Does Human Evolution Have a Mutation Rate? New Research Says "Yes"

First things first: You’re a mutant.  But don’t waste your time trying to fly or look through people’s clothes, as your amazing mutant powers are “not having pseudopods” and “consisting of more than a single cell.”  All of evolution results from random changes in DNA, and now scientists have recorded the current rate of human mutation.

A global team of researchers recruited two men from a remote Chinese village.  The subjects’ family had lived their for over two centuries, leaving the men extremely distant relations (thirteen generations apart).  By examining sections of their Y chromosomes and screening out mutations caused by the scientific work (which somehow failed to create an army of unstoppable mutant clones), the team worked out the rate of change of human DNA.  (dhuman/dt, if you like.)

One in thirty million nucleotides mutate per generation - which doesn’t sound much until you realise you have twelve billion of the things.  You’ve got a couple of hundred errors in your cellular scripting, but luckily most don’t do any damage.  And not all of these changes are errors.  The vast majority cause, “nothing”, a minority cause “death”, but an extremely special few can be beneficial.  Scale up over entire species and hundreds of millions of years and you can end up with almost anything.  As proven by the duck-billed platypus.

The discovery of this base mutation rate is an important discovery for the vital field of genetics. By comparing mutation rates between locations or even individuals, we can decode much more about our sicknesses, or our future.  It could be used to molecularly date organic remains, and don’t forget that the little problem of cancer is all about mutation.  Now we’ve timed the ticking of the mutation clock, we’ll see if we can stop or reset it.

Luke McKinney

Recommended Post:

Darwin’s Radio: Prehistoric Gene Reawakens to Battle HIV -A Galaxy Classic

Source: We Are All Mutants

NASA's NextGen Astronauts - Bacteria With the Ability to Survive Radiation & Rapidly Repair Its Own DNA

A plot for the next Ridley Scott space thriller? The eye of the next generation HAL 9000? Guess again. NASA is experimenting was an extremeophile bacteria that could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to toxic chemicals.

Amazingly, they even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually with 48 hours. D. rad is capable of withstanding an instantaneous dose of up to 5,000 Gy of ionizing radiation with no loss of viability, and an instantaneous dose of up to 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.  The symbol Gy for a “gray,” is the unit of absorbed radiation dose due to ionizing radiation such as X-rays).

A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred complete breaks into the organism’s DNA. By comparison, 10 Gy can kill a human, over 4000 to kill the radiation-resistant tardigrade, and 60 Gy will kill E. coli. It accomplishes its resistance to radiation by having multiple copies of its genome and rapid DNA repair mechanisms. It usually repairs breaks in its chromosomes within 12-24 hours through a 2-step process.

Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D. rad are of interest to NASA partly because they might be adaptable to help human astronauts survive on other worlds. A recent map of D. rad’s DNA might allow biologists to augment their survival skills with the ability to produce medicine, clean water, and oxygen. Already they have been genetically engineered to help clean up spills of toxic mercury. Likely one of the oldest surviving life forms, D. rad was discovered by accident in the 1950s when scientists investigating food preservation techniques could not easily kill it.

A team of Russian and American scientists proposed that evolution of the microorganism could have taken place on the Martian surface until it was delivered to Earth on a meteorite. However, apart from its resistance to radiation, D. rad is genetically and biochemically similar to other terrestrial life forms, arguing against an extraterrestrial origin.

Casey Kazan

Source: NASA/Apod

Image credit:
Credit: Michael Daly (Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences), DOE

NASA's NextGen Astronauts - Bacteria With the Ability to Repair Its Own DNA

A plot for the next Ridley Scott space thriller? The eye of the next generation HAL 9000? Guess again. NASA is experimenting was an extremeophile bacteria that could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to toxic chemicals.

Amazingly, they even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually with 48 hours. D. rad is capable of withstanding an instantaneous dose of up to 5,000 Gy of ionizing radiation with no loss of viability, and an instantaneous dose of up to 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.  The symbol Gy for a “gray,” is the unit of absorbed radiation dose due to ionizing radiation such as X-rays).

A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred complete breaks into the organism’s DNA. By comparison, 10 Gy can kill a human, over 4000 to kill the radiation-resistant tardigrade, and 60 Gy will kill E. coli. It accomplishes its resistance to radiation by having multiple copies of its genome and rapid DNA repair mechanisms. It usually repairs breaks in its chromosomes within 12-24 hours through a 2-step process.

Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D. rad are of interest to NASA partly because they might be adaptable to help human astronauts survive on other worlds. A recent map of D. rad’s DNA might allow biologists to augment their survival skills with the ability to produce medicine, clean water, and oxygen. Already they have been genetically engineered to help clean up spills of toxic mercury. Likely one of the oldest surviving life forms, D. rad was discovered by accident in the 1950s when scientists investigating food preservation techniques could not easily kill it. Pictured above, Deinococcus radiodurans grow quietly in a dish.

