Wednesday, March 13, 2013

MTA Workers Claim Budget Cuts Lead To Rat Population Exploding

MTA Workers Claim Budget Cuts Lead To Rat Population Exploding: MTA workers protested Wednesday in front of Jamaica Central Terminal demanding that the city address what they say is a terrible rodent problem in the subway system, CBS News reports.

Members of the Transit Workers Union 100 passed out pamphlets to riders and solicited signatures for their online petition, telling people, "If You Smell Something, Sign Something."

The protesters claimed the city needs to increase the frequency of garbage pickups, put more trash bins in stations and better seal off refuse storage rooms to rodents.

The MTA's 2010 and 2011 budget cuts would eliminate 254 subway car-, track- and station-cleaning positions. And for the TWU, what the city might have saved in money, it's gaining in rats.

The trash pickups used to happen "every couple of days," Paul Flores, a 12-year subway station agent, tells NBC News. "Now it's four or five days before they pick up the garbage, and the rats just basically call that home."

As the I-O center of the economy weakens then R contagion can increase, here a boom and bust in the Iv-B economy from weak I-O policing leads to a lack of money for policing in an exponentially growing problem. In effect the garbage collectors as Oy are like predators, they ask the Ro population to cooperate to reduce the R contagion. This is like the O police asking Ro ghettoes to police the R drug addicts and prostitutes in their areas as the O police can't afford to.

How Pathogens Fight Drugs - Technology Review

How Pathogens Fight Drugs - Technology Review: When attacked with antibiotics, bacteria can mutate rapidly in order to survive—it's what makes, for instance, the staph infection MRSA so dangerous. New research suggests that such bacterial evolution occurs even faster, and in a more predictable fashion, than anyone thought. Using a novel type of microfluidics chip, researchers have shown that bacteria can develop antibiotic resistance in less than 10 hours.

Rather than taking the conventional approach of testing the bacteria in a test tube, Robert Austin, a biophysicist at Princeton University, designed a microfluidics chip to simulate the complex chemical environments that bacteria experience in the real world. The chip contains over 1,000 tiny hexagonal chambers, each one a microhabitat connected to others by long, slim corridors.
Austin flowed nutrients around one side of the chip and a solution of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin around the other. The solutions diffused into the inner hexagons through nano-sized slits, building a landscape of different ecologies. "I call it the 'death galaxy'—a galaxy of different environments designed to be very stressful," Austin says. "And the question is, if we apply very high levels of antibiotics to this funny world, would we see the rapid evolution of resistance?"
Austin and colleagues began to see resistant strains emerge within five hours. After 10 hours, the resistant strains were populating even the most Cipro-saturated chambers.


The researchers also discovered that the evolution occurred predictably. Every time they ran the experiment, they got the same result, with the same four resistance-conferring mutations emerging over and over again. "It's surprising that it happens so quickly and in such a logical and repeatable manner," he says.

The same happens with R animals over time, when the environment favors cooperation or sharing knowledge about dangers then they form Ro cooperative herds. People also do this in Roy societies, they might try to survive as R by secrecy and deception, if it is too dangerous for this to succeed then they form Ro gangs to use numbers to protect themselves. Also high mutations lead to the same result, those less fit die off leaving the surviving mutations as R to grow exponentially.

Teenage brains

Teenage Brains - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine: Researchers such as Steinberg and Casey believe this risk-friendly weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because, over the course of human evolution, the willingness to take risks during this period of life has granted an adaptive edge. Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations. "The more you seek novelty and take risks," says Baird, "the better you do." This responsiveness to reward thus works like the desire for new sensation: It gets you out of the house and into new turf.

As Steinberg's driving game suggests, teens respond strongly to social rewards. Physiology and evolutionary theory alike offer explanations for this tendency. Physiologically, adolescence brings a peak in the brain's sensitivity to dopamine, a neurotransmitter that appears to prime and fire reward circuits and aids in learning patterns and making decisions. This helps explain the teen's quickness of learning and extraordinary receptivity to reward—and his keen, sometimes melodramatic reaction to success as well as defeat.
The teen brain is similarly attuned to oxytocin, another neural hormone, which (among other things) makes social connections in particular more rewarding. The neural networks and dynamics associated with general reward and social interactions overlap heavily. Engage one, and you often engage the other. Engage them during adolescence, and you light a fire.

Younger people tend to be R or B, they are looking to put down their roots by secretly looking for opportunities. Later they can cooperate with others as Bi or Ro to protect their Gb private property or G turf. They are like growing seeds of a plant that thrive by fast growing and competing against other seedlings to not be overshadowed. Young R prey survive by hiding and spotting danger until they are strong enough to cooperate with others in protections as Ro.

War On The EPA: Republican Bills Would Erase Decades Of Protection

War On The EPA: Republican Bills Would Erase Decades Of Protection: Both have passed the House and are pending in the Senate. Still another proposed measure that would have all-encompassing reach is the Regulatory Accountability Act, which would make cost the top consideration for all federal regulations.

"It single-handedly amends probably more laws of the United States than any law ever introduced in Congress," said John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Taken together, the measures would so hamstring regulators that they would effectively return the nation to the 1880s era of the nation's first modern-style regulator, the Interstate Commerce Commission, advocates say.

The Iv-B and V-Bi disconnect puts pressure on the I-O police to weaken them, in Iv-B companies want to pollute more to give B consumers cheaper products. This happens for example in the transfer of manufacturing to high polluting countries where this pollution is far enough away. So the competition in Iv-B tries to evade the environmental police, also in V-Bi the pressure between them to profit more is against the same EPA. This is held together by compromise between Iv agents and Bi communities who recognize the value of environmental policing, for example Bi groups see evidence of pollution hurting them by discussing it. Iv agents realize that a polluting or dangerous product can get a bad reputation and lose them money if the Bi community realizes it. So both often look for a neutral I-O environmental police to reduce pollution but not to make products too expensive.


"This is a departure not just from recent political thinking but literally would be a reversal," said NRDC's David Goldston. "The last time this was a situation that prevailed was the 1890s."

"It shows just a profound disgust and disdain for the regulatory state that is unhinged from any facts or concerns for the benefits from those rules," said Walke.

The ongoing anti-regulation crusade was on display in the House this week -- and will be again next week -- with some smaller bore bills. On Thursday, the House passed a measure that will delay regulations of cement factories that were aimed at implementing court-mandated controls on mercury and other pollutants.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Rick Perry's Opposition To Pesticide Regulations Helped Launch His Political Star

Rick Perry's Opposition To Pesticide Regulations Helped Launch His Political Star: "This became how Perry rises in politics," claims Jim Harrington, director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a public interest law group. "Perry is the weathervane, pure and simple. He saw where the money was and where the politics were drifting."

In the 1980’s, agricultural workers in Texas didn’t enjoy many of the workplace protections that were taken for granted in other industries. So in 1987, after Harrington’s group had sued the state on behalf of farm workers, the Texas agriculture department developed a law called the Agricultural Hazards Communications Act, known colloquially as Right to Know.

