Created a living computer from E. coli Bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems (Jacob Aron; The Guardian, 24.07.09)

Posted by
Jacob Aron Friday 24 July 2009
guardian.co.uk

A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that could solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon.

The research can be used to solve a puzzle known as the Hamiltonian Path Problem. Imagine you want to tour the 10 biggest cities in the UK – one route might start in London (number 1) and finish in Bristol (number 10), for example. The solution to the Hamiltonian Path Problem would be the route that takes in each city just once.

This simple problem is surprisingly difficult to solve. There are over 3.5 million possible routes to choose from, and a regular computer must try them out one at a time to find the one that visits each city only once. Alternatively, a computer made from millions of bacteria can look at every route simultaneously. The biological world also has other advantages. As time goes by, a bacterial computer will actually increase in power as the bacteria reproduce.

Scanning electron micrograph of E. coli bacteria. A rapidly growing colony can be programmed to act as a hugely powerful parallel computer. Photograph: Getty

Programming such a computer is no easy task, however. The researchers coded a simplified version of the problem, using just three cities, by modifying the DNA of Escherichia coli bacteria. The cities were represented by a combination of genes causing the bacteria to glow red or green, and the possible routes between the cities were explored by the random shuffling of DNA. Bacteria producing the correct answer glowed both colours, turning them yellow.

In addition to proving the power of bacterial computing, the team have also contributed significantly to the field of synthetic biology. Just as electronic circuits are made from transistors, diodes and other devices, so too are biological circuits. Synthetic biologists have worked together to create the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, and this new research has contributed more than 60 new components to the list. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/jul/24/bacteria-computer

World's Largest Shark Species at Risk (National Geographic, January 17, 2008)

Photograph by David Doubilet/NGS

Whale sharks are the world's largest living fish species, growing up to 40 feet (12 meters) long.

They move near the surface, feeding on the plankton and krill that mass in these waters during the winter months. Around the world, shark populations have declined dramatically in recent years, mainly due to overfishing.

Most at risk are migratory sharks, including whale sharks, which are known to travel more than 8,000 miles (12,875 kilometers) across the Pacific Ocean, from Mexico to the Tonga Islands, according to Zeb Hogan, a fisheries biologist with the University of Reno in Nevada. "Every time a migratory shark moves from one spot to another, there's a greater chance that it might be targeted by fishermen or subject to habitat destruction," Hogan said.

Stefan Lovgren in La Paz, Mexico

READ MORE AT: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080117-whale-sharks.html

The Bru na Boinne Complex: 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Did you know that within 50 miles of Dublin the passage tombs of the Bru na Boinne Complex (built between 3300 and 2900 B.C.) are 500 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza and about 1,000 years older than Stonehenge?

Newgrange is a burial mound, 250 feet across and 40 feet high. It covers one acre. Inside the mound a 60 foot long passage leads to a cross-shaped chamber featuring a corbelled roof (a roof of progressively overlapping stones topped with a capstone) rising to 20 feet. After 5,000 years the roof has remained intact and waterproof.

Newgrange, like many ruins of ancient civilizations, is aligned with a particular equinox. In this case on the winter solstice, or shortest day of the year, a narrow beam of sunshine shines directly onto the passage into the chamber and illuminates the floor of the chamber, lasting for about 17 minutes. Every year tens of thousands enter a drawing to be one of the 50 or so allowed inside to witness the event.

Newgrange was surrounded by huge standing stones about 1,000 years after it was originally built. Bronze Age peoples placed 37 stones around Newgrange, although only 12 remain.

Knowth is twice the size of Newgrange. It is the largest of the passage graves situated within the Bru na Boinne complex. Knowth contains two passageways into the burial chamber and has 127 curbstones.

More than one third of all known megalithic art in all Western Europe is found at Knowth. It seems stones were even “recycled” and carved on one side, then later flipped and carved on the other. The artwork at Knowth contains a large variety of images, such as crescents, spirals, lozenges, and serpentiform.