A team of Russian and American scientists proposed that evolution of the microorganism could have taken place on the Martian surface until it was delivered to Earth on a meteorite. However, apart from its resistance to radiation, D. rad is genetically and biochemically similar to other terrestrial life forms, arguing against an extraterrestrial origin.

Casey Kazan

Source: NASA/Apod

Image credit:
Credit: Michael Daly (Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences), DOE

Will the Laws of Physics Extend Beyond Our Universe? A Galaxy Classic

Chris Knight, the finest fictional physicist of our time, once said
“All science.  No Philosophy.  Wrong.”  It’s true that an understanding
of existence outside of equations is vital for scientists, both in
terms of enjoying life and avoiding things like Agent Orange, but
beware careless combination of the two.  A science/philosophy mixture
can lead to metaphysical claims that the laws of physics are nothing
but local zoning ordinances, as demonstrated by Lee Smolin.

Smolin is author of “the fecund universes theory” of cosmology which
suggests that the rules of biology apply on the grandest scales, and is
often referred to as “cosmological natural selection”. Smolin
summarized the idea in his book, The Life of the Cosmos.

The
theory surmises that a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a
new universe on the “other side”, whose fundamental constant parameters
(speed of light, Planck length and so forth) may differ slightly from
those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe
therefore gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes.

The
Perimeter Institute theoretical physicist got together with philosopher
Roberto Unger and arrived at three radically new conclusions. The first
is that there is only one universe - the idea of a multiverse might be
awesome science fiction, and essential to the slightly less credible
string theory, but there’s no reason to base your worldview on worlds
where the Nazis won or the universal constant of gravitation has a
different value.

The second idea is that time is real.  Remember
when you read that first sentence?  Okay, you agree with us - this is
one of those discussions that takes place at a level regular humans
don’t argue at.  Some say that all of existence is a crystal of reality
that we happen to move through, Dr Manhattan style, which is
wonderfully imaginative but displays incredible cognitive
disconnection.  Even speaking the words aloud demonstrates the passage
of time, and most arguments beyond that depend on bringing the debate
to an extremely specific linguistic field of hyper-definitions that the
opponent hasn’t wasted their life learning, and will therefore “lose”
at.  Luckily for us, Lee agrees that time actually exists and we can
move on to the real problem: the idea of physics as local rules.

His
argument that physics can change over time and space is apparently
based on an extremely specific strawman argument which depends on
separating experimental procedure into initial conditions and laws.  He
says you can only arrive at laws by examining a large “configuration
space” of possible setups.  In the lab you can set up a large number of
tests, in cosmology you can look at a wide variety of situations, so in
both you can arrive at laws.  His argument is that since you can’t
actually rearrange the stars themselves to set up different initial
conditions in each place, you can’t make conclusions about the physical
laws there.  He uses many, many more words to describe this idea.

It’s
all very intellectually stimulating, but mainly demonstrates the
difference between metaphysics and useful physics.  If you’re going to
claim that general relativity stops working beyond some sort of
interstate-of-existence line, the burden of proof is on you to show
that’s the case - and strawman arguments on the nature of
experimentation aren’t going to cut it.  You can say that the plank
constant is a variable over time and space, but when we want to build
an bridge or a fusion reactor we’re going to stick with our silly,
provincial, non-new-book-publishing “actual physics.”   And that’s the
difference.

Posted by Luke McKinney

The Unique Universe

VIDEO

The "Great Wall" Of Space: Galactic Superclusters a Billion Light Years Away Extend for 5% of Observable Universe

The vastest structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable universe.  Insert “yo mamma” joke here.  If it took a God one week to make the Earth, going by mass it would take him two quintillion years to build this thing - far longer than science says the universe has existed for, and it’s kind of fun to have those two the other way round for a change.  Though He could always omnipotently cheat and say “Let there be a Sloan Great Wall.”

The great wall is a massive array of astronomical objects named after the observations which revealed them, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.  An eight year project scanned over a quarter of the sky to generate full 3-D maps of almost a million galaxies.  Analysis of these images revealed a huge panel of galaxies 1.37 billion light years long, and even the pedantic-sounding .07 there is six hundred and sixty billion trillion kilometers.  This is science precisely measuring made-up sounding numbers.

This isn’t the only wall out there - others exist, all with far greater lengths than width or depth, actual sheets of galaxies forming some of the most impressive anythings there are.  And these walls are only a special class of galactic filaments, long strings of matter stretched between mind-breaking expanses of emptiness.

