what are they trying to signal?

Video - Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking Aliens

Guardian | "Extremophiles" are species that can survive in places that would quickly kill humans and other "normal" life-forms. These single-celled creatures have been found in boiling hot vents of water thrusting through the ocean floor, or at temperatures well below the freezing point of water. The front ends of some creatures that live near deep-sea vents are 200C warmer than their back ends.

"In our naive and parochial way, we have named these things extremophiles, which shows prejudice – we're normal, everything else is extreme," says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at Warwick University and author of What Does A Martian Look Like? "From the point of view of a creature that lives in boiling water, we're extreme because we live in much milder temperatures. We're at least as extreme compared to them as they are compared to us."

On Earth, life exists in water and on land but, on a giant gas planet, for example, it might exist high in the atmosphere, trapping nutrients from the air swirling around it. And given that aliens may be so out of our experience, guessing motives and intentions if they ever got in touch seems beyond the realm's even of Hawking's mind.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and chair of Seti's post-detection taskforce, argues that alien brains, with their different architecture, would interpret information very differently from ours. What we think of as beautiful or friendly might come across as violent to them, or vice versa. "Lots of people think that because they would be so wise and knowledgeable, they would be peaceful," adds Stewart. "I don't think you can assume that. I don't think you can put human views on to them; that's a dangerous way of thinking. Aliens are alien. If they exist at all, we cannot assume they're like us."

Answers to some of these conundrums will begin to emerge in the next few decades. The researchers at the forefront of the work are astrobiologists, working in an area that has steadily marched in from the fringes of science thanks to the improvements in technology available to explore space.

sarmoun stigmergy

Video - Bee Colony Collapse Disorder.

Guardian | Fears for crops as shock figures from America show scale of bee catastrophe. The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter. Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.

The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US fell by 33.8% last winter, according to the annual survey by the Apiary Inspectors of America and the US government's Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

The collapse in the global honeybee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honeybee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy.

Potential causes range from parasites, such as the bloodsucking varroa mite, to viral and bacterial infections, pesticides and poor nutrition stemming from intensive farming methods. The disappearance of so many colonies has also been dubbed "Mary Celeste syndrome" due to the absence of dead bees in many of the empty hives.

US scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and pollen, lending credence to the notion that pesticides are a key problem. "We believe that some subtle interactions between nutrition, pesticide exposure and other stressors are converging to kill colonies," said Jeffery Pettis, of the ARS's bee research laboratory.

A global review of honeybee deaths by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) reported last week that there was no one single cause, but pointed the finger at the "irresponsible use" of pesticides that may damage bee health and make them more susceptible to diseases. Bernard Vallat, the OIE's director-general, warned: "Bees contribute to global food security, and their extinction would represent a terrible biological disaster."

the fertility-opportunity hypothesis

Wikipedia | Abernethy's research has focused on the issues of population and culture. Her most famous work discounts the demographic transition theory, which holds that fertility drops as women become more educated and contraceptives become more available. In its place she has developed a fertility-opportunity hypothesis which states that fertility follows perceived economic opportunity. A corollary to this hypothesis is that food aid to developing nations will only exacerbate overpopulation. She has advocated in favor of microloans to women in the place of international aid, because she believes microloans allow improvement in the lives of families without leading to higher fertility.

She has opposed programs that would spur economic development in less developed countries on the grounds that they are self-defeating. In the December 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly she authored an article entitled "Optimism and Overpopulation" in which she argued that "efforts to alleviate poverty often spur population growth, as does leaving open the door to immigration. Subsidies, windfalls, and the prospect of economic opportunity remove the immediacy of needing to conserve. The mantras of democracy, redistribution, and economic development raise expectations and fertility rates, fostering population growth and thereby steepening a downward environmental and economic spiral."

Vanderbilt | As world reserves of oil and natural gas dwindle over the coming decades a prospect predicted by many energy experts the rate at which the people in most societies around the world have babies is likely to drop precipitously as well.

That is the prediction of anthropologist Virginia Abernethy, professor emerita of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University , speaking on Feb. 13 in the symposium From the Ground Up: The Importance of Soil in Sustaining Civilization at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Seattle.