In addition to requiring that field workers be trained on the dangers of pesticides, the law required farmers to maintain a list of the chemicals they used on their crops -- known as the “crop sheet” -- and to provide it to farm workers, along with a notice of their rights as workers. The law also stated that workers couldn’t be forced to handle chemicals that came unlabeled, nor could they be fired or disciplined for filing a complaint against an employer with regards to Right to Know.

Oy agents deceptively use toxic chemicals, the R nomadic workers like R prey get sick from them. Because both are secretive, R workers are often undocumented, they both tend to hide from the I-O police. Making this more transparent with Ro protests saves time in treating these diseases as the information on these chemicals diffuses through the medical community. In Oy-R there is also a right to hide information. 

The crop sheet was important because Texas’ heavily Latino farm workforce tends to migrate, handling different crops in different regions during different seasons. A detailed listing of chemicals used and their dangers could help workers pinpoint the cause of an illness. According to Vaughn Cox, who worked in the agriculture department in the late 80’s, Right to Know was a sensible law designed specifically to help the farm worker and the doctors in the event of a pesticide-related emergency.
“If it says cabbage in South Texas is treated with these chemicals this time of year, then the doctor can say, ‘Oh, they used this kind of chemical.’ It could speed up the process of treating them,” says Cox. “So many farm workers were being exposed to chemicals in unsafe ways. They had no training, no protective clothing or anything that common sense would say you should have.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The Fracking Industry's War On The New York Times -- And The Truth

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The Fracking Industry's War On The New York Times -- And The Truth: My caveat was that the natural gas industry and government regulators needed to act responsibly to protect the environment, safeguard communities from irresponsible practices and to candidly inform the public about the true risks and benefits of shale extraction gas.

The opposite has happened.

The industry's worst actors have successfully battled reasonable regulation, stifled public disclosure while bending compliant government regulators to engineer exceptions to existing environmental rules. Captive agencies and political leaders have obligingly reduced already meager enforcement resources and helped propagate the industry's deceptive economic projections. As a result, public skepticism toward the industry and its government regulators is at a record high. With an army of over 40,000 highly motivated anti-fracking activists in New York alone, popular mistrust of the industry is presenting a daunting impediment to its expansion.

Iv agents of V oil companies act secretively and deceptively on commission, B farmers are often hurt by pollution though they might benefit from royalties. It can become a Roy negative sum game where both Oy and R are being hurt by pollution and declining profits. The Bi community protests to protect the B farmers which moves the I-O police towards regulating it in a more neutral way restoring color balance.

Light on Leaves | The Scientist

Light on Leaves | The Scientist: The finding

For 150 years it was assumed that an unknown internal stimulus drove leaf genesis. But Saiko Yoshida and colleagues in the lab of Cris Kuhlemeier at the University of Bern have now determined that even though the location where new leaf development occurs—stem cells at the tip of a plant shoot—is shrouded by a dense covering of leaves, enough light can penetrate to activate growth hormones.
The hormones

The authors looked at two hormones—cytokinin and auxin—known to react to environmental stimuli. Cytokinin promotes cell division, while auxin is responsible for leaf formation.

The experiments

When researchers grew tomato plants in the dark, new leaf production ceased even when sugar was added to make up for the lack of photosynthesis. Instead, the auxin transporter protein gradually disappeared from cell membranes with a consequent drop in auxin levels. Applying auxin externally and allowing it to diffuse into the cells did not restore leaf formation, but cytokinin application did, suggesting that auxin does not work alone.

The application

For the first time, external stimuli were found to affect leaf initiation. This light trigger could be used to manipulate leaf arrangement to optimize light capture and potentially provide higher crop yields. In addition, it suggests researchers might want to take another look at signals that were assumed to be independent of environmental cues, says Karen Halliday, at the University of Edinburgh.

As Biv plants grow they look for light so as not to be overshadowed by each other, they also grow more leaves in this light to overshadow competitors below them. V companies also look for opportunities to develop products by synthesizing Iv ideas where there are gaps in products available. These close the gaps that competitors might exploit to become a threat later. Large electronics companies for example often have many products that don't sell well to stop others getting a foothold in the market.

The Untapped Healing Potential of DMSO - 2 - Life Extension

The Untapped Healing Potential of DMSO - 2 - Life Extension: An “underground” market in DMSO sprung up, with sales rumored to be over a billion dollars a year. This, Dr. Jacob notes, was from selling not pharmaceutical-quality DMSO, but rather so-called “underground” DMSO. It was not illegal to sell DMSO, and the public could purchase the industrial product virtually anywhere, from the local health food store to the dry cleaners, ice cream shops, hobby stores, and from the trunks of cars. It was also inexpensive: distributors paid about $1 a pint in bulk, and consumers were happy to pay about $20 a pint for a product that brought relief for conditions such as arthritis and sports injuries.3 The FDA, however, began seizing DMSO from distributors and retailers. It became harder to obtain, and eventually the furor died down. For Dr. Jacob and other DMSO researchers, however, the battle with the FDA continues to this day.

An additional (though related) obstacle to DMSO’s widespread use is its lack of potential profitability for drug companies. The few early patents granted on DMSO expired in 1987, and without patent protection for the DMSO molecule itself, drug companies cannot make money on it. Sales of so-called underground DMSO have moved to the Internet, where buyers usually cannot be certain of the strength or purity of the chemical-grade and industrial-quality product offered. 

An Iv-B industry where Iv sellers might be deceptive with its quality, B users are also hiding from the I-O police to get relief. They hide these transaction on the internet, the I-O police should make the market more transparent in Bi with communities sharing information on its dangers cooperatively. For example Iv sellers with poor products might be outed under Bi pressure on the I-O police to check their products. 

Jennifer Fearing, Humane Society State Director, Pushes Animal Welfare In California

Jennifer Fearing, Humane Society State Director, Pushes Animal Welfare In California: "I've been working to build bridges. I'm not some crazy Jihad terrorist," said Fearing, 40. "Let's sit down and work constructively in the areas where we agree and make animals' lives better in those areas."

In the Supreme Court last week, the justices heard an appeal from the National Meat Association, which seeks to block the 2009 state law that barred the butchering of downer cows. Critical questions about the law from the justices appeared to side with the meat industry's position.

The notion that animal welfare activists know more about caring for livestock than do farmers galls Jill Benson, the fourth-generation owner of Modesto egg producer JS West. Since Prop 2 she has fought negative perceptions by taking a mobile chicken house on the road and placing a live cam in one of her massive egg barns newly outfitted with bigger cages.

"We as farmers have always cared for our animals, but we have not done a good job in communicating to the consumer how we do that," said West, who is critical of what she describes as HSUS scare tactics. "An animal activist group can spin it with deplorable video and tell a story that the consumer believes is common practice, when, in fact, it is one bad apple."

People supporting R animals can be secretive and deceptive like terrorists, sometimes they are countered by B farmers also being secretive and deceptive or acting as Bi being more transparent.