The immensity of existence truly defies human understanding - which makes it very humanly awesome of us to try anyway.  If people could understand for a single second the true scale of everything out there, all our idiotic problems would evaporate instantly.  (Either because we got our acts together or our heads popped, no bets on which.)

Luke McKinney

A Map Of The Universe http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310571

"Creating Artificial Personalities" (An Evolutionary Step Toward Replacing the Human Species?)

We can now engineer entirely artificial personalities, and we don’t
mean your-kid-for-cash strategies like Hannah Montana.  Scientists have
now evolved artificial personalities based on simulated genetic
algorithms. Meaning they’re only one good synthetic-skin invention from
getting rid of our species altogether.

A research collaboration between Samsung and the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has created a virtual
puppy, Rity, a computerized creature whose every action is guided by a
simulated personality system.  It’s an excellent choice by the
developers, making the first models as harmless-looking as possible -
affording them extra time to develop successors and dig the
EMP-shielded bunkers.

Rity’s personality is based on
silicon-simulated genes.  Its personality program is run from a an
artificial genome consisting of 1,764 genes, divided into 14
chromosomes.  These chromosomes control various components of three
separate internal state units, which react to external information and
send votes to a probabilistic behavior module equipped with instant
instinct reactions. This puppy’s brain is more complicated than most
country’s governments, and this is only the first generation.

It’s
important to understand what “genes” mean in software development: this
electronic puppy isn’t able to breed (to the dismay of the scarier
parts of the internet population), so we aren’t looking at a horde of
evolved software agents.  Evolutionary algorithms evolve a program by
mutating various genes in thousands of generations - the fittest
results are selected and mutated again, and again and again.  This can
result in surprisingly effective algorithms - the evolved solutions in
this case actually performed better than those hand-designed by the
programmers.  Or in other, more movie-trailer-friendly terms, this
thing is better at the game than the people who designed said game. 
And the game is “create artificial beings.”  And these are the same
people who, presumably, designed the “don’t escape into the world and
kill etc etc” subroutines.

So the system can’t breed an
invincibly army, but as a program it can easily be copied, which is the
point - spend a ton of computer time evolving up a good solution then
use it for everything.  At this point the solution is only for “See if
a simulated pet likes being stroked”, which even a pink DS can do, but
the future applications are far more significant.

Everything from
assistants for the elderly (which have already been built), to
human-interface agents online, to more realistic AI in video games. 
Because that’s the best possible idea: evolve electronic intelligences,
then shoot at them all the time to see what happens.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

The Origin of Artificial Species

"The Great Silence": Why Haven't Signs of Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life Been Discovered?

“The idea that we are the only intelligent creatures in a cosmos
of a hundred billion galaxies is so preposterous that there are very
few astronomers today who would take it seriously. It is safest to
assume therefore, that they are out there and to consider the manner in
which this may impinge upon human society.”

Arthur C. Clarke, physicist and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

The world-renowned physicist Lee Smolin author of Life of the Cosmos
says that what we should look for to confirm the existence of
intelligent life in the Milky Way is a message left for us some time in
the last several hundred million years. 

Smolin suggests that one such
message might have been left in the genetic code of some living
creature in the language of nucleic acid bases in the DNA, confident
that the ability of living creatures to replicate DNA would keep the
message relatively uncontaminated for the time scales of this order.
There is a great deal of DNA in most species that does not play any
biological role and varies enormously from species to species without
apparent cause. The existence of this DNA is one of the puzzles of
molecular biology.

The unsolved question of the existence of
extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the greatest  scientific challenges that currently
confronts humanity.

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high
estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations and the lack of evidence for or contact with such
civilizations.

The 14-billion-year age of the universe and its
130 billion galaxies and a Milky Way Galaxy with some 400 billion stars
suggest that if rocky planets like Earth orbiting around small yellow stars are typical, intelligent life should be
common. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of scientists found that
at least 20 percent, and possibly the majority (as many as 60 percent)
of stars similar to the sun are candidates for forming rocky planets.
The Legacy Science Program set out to determine whether planetary
systems like ours are common or rare in the Milky Way. What they found
is that many, perhaps even most, of the sun-like stars in our galaxy
could well harbor Earth-like planets.

The ideal stars to support planets suitable for life for tens of billions of years may be a smaller slower burning 'orange dwarf' with a longer lifetime than the Sun ― about 20-40 billion years. These stars,  called K stars, are stable stars with a habitable zone that remains in the same place for tens of billions of years. They are 10 times more numerous than Sun G-class stars, and may provide the best potential habitat for life in the long run.

Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, discussing this observation with
colleagues over lunch in 1950, asked, logically: “Where are they?” Why,
if advanced extraterrestrial civilizations exist in our Milky Way
galaxy, hasn’t evidence such as probes, spacecraft, or radio
transmissions been found?

