Life’s Crystal Code

One of the greatest mysteries about the origin of life is how the necessary ingredients consistently came together in a workable way. On a planet full of raw chemical materials, what happy accident of nature led to the first tiny glimmer of life?

To Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith, that glimmer may owe something to the sparkle of a crystal.

Cairns-Smith, an organic chemist at the University of Glasgow, sees a significant relationship between the structure of DNA molecules and the structure of certain kinds of mineral crystals. He says that while patterned structures that replicate themselves are common in the inorganic world of crystals, it is a rare quality in the organic world — DNA and RNA are the only organic molecules we know of that strongly exhibit this characteristic.

The four bases that help make up the DNA molecule — adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine — do not repeat endlessly in strict order (such as ACGTACGTACGT…). Instead, the pattern is varied, like a barcode. This variability in DNA leads to the differences between organisms, and the copying of such complex sequences is the basis of heredity. Cairns-Smith sees this ability to print off reliable copies of sequences as an important point of similarity between certain kinds of inorganic crystals and DNA.

“One of the miracles of life, to my mind, is the accuracy with which DNA gets itself replicated in the cell,” he says. “It has to be that unbelievably accurate, otherwise we’d all die out in no time.”

Life’s First Barcode?

In 1949, the Irish scientist J.D. Bernal suggested that clay minerals may have created a meeting place for life’s first molecules. Such a scenario could explain how the randomly dispersed molecules of life managed to come together in the diffuse primordial soup.

Cairns-Smith’s idea takes Bernal’s theory a step further. In his view, clay mineral layers not only attracted certain chemicals from the environment to their surfaces, the mineral layers also acted as the first genetic information carriers, much as the base pairs in DNA do today.

“The objects that I’m particularly interested in are mixed-layered crystals, in which the crystal structure consists of beautifully formed layers packed on top of each other, but with an arbitrary sequence,” says Cairns-Smith. “In that respect, they’re like a DNA molecule, which has base pairs, little platelets inside it which are stacked on top of each other. It is the sequence of this stacking which creates the information.”

Cairns-Smith doesn’t think the clay mineral crystals were “alive” anymore than a DNA sample is thought to be alive. Instead, by acting as the first genetic materials for early life, clay mineral crystals created a link between the worlds of inorganic and organic chemistry.

via SPACE.com — Life’s Crystal Code.

Egypt to open inner chambers of ‘bent’ pyramid

Travelers to Egypt will soon be able to explore the inner chambers of the 4,500-year-old “bent” pyramid, known for its oddly shaped profile, and other nearby ancient tombs, Egypt’s antiquities chief announced Monday.

The increased access to the pyramids south of Cairo is part of a new sustainable development campaign that Egypt hopes will attract more visitors but also to avoid some of the problems of the urban sprawl that have plagued the famed pyramids of Giza.

Egypt’s chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, said the chambers of the 330-foot-pyramid outside the village of Dahshur, 50 miles south of Cairo, will be opened for the first time to tourists within the next “month or two.” “This is going to be an adventure,” he told reporters.

Dahshur’s bent pyramid is famous for its irregular profile. The massive tomb’s sides rise at a steep angle but then abruptly tapers off at a more shallow approach to the pyramid’s apex.

Archaeologists believe the pyramid-builders changed their minds while constructing it out of fear the whole structure might collapse because the sides were too steep.

The pyramid is entered through a cramped 80 meter-long tunnel that opens into an immense vaulted chamber. From there, passageways lead to other rooms including one that has cedar wood beams believed to have been imported from ancient Lebanon.

Hawass said archaeologists believe the 4th dynasty founder Pharaoh Sneferu’s burial chamber lies undiscovered inside the pyramid.

The inner chambers of the nearby Red pyramid, also built by Sneferu, are already accessible to visitors. Hawass said several other nearby pyramids, including one with an underground labyrinth from the Middle Kingdom, would also be opened in the next year.

“It is amazing because of a maze of corridors underneath this pyramid — the visit will be unique,” said Hawass, about the pyramid of Amenhemhat III, who ruled during Egypt’s 12th dynasty from 1859-1813 BC.

“Twenty-five years ago, I went to enter this pyramid, and I was afraid I would never come back, and I had to ask the workmen to tie ropes around my leg so I wouldn’t lose my way,” he recalled.

Only 5 percent of tourists coming to Egypt visit the three pyramids of Dahshur, Hawass said.

via Egypt to open inner chambers of ‘bent’ pyramid.

Language Of Music Really Is Universal, Study Finds

Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said.

