Ron Paul at UC Davis

His ideas would probably fix the economy and put us on a much better track for the future than the other candidates but he won’t win because he is not backed by the military industrial agenda. I’d vote for him, but I can’t, because he doesn’t believe in evolution. That level of ignorance about basic biology is frightening to me. Enjoyed seeing him live, nevertheless.

End the Fed! Bring our troops home! Repeal the Patriot Act! Give people privacy and make government transparent! End the failed war on drugs! Stop torture! Close Gitmo!

Tsunami survivor claims Harley-Davidson found in Canada

The owner has been found of a Harley-Davidson that drifted to Canada after being swept out to sea in the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

Details from the motorcycle’s licence plate helped to locate Ikuo Yokoyama.

According to CBC News, Mr Yokoyama lost his home and three family members in the tsunami.

The shop that sold the motorcycle to Mr Yokoyama is now hoping to ship the Harley-Davidson back to Japan and restore it.

The motorcycle is among the first items in a wave of debris heading to the west coast of North America. Most of the debris is expected to arrive in 2013.

The Harley-Davidson motorcycle was discovered by Peter Mark on 18 April on the coast of an island in British Columbia.Mr Mark said it was caked with “a lot of corrosion, a lot of rust”, but that he could see the manufacturer’s distinctive logo.

The Canadian realised that the bike could be part of the tsunami debris after he noticed that licence plate was from Miyagi prefecture, the area hardest hit by the March 2011 disaster.

Mr Yokoyama’s bike was inside a large white container he was using as a storage shed, which eventually washed away, leaving the bike partially buried in sand.

“This is unmistakably mine,” Mr Yokoyama told Nippon TV when shown photos of the motorcycle. “It’s miraculous.”

He told the Japanese TV station NHK that he wished to thank the man who found it personally.

In February, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials said currents would carry much of the debris 4,000 miles (6,400km) to the coasts of Alaska, Canada, Washington and Oregon between March 2013 and 2014.

Lighter items, such as buoys and bottles, have been among the first to wash ashore on the continent.

In March, an Alaska man found a football and later a volleyball from Japan.

Last month the US Coast Guard sank a Japanese fishing boat that had drifted to the Gulf of Alaska, after authorities deemed the ship a hazard.

via BBC News – Tsunami survivor claims Harley-Davidson found in Canada.

 

Squid outsmart fishermen, mostly. National squid catching championship results on one catch

They stood for five hours on the chilly, windswept coast beside Brighton Marina and waited… and waited.

After a hard day’s fishing, 73 competitors had failed to land a solitary squid. They packed up their gear with diddly-squat in their keepnets –apart from one man.

Aquatic ecologist Davide Thambithurai was about to cast his lure back into the murky Solent when he noticed a 1cm-long baby squid.

‘Fortunately, I checked it first,’ said the 28-year-old from Portsmouth.

‘Typically, you feel the squid on the end of your line as they are a good size, but it just felt like a bit of debris. I thought that, given the colour of the water, I was in with a chance of winning because nobody else was catching anything.’

It looked more like the kind of bait you’d use to catch a mackerel but it was enough to secure first place. He won last year’s event with a 61cm (24in) squid and most anglers catch 40cm (16in) long specimens.

If Mr Thambithurai was slightly embarrassed, competition sponsor George Cunningham felt distinctly short-changed.

‘We didn’t specify a minimum size limit, it was a squid and it was caught, so we couldn’t argue with it and it won,’ he said.

‘I gave away a £210 rod as a prize for that squid which is unbelievable but rules are rules.’ Mr Thambithurai’s rivals got a tiny bit of revenge. They nicknamed his catch The Kraken.

via Squiddly dot? It’s a winner at national squid catching championship | Metro.co.uk.

Sunbed mother accused of allowing her five-year-old daughter in tanning booth

Authorities say Patricia Krentcil’s daughter, now six, turned up at her elementary school in Nutley, New Jersey, with sunburn, prompting a school nurse to contact police.

New Jersey is among several states that have adopted regulations prohibiting anyone age 14 or under from using ultraviolet devices because of the risk of skin cancer.

Ms Krentcil, 44, who has extremely tanned skin herself, denied bringing her fair-skinned daughter into the tanning booth of a salon that she frequents.

“I tan, she doesn’t tan. It’s called a tanning booth and a tanning room,” said Krentcil, saying her daughter was in the room but not the booth.

“I’m not gonna bring my little daughter into a 90 degree bed. I mean, that’s not normal,” she said.

Mrs Krentcil has pleaded not guilty to the charge.

via Video: Sunbed mother accused of allowing her five-year-old daughter in tanning booth – Telegraph.

 

 

Cooked

British Military Tank Demolishes Minnesota Home (video)

A company in Kasota, Minn., took home demolition to the next level when they used a tank to raze an abandoned house.

The 150-year-old home had been slated for demolition on Monday, but the owners decided to spice things up and called in a British FV432 armored personnel carrier owned by Drive-A-Tank. The local company typically caters to individuals interested in military tank driving and car crush adventures.