As our technologies become ever more sophisticated and the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence continues to fail, the “Great
Silence” becomes louder than ever. The seemingly empty cosmos is
screaming out to us that something is amiss. Or is it?

Using a computer simulation of our own galaxy, the Milky Way,
Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen,
proposed an answer to the Fermi Paradox. Bjork proposed that an alien civilization might
build intergalactic probes and launch them on missions to search for
life.

He found, however, that even if the alien ships could hurtle through
space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, - NASA’s
current Cassini mission to Saturn is gliding along at 32km a second -
it would take 10 billion years, roughly half the age of the universe, to
explore a mere four percent of the galaxy.

Like humans, alien civilizations could shorten the time to find
extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that
might leak from colonized planets. “Even then,” he reported in the New
Scientist, “unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that
gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it’s still going to take
millions of years to find us. There are so many stars in the galaxy
that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in
contact with them? Not in our lifetime.”

The problem of distance is compounded by the fact that timescales
that provide a “window of opportunity” for detection or contact might
be quite small. Advanced civilizations may periodically arise and fall
throughout our galaxy as they do here, on Earth, but this may be such a
rare event, relatively speaking, that the odds of two or more such
civilizations existing at the same time are low.

In short, there may have been intelligent civilizations in the
galaxy before the emergence of intelligence on Earth, and there may be
intelligent civilizations after its extinction, but it is possible that
human beings are the only intelligent civilization in existence “now.”
“Now”  assumes that an extraterrestrial intelligence is not able to
travel to our vicinity at faster-than-light speeds, in order to detect
an intelligence 1,000 light-years distant, that intelligence will need
to have been active 1,000 years ago.

There is also a possibility
that archaeological evidence of past civilizations may be detected
through deep space observations — especially if they left behind large
artifacts such as Dyson spheres.

Perhaps…but in
our search for life and intelligence we have to keep in mind that the
Milky Way Galaxy is two or three times the age of our Solar System, so
there are going to be
some societies out there that are millions of years, maybe more, beyond
ours, which may have proceeded beyond biology—that have invented
intelligent, self-replicating machines and it could be that what we
first find is something
that’s artificially constructed if we have the ability to recognize it
as such. It may very well be that our greatest discovery will be that
the very nature of alien communication will prevent our being able to
communicate with it.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Recommended:

Stephen Hawking: Why Isn’t the Milky Way “Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?”

Related Galaxy posts:

James Cameron & Arthur C Clarke on 2001 A Space Odyssey
New Technologies & the Search for -A Galaxy Insight
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos Revisited -NASA’s Phoenix Probe & the Search for
Eyes on the Cosmos -European Space Agency’s Hawk 1 & Hubble’s Successor
New Phoenix Mission Technology to Search for Life
Cruising the Goldilocks Zone -The Search for “Super-Earths”
Adventures of a Planet Hunter
Non-Carbon Lifeforms -Why We May Overlook
The Milky Way Enigma -How Galactic Forces May Control Life on Earth
Astro-Engineering Artifacts as Evidence of
The Biological Universe -A New Copernican Revolution? 
Jupiter’s Europa & the Search for
Earth’s Twin Habitable?
Search for Extraterrestrial Genomes

Code Red: Military Shuts Out Scientists from Infra-Red Signatures on All Meteors Which Hit the Planet

The military has decided to deny scientists data on incoming meteors in
order to protect military secrets.  Anyone who can’t see any problems
with this arrangement, well done on never having seen a movie -ever. 
Oh, and get Michael Bay on the phone - we’ve got his next plot ready.

The
Air Force’s Defense Support Program satellite network scans the globes
for infra-red signatures (indicative of missile blasts and nuclear
explosions) and incidentally picks up incredibly detailed information
on all meteors which hit the planet.  Something the military didn’t
think was particularly interesting.  They did at least send the
occasional update to the Earth-watching scientific community, scraps of
data they didn’t need, but a recent announcement makes it clear that
there will be no more.

The most likely reason is an upgrade to the satellite defense
network, with the top brass believing that any risk of revealing the
capabilities of the new system is unacceptable.  The worst thing is
that it isn’t really secrecy that’s stopping the data transfer, but
miserliness.  It’s the work of moments to boil out any unwanted
information revealed by records of meteor strikes, but with their
hundred-billion dollar budget the USAF just doesn’t see the point in
hiring someone to do it.  That would be money with absolutely no
ability to kill people, after all, and paltry little things like “using
the most advanced satellite network in existence to further our
understanding of the universe” isn’t going to blow anybody up either.

They’re
literally throwing out incredible data because they can’t be bothered
to keep it.  This is everything that’s wrong with human ambition right
here.

