Smart Energy

Over on The Journal of Are You Fucking Kidding Me, the Editor-in-Commandant writes:

if you’ve been injected with succinylcholine (also known as suxamethonium chloride or simple ‘sux’) you’re most likely in a hospital,undergoing intubation with accompanying respiratory support.

Unless, of course, you’re being mind-controlled by aliens, as in my 1999 novel Splitting. The aliens apply sux to one’s mind in order to suck away what you think you know and replace it with what they want you to know. Here’s the first sentence from Splitting (you’ll find a longer excerpt here), pretty much, to my mind, verbalizing the effects of a shot of the above mentioned sux:

The rush from the injection while supplies last kicks me in the chest, a chill metal gasp fleeing custody, a lightning of Tartars hording down my medulla oblongata.

I’m not trying to be coy, or whatever, when I say I’d never heard of a drug called sux before coming across a link to the above JAYFKM post on Boing Boing. Proving, therefore, that the world is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think.

40,000 year old flute from the site of Geißenklösterle made from bird bones. The University of Tübingen

Scientists researching a human settlement in southern Germany have discovered some bone flutes they think are some 40,000 years old. LiveScience writer Jennifer Welsh writes on Discovery:

Early modern humans could have spent their evenings sitting around the fire, playing bone flutes and singing songs 40,000 years ago, newly discovered ancient musical instruments indicate. The bone flutes push back the date researchers think human creativity evolved.

• The flutes are the earliest record of technological and artistic innovations characteristic of the Aurignacian period.
• The Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe.
• Neanderthals as well as modern humans may have lived in this area around the same time.

“These results are consistent with a hypothesis we made several years ago that the Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago,” study researcher Nick Conard, of Tübingen University, said in a statement. “Geißenklösterle is one of several caves in the region that has produced important examples of personal ornaments, figurative art, mythical imagery and musical instruments. The new dates prove the great antiquity of the Aurignacian in Swabia.”

The El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico is a tropical rainforest where a strain of the microbe Enterobacter lignolyticus was found that can tolerate an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass for microbial-based biofuel production. (Credit: Photo by Kristen DeAngelis)

In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: the ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestible for microbes can also be toxic to them. A solution to this conundrum, however, may be in the offing.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, have identified a tropical rainforest microbe that can endure relatively high concentrations of an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass. The researchers have also determined how the microbe is able to do this, a discovery that holds broad implications beyond the production of advanced biofuels.

“Our findings represent an important first step in understanding the mechanisms of ionic liquid resistance in bacteria and provide a basis for engineering ionic liquid tolerance into strains of fuel-producing microbes for a more efficient biofuel production process,” says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI’s Deconstruction Division and one of the senior investigators for this research.

Adds Michael Thelen, the principal investigator and a member of JBEI’s Deconstruction Division, “Our study also demonstrates that vigorous efforts to discover and analyze the unique properties of microorganisms can provide an important basis for understanding microbial stress and adaptation responses to anthropogenic chemicals used in industry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Having natural habitat in farming areas that supports ladybugs could help increase their abundance in crops where they control pests and help farmers reduce their costs, says a Michigan State University study. Read the rest of this entry »

Image from bagitmovie.wordpress.com

A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.

At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Read the rest of this entry »

Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning…. Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Question­naire… [and] subjects’ performance on tasks requiring creative insight was consistently better during their nonoptimal times of day.

via Sleepy Brains Think More Freely: Scientific American.

Back in 2007, I presented a paper at an academic conference arguing that it should be possible to read clues about previous climate regimes in literary works. My paper was short and only offered a few examples from 18th century English-language novels, but the idea, I think was sound. And thus was climato-criticism born.

So I was especially interested to see that a group of Spanish scholars are mining 8th – 10th century Arabic manuscripts for hints about past climate regimes and events. According to a news release on Eureka Alert, “The sources, from historians and political commentators of the era, focus on the social and religious events of the time, but do refer to abnormal weather events.

” ‘Climate information recovered from these ancient sources mainly refers to extreme events which impacted wider society such as droughts and floods,’ said lead author Dr Fernando Domínguez-Castro. ‘However, they also document conditions which were rarely experienced in ancient Baghdad such as hailstorms, the freezing of rivers or even cases of snow.’ ”

I think that’s a great approach, natch, and it is pretty much the one I took in examining early Gothic novels: the weather (it was the tail end of the Little Ice Age) heavily influenced the tone of these works, and heavy cloud cover, extreme storms, and the like dominate the descriptions of the natural world therein.

It turns out a group of psychics believe Apollo 16 might have found an alien ship on the moon. Plus, the sun is spitting giant magnetic bubbles of radiation at the Earth like we talked about its sister! Enjoy This Week in Discovery News.

via Psychics on the Moon and Incoming Sun Spit : Discovery News.

Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.

The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.

via Dramatic links found between climate change, elk, plants, and birds.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results. John Dupuis has an excellent round-up of posts on the subject and Kevin Zeinio has a great rant on the topic of keeping scientific knowledge open and accessible, too. What follows is an analysis by Janet D. Stewwedel from the Scientific American blog. Read the rest of this entry »