Malaria vs. Mankind: Chemicals, Conservation And An Ancient Arms Race

Malaria vs. Mankind: Chemicals, Conservation And An Ancient Arms Race: When Boston University's McCann arrived in Burie, Ethiopia, in 2005, it was very different from what he remembered from his two-year stay in the 1970s. Back then, the area was malaria-free. "There were no mosquitoes," McCann recalls. "There was no reason to be awake at night from buggers buzzing around."

But sometime in the subsequent decades, mosquitoes moved in and brought malaria with them. McCann's former landlord and other townspeople shared horror stories of entire schools abandoned and of houses simply locked up because no one inside had survived.

McCann, an agricultural expert, noticed something else that had changed: widespread planting of a new variety of corn.

Lacking food security, Africans have embraced just about any opportunity to squeeze more sustenance from the earth. The new maize, which grows faster and more abundantly than traditional varieties, had "spread like wildfire," McCann says.
The locals call it "Silsa Sidist," or 66, short for BH660. While the varietal is a powerful example of agricultural technology's potential, McCann feared that the product may have a serious drawback: The plant sheds pollen at the same time that mosquitoes lay their eggs. And this particular pollen is perfect food for the larvae. As McCann puts it, the right temperature and right humidity come together to create the "perfect storm."
Curious to see if this explained the local surge in malaria, McCann worked with an Ethiopian malaria expert to study where farmers were growing the super corn and where people were getting malaria. They found 10 times the rate of malaria associated with the new corn as compared to other crops.
McCann shared their results with a local agriculture manager. "I just got this look of, 'Yes, you've convinced me,'" recalls McCann.
"And then he said, 'Don't tell anyone.'" Farmers weren't about to give up their prize crop.

 This creates an exponential increase in malaria as more V food is given to it, it is like R locusts multiplying from eating commercial V crops.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Klebsiella planticola--The Gene-Altered Monster That Almost Got Away

http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/Klebsiellaplanticola.html

Let's talk about why today's conventional agricultural systems require
such massive inputs of pesticides and fertilizers. When a healthy soil is
first plowed out of native grassland, for example, the disease-suppressive
bacteria and fungi, protozoa and nematodes are present. For the first 5 to
15 years after plowing native grassland you don't have to use any
pesticides. No fertilizers are required because there is natural nutrient
cycling, natural nitrogen retention, and disease suppression. As you plow
that soil, you start to kill the beneficial organisms, you lose the
organic matter, and you lose the food to feed the beneficial
organisms. After about 10 to 15 years, if you're not adding back
adequate plant residue to feed those organisms, you lose them, and
start having significant disease problems. Then you either leave that
land and farm elsewhere, or in the US, we used fertilizers to keep
yields high. As more and more of the organisms were killed by the
salt effect of the fertilizers, and the constant plowing mined out
more and more of the organic matter, starving the beneficial
organisms to death, disease became a serious problem. And we started using
more and more pesticide to knock the disease back.

A balanced color environment as Oy predatory insects and animals such as birds feeding on R insects, these in turn feed on the V leaves of plants. When these balances are disturbed then there can be Oy-R mutations of animals and insects trying to find this balance again. Pesticides don't work well to replace Oy predators because they cannot counter innovate as well as Oy can, also there is no history of innovation like this against those R insects.

Evolution, Tout de Suite | The Scientist

Evolution, Tout de Suite | The Scientist: Frank Johannes at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands has been trying to understand the intricacies of epigenetic inheritance—specifically, how methylation of DNA bases can contribute to the inheritance of particular characteristics in Arabidopsis. “People are beginning to speculate,” he says. “ ‘ Wait a minute. What’s going on in nature? Does this contribute significantly to adaptation?’ ”

But it’s hard to tell in most natural populations whether inheritance is due to DNA sequence variation or epigenetic changes. “We cannot delineate these two causes very well,” Johannes says. So with his collaborator, Fabrice Roux at the University of Science and Technology in Lille, France, he has been studying a large population of Arabidopsis plants with disrupted methylation patterns. The plants were derived from two Arabidopsis parents with essentially identical genomes, but with one having a mutated DDM1 DNA methylation gene. DDM1 is required for normal methylation—the conversion of cytosine, in cytosine-guanine pairs in the DNA, into 5-methylcytosine—and its mutation reduces genomic methylation by 70 percent.

The reduction of mutation allows more random evolution to predominate such as random matings, more normal offspring from this tend to the center of the normal curve and deviants to this are often less fit and survive less often. Methylation however can be chaotic, it creates a change here in one plant that affects how and where it grows in the next generation, which in turn can affect how often it seeds and where it gets pollen from. Increasing the mutation rate through epigenetics can allow V-Bi plants that evolve randomly to innovate more as Iv-B plants. For example this methylation switch might be turned on and off randomly, if conditions are stable then this might switch it off partially. If conditions change then the suppression of this methylation switch might be lost and the plant innovates with mutations until it reaches a stable environment again when this methylation is switched off again. This behavior would be an evolutionary advantage so a methylation switch like this is more likely to evolve than one for example that only switched on in stable environments or was random.

A team headed by Vincent Colot, now at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, backcrossed the first generation offspring and selected progeny that were homozygous for the wild type DDM1 gene; in other words, with fully functional methylation machinery. They propagated the plants through a further six rounds of inbreeding, creating “epigenetic recombinant inbred lines” (epiRILs), which carried a mosaic of the parental epigenome. When Roux grew them in a common garden in northern France to subject the almost 6,000 plants to “realistic” ecological selection, they found that the epiRILs yielded plants with distinctly different phenotypes despite being effectively genetically identical.
The segregation and heritability of these traits—which included flowering time and plant height—mirrored those found in naturally divergent Arabidopsis populations, in which phenotypic variation represents adaptations to different environmental conditions. But natural populations have had thousands of years to generate these variations: the epiRILs managed to do it in just eight generations. Andrew Hudson at the University of Edinburgh says there is a clear implication that “DNA methylation and epigenetic changes are important in evolution.”

Rats free each other from cages : Nature News & Comment

Rats free each other from cages : Nature News & Comment: Rats, often anthropomorphized as greedy and selfish, may not be the callous, cartoon villains they are sometimes made out to be. A paper published today in Science demonstrates that the rodents will liberate trapped cage-mates — even when they have nothing to gain.

There is a growing body of research showing that animals respond to the emotions of others. But it wasn't certain whether rats could suppress their own distress in order to aid another rat.

Lead author Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, thinks her work is a significant step towards settling this question. “This finding is the big kahuna — evidence that empathy motivates one individual to help another,” she says.

R rats can survive by running and hiding, however they can also cooperate in teams to defeat smaller predators. Cooperative behavior can then occur as long as threats are not frightening enough to make them run instead. This is like Roy herd animals such as gazelles, they might stay together as a herd to cooperate in chasing off a smaller Oy predator like a wild dog but run from a larger one.

