Scientists Recover Wooly Mammoth Blood

The half life of all DNA is 521 years.

Did you even READ that article?

"After cell death, enzymes start to break down the bonds between the nucleotides that form the backbone of DNA, and micro-organisms speed the decay. In the long run, however, reactions with water are thought to be responsible for most bond degradation. Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate."

So, that 'half life' is for buried bones in fairly specific situations. It doesn't apply everywhere.

Best part of all, is that story you linked to has its own related stories, and the first link is another story where they recovered DNA from 19,000 year old eggshells.

The second link is a story about sequencing the DNA from 100,000+ year old polar bears. Where the 'cold DRY' environment allows DNA to be preserved.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/-8mlRUm_c4g/story01.htm

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Beer-pouring robot programmed to anticipate human actions

May 28, 2013 ? A robot in Cornell's Personal Robotics Lab has learned to foresee human action in order to step in and offer a helping hand, or more accurately, roll in and offer a helping claw.

Understanding when and where to pour a beer or knowing when to offer assistance opening a refrigerator door can be difficult for a robot because of the many variables it encounters while assessing the situation. A team from Cornell has created a solution.

Gazing intently with a Microsoft Kinect 3-D camera and using a database of 3D videos, the Cornell robot identifies the activities it sees, considers what uses are possible with the objects in the scene and determines how those uses fit with the activities. It then generates a set of possible continuations into the future -- such as eating, drinking, cleaning, putting away -- and finally chooses the most probable. As the action continues, the robot constantly updates and refines its predictions.

"We extract the general principles of how people behave," said Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research. "Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it." The robot builds a "vocabulary" of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognize a variety of big activities, he explained.

Saxena will join Cornell graduate student Hema S. Koppula as they present their research at the International Conference of Machine Learning, June 18-21 in Atlanta, and the Robotics: Science and Systems conference June 24-28 in Berlin, Germany.

In tests, the robot made correct predictions 82 percent of the time when looking one second into the future, 71 percent correct for three seconds and 57 percent correct for 10 seconds.

"Even though humans are predictable, they are only predictable part of the time," Saxena said. "The future would be to figure out how the robot plans its action. Right now we are almost hard-coding the responses, but there should be a way for the robot to learn how to respond."

The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation and Microsoft.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaa_wEkCvG0

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/Q-WusbqRSK8/130528143623.htm

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Ancient plants reawaken: Plants exposed by retreating glaciers regrowing after centuries entombed under ice

May 28, 2013 ? When University of Alberta researcher Catherine La Farge threads her way through the recently exposed terrain left behind by retreating glaciers, she looks at the ancient plant remains a lot closer than most. Now, her careful scrutiny has revealed a startling reawakening of long-dormant plants known as bryophytes.

La Farge, a researcher in the Faculty of Science, and director and curator of the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the University of Alberta, has overturned a long-held assumption that all of the plant remains exposed by retreating polar glaciers are dead. Previously, any new growth of plants close to the glacier margin was considered the result of rapid colonization by modern plants surrounding the glacier.

Using radiocarbon dating, La Farge and her co-authors confirmed that the plants, which ranged from 400 to 600 years old, were entombed during the Little Ice Age that happened between 1550 and 1850. In the field, La Farge noticed that the subglacial populations were not only intact, but also in pristine condition -- with some suggesting regrowth.

In the lab, La Farge and her master's student Krista Williams selected 24 subglacial samples for culture experiments. Seven of these samples produced 11 cultures that successfully regenerated four species from the original parent material.

La Farge says the regrowth of these Little Ice Age bryophytes (such as mosses and liverworts) expands our understanding of glacier ecosystems as biological reservoirs that are becoming increasingly important with global ice retreat. "We know that bryophytes can remain dormant for many years (for example, in deserts) and then are reactivated, but nobody expected them to rejuvenate after nearly 400 years beneath a glacier.

"These simple, efficient plants, which have been around for more than 400 million years, have evolved a unique biology for optimal resilience," she adds. "Any bryophyte cell can reprogram itself to initiate the development of an entire new plant. This is equivalent to stem cells in faunal systems."

La Farge says the finding amplifies the critical role of bryophytes in polar environments and has implications for all permafrost regions of the globe.

"Bryophytes are extremophiles that can thrive where other plants don't, hence they play a vital role in the establishment, colonization and maintenance of polar ecosystems. This discovery emphasizes the importance of research that helps us understand the natural world, given how little we still know about polar ecosystems -- with applied spinoffs for understanding reclamation that we may never have anticipated."

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/P0SV9veptBk/130528202549.htm

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Lull in winds aids fight against Calif. wildfire

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) ? Firefighters took advantage of a lull in winds on Tuesday to gain ground against a forest fire in mountains northwest of Santa Barbara, Calif., as some crews were diverted to a second fire that broke out nearby and jumped two highways.

The Santa Barbara County blaze erupted Monday in Los Padres National Forest, carving its way through 3.2 square miles of dry chaparral, oak and pine. Firefighters had it 65 percent contained by sunset Tuesday, despite feared wind gusts of