if i had fingers that fast, i could pinch off flesh

Panamanian Termite Goes Ballistic: Fastest Mandible Strike In The World

ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2008) — A single hit on the head by the termite Termes panamensis (Snyder), which possesses the fastest mandible strike ever recorded, is sufficient to kill a would-be nest invader, report Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven, post-doctoral fellows at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Rudolf Scheffrahn from the University of Florida.

Niven and Seid conducted the study at the Smithsonian's new neurobiology laboratory in Panama, established by a donation from the Frank Levinson Family Foundation. The laboratory was built to use Panama's abundant insect biodiversity to understand the evolution of brain miniaturization.

"Ultimately, we're interested in the evolution of termite soldiers' brains and how they employ different types of defensive weaponry," says Seid. Footage of the soldier termite's jaws as they strike an invader at almost 70 meters per second was captured on a high speed video camera in the laboratory at 40,000 frames per second. "Many insects move much faster than a human eye can see so we knew that we needed high speed cameras to capture their behavior, but we weren't expecting anything this fast. If you don't know about the behavior, you can't hope to understand the brain," Seid adds.

Why are the termites so fast? When insects become small they have difficulty generating forces that inflict damage. "To create a large impact force with a light object you need to reach very high velocities before impact," Niven explains.

The Panamanian termite's strike is the fastest mandible strike recorded, albeit over a very short distance. Because a termite soldier faces down its foe inside a narrow tunnel and has little room to parry and little time to waste, this death blow proves to be incredibly efficient.

The force for the blow is stored by deforming the jaws, which are held pressed against one another until the strike is triggered. This strategy of storing up energy from the muscles to produce fast movements is employed by locusts, trap-jaw ants and froghoppers. "The termites need to store energy to generate enough destructive force. They appear to store the energy in their mandibles but we still don't know how they do this—that's the next question," says Niven.

A full report of the study appears in the Nov. 25, 2008 issue of the journal Current Biology.

beetles with antibiotics

yay, enough emoing, back to awesome articles

Some Beetles Can Quickly Neutralize Bacteria And Reduce Emergence Of Resistant Bacteria At Same Time

ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2008) — In less than an hour, the immune system of the beetle Tenebrio molitor neutralizes most of the bacteria infecting its hemolymph (the equivalent to blood in vertebrates); this is rendered possible by a cascade of ready-to-use cells and enzymes.

Bacteria that resist these "front-line" defenses are then dealt with by antimicrobial peptides – a sort of natural antibiotic – which halt their proliferation. A clearer understanding of these actors in insect immunity may make it possible to design treatments that prevent the development of drug resistance.

This has been shown in the results of a study carried out by the Equipe Ecologie Evolutive in the Laboratoire Biogéosciences (CNRS/Université de Bourgogne in Dijon), in collaboration with a British research group, and published in the journal Science.

Microorganisms have a considerable capacity for adaptation to the many strategies implemented to destroy them. Over the past 400 million or so years, the immune system of animals, and notably the relatively simpler system in insects, appears to have succeeded in preventing the evolution of microbial resistance. The secret to this achievement lies in a small toolbox of targeted natural antibiotics, the antimicrobial peptides.

In the present case, the researchers showed that the so-called "constitutive" front-line of cellular and enzymatic defenses in the insect immune system spares a small number of bacteria and thereby favors the development of microbial resistance.  However, a second line of defenses involving antimicrobial peptides synthesized following the elimination of most bacteria by the front line, is able to restrict the growth of these surviving microorganisms, which may lead to their removal.

Thus the principal function of the antimicrobial peptides produced by the insect immune system is to prevent the resurgence of bacteria resistant to the host's constitutive defenses, which will consequently reduce the emergence of resistant bacteria.

is it worth it?

Alright, it's time for some reflection I guess. For the past 4 years, I gave up opportunities, just so that I could help set up a culture for the school. I changed not only my decisions, but also my way of life and personality, to tell the school that I would be there to help them build up what they need to build up, and set down what is needed. In the first year, I accepted 3 leadership positions, sleeping less in 3 days than I usually sleep in a day, just to get things going. 

Scouts: we started with nothing. Absolutely nothing. In a year, we changed 3 different teacher mentors. Only i was left to make sure that everything flowed smoothly. I personally trained my juniors, forcing myself to relearn things that I probably would never need in my life. This set the foundations of the present scout troop. 

House: how many people knew I was the house captain of 2005? Most, even within Nobel itself, thought I was the vice captain. The shit I put in, staying up till 1am to call everyone down, not an easy job. At least i had the help of my co captain to do the showy stuff, which of course led everyone to think that I was a nobody. We got first in 2005, whatever the school said. 