The availability of energy has been a major factor in population growth, says Abernethy. In the modern context, energy use per capita affects economic activity. So a prolonged decline in energy use per capita will tend to depress the economy which, in turn, will cause a decline in the fertility rate.

Abernethy's argument has two parts: the link between the availability of petroleum and the economy, and the link between changes in economic conditions and fertility rates.

Regarding the first link, she points out that oil and gas are unparalleled sources of energy. Not only does petroleum provide the fuel that powers modern vehicles and the natural gas that people use for home heating and cooking, but petroleum products are the source for hundreds of industrial and agricultural products, including fertilizer, pesticides and plastics. This means that petroleum cannot be easily replaced by other fuels and feed stocks.

Despite the fact that continuing low prices are encouraging Americans and the inhabitants of other industrialized countries to consume oil and gas at profligate rates, numerous geologists, physicists and computer scientists have calculated that petroleum and liquid natural gas production will begin to plateau and then decline within five to 10 years, she says.

courage of the sisters

Video - Overview of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

NYTimes | In the fierce closing debate over health care reform, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops charged that the legislation didn’t do enough to restrict insurance coverage of abortions. Many Catholic nuns and the Catholic Health Association of the United States, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals, looked at the same bill and concluded that it would have no effect on abortion financing. They signed a letter urging its passage, saying the reform was “life-affirming” and consistent with Catholic values.

Now one bishop is punishing the nuns who supported reform. Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt of Greensburg, Pa., has decreed that “any religious community” that signed the letter would be forbidden to use the diocese’s offices, parishes or newspaper to promote programs that encourage young people to consider the religious life.

That was precisely what the Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden, Pa., whose leadership team signed the letter, were asking Bishop Brandt’s parishes to help promote. Many of the sisters — who specialize in health care, social services and education — work in hospitals, hospices and nursing homes as administrators, nurses and therapists. In an age of declining vocations, they are trying to encourage young women to join their ranks.

Bishop Brandt accuses the nuns of taking “a public stance in opposition to the church’s teaching on human life.” The nuns did not challenge the church’s doctrine of life from conception to natural death. They saw the bill as a powerfully positive step, because it provided health insurance to millions of people without it, and hundreds of millions of dollars for the care of pregnant women.

The Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden showed courage and compassion when they spoke out for reform. It makes no sense at all to try to punish them or thwart their efforts to find new sisters who would care for the sick and dying and lead exemplary Catholic lives.

stand down if you don't have ovaries

NYTimes | While we’ve been distracted by Tea Party antics, the government’s efforts to sack Goldman Sachs and the tawdry drama of John Edwards and his baby’s mama, a rash of states has rushed to restrict access to abortion.

Two weeks ago, the governor of Nebraska signed a law that banned most abortions after 20 weeks on the theory that that’s when the fetus can feel pain. But as Caitlin Borgmann, a City University of New York law professor, wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “There is nothing approaching a scientific consensus on fetal pain at 20 weeks’ gestation.”

On Wednesday, Mississippi’s Legislature sent a bill to the governor that forbids public financing of abortions. The prohibition stands even in cases of severe birth defects.

Tuesday, the Oklahoma Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto to pass two abortion laws. One requires women, even those seeking to end a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, to have an ultrasound and have the fetus described to them. The other prevents mothers from suing doctors who withhold information about fetal birth defects.

And on Friday, the Florida Legislature passed a bill also requiring all women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound. Even if the women don’t want to see the image, the doctor must still describe it to them.

It is a striking series of laws, enacted mostly by men, that seek legal control over women’s bodies. I happen to agree with Representative Janet Long of Florida, who said on Friday that you should “stand down if you don’t have ovaries.”

Proponents hope that some of these measures will force the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, public opinion is inching in their direction. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released on Friday found that the percentage of people who think that the Supreme Court is too liberal is at its highest since they began asking the question, as is the percentage of people who say that if Roe v. Wade were to come before the court again, the next justice should vote to overturn it. They’re not the majority, but it’s still not good.

It might be tempting to think of this as a temporary blip — a conservative swing during tough times, but that would be shortsighted. There is a long-range trend of public opposition coming from unexpected quarters.