The 6 Weirdest Ways Wild Animals Are Having to Adapt to Us | Cracked.com

The 6 Weirdest Ways Wild Animals Are Having to Adapt to Us | Cracked.com: So, as a consequence, we are inadvertently prescribing fish every medication we ingest.

Water treatment plants aren't designed to account for the massive amounts of antidepressants humanity is literally pissing away each day (the number of people in the U.S. alone taking antidepressants is well over 27 million), since we don't have a reasonable method to treat water for pharmaceuticals. That means that ultimately fish are being exposed to considerable amounts of antidepressants, by fish standards. As of yet the results of this haven't been fully researched, but some researchers bothering to test the effects have noted that young fish exposed to the drugs become more "laid back" (seriously).

Science is often V-Bi based, it is transparent and cooperative with other scientists sharing information. Many products are worked out on a normal curve with two standard deviations from this normal operation defined as deviant potentially with side effects. However often this is inaccurate, also side effects less significant might be ignored so they reach a randomized distribution in society with many people having minor side effects. This creates a fringe in society like the fringe of the normal curve where side effects are ignored as existing because of their low statistical significance or because trials are deceptively rigged as Iv-B. For example 11% of the US population use antidepressants without any efficacy shown for them compared to placebo for mild to moderate depression. These drugs then can be sold with deception, the side effects hidden as relatively insignificant statistically. They represent a manipulation of randomness in statistics itself, then these drugs spread out in animals as well with low significance levels. However deception usually results in movement from floors to ceilings so the rise in these levels might eventually lead to serious health problems in humans and animals.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Genetically modified maize - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Genetically modified maize - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: It is anticipated resistance to Bt will evolve in the form of a recessive allele in the pest. Because of this, a pest that gains resistance will have an incredibly higher fitness than the wild type pest in the Bt corn fields. If the resistant pest is feeding in the non-Bt corn nearby, the resistance is neutral and offers no advantage to the pest over any nonresistant pest. Ensuring there are at least some breeding pests nearby that are not resistant increases the chance the resistant pests will choose to mate with nonresistant ones. Since the gene is recessive, all offspring will be heterozygous, and the offspring from that mating will not be resistant to Bt and therefore no longer a threat. Using this method, scientists and farmers hope to keep the number of resistant genes very low, and use genetic drift to ensure any resistance that does emerge does not spread.

The pests are an R chaotic feeder on V plants, when they are attacked too much by Oy pesticides then they mutate into varieties that are secretive and deceptive to this pesticide, i.e. not hurt by it because the pesticide no longer targets them. By keeping this Oy attack low it is like fewer Oy predators such as hyena chasing R gazelles, they select less for faster gazelles that will outrun Oy predators later. These innovations against pesticides can build resistance, this is when pests cooperate with each other to transfer this immunity often by direct genes transferred between them to nonresistive pests. This is similar to political problems in a Roy country, Oy secret police target R terrorists and freedom fighters until they kill off those vulnerable leaving others smart enough to evade the secret police. They then transfer this knowledge to Ro demonstrators who can have a united front against the Oy forces. When left alone this Ro resistance can weaken until they let their guard down and become vulnerable to attack as with the pests.

Peppered Moths Re-examined | The Scientist

Peppered Moths Re-examined | The Scientist: To lay the matter to rest, a late evolutionary biologist from the University of Cambridge, Michael Majerus, carried out a 7-year study in a hamlet close to his home in Cambridge, England, the results of which were published yesterday (February 8) in Biology Letters.

“These data provide the most direct evidence yet to implicate camouflage and bird predation as the overriding explanation for the rise and fall of melanism in moths,” the authors wrote in the abstract.

According to Majerus, the controversy started back in the late 1990s, when Nature ran a review of his book Melanism: Evolution in Action suggesting that “the peppered moth case is fatally flawed as an example of Darwinian evolution,” he explained in a talk back in 2004. Newspapers and other media outlets picked up the review and further discredited the peppered moth story, providing fodder for evolution skeptics.

In Aperiomics R prey use deception, secrecy, camouflage, speed, faster breeding, etc to survive chaotically. Often this becomes a secretive war against Oy predators that use the same tactics, both sides innovate and mutate in these ways. In this aspect it would be more of a theory of  R revolution and oy counter revolution. Evolution occurs through randomness in horizontal levels of the evolutionary tree where a normal animal evolves with deviations from this being less successful. For these animals to understand this normality there needs to be less deception and more cooperation, the normal animals experience less competition because there develops a consensus among these animals of  what is a desirable characteristic that is to be protected and fine tuned.

Sperm whales: How plastic bags are poisoning the planet's greatest predators | Mail Online

Sperm whales: How plastic bags are poisoning the planet's greatest predators | Mail Online: In another recent and tragic case, a group of seven sperm whales stranded themselves on a Mediterranean beach. They had been driven into shallow waters, possibly by military sonar exercises. There they were unable to feed on squid. And since whales get their liquid from their food, they began to dehydrate.

Then, their starving bodies began to break down fat — to deadly effect. The pollutants they’d absorbed from the ocean and had been deposited in their fat were released.

They included heavy metals such as mercury, lead and cadmium, and organochlorines like PCBs and DDTs, even fire-retardants used on modern furnishings.

In effect, the whales were poisoning themselves. Fatally weakened, they stranded themselves together on the shore, demonstrating the unswerving loyalty to each other for which their species is renowned.

And when their carcases were dissected, it came as no surprise to discover an unusual amount of plastic, including the dreaded plastic bags, in their stomachs.

Pollution can have random or chaotic effects on the environment, if random then it can reach a normal equilibrium where it is tolerated with occasional deviations of severe harm. If chaotic then the effects can rise exponentially to a ceiling and collapse, for example some pesticides such as DDT caused mutations in animals and people leading to collapses in some populations. Here the whales encounter a tipping point where the levels of pollutants rose exponentially in their bloodstreams from being stranded. This would happen more often as this normal level of pollutants gets closer to a tipping point, random variation would increasingly push them over the edge into disaster.

Do Plants Think?: Scientific American

Do Plants Think?: Scientific American



My interest in the parallels between plant and human senses got their start when I was a young postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Xing-Wang Deng at Yale University in the mid 1990s. I was interested in studying a biological process that would be specific to plants, and would not be connected to human biology (probably as a response to the six other “doctors” in my family, all of whom are physicians). So I was drawn to the question of how plants sense light to regulate their development.
It had been known for decades that plants use light not only for photosynthesis, but also as a signal that changes the way plants grow. In my research I discovered a unique group of genes necessary for a plant to determine if it’s in the light or in the dark. When we reported our findings, it appeared these genes were unique to the plant kingdom, which fit well with my desire to avoid any thing touching on human biology. But much to my surprise and against all of my plans, I later discovered that this same group of genes is also part of the human DNA.
This led to the obvious question as to what these seemingly “plant-specific” genes do in people.  Many years later, we now know that these same genes are important in animals for the timing of cell division, the axonal growth of neurons, and the proper functioning of the immune system.

