Students in the Introduction To Biotechnology (IT220) class at Purdue were instructed for one of their projects to collect soil samples as part of the National Genomics Research Initiative. Most of the students were content to collect samples from around the Purdue campus, but Emilia Czyszczon traveled 3 hours to a remote Indiana cave and then took a boat on an underground river to a spot deep within the cave. The soil sample that Emilia ended up taking turned out to be glacial mud untouched since the ice age and contained a bacteriophage virus that was unknown to science. Scientists think that this virus might be beneficial to humans and could be used to fight diseases like tuberculosis.
Further analysis proved to be even more remarkable. Lurking in the dank sample of cave mud she collected was a virus previously unknown to science — a bacteriophage that attacks bacteria from the same family as those that cause tuberculosis.
In other words, despite the usual connotation associated with the discovery of a virus, this virus is not harmful to humans. Rather, just the opposite: it is a virus that attacks bacterial strains that could be harmful to humans. The discovery has prompted the adventurous young Czyszczon to look ahead in her career; she has already received grant money to probe into the DNA of the virus to help find alternative cures for debilitating diseases like tuberculosis.
An era before time. An era before aquatic decency. An era of totally bitching ichthyosaur fights!
New fossil finds indicate a very violent encounter (most likely) between two ichthyosaurs which left one scarred by deep gouges in the snout. Little is known for sure about the 20-foot-long creatures, since it has no living relatives. Since the bite pattern on the recovered fossil matches that of another ichthyosaur, it is telling that they fought amongst themselves for land and territory.
Either way, it’s a tragedy of epic proportions that these two beasts were fighting and killing each other before YouTube was invented.
The dusky skies of San Juan, Argentina glowed extra bright on April 25th. Beams of light from the peaking moon, normally soft and gentle, a nudging reminder of the coming night pierced through the air with uncommon veracity.
What could make the moon explode with such vibrant spires of light? More specifically: why did whatever was magnifying the moon form a triangle shape as it moved slowly out of it’s direction, returning the familiar orb to it’s muted degree of intensity?
So frames the alleged sighting of Argentina’s translucent UFO…
“I swear that I was petrified!” said Martin Pastor as he pointed at the image that he picked up last Sunday in Calingasta. he said that he thought the recently rising moon had a strange shape to it, and thus began to photograph it. After a while, he was able to see a triangle with three circular vertexes superimposed over the moon. As it moved away from the moon’s glow, it became invisible. “It was a UFO to me,” he said.
Filed under “Things That Maybe Aren’t That Great”, scientists have figured out how to induce schizophrenic symptoms in a computer. In the test, they were able to overwhelm the computer with so much information that it developed crazy delusions, even claiming responsibility at one point for a terrorist bombing. Using a neural network called DISCERN that is able to learn using natural language, they cranked up the rate of learning and instructed DISCERN to forget less, thus causing a mental breakdown.
Telling the computer to “forget less” was akin to flooding the system with dopamine, confounding its ability to discern relationships between words, sentences and events, according to a news release from UT.
“DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall,” according to the news release. In one answer, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
In 2001, a bizarre scarlet rain showered southwest India on-and-off over two months. Many were baffled by the cell structures which gave the droplets its red hue. Some even suggested they might be extra terrestrial.
Those people have a sturdier stage to stand on today as a new study links historical accounts of similar red rains with meteor passings.
McCafferty analyzed, as he wrote, “80 accounts of red rain, another 20 references to lakes and rivers turning blood-red, and 68 examples of other phenomena such as coloured rain, black rain, milk, bricks, or honey falling from the sky.”
Sixty of these events, or 36 percent, “were linked to meteoritic or cometary activity,” he went on. But not always strongly. Sometimes, “the fall of red rain seems to have occurred after an airburst,” as from a meteor exploding in air; other times the odd rainfall “is merely recorded in the same year as a stone-fall or the appearance of a comet.”
