A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.

In all existing life forms, the four “letters” of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.

Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell’s machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.

In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic “words” are called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Now Chin’s team have created 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that don’t even exist yet.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

photo { Maria Petschnig, Born to Perform, 2009 }

Has everybody forgotten that the arts are recession proof? Yes, of course, revenues shrink, contributions dry up, and expenses continue to rise. (…)

But the arts—the play of the imagination, the need for this parallel universe with its dream logic and its moral reverberations—are not affected by shifts in the housing market or the Dow.

The value of a painting has never been established at auction. The power of a novel has never been determined by the advance the author happened to receive or by the number of copies that eventually sold. The greatness of a theatrical production has nothing to do with how many people attend. Dancers who can barely make their rent go on stage and give opulent performances. Poets, with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper, erect imperishable kingdoms. And there are millionaires who chose to live with the barebones beauty of a Mondrian or a Morandi.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

The principle of Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one — or as the character Gil Grissom in “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” succinctly puts it, if you hear hoofbeats, “think horses, not zebras.”

In his lively new book, “Voodoo Histories,” the journalist David Aaronovitch uses Occam’s razor to eviscerate the many conspiracy theories that have percolated through politics and popular culture over the last century, from those that assert that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually a United States government plot to those that claim that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered at the direction of the royal family or British intelligence.

In most cases, Mr. Aaronovitch notes, conspiracy theorists would rather tie themselves into complicated knots and postulate all sorts of improbable secret connections than accept a simple, more obvious explanation. (…)

Does the Internet, with its increased democratization of information, help spread conspiracy theories or help expose them? Mr. Aaronovitch says that it was obvious that “sites endorsing 9/11 conspiracy theories and those subscribing to them in passing far outnumbered sites devoted to debunking or refuting such theories.”

He writes that the Internet has enabled the “release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd,” and that “cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally self-invented individuals have grown up, some of them permitting contact between people who in previous times might have thought each other’s interests impossibly exotic and even mad.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ My New Pink Button | Thanks Chris! }

{ Joe Holbrook | more }

The Galton board, also known as a quincunx or bean machine, is a device for statistical experiments named after English scientist Sir Francis Galton. It consists of an upright board with evenly spaced nails (or pegs) driven into its upper half, where the nails are arranged in staggered order, and a lower half divided into a number of evenly-spaced rectangular slots. The front of the device is covered with a glass cover to allow viewing of both nails and slots. In the middle of the upper edge, there is a funnel into which balls can be poured, where the diameter of the balls must be much smaller than the distance between the nails. The funnel is located precisely above the central nail of the second row so that each ball, if perfectly centered, would fall vertically and directly onto the uppermost point of this nail’s surface.

Each time a ball hits one of the nails, it can bounce right (or left) with some probability P (and q = 1 - P). For symmetrically placed nails, balls will bounce left or right with equal probability, so P = q = 1/2. If the rows are numbered from 0 to ^{N - 1}, the path of each falling ball is a Bernoulli trial consisting of ^N steps. Each ball crosses the bottom row hitting the ⁿth peg from the left (where ^{0≤ n ≤ N - 1}) If and only if it has taken exactly ⁿ right turns, which occurs with probability

{ Wolfram MathWorld | Continue reading }

from the archives { The whole system—the nine thousand polystyrene balls dropping through a pegboard of 330 precisely cantilevered nylon pins, the real-time photoelectric counters tallying (by LED readout) the segmented heaps forming below, the perennially balky bucket-conveyor for resetting an experimental run—had all been painstakingly constructed and calibrated in order first to exemplify, and then to defy, what the Victorian statistician Francis Galton dubbed the “Law of Frequency of Error.” | Cabinet | Continue reading }

Doctors eventually determined that Mrs. Lee had suffered from broken-heart syndrome. (…) The mysterious malady mimics heart attacks, but appears to have little connection with coronary artery disease. (…)

For reasons that aren’t fully understood, the problem, formally known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy, afflicts mostly women after menopause. The syndrome is relatively uncommon, accounting for an estimated 1% to 2% of people—and about 6% of women—who are diagnosed with a heart attack. In addition to such common emotions as grief and anger, doctors say broken-heart syndrome has been triggered by a person’s anxiety over making a speech, a migraine headache or the emotional response to a surprise party. It can be fatal on occasion, but for the most part patients recover quickly, with no lasting damage to their hearts.

