China is apparently working on a super-duper-high-speed maglev vacuum train with a top speed of 1000+ km per hour, at a cost of over $2.95 million per kilometer of maglev vacuum railway.
Put those two numbers together, and you get a train that travels at $3 billion per hour. I would make a pilgrimage to China just for that. And pandas.
Add comment August 5th, 2010 at 09:37pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, TechnologyFor those of you who might be wondering who you write like, there’s… this.
Apparently I write like Chuck Palahniuk here, and William Gibson at FDL. I swear it’s not intentional…
Add comment July 21st, 2010 at 11:20am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Books, Coolness
I have long believed that if The Darkness traveled back in time to the 1970s and brought their video for A Thing Called Love with them, they would have been worshiped as gods. But now Alex Varanese has done them one (or four) better, with these brilliant retro product concepts and no-we-totally-didn’t-travel-in-time-why-would-you-think-that-that’s-crazy-talk advertisements for iPods, laptops, cellphones and Gameboys… done 70s style. Awesome!
(h/t Engadget)
1 comment June 22nd, 2010 at 11:28am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Art/Architecture, Coolness, TechnologyMega Piranha (starring Tiffany!) is on SyFy tonight at 9:00, and I cannot recommend it enough. It is truly one of the Most Awesome Movies Ever Made.
Add comment May 30th, 2010 at 12:06pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Movies
(Skip ahead to about the one-minute mark for THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER)
So when I heard that SyFy was going to be presenting a movie called Mega Piranha, starring Greg Brady and Tiffany, I was fairly certain that it would be The Most Awesome Movie Ever Made, with the possible exception of Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus, which starred Debbie Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas. But I got more. A lot more.
So without further ado, here is some of the Vital Knowledge I was able to glean from this Brilliant Cinematic Masterpiece:
1) It is possible to fend off a swarm of giant mutant piranha with either a hunting knife or bicycle kicks (see video above for documentary proof).
2) It is possible to construct a movie in which the guy who played Greg Brady is the best actor present.
3) Tiffany makes Debbie Gibson look like Meryl Streep.
4) The Orinoco River is full of coral reefs.
5) Giant mutant piranha are are asexual hermaphrodites that double in size every 1 to 36 hours and don’t mind saltwater or nuclear explosions. They have two hearts, three stomachs, no blood vessels in their eyes, and are made of stem cells. Or something.
6) Giant mutant piranha can grow large enough to eat helicopters, submarines, battleships, shady diplomats, research scientists, and TV reporters.
7) Giant mutant piranha like to jump through the air while swimming, for no apparent reason.
8) Giant mutant piranha will often leap onto land in search of food, often embedding themselves in buildings.
9) If you kill one giant mutant piranha, the rest will ignore all other prey and kill each other fighting over its corpse.
10) Did I mention the bicycle kicks?
6 comments April 11th, 2010 at 03:14pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Monday Media Blogging, Movies, WeirdnessTutu says what desperately needed to be said, and not just to Africa. I usually try not to quote an entire column, but, well…
Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity — or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.
It is time to stand up against another wrong.
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.
Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.
These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.
Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.
And they are living in hiding — away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said “Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.” Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.
“But they are sinners,” I can hear the preachers and politicians say. “They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished.” My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?
The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
More Tutus, fewer Hagees. And Warrens. And Dobsons. And…
9 comments March 13th, 2010 at 12:36pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Religion, Teh GayRepublicans like a politician who stands up for what he believes — even if he believes the Republican Party is populated by a bunch of “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.”
The candidate leading the Florida GOP primary to determine who will take on Rep. Alan Grayson, the Democrat who represents the Orlando-based district, is none other than Grayson himself, according to a poll paid for by his campaign. Grayson is a freshman congressman who has drawn scorn from the GOP and has quickly built a nationwide following of progressives.
The poll has Grayson leading the 13 Republicans — among Republicans — with 27.8 percent of the vote. The congressman who mocked the GOP health care plan by saying that it amounts to telling people not to get sick and if they do, to die quickly, received more support than all of the Republican candidates combined.
No GOP candidate scored above 3.7 percent; 57.7 percent said they were undecided.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh yeah, he’s really in Desperate Electoral Peril all right.
I know it’s his own poll, but if the numbers are even close to right it’s hugely embarrassing for the Republicans. It’s also some pretty brilliant and creative campaign messaging.