According to a Gallup report released on Wednesday, the percentage of college-educated people who favor legal abortion under any circumstances has been dropping since the early 1990s and has now reached a new low. And while the largest overall drop was among men over 65, it was closely followed by a drop among women under 30.

This shifting landscape is ripe for a row over Roe. It’s coming. With luck, President Obama will nominate a warrior to the court. Preferably one who also agrees with Representative Long.

rachel maddow interviews dan stein

Video - Rachel Maddow sets the stage for FAIR president interview.


Video - Rachel all up in that..., just watch it.

rachel maddow fact checks dan stein

Video - Rachel Maddow fact checks Dan Stein.

cultural hegemony

Video - explaining Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony.

The View From Brittainy | The problem of Peak Oil is that the narrative which underlies it runs contrary to everything Enlightenment and the ideology of progress stand for. Where progress is about conquest and mastery of nature, peak oil tells us of the absolute, unmovable limits this very nature assigns to our development and prosperity. There is no way to reconcile them, and those who attempt to do it – such as the “bright green” - choose a more convenient problem to solve, global warming for instance, or end up defending such oxymoronic cause as “green growth”.

To get out of our global predicament we must recognize that an unsustainable society simply cannot be sustained and reshape it for resilience and sobriety. This massive powerdown effort cannot be even begun, except at the local level, without first undermining, then overthrowing the culture of progress which rules our civilization since the end of the XVIIIth century.

Similar ideological warfare have been won in the past, and against adversaries every bit as hegemonic as the ideology of progress. Christianity, initially, a small Jewish cult, progressively spread in the Roman underground during the heyday of the Empire before becoming its official faith and utterly replacing the once hegemonic pagan civic religions. The Reformation imposed itself in the northern half of Europe – and goaded the once all-powerful into extensive reforms – after more than a century of confused intellectual (or not so intellectuals in the case of the Hussites, for instance) struggles. As for the Enlightenment itself, its victory was a slow and difficult one. The late Christopher Lasch pointed out that the ideology of progress met with considerable resistance in America, from the Knights of Labor to the Southern Agrarian. As late as the early twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church condemned popular sovereignty and religious pluralism and until 1967 all priests and teachers had to take an anti-modernist oath.

It was not until after World War Two that those ideas fell into growing irrelevancy. The ultimate fate of the ideology of progress will ultimately mirror theirs, even if we still don't know which paradigm will replace it. History is full of aborted world religions and hegemonic cultures. The rise of Christianity and the Reformation witnessed the birth, and death, of not a few “heretic” sects which could have become the new norm, had things turned out otherwise – who remembers the Marcionites, for instance, or Arianism, at a time the official religion of most of Western Europe, or the original Anabaptists cults which raised such an alarm in Renaissance Germany before being stomped out by both Catholics and Protestants. Others, which could also have become hegemonic have survived by insulating themselves and becoming closed, self-sufficient, communities. The Jews or the Parsi come to mind, but the Waldenses or the Mennonites are also good examples.

popping pills to boost "brain power"

Watch CBS News Videos Online

CBSNews | If there were a drug that would make you smarter, would you take it? Today an increasing number of healthy people are using drugs without a prescription as a way to improve their mental function.

It's called neuroenhancement and if you want to find someone who's trying it out, just visit a college campus. That's where a surprising number of students are turning to drugs like Adderall and Ritalin, originally developed to treat attention disorders, to boost their brain power and help them make the grade.

the psychiatric drugging of children

Video - a pharmacist describes Depakote.

Counterpunch | Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, "the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society," warns the world-renowned expert, Dr Peter Breggin, often referred to as the "Conscience of Psychiatry."

"We're bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you're told, or you get diagnosed and drugged," he points out.

Breggin considers the situation to be "a national tragedy." "To inflict these drugs on the growing brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive," he contends.

The kids who get drugged are often our best, brightest, most exciting and energetic children, he points out. "In the long run, we are giving children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems."

Dr Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, "Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs," believes that giving infants and toddlers "powerful, brain-effecting psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity."

