I've mentioned
the Littlest Squid before: the genus
Idiosepius, which contains only a handful of very small, very adorable species. And I commented that they have this habit of gluing themselves to seaweed, to hide from predators.
Well, today I'm here to explain how they do it, because
a new paper just came out on the topic of itty-bitty squids and their glue organs.
I met Makana in August 2005, where an old lava flow meets the ocean in a series of ledges and tide pools on Kauai, one of the Hawaiian Islands. He was a “local” of about my age who got his name (Hawaiian for “gift”) from the old volcano that formed the backdrop of our introduction. He wasn’t in college, but had a good job as a caddy at an upscale golf course, where Bill Clinton had tipped one of his buddies well the day before. In the afternoons, he and his friends came to this spot — still called “The Queen’s Bath” decades after the days of Hawaii’s royal rulers — to “talk story” and swap tales with an endless stream of tourists.
If you're worried about getting the flu, chances are that you got an influenza vaccine; these are created on an annual basis and use a method from the 1950s; it is egg-based technology, literally produced in chicken eggs. Some vaccines, like polio, are now created using laboratory-grown cell lines that are capable of hosting a growing virus. The first is inefficient, the second is expensive.(1)
The future of vaccines looks a little different. The race is on to create a universal flu vaccine, one that does not have to be recreated each year, and to also bring the technology cost down to where it is more financially constructive to get people a vaccine than have them in the hospital.(2)
I am a Science 2.0 newbie: I have written my
first article only a few days ago, and a
second one shortly afterwards. But I have soon realized that there is a sort of underground debate going on, about whether non-scientists should trust scientists about their claims, whether there exists a scientific establishment trying in every possible way to ignore/refute unorthodox ideas, and so on.
During the last decade, the almost singular focus on CO2 has been something of a puzzle; leaving out methane, with 23X the warming impact of CO2, seemed like a mistake.
Biologists working with fruit flies activated a gene called PGC-1, which increases the activity of mitochondria, the tiny power generators in cells that control cell growth and tell cells when to live and die. Result: it slowed the aging process of the flies' intestines and extended their lives by as much as 50 percent.
Fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, have a life span of about two months. They start showing signs of aging after about one month - they slow down, become less active and die. They are a good model for studying aging because scientists know every one of their genes and can switch individual ones on and off.
Want to get people excited about space exploration? Continue to use D&D-style names like Tharsis Tholus for geological features on Mars and every young man in the world will want to visit.
If you've studied the martial arts, or know anything at all about Asian culture, you have heard of the ch'i. It's spelled lots of different ways, which happens when you turn Eastern sounds into Western letters, but essentially it means a life force.(1)
As a young guy, open to the world, it's easy to be drawn into discussions and thoughts about lots of ideas and a life force essential to all humans might as well be in the mix. Some proponents even believe that all matter derives from ch'i, which at least has a science parallel.
Loudspeakers have improved a lot in the last 50 years but one pesky issue has remained; dead spots.
Modern oudspeakers can be designed to deliver the full frequency range of audible sound but it is difficult to achieve a smooth frequency output in all directions. Dead spots are caused by deconstructive interference as a result of radiating sound waves overlapping and cancellng each other out. This often happens when the sound is radiating from two or more sources, like in the mid-frequency ranges where both the 'woofer' and 'tweeter' loudspeaker cones are both active. This creates areas where the frequency response of the loudspeaker is less smooth, and sound quality is diminished.