Plants have a B root and iv branch structure like nerves in a Roy animal, their impulses in this structure are similar then to impulses down actual nerves. In the same way a root and branch structure in computer networks and software has a similar thought process of growing chaotically and collapsing.

The Dust Bowl | Economic History Services

The Dust Bowl | Economic History Services


Despite the multiple uses of the phrase "Dust Bowl" it was an event which occurred in a specific place and time. The Dust Bowl was a coincidence of drought, severe wind erosion, and economic depression that occurred on the Southern and Central Great Plains during the 1930s. The drought – the longest and deepest in over a century of systematic meteorological observation – began in 1933 and continued through 1940. In 1941 rain poured down on the region, dust storms ceased, crops thrived, economic prosperity returned, and the Dust Bowl was over. But for those eight years crops failed, sandy soils blew and drifted over failed croplands, and rural people, unable to meet cash obligations, suffered through tax delinquency, farm foreclosure, business failure, and out-migration. The Dust Bowl was defined by a combination of:
  • extended severe drought and unusually high temperatures
  • episodic regional dust storms and routine localized wind erosion
  • agricultural failure, including both cropland and livestock operations
  • the collapse of the rural economy, affecting farmers, rural businesses, and local governments
  • an aggressive reform movement by the federal government
  • migration from rural to urban areas and out of the region
This also occurred as part of the Iv-B economy of the roaring 20s, business grew exponentially along with weak I-O policing. Fraudsters as Iv-Oy sold land to R-B farmers that historically didn't have enough rain for farming, the result was destroying natural vegetation for new crops that failed producing dust storms with a loss of topsoil. Some abandoned these farms returning it to being G public land again, for many they were on the G-Gb fence where it was barely worth owning as Gb private property. 

This is like in the Roy animal kingdom where R prey might overeat V natural vegetation beyond its ability to maintain normal growth, this results in collapse of the Biv vegetation and chaotic collapse of the R animals as well as the Roy food chain depending on them. In poor economies a similar process occurs, the Biv capitalistic system is like vegetation in areas with few resources. Roy animals can easily overeat them creating a dustbowl or grasslands instead of a forest. The Biv businesses become attacked by Roy criminals or bad debts so they lose money and die out like the Biv forest leaving a grassland of small and poor businesses or none at all in an economic dustbowl.

The Dust Bowl on the Great Plains coincided with the Great Depression. Though few plainsmen suffered directly from the 1929 stock market crash, they were too intimately connected to national and world markets to be immune from economic repercussions. The farm recession had begun in the 1920s; after the 1919 Armistice transformed Europe from an importer to an exporter of agricultural products, American farmers again faced their constant nemesis: production so high that prices were pushed downward. Farmers grew more cotton, wheat, and corn, than the market could consume, and prices fell, fell more, and then hit rock bottom by the early 1930s. Cotton, one of the staple crops of the southern plains, for example, sold for 36 cents per pound in 1919, dropped to 18 cents in 1928, then collapsed to a dismal 6 cents per pound in 1931. One irony of the Dust Bowl is that the world could not really buy all of the crops Great Plains farmers produced. Even the severe drought and crop failures of the 1930s had little impact on the flood of farm commodities inundating the world market.

Our Wildlife - The Lynx-Snowshoe Hare Cycle

Our Wildlife - The Lynx-Snowshoe Hare Cycle


The Lynx-Snowshoe Hare Cycle

The primary food of the lynx is the snowshoe hare and therefore the population cycles of these two species are closely linked. When hares are plentiful, lynx eat little else, taking about two hares every three days. When hares are scarce, lynx also prey upon mice, voles, squirrels, grouse, and ptarmigan, and they will also eat carrion. However, these food sources often do not meet the lynx's nutritional needs. Some lynx cannot maintain their body fat reserves, and become more vulnerable to starvation or predation. Other lynx manage to remain healthy by using alternative prey and food sources when the hares are low. When snowshoe hares are scarce, many lynx leave their home range in search of food.

This illustrates parts of the Roy cycle that also occurs in economics and other parts of society. R prey are in a chaotic relationship with Oy predators, both use secrecy and speed to survive as well as faster birth rates. This then moves between a ceiling of high population like a boom in an economy and crashes to a floor as a recession. When R grows in numbers the Oy predators can lag, then they can overshoot eating too many R hares causing the numbers to crash and eventual starvation of some Oy lynx. Then the cycles keep repeating but in a chaotic way rather than having an average or normal pattern. 

In Roy there are also Ro prey and Y predators, these move in teams and offset this chaos with random behavior on a normal curve. Their numbers tend to have an equilibrium or normal center and over or under population is deviant to this. The combination of Oy-R moving between floors and ceiling and Y-Ro moving around a normal level gives stability and innovation to the gene pool, O is the middle of the food chain where animals tend to be partially chaotic and random. 


Across most of the boreal forest, hare populations experience dramatic fluctuations in a cycle that lasts 8-11 years. At the peak of the cycle, snowshoe hares can reach a density of up to 1500 hares per km2. The habitat cannot support this many animals, and as predation increases and starvation sets in, the population starts to decline. Continued predation accelerates the hare population decline, since lynx and other predators are at a population high. When the hare population reaches a low level, it stabilizes, for several years. The food plants slowly recover and the hare population starts to increase again. Since hares have several litters each year, the hare population increases rapidly. After a year or two at high densities, the hare cycle repeats itself.

The lynx population decline follows the snowshoe hare population crash after a lag of 1 to 2 years. As hare numbers start to decline, lynx continue to eat well because they easily catch the starving hares. When hares become scarce, the lynx numbers decline as well. Their lack of fat reserves makes them less able to live through starvation and cold temperatures. Food shortages also cause behavioural changes such as increased roaming and loss of caution. This increases their vulnerability to predation. Malnourishment has the most significant effect upon lynx reproduction and population levels. When females are in poor condition, fewer will breed and not all of those bred will produce litters. Litters will be smaller, and most, if not all, of the few kittens born will die soon after birth. This means that for a period of 3 to 5 years, few or no kittens survive to adulthood. Studies have shown that the level of kittens in a lynx population may be zero at the population low, and as high as 60% when their numbers are increasing. Low lynx population levels last for 3 or 4 years. When hares become plentiful again, the lynx population begins to increase as well.

Mayans may have aided own demise - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience - NBCNews.com

Mayans may have aided own demise - Technology & science - Science - LiveScience - NBCNews.com


A Roy society survives by feeding off the Biv society, this can be from Roy invading Biv wealthy areas to plunder which imposes their philosophy on them. It can also be by trading with them, this is Biv imposing their philosophy on Roy. R prey such as gazelles can be chaotic and overeat Biv vegetation causing their ecosystem to collapse, an R society of nomadic farmers might cut down so much forest to grow crops that the ecosystem is damaged. For example this can cause the soil to be lost by trying to farm on hills, the rain washes it into the valleys as the Romans found when farming in Libya. The chaos R and B farmers can wreak on the environment is usually quenched by the randomness of V plants to absorb this damage. For example plants that are overeaten tend to evolve defenses like poison and thorns to survive. When the tastiest plants are eaten the more unpleasant ones are all that remain, this acts as a ceiling on the R chaos of feeding so their population might collapse rather than destroying more of the plants. Then after this collapse into starvation or moving elsewhere the Biv plants re establish themselves beinging the colors into balance again.