"Giving them these drugs," he says, "has no rationale, and ignores the basic fact that youngsters are very sensitive to their environments, both social and chemical, with the juvenile brain easily damaged by the latter."

During an interview on ABC Radio National in August 2007, Dr David Healy, the noted British pharmacology expert, and author of the book, "Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder," told reporter Jane Shields: "Just to give you a feel for how crazy things have actually got recently, it would appear that clinicians in the US are happy to look at the ultrasounds of children in the womb, and based on the fact that they appear to be more overactive at times, and then possibly less active later, they're prepared to actually consider the possibility that these children could be bipolar."

On April 9, 2009, Christopher Lane, author of the book, "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness," published an interview on his Psychology Today blog with Dr Healy. In the interview, Healy explained the history behind the drastic rise in the sale of anticonvulsants and antipsychotics as "mood stabilizers," and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

"The key event in the mid-1990s that led to the change in perspective was the marketing of Depakote by Abbott as a mood stabilizer," Healy tells Lane, and further explains:

"Mood stabilization didn’t exist before the mid-1990s. It can’t be found in any of the earlier reference books and journals. Since then, however, we now have sections for mood stabilizers in all the books on psychotropic drugs, and over a hundred articles per year featuring mood stabilization in their titles. Fist tap Dale.

church pitted against society and itself

NYTimes | As the sexual abuse crisis continues to unfold in the Roman Catholic Church, with more victims coming forward worldwide and three bishops resigning last week alone, it is clear the issue is more than a passing storm or a problem of papal communications.

Instead, the church is undergoing nothing less than an epochal shift: It pits those who hold fast to a more traditional idea of protecting bishops and priests above all against those who call for more openness and accountability. The battle lines are drawn between the church and society at large, which clearly clamors for accountability, and also inside the church itself.

Uncomfortably, the crisis also pits the moral legacies of two popes against each other: the towering and modernizing John Paul II, who nonetheless did little about sexual abuse; and his successor, Benedict XVI, who in recent years, at least, has taken the issue of pedophile priests more seriously.

He has had little choice, given the depth of the scandal and the anger it has unleashed. But when supporters defend Benedict, they are implicitly condemning John Paul and how an entire generation of bishops and the Vatican hierarchy acted in response to criminal behavior.

“The church realizes that it doesn’t have a way out, at least not until it confronts the entirety of its problems,” said Alberto Melloni, the director of the liberal Catholic John XXIII Foundation for Religious Science in Bologna, Italy.

This latest eruption of the scandal, nearly a decade after the costly turmoil in the American church, may just be beginning. Last week, a bishop in Ireland resigned, acknowledging he had covered up abuse, while one in Germany and one in Belgium also stepped down, admitting that they themselves had abused children. Other resignations are expected in Ireland after two government reports documented decades of widespread abuse and a cover-up in church-run schools for the poor.

The question, Mr. Melloni said, is whether the Vatican will hew to old explanations that pedophilia is the byproduct of a sexual revolution it had always fought, or whether it will confront the failures in church leadership that allowed sexual abuses to go unpunished.

Benedict expressed both views in a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics released March 20, his most complete remarks on the sexual abuse crisis. He said that secularism and “misguided” interpretations of the reforms of the liberalizing Second Vatican Council contributed to the context of the abuse.

But he also strongly decried “a tendency in society to favor the clergy and other authority figures; and a misplaced concern for the reputation of the church and the avoidance of scandal.”

no racial stereotypes or social fear

Discoverblog | People with Williams syndrome are some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. They are incredibly sociable, almost unnervingly so, and they approach strangers with the openness that most people reserve for close friends.

Their sociable streak is the result of a genetic disorder caused by the loss of around 26 genes. This missing chunk of chromosome leaves people with a distinctive elfin face, a risk of heart problems, and a characteristic lack of social fear. They don’t experience the same worries or concerns that most of us face when meeting new people. And now, Andreia Santos from the University of Heidelberg has suggested that they have an even more unique trait – they seem to lack racial bias.

