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No really, this is what counts for political discourse in Alabama…
Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 30 July, 1816
Prepare for your dinner to force its way back up. The Bible isn’t a science book. Religious fundamentalism of any sort is a plague on the mind. Again, capricious regard for facts and reality are characteristic of the right.
A Cardiff University study suggests that human beings are heterotic, that is from outbreeding, also known as hybrid vigor. This seems to be something of common sense when thinking about the fitness of of inbred and outbred people I have known and know of.
The Cardiff University study involved rating 1,205 black, white, and mixed-race faces.
Each face was judged on its attractiveness, with mixed-race faces generally perceived as more attractive.
Author of the study, Dr Michael Lewis, also suggested mixed-race people were disproportionately successful in many professions.
The study based its hypothesis on Darwin’s notion of heterosis, the biological phenomenon that predicts that cross-breeding leads to offspring that are genetically fitter than their parents.
Dr Lewis said the phenomenon was mirrored in the results of his study.
“The results appear to confirm that people whose genetic backgrounds are more diverse are, on average, perceived as more attractive,” Dr Lewis said.
Yet there is reason to believe that mixed-race people may not just be more attractive, but more successful.
Dr Lewis said: “There is evidence, albeit anecdotal, that the impact of heterosis goes beyond just attractiveness.
“This comes from the observation that, although mixed-race people make up a small proportion of the population, they are over-represented at the top level of a number of meritocratic professions like acting with Halle Berry, Formula 1 racing with Lewis Hamilton – and, of course, politics with Barack Obama.”
Dr Lewis will present his findings to the British Psychological Society’s annual meeting on Wednesday.
This is natural selection at work. A more diverse gene pool results in fitter (in a Darwinian sense) human beings. This sure tosses the whole idea of racial purity out of the window. I’m sure the haters would love that.
Check this. Korean researchers have discovered a way to create alcoholic drinks that reduce hangovers without weakening the drink. How? By adding oxygen bubbles to the liquor
When you drink ethanol, you body needs to oxidize it to water and carbon dioxide in order to process it. This occurs via hepatic oxidation, where the liver does its thing to counteract the liquor you’ve just poured down your gullet. The enzymes that process alcohol require oxygen to function, and it’s thought that by storing the oxygen in the alcohol itself, the system functions more quickly and efficiently.
Check out this story from The Guardian. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a lobby group who represents the RIAA, MPAA and others, thinks that open source software threatens capitalism and they want the US government to classify Brazil as a threat to capitalism for using open source software.
LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists say they have solved a crucial puzzle about the AIDS virus after 20 years of research and that their findings could lead to better treatments for HIV.
British and U.S. researchers said they had grown a crystal that enabled them to see the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV and is a target for some of the newest HIV medicines.
“Despite initially painstakingly slow progress and very many failed attempts, we did not give up and our effort was finally rewarded,” said Peter Cherepanov of Imperial College London, who conducted the research with scientists from Harvard University.
The Imperial and Harvard scientists said that having the integrase structure means researchers can begin fully to understand how integrase inhibitor drugs work, how they might be improved, and how to stop HIV developing resistance to them.
When the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infects someone, it uses the integrase enzyme to paste a copy of its genetic information into their DNA, Cherepanov explained in the study published in the Nature journal on Sunday.
Some new drugs for HIV — like Isentress from Merck & Co and elvitegravir, an experimental drug from Gilead Sciences — work by blocking integrase, but scientists are not clear exactly how they work or how to improve them.
The only way to find out was to obtain high-quality crystals — a project that had defeated scientists for many years.
“When we started out, we knew that the project was very difficult, and that many tricks had already been tried and given up by others long ago,” said Cherepanov.
“Therefore, we went back to square one and started by looking for a better model of HIV integrase which could be more amenable for crystallization.”
The researchers grew a crystal using a version of integrase borrowed from another retrovirus very similar to its HIV counterpart.
It took more than 40,000 trials for them to come up with one a crystal of sufficiently high quality to allow them to see the three-dimensional structure, they said.
They tested the Merck and Gilead drugs on the crystals, and were able to see for the first time how the medicines bind to, and block, integrase.
Almost 60 million people have been infected with HIV and 25 million people have died of HIV-related causes since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. There is no cure and no vaccine, although drug cocktails can keep patients healthy.
United Nations data for 2008 show that 33.4 million people had HIV and 2 million people died of AIDS. The worst-affected region is sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 67 percent of all people living with HIV.
I never really thought about this, but yeah I guess there has to be some sort of infrastructure to enable Internet access in space.
[S]pace Internet is a strange hodgepodge of communication systems, and collectively it all largely sucks. A new plan by NASA, however, will result in the agency consolidating its Space Network, Near Earth Network and Deep Space Network into one unified system… and hopefully, this will lead to vastly improved Internet access for astronauts.
The problem is that right now, NASA has no unified communication infrastructure. Each mission the agency puts together is uniquely put together, and communication equipment widely varies. This equipment consequently proves difficult to upgrade, leaving wide discrepancies in performance: the International Space Station, for example, gets sub-dial-up rates, while the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter can suck up over 450GB a day.
NASA’s aiming to fix this by appointing Badri Younes as deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation, who will overhaul, consolidate and standardize all of NASA’s disparate communications system by 2018.
From the American Museum of Natural History…
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