1 comment March 5th, 2010 at 11:24am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Polls, RepublicansFrom, uh… cellphones.
http://www.vimeo.com/8118831(h/t Switched, by way of Engadget)
2 comments December 24th, 2009 at 10:56am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Monday Media Blogging, TechnologyNot so much the casting (although I like Natalie Portman) as the fact that this movie is getting made at all:
Portman will star in and produce “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” a film that is based on the bestselling book written by Seth Grahame-Smith and Austen. Lionsgate will finance and distribute. Quirk Books published the tome.
(…)
Described as an expanded version of the Austen classic, the book tells the timeless story of a woman’s quest for love and independence amid the outbreak of a deadly virus that turns the undead into vicious killers.
Portman will play feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet, who is distracted from her quest to eradicate the zombie menace by the arrival of the arrogant Mr. Darcy.
Awesome. Now if someone will just make “Zombies On A Plane”, I can die happy. And then get reanimated on a plane and start eating people.
(h/t The Frisky)
Add comment December 11th, 2009 at 04:37pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, MoviesLou Dobbs, the longtime CNN anchor whose anti-immigration views have made him a TV lightning rod, plans to announce Wednesday that he is leaving the network, two network employees said.
A CNN executive confirmed that Mr. Dobbs will announce his resignation plans on his 7 p.m. program. His resignation is effective immediately; tonight’s program will be his last on CNN. His contract was not set to expire until the end of 2011.
Good riddance. I’m gonna go with four months as the over/under for when he gets his own show at Fox News.
4 comments November 11th, 2009 at 06:57pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Immigration, Media, Racism, Republicans, Wankers
Yet another new theory on the purpose of dreams:
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking.
(…)
In study published in September in the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — most notably in the frontal areas of the brain, which are quiet during normal dreaming. Dr. Hobson was a co-author on the paper.
“You are seeing this split brain in action,” he said. “This tells me that there are these two systems, and that in fact they can be running at the same time.”
I’m not entirely sure I buy the parallel systems theory, unless that parallel system serves some other function when we’re awake. Another sleep scientist mentioned in the story believes that dreaming is simply what happens when our consciousness is cut off from sensory inputs, but I don’t think I buy that either, but perhaps it was inelegantly explained. I have a hard time believing that our whole consciousness is online when we’re dreaming, but I can certainly believe that there’s some kernel or submodule of consciousness that’s always on, and which produces strange and unpredictable output when separated from the rest of the mind and senses. In which case it’s not really all that different from Hobson’s theory.
Anyway, I’m fascinated by brain stuff, especially anything that suggests that there are multiple semi-autonomous modules in there.
1 comment November 10th, 2009 at 07:43am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, ScienceThe 2016 Olympics will have The Most Awesome Opening Ceremony Ever.
And probably the first ever to be available only on Pay-Per-View.
Add comment October 2nd, 2009 at 07:53pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, SportsThis is just awesome. Bonus points to whoever makes best use of the word “comeuppance”:
This week, Allison Vivas of Pink Visual received a fax from Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) group, informing her that she’s been chosen for a 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year award by his Business Defense and Advisory Council. From the letter obtained by ThinkProgress:
Newt would like to arrange a private dinner with you at the historic Capitol Hill Club on the evening of October 7, 2009 in Washington. You’ll dine privately with Newt at this exclusive venue and he’ll take the occasion to present you with your well deserved award and have your photo taken together.
This tremendous honor is a testament to your success in building your business and recognition of the risks you take to create jobs and stimulate the economy. As an award winner, you’ll be on the ground floor as Newt and his Council begin the work to turn this country around. … Newt is looking forward to hearing your ideas on getting the economy moving again and getting your feedback on his plans over dinner.
Pink Visual is a porn DVD superstore — not the type of company you’d expect Gingrich would want stimulating the economy. ThinkProgress contacted Gingrich aide Joe Gaylord, who sent the faxed letter to Vivas, but we didn’t receive a response. An ASWF representative reportedly called Pink Visual this morning saying it had “inadvertently” sent the fax to Vivas and was retracting the honor. Pink Visual’s marketing coordinator Q Boyer didn’t buy the excuse:
“Allison was disappointed to receive a call this morning from an ASWF representative stating that the fax had been sent to her ‘inadvertently,’” Boyer told AVN.com. “We’re not entirely clear on how one ‘inadvertently’ sends a fax to the right person at the correct fax number, so our sense is that this is damage control on the part of a group that is having second thoughts about either recognizing the excellent work of a porn company entrepreneur in light of their own conservative political and social orientation, or having second thoughts about their promotional methodology and communication protocols.”