Scientists believe the mound at Knowth was originally aligned with the spring and summer equinoxes, however that alignment does not exist today. The original passages have been destroyed or distorted so it is impossible to conclusively determine if the alignment ever existed.

Knowth appears to have also been used as a burial site by the Celts as some 35 graves have been found during excavation. Most graves are those of females; however one grave contained the bodies of two young decapitated men buried together with a gaming set.

By Joy Crutchfield
http://www.mcalesternews.com/features/local_story_178184608.html

Victims Champion The Sharks That Hurt Them (The International Herald Tribune; Friday, Juli 17, 2009)

Nearly a dozen shark/attack victims -many of them badly scarred or missing limbs- have urged the U.S. Congress to protect a sea creature they'd rather not run into again.

The group wants to strengthen laws protecting sharks from "finning," in which their fins are sliced off and they are left to dead. The growing market for fin meat, adelicacy in Asia, threatens many shark species around the world, they say.

Bull Shark

"We bring pretty instant credibility," Chuck Anderson said Wednesday. He is a school athletic director in Summerdale, Alabama, who spent 13 days in intensive care and lost most of his right arm after being attacked by a bull shark while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico in 2000.

Shark Fin Soup

Mr. Anderson and other attack victims met with senators and staff members here. The lobbying blitz was organized by the Pew Environment Group to pass a bill that would strengthen an existing ban on finning in U.S. waters.

The Measure, which supporters say would close loopholes and allow for stronger enforcement, easily passed the House by voice vote in March and is now in the Senate. Among other things, it would prohibit sea vessels from carrying illegal fins and it would allow the United States to call attention to other nations that are not following through with finning bans.

Swine Flu Vaccine: Baxter International and its dubious reputation.

Jane Burgermeister has filed bioterrorism charges with the FBI against Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, based in Austria; Baxter AG, also in Austria; and its parent company Baxter International in Deerfield, Illinois. Baxter International is providing much of the swine flu vaccine for mass inoculation. This is the same Baxter International that sent bird flu virus to European laboratories 'by mistake' earlier this year and it was mixed with a seasonal flu virus to create a much more dangerous strain.

Last year at least 81 people were killed by Baxter International's contaminated blood-thinning product, heparin, which was made in China from, among other things, pig intestines. The contaminated heparin also seriously injured hundreds of others and it was revealed that the factory of Baxter's Chinese supplier had never been inspected by either American or Chinese public 'protection' agencies.

More than 50 dialysis patients died in 2001 because of faults with Baxter International equipment, and this month Baxter Healthcare Corporation, a subsidiary of Baxter International, reached an out-of-court settlement of two million dollars with the State of Kentucky. Baxter had been caught inflating the cost of intravenous drugs sold to Kentucky Medicaid by as much as 1,300 per cent.

This is clearly a company you can trust and it is now is a major source of the swine flu vaccine that governments across the world want to impose upon entire populations with the most minimal safety checks. The vaccine is being fast-tracked through the regulatory system with safety trials lasting less than a week. The London Times reported: 'Regulators at the European Medicines Agency said the fast-tracked procedure has involved clinical trials of a "mock-up" vaccine similar to the one that will be used for the biggest mass vaccination programme in generations. It will be introduced into the general population while regulators continue to carry out simultaneous clinical trials.'

DAWN.COM (Wednesday, 15 Jul, 2009 ): Activists say Malaysia is losing battle to save Tigers

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia is losing the battle to save its dwindling population of wild tigers, a conservation coalition warned Wednesday after a series of raids that netted tiger carcasses and bones.

‘It is clearly time to admit that we are fast losing the battle to save our tigers to an army of smugglers and poachers intent on killing every last one,’ said the Malaysian Conservation Alliance for Tigers (MyCat).

‘They enter our protected areas with ease, and illegally trap, kill and export our wildlife with little fear,’ said the alliance which includes WWF Malaysia and watchdog Traffic Southeast Asia.

