, and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses.”
This is not remotely true. But it has become the scare theme for over a week now, ever since the President used almost the same words in his interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley.
Of course the government will have enough money to pay the monthly Social Security checks. The Social Security administration has its own savings – in Treasury bills. I realize that lawyers (such as . Obama and indeed most American presidents) rarely understand economics. But this is a legal issue. Obama certainly must know that Social Security is solvent, with liquid securities to pay for many decades to come. Yet . Obama has put Social Security at the very top of his hit list.
The most reasonable explanation for his empty threat is that he is trying to panic the elderly into hoping that somehow the budget deal he seems to have up his sleeve can save them. The reality, of course, is that they are being led to economic slaughter. (And not a word of correction reminding the President of financial reality from Rubinomics Treasury Secretary Geithner, neoliberal Fed Chairman Bernanke or anyone else in the Wall Street Democrat administration, formerly known as the Democratic Leadership Council.)
It is a con. Obama has come to bury Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to save but kill them. This was clear from the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission, headed by avowed enemies of Social Security Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, and President Clinton’s Rubinomics chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Obama’s more recent choice of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats to be delegated by Congress to rewrite the tax code on a bipartisan manner – so that it cannot be challenged – is a ploy to pass a tax “reform” that democratically elected representatives never could be expected to do.
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:14 am by nemo
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS): On Heels of Heat Wave, House To Vote on Amendments That Could Worsen Global Warming
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/07/25-6
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:13 am by nemo
Earthjustice: House Continues Assault on Key Health & Environmental Protections
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/07/25
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:12 am by nemo
Congressman Dennis Kucinich Asks Tough Questions About FBI Investigation of Anti-War Groups
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/07/25-1
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:12 am by nemo
Tom Gallagher: A Little More American Raj in Afghanistan?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/25
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:11 am by nemo
Jon Walker: How Can Boehner Say Yes When the Deal Gets Sweeter by the Day?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/25-9
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:10 am by nemo
Holly Sklar: CEOs to Workers: More for Me, Less for You
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/25-0
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:09 am by nemo
Marge Baker: Too Many Rulings are Supremely Courteous to Corporations
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/25-8
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:08 am by nemo
Nawal El Saadawi: ‘The Revolution Will Win, Because of the Millions That Are United’
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/07/25-0
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:07 am by nemo
Free Trade Deals: Lobbying Fever Foreshadows Winners, Losers
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/25-2
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:06 am by nemo
UN Urges ‘Massive’ Action on Horn of Africa Drought
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/25-3
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:06 am by nemo
Scientists: Melting Arctic Releasing Toxic Chemicals
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/25
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:05 am by nemo
Seeing ‘Islamic Terror’ in Norway: Learning No Lessons From Oklahoma City Mistakes
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/07/25-4
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Posted in General at 10:04 am by nemo
Robert Reich: Why Washington is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/25-7
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07.25.11
Posted in archaeology at 12:26 pm by nemo
Heavy Metal Hardens Battle: Body Armor Hindered Medieval Warriors
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2011) — The French may have had a better chance at the Battle of Agincourt had they not been weighed down by heavy body armour, say researchers.
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Posted in General at 12:23 pm by nemo
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap5_1.htm
The long term trends toward empire are countered by the action of the transitional periods in the eonic series: a harsh judgment of man left to his own devices!
Brief Escape From Empire In reality, we notice that Greece itself experiences merely a brief interval, precisely timed to our eonic periodization, of respite from this phenomenon of empire, and then succumbs in the wake of Alexander. The usual periodization of the Axial period is thus misleading. By the time of Alexander, we suspect, it is well over. Let us note the remarkable fact that the emergence of monotheism, one of the prime ‘eonic emergents’ of this Axial period, occurs decisively in the period of the so-called Exile, when Persia and ‘Israel’ interact, as if the nimble and, ironically, impotent Canaanite non-kingdom were the only vehicle to carry the day. As if unable to untangle monotheism from empire, the Persia Zoroastrianism seems almost to cast its lot with the Israelite stream.
Surviving Empire In the remarkable case of Israel we see a victim of empire producing something new to replace it: an oikoumene religion, or a set of them. Nothing could be more remarkable than this frontier effect in the case of ‘Israel’, or rather ‘Israel/Judah’, that patch of Canaanite geography in the double shadow of Sumer and Egypt, suddenly spawning a religious literature, assembled from the folk tales and chronicles legends of its history. The most remarkable aspect of this phenomenon is the way that the geography is constantly challenged, whittled away, leaving a literary remainder, one that will soon diffuse into the general oikoumene emerging first in the Hellenistic, then in the Roman periods. This clever way of transcending geography is a tour de force of the Axial period.
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Posted in General at 12:19 pm by nemo
Egypt: A Synchronous ‘Axial’ Effect
The Axial Age provides the key to the study of earlier civilizations, and the synchronous take-off of two civilizations ca. -3000 makes no sense by itself. But once we see the dynamics of the Axial period the earlier case is suddenly transparent.
