336 replies to this topic

[AnBr]

A thread for posts that fit no where else and aren't worth their own threads:

Child yells ‘wow’ at end of moving Mozart concert in Symphony Hall and now the orchestra wants to know who he is

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As the solemn and harmonic music of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music came to an end, there was utter silence in Boston’s Symphony Hall. You could hear a pin drop. And then, from somewhere in the audience, a young child’s voice pierced the silence: “Wow!”

The audience laughed, then erupted in applause.

[golden_valley]

I'm glad the kid's parents exposed him to live symphonic music. Wow! indeed. The sound and emotion just blows you away. No popular, rock, or jazz concert ever makes me feel like I do at the symphony.

[Practical Girl]

When my son was very young, he got Hans Joseph Haydn from me. Much of it is child-like. He loved it. Wasn't live.

I did my best to take him to live symphony. He was at first resistant. Then he met (of all things) my ski instructor. She just happened to be first chair, violin, in our local orchestra. First things first. She was beautiful. Physical. Helping Mom not kill herself on the hills. OK! We saw a lot for a few years, after that.

Most of it has gone by the wayside. Not this. Popular music meets symphony, in the most beautiful venue. It happens, and it's wonderful when it does.

[LFC]

golden_valley, on 09 May 2019 - 11:01 AM, said:

I'm glad the kid's parents exposed him to live symphonic music.

EDIT: Jump doesn't work. Go to 3:10.

[LFC]

Slug slime might hold a key to a better surgical glue, one that is appropriately elastic.

[Beelzebuddy]

Caption:

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Anticrepuscular Rays + lightning + rainbow all captured together during a stormy Thursday. Credit: WINK viewer Matthew Foster.

[LFC]

 Beelzebuddy, on 10 May 2019 - 12:55 PM, said:

Caption:

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Anticrepuscular Rays + lightning + rainbow all captured together during a stormy Thursday. Credit: WINK viewer Matthew Foster.

What a shame. He just barely missed the REAL shot!

[LFC]

The view that life on other planets is not just possible but likely.

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Extraterrestrial life, that familiar science-fiction trope, that kitschy fantasy, that CGI nightmare, has become a matter of serious discussion, a “risk factor”, a “scenario”.

How has ET gone from sci-fi fairytale to a serious scientific endeavour modelled by macroeconomists, funded by fiscal conservatives and discussed by theologians?

Because, following a string of remarkable discoveries over the past two decades, the idea of alien life is not as far-fetched as it used to seem.

Discovery now seems inevitable and possibly imminent.

It’s just chemistry
While life is a special kind of complex chemistry, the elements involved are nothing special: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on are among the most abundant elements in the universe. Complex organic chemistry is surprisingly common.

Amino acids, just like those that make up every protein in our bodies, have been found in the tails of comets. There are other organic compounds in Martian soil.

And 6,500 light years away a giant cloud of space alcohol floats among the stars.

Habitable planets seem to be common too. The first planet beyond our Solar System was discovered in 1995. Since then astronomers have catalogued thousands.

Based on this catalogue, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley worked out there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the so-called “habitable zone” around their star, where temperatures are mild enough for liquid water to exist on the surface.

There’s even a potentially Earth-like world orbiting our nearest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri. At just four light years away, that system might be close enough for us to reach using current technology. With the Breakthrough Starshot project launched by Stephen Hawking in 2016, plans for this are already afoot.

Life is robust
It seems inevitable other life is out there, especially considering that life appeared on Earth so soon after the planet was formed.

The oldest fossils ever found here are 3.5 billion years old, while clues in our DNA suggest life could have started as far back as 4 billion years ago, just when giant asteroids stopped crashing into the surface.

Our planet was inhabited as soon as it was habitable – and the definition of “habitable” has proven to be a rather flexible concept too.

[LFC]

New amber encased specimens may answer some questions about how spiders evolved. They also look really bad-assed!

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A new, bizarre spider-like creature has just been discovered in Southeast Asia, having been encased in amber during the Cretaceous period some 100 million years ago, and it might be more terrifying than any of the creepy-crawlies lurking in the dark corners of your basement.

Amber mined for centuries in Myanmar for jewelry is a treasure trove for understanding the evolution of spiders and their other arachnid relatives. This week, two independent teams describe four 100-million-year-old specimens encased in amber that look like a cross between a spider and a scorpion.