Council: pretty much my pride and joy. Joined in 2005 because i befriended the right people. But at least I was in. Met 3 friends, who with me, organised one of the best youth days in the history of our school. I will never forget them. watched council rise, fall, rise again, always with it. sat till 9pm to stock take council supplies. stayed till 10 to ensure that programmes went well. stressed over limited resources. never once complained about the lack of recognition. just because i was the least public centred of the lot.

now i look back, how much have i put in? how much could i have done to bring up my name? should i be as glory hunting as the others? i could do less, and still get more in return. anyway, this is how life works no? 

my first team in council: yingzhen, yunzhi, nat. All three have been awesome in many ways. just take a closer look at the awards given out on the 1st of december. outstanding contribution. turns out ultimately, i still haven't done enough to stand out from the remaining 80% of the level. to the school, i'm still just a face in the crowd. just another one of the could be's. 80% of the level, at least a fifth of them never done a single thing for the school. i can't differentiate myself from them. pathetic. i could have rejected the responsibilites. i could have taken a backseat in council, scouts, house. would that make any difference in what the school is now? let someone else take the lead. i would have more time, more sleep, less pain, but no less recognition. because in terms of recognition, i have already hit rock bottom. perhaps, my grades might even have been better, i might even be able to break into the distinction category. oh look, MORE recognition for doing less. 

School: please don't give me false hopes. "because of your contribution to the school, we have decided to put you as vice president for alumni" was that to pacify me? because i think it's failed. 5 students given the award of outstanding contribution. 60% of them NOT in the alumni. ms valedictarian: NOT in alumni. they contributed so much already. why not let THEM lead the alumni? honestly speaking. you just had to pick 4 people from the list of volunteers, and give reasons for why you chose them. please give honest answers. "we needed to find people. we rolled some dice. you came up" will do. i can take it. telling me something you don't believe in. that, i won't. 

4 years of my time in NUS High School. 3 years, attention was directed only at the school's wellbeing. last year to try and save my own sorry ass from the depths of "just another face". looks like it wasn't enough. was it worth it?

a plastic brain. interesting.

Forgotten But Not Gone: How The Brain Re-learns

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2008) — Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new?

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten.

While an insect still flings itself against the window-pane after dozens of unsuccessful attempts to gain its freedom, our brain is able to learn very complex associations and sequences of movement. This not only helps us to avoid accidents like walking into glass doors, but also enables us to acquire such diverse skills as riding a bicycle, skiing, speaking different languages or playing an instrument. Although a young brain learns more easily, we retain our ability to learn up to an advanced age. For a long time, scientists have been trying to ascertain exactly what happens in the brain while we learn or forget.

Flexible connections

To learn something, in other words, to successfully process new information, nerve cells make new connections with each other. When faced with an unprecedented piece of information, for which no processing pathway yet exists, filigree appendages begin to grow from the activated nerve cell towards its neighbours. Whenever a special point of contact, called synapse, forms at the end of the appendage, information can be transferred from one cell to the next - and new information is learned. Once the contact breaks down, we forget what we have learned.

The subtle difference between learning and relearning

Although learning and memory were recently shown to be linked to the changes in brain structure mentioned above, many questions still remain unanswered. What happens, for example, when the brain learns something, forgets it after a while and then has to learn it again later? By way of example, we know from experience that, once we have learned to ride a bicycle, we can easily pick it up again, even if we haven’t practiced for years. In other cases too, "relearning" tends to be easier than starting "from scratch". Does this subtle difference also have its origins in the structure of the nerve cells?

Cell appendages abide the saying "a bird in the hand …"

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now managed to show that there are indeed considerable differences in the number of new cell contacts made - depending on whether a piece of information is new or is being learned second time around. Nerve cells that process visual information, for instance, produced a considerably higher number of new cell contacts if the flow of information from their "own" eye was temporarily blocked. After approximately five days, the nerve cells had rearranged themselves so as to receive and process information from the other eye - the brain had resigned itself to having only one eye at its disposal. Once information flowed freely again from the eye that had been temporarily closed, the nerve cells resumed their original function and now more or less ignored signals from the alternative eye.

"What surprised us most, however, was that the majority of the appendages which developed in response to the information blockade, continued to exist, despite the fact that the blockade was abolished ", project leader Mark Hübener explains. Everything seems to point to the fact that synapses are only disabled, but not physically removed. "Since an experience that has been made may occur again at a later point in time, the brain apparently opts to save a few appendages for a rainy day", Hübener continues. And true enough, when the same eye was later inactivated again, the nerve cells reorganized themselves much more quickly - because they could make use of the appendages that had stayed in place.