Typically, children start overtly gravitating towards their own ethnic groups from the tender age of three. Groups of people from all over the globe and all sorts of cultures show these biases. Even autistic children, who can have severe difficulties with social relationships, show signs of racial stereotypes. But Santos says that the Williams syndrome kids are the first group of humans devoid of such racial bias, although, as we’ll see, not everyone agrees.

Santos compared the behaviour of 20 white children with Williams syndrome, aged 7 to 16, and 20 typical white children of similar backgrounds and mental ages. To do so, she used a test called the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM-II), which is designed to tease out traces of gender or racial biases in young children.

Santos suggests that children with Williams syndrome don’t develop the same biases that their peers do, because they don’t experience social fear. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, who led the study, says, “There are hyper-social, very empathetic, very friendly, and do not get danger signals.” And because they’ll freely interact with anyone, they are less likely to cultivate a preference for people of their own ethnic groups. Alternatively, it could be that because they don’t fall prey to stereotypes, they’re more likely to socialise with everyone.

Santos is quick to rule out alternative explanations for this result. Some of the children with Williams syndrome were more intelligent or mentally advanced than the others, but they behaved in the same way. Nor could it be that they suffered from a general inability to assess people’s features, for both groups of children showed a bias towards their own gender. Fist tap Dale.

will goldman sachs prove that greed is god?

Guardian | The investment bank's cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilisation – the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can.

So Goldman Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.

Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s – and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.

When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the American housing bubble two years ago, few people understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.

While, outside of America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person western civilisation has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting died of boredom-induced aneurysms), in America Rand is upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom. Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshipped even by people who've never read her books oreven heard of her. The rightwing "Tea Party" movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.

Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the bank a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity") that unexpectedly sparked a heated national debate. On one side of the debate were people like me, who believed that Goldman is little better than a criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking the market, the government, and even its own clients in a bewildering variety of complex financial scams.

On the other side of the debate were the people who argued Goldman wasn't guilty of anything except being "too smart" and really, really good at making money. This side of the argument was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealised heroes, the saviours of society.

In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the rich) and the "parasites" and "moochers" who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics. Rand believed government had virtually no natural role in society. She conceded that police were necessary, but was such a fervent believer in laissez-faire capitalism she refused to accept any need for economic regulation – which is a fancy way of saying we only need law enforcement for unsophisticated criminals.

parasitic psychopaths control major financial institutions

Fist tap Dale.

Video - Bill Black Interview To Rob a Country, Own a Bank.

Video - Bill Black Interview Pt 2.

Video - Bill Black Interview Pt 3.

five fundamental errors

Dieoff | Any ONE fundamental error in neoclassical economic theory should be sufficient reason to reject conclusions based upon that theory. Here are five fundamental errors in the theory:

#1. A fundamentally incorrect "method": the economist uses "correlation" and "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after-the-fact) reasoning, rather than the "scientific method".

#2. A fundamentally inverted worldview: the economist sees the environment as a subsystem of the economy, rather than the other way around. In other words, economists are trained to believe that natural resources come from "markets" rather than the "environment". The corollary is that "man-made capital" can substitute for "natural capital". But the First Law of thermodynamics tells us there is no "creation" -- there is no such thing as "man-made capital". Thus,ALL capital is "natural capital", and the economy is 100% dependent on the "environment" for everything.

#3. A fundamentally incorrect view of "money": the economist sees "money" as nothing more than a medium of exchange, rather than as social power – or "political power". But even the casual observer can see that money is social power because it "empowers" people to buy and do the things they want -- including buying and doing other people: politics.

If employers have the freedom to pay workers less "political power", then they will retain more political power for themselves. Money is, in a word, "coercion", and "economic efficiency" is correctly seen as a political concept designed to conserve social power for those who have it -- to make the politically powerful, even more powerful, and the politically weak, even weaker.

#4. A fundamentally incorrect view of his raison d'etre: the economist sees "Homo economicus" as a "Bayesian utility maximizer", rather than "Homo sapiens" as a "primate". In other words, contemporary economics and econometrics is WRONG from the bottom up -- and economists know it. The entire discipline of economics is based on a lie -- and economists know it. Moreover, if human behavior is not the result of mathematical calculation -- and it isn't -- then in principle,economists will NEVER get it right.