A-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
I’m afraid I really don’t have much to add, it’s already perfect.
1 comment September 12th, 2009 at 07:24pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Republicans
Sci-Fi SyFy channel is re-airing both Malibu Shark Attack and Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus tomorrow night at 7PM & 9PM respectively!
For those of you needing a refresher on why it is a Moral Imperative that you must watch these movies, we have the shadowy & mysterious Codename V’s review of Malibu Shark Attack, and my 11 reasons why Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus is the The Awesomest Movie Of All Time.
W00t!!!
1 comment September 5th, 2009 at 02:37pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Movies
This Saturday at 9PM, the Sci-Fi Channel SyFy will be showing The Greatest Movie Ever Made, Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus.
If you’re unsure whether this is worth two hours of your life, you should probably review my list of 11 reasons why Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus is The Awesomest Movie Of All Time.
You’ll thank me.
UPDATE: The 7:00 movie is Malibu Shark Attack, which is pretty hilarious in its own right.
2 comments August 28th, 2009 at 06:26pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, MoviesThis is actually really cool and, I think, really real:
Fourteen years ago, Alex Queral was out looking for wood for a new sculpture, when he suddenly noticed all of the out-of-date phone books being thrown out. It dawned on him that these books could be put to better use, so he collected some and took them home to practice carving.
Queral has since made a reputation for himself for the uncanny portraits of celebrities he is able to find in the pages!
So how does he do it? He sketches the person’s face on a piece of paper and lays it over the phonebook. Using a razor blade, he then begins to carve away at the thousands of pages to create the 3-D portrait! Queral is now able to do about two per month.
Queral has had three solo shows to display the phonebooks, as well as a recent joint Obama display for his new portrait:
Wow. Now that there is an artistic medium that never ever would have occurred to me.
Add comment August 26th, 2009 at 07:40pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Art/Architecture, Coolness, Weekly World News, Weirdness
The young people laughed when the ATM asked them if they required “some moolah for ya sky rocket”. The machine, in Spitalfields, was one of five Cockney cash dispensers from East London to Barnet that began dispensing “moolah” yesterday morning.
Bank Machine, which runs 2,500 ATMs across the country, was aiming to amuse, but it has grander ambitions too. It hopes to follow the Cockney cash machines with Brummie, Geordie, Scouse and Scots ATMs. It hopes that ATMs will serve to keep these dialects alive in Britain.
(…)
John Strachan, 52, an IT worker from Dundee, found the experience troubling. When it offered to serve him in English or Cockney, he suspected a hoax. He selected Cockney.
“Readin’ your bladder of lard”, read the message on the screen. It asked for his “Huckleberry Finn”. Then more bewildering questions: did he wanted to see his balance on the Charlie Sheen? Did he wish to change his Huckleberry Finn or did he simply require sausage and mash, with or without a receipt?
After the concept was explained to him, he was so indignant that he resorted to slang himself: “It’s complete pants,” he said. “Using an ATM is a very sensitive moment.”
(…)
[N]ext to the Cockney cash machine in Hackney, Roy Parker, 62, a bona fide Cockney, was working behind the counter of a mini-cab firm. So, what did he think of the ATM outside?
“Real Cockneys don’t have bank accounts or all that palava,” he said. “They put it under the mattress.”
I would totally use the Cockney ATMs.
(h/t Yahoo, by way of Engadget)
Add comment August 25th, 2009 at 07:12am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Technology, WeirdnessI’ll believe it when I see a good bill emerge or a bad bill get shot down, but it’s nice to see House progressives actually flexing their muscles rather than just being railroaded into accepting Blue-Dog-friendly crap:
Liberals, Hispanics and African-American members — Pelosi’s most loyal base of support — are feeling betrayed after House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) reached an agreement with four of seven Blue Dogs on his committee who had been bottling up the bill over concerns about cost.
The compromise, which still must be reconciled with competing House and Senate versions, would significantly weaken the public option favored by liberals by delinking reimbursement rates to Medicare.
“Waxman made a deal that is unacceptable,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), one of about 10 progressives who met repeatedly with Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) on Wednesday.
“We signed a pledge to reject any plan that doesn’t include a robust public option, and this plan doesn’t have a robust public option,” he added.