The discovery, “could help close major gaps in our understanding of spider evolution,” says Prashant Sharma, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who was not involved in the work.

[LFC]

The nuclear waste problem rears its ugly head. Containment that ends up being built to last 60-70 years is hardly the ultimate example of proper long-term planning.

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A Cold War-era concrete “coffin” brimming with atomic waste is leaking radioactive material into the Pacific Ocean, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned. The dome was built to contain the nuclear waste that was created when the U.S. and France conducted atomic tests in the Pacific between 1946 and 1958. “The Pacific was victimized in the past as we all know,” said Guterres, according to AFP. The structure is on the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands; Guterres described the dome as “a kind of coffin” designed to contain nuclear material. Thousands of indigenous island people were evacuated or exposed to radioactive fallout when the U.S. carried out dozens of nuclear weapons tests in the area. The bombs tested included the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb, which was 1,000 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 16 May 2019 - 12:35 PM, said:

The nuclear waste problem rears its ugly head. Containment that ends up being built to last 60-70 years is hardly the ultimate example of proper long-term planning.

What mess. And we are still producing waste in the form of the radiation based medical stuff. Can't stuff that genie back in the bottle.

[Rue Bella]

LFC, on 16 May 2019 - 12:35 PM, said:

The nuclear waste problem rears its ugly head. Containment that ends up being built to last 60-70 years is hardly the ultimate example of proper long-term planning.

Not to worry. The long-term solution is The Rapture! All problems immediately solved.

[Rue Bella]

LFC, on 10 May 2019 - 12:13 PM, said:

Slug slime might hold a key to a better surgical glue, one that is appropriately elastic.

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[color=rgba(2, 20, 31, 0.85)]
Andrew Smith, a biologist at Ithaca College, was plucking the invasive Dusky Arion slugs out of his garden one day when one excreted slime on him.[/color][color=rgba(2, 20, 31, 0.85)]
His fingers were stuck together as if he had grabbed a glob of crazy glue. But amazingly, the slug glue didn’t stick on the slug itself.[/color]

For snail control in the garden, I'll go out and collect them first thing on damp mornings. Snails, like slugs, also leave behind a slime trail. When I come in and wash my hands, I'll use dilute dish detergent. And still I cant get all that slime off my hands. Just hate the stuff. Snail slime however is one of the latest ingredients for beauty products:

http://nymag.com/str...n-benefits.html

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What Does Snail Slime Actually Do for Your Skin?

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In recent years, snails have gone from garden dweller and French appetizer to practically ubiquitous skin-care ingredient: Their mucin (the slime they trail in their wake) forms the foundation for a recent wave of hyperpopular creams, masks, and serums — many of which we’ve tried and loved here at the Strategist. Snail mucin was a gateway into K-beauty for our beauty writer Rio Viera-Newton, whose first Google doc included a Cosrx snail-mucin essence and Benton Snail Bee sheet mask.

Though Korean brands may be known for launching the snail craze Stateside, Chileans were actually the first to incorporate snails into skin care after Chilean snail breeders in the ’80s marveled at how unusually soft their hands were from handling the snails, leading to the Chilean snail cream Elicina. But on a scientific level, what is snail mucin actually doing? I contacted a few dermatologists to find out.

[LFC]

The Y-chromosome may be evolving away.

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The Y chromosome may be a symbol of masculinity, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is anything but strong and enduring. Although it carries the “master switch” gene, SRY, that determines whether an embryo will develop as male (XY) or female (XX), it contains very few other genes and is the only chromosome not necessary for life. Women, after all, manage just fine without one.

What’s more, the Y chromosome has degenerated rapidly, leaving females with two perfectly normal X chromosomes, but males with an X and a shrivelled Y. If the same rate of degeneration continues, the Y chromosome has just 4.6m years left before it disappears completely. This may sound like a long time, but it isn’t when you consider that life has existed on Earth for 3.5 billion years.

The Y chromosome hasn’t always been like this. If we rewind the clock to 166m years ago, to the very first mammals, the story was completely different. The early “proto-Y” chromosome was originally the same size as the X chromosome and contained all the same genes. However, Y chromosomes have a fundamental flaw. Unlike all other chromosomes, which we have two copies of in each of our cells, Y chromosomes are only ever present as a single copy, passed from fathers to their sons.