The city states of the ancient Mayan empire flourished in southern Mexico and northern Central America for about six centuries. Then, around A.D. 900, Mayan civilization disintegrated.
Two new studies examine the reasons for thecollapse of the Mayan culture, finding the Mayans themselves contributed to the downfall of the empire. 
Scientists have found that drought played a key role, but the Mayans appear to have exacerbated the problem by cutting down the jungle canopy to make way for cities and crops, according to researchers who used climate-model simulations to see how much deforestation aggravated the drought.
"We're not saying deforestation explains the entire drought, but it does explain a substantial portion of the overall drying that is thought to have occurred," said the study's lead author, Benjamin Cook, a climate modeler at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a statement. [ Dry and Dying: Images of Drought ]
Using climate-model simulations, he and his colleagues examined how much the switch from forest to crops, such as corn, would alter climate. Their results, detailed online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggested that whendeforestation was at its maximum, it could account for up to 60 percent of the drying. (The switch from trees to corn reduces the amount of water transferred from the soil to the atmosphere, which reduces rainfall.)

Microeconomics by Bernanke

Likewise, the novice may notice that in some animal species males are much larger than  females, but  the biology student  knows  that  pattern occurs only in species in which males take several mates.  Natural selection favors larger males in those  species because  their  greater  size helps  them  prevail  in the  often bloody  contests  among  males for access to females. By contrast, males tend to be roughly  the same size as females in monogamous species, in which there is much less fighting for mates.

In Aperiomics there is also a defensive strategy that can produce larger animals or people. predatory Y males might evolve to be larger or join gangs to use their strength to get mates. Oy makes might evolve to be smaller and faster to get mates without being noticed or to escape. Ro males might defend their neighborhoods like Ro buffaloes from predatory criminals, they do this by also forming gangs or teams and evolving to be larger. R males might survive and find mates by being smaller and faster like Oy males, they with their mates can hide and run when attacked and so live on to have offspring.

Rooted in experience: The sensory world of plants

In Aperiomics the Roy animal kingdom and Biv plant kingdom are two kinds of systems in economics as well. A Biv wealthy economy has abundance and evolves like plants do. This happens through Gb private property, a plant in effect owns the ground it grows on like a farmers owns his field. Both don't move around because they have enough abundant resources where they are, so abundance is a necessary and sufficient condition for private property to work in an economy.

A Roy economy works like the animal kingdom, there is little private property and most is G publicly owned. People then don't own this public property but can use what they can control, for example a Y mafia might control a city without owning the property in it. A Ro neighborhood watch association might control crime in their area without owning it. Animals don't own the ground they live on, they can control a territory though. So scarcity of resources is the basis for public ownership of property, there is little point in owning a small piece of ground if it doesn't have enough resources for someone to stay there.


Rooted in experience: The sensory world of plants


(Image: Philippe Sainte-Laudy Photograph/Flickr/Getty)

HAVE you ever wondered what the grass under your feet feels, what an apple tree smells, or a marigold sees?
Plants stimulate our senses constantly, but most of us never consider them as sensory beings too. In fact
 senses are extremely important to plants. Whatever life throws at them, they remain rooted to the spot -
they cannot migrate in search of food, escape a swarm of locusts or find shelter from a storm. To grow and
 survive in unpredictable conditions, plants need to sense their environment and react accordingly. Some people
may not be comfortable describing what plants do as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. They
certainly lack noses, eyes, ears, mouths and skin, but in what follows, I hope to convince you that the sensory
world of plants is not so very different from our own. Daniel Chamovitz
SIGHT



Like us, plants see light. Just as we have photoreceptors in our eyes, plants have their own throughout their
stems and leaves
Read more
TOUCH




Branches sway in the wind, insects crawl across leaves, vines search out supports to cling to: plants live in a
very tactile world
Read more
SMELL


11:53 21 August 2012

All plants have a sense of smell. It allows them to communicate, and studies show that they ripen in
response to the whiff of certain chemicals
Read more
TASTE




A plant's taste is as interconnected with smell as it is in humans – but they use it to sense danger
and drought and even to recognise relatives
Read more
HEARING




Music isn't ecologically relevant for plants, but there are sounds that could be advantageous for them to hear
Read more
ADVERTISEMENT

Thursday, March 7, 2013

"Evolutionary Theory’s Welcome Crisis" by John Dupre | Project Syndicate

"Evolutionary Theory’s Welcome Crisis" by John Dupre | Project Syndicate


For the last 70 years, the dominant paradigm in evolutionary science has been the so-called “new synthesis.” Widely publicized in recent years by Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the new synthesis unites Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Mendelian genetics, which explains heredity.
The current crisis in evolutionary science does not imply complete rejection of this paradigm. Rather, it entails a major, progressive reorganization of existing knowledge, without undermining the fundamental tenets of evolutionary theory: organisms alive today developed from significantly different organisms in the distant past; dissimilar organisms may share common ancestors; and natural selection has played a crucial role in this process.
Other assumptions, however, are under threat. For example, in the traditional “tree of life” representation of evolution, the branches always move apart, never merging, implying that species’ ancestry follows a linear path, and that all evolutionary changes along this path occur within the lineage being traced. But examination of genomes – particularly microbes – has shown that genes moving between distantly related organisms are an important catalyst of evolutionary change.
Moreover, the new synthesis assumes that the main drivers of evolution are small mutations generated by chance within a species. But recent evidence suggests that large changes, caused by the absorption of a chunk of alien genetic material, may be just as significant. Indeed, the absorption of entire organisms – such as the two bacteria that formed the first eukaryotic cell (the more complex cell type found in multicellular animals) – can generate large and crucial evolutionary change.

This can create chaotic effects rather than just randomness being behind mutations. For example one mutation might build on another as dependent variables to amplify the effects. For example a mutation might cause R prey to have larger lung, a later mutation to longer legs might then be amplified because the animal already has an extra ability to supply oxygen in this faster running. 
Further destabilizing evolutionary theory is the growing realization that many factors, not just the genome, determine an individual organism’s development. Ironically, as the discovery of DNA’s structure – initially lauded as the final act in the triumph of the new synthesis – led to a better understanding of genomes’ functioning, it ended up weakening belief in their unique role in directing biological development. Those who long deplored the omission of development from evolutionary models – a decades-old critique made under the scientific banner of evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) – together with the insistence that organisms’ development draws on a wide variety of resources, have been vindicated.
Recent developments in molecular biology have put the final nail in the coffin of traditional genetic determinism. For example, epigenetics – the study of heritable modifications of the genome that do not involve alterations to the genetic code – is on the rise. And the many kinds of small RNA molecules are increasingly recognized as forming a regulatory layer above the genome.