Luke McKinney

Military Shuts Out Scientists

"Firestarter" Discovery: 1st Technology Began 70,000 years Ago

The very beginning of modern man was setting fire to things, smashing them off each other, and using the result to kill whatever you wanted dead.  Which means action movies are the pinnacle of evolution!  Humanity was harnessing fire for technology over seventy thousand years ago - leading to us winning the evolutionary game so hard we ended up researching it instead of playing.

A global team of researchers found evidence of rock tool use among early South African tribes, but couldn’t find any of the actual rocks.  Since seventy thousand years is barely a blink by geological standards this was something of a problem, until they found some rocks buried in a fire-pit and realised: they were right about the rocks in the area being wrong.  And early man had been making his own.

By firing native silcrete rocks the very first technologists on record created something better than anything that existed before.  Fired silcrete was far easier to shape into tools, and by tools we mean “sharp things for making meat hold still before you eat it.”  More importantly the prevalence of fired silcrete tools means this wasn’t a lucky accident (at least, not after the first time.)  The tribes must have been able to pass on the process, refining it as they went and becoming the very first - and thus most important - designers.  And we can all agree that “make food us live!” is a better mission statement than most of the crap we have today.

It’s an incredible insight into early evolution, and just how humanity became so awesomely dominant we can waste resources on crap like Pokemon while every other species struggles to stay alive. It meant communication, co-operation, teamwork and - since hunters would have to feed the fire-users - the ability to put the good of the group ahead of your own short term gains.  A trick which those who follow politics might say we’re losing.

Luke McKinney

Early Humans Use Fire To Engineer Tools

How Fast Can a Human Ulitimately Run? Is a 5.0 Second 100 Meters Possible?

Amazing as Usain Bolt’s new world record 100-meter victory was,
his
time of 9.58 seconds is nowhere near what biostatisticians such as
Peter Weyand of SMU thinks is
the natural limit for the human body. Experts studying the steady
progression of records over the past 50 years, see the limit of the
world record, with a probable error of 0.17 seconds, namely, to lie
between 9.26 to 9.60 seconds. Some see 5.0 seconds a possibility.

Because 6′ 5″ Usian Bolt broke the mathematical model that had fit
100-meter record data for almost a century, his incredible performance
has reset the bar for how fast researchers believe humans ultimately
can run. Will it be done by a 6′ 9″  or 7′ future version of Bolt?

How fast will man eventually run? Will he ever run the 100 meters in five seconds flat?

“Not impossible,” says one of the world’s best known authorities on physiology and
biomechanics. Professor Peter Weyand, of Southern Methodist University, known for his
expertise in terrestrial locomotion and human and animal performance. Weyand said that
humans would soon have the ”ability to modify and greatly enhance
muscle fibre strength.” This is would actually reduce the difference
between the muscle properties of humans and the world’s fastest animal,
the cheetah, to almost zero.

Usain Bolt has now brought up the question — will man get faster and faster?
And based on what Weyand says, will he one day outrun the cheetah?

“Probably not,” said Weyand. “The same laws of physics apply to all runners.
However, biologically speaking, speed is conferred by an ability of the limbs to
hit the ground forcefully in relation to the body’s weight, an attribute
conferred largely by the properties of the muscles of the runner. The fast four-legged
runners or quadrupeds do seem to be advantaged versus bipeds in terms of the
mechanics allowed by their anatomy. These mechanics help quadrupeds to get the
most out of the muscles that they have in a way that bipedal runners probably
cannot.

Scientists believe man can't run faster than 30 mph, with the best at about
27mph. A cheetah, on the other hand, reaches speeds triple that. Weyand said he
expected speed to continue to improve and faster runners to emerge.

Reza Noubary, a mathematician at Bloomsburg University of
Pennsylvania and author of a textbook on statistics and sports, had
previously calculated an “ultimate record” of 9.44 seconds for the 100
meter.

Mathematicians don’t use the body’s physiology to assess human
physical limits. They were merely working with data that suggested that
human speed increases were decelerating and would eventually stop
completely. Indeed, in some events, like the long jump, the pace of
record-setting has slowed nearly to a stop. That record has only been
broken twice since 1968.

Despite the success of Mureika’s model, Weyand, said that
mathematical models could never predict how fast humans might
eventually run.

“Predicting it is fine for the sake of kicks, but it’s not a
scientifically valid approach,” Weyand said. “You have to assume that
everything that has happened in the past will continue in the future.”

He suggested that it’s impossible for mathematicians to predict the
magnitude of the “freakiness of athletic talent at the extreme margins
of humanity. Bolt, it turns out, is a perfect example.”

Weyand, who has conducted research on the body types of the top 45
100-meter sprinters in the last 15 years, said that almost all elite
runners conform to the body norms for their race length, except for the
most-recent Olympic champion.

“Bolt is an outlier. He’s enormous,” Weyand said. “Typically when you get someone that big, they can’t start.”