By sundown Wednesday, the outcry from the left had become so loud that Waxman was forced to scrap a scheduled markup of the compromise measure. He rescheduled the meeting for Thursday morning and convened a mass question-and-answer session for a deeply divided Democratic Caucus — a meeting that is expected to be extremely contentious.
(…)
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) predicted that House liberals, who believe they have compromised away several core issues to further President Barack Obama’s agenda, might finally buck leadership if they are force-fed a weakened public option.
“I don’t think it would pass the House — I wouldn’t vote for it,” Frank, a CPC member, told POLITICO.
He answered “yes” emphatically when asked if progressives were willing to delay the entire process as the Blue Dogs have done.
Frank said liberals are becoming increasingly leery of the clout wielded by Blue Dogs and are learning from the success they have had in leveraging their numbers — a fraction of the liberals’ — into real power.
“If you allow one wing of the House to exercise all this influence, you have to do something or you lose all of your influence,” he said.
Apparently our progressives is learning. Maybe the Blue Dogs’ reign of terror over the Democratic caucus is finally coming to an end. (I know, I know, I’m not holding my breath)
Add comment July 30th, 2009 at 09:48pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Democrats, Healthcare, PoliticsThis is a creative new twist:
SOUTHAVEN, Miss. — Police say a 24-year-old woman has been charged with carjacking and assault after taking a car and trying to rob a Southaven business, all while wearing swimming attire.
Police Chief Tom Long said Morgan Haley of Horn Lake forced a woman to give up her car Thursday.
Long said the victim gave up the car without a fight to a bikini-clad Haley, asking only for time to remove her young children from inside.
Long said Haley then drove the stolen car to a business, where she told employees she had a gun and demanded money. The employees did not believe Haley’s claim and restrained her until officers arrived.
Police said Haley appeared to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the carjacking and attempted robbery.
It’s the spectacle of a woman in a bikini trying to convince people that she has a gun that elevates this from weird to brilliant.
Add comment July 28th, 2009 at 08:02pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, WeirdnessApparently, there may exist some alternate universe in which Walter Cronkite became Vice President of the United States…
It’s not even a long story. In 1972 I was political director for the presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern. That July, just as a rather chaotic Democratic National Convention in Miami agreed to make McGovern the party’s nominee, I convened a group of top campaign officials to come up with some options for the candidate to consider as his running mate. Armed with a poll showing Walter Cronkite to be the most trusted man in America, I proposed that the senator put forward Walter Cronkite for vice president.
My idea met with instant, and unanimous, disapproval. He’d never accept, and we’d look bad, colleagues said. Our candidate would seem to be grasping at straws, I was told. McGovern was still very much in the race: Polls showed us five to seven points behind President Nixon. The consensus was that we needed a mainstream political figure, acceptable to most of the Democratic constituencies. We came up with a few names, led by Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri. Eagleton had a lot going for him: He was antiwar, Roman Catholic, supported by labor, had a good record in three or four statewide elections. He was also free of scandal.
(…)
I had no allies among the top McGovern operatives. We settled on Eagleton, an ideal nominee by all the normal standards. The senator, alas, had neglected to tell us he had been hospitalized three times for what he termed “melancholy,” a condition for which he had received electric shock treatment. He had to leave the ticket, and the resulting crisis over a replacement cost McGovern heavily; indeed, pollsters said it doomed his campaign.
Decades later, at a meeting of a corporate board on which they both served, George McGovern mentioned to Walter Cronkite that his name had been proposed as the vice presidential nominee at that stage of the campaign but was rejected because we were certain he would have turned us down. “On the contrary, George,” the senator told me Cronkite replied, “I’d have accepted in a minute; anything to help end that dreadful war.” At a later board meeting, Cronkite told a larger group that he would gladly have accepted the invitation to run with McGovern.
My suspicion is that if the ticket had been
McGovern-Cronkite instead of McGovern-
Eagleton, McGovern might well have won that 1972 election, or at least have made it close. Had the latter happened, after the forced resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, McGovern probably would have been triumphantly renominated — and elected — president in 1976, with the most trusted man in America at his side.
Sigh. If only.
Add comment July 25th, 2009 at 02:28pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Democrats, Media, Politics, Weirdness
Okay, I know this is totally frivolous and silly, but it’s the kind of thing that makes me smile.
The Mets, as any baseball fan knows, are in the middle of a nightmare season of injuries and ineptitude. They managed to tread water for a little while, but the free fall has begun, and they’re just painful to watch. They hadn’t hit a home run in eight games, but today Brian Schneider and Fernando Tatis went back to back.
