Wired has this article on “the world’s loneliest species” which was discovered living deep (3km down) in a South African mine. This is the first ecosystem ever discovered that is comprised of only a single species. That makes it “the tidiest package of life found yet” with everything necessary for maintaining life packed into a single genome.
Nice.
The Ig Nobel awards are a parody of the Nobels for ‘improbable science’
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes that are awarded for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The prizes generally go out for interesting but strange research.
This year’s awards for for research including:
Very cool. Check out more detail on the winners and previous winners here.
It’s a little old by now, but this is an interesting story about how automated news crawling wiped $300m off United Airlines’ market cap. Basically this is what happened:
Crazy stuff.
XKCD is a superb webcomic (although pretty geeky) that I follow religiously. I recently came across this one which I found funny.
I thought it was pretty random so I Googled the incident and it turns out that Jimmy Carter was indeed ‘attacked’ by a swimming swamp rabbit in 1979! Read about it in the Wikipedia article: Jimmy Carter Rabbit Incident. There are also links to more detail.
Jimmy Carter stares at the crazed swamp rabbit that he had just fought off. Carter was out fishing alone when the swamp rabbit swam towards him and tried desperately to enter the boat. Mr President was forced to fend it off with an oar. Not sure that I believe this – but it does seem to be legit…
This site shows how common your surname is around the world (actually a quick look at the FAQ reveals that only 22 countries are covered). Anyway, I pumped Pott in and found out that:
Pott is most common in Germany although there appear to be quite a few Potts in Canada too
The highest density that I could find was Murphy in Ireland with 17,080 people per million!
Those who thought that only God could create life are in for a nasty surprise. Wired has this article about a team of scientists who are close to creating life from scratch. The scientists are able to build protocells using fatty molecules (for the cell membrane) and inserting bits of nucleic acids containing ‘source code’ for replication.
These guys aren’t able to get the cells to replicate properly on their own yet – only certain DNA sequences get replicated. But they are close to creating a new form of life.
Wired has this interesting article showing word clouds of the different speeches at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. Basically words used most often are largest in word clouds – they make an interesting way of seeing what was spoken about. For instance this is a word cloud for Michelle Obama’s speech about her husband. Predictably the word ‘Barack’ is most common but the words ‘work’, ‘people’ and ‘like’ are common too.
Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic conventionCheck out the article for the other word clouds, below I have listed the speakers and their most common words. Pretty interesting.
Dung beetles – evolving
One of the lies frequently used to refute evolution is that it can’t be seen happening. That argument is, of course, both irrelevant and untrue.
Evolution is routinely observed in action and a recently published paper (reported in The Economist) has illustrated yet another case. What I like about this case is that it illustrates speciation.
Speciation is more than an animal evolving a trait (like a longer tail, or bigger teeth) but rather a single species evolving into two different species. The resulting species are unable to interbreed and will go on to evolve completely separately – just has humans and chimps have evolved separately since their own ancient split.
The object of the study was the humble dung beetle, or rather a specific species of dung beetle which has recently split into four species. The beetles in question were introduced into eastern Australia, western Australia and North Carolina within the last 50 years.
Since then (through a fascinating mechanism that has to do with the relationships between horn, penis and vagina sizes – read the article for more detail) the different populations have developed to the point where they are (or very nearly are) completely different species.
Well within a human lifetime. Take that.
The Economist has this interesting article on an emerging field called ‘olfactory diagnostics’. Basically diagnosing ills by analyzing the air exhaled by patients. It has already been shown that more than 3,000 compounds are regularly exhaled, excreted or exuded from the human body.
By analyzing these compounds and their relative quantities a surprising amount of information can be gained. For example specially trained dogs have been diagnosing bladder cancer for years. However, advances are now being made in order to automate and increase the diagnoses possible.
It is plausible that in future incredible amounts of information could be gleaned through analysis of the air we exhale. Imagine the privacy concerns if, for instance, your employer could learn about your eating habits and possible health problems by analyzing the air you exhale at work.