Useful reactivation

Many of the appendages that develop between nerve cells are thus maintained and facilitate later relearning. This insight is crucial to our understanding of the fundamental processes of learning and memory. And so, even after many years of abstinence, it should be no great problem if we want to have a go at skiing again this winter.

should probably stop getting surprised at what earth can offer.

New Life Beneath Sea And Ice

ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2008) — Scientists have long known that life can exist in some very extreme environments. But Earth continues to surprise us.

At a European Science Foundation and COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) 'Frontiers of Science' meeting in Sicily in October, scientists described apparently productive ecosystems in two places where life was not known before, under the Antarctic ice sheet, and above concentrated salt lakes beneath the Mediterranean. In both cases, innumerable tiny microbes are fixing or holding onto quantities of organic carbon large enough to be significant in the global carbon cycle.

Lakes under the ice

Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, in the US, told the conference about the microbes living within and beneath the ice on Antarctica. In the last decade, scientists have discovered lakes of liquid water underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. So far we know of about 150 lakes, but this number will probably increase when the entire continent has been surveyed. These lakes occur as a result of geothermal heat trapped by the thick ice, melting it from underneath, and the great pressure from the ice above, which lowers the melting point of water.

The largest subglacial lake, Lake Vostok, lies beneath the coldest place on the planet, where the temperature at the surface often falls below minus 60 degrees Celsius. "It's the sixth largest freshwater lake on the planet by volume, and about the size of Lake Ontario," says Christner. "If you were on a boat in the middle of the lake, you would not see shores."

Christner has examined microbial life in ice cores from Vostok and many other global locations. While direct samples of water from subglacial Antarctic lakes have yet to be obtained, the lower 80m or so of the Vostok ice core represents lake water that progressively freezes onto the base as the ice sheet slowly traverses the lake. "Microbial cell and organic carbon concentrations in this accreted ice are significantly higher than those in the overlying ice, which implies that the subglacial environment is the source," says Christner.

Based on accumulating measurements of microbes in the subglacial environment, he calculates that the concentration of cell and organic carbon in the Earth's ice sheets, or 'cryosphere', may be hundreds of times higher than what is found in all the planet's freshwater systems. "Glacial ice is not currently considered as a reservoir for organic carbon and biology," says Christner, "but that view has to change."

Salt below the sea

Beneath the Mediterranean lurks a similar surprise. Michail Yakimov of the Institute of the Coastal Marine Environment, Messina, Italy is a project leader for the European Science Foundation's EuroDEEP programme on ecosystem functions and biodiversity in the deep sea. His team studies lakes of concentrated salt solution, known as anoxic hypersaline basins, on the floor of the Mediterranean. They have discovered extremely diverse microbial communities on the surfaces of such lakes.

The anoxic basins, so called because they are devoid of oxygen, occur below 3,000 m beneath the surface and are five to ten times more saline than seawater. One theory says they exist uniquely in the Mediterranean, because this sea entirely evaporated after it was cut off from the Atlantic around 250 million years ago. Its salt became a layer of rock salt, called evaporite, which was then buried by windblown sediment. Now the sea is filled again, the salt layer has been exposed in some places, perhaps by small seaquakes, and the salts from the ancient Mediterranean have dissolved again, making the water very salty.

Despite the harsh conditions, hypersaline brines have been shown to possess a wide range of active microbial communities. Together with other international partners, Yakimov's team has already identified more than ten new lineages of bacteria and archaea (these are ancient bacteria-like organisms), which they have named the Mediterranean Sea Brine Lake Divisions.

There is ample life at the boundary between the concentrated basin and the ordinary seawater. "Because of the very high density of the brine, it does not mix with seawater," he explains, "and there is a sharp interface, about 1m thick."

In that layer, microbial diversity is incredibly rich. The research shows that these microbes largely live by sulphide oxidation. Like the communities at hydrothermal vents in the deep ocean, they can survive independently of sunlight and oxygen. But they are an important store for organic carbon. "The deep-sea microbial communities in the Mediterranean fix as much or even more carbon dioxide each year as those in the surface layers," says Yakimov. "This carbon sink should be taken into account at the global scale."

This research was presented at the "Complex Systems: Water and Life" Frontiers of Science conference, organized by European Science Foundation and COST, 29-31 October, Taormina, Sicily.

fatal to dawin theory? creationists, take that!