In a conventional heart attack, an obstructed artery starves the heart muscle of oxygenated blood, quickly resulting in the death of tissue and potentially permanently compromising heart function. In contrast, the heart muscle in broken-heart-syndrome patients is stunned in the adrenaline surge and appears to go into hibernation. Little tissue is lost.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

How far can bullets travel when fired into water?

The first candidate for this test was the Civil War rifle. At a range of 15 feet, the ballistics gel was completely unharmed; likewise at five feet. Only when the range was reduced to three feet did the bullet finally penetrate the gel, suggesting that diving under water was probably a pretty effective way of dodging slugs during the Civil War.

The experimenters moved on to the hunting rifle, which was loaded with a full-metal jacket .223 round that emerged at roughly 2,500 feet per second. At ten feet, the bullet disintegrated and the gel was untouched. At three feet, the bullet again broke up, with its tip coming to rest on the gel — not nearly enough power to damage flesh.

A bullet from the M1 Garand, with a muzzle speed of 2,800 ft/sec, also disintegrated at the ten-foot range. At two feet, the slug penetrated about four inches into the gel, suggesting a non-fatal wound. The armor-piercing .50 caliber round didn’t do any better — it, too, came apart at distances greater than five feet and lost most of its punch by three feet.

The engineers at the Central Scientific Research Institute for Precision Machinery Construction in Moscow correctly perceived the problem with shooting into water and in response developed the SPP-1 (Spetsialnyj Podvodnyj Pistolet, or “Special Underwater Pistol”) for use by Russian Navy frogmen. The SPP-1 is a manually operated four-barrel handgun that breaks open along the top and loads in a fashion similar to a double-barrel or over-and-under shotgun. The ammunition is designed to work underwater, using long bottlenecked rimmed casings plus bullets made from mild rather than hardened steel and designed to be stable underwater. The barrel isn’t rifled. According to the specs for the pistol, when fired at a depth of five meters — over sixteen feet — it’s lethal up to seventeen meters, or over fifty-five feet.

The SPP-1 isn’t the only exemplar of the breed. Other firearms are designed to work underwater as well, but they tend more towards the spear-gun model using dart-like projectiles. There’s no bright-line boundary where a bullet becomes a dart, but the projectiles fired by the Heckler & Koch P11 Underwater Pistol, for example, clearly cross the line. The H&K is an all-polymer weapon made especially for underwater use by the German Bundeswehr Kampfschwimmer — “army combat divers.” Each of the five dart-shaped projectiles is powered by a small, solid-fuel rocket. The weapon has been featured in some high-profile films, including Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie, and is said to be able to inflict a fatal wound at fifty feet underwater.

{ The Straight Dope | NB: The article isn’t on the site anymore | Related: Can a bullet fired into the air kill someone when it comes down? }

photos/enlarge { 1. Howard Schatz | 2. Unsourced }

{ Miss Landmine | Thanks Glenn! }

Magician rushed to hospital after spending more than 64 hours as a human ice cube to break a world endurance record.

73-year-old Russian farmer convicted of planting landmines around his field to ward off trespassers. He was concerned about the frequent theft of potatoes from his farm.

Scuba divers chase Google Street View car away with pitch forks in Norway. [More pics and on Google Street]

Big tree carved into a male phallus pops up in Tempe, AZ neighborhood.

Rio’s chronic lack of public bathrooms, copious amounts of beer and the general carefree abandon of Carnival conspire to create rivers of urine that can shock the uninitiated.

Walter Fredrick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, dies at 90. Related [August, 2002]: Eccentric Frisbee inventor Ed Hendrick dies at 78, requesting that his ashes are made into commemorative flying discs.

Man claiming to have AIDS used a hypodermic needle to hold up a Minneapolis bank. [Thanks JW!]

A Web designer is hawking square inches of an empty lot in Detroit for a dollar each to show what can be done with vacant spaces.

From 2007:Did you read about the Zimbabwean female athlete who has a penis, a vagina, and a last name of Sithole?

BBC presenter decides to admit that he killed a guy a while ago.