Apparently the home run apple in centerfield needs 45 seconds to “recharge”, so it didn’t go up after the Tatis home run. First the fans booed the apple’s no-show, then started chanting, “Apple, apple.” The apple finally went up at the end of the inning, and the fans gave it a standing ovation.
The team sucks, but the fans rule.
1 comment July 12th, 2009 at 04:01pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, SportsCan any of those English Firsters say that they’ve created a written language all by themselves?
The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made marks on paper, convinced that these “talking leaves” were the source of white power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create a Cherokee written language.
Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah that around 1809 he started devising a writing system for the spoken Cherokee language.
Ten years later, despite the ridicule of friends who thought him crazed, he completed the script, in which each of the 85 characters represented a distinct sound in the spoken tongue, and combinations of these syllables spelled words. Within a few years, most Cherokees had adopted this syllabary, and Sequoyah became a folk hero as the inventor of the first Native American script in North America.
It may be, as is often noted, that his achievement is the only known instance of an individual’s single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing.
(…)
By some accounts, Sequoyah was a kind of Professor Henry Higgins who enlisted family members who had sharper ears for discriminating distinct sounds. They helped him divide spoken words into their constituent sounds, and to each sound he assigned a symbol drawn mostly, it is said, from an English spelling book….
(…)
While working on his invention, Sequoyah the silversmith, teacher and soldier traveled widely from North Carolina and Tennessee into Georgia and Alabama. In 1821, after he reached Arkansas, he and his daughter Ayoka demonstrated the writing to Cherokee leaders, who encouraged its instruction.
A Cherokee Baptist minister translated the New Testament using the syllabary, Dr. Tankersley said, and Sequoyah was asked to use the translation to teach Cherokee boys to write at the Choctaw Academy near Georgetown, Ky., which was run by a Baptist missionary society. Other missionaries in Oklahoma embraced the script in Bible and other book translations.
Within five years, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, “thousands of Cherokees were literate — far surpassing the literacy rates of their white neighbors.”
It really is quite amazing – perhaps Sequoyah didn’t realize that he was trying to do something impossible.
Add comment June 23rd, 2009 at 11:37am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: CoolnessIt looks like biologists are closing in on the answers to some longstanding questions about how life first evolved:
The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them? How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together? But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?
(…)
The three researchers, Jack W. Szostak, David P. Bartel and P. Luigi Luisi, published a somewhat adventurous manifesto in Nature in 2001, declaring that the way to make a synthetic cell was to get a protocell and a genetic molecule to grow and divide in parallel, with the molecules being encapsulated in the cell. If the molecules gave the cell a survival advantage over other cells, the outcome would be “a sustainable, autonomously replicating system, capable of Darwinian evolution,” they wrote.
(…)
Simple fatty acids, of the sort likely to have been around on the primitive Earth, will spontaneously form double-layered spheres, much like the double-layered membrane of today’s living cells. These protocells will incorporate new fatty acids fed into the water, and eventually divide.
Living cells are generally impermeable and have elaborate mechanisms for admitting only the nutrients they need. But Dr. Szostak and his colleagues have shown that small molecules can easily enter the protocells. If they combine into larger molecules, however, they cannot get out, just the arrangement a primitive cell would need. If a protocell is made to encapsulate a short piece of DNA and is then fed with nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, the nucleotides will spontaneously enter the cell and link into another DNA molecule.
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but this does sound promising. Cell formation isn’t the only question about how life got started – the article goes on to describe advances in understanding RNA replication, nucleotide pair formation, and some things about the “handedness” of the various component molecules. Fascinating stuff.
Add comment June 16th, 2009 at 07:34am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Science
About.com has a most entertaining Top 10 list of embarrassing moments in the history of paleontology. The middle four are my favorites:
4. The Caterpillars that Killed the Dinosaurs
Caterpillars evolved in the late Cretaceous period, shortly before the dinosaurs went extinct. Coincidence, or something more sinister? A while back, scientists were semi-convinced by the theory that hordes of voracious caterpillars stripped ancient forests of their leaves, causing the starvation of herbivorous dinosaurs (and of the carnivorous dinosaurs that fed on them). Death-by-caterpillar still has its adherents, but today, most experts believe the dinosaurs were done in by a massive meteor impact–which somehow sounds more convincing!
