Human Cells a Chimera of Ancient Life

Despite eons of mingling inside our cells, gene networks we’ve inherited from primitive, singled-celled ancestors have stayed separate. Our cells remain chimeras, a hybrid fusion of unrelated creatures.

The genes date from an event 1.5 billion years ago, when two kinds of simple cells, neither having a nucleus or cellular membrane, shacked up and created an entirely new form of life: eukaryotes.

While the two distinct communities of genes work together to keep cell machinery ticking, they otherwise stay out of each other’s hair, report biologists from the National University of Ireland.

“We humans, as part of the eukaryotes, we’re still a community of two prokaryotes,” said James McInerney, co-author of a study published in Genome Biology and Evolution, July 27. 

While some scientists think prokaryotes evolved directly into eukaryotes, others think it required a merger, with two cells — one archaebacteria and one eubacteria — joining at some prehistoric point to make a cell capable of complex internal structures.

(via Wired.com)

Earth Had 2 Moons That Crashed to Form 1, Study Suggests

A tiny second moon may once have orbited Earth before catastrophically slamming into the other one, a titanic clash that could explain why the two sides of the surviving lunar satellite are so different from each other, a new study suggests.

The second moon around Earth would have been about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide and could have formed from the same collision between the planet and a Mars-sized object that scientists suspect helped create the moon we see in the sky today, astronomers said.

(via Space.com)

NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system. The discovery of this so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010. This video is narrated by Kepler Deputy Science Team Lead Natalie Batalha.

Japanese Researchers Create Singing Mice

Researchers at the University of Osaka in Japan have created a genetically engineered mouse that features the remarkable ability to tweet and sing like a bird. Arikuni Uchimura, head researcher of the “Evolved Mouse Project,” which involves the use of genetically modified mice to aid in mutation and evolution.

According to Uchimira, “Mutations are the driving force of evolution. We have cross-bred the genetically modified mice for generations to see what would happen.”

The singing mouse, although a fluke, has resulted in the creation of more than one hundred other singing mice to be used in further research. Other characteristics the researchers have found include short limbs and a long tail “like a dachshund.”

While Uchimura would love to one day make a “Mickey Mouse,” the goal of this project, which operated out of a laboratory directed by professor Takeshi Yagi at the Osaka University’s Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences in western Japan, is to provide a greater understanding of the evolution of language.

Using birds, which emit a variety of sounds that are strung together to form a song that operates much like language, as a basis, Uchimura suggested that the “chirping” made by the mutated mice “may be some sort of expressions of their emotions or bodily conditions.” The mice are preferred study subjects over birds due to being mammals and having brain structures and other biological similarities to humans.

Beyond this, the team of researchers also discovered that some normal mice, when raised alongside the mutant offspring of Fievel from “An American Tale,” will emit “fewer ultrasounds” than other normal mice, which might imply a spread of communication methods. 

moviesinframes:

Fahrenheit 451, 1966 (dir. Francois Truffaut)
By theathenaeum

On the outside, from within.

(via timetravelswithoutamachine)

Tenuous Oxygen Atmosphere Found Around Saturn’s Moon Rhea | Universe Today

A few years ago, astronomers thought they found wispy rings around Saturn’s moon Rhea. Although the possibility of rings around this icy moon was later nixed, astronomers knew there was still something around Rhea that was causing a strange, symmetrical structure in the charged-particle environment around Saturn’s second-largest moon. Now, new observations have shown something else around Rhea that was completely unexpected: an oxygenatmosphere. In March of this year, the Cassini spacecraft made a close flyby of Rhea and recorded data showing a thin atmosphere made up of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
 

The source of the oxygen is not really a surprise: Rhea’s density of 1.233 times that of liquid water suggests that Rhea is three quarters ice and one quarter rock. The moon’s tenuous atmosphere is maintained by the ongoing chemical decomposition of ice water on the moon’s surface by irradiation from Saturn’s magnetosphere.

Oxygen has also recently been detected in the atmospheres of two of Jupiter’s moons, Europaand Ganymede. Since oxygen is a main component of the atmosphere surrounding Saturn’s rings, astronomers think there could be similar atmospheres around other icy moons that orbitinside Saturn’s magnetosphere.

“The new results suggest that active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe,” said lead author Ben Teolis, a Cassini team scientist based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it.”

Of course, there’s always the possibility of life as we don’t know it.

And, there must be some sort of organics on the moon – meaning carbon compounds. The source of the carbon dioxide in Rhea’s atmosphere is not yet known, but its presence suggests that radiolysis reactions between oxidants and organics are ongoing at the moon’s surface.

As far as any of these new findings having a relation to the ruled-out hypothesis of rings around Rhea, Teolis told Universe Today there is still much about Rhea’s environment that is yet to determined. “The electron depletion is currently unexplained,” Teolis said in an email. The sharp, symmetrical drop in electrons detected around Rhea was the initial finding behind the ring theory. “Our current thinking is that it may be related to the ionization of the atmosphere, perhaps in conjunction with electrostatic charging of Rhea’s surface, but I do not have a definitive answer at this point. The atmosphere – magnetosphere interaction is a complex problem, and will take some time to sort out. But for the first time at an icy moon, the Cassini findings give us an in situ observational window onto this interaction, understanding of which is still highly theoretical. We’re working on it.”

This latest data came from Cassini’s ion and neutral mass spectrometer and the Cassini plasma spectrometer during flybys on Nov. 26, 2005, Aug. 30, 2007, and March 2, 2010. The ion and neutral mass spectrometer saw peak densities of oxygen of around 50 billion molecules per cubic meter (1 billion molecules per cubic foot). It detected peak densities of carbon dioxide of around 20 billion molecules per cubic meter (about 600 million molecules per cubic foot).

The plasma spectrometer saw clear signatures of flowing streams of positive and negativeions, with masses that corresponded to ions of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

The scientists said the oxygen appears to rise to an atmosphere when Saturn’s magnetic field rotates over Rhea. Energetic particles trapped in the planet‘s magnetic field pepper the moon’s water-ice surface. They cause chemical reactions that decompose the surface and release oxygen.

Releasing oxygen through surface irradiation could help generate conditions favorable for life at an icy body other than Rhea that has liquid water under the surface, Teolis said. If the oxygen and carbon dioxide from the surface could somehow get transported down to a sub-surface ocean, that would provide a much more hospitable environment for more complex compounds and life to form.

The scientists are unsure how the carbon dioxide is released. It could be the result of “dry ice” trapped from the primordial solar nebula, as is the case with comets, or it may be due to similar irradiation processes operating on the organic molecules trapped in the water ice of Rhea. The carbon dioxide could also come from carbon-rich materials deposited by tiny meteors that bombarded Rhea’s surface.

“Rhea is turning out to be much more interesting than we had imagined,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL. “The Cassini finding highlights the rich diversity of Saturn’s moons and gives us clues on how they formed and evolved.”

This research appears in the November 25, 2010 issue of Science Express.

towerofsleep:

_{Shoveling pirated DVDs in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China, April 20, 2008. From here.}

Hito Steyerl, In Defense of the Poor Image / Journal / e-flux

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.

Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

Things really haven’t changed that much, ironically. That’s an over-simplification, but not a wholly inaccurate one.

monstermadeofeyes:

(via easy123)

These gentlemen? Not worried about a machine uprising. Maybe a machine machine uprising, though…

(via lucyphermann, surrogateself)