Letters chronicling an adulterous affair between JFK and a Swedish babe up for auction.

For the truth is that lack of fiscal discipline isn’t the whole, or even the main, source of Europe’s troubles — not even in Greece, whose government was indeed irresponsible.

Interview with Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Is the recession over?

Banking compensation around the world.

Today’s young artists are having to make ends meet with day jobs. Related: Annie Leibovitz is selling limited editions and weighing book deals in an effort to regain control of her homes and the copyrights to her work.

The ten most expensive pieces of art ever sold.

Neuroscientists discover brain area responsible for fear of losing money.

New research finds a sense of purpose developed during college years sticks with you and helps shape adult behavior.

New clue why autistic people don’t want hugs.

The 10 most destructive human behaviors.

Two interpretations of human evolution: Essentialism and Darwinism. [PDF]

It’s time for a study of the immune system on a grand scale, something akin to the Human Genome Project.

How many Americans are immune to H1N1?

The role of quasars in galaxy formation.

A NASA scientist answers the top 20 questions about 2012.

No, Google doesn’t intend to become a national Internet Service Provider, despite its new plan to build a number of optical networks to serve homes and businesses at up to one gigabit-per-second. 

Google may be earning an alleged $500 million a year via companies and individuals who register deceptive website addresses. The claim centres on a controversial scheme known as “typosquatting”, the practice of registering a misspelled variant of a popular web domain.

Comparing and analysing the correlation between food choice, health outcomes, and population characteristics.

How to pinpoint the world’s best cheese?

How to choose a sushi restaurant.

How dangerous are Tasers?

How to swear in French. [let me just correct a couple of typos: Je m’en fous, Connasse, Casse-toi]

How to make small-scale super-realistic Model landscapes.

How to promote nail polish.

If you’ve ever wanted to see the interior of the Guggenheim Museum in its pristine state, now’s the time. There isn’t a painting in sight. [Thanks JJ!]

Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, two of the most powerful art critics in New York, spent Valentine’s Day together seeing a few art shows—nothing out of the ordinary for the couple.

A section of Time Out New York has articles on finding strippers and getting checked for sexually transmitted diseases.

My night with a prosti-dude.

World’s strangest aphrodisiacs.

Kant on the Beautiful: The Interest in Disinterestedness. [PDF]

One of the questions I get all the time is about the economics of the book: How much did it sell, what was your advance, what did it cost to produce. Bookonomics (or, why writers barely make min. wage).

Behind the breakthrough magic of Walt Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and his other 30s and 40s classics—Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi—toiled as many as 100 young women, the inkers and painters, working from dawn to dusk on thousands of cels that brought his dreams to life.

High speed videography of mosquitoes.

They are both really named Andrew. What is impressive is that they’ve been dressing identically for almost 10 years. [About page]

The term Guerrilla marketing was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing.

Astroturfing is a term referring to political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but designed to mask its origins to create the impression of being spontaneous.

A history of the threesome on tv, in movies, and in life.

Sex doll with reloadable hymen. [via copyranter]

Witchcraft, satanism, occult. Need help out?

Mount Rushmore from the other side.

Celebrities upside down.

Weatherman attacked by pelican. [video]

Eulogy for Things Left Unsaid. [video]

I thought, peradventure you would prefer to have a few posts to read every morning vs. the full rack once a week?

So speak out. [I left the ‘Add a different answer’ option, don’t be shy to use it.]

Zachary Mason’s critically praised first novel comes with a largely self-explanatory title: “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” purports to be a compilation of 44 alternate versions of Homer’s epic. What that title cannot possibly convey, though, is the unusual journey of Mr. Mason’s manuscript on its way to publication by Farrar, Straus & Giroux last week.

Mr. Mason, 35, a computer scientist specializing in search recommendation systems and keywords, once worked at Amazon.com. He avoided writing workshops and M.F.A. programs as a matter of principle, and produced “The Lost Books” at night, during lunch breaks and on weekends and vacations. (…)

In person, Mr. Mason is extremely soft-spoken and tends to talk in a flat, unemotional tone, though he does note with regret that he “turned down Google two weeks before their I.P.O.” (He’s now employed at a Silicon Valley start-up.) He approaches literature almost as if it were a branch of science, governed by laws that are quantifiable and predictable, as when he talks of devising an algorithm, later discarded, to determine an optimum chapter order for his novel or when he compares writing to the annealing of metals.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

{ via hsgn | Thanks Tom! }

{ Imp Kerr, Mergers, Acquisitions, and Disposals, 2009 }

If I call you, will you call back? The study of reciprocity between mobile phone users reveals surprising insights about the flow of information in society.