“These findings could explain why Western music has been so successful in global music distribution, even in music cultures that do not as strongly emphasize the role of emotional expression in their music,” said Thomas Fritz of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

The expression of emotions is a basic feature of Western music, and the capacity of music to convey emotional expressions is often regarded as a prerequisite to its appreciation in Western cultures, the researchers explained. In other musical traditions, however, music is often appreciated for other qualities, such as group coordination in rituals.

via Language Of Music Really Is Universal, Study Finds.

NASA may send fleet of spacecraft to Venus

Two high-altitude balloons built to hover in sulphuric acid clouds could be part of a future fleet of spacecraft sent to Venus, a NASA advisory team says.

The multi-billion-dollar mission concept – which is being considered for launch in the next fifteen years – could help reveal more about Venus’s runaway greenhouse effect, any oceans it may once have had, and possible ongoing volcanic activity.

It could be the next flagship mission sent to a planet, after a planned mission to Jupiter and its moons set for launch in 2020.

The Venus mission would cost some $3 billion to 4 billion and would launch between 2020 and 2025, according to NASA, which in 2008 tasked a group of scientists and engineers to formulate goals for the mission.

The team’s study, which will be released in April, outlines a plan to study the hazy planet, which has more in common with Earth than any other in terms of distance from the Sun, size and mass, but evolved into an inhospitable world where surface temperatures hover close to 450°C and sulphuric acid rains from the sky.

The team’s mission concept includes one orbiter, two balloons and two short-lived landers, all of which would launch into space on two Atlas V rockets.

“Our understanding of Venus is so low, we really need this armada,” says planetary scientist Mark Bullock of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the team leaders.

via NASA may send fleet of spacecraft to Venus – space – 19 March 2009 – New Scientist.

The Pagan Roots of Easter

In the UK Christianity has come to dominate our understanding of Easter. However, Easter is historically diverse in its celebrations and origins, stemming from ancient cultures that predate Jesus and Christianity.

The celebration of Jesus’ crucifixion and subsequent resurrection is the most important date in the Christian calendar. The date of Easter itself has been disputed throughout the centuries.

Despite efforts by the First Council of Nicaea, held in 325, to establish a fixed date for the celebrations, the date of Easter alters each year according to the lunisolar calendar. Christian churches now use 21st March as the starting point for determining the date of Easter; it is then calculated as the Sunday following the next full moon.

The word Easter itself comes from the Old English word Eostre or Eastre which was the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess. She was celebrated during the Spring Equinox, the time we now associate with the Easter period. To this day many Wiccans and Neopagans celebrate this time as one of their eight holy days of celebration, also known as Sabbats. Within these religions the Spring Equinox is generally a celebration of fertility, bound up in the growing of crops and the growing balance between night and day.

Pagan religions in the Mediterranean based their celebrations on a story very similar to that of Jesus and his resurrection. Attis, a figure of a mystery cult that appeared in Rome about 200 BC, was reported to have been born of a virgin impregnated by the fruits of an almond tree. He was believed to be reborn annually, and the celebrations began with a day of blood on what they called ‘Black Friday’ and continued over three days in which they rejoiced over his resurrection. The colour black has also been adopted in Christian celebrations as the symbol of Good Friday. …

The traditional Easter egg and Easter bunny can be traced back to antiquity as symbols of fertility. Rabbits and hares, or more specifically Lagomorphs, were symbolic particularly for their prolific breeding. The phrase ‘at it like rabbits’ serves to explain these ancient attitudes towards these animals.

via Easter: what does it mean? – Features – The Yorker.

Robots could flex muscles that are stronger than steel

A new material that is weight for weight stronger than steel and stiffer than diamond, and weighs little more than its volume in air, could be the perfect artificial muscle for robots.

“We’ve made a totally new type of artificial muscle that is able to provide performance characteristics that have not previously been obtained,” says Ray Baughman, a materials scientist at the University of Texas, Dallas, and co-developer of the new muscle.

Baughman and colleagues have developed a technique to make ribbons of tangled nanotubes that expand in width by 220% when a voltage is applied and then return to their normal size once it is removed. The process takes only milliseconds.

Collections of those ribbons could act as artificial muscle fibres – for example, to move the limbs of a walking robot, says Baughman. And the material has other impressive properties.

It is extremely stiff and strong in the “long” direction – that in which the nanotubes are aligned – but is as stretchy as rubber across its width. It also maintains its properties over an extreme range of temperatures: from -196 °C, at which temperature nitrogen is liquid, to 1538 °C, above the melting point of iron.

This means any robot equipped with the nanotube muscles could potentially keep working in some very extreme environments.

The new material has some advantages over previous artificial muscles. Some of those work only when bathed in methanol fuel, others are capable of only very small changes in size and none of them work well at extreme temperatures.

via Robots could flex muscles that are stronger than steel – tech – 19 March 2009 – New Scientist.