MyCat demanded that Malaysian authorities take action to stop the illegal trade in tiger parts. It listed a series of seizures of dismembered tigers in recent months, from the Thai-Laos border right down to Malaysia itself, including three kilograms (six-and-a-half pounds) of tiger bones found in northeastern Kelantan state last month.

The coalition said that investigations into the seized tiger parts found that some were from sub-species not found in the wild in Asia, including the Siberian tiger.

It said the findings suggested that captive tigers, such as those found in zoos and theme parks, were finding their way into the illegal wildlife trade where they are butchered for traditional medicine.

‘Swift and severe action must follow,’ MyCat said. ‘If we cannot stop captive tigers from government-supervised institutions from being illegally traded, there is little hope of protecting wild tigers,’it said.

Malaysia is estimated to have just 500 tigers still living in the wild. The loss of such a species can have a damaging effect on the ecosystem which is why many environmentalists are also concerned. –AFP http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/sci-tech/21-activists-say-malaysia-is-losing-battle-to-save-tigers-sz-40

Marcus du Sautoy: Pefect Numbers (The Times, July 1 2009)

(...) As a mathematician I was beginning to feel a bit left out. We´got Pi Day, which we celebrate on march 14, but how about adding a World Maths Day to the June calendar? On Sunday, when I looked at the date, it suddenly dawned on me why 28/6 would be the pefect day to celebrate World Maths Day - literally the pefect day because 28 and 6 are what mathematicians call perfect numbers.

A number is called perfect it, when you take all the smaller whole numbers that can be used to divide the number and you add them together, you get the original number. For example 6 is divisible by 1, 2 and 3. Add these together and you get 6. Similarly, 28 is divisible by 1, 2, 4, 7 and 14, which add up to 28. These are the first two pefect numbers. The next is 496.

Perfect numbes have been studied since ancient times and were regarded as having mystical significance. The 4th-century philospher Saint Augustine believed that God created all things in six days precisely beause the number 6 is a perfect number. In Jewish mysticism, it was because 28 was a perfect number that the mystics believed that God Chose it as the number of days that it takes the Moon to travel round the Earth, so defining the lenght of the Jewish month.

But it was the great Greek mathematician Euclid who discovered the exciting connection between perfect numbers and another important sort of number: the primes. By adding up powers of 2 he found that whenever the answer was a prime number then there was a way to use that prime number to get a perfect number. For example, 1 + 2 + 4 = 7, which is a prime number. If you multiply that prime by the last power of 2 in the sequence you get a perfect number. In this case 7 x 4 = 28. The next time you get a prime by adding up powers of 2 is 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 = 31. Multiply 31 by 16 and you get 496, the third perfect number.

Euclid was able to prove that this always worked. Whenever the powers of 2 add up to a prime, you get a perfect number by multiplying the prime by the last power of 2 you added. But was every perfect number discovered this way? It wasn't until nearly 2,000 years later that mathematicians were able to give a partial answer to this. Both Descartes and Fermat wrote to the French monk Mersenne with their discovery that every perfect number must come from the primes that are sums of powers of 2.

Mersenne acted as something of a medieval intenet hub, broadcasting discoveries across Europe, and it is his name that is now given to the primes that are got by adding powers of 2. Whenever a new Mersenne prime is discovered it leads to teh discovery of a new perfect number. So far we have dicovered 47 perfect numbers, the largest of which has nearly 26 million digits.

But there are still many mysteries that surround these perfect numbers. Are there infinitely many of them? Or is the 47th perfect number the last one? Thanks to Descartes and Fermat, we know how to get even perfect numbers. But it is still unknown how to get and odd perfect number. Indeed most mathematicians believe there is none.

So when June comes round again next year, and it's time to give thanks for the badgers and the oceans, why not celebrate a bit of mathematics on the perfect day: June 28.

The Ancestor Within (Michael Le Page; New Scientist, January 2007)

I have taken the liberty to include only those paragraphs and notes I believe are worth reading.

Evolution isn´t supposed to run backwards, but when it does it can sometimes represent the future of a species - even us.