What do your mobile phone habits say about you? Probably more than you might imagine.

At least, that’s the suggestion from Lauri Kovanen and pals at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Finland. These guys have studied the 350 million calls made by 5.3 million customers over an unnamed mobile phone network during a period of 18 weeks. The primary question they ask is whether mobile phone calls are mutually reciprocated: in other words, does somebody who calls another individual receive in return as many calls as he or she makes, a phenomenon known as reciprocity.

Mobile phone calls are a particularly good way to study reciprocity because they are directed in a way that sms messages and email are not. In a mobile phone call, the caller initiates the conversation and then both parties invest a certain amount of time in the event. But afterwards there is usually no immediate reason for the recipient to call back. So it’s clear who initiated the event.

But SMS messages or e-mails are entirely different: here a conversation usually means sending a sequence of reciprocated messages and this makes it much more difficult to study reciprocity by simply counting the number of messages.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Thief commits robbery armed with a cup of coffee.

Drunken man steals ambulance with patient inside.

12-year-old girl from Queens was led out of her school in handcuffs after she was caught doodling on her desk with an erasable marker.

Naked rambler Stephen Gough has been jailed for a total of 21 months after he was arrested seconds after walking free from an earlier jail term. Gough has become notorious for trying to walk around Britain naked. Related: H Get naked: It’s good for your brain.

Alexander McQueen is dead.

In the next 24 hours, more than 150,000 individual humans will become extinct. But it’s not just humans who are being lost. Is extinction in your future?

Report shows severity of China’s pollution.

How financial innovation causes bubbles.

How does Facebook make overt self obsession ok?

The future of gaming: The hot potato experience. The next generation of pervasive games are beginning to appear.

The robots are coming but are we ready for them? Developments in the field of robotics are accelerating us towards a bio-mechanical future. But if robots are to plug safely into society, we must start thinking about the rules of interaction today.

Mobile phones’ impact on health. Related: How Pong works reducing cell phone radiation. [Thanks Glenn!]

Should we clone Neanderthals?

The perverse pleasure of musical pain.

Statistical analysis of graffiti found at the University of Chicago Library.

Do other New Yorkers know about the “Library Walk” on East 41st Street?

New exhibition at the Museum of Sex, “Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom.”

William Faulkner appears to have drawn the names of characters and other inspiration from a Mississippi plantation diary just discovered by scholars.

Does awe, or something else, move you to e-mail articles? [Read more]

A new technique for analyzing early English texts is gradually revealing the history of the apostrophe.

Nasty pets.

The new Diesel “Be Stupid” posters are now all over Manhattan.

Duchamp owns everything.

{ Reka Nyari }

The long-term effects of short-term emotions

The heat of the moment is a powerful, dangerous thing. We all know this. If we’re happy, we may be overly generous. Maybe we leave a big tip, or buy a boat. If we’re irritated, we may snap. Maybe we rifle off that nasty e-mail to the boss, or punch someone. And for that fleeting second, we feel great. But the regret—and the consequences of that decision—may last years, a whole career, or even a lifetime.

At least the regret will serve us well, right? Lesson learned—maybe.

Maybe not. My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made. When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }

My impossible ones. — Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. (…) Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. (…) Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. (…) Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. (…) Zola: or “the delight in stinking.”

{ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888 | Continue reading }

Who are the best spreaders of information in a social network? The answer may surprise you.

The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. It’s easy to imagine that because the links that form between various individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they must have a random structure. So the discovery in the 1980s that social networks are very different came as something of a surprise. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.

Today, there’s another surprise in store for network connoisseurs courtesy of Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and various buddies. One of the important observations from these networks is that certain individuals are much better connected than others. These so-called hubs ought to play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through society.

In fact, no small effort has gone into identifying these individuals and exploiting them to either spread information more effectively or prevent them from spreading disease.

The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

illustration { Martin Wong’s Ferocactus }