Some 385 million years ago, a series of mutations allowed the sea-dwelling fish to inhabit dry land for the first time on this planet.

Curiously enough, there was a (20 million years) gap in the fossil record around the time when that transition happened. That is, until fossils of Tiktaalik roseae were found last year up in Nunavut.

The finding was reported in today’s issue of the journal Nature, and is now all over the news.

… that is, of course, unless you are a bird. Here’s why:

The H5N1 influenza strain struggles to infect cells high up in the human airway, significantly limiting the extent to which victims can pick up the virus and pass it on by coughing and sneezing

and:

The H5N1 virus can mutate in many different ways, one of which is to change so that it starts infecting the upper respiratory tract. This would make it more transmissible among humans. However, if this happened, it would also be easier to treat as infection would not start deep down in the lung.

Did you know that balloons, not strings, are the fundamental building blocks of matter? balloonmolecules.com shows the basic steps of making molecules using model balloons. Here’s an impressive one (emphasis mine):

This two-and-a-half-metre-model of the DNA-helix with a diameter of 1 metre shows that a lot is possible. If the PO4-units and the sugar are adjusted correctly, the helical structure will form without any pressure. For understandable reasons a construction manual is not available.

(via inkycircuis)

Oniszczak envisions: Forget biotech – the future is quantum; a conversation in 2106.

via the quantum pontiff.

(My) transcript of K.C.Cole’s latest perspective:

How do we know what we know? In science, that’s always a central question, which is why it surprises me that there isn’t more of “how do we know?” in the so called debate over evolution. Human evolution is pretty disturbing, of course; embarrasing parents are hard enough to deal with — who wants fish, fungi, and slime-molds stinking up the family tree. It doesn’t help that our whole existence seems to be an accident — the end result of a long chain of small changes, brought about purely by chance. Stray cosmic rays tweaking the DNA of ancient critters, in ways that made them better at hiding, or eating, or getting about, and therefore having more offspring. This process even produced the big brains and loud mouths that let us argue -incessantly, it seems- over how it all came to be. “A likely story,” some of you were saying, how do I know it’s true? In the same way I know, the person sitting next to me on the bus isn’t a giant banana — not just because he doesn’t look like a banana, but because he doesn’t smell like a banana, or sound like a banana, or act like a banana; and no one else on the bus thinks he’s a banana either. In other words, I have multiple lines of evidence, and all of them agree. The other people on the bus are conducting the same experiment, and they agree too. It’s the same reason I believe an even more unlikely creation saga, the big bang; no one was around to see the universe explode into being some 13 billion years ago, yet the theory is widely accepted, because so many different lines of evidence clearly point in the same direction; the shape of the universe, the motions of the galaxies, the composition of matter. And so it is with evolution: it’s not just the story of ever-increasing complexity written in the fossil record; it’s the way wings and eyes have evolved in different places, over and over again; the way devevloping embryos of rabbits and humans look virtually the same; we grow tails and gill-slits for heaven’sakes; the way our genes match-up; more than 99% the same with chimps, 50% with fungi; we even see evolution in action right infront of our noses, if we didn’t , we wouldn’t be worried about drug-resistant strains of bacteria, not to mention bird-flu. That’s why even the most devoutly religious scientist takes evolution on evidence, not on faith. Ignoring evidence can get you into trouble; you just might find yoruself sitting on the bus, someday, chatting up a banana.

for evolution schmevolution. (via The Quantum Pontiff (via Pharyngula)):

Science vs. Religion. Evolution vs. Creation. It is an age-old battle whose time has come. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” will gather together all the experts (or at least those who will talk to them), travel to the places that matter in the debate (basic cable budget permitting) and ultimately settle the controversy once and for all. “Evolution Schmevolution: A Daily Show Special Report” will premiere on Monday, September 12 and air nightly at 11:00 p.m. through September 15.

(For those who don’t get the broadcast, some Daily Show clips are available from comedycentral — in crappy old windows-media stream, as it were. If you prefer bittorrents, then you probably already know where to find them.)

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions”
— Seth Lloyd; Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004)

Much have been written about the second law of thermodynamics in the last hundred and fifty some years; from its relation to the arrow of time, to the expansion of the universe, gravity, entropy, order and disorder, quantum mechanics, chemical reactions and lots more — not the least controversial of which is the recent rhetoric about its connection to biological evolution and creationism. Some people even went as far as dubbing it: “The … most powerful, most general idea in all of science.” (I am not going to treat any of these connections in this post, but feel free to ask for references. It should be relatively easy to find information about any of the aforementioned topics — a good place to start is the Wikipedia entry, which, incidently, is where I found the opening quote.)

What I want to argue in this post however, as the title suggests, is that the second law is ingrained in everyone’s perception of everyday experience — notwithstanding some people’s heedlessness of the labelling and the underlying concepts. Let me illustrate with an example.

Examine this photograph (taken in my kitchen, i.e. on Earth) for a minute:

If you feel that this doesn’t look right, not only would you be correct, but you would also be (maybe unknowingly) invoking two fundamental principles of physics: One, your recognition that this configuration is not a stable configuration of this particular system demonstrates your familiarity with the influence of gravity; and Two, your thinking that this system, left to itself, should’ve evolved to a stable configuration, is an invokation of the second law of thermodynamics — in fact, this is precisely one way to state the second law.

If this doesn’t convince you, think of those videos of broken pots assembling off the floor and then rising in the air, or smoke collecting from a room into a smoker’s mouth, or any video run backwards — how do you recognize that the video is going back in time? My argument is: We are all familiar with The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

(Now, concerning the photo; since there are a bunch of ways this trick could’ve been performed, I left two clues in the photograph as to which trick was used.)

If you were ever curious about Wolfram’s New Kind of Scince, but were overwhelmed by the sheer size of the (~1000 page) book, or would rather have someone introduce you to it; Well, why not get it from the horse’s mouth? Here’s a (90 min) video of a lecture that Wolfram gave at MIT back in September of 2003 about the work.

z1: did you ever wonder what happens when you blink?

z2: how do you mean?

z1: did you ever wonder why it doesn’t suddenly turn dark for that short period of time when you blink?

z2: yeah, as a matter of fact, I did. The best I could figure out is that it’s just too quick for one’s brain to notice. Isn’t it something like 0.1 second?

z1: uh huh.

z2: and if you try to close your eyes for any period longer than a blink, then you actually detect the darkness.

z1: true … but how come you can see other people blink then?

z2: good point…

z1: well -wonder no more- turns out that when the eyes shut, even for a fraction of a second, the visual system of the brain shuts down as well. The guardian had this article last week about research published in current biology to that effect — it’s very interesting, you should check it out.

z2: maybe I will.

Two interesting bits on last Saturday’s (cbc’s) quirks and quarks:

First, it was Dr. Andrade discussing her recent paper titled Novel male trait prolongs survival in suicidal mating. (more…)