5. The Elasmosaurus with a Head on its Tail
In 1868, one of the longest-running feuds in modern science got off to a rousing start when paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope reconstructed an Elasmosaurus skeleton with its head on its tail, rather than its neck (to be fair, no one had ever seen such a long-necked reptile before). According to legend, the error was quickly pointed out (in a not-very-friendly way) by Cope’s rival, Othniel C. Marsh, the first shot in what came to be known as the “Bone Wars” of the late 19th century.
6. Hydrarchos, the Ruler of the Sea
The early 19th century was the “Gold Rush” of dinosaur paleontology, with biologists, anatomists, geologists, and just plain amateurs rushing to unearth the latest spectacular fossils. The culmination of this trend happened in 1845, when Albert Koch displayed a gigantic aquatic reptile he named Hydrarchos, which had actually been pieced together from the skeletal remains of five separate whales. After his hoax was exposed, one wag appended the species name “sillimani” to the fearsome “Hydrarchos” genus.
7. The Oviraptor that Kidnapped its Own Eggs
When the fossil of this small Mongolian theropod was discovered in 1923, its skull was only four inches away from a clutch of Protoceratops eggs, prompting paleontologist Henry Osborn to assign it the name Oviraptor (Greek for “egg thief”). For years afterward, Oviraptor lingered in the popular imagination as a wily, hungry, none-too-nice gobbler of other dinosaurs’ young. The trouble is, it was later shown that those “Protoceratops” eggs were really Oviraptor eggs, and the misunderstood reptile was simply guarding its own brood!
Shorter Paleontology: D’oh!
Add comment June 5th, 2009 at 09:33pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, ScienceAlas, embedding is disabled, but one of my favorite movies of all time is on YouTube in its entirety. It’s called Koyaanisqatsi, and it has no plot or dialogue, just… imagery. It’s absolutely gorgeous, albeit a little depressing. And the Philip Glass score is fantastic.
Check it out so I don’t have to lend you the DVD.
1 comment June 5th, 2009 at 11:28am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Movies
Sarah Krulwich/New York Times
Today’s NYT Science Times has a fascinating profile of Victor Deak, who uses facial reconstruction techniques to turn hominid skulls into faces. But not just any faces – no matter how primitive (or in some cases outright bizarre), Deak somehow manages to give our long-dead ancestors and cousins dignity, serenity, curiosity, intelligence and, yes, humanity.
Well, except for the neanderthal, who just looks confused and dismayed.
Be sure to check out Deak’s physical and virtual reconstructions at his own website. It’s absolutely mesmerizing.
2 comments June 2nd, 2009 at 11:40am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Art/Architecture, Coolness, Science
Why Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus is The Awesomest Movie Of All Time:
1) The title.
2) See video above. The most WTF moment in movie history.
3) Debbie Gibson is probably the best actor in the whole movie.
4) Lorenzo Lamas. And he gets seasick.
5) Debbie Gibson and her scientist friends know their pheromone lure will work because it glows in the dark.
6) “Every scientist faces something like this sooner or later.”
7) Mega Shark is faster than a jet and big enough to eat the Golden Gate Bridge.
8) References to “The Thrilla in Manila” and Julius Caesar.
9) “Indeed, the laws of physics apply. Each possesses a strength that dwarfs our military might.”
10) Submarine helmsman freaks out and pulls a gun on his captain right in the middle of a dangerous and delicate maneuver, so Debbie Gibson knocks him out with a single punch.
11) Shark-octopus fight scenes OMG.
8 comments May 30th, 2009 at 02:03pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Coolness, Movies, Weirdness
Wow.
Add comment May 12th, 2009 at 07:43am Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: Blogosphere, Coolness, WeirdnessThis is an elegant and clever solution to the annoyance of Daylight Savings Time:
Just tilt it to the left to “fall back” or to the right to “spring forward.”
Come to think of it, why not just put a Daylight Savings Time button on clocks and watches so you could toggle it on or off rather than having to go through the whole time-setting process? I know, not as elegant as just tilting it over, but you can’t really do that with digital timepieces. And since tilting doesn’t really work for analog watches either, how about a movable number dial?
Or better yet, we could just do away with Daylight Savings Time altogether…
(h/t Coolest Gadgets, by way of Engadget)
1 comment April 18th, 2009 at 12:26pm Posted by Eli
Entry Filed under: CoolnessJust a little something I stumbled upon at Stumbleupon:
I always wondered where my kung fu gland was located. And whether I even had one.
Add comment April 9th, 2009 at 07:58pm Posted by Eli
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