This means that genes on the Y chromosome cannot undergo genetic recombination, the “shuffling” of genes that occurs in each generation which helps to eliminate damaging gene mutations. Deprived of the benefits of recombination, Y chromosomal genes degenerate over time and are eventually lost from the genome.

Despite this, recent research has shown that the Y chromosome has developed some pretty convincing mechanisms to “put the brakes on”, slowing the rate of gene loss to a possible standstill.

[Rue Bella]

Dog Plays Tag With Deer in Florida

https://www.youtube....7&v=_jJP7UYVQ_8

[George Rowell]

LFC, on 16 May 2019 - 03:58 PM, said:

The Y-chromosome may be evolving away.

I have long held the belief that nature does not like intelligent and extremely masculine men. Maybe it causes problems. There are of course numerous examples in history but they still form a very small population percentile. They wield too much influence to be stable to the population, perhaps.

Along the same vein of thought, intelligence does not seem to be a good survival indicator, or necessarily a reliable indicator of achievement. If it did nature would have little problem in making us all geniuses-genii.

[Rue Bella]

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Along the same vein of thought, intelligence does not seem to be a good survival indicator, or necessarily a reliable indicator of achievement. If it did nature would have little problem in making us all geniuses-genii.

Ya gotta have a lot more followers than leaders.

[George Rowell]

Rue Bella, on 17 May 2019 - 02:29 PM, said:

Ya gotta have a lot more followers than leaders.

That seems to be written in our code

[baw1064]

LFC, on 16 May 2019 - 03:58 PM, said:

The Y-chromosome may be evolving away.

I suggest the following tie-in to the Bird Thread:

Bird sex chromosomes (denoted as Z and W) work more or less opposite to those of mammals: males are ZZ, and females are ZW. In birds, the default is to be male, and the presence of a W overrides this and makes the bird female (the opposite of mammals where the default is to be female and the presence of a Y overrides this to make the animal male).

So is the W chromosome in birds degrading in the same way?

[LFC]

As oil companies in Canada go bankrupt and shut down they are leaving behind a pile of old wells that they never cleaned up. There is an industry group cleaning up some number of them. All I can think is how this would play out in America. Probably about as efficiently as all of the Super Fund sites that the local residents and American taxpayer got stuck with.

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When quadding this spring on his land just southeast of Didsbury, Alta., 59-year-old Pat Williams can’t miss the herd of heavy equipment that’s returned to his farm for a second year. On one of his three quarter-sections, Williams pastures 65 Angus cows who were recently about to calve. On the other two he farms rotating crops of wheat, canola and barley. And for 50 years, there has been an oil well on each of the quarters.

But last summer the well heads, pumps and other equipment related to the wells on Williams’s land were harvested—so to speak—by the Orphan Well Association (OWA).

Established in the 1990s, the industry-financed OWA is tasked with trying to clean up the environmental messes left behind by bankrupt oil companies that walked away from their wells. By definition, an “orphan” well is one that no one actually owns after a company goes bankrupt.

READ: What happens when the demand for Alberta oil goes away?

When a well is orphaned, the OWA is supposed to step in to decommission it and restore the land to its original condition. But it’s having trouble keeping up with the growing number of orphaned wells in the province. In its most recent quarter, from last January to the end of March, some 1,574 wells were turned over to the OWA, mostly due to the collapse of three companies. As of mid-April, the organization listed 3,172 wells as orphaned—and that may prove to be a drop in the barrel. According to a recent government estimate, of more than 300,000 wells in the province, at least 167,000 are inactive, abandoned or orphaned.

The wells on Williams’s land, drilled back in the ’50s and ’60s, stopped pumping in 2012 after the last owner, Neo Exploration Inc., went under. He never worried about the health impacts on his family—the wells were tested often for air and ground contaminants and posed no risks. But other Alberta property owners stuck with orphaned wells attribute chronic health problems and even deaths to leakages from them.

Neo should have decommissioned its wells on the Williams property, removing surface equipment, plugging the well bores, hauling off contaminated soil and restoring the land. Critics accuse the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER)—an industry-run organization that funds the OWA—of failing to force firms to properly clean up their abandoned or orphaned wells. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed that companies can’t escape their regulatory obligations just by declaring bankruptcy. That’s expected to put the regulator under increasing pressure: with oil prices stagnating, more companies will struggle to meet their clean-up obligations.