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Dumb Ideas

Sappy Birthday, Plate Tectonics
March 8, 2007
Authors of prose and poetry often use personification to set the imagination and emotions moving.  Such talk is infrequent in science, because it can confuse more than illuminate.  We’ll let the reader decide the effect of a commentary in GSA Today1 by Shoufa Lin (U of Waterloo, Ontario), who asked, “When did the life of […]
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Amazing Facts

Turtles Hurtle Through the Sea Magnetically
March 6, 2007
Experiments on sea turtles have shown that they follow the earth’s magnetic field to the exact beach where they were born to lay their eggs.  “It is almost as if they were equipped with a compass pointing towards the beach in question,” says an article on EurekAlert.  “So they can correct any deflection they are […]
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Dinosaurs

Dino Horns: Is Smaller More Evolved?
March 5, 2007
One can never tell which way the evolutionary path will take to determine fitness.  Could be bigger, could be smaller.  Could be faster, could be slower.  Could be better camouflaged, could be flashy.  Michael Ryan (Cleveland Museum) decided that shorter horns on his dinosaur constituted better fitness.  CNN says his discovery, a 20-foot dinosaur in […]
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Amazing Facts

The Moth in Spider’s Clothing
February 28, 2007
National Geographic News has a picture story about a moth that mimics a jumping spider.  It appears to work.  Scientists staged a battle royale between contestants of mimics and non-mimics in the ring with their jumping spider enemies, and the mimics won hands down.  The spiders went for the normal moths 62% of the time, […]
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Amazing Facts

Submarine, Make Like a Fish
February 21, 2007
Submarine designers are learning a thing or two from fish.  The latest fish trick to imitate is the lateral line: a row of specialized sensors fish have along their flanks.  Fish use these for synchronized swimming and predator avoidance.  EurekAlert reported on work by scientists at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne to build artificial lateral […]
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Amazing Facts

Watch a Ribosome in Action
February 21, 2007
A remarkable article about a remarkable machine: that’s what Chemical and Engineering News has published about the ribosome, a molecular machine vital to everything alive in the world.  Stu Borman’s article lavishes praise on the details of this assembly-line factory that translates RNA into proteins.  He surveys the history of investigation into the ribosome’s secrets.  […]
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Origin of Life

OOL on the Rocks
February 15, 2007
Robert Shapiro demolishes the RNA World just in time for Leslie Orgel to demolish Shapiro's own myth. Ashes, ashes; they all fall down.
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Amazing Facts

Cells Perform Nanomagic
February 13, 2007
The cell is quicker than the eye of our best scientific instruments.  Biochemists and biophysicists are nearing closer to watching cellular magic tricks in real time but aren’t quite there yet.  They know it’s just a trick of the eye, but it sure is baffling how cellular machines pull off their most amazing feats.  Think, […]
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Dumb Ideas

Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week: What Thou Doest, Do Quickly
February 5, 2007
This award should be for last week since the article on EurekAlert was dated Jan 29.  From a press release at Rice University, it begins: It’s a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time.  For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years […]
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Amazing Facts

Cells Perform Sporting Interactions
January 31, 2007
The components of living cells perform such acrobatic moving interactions, one would think they are having fun.  Here’s the news from the Wide World of Cellular Sports. Speedway:  A news release from Penn Medicine talks about how motor proteins step on the gas and the brakes in their motions around the cell.  The announcer from […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Quality Control Runs a Tight Ship
January 31, 2007
Without the surveillance and rapid response of quality control, cells would collapse and die.  Here are some recently-published examples of nanoheroes in action. Plant checkpoints:  Picture a child watching the wonder of a seedling breaking through the soil into the light for the first time.  Within hours, the ghostly-white stem turns green, and a day […]
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Amazing Facts

Squid Eye Beats Zeiss
January 29, 2007
A squid whose scientific name means “vampire from hell” wears specs with excellent specs (that’s lenses with excellent specifications, for the pun-challenged).  Elisabeth Pennisi in Science reported on a talk given at an Arizona science conference about the vampire squid, whose “lenses are designed for seeing details, even in virtual darkness.”  Researchers studying cephalopod eyes […]
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Amazing Facts

Muscles Use Gears, Automatic Transmission
January 28, 2007
Analogies may not be perfect representations of reality, but it must pique the interest of all of us the way Elisabeth Pennisi in Science1 compared muscle to cars and bicycles: One look at a ballerina as she pirouettes and poses drives home the remarkable ability of our muscles to adapt to diverse biomechanical demands.  Manny […]
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Amazing Facts

Cell Membrane Has Ticket-Operated Turnstiles
January 27, 2007
Cells are like castles surrounded by walls.  A wall without gates, however, would prevent commerce and trap the inhabitants inside.  The cell has ingenious gates that control the flow of goods and services through its outer membrane under tight surveillance and quality control.  This controlled flow, as opposed to passive diffusion or osmosis, is termed […]
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Amazing Facts

Robot Legs Can’t Keep Up With Animals
January 25, 2007
Robot designers are envious of animals.  Insects, crabs and lizards leave them in the dust.  Alison Abbott in Nature (Jan 18) described the latest attempts to get the bugs out of insect-imitating “biological robots.”1  “Programming a robot to think like an insect is tough,” the subtitle reads, “but it could help breed machines as manoeuvrable […]
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