That’s because muscle speed in animals is generally tied to their
size. For example, rodents, being much smaller than elephants, can move
their muscles much faster. The same holds true for human beings.
Sprinters are short and have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, allowing
them to accelerate quickly, but compromising their ability to run
longer distances. Four hundred-meter runners, almost always taller,
have the reverse composition of muscle fibers.

Bolt, though, combines the mechanical advantages of taller men’s bodies with the fast-twitch fibers of smaller men.

“We don’t really know what the best form is and maybe Bolt is
redefining that and showing us we missed something,” said
biomechanicist John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College at the
University of London, who studies how animals move.

Hutchinson also agreed with Weyand that the human speed limit will remain impossible to predict with any confidence.

For him, it’s the International Olympic Committee and other
regulatory authorities that will determine how fast athletes will be
able to run by limiting the amount of advanced biotechnologies
sprinters can use.

“The limits will be largely set by the rules of the IOC,” Hutchinson
said. “It’s kind of an arms race with the regulators of the sport and
the people trying to push the technology to the limits. At some point
here there must be a détente where technology can’t push us any further
and the rules will restrict it.”

With techniques for gene therapy likely to become available at some
point in the not-too-distant future, Weyand said that its use by
athletes was “inevitable.”

“You could see really freakish things and we probably will,” he warned.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Sources:

http://ideaisaac.blogspot.com/2008/08/world-records-for-mens-100-m-defy.html

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/08/16/ap6783375.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/bolt-is-freaky/

http://www.smu.edu/newsinfo/excerpts/peter-weyand-toi-20aug2008.asp

http://boyceupholt.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/lightning-bolt-and-math/

Image of the Day: Laser Strikes at Supermassive Black Hole at Core of the Milky Way Galaxy

It’s not the sequel to War of the Worlds! Astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) site in Chile are trying to measure the distortions of Earth’s ever changing atmosphere. Constant imaging of high-altitude atoms excited by the laser — which appear like an artificial star — allow astronomers to instantly measure atmospheric blurring.  In this case, the VLT was observing our Galaxy’s center, and so Earth’s atmospheric blurring in that direction was needed.

At the center of the Milky Way is Sagittarius A -believed to be a supermassive black hole, which lurk at the center of all spiral galaxies. If we can observe Sagittarius A*’s surroundings we can
confirm once and for all whether it’s a black hole - and prove Einstein
right (or wrong!) . Relativity theory predicts the existence of black holes. If relativity breaks down, we might not see a black hole at all, but something totally weird.

Relativity describes how large masses can bend
space, and a black hole is where the mass is so large that space gives
up altogether and becomes a singularity.  Black holes are already well
understood, we think, but we’ve only ever observed them at second hand
- the behavior of orbiting objects or bent light rays.  To actually
view the shadow of a black hole, the cut-off point where light is
swallowed and cannot escape, would be a massive advance - and only the
beginning.

Detailed observation of the area around the Sag A*
border would be a goldmine of information. The spin and rate of matter
inflow into the central black hole will tell us about the Milky Way’s
creation, as well as providing further extreme tests of general
relativity.  We could even see frame dragging, which sounds like a
video game hardware issue but is actually something that could happen
to reality - where a spinning black hole grabs hold of space and
literally pulls reality around after it.

The rock star at center of Earth’s microwave eye will be in the high deserts of
Chile, where the Atacama 66-dish Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is
being built, which should be up and running
by 2012. In concert with other scopes across the planet. ALMA will should
provide a much clearer picture of Sag A*

ALMA is a giant, international observatory
composed initially of 66 high-precision telescopes, operating at
wavelengths of 0.3 to 9.6 mm. The ALMA antennas will be electronically combined and provide
astronomical observations which are equivalent to a single large
telescope of tremendous size and resolution, able to probe the Universe
at millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths with unprecedented
sensitivity and resolution, with an accuracy up to ten times better
than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney

Image Credit: Yuri Beletsky (ESO)
Source: APOD

Today's Popular Posts

• Storms of Saturn’s Moon Titan - A Model of the Early Earth?
• Is The Digital Era Overriding Our Ability to Forget?
• Gary McKinnon Case: Extraditing the ‘Extraterrestrial’ Hacker - Yes or No? A Galaxy Poll
• NASA’s Volcanic Robo-Spiders: Sentinels of Future Eruptions
• Is Mars Between Ice Ages? Experts Say “Yes” -A Galaxy Classic
• “The Black Cloud” - Could Non-Carbon Life Exist in Cold Clouds of Interstellar Dust?
• Antimatter: Angel or Demon

The Space Elevator Games -The Next Big Reality TV Show? (VIDEO)

It’s right out of NOVA or the scifi channel: Microsoft is sponsoring the 2009 Space Elevator Conference,
a four-day long event with movies, presentations, and workshops where
engineers and entrepreneurs gather to discuss the technical and
logistical issues of building an actual elevator to space.