Medical condition sexsomnia makes barmaid Haley, 23, – a sexsomniac – demand sex while she’s asleep

Haley Batty is suffering from an amazing sleeping sickness that really does keep her boyfriends up all night.

A medical condition means she can’t help pestering them for sex from bedtime till dawn. But she’s ASLEEP all the time—and never remembers a thing in the morning.

And, far from counting their lucky stars, the exhausted lads all do a runnner because they can’t keep up with her dozing desires.

Haley, 23, explains about her condition on our video player below.

Haley’s been dumped by a string of men who got the hump when they asked “Was it good for you, too?” only to get the response: “Eh?” because she’d been unconscious all night.

She sighs: “I can have sex three or four times a night if the guys have the stamina, but in the morning I won’t know anything about it.

“My last boyfriend went along with it the first couple of times, but then he said it just felt peculiar being groped by someone who was asleep and dumped me.” She says her behaviour is a recognised medical condition. “I discovered the name for it, sexsomnia. It’s like a form of sleepwalking, only you don’t sleepwalk, you have sex.”

… “My last boyfriend dumped me because of it. He moved in with me and the first morning he woke up and said, ‘You were rampant last night. You couldn’t keep your hands off me’. He looked shattered and I explained about the sexsomnia. He laughed and said he’d look forward to more of that but I knew it would soon weird him out. In the end he couldn’t cope and moved out.”

Another boyfriend was upset when she told him she’d been fast asleep during his sex marathon.

“He completely freaked out. He thought I was mocking his prowess in bed. He told me he never wanted to see me again.”

She’s now under the doctor and seeking treatment from a psychotherapist and at a sleep clinic. Haley adds: “It’s a horrible feeling to wake up next to someone not knowing what you’ve been doing with them. All I want is to have a normal sex life and to be awake when I’m doing it.”

via Medical condition sexsomnia makes barmaid Haley, 23, – a sexsomniac – demand sex while she’s asleep | News | News Of The World.

Video here of Haley explaining her condition.  Some may think this is a hoax, but here’s what Wikipedia says:

Sleep sex or sexsomnia is a form of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) parasomnia (similar to sleepwalking) that causes people to engage in sexual acts while they are asleep. The proposed medical diagnosis is NREM Arousal Parasomnia – Sexual Behaviour in Sleep, and is considered to be a distinct variant of sleepwalking/confusional arousals (ICSD 2).

The first research paper that suggested that sexual behavior during sleep may be a new type of parasomnia was published in 1996 by three researchers from the University of Toronto (Dr. Colin Shapiro and Dr. Nik Trajanovic) and the University of Ottawa (Dr. Paul Fedoroff) [1]. Later, several papers were published describing the problem and suggested that problematic forms of sleep sex are medically treatable “conditions” (see external links). The condition was defined in a paper called “Sexsomnia — A New Parasomnia?” published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry in June 2003. The first doctor to coin the term “Sleep sex” was Dr. David Saul Rosenfeld, a neurologist and sleep doctor from Los Angeles, California.

In some cases, sufferers are aware of their behavior for a long time before they seek help, often because they lack information that it is a medical disorder or for fear that others will judge it as willful behavior rather than a medical condition. However, the reality of sexsomnia has been confirmed by sleep disorder researchers who have made polygraphic and video recordings of patients with the condition while they are asleep and observed unusual brain wave activity during the episodes similar to that experienced in other NREM arousal parasomnias. It is a mind/body disconnect that occurs during sleep. The treatment has commonalities with other NREM parasomnias, and also involves specific interventions. By avoiding precipitating factors and ensuring a safe environment, the condition could be brought to a high level of control with minimal effort.

Sexsomnia is not always problematic or extreme for those who experience it or for their partners. There is a great variety in both the frequency and levels to which people are affected by this disorder.

‘He really is dead’: Son takes his father’s ashes to the doctor to stop endless appointment reminders

A son got so fed up with hospital staff sending letters to his dead father that he took the ashes to an appointment.

Andrew Wild, 44, received more than 20 reminders asking his father Peter to attend kidney clinics at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire – despite repeatedly telling them he had died in 2007 – so he took the urn to one of his own appointments.

He said: ‘The consultant asked how I was feeling. I said I was OK, then produced dad’s ashes and asked, “But what can you do for him?”

‘He was gobsmacked. I know it was morbid but I couldn’t think of what else to do.’

The hospital has apologised.

via ‘He really is dead’: Son takes his father’s ashes to the doctor to stop endless appointment reminders | Mail Online.