#5. A fundamentally incorrect view of economic élan vital: the economist sees economic activity as a function of infinite "money creation", rather than a function of finite "energy stocks" and finite "energy flows". In fact, the economy is 100% dependent on available energy -- it always has been, and it always will be.

sources of heritable novelty

How is new genetic material acquired? How much new genetic material can be acquired a gene at a time, or just a few genes - the ones desired? The new technology of DNA-sequencing lets us answer these questions directly.

The minimal heritable genetic change is a single base-pair change in DNA - from A-T to G-C (or from G-C to A-T). The maximal heritable change is the acquisition of an entire set of genes to run an organism (the genome) along with the rest of the organism in a healthy state so that the genome may have something to run. In between are many other ways in which organisms gain and retain heritable novelty. When the complete sequencing of the human genome was announced at the beginning of this millennium, many were quite surprised to learn that some 250 of the more than 30,000 human genes of our bodies have come directly from bacteria. These genes, long sequences of DNA that code for proteins, are as recognizably of bacterial origin as a feather is recognizably from a bird rather than, say, a shark's mouth.

How bacteria passed genes to people no one knows, but a good guess is via viruses. Bacteria are notorious for harboring viruses and moving them to new localities, such as to other bacteria.

The genome of the common yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been fully sequenced, and it gave the scientists who did it a nice surprise. The chose S. cerevisiae-a single-celled fungus-as the representative of the fungus kingdom to sequence because this versatile little cell's life is tied to ours in many ways. This yeast makes dough rise, and therefore most baked goods - bread or cake or brioche - depend on it. It brews beer, therefore all beer with alcohol depends on happy growing conditions for Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It abounds in yougurt and other dairy products. It grows quickly and well under laboratory conditions and has been a favorite object of study in the investigation of fungal sex, fungal viruses, chromosome behaviour, growth, and survival as well as spore formation. Each Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast cell, as was well known, is "haploid", which means it has only one copy of each of its ten chromosomes. (We human animals are diploid, which means each of us has two copies of each of our twenty-three chromosomes; one set comes from our father, the other comes from our mother). What surprised everyone was that haploid yeast had two copies of nearly all the genes.

The yeast story adds another item to our collection of ways to gain new genetic materials: duplication. Every organism that has been studied has some detectable degree of gene duplications; a part of an older gene, and entire single gene, a set of a few genes, a chromosome's worth, or - as in yeast - nearly every gene in the cell's little body. Just as extra copies of manuscripts or instruction booklets free up the originals to differ from the copies, extra sets of genes have proved to be very useful as yeasts and other organisms have evolved to larger sizes and more complexity. Principles of Evolutionary Novelty - Acquiring Genomes - Dr. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.

"deep" homology - not quite....,

NYTimes | Edward M. Marcotte is looking for drugs that can kill tumors by stopping blood vessel growth, and he and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin recently found some good targets — five human genes that are essential for that growth. Now they’re hunting for drugs that can stop those genes from working. Strangely, though, Dr. Marcotte did not discover the new genes in the human genome, nor in lab mice or even fruit flies. He and his colleagues found the genes in yeast.

“On the face of it, it’s just crazy,” Dr. Marcotte said. After all, these single-cell fungi don’t make blood vessels. They don’t even make blood. In yeast, it turns out, these five genes work together on a completely unrelated task: fixing cell walls.

Crazier still, Dr. Marcotte and his colleagues have discovered hundreds of other genes involved in human disorders by looking at distantly related species. They have found genes associated with deafness in plants, for example, and genes associated with breast cancer in nematode worms. The researchers reported their results recently in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The scientists took advantage of a peculiar feature of our evolutionary history. In our distant, amoeba-like ancestors, clusters of genes were already forming to work together on building cell walls and on other very basic tasks essential to life. Many of those genes still work together in those same clusters, over a billion years later, but on different tasks in different organisms.

Studies like this offer a new twist on Charles Darwin’s original ideas about evolution. Anatomists in the mid-1800s were fascinated by the underlying similarities of traits in different species — the fact that a bat’s wing, for example, has all the same parts as a human hand. Darwin argued that this kind of similarity — known as homology — was just a matter of genealogy. Bats and humans share a common ancestor, and thus they inherited limbs with five digits.