If this study is on to something and if we can link meteor air bursts to this type of rainfall and if we can assume that something is being dropped from outer space into our atmosphere, the next question is… what is it?
Andrew would like to clone a Unicorn and comes up with a new way to fund a Space Elevator. Brian and Justin discuss their new lives as undead Special Forces agents. Meanwhile, a mysterious signal from an advanced alien civilization puts President Young in a pickle with his Vice President Brushwood and NSA Chief Mayne.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new SciFi book The Grendel’s Shadow for only .99 at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!
Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).
Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as “a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds”.
No, but seriously Supreme Leader, was this your card?
This treehopper insect has developed an absolutely insane helmet that looks like an aggressive species of ant. There are more of these over at New Scientist.
Henry Wu: You’re implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will… breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.
Scientists looking to create a species of all-female lizards have finally succeeded. An origin of a species like this has never been directly observed.
“It’s recreating the events that lead to new species,” said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place.”
Female-only species that reproduce by cloning themselves — a process called parthenogenesis, in which embryos develop without fertilization — were once considered dead-end evolutionary flukes. But in the last decade, unisexuality has been found in more than 80 groups of fish, amphibian and reptiles. It might not be such a dead end after all.
Peter, the kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers. Painfully, maybe even.. dangerously, but and… well, there it is.
Imagine an ant so large it could tear your flesh. Now imagine an entire colony of them descending upon you in your sleep.
You wake up almost instantly as the shifting weight of a cadre of insect killers disturbs your dreams. Terror creeps quickly as you come back to the terrifying reality.
You brush off as many as you can, frantically running your hands over your arms and legs while stamping madly on the ground. But your feet can’t crush these resilient bastards. They regroup and circle around your position. This time they try and climb you from the back of your legs.
This is how you die. Cold. Alone. Mutilated by a creature no longer alive in your native time.
Now: be happy you didn’t live 50 million years ago, when these things really existed.
At about 2 inches (5 cm) long, the specimen is a “monstrously big ant,” said Bruce Archibald, a paleoentomologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who reported the discovery today (May 3) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Though fossils of loose giant ant wings have been found before in the United States, this is the first known full-body specimen.
Massive ants of this size have been found before but not in America. It remains a mystery how they arrived there.
A very careful analysis from Loren Coleman says that Sasquatch and Osama Bin Laden were most likely around the same height. Spoiler Alert: they were both a littler shorter than we thought.
Also, Bigfoot survived Osama Bin Laden. That makes me really, really excited.
A 55-foot long, unknown sea creature has washed up on the beaches of Guangdong, China tied up in ropes. Did it lose an epic battle with Santiago or did it just become entangled in the trash of the ocean? What do you think? The fish is rotting very quickly and it is estimated to weigh around 10,000 lbs.
Hwang, a 66-years-old fisherman living in the near area, said he has never seen anything like this in his whole life and that the fish was tied with ropes when it was first found.
Many people have flocked to see this strange specimen since its discovery, although its rotting corpse already emits a foul smell.
Andrew describes a harrowing trip into the woods where he comes face to face with a real Chupacabra. The Boys get into an extremely nerdy screaming match about the relative merits of going to Mars or building a Space Elevator. Justin is delighted by the exploits of a human freak of nature whose run up and down Mount Kilimanjaro in only shorts.
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new SciFi book The Grendel’s Shadow for only .99 at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!
Students in the Introduction To Biotechnology (IT220) class at Purdue were instructed for one of their projects to collect soil samples as part of the National Genomics Research Initiative. Most of the students were content to collect samples from around the Purdue campus, but Emilia Czyszczon traveled 3 hours to a remote Indiana cave and then took a boat on an underground river to a spot deep within the cave. The soil sample that Emilia ended up taking turned out to be glacial mud untouched since the ice age and contained a bacteriophage virus that was unknown to science. Scientists think that this virus might be beneficial to humans and could be used to fight diseases like tuberculosis.