Fatal stampede before Pope’s speech in Angola

Two people were killed after deadly stampede broke out at a stadium a few hours before Pope Benedict XVI addressed young people in the Angolan capital of Luanda on Saturday.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi said the Pope is “very upset” by reports that two people were killed in the crush. The stampede broke out as the gates to Luanda’s Coqueiros stadium opened hours before Benedict arrived, Lombardi said.

Portuguese news agency LUSA cited an unidentified source at a local hospital as saying a man and a woman were killed, eight others were hospitalized with minor injuries and 10 were given medical assistance at the site.

An Associated Press reporter saw another stampede break out when the Pope arrived, and at least 20 people were taken away in ambulances.

Tens of thousands of Angola’s Catholics lined the streets of the capital Saturday for a blessing from the Pope, 81, who urged the country’s faithful to reach out and convert people who believe in witchcraft.

Eighty per cent of Angola’s 16 million residents are Christian, about 65 per cent Catholic.

The pontiff, wearing white robes, looked tired and moved slowly in the tropical heat during the late afternoon stadium appearance before about 30,000 people.

He gave a message of hope to young people, including some wounded and maimed during Angola’s long civil war, which started with Angola’s 1975 independence from Portugal and ended in 2002.

Benedict began his day addressing Catholic clergymen and nuns, telling them to be missionaries to those Angolans “living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they end up even condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers.”

In Africa, some churchgoing Catholics also follow traditional animist religions and consult medicine men and diviners, who are denounced by the church. People accused of sorcery or of being possessed by evil powers sometimes are killed by fearful mobs.

via Fatal stampede before Pope’s speech in Angola.

Octomom Nadya Suleman says name of her babies’ dad is safe

With the help of fertility drugs and a sperm donor, Suleman gave birth to octuplets three weeks ago, according to startribune.com.  She’s been all over the news for her amazing golden uterus. But there’s a catch. She already had a Brady bunch – six kids – at home and decided eight more could be fun.  Fourteen freakin’ kids? Are you kidding me?  “That was always a dream of mine, to have a large family, a huge family,” Suleman said, according to cnn.com.  – theorion

…Octomom Nadya Suleman said when she told the father of all 14 of her children that she was pregnant with octuplets, he was speechless. “He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t even utter a word to me,” she said. “He was so angry at the doctor. He said, ‘Doesn’t that doctor know that you have five [sic] kids already?’”

And Suleman said she’ll also remain speechless – promising never to divulge his identity, according to a video she posted Saturday on RadarOnline. Suleman, 33, would say only that he’s a foreign-born California resident in his late 30s and that he resembles her son Elijah. “I’m sorry for all this mess, and I hope he isn’t scared it’ll come out, because it won’t,” Suleman said in the video. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never disclose who he is.” Suleman gave birth Jan. 26. She brought home two more babies – Maliyah and Nariyah – Saturday.

via Octomom Nadya Suleman says name of her babies’ dad is safe.

One neighbor who did not identify herself described the crowd’s behavior as “ridiculous.” “It was so awful,” the woman told KCAL-TV. “I can’t believe people would do that to her. It’s really sad. All the paparazzi hanging on to a car like that? It’s really crazy.” Suleman, an unemployed divorced mother, gave birth to the octuplets nine weeks premature on Jan. 26 in Bellflower. She already had six children, ages 2 to 7.

The octuplets — who at birth weighed from 1 pound, 8 ounces to 3 pounds, 4 ounces — spent their first seven weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center. The first two babies to be discharged — Noah and Isaiah — are each about 5 pounds and are able to bottle feed, the hospital said. The other two girls and four boys continue gaining weight and will be released another day, the hospital said. …

Several neighbors joined other onlookers to take in the scene. “We wanted to see the octomom,” said neighbor Johnny Euentes, 46, who lives around the corner and waited with his wife and son on the cul-de-sac. “I’ve got nothing else to do tonight; I’m just missing American Idol.”

… Video posted on Radaronline.com, where Suleman has been posting a video diary, showed the SUV pulling into the garage from the inside, and screams can be heard for the photographers to get out. Laughter is audible from inside the vehicle after the garage door closed. Two caretakers in scrubs help Suleman take the babies into the house after she shows them off to the camera, and Suleman’s older children are shown kneeling and fawning over their baby brothers. …

In recent weeks, Suleman has been seen squabbling with her mother on Internet videos, and led tours of her new home for paparazzi. Last week, as Suleman made last-minute fixes to make the home safer for the delicate infants, she had a televised baby shower on the “Dr. Phil” show. Suleman said she is paying for the house — listed for $564,900 — with money from “opportunities” she has selected, but did not elaborate on what they were. – nydailynews

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