How bees decide what to be: Reversible 'epigenetic' marks linked to behavior patterns

How bees decide what to be: Reversible 'epigenetic' marks linked to behavior patterns


The scientists say what is most significant about the new study, described online September 16 in Nature Neuroscience, is that for the first time DNA methylation "tagging" has been linked to something at the behavioral level of a whole organism. On top of that, they say, the behavior in question, and its corresponding molecular changes, are reversible, which has important implications for human health.
According to Andy Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H., Gilman scholar, professor of molecular medicine and director of the Center for Epigenetics at Hopkins' Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, the addition of DNA methylation to genes has long been shown to play an important role in regulating gene activity in changing biological systems, like fate determination in stem cells or the creation of cancer cells. Curious about how epigenetics might contribute to behavior, he and his team studied a tried-and-true model of animal behavior: bees.
Working with bee expert Gro Amdam, Ph.D., associate professor of life sciences at Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Feinberg's epigenetics team found significant differences in DNA methylation patterns in bees that have identical genetic sequences but vastly different behavioral patterns.
Employing a method that allows the researchers to analyze the whole genome at once, dubbed CHARM (comprehensive high-throughput arrays for relative methylation), the team analyzed the location of DNA methylations in the brains of worker bees of two different "professions." All worker bees are female and, within a given hive, are all genetically identical sisters. However, they don't all do the same thing; some nurse and some forage.

This is like horizontal evolution where circumstances around a person can change their genes, this can then change how they succeed in life and who they marry. The evolutionary system can be viewed as a tree with branches of species, this is like two pascal's triangles with their apexes touching as in the diamond graph in Aperiomics. Horizontal influences are like horizontal levels of pascal's triangle which are like normal curves. So these evolutionary influences tend to happen randomly to produce normal offspring. For example methylation of these genes might happen in a team environment where people cooperate to be similar to each other, the same influences lead to similar epigenetic changes. They might all drink green tea to be part of the team, this gives a normalizing change to the methylation of their genes, said to give more weight loss. So this horizontal evolutionary effect is more randomizing while Darwin's evolution is more revolutionary and counter revolutionary in the tree of life.This is because it is more deterministic, a person might get genes from his ancestors and give them to his descendants without any random changes. This can also be affected by mutations in genes which are like innovations in an Iv-b economy. So this epigenetic effect is like changes from team behavior in the V-Bi part of the economy. 

The Evolutionary Advantage of Depression - Brian Gabriel - The Atlantic

The Evolutionary Advantage of Depression - Brian Gabriel - The Atlantic


Interestingly, researchers at the University of Michigan's Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute discovered that individuals with major depressive disorder were more likely to have the mutated NPY geneThe normal NPY gene codes for higher levels of a neurotransmitter known as Neuropeptide Y, which appears to help ward off depression by increasing one's tolerance of stress. So the same mutated NPY gene that likely protected our ancestors against pathogens also increases our chance of developing depression.
Drs. Miller and Raison believe that acute (or severe but short-term) stress can not only lead to depression, but also jump-start the immune system. The physicians note that in the environments in which our ancestors lived, acute stress was often associated with the threat of physical harm or physical wounds. And unlike today, wounds readily led to infection and death. Therefore, Drs. Miller and Raison believe that evolution favored individuals whose immune systems operated under a "smoke-detector principle."
Although smoke detectors often react to false alarms (for me, burnt toast), if you removed the detector's battery and a real fire occurred, the consequences could be severe. Similarly, immune responses to acute stress are typically not necessary -- not every stressful situation results in a wound and infection. However, if our ancestors became wounded even a single time and didn't experience a piqued immune response, they might die from an infection.

The immune system acts like the I-O police in the body to find usually R germs that are hiding and camouflage themselves. They act like the middle of the food chain in the Roy animal kingdom and like the trunk of a tree in the Biv plant kingdom. A high stress environment can occur in an Iv-B economy because safety nets and insurance are much lower, people feel stress like a piece of flexing metal might experience stress until it cracks and shatter from chaos. 

Depression from stress can then be related to this this IV-B economy which also affects the immune system, it can also relate to a depressed economy where the weakened immune system has wasted so many resources from being overworked and false alarms. For example a person might become depressed because of chronic inflammation and being sick, auto immune problems, germs that the body can't get rid of because of this stress, etc. in the same way an economy can become depressed from this weakened and overworked I-O policing system, Iv-B and Oy-R interactions are secretive and deceptive giving continual levels of fraud such as in the financial system. The economy experiences this as chronic inflammation as a response to this fraud, it can be from mistakes with this I-O policing causing outrage in the V-Bi community like police shooting innocent people. 

The economy becomes like a zombie, it has this low grade infection of Iv-B secretive frauds and the government tries to compensate by putting it on life support with regular economic stimulus like a comatose patient kept alive with transfusions.

An I-O police can also have problems by not having this piqued or hyperactive immune response, this is like a neighborhood where the police are slow to respond to crime. it is also like how I-O regulators ignored many of the warning signs prior to the GFC. Such an immune system can also allow infections just as an overactive one can become exhausted then allow similar infections. In an economy the I-O police then need to be strengthened but also to become more selective and accurate at finding these deceptive criminal infections , this avoids auto immune responses of attacking innocent people which can exhaust it.  

It turns out that depression may not be a mere trade-off for a vigorous immune response. Dr. Miller suggests that depressive symptoms like social withdrawal, lack of energy, and a loss of interest in once enjoyable activities were actually advantageous to our ancestors. For example, a loss of energy might ensure that the body can leverage all of its energy to fight an infection. Also, social withdrawal minimizes the likelihood of being exposed to additional infectious agents. In this way, Drs. Miller and Raison note that "depressive symptoms are inextricably intertwined with -- and generated by -- physiological responses to infection that, on average, have been selected as a result of reducing infectious mortality across mammalian evolution."
Recently Dr. Miller and Dr. Raison completed a separate study in which they attempted to treat patients with "difficult to treat" depression with a novel drug infliximab. Infliximab works by disrupting communication between immune cells and consequently reduce inflammation. 
While infliximab did not significantly improve depression symptoms in the group being studied as a whole, it did reduce depression symptoms among a subset of study participants who showed elevated levels of inflammation. Inflammation was measured using blood tests for "C-reactive protein" (CRP). The higher the

Who’s in Charge Inside Your Head? - NYTimes.com

Who’s in Charge Inside Your Head? - NYTimes.com


That’s right: zombie bees. First reported in California in 2008, these stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State.
Of course, they’re not really zombies, although they act disquietingly like them, showing abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically and then dying. These “zombees” are victims of a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis. The fly lays eggs within honeybees, inducing their hosts to make a nocturnal “flight of the living dead,” after which the larval flies emerge, having consumed the bee from the inside out.