Darwin Was Right About How Evolution Can Affect Whole Group

ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2008) — Worker ants of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your fertility. The highly specialized worker castes in ants represent the pinnacle of social organization in the insect world. As in any society, however, ant colonies are filled with internal strife and conflict. So what binds them together? More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin had an idea and now he's been proven right.

Evolutionary biologists at McGill University have discovered molecular signals that can maintain social harmony in ants by putting constraints on their fertility. Dr. Ehab Abouheif, of McGill's Department of Biology, and post-doctoral researcher, Dr. Abderrahman Khila, have discovered how evolution has tinkered with the genes of colonizing insects like ants to keep them from fighting amongst themselves over who gets to reproduce.

"We've discovered a really elegant developmental mechanism, which we call 'reproductive constraint,' that challenges the classic paradigm that behaviour, such as policing, is the only way to enforce harmony and squash selfish behaviour in ant societies," said Abouheif, McGill's Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.

Reproductive constraint comes into play in these ant societies when evolutionary forces begin to work in a group context rather than on individuals, the researchers said. The process can be seen in the differences between advanced ant species and their more primitive cousins. The study was published in the Nov. 18 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ants – organized in colonies around one or many queens surrounded by their specialized female workers – are classic examples of what are called eusocial organisms.

"More primitive, or ancestral, ants tend to have smaller colony sizes and have much higher levels of conflict over reproduction than the more advanced species," Abouheif explained. "That's because the workers have a much higher reproductive capacity and there is conflict with the queen to produce offspring."

To their surprise, Khila and Abouheif discovered that "evolution has tinkered with the molecular signals that are used by the egg to determine what's going to be the head and what's going to be the tail, to stop the worker ants from producing viable offspring," Abouheif explained. "Different species of ants have different levels of this "reproductive constraint," and we believe those levels provide a measure of how eusocial the colony is. The less the workers reproduce, the more coherent the group becomes."

The existence of sterile castes of ants tormented Charles Darwin as he was formulating his Theory of Natural Selection, and he described them as the "one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my theory." If adaptive evolution unfolds by differential survival of individuals, how can individuals incapable of passing on their genes possibly evolve and persist?

Darwin proposed that in the case of ant societies natural selection applies not only to the individual, because the individual would never benefit by cutting its own reproduction, but also to the family or group. This study supports Darwin's prescient ideas, and provides a molecular measure of how an entire colony can be viewed as a single or "superorganism."

philosophy can eat shit today. i'm blogging about this. 

i'm starting to get pissed. i mean, what's wrong with courts? they tell me the comp is nice, i pay 1.6k for it, they send me the wrong comp, take another 2 weeks to get it right, decide to come over to add the ram later, effectively destroying the acer warrantee, while looking like freaking beginners while adding it.

NOW, with no acer warrantee, but only with courts warrantee, my comp starts screwing up with the stupid flickering screen, which doesn't happen when i put it on my 4 year old comp, and then my comp starts blue screening for starting up windows, i send it over to courts, and they tell me my comp is fine? after handling it myself (means the goodness knows how much paid for the 3 year courts warrantee is pointless), i get it to normal. and now it's still crashing on me. for? using google chrome. for? using msn. software problem? no. i reformatted it, deleting all my beautiful saved games and anime cos it crashes when i try to back THAT up. 

what's the freaking problem with courts man? give me lousy shit, then tell me the shit's strawberries? you think i'm a 2 year old pooper? i know shit when i get smacked in the face with it. should have realised it was shit when i saw it from 2 miles off.

catalytic power of emzymes

Without Enzyme, Biological Reaction Essential To Life Takes 2.3 Billion Years

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2008) — All biological reactions within human cells depend on enzymes. Their power as catalysts enables biological reactions to occur usually in milliseconds. But how slowly would these reactions proceed spontaneously, in the absence of enzymes – minutes, hours, days? And why even pose the question?

One scientist who studies these issues is Richard Wolfenden, Ph.D., Alumni Distinguished Professor Biochemistry and Biophysics and Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wolfenden holds posts in both the School of Medicine and in the College of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1995, Wolfenden reported that without a particular enzyme, a biological transformation he deemed "absolutely essential" in creating the building blocks of DNA and RNA would take 78 million years.

"Now we've found a reaction that – again, in the absence of an enzyme – is almost 30 times slower than that," Wolfenden said. "Its half-life – the time it takes for half the substance to be consumed – is 2.3 billion years, about half the age of the Earth. Enzymes can make that reaction happen in milliseconds."