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Posted in General at 12:17 pm by nemo
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap3_2_2.htm: Deconstructing Flat History…
The idea of a ‘metanarrative’ has challenged ad infinitum by postmodernists, but in reality a ‘metanarrative’ is the one thing that can rescue historical study from chaos. The key to such a metanarrative is the idea of evolution…
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Posted in Evolution at 12:14 pm by nemo
http://history-and-evolution.com/whee4th/chap2_2_4.htm
The idea of a law of evolution after the manner of a law of physics backfires, because no such law will work with organisms, and certainly not with man, who has a subjective attitude toward such a law, and the confusing option of carrying it out or not!
One can thus falsify the very law in question with a voluntary decision to ‘do otherwise’/
Our beliefs about natural selection contain a subtle prediction about what will happen if we ‘act out the theory’. We can see from the eonic effect that no higher culture will be the result! Quite the contrary. If the rules of the game were survival of the fittest the long term trend toward empire would go unchecked, and democracy and equalization, connected with freedom induction, would be superfluous.
If we assume that natural selection is ‘how things are’, the source of all higher complexity, we put a premium on its ‘mechanism’, e.g. competition, and the ‘acting out’ of selectionist presumption as a curiously inverted ethic. We should be wary that something is missing in our understanding! Clearly the generalization about selection must be false, somewhere. We can see this if we consider this paradox: if survival of the fittest produces altruism, then won’t more competition produce greater altruism? Shouldn’t we disregard ethics and altruistic action long enough to produce more ethically altruistic men? This contradiction takes many forms, and strongly suggests, independently of the evidence (which isn’t provided in any case) that natural selection is a false generalization, and that a ‘boundary present’ issue must be taken into consideration in theories of evolution, as opposed to theories of physics.
Physical laws are statements about carefully defined massive objects. Evolutionary generalizations are about organisms, and the character of these entities is never systematically defined, or observed, and their character changes over time. The generalization by natural selection, apparently, stretches from the beginning of life, to the emergence of man, and therefore to man’s present, and, evidently his future, since, by definition, that is the nature of a ‘law’.
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Posted in General at 12:10 pm by nemo
Decline and Fall The study of civilizations has tended to confuse the analysis of historical dynamics. And here the work of Toynbee and Spengler (who totally misunderstood and rejected modernity) has had a popularity that has been uncritical on this point (they have plenty of critics, but none of that has prevented their enduring muddles).
A far more insightful analysis asks if their is something operating at a higher level than the civilization?
Once we ask the right question, that ‘macro’ factor becomes discoverable as an embedded sequential logic that is meta-civilizational.
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Posted in General at 11:18 am by nemo
GLOBAL INSECURITY
Terrorist proclaimed himself ‘Darwinian,’ not ‘Christian’
Norwegian’s manifesto shows Breivik not religious, having no personal faith
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Read more: Terrorist proclaimed himself ‘Darwinian,’ not ‘Christian’ http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=325765#ixzz1T8Ori1Yo
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Posted in General at 11:16 am by nemo
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/642303-ban-these-sick-ape-man-frankensteins
Ban These Sick Ape-Man Frankensteins
By – - NEUROSKEPTIC
Added: Monday, 25 July 2011 at 10:32 AM
According to a new report, urgent action is required to stop scientists creating a monstrous race of apes with fully functional human brains (just as Christine O’Donnell warned us about those mice), thus causing Planet Of The Apes to come true.
OK, that’s not quite what the Academy of Medical Sciences said. But judging from most of the media coverage, you might think it was.
The report is actually about “Animals containing human material” and it notes that under British law, experiments of this kind are covered by generic animal research rules, but there are no special animal-human regulations.
Should there be?
I think there should be. We as a society allow experiments on animals or animal embryos that we don’t allow on humans, even on human embyros. Clearly, we need to decide what we’re going to do about organisms that have both human and animal DNA, or whatever. This doesn’t mean restricting it – to clear up the rules could also facilitate such research, by making it explicit what is allowed.
However, we should tread carefully here. This is an area where our intuitions can lead us astray.
Although we have absolutely no idea how to make an animal-human “hybrid”, or even whether it’s possible at all, the very idea of it has many people worried. It’s probably a case of the uncanny valley and lots of cultural baggage (Planet of the Apes et al).
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Posted in General at 11:12 am by nemo
Gardening in the Brain: Cells Called Microglia Prune the Connections Between Neurons, Shaping How the Brain Is Wired
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Posted in Evolution at 11:09 am by nemo
Epigenetic ‘Memory’ Key to Nature Versus NurtureScienceDaily (July 25, 2011) — Researchers at the John Innes Centre have made a discovery, reported this evening (24 July) in Nature, that explains how an organism can create a biological memory of some variable condition, such as quality of nutrition or temperature. The discovery explains the mechanism of this memory — a sort of biological switch — and how it can also be inherited by offspring.
The work was led by Professor Martin Howard and Professor Caroline Dean at the John Innes Centre.
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