Some 150 years of research have amply confirmed Darwin’s insight. Paleontologists, for example, have brought ambiguous homologies into sharp focus with the discovery of transitional fossils. A case in point is the connection between the blowholes of whales and dolphins and the nostrils of humans. Fossils show how the nostrils of ancestral whales moved from the tip of the snout to the top of the head.

In the 1950s, the study of homology entered a new phase. Scientists began to discover similarities in the structure of proteins. Different species have different forms of hemoglobin, for example. Each form is adapted to a particular way of life, but all descended from one ancestral molecule. Fist tap Nana.

race and empathy matter on a neural level

Video - Jeremy Rifkin on Empathic Civilization

ScienceDaily | Race matters on a neurological level when it comes to empathy for African-Americans in distress, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In a rare neuroscience look at racial minorities, the study shows that African-Americans showed greater empathy for African-Americans facing adversity -- in this case for victims of Hurricane Katrina -- than Caucasians demonstrated for Caucasian-Americans in pain.

"We found that everybody reported empathy toward the Hurricane Katrina victims," said Joan Y. Chiao, assistant professor of psychology and author of the study. "But African-Americans additionally showed greater empathic response to other African-Americans in emotional pain."

The more African-Americans identified as African-American the more likely they were to show greater empathic preference for African-Americans, the study showed.

Initially, Chiao thought that both African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans would either show no pattern of in-group bias or both show some sort of preference.

The take-home point to Chiao: our ability to identify with another person dramatically changes how much we can feel the pain of another and how much we're willing to help them.

"It's just that feeling of that person is like me, or that person is similar to me," she said. "That experience can really lead to what we're calling 'extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation.' It's empathy and altruistic motivation above and beyond what you would do for another human."

no link between growth and better life

Video - Gapminder unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world.

Times of India | Economic growth seems to have little to do with human development. On the other hand, the empowerment of women may have a lot more to do with an entire country's development than previously believed. Those are the conclusions reached by a study done by two economists for the UNDP, conclusions that are sure to reignite the growth versus development debate.

Economists George Gray Molina and Mark Purser analysed data from 1970 to 2005 for 111 countries to reach these conclusions. The as-yet unreleased paper, Human Development Trends Since 1970: A Social Convergence Story is one of several commissioned by UNDP for its 20th anniversary Human Development Report, to be released later this year. The Human Development Index (HDI), inspired by Amartya Sen's capability approach, is recommended by some development thinkers as giving a fuller understanding of a country's development than mere money indicators, like GDP growth rate. It is a composite indicator with an income component (GDP per capita) and a non-income component (life expectancy, school enrollment ratio, literacy) with different weights.

Molina and Purser tracked the changes in the income and non-income components of the HDI separately. They found that changes in the two components are not correlated, thus undermining the common view that economic growth automatically leads to or at least is accompanied by human development.

The evidence shows that massive increases in education and health achieved over past 40 years had little if anything to do with globalization. They had to do with decision by states to expand their educational and health systems, coupled by initiatives of the international community to enable access to vaccines and antibiotics, said Francisco R Rodrmguez, Head of Research Team, Human Development Report Office, UNDP, commenting on Molina and Pursers paper. The increase in human development is actually an example of how state intervention works, he added.

Several poor countries have caught up with much richer countries in the non-income aspects of the HDI. In fact, the most rapid improvements in life expectancy and literacy are not occurring in the fastest growing economies of the world. They are occurring in a subset of lower and middle-income countries in Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa. China and the Republic of Korea are in fact the only two countries which appear both among the top ten income and HDI performers.

The paper found that changes in gender roles (literacy, fertility and labour participation) were a strong driver of human development achievements over time. Molina and Purser concluded that the forces that drive economic growth are not the same as the ones that drive human development. Demographic transitions, urbanization and declining fertility rates have accelerated life-expectancy and literacy achievements over past half-century. We believe the underlying drivers of these changes are linked to individual and household-level decisions concerning fertility and female schooling, the paper said. Fist tap Dale.