“It’s bringing top people around to present ideas from a research
standpoint and a business standpoint,” said conference spokesperson
Melinda Young. “We’re talking about a way to supplement travel to space
by rockets.”

While the idea of a space elevator has been around for about 100 years, the idea became more feasible by the 1991 discovery of “carbon nanotubes,” tiny atoms that can come together and make a cylinder. The elevator is built around the idea of a ribbon and tether that could lift people thousands of miles into near space to a destination such as the International space station

Meanwhile, in
final proof that sports channels don’t know what the hell they’re
doing, for the last five years NASA and The Spaceward Foundation have
been running “The Space Elevator Games” - a competition to build a
robot and cable to literally CLIMB INTO SPACE - and TV still shows
skateboarding instead.  The future is happening, and nobody’s watching.

Similar to the X Prize and the Google Lunar Prize, the Space
Elevator games are based on offering a big chunk of money to access the
incredible inventive potential available outside of established
agencies.  The games attract university teams of student researchers,
the next generation of the field, with a total prize purse of four
million dollars.  Which is more than you’ll get at the average track
meet.

The games have two events: climbing space cables, and
making them.  The Climber battle is an awesome combination of
edge-pushing technologies as it requires lightweight cargo-carrying
robotics and power-beaming technology to drive them.  As a model of an
actual space elevator, a cable into orbit, the machines can’t carry any
power source - they need to have energy transmitted to them.  This
means that the games involve experimental robots climbing a one
kilometer cable suspended by a helicopter while high energy lasers fire
at them, or in other words, about five action movies happening at once.

The
second stage of the competition is building a the cable, or “tether”,
so the competition really is bootstrapping space elevation: they’re
working out how to build the cable and then climb it, aka “Most of the
stuff you need to get this scifi idea actually working.”  While the
climbing prize is based on speed, the cable competition requires
continual improvement: to win the prize you have to do 50% better than
last years winner.  If there’s ever been a better acceptance of
exponential technology acceleration we’ve yet to see it.

It’s an
awesome motivation for a whole new generation of scientists, and even
those who don’t win have an incredible boost in the field of “Thinking
of something awesome and making it happen.”  Plus, with a $900,000
prize awarded at a climbing speed of 2 m/s (and the most recent record
being 1.8 m/s) sometime soon a student dorm is going to have the best
bigscreen in the world.

Luke McKinney

Space Elevation http://www.spaceward.org/elevator2010

http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/archives/176501.asp?from=blog_last3

Storms of Saturn's Moon Titan - A Model of the Early Earth?

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft buzzed Titan last year, coming close
enough to taste the Saturnian moon’s atmosphere.  The data acquired has
implications for our understanding of life throughout the galaxy, as
well as Earth’s own past.

Meanwhile, just this month astronomers used the NSF-supported Gemini Observatory to capture the first images of clouds over Titan’s tropics. The images clarify a long-standing mystery linking Titan’s weather and surface features, viewed by some scientists as an analog to Earth when our planet was young.

The effort also served as the latest demonstration of adaptive optics, which use deformable mirrors to enable NSF’s suite of ground-based telescopes to capture images that in some cases exceed the resolution of images captured by space-based counterparts.

On Titan, clouds of light hydrocarbons, not water, occasionally emerge in the frigid, dense atmosphere, mainly clustering near the poles, where they feed scattered methane lakes below. Closer to the moon’s equator, clouds are rare, and the surface is more similar to an arid, wind-swept terrain on Earth. Observations by space probes suggest evidence for liquid-carved terrain in the tropics, but the cause has been a mystery.

Emily Schaller from the University of Hawaii and her colleagues used NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, situated on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, to monitor Titan on 138 nights over a period of two years, and on April 13, 2008, the team saw a tell-tale brightening. The researchers then turned to the NSF-supported Gemini North telescope, an 8-meter telescope also located on Mauna Kea, to capture the extremely high-resolution infrared snapshots of Titan’s cloud cover, including the first storms ever observed in the moon’s tropics.

The team suggests that the storms may yield precipitation capable of feeding the apparently liquid-carved channels on the planet’s surface, and also influenced weather patterns throughout the moon’s atmosphere for several weeks.

The second largest moon in the solar system, Titan has long been of
interest for hopeful exobiologists.  As the only other body we know of
with surface bodies of liquid, complete with nitrogen, methane and
complete seasonal weather weather patterns (similar to Earth’s).  It
even has beaches, though you’ll need a little more than a swimsuit to
visit.  Vast bodies of chemicals constantly stirred by wind and wave,
heated over a gentle sunlight heat with the occasional dash of articles
from Saturn’s magnetosphere for spice - a perfect recipe for life.
Just like a certain planet you might be familiar with (look down if you
forget).