These are R pests that can grow like a contagion, without Oy predators they can grow exponentially in number. In some ways the US economy was infected with zombie like home loans prior to the GFC, R people who were usually poor and even nomadic fruit pickers were able to buy million dollar homes on little or no deposit. Their aim was to resell these in the boom to make a profit to provide for their families like the parasitic fly did. The result of so many liar loans was a bizarre market that seemed to be growing because R and B people had a lot of secret income, however it was often parasitic where the usual predators looking out for this fraud where abetting it as Iv subprime agents. The center of the food chain or I-O police were weakened and deregulated allowing this self interested parasitism to grow so large as to be systemically dangerous. 
These events, although bizarre, aren’t all that unusual in the animal world. Many fly and wasp species lay their eggs inside hosts. What is especially interesting, and a bit more unusual, is the way an internal parasite not only feeds on its host, but also frequently alters its behavior, in a way that favors the continued survival and reproduction of the parasite.
Not all internal parasites kill their hosts, of course: pretty much every multicellular animal is home to numerous fellow travelers, each of which has its own agenda, which in some cases involves influencing, or taking control of, part or all of the body in which they temporarily reside.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Tree of life branches out online


 http://phys.org/news/2012-10-tree-life-online.html

The site – called OneZoom – starts with a graphic depicting the tree of life with a trunk, branches, twigs and then leaves representing individual species. But you can use the mouse to zoom in on any point on the tree to explore ever smaller categories of life. And if you want to find where we or any other creature appears on the tree, you just type a name in and click on go. The tool then zooms into the leaf depicting whichever species you typed in, giving its Latin name, as well as conservation and population status. In the process, you can see exactly which other species it is related to. 'OneZoom gives you a natural way to explore large amounts of complex information like the tree of life. It's intuitive because it's similar to the way we explore the real world by moving towards interesting objects to see them in more detail,' says Dr James Rosindell from Imperial College London, who devised the tool together with Dr Luke Harmon from the University of Idaho. Until now, there were only limited ways to visualise the tree of life. The traditional tree is often drawn with a thick trunk denoting the first life on Earth. The trunk then splits into large boughs for different categories of life such plants and animals, then ever-smaller branches for different groups of life such as insects, fish, birds and mammals.

Both the Roy animal kingdom and Biv plant kingdom can appear as branches of a tree as each branch specializes into a new branch. They can also show more cooperative herd animals of Y-Ro groups of nearby branches might remain as part of the same species for interbreeding and are held together by cooperation. For example Ro buffalo might tend to split into different branches of species seen as going up the tree but horizontally these branches near each other continue to mix their genes forming a single species. If they were attacked so much by predators that they had to break up their herds then these different genes might separate again into more separate branches that became different species. For example buffalo of different sizes, speeds, temperaments, colors, etc might stay a single herd by mixing up these gnes and protecting each other against Y predators. If they were overwhelmed by attacks then some might start to split off into separate herds or hide as loners. For example the weaker buffalo might not get protected enough and so they split off into a separate herd that survives better by running faster than the bigger buffalo. Another herd might form with colorings that hide them better in one area while the rest of the herd moves to open Savannah where their cooperation protects them better than camouflage.

However it can also be represented as roots, a Ro herd of buffalo might be one species that formed by different animals that came together to protect each other in the reverse of the previous example of a herd fragmenting. Usually each animal or person has characteristics different from each other, as do their parents down the root structure. These variations can be chaotic, go back far enough and some revolutionary gene mutations will have cause the buffalo to become what they are. This is not the same as evolution which represents incremental changes. Other variations can be random, herd animals sometimes vary in their size and weight so further down the roots they can be deviations from the normal buffalo ancestor. If two then were heavier than the norm then the offspring might be heavier, the next pairing might revert to the mean weight but some might continue randomly to select heavier mates until a species incrementally becomes the new normal of a heavier buffalo. This depends on the actions of predators, the heavier buffalo might have been slower and more vulnerable or their weight might have been an advantage.
The site – called OneZoom – starts with a graphic depicting the tree of life with a trunk, branches, twigs and then leaves representing individual species. But you can use the mouse to zoom in on any point on the tree to explore ever smaller categories of life. And if you want to find where we or any other creature appears on the tree, you just type a name in and click on go. The tool then zooms into the leaf depicting whichever species you typed in, giving its Latin name, as well as conservation and population status. In the process, you can see exactly which other species it is related to. 'OneZoom gives you a natural way to explore large amounts of complex information like the tree of life. It's intuitive because it's similar to the way we explore the real world by moving towards interesting objects to see them in more detail,' says Dr James Rosindell from Imperial College London, who devised the tool together with Dr Luke Harmon from the University of Idaho. Until now, there were only limited ways to visualise the tree of life. The traditional tree is often drawn with a thick trunk denoting the first life on Earth. The trunk then splits into large boughs for different categories of life such plants and animals, then ever-smaller branches for different groups of life such as insects, fish, birds and mammals.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-tree-life-online.html#jCp
The site – called OneZoom – starts with a graphic depicting the tree of life with a trunk, branches, twigs and then leaves representing individual species. But you can use the mouse to zoom in on any point on the tree to explore ever smaller categories of life. And if you want to find where we or any other creature appears on the tree, you just type a name in and click on go. The tool then zooms into the leaf depicting whichever species you typed in, giving its Latin name, as well as conservation and population status. In the process, you can see exactly which other species it is related to. 'OneZoom gives you a natural way to explore large amounts of complex information like the tree of life. It's intuitive because it's similar to the way we explore the real world by moving towards interesting objects to see them in more detail,' says Dr James Rosindell from Imperial College London, who devised the tool together with Dr Luke Harmon from the University of Idaho. Until now, there were only limited ways to visualise the tree of life. The traditional tree is often drawn with a thick trunk denoting the first life on Earth. The trunk then splits into large boughs for different categories of life such plants and animals, then ever-smaller branches for different groups of life such as insects, fish, birds and mammals.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-tree-life-online.html#jCp
The site – called OneZoom – starts with a graphic depicting the tree of life with a trunk, branches, twigs and then leaves representing individual species. But you can use the mouse to zoom in on any point on the tree to explore ever smaller categories of life. And if you want to find where we or any other creature appears on the tree, you just type a name in and click on go. The tool then zooms into the leaf depicting whichever species you typed in, giving its Latin name, as well as conservation and population status. In the process, you can see exactly which other species it is related to. 'OneZoom gives you a natural way to explore large amounts of complex information like the tree of life. It's intuitive because it's similar to the way we explore the real world by moving towards interesting objects to see them in more detail,' says Dr James Rosindell from Imperial College London, who devised the tool together with Dr Luke Harmon from the University of Idaho. Until now, there were only limited ways to visualise the tree of life. The traditional tree is often drawn with a thick trunk denoting the first life on Earth. The trunk then splits into large boughs for different categories of life such plants and animals, then ever-smaller branches for different groups of life such as insects, fish, birds and mammals.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-tree-life-online.html#jCp