| The Origin of Life on Earth (preview) Every living cell, even the simplest bacterium, teems with molecular contraptions that would be the envy of any nanotechnologist. As they incessantly shake or spin or crawl around the cell, these machines cut, paste and copy genetic molecules, shuttle nutrients around or turn them into energy, build and repair cellular membranes, relay mechanical, chemical or electrical messages--the list goes on and on, and new discoveries add to it all the time.It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago. To be sure, under the right conditions some building blocks of proteins, the amino acids, form easily from simpler chemicals, as Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago discovered in pioneering experiments in the 1950s. But going from there to proteins and enzymes is a different matter. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Nerd a Vacation?: Travel with The Geek Atlas After five years of gallivanting across the globe, Charles Darwin settled down at Down House in Downe, England. Other than day trips to London, he hardly left his neighborhood for the remaining 45 years of his life. After three days at a conference in London this past summer, I took a day trip to Downe to see Darwin’s house, which is now a small museum. What I did not know at the time was that I was visiting site number 043 in The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive (O’Reilly Media, 2009).Author John Graham-Cumming holds a doctorate in computer security and is described in the book as “a wandering programmer.” (That background probably explains the zeroes that give all his site numbers three digits. Not to mention the choice of 128 places--programmers can’t resist powers of 2.) Graham-Cumming secured his own geek status by contributing to Linux Magazine . And he became a supergeek with his previous book, published in 2008, a guide to the software program GNU Make. That’s right, Graham-Cumming is the author of GNU Make Unleashed , which, he notes, “saturated its target market of 100 readers.” [More] rss.sciam.com |
South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering (preview) Twenty-five years ago international teams of scientists showed that a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could produce a “nuclear winter.” The smoke from vast fires started by bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would envelop the planet and absorb so much sunlight that the earth’s surface would get cold, dark and dry, killing plants worldwide and eliminating our food supply. Surface temperatures would reach winter values in the summer. International discussion about this prediction, fueled largely by astronomer Carl Sagan, forced the leaders of the two superpowers to confront the possibility that their arms race endangered not just themselves but the entire human race. Countries large and small demanded disarmament.Nuclear winter became an important factor in ending the nuclear arms race. Looking back later, in 2000, former Soviet Union leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev observed, “Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act.” [More] rss.sciam.com |
Playgrounds for Skiers and Snowboarders Loon Mountain in central New Hampshire has managed to serve snowboarders and skiiers by designing terrain parks snow playgrounds with jumps, ramps and other tricked-up features. nytimes.com |
Last of Their Kind: What Is Lost When Cultures Die? (preview) Over the past decade geneticists have proved that all people alive today are descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and carried the human spirit and imagination to every corner of the habitable world. Our shared heritage implies that all cultures share essentially the same potential, drawing on similar reserves of raw genius. Whether they exercise this intellectual capacity to produce stunning works of technological innovation (as has been the great achievement of the West) or to maintain an incredibly elaborate network of kin relationships (a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia) is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive benefits and cultural priorities. Each of the planet’s cultures is a unique answer to the question of what it means to be human. And together they make up our repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us as a species in the millennia to come.But these global voices are being silenced at a frightening rate. The key indicator of this decline in cultural diversity is language loss. A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Each one is an old-growth forest of the mind. Linguists agree, however, that 50 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered. Every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. Within a generation or two, then, we may be witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity’s social, cultural and intellectual legacy. This is the hidden backdrop of our age. [More] Language - Social Sciences - Linguistics - Old-growth forest - Human rss.sciam.com |