Of course there a few minor differences from our own blue-green globe.
There’s no oxygen for one thing, but if you think that’s a problem then
you’re guilty of “aerobic respiration prejudice” (don’t worry, most
multicellular organisms are).  It’s also really quite amazingly cold -
so cold that it has awesomely-named “cryovolcanoes”, where boiled (or
even just melted) water is enough to set off seismic-level explosions.
Again, that’s a barrier that’s been overcome by homegrown Earth
bacteria, so there’s no reason it couldn’t be managed elsewhere.

Cassini’s onboard instruments have detected hydrocarbons containing up
to seven carbon atoms.  How important is that for life?  Here’s a hint:
molecules with carbon in them are called organic, and those without are
inorganic.  Carbon is kind of a big deal, and the more (and more
complicated) carbon compounds present the further towards the great
cosmic chemical cocktail that is “life” you are.  Some scientists
believe that the Titanian interior, with its greater temperature, could
already host microbial life - but it’ll be a while before we can check
that (unless we get real lucky, and some alien cells get real unlucky,
with a cryovolcano eruption).  One thing’s for sure - the craft is only
on the sixth of forty-five planned flybys so we can expect to hear a
lot more about this real soon.

PS: Yes, it is ironic that we’re expecting Titanic lifeforms to be single celled.

Posted by Luke McKinney. Photo Credit: James Estrin/New York Times.

Related Galaxy posts:

“The Earth Strain” -Spreading Life To The Stars (whether we want to or not)
MIT Asks: How Would Extraterrestrial Astronomers Study Earth?
“The Great Silence” -A Galaxy Insight
Harvard-Smithsonian Scientists Zero In On Key Sign of Habitable Worlds
Cruising the Goldilocks Zone -The Search for Super Earths
Dead Zones in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
  Non-Carbon Lifeforms -Why We May Overlook  

Source links:

Cassini flyby http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=16737
The Cassini Mission Home http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

Discovery of Ancient Antarctica Mountain Range May Alter Global Climate-Change Predictions

An international team of experts have mapped a huge, incredibly old
location, mentioned in the notes of a Russian explorer from half a
century ago, buried under hundreds of meters of ice.  In an amazing
break with tradition this process did not result in the unleashing of
ancient horrors, a self-destruct sequence, alien invasion or anyone
shooting at Indiana Jones.  They’ve examined the entire Gamburtsev
mountain range, 700 meters tall and buried under a kilometer of
Antarctica.

The team used an array of tools including seismic wave reflection,
radar, and precise gravitational measurements to map the frozen
features - there are a lot more differences between ice and rock than
“one works in drinks”, and they used them all.  If “Sub-Antarctic
Mountain Range” isn’t good enough for you, the valleys between the
peaks come complete with rivers and lakes - yes, lakes.  Under the
ice.  At the South Pole.

The mountains are a massive mystery - they seem to be half a billion
years old, but on a tectonic scale you can’t just say “that’s a long
time ago so who cares.”  There are no other indications of such titanic
tectonics in the area at the time, and the range has none of the signs
of volcanic formation.  Which is a pity, as volcanoes erupting into
thousands of tons of solid ice is probably the only way this incredible
landscape could sound any more awesome.

The researchers predicted a flat plateau, but instead found a range
similar in height and shape to the Alps - with massive peaks as high as
Mount Blanc and deep valleys.

Water, turned to liquid due to the
pressure of East Antarctic Ice Sheet above, could be seen in rivers and
lakes nestled in valleys. One lake, Vostok, a possible living
biological lab of ancient lifeforms, was an incredible 300 kilometers.

Scientists
hope the findings will aid predictions about the effects of climate
change on ice sheets and challenge long-held views that the ice sheet
formed over millions of years.The new research suggests they formed in
a fraction of the time and the area could have been ice free at some
points in history.

This means any rapid fluctuation in global
temperature could have a much faster effect on the formation of ice
sheets than previously thought

Posted by Luke McKinney

Related Galaxy posts:

Secrets of Antarctica’s 15-Million Year-Old Lake -A Galaxy Classic
World’s Oldest Living Microbes May Cast Light on Aging & Life on Mars
Will Jupiter’s Moon -Europa- Provide the 1st Proof of Extraterrestrial Life? -A Galaxy Insight
Ancient Antarctic Microbes Revived in Lab
Antarctica -Mapping The White Continent

Links:

Lake Vostok Slide Show

http://www.unspecial.org/UNS633/UNS_633_T13.htm

A PDF on the Vostok drilling
Wiki to Vostok -
Wiki on the Antarctic Treaty