TIME-WARRIOR
Thursday, November 01, 2007
A detailed map that pinpoints the location of every atom in a 450-million-yeard-old resurrected protein reveals the precise evolutionary steps needed to create the molecule’s modern version, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Oregon. (Note: 450 MILLION years, not 6,000)
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Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The study's results have serious repercussions for genome-sequencing projects.
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Laszlo Laufer and Bottyan Nemeth at the Budapest Univesrity of Technology and Economics have discovered that a gamer's button presses can be predicted 2 seconds before they make them, through measurements of skin conductance.
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Individual human DNA was thought to be 99.9% identical, but is turning out to be only 99% similar.
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The individual whose genome is described in this report is J. Craig Venter, who was born on 14 October 1946, a self-identified Caucasian male. The DNA donor gave full consent to provide his DNA for study via sequencing methods and to disclose publicly his genomic data in totality.
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Three years ago, "ultraconserved elements" were discovered in the genomes of mice, rats, and humans. These are DNA sequences 200 base pairs in length or longer — some are over 700 base pairs long — showing 100-percent identity among the three species. They have been perfectly conserved since the last common ancestor of mice, rats, and humans, which
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Tajmar's breakthrough in March of 2006 in more detail, with a surprising twist.
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A study reveals that many of the genes linked to schizophrenia have also been subject to selective pressure during the history of human evolution. Might the disease simply be an unfortunate side-effect of our complex brains?
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How a man named DB perceives flickering Gabor patches much more accurately and consistently in his "blind" eye than in his sighted eye -- even though he denies ever seeing anything with the blind eye. Sacksian stuff here; read it and wonder.
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How we come to express the genes of one parent over the other is now better understood through studying the platypus and marsupial wallaby -- and it doesn't seem to have originated in association with sex chromosomes.
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Erwin Schrödinger famously related the idea of a cat simultaneously dead and alive to the idea that particles behaving according to quantum physics can occupy simultaneously two opposite states. Researchers have generated light waves that simultaneously have two opposite phases and are thus optical Schrödinger cats.
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For two generations of physicists, it has been a standard belief that the neutron, an electrically neutral elementary particle and a primary component of an atom, actually carries a positive charge at its center and an offsetting negative charge at its outer edge.
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New insights into how the basic units of learning and memory function. Individual memories are "burned onto" hundreds of receptors that are constantly in motion around nerve synapses – gaps between individual nerve cells crucial for signals to travel throughout the brain...
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While it's one of the most important and abundant chemical compounds on Earth, water is still a puzzle to scientists.
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Evidence is mounting for the existence of a strange new state of matter called a "supersolid", in which a small fraction of ultracold helium decouples from the rest of the solid and flows effortlessly through the material as if it were not there.
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A study by Yale researchers offers a new view of what causes the greatest genetic variability among individuals — suggesting that it is due less to single point mutations than to the presence of structural changes that cause extended segments of the human genome to be missing, rearranged, or present in extra copies.
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the speed of gravity has not been measured directly in the laboratory--the gravitational interaction is too weak, and such an experiment is beyond present technological capabilities. The "speed of gravity" must therefore be deduced from astronomical observations, and the answer depends on what model of gravity one uses to describe those .....
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A particular class of hydrogen atoms may prove ideal for the study of one of the four fundamental forces of physics, according to research performed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.
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It goes to the heart of one of the biggest challenges in economics: how to arrange our economic interactions so that, when everyone behaves in a self-interested manner, the result is something we all like.
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University of Toronto astronomers announced Wednesday they had compared the stars in nearby galaxies to those in the distant universe and found the nearby stars were on average 12 per cent dimmer.
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The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space. A group of astrophysicists say observers inside such a Universe would see it accelerating away from them just before the flip, which is exactly what astronomers are now seeing. Gulp!
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The inventor’s trial-and-error approach can be automated by software that mimics natural selection
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The walls of Obrist's office were covered with single pages of size A4 paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his question: "What Is Your Formula?" Among the pieces were formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
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According to Efstratios Manousakis, a professor of condensed matter physics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, the key to human consciousness could be lie in the quantum effects that occur in the brain when one is viewing ambiguous images.
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According to Kounios, “Problem solving, whether creative or methodical, doesn’t begin from scratch when a person starts to work on a problem. His or her pre-existing brain-state biases a person to use a creative or a methodical strategy.”
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