MarKessa Baedke-Petersen, event coordinator for Drive-A-Tank, told The Huffington Post that her company did not think twice about the request.

“You pay us enough money and we’ll destroy anything with our tanks,” she said.

So on Saturday the small city of Kasota, located about 70 miles southwest of Minneapolis, nearly doubled in size when Baedke-Petersen and her outfit rolled into town. Once on scene, they set about making sure everything was ready for their mobile wrecking machine.

“The basement had to be filled with wet sand, because we did not want the tank falling in. We also had to go through and make sure the electricity was disconnected and all the pipes were shut off,” Baedke-Petersen explained.

Once the all-clear was given, Tony Burglum, Drive-A-Tank’s owner and operator, drove the 15-ton behemoth through the two-story home. It took about four passes for him to completely destroy the structure.

“From start to finish, it took maybe 20 minutes,” Baedke-Petersen said of the military-style makeover.

The property on which the home was situated was recently sold and the new owners are planning to build a home on the now-vacant lot.

According to Baedke-Petersen, her company may be doing another home demolition in the near future.

“Somebody heard about this demolition and called us,” she explained. “They said, ‘Hey, you want to run a tank through a house down here in Iowa?’ So we’re working it out.” …

via British Military Tank Demolishes Minnesota Home (WATCH).

Venus to cross sun’s face in a lifetime event

On June 5 and 6, millions of people worldwide will be able to spot Venus crossing the Sun’s face in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Venus will take about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the sun’s surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.

Jay M. Pasachoff, astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts, US, explores the science behind Venus’ transit and gives an account of its fascinating history, the journal Physics World reports.

Transits of Venus occur only on very rare occasions when Venus and the Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times, Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other, according to a Williams statement.

Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years – the last transit was in 2004.

Building on the original theories of Copernicus from 1543, scientists were able to predict and record the transits of both Mercury and Venus in the centuries that followed.

Kepler successfully predicted that both planets would transit the Sun in 1631, part of which was verified with Mercury’s transit of that year. But the first transit of Venus to actually be viewed was in 1639 – an event that had been predicted by the English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks.

Pasachoff expects the transit to confirm his team’s theory about the phenomenon called “the black-drop effect” – a strange, dark band linking Venus’s silhouette with the sky outside the Sun that appears for about a minute starting just as Venus first enters the solar disk.

Pasachoff and his colleagues will concentrate on observing Venus’s atmosphere as it appears when Venus is only half onto the solar disk. He also believes that observations of the transit will help astronomers who are looking for extrasolar planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

“We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage,” says Pasachoff.

via Venus to cross sun’s face in a lifetime event – Phenomenica.

Jurassic pain: Giant ‘flea-like’ insects plagued dinosaurs 165 million years ago

It takes a gutsy insect to sneak up on a huge dinosaur while it sleeps, crawl onto its soft underbelly and give it a bite that might have felt like a needle going in — but giant “flea-like” animals, possibly the oldest of their type ever discovered, probably did just that.

And a few actually lived through the experience, based on the discovery by Chinese scientists of remarkable fossils of these creatures, just announced in Current Biology, a professional journal.

These flea-like animals, similar but not identical to modern fleas, were probably 10 times the size of a flea you might find crawling on the family dog — with an extra-painful bite to match.

“These were insects much larger than modern fleas and from the size of their proboscis we can tell they would have been mean,” said George Poinar, Jr., a professor emeritus of zoology at Oregon State University, who wrote a commentary on this find in the same journal. …

Called Pseudopulex jurassicus and Pseudopulex magnus, they had bodies that were more flat, like a bedbug or tick, and long claws that could reach over scales on the skin of dinosaurs so they could hold onto them tightly while sucking blood. Modern fleas are more laterally compressed and have shorter antennae, and are able to move quickly through the fur or feathers of their victims.

“These are really well-preserved fossils that give us another glimpse of life into the really distant past, the Cretaceous and Jurassic,” said Poinar, who has also studied “younger” fleas from 40-50 million years ago preserved in amber.

via Jurassic pain: Giant ‘flea-like’ insects plagued dinosaurs 165 million years ago.

A needle in a haystack: How does a broken DNA molecule get repaired?

 

Scientists from the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology have discovered a key element in the mechanism of DNA repair. When the DNA double helix breaks, the broken end goes searching for the similar sequence and uses that as a template for repair. Using a smart new dual-molecule technique, the Delft group has now found out how the DNA molecule is able to perform this search and recognition process in such an efficient way. This week, the researchers report their findings in Molecular Cell. …

Sometimes, the DNA double helix gets broken: both strands are accidentally cut. This presents a vital problem because cells cannot cope with such damaged DNA. Genomic DNA instabilities such as these, are a known cause of cancer. The good news is that an intricate DNA repair system exists which is impressively error-proof and efficient. How does this work?