With co-author Charles A. Lewis, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scientist in his lab, Wolfenden published a report of their new findings recently in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The study is also due to appear in the Nov. 11 print edition.

The reaction in question is essential for the biosynthesis of hemoglobin and chlorophyll, Wolfenden noted. But when catalyzed by the enzyme uroporphyrinogen decarboxylase, the rate of chlorophyll and hemoglobin production in cells "is increased by a staggering factor, one that's equivalent to the difference between the diameter of a bacterial cell and the distance from the Earth to the sun."

"This enzyme is essential for both plant and animal life on the planet," Wolfenden said. "What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome, that the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years."

Knowing how long reactions would take without enzymes allows biologists to appreciate their evolution as prolific catalysts, Wolfenden said. It also enables scientists to compare enzymes with artificial catalysts produced in the laboratory.

"Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans," he said. "It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction."

Experimental methods for observing very slow reactions can also generate important information for rational drug design based on cellular molecular studies.

"Enzymes that do a prodigious job of catalysis are, hands-down, the most sensitive targets for drug development," Wolfenden said. "The enzymes we study are fascinating because they exceed all other known enzymes in their power as catalysts."

Wolfenden has carried out extensive research on enzyme mechanisms and water affinities of biological compound. His work has also influenced rational drug design, and findings from his laboratory helped spur development of ACE inhibitor drugs, now widely used to treat hypertension and stroke. Research on enzymes as proficient catalysts also led to the design of protease inhibitors that are used to treat HIV infection.

"We've only begun to understand how to speed up reactions with chemical catalysts, and no one has even come within shouting distance of producing, or predicting the magnitude of, their catalytic power," Wolfenden said.

Support for this research came from the National Institute of General Medicine, a component of the National Institutes of Health.

another you

this is a nice song... ^^

Female models and male self consciousness

Surprisingly, Female Models Have Negative Effect On Men

ScienceDaily (Nov. 7, 2008) — Many studies have shown that media images of female models have had a negative impact on how woman view their own bodies, but does this same effect hold true when men view male models? A leading researcher of media effects on body image at the University of Missouri looked at the effect of male magazines on college-age men.

Completing three different studies, Jennifer Aubrey, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science, found that unlike their female classmates, it was not the same-sex models that affected the males negatively, but quite the opposite.

In her research, which will be published in Human Communication Research, Aubrey found that the cultural expectation for men is not that they have to be as attractive as their peers, but that they need to be attractive enough to be sexually appealing to women.

In her first study, Aubrey measured male exposure to 'lad' magazines, such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff, which she observes contains two main messages: the visual, which mostly contain sexually suggestive images of women; and textual, which contain articles that speak in a bawdy, male voice about topics including fashion, sex, technology and pop culture. Aubrey also measured male body self-consciousness (a participant's awareness and tendency to monitor one's appearance) and appearance anxiety (the anticipation of threatening stimuli). Participants were asked questions such as "During the day, I think about how I look," and then asked the same questions a year later.

"We found that reading lad magazines was related to having body self-consciousness a year later," said Aubrey. "This was surprising because if you look at the cover of these magazines, they are mainly images of women. We wondered why magazines that were dominated by sexual images of women were having an effect of men's feelings about their own bodies."

To help answer this question, Aubrey collaborated with University of California-Davis Assistant Professor Laramie Taylor. The researchers divided male study participants into three groups. Group one examined layouts from lad magazines that featured objectified women along with a brief description of their appearances. The second group viewed layouts about male fashion, featuring fit and well-dressed male models. The final group inspected appearance-neutral layouts that featured topics including technology and film trivia.

"Men who viewed the layouts of objectified females reported more body self-consciousness than the other two groups," Aubrey said. "Even more surprising was that the male fashion group reported the least amount of body self-consciousness among the three groups."

Aubrey speculated that the exposure to objectified females increased self-consciousness because men are reminded that in order to be sexually or romantically involved with a woman of similar attractiveness, they need to conform to strict appearance standards.

To test her theory, Aubrey and Taylor completed a third study that involved breaking men into two groups. Group one received lad magazine layouts of sexually idealized females and group two received the same layouts with average-looking 'boyfriends' added to the photos, with captions about how the female models are attracted to the average-looking men.

"We found that the men who view the ads with the average-looking boyfriend in the picture reported less body self-consciousness than the men who saw the ads with just the model," Aubrey said.  "When the men felt that the model in the ad liked average-looking guys, it took the pressure off of them and made them less self-conscious about their own bodies."