Monthly Archives: January 2012

GOP Leader: Pray that “Obama’s ‘Children Be Fatherless And His Wife A Widow’

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Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal is a piece of work, and I hope he is under Secret Service investigation after calling for the President’s death. But you know he’s just a cranky old guy who’s lost his filters and is saying out loud what most Tea Party Republicans are thinking in their heads all the time.

Think Progress has the whole story, here’s a bit of it:

ThinkProgress reported last week that Kansas House Speaker Mike O’Neal (R) was forced to apologize to First Lady Michelle Obama after forwarding an email to fellow lawmakers that called her “Mrs. YoMama” and compared her to the Grinch.

Earlier that same week, the Lawrence Journal-World was sent another email that O’Neal had forwarded to House Republicans that referred to President Obama and a Bible verse that says “Let his days be few” and calls for his children to be without a father and his wife to be widowed.

Kansas should be ashamed of itself.

The Dana Show (Radio)

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On her radio show, CNN contributor and Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch cheered on an Internet video reportedly showing U.S. Marines urinating on what appear to be dead Afghans, saying she would “drop trou and do it too.” The video has been widely condemned by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, U.S. military commanders, foreign policy experts and others as depicting conduct that “does not reflect our values” and may endanger Afghanistan peace talks.

CNN Contributor On Marines Urinating On Dead Bodies: “Supposed To Be A Scandal”? “I’d Drop Trou And Do It Too” from Media Matters on Vimeo.

Source

Does every star have planets?

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According to one study, yes.

Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.

The findings were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, alongside reports of the smallest “exoplanets” ever discovered.

Gravitational microlensing is a method that uses the gravity of a far-flung star to amplify the light from even more distant stars that have planets.

Astronomers used a number of relatively small telescopes that make up the Microlensing Network for the Detection of Small Terrestrial Exoplanets, or Mindstep, to look for the rare event of one star passing directly in front of another as seen from Earth.

The team witnessed 40 of these microlensing events, and in three instances spotted the effects of planets circling the more distant stars.

That would mean that there about bout 10 billion earth-size planets in this galaxy. Details here.

Three Smallest Planets Yet Discovered

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… outside our solar system.

Kepler has discoverd theree planets around the star KOI-961, and they are a mere 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth, rocky like the earth, but alas, they are too close to the star so there can’t be any liquid water on them. But still, there are hardly any rocky exoplanets known, and the small ones are hard to find.

And the possibility of life being on them is, well, just have a look:

Here’s the NASA press release on this new finding.

Comments on Zimmer's "Can A Scientist Define Life?

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Imagine a “primordial soup” on some planet somewhere from which there occasionally emerges a thing that could locomote, and as it locomoted around it would scrape up some of the dust that lay around on the planet, and occasionally eat other things that had come out of the “primordial soup” and it would thus grow. Eventually it would wear out as its molecules, put together by some chemical process of abiogenecis in the aforementioned soup, and thusly worn out, molecules broken down by ultraviolet rays from the nearby star, it would eventually stop moving and remain exposed to the elements and dry out and become part of the dust, to be scraped up and consumed by other things.

Imagine that dozens of shallow seas of primordial soup on this planet each produced a range of such things, and they moved around on the planet, some staying in the soup, some going onto land, interacting, competing, cooperating, eating each other, sliding past each other, being born of the soup and dying, the dust sometimes being blown back into the soupy seas or being scraped up by other things.

The things are alive, right?

What if there was a form of thing on some other planet that had crawled out of the ooze and over time evolved, changed, varied, but over even longer periods of time, a self replicating version of this thing, or set of things, developed a way of perfectly identifying copies of itself that were not perfect, and destroying them. Say this emerged in several lineages of things, and this invariance gave some advantage to the things that did this. All other things, the ones that vary and change over generational time, are out-competed and those lineages disappear. So eventually, there are dozens of lineages of distinct but invariant things walking, sliding, coasting, flying, around on the surface of this planet, replicating but always duplicating perfectly, for hundreds of thousands of generations.

These things are alive, right?

Not according to Edward Trifonov, who defines life as:

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A word or two about tobacco, and some neat and new research

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This post was chosen as an Editor's Selection for ResearchBlogging.orgOver the last few weeks I’ve run into a few misconceptions about tobacco, as well as some interesting news, so I thought I’d share. If you already know some of this, forgive me, not everyone else does.

First, tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, is a member of the Solanaceae family of plants, which from a human perspective has got to be one of the most interesting plant families out there. It includes Belladonna, peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes. So, from this one family of plants, you can kill your neighbor, have a nice meal, and a smoke a cigar afterward.
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