First, proteins form a filamentous structure on the broken DNA end. Second, this filament examines recently copied DNA or the second DNA chromosome (remember that we have two copies of each chromosome) in search of a DNA sequence that matches that of the broken end. Note that this is a daunting task: given that, for example, our human genome contains three billion base pairs, finding your few hundred base pairs of interest, is really like finding a needle in a haystack.

‘Still this search process occurs within minutes and with great efficiency. How that is achieved, has been a mystery for decades. The new experiments from our group now resolve this by revealing the key step in the process, the molecular recognition step’, says scientist Iwijn de Vlaminck, who was the postdoc that did the experiments in the group of prof. Cees Dekker at Delft. …

‘In bacteria, the so-called RecA protein is responsible for conducting the search operation. In E. coli bacteria, a filament of RecA protein formed on DNA, searches and pairs a sequence within a second DNA molecule with remarkable speed and fidelity. To do so, individual molecules of RecA first come together to form a filamentous structure on the broken DNA. The filament then grabs DNA molecules in its vicinity and compares their sequence to the sequence of the broken DNA. When a sequence match is found, both molecules bind tightly to one another allowing repair to ensue’, says De Vlaminck (since recently at Stanford University).

‘We found that the filament’s secondary DNA-binding site interacts with a single strand of the incoming double-stranded DNA during homology sampling. Recognition is achieved upon binding of both strands of the incoming DNA to each of two DNA-binding sites in the filament.’

The data indicate that the fidelity of the search process is governed by the distance between the DNA binding sites. The Delft experiments clarify what exactly happens in the sequence comparison of the two molecules, making clear why a ‘wrong’ sequence leads to quick dissociation of the molecules while a ‘correct’ sequence makes a strong bond leading up to further repair. These are the two elements that lead to the impressive speed and high efficiency of the DNA repair process. …

The team from TU Delft developed a unique new instrument that makes it possible to independently manipulate an individual DNA molecule and an individual RecA filament and to measure the strength of intermolecular interactions. This dual-molecule manipulation instrument combines magnetic-tweezer and laser-trapping-based DNA-molecule manipulation with a laminar flow system. The setup also allowed to unwind the DNA helix a bit, thus opening local regions where the normal duplex was destabilized. This effect turned out to be crucial for the molecular recognition process. Thus, the team was able to directly probe the strength of the two-molecule interactions involved in search and recognition and build a new model for it.

via A needle in a haystack: How does a broken DNA molecule get repaired?.

First light: NIST researchers develop new way to generate superluminal pulses

In four-wave mixing, researchers send “seed” pulses of laser light into a heated cell containing atomic rubidium vapor along with a separate “pump” beam at a different frequency. The vapor amplifies the seed pulse and shifts its peak forward, making it superluminal. At the same time, photons from the inserted beams interact with the vapor to generate a second pulse called the “conjugate.” Its peak, too, can travel faster or slower depending on how the laser is tuned and the conditions inside the gain medium.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel way of producing light pulses that are “superluminal”—in some sense they travel faster than the speed of light.* The technique, called four-wave mixing, reshapes parts of light pulses and advances them ahead of where they would have been had they been left to travel unaltered through a vacuum. The new method could be used to improve the timing of communications signals and to investigate the propagation of quantum correlations.

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, light traveling in a vacuum is the universal speed limit. No information can travel faster than light.

But there’s kind of a loophole. A short burst of light arrives as a sort of (usually) symmetric curve like a bell curve in statistics. The leading edge of that curve can’t exceed the speed of light, but the main hump, the peak of the pulse, can be skewed forward or backward, arriving sooner or later than it normally would.

Recent experiments have generated “uninformed” faster-than-light pulses by amplifying the leading edge of the pulse and attenuating, or cutting off, the back end. The method introduces a great deal of noise with no great increase in the apparent speed. Four-wave mixing produces cleaner, less noisy pulses with a greater increase in speed by “re-phasing” or rearranging the light waves that make up the pulse.

In four-wave mixing, researchers send 200-nanosecond-long “seed” pulses of laser light into a heated cell containing atomic rubidium vapor along with a separate “pump” beam at a different frequency from the seed pulses. The vapor amplifies the seed pulse and shifts its peak forward so that it becomes superluminal. At the same time, photons from the inserted beams interact with the vapor to generate a second pulse, called the “conjugate” because of its mathematical relationship to the seed. Its peak, too, can travel faster or slower depending on how the laser is tuned and the conditions inside the laser.

In the experiment, the pulses’ peaks arrived 50 nanoseconds faster than light traveling through a vacuum.

One immediate application that the group would like to explore for this system is quantum discord. Quantum discord mathematically defines the quantum information shared between two correlated systems—in this case, the seed and conjugate pulses. By performing measurements of quantum discord between fast beams and reference beams, the group hopes to determine how useful this fast light could be for the transmission and processing of quantum information. …

via First light: NIST researchers develop new way to generate superluminal pulses.