(...) The description of any animal as an "evolutionary throwback" is controversial. For the better part of the century most biologists have been reluctant to use those words, mindful of a principle of evolution that says "evolution cannot run backwards". But as more and more examples come to light and modern genetics enters the scene, that principle is having to be rewritten. Not only are evolutionary throwbacks possible, they sometimes play an important role in the forwards march of evolution.


(...) In 1919, a humpback whale with a pair of leg-like appendages more than a meter long, complete with a full set of limb bones, was caught off Vancouver Island in Canada.

(...) Birds lost their teeth some 70 million years ago, yet in a famous experiment biologists managed to coax chicken cell to grow into rudimentary teeth by grafting them onto mouse jaw tissue."
(...) There are more than 100 medical reports of human babies born with tails. Some are no more than fatty appendages, but others have vertebrae and can even move."

Why Do Stars Exist in Pairs? (BBC Sky at Night, July 2005)

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Current estimates put the population of multiple star systems in the Milky Way at arouns 65 per cent, so the majority of stars we see in the sky actually consist of several stars. Binaries are the most common multiple systems; triples -a binary pair plus a single star, and quadruples- two binaries in orbit around each other, are much less frequent.

The first definitive proof of the existence of a binary star system was found by William Herschel in 1804, observing the bright star Castor. Castor actually consists of six stars in three binary systems; sextuplets like Castor are extremely rare.

Binaries exist in many forms, with periods ranging from minutes to thousands of years. Our closest star, Proxima Centauri, is part of a triple system with Alpha Centauri A and B. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, is also a binary, with a white dwarf and a main sequence A star in a 49.9-year orbit. The unusual ´wobbly´motion of Sirius led the mathematician Friedrich Bessel to propose the presence of an unseen companion in 1834, but it wasn´t until observations by Alvan Clark in 1863 that the dim white dwarf was spotted. Yvonne Hollands (BBC Sky at Night Mag.)

Rare Albino Whale Spotted (Video - National Geographic, July 2, 2009)

Migaloo, the rare all-white albino humpback whale, was spotted swimming off the Queensland state this week as he migrated northward along the Australian coast.

Migaloo was swimming with a small group of whales, and watchers set sail from the Gold Coast to get a glimpse of the endangered whale. Humpback whales have been heading north to warmer waters.

Migaloo is the only documented white humpback whale in the world, according to the Pacific Whale Foundation. Whale watchers enjoyed seeing him.

Watch video at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090702-albino-whale-video-ap.html

Stephen Hawking on Self Designed Evolution (The Daily Galaxy; July 03, 2009)

(...) "By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."
The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

Casey Kazan at http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/stephen-hawking-the-planet-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html

ARCHAEOLOGY: The Mayan Calendar (Video)

NASA FINDS MISSING MOON LANDING TAPES (Daily Express, 28.06.09)

Sunday June 28 2009 by Ted Jeory

ECSTATIC space officials at Nasa could be about to unveil one of their most stunning discoveries for 40 years — new and amazingly clear footage of the first moon landing.

The release of the new images next month could be one of the most talked about events of the summer.

The television images the world has been used to seeing of the historic moment when Neil Armstrong descended down a ladder onto the moon’s surface in 1969 is grainy, blurry and dark.

The following scenes, in which the astronauts move around the lunar lander, are so murky it is difficult to make out exactly what is going on, causing conspiracy theorists to claim the entire Apollo 11 mission was an elaborate fraud.

However, viewers have only ever seen such poor quality footage because the original analogue tapes containing the pictures beamed direct from the lunar surface were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

Instead, a poor quality copy made from a 16mm camera pointing at a heavily compressed image on a black and white TV screen has been the only record of the event.

The Sunday Express can now reveal that the missing tapes containing the original high quality images have been found.



If the visual data can be retrieved, Nasa is set to reveal them to the world as a key plank of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings next month.

The tapes show in much more detail than almost anyone has previously seen the surface of the moon beneath the patriotic symbol of the US flag. http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/110442/WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-NASA-finds-missing-moon-landing-tapes