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News Briefs 24-09-2007

Paradigms are shifting all over the place today. Sorry I’m a bit late posting the news – apparently I can’t read fast when it’s hailing. 😉

  • Genome research is unraveling scientists’ basic biological beliefs. The science of life is undergoing a revolution so jolting, researchers are said to be awed, shell-shocked, confounded, and disoriented.
  • Researchers have discovered anaerobic bacteria that use sulphate instead of oxygen for respiration, and utilize propane and butane as their sole source of carbon and energy.
  • Velikovsky fan Robert S. Fritzius believes he’s found evidence of an interplanetary microbial delivery system; and he’s been trying to spark interest, and struggling to defend his ideas, at a mainstream science forum. *cough*cahones!*cough* More on his theories and research.
  • Scientists identify hundreds of new cold viruses.
  • NASA spacecraft found seven cave entrances on Mars. Some decent photos – that don’t take an hour to download.
  • Threatening asteroids that zoom past the Earth, fireballs in the sky seen by hundreds of people, and mysterious craters which may have been caused by impacting meteorites all make the ESA’s inaptly-named Don Quijote mission look increasingly timely.
  • Using a laser-heated diamond anvil cell to heat and compress the samples, scientists subjected ferropericlase to almost 940,000 atmospheres and 3,140 °F. Their results suggest that, from about 620 miles to 1,365 miles deep in Earth’s lower mantle, there’s a ‘spin-transition zone’ where density, sound velocities, conductivity, and other properties of materials continuously change.
  • All Change At Earth’s Core: Until recently scientists were fairly confident that they understood the way the iron atoms in the Earth’s core packed together, but new research has sent them back to the drawing board.
  • Geochemists challenge commonly held ideas about how gases are expelled from the Earth.
  • Unparticle physics: Our world may contain fields that have very unusual properties — properties that no particle field could have.
  • Why the mad scramble for the seabed?
  • UK plans to annex the south Atlantic.
  • Samples taken from a ridge beneath the North Pole appear to back up Russia’s claim on the potentially oil-rich Arctic seabed.
  • Oil Shale to the Rescue?
  • Blackwater: Where Military Rules Don’t Apply. (Wash-Post log-in req’d)
  • Seven CIA veterans challenge 9/11 Commission Report.
  • The Economist weighs in on the real price of freedom: It is not only on the battlefield where preserving civil liberties may have to cost many lives.
  • An Oracle for Our Time. (Not the computer algorithms, surprisingly enough.)
  • Accumulating and compelling evidence is undermining everything scholars originally thought about The Dead Sea Scrolls.
  • How Joan escaped the stake, and lived happily ever after.
  • Descent into madness led to the creative flowering of one of art’s supreme geniuses. Van Gogh’s final masterpiece to be auctioned for the first time.

Quote of the Day:

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist’s snobbishness.

Albert Einstein, 1954

  1. Genetic mayhem
    Interesting article.

    Makes it sound like there really are 2 currents in science, the one on top, that ends up being the one everybody gets to hear about, and the undercurrent, the one no one hears about until the other current starts breaking up.

    Just an impression.

    1. Unraveling DNA
      Since reading the article, I’ve been thinking about how huge this really is. The subject line of your comment – ‘Genetic mayhem’ – provides a clue. We’ve heard biologists’ drumbeat of genetics, genetics, genetics for so long, it’s difficult to think of a DNA-related term that doesn’t reference ‘genes’.

      First off, they need to stop saying ‘junk’, and come up with some genuinely descriptive terms for the other 96% of DNA. But it’s difficult to coin new terms for processes that you barely recognize exist, much less understand.

      Kat

      1. How about…
        CRYPTO DNA? 🙂

        —–
        It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
        It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

        Red Pill Junkie

      2. Junk Science
        One problem is that many scientists consider anything they don’t know anything about or anything they can’t currently explain as junk.

        The day science will have uncovered certain aspects of the influence of the invisible over matter, it will claim to own the ‘concept’. Someone may even trademark it!

        In the mean time, its junk.

        Cellular consciousness is not understood, if recognized at all. Pushing forward into the atomic and molecular interactions within the cell will eventually lead to a materialistic dead end, like the study of fundamental physics will eventually lead to a study of pure energy, which in turn will lead to a materialistic dead end.

        But there is nothing like realizing one day that what is understood is so remote from reality, so long as one has really learned his lesson instead of just shifting between dogmas.

    2. 2 currents?
      Now I know you Richard, and you don’t really believe that there are just 2.

      That are many thousands, as it should be.

      —-
      The cost of living has not affected its popularity.

      1. Yes
        If the public knew to not believe, not believe anything. And I am not just applying this to metaphysical, spiritual, esoteric concepts or anything other than science, then the public could see what people are bringing about and decide for themselves.

        At the very least, the public would not be caught so much in impressions and there would be far less argumentations and opposition of what each individual holds as the truth.

        In short, the public can only get caught between currents when it wants to believe them and if the public believes one over the other, it misses another other half of the medal.

    3. hearing about currents
      One problem is that whether the best idea ends up being a mainstream current, an undercurrent, or an alternative current is too often dependent on factors that have nothing to do with science, i.e. egos, amount of research funding, cultural factors, etc.

      I included a link to ‘Life on Venus bugging us?’ in that mainstream science forum (Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum – or bautforum) because the process of evaluating a new idea is quite interesting.

      I placed the article about bacteria that use sulphate instead of oxygen for respiration just above it to illustrate that there are always new discoveries coming along that may upset various applecarts, and point to new possibilities for life elsewhere.

      If you don’t get the connection, check out Wikipedia’s post on the Atmosphere of Venus, particularly the sections on the upper cloud layer and Possibility of Life.

      Addendum: I couldn’t find this when I originally posted the link to Atmosphere of Venus:

      “Despite the harsh conditions on the surface, at about a 50 km to 65 km level above the surface of the planet the atmospheric pressure and temperature is nearly the same as that of the Earth, making its upper atmosphere the most Earth-like area in the Solar System… Due to the similarity in pressure, temperature and the fact that breathable air (21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen) is a lifting gas on Venus in the same way that helium is a lifting gas on Earth, the upper atmosphere has been proposed as a location for both exploration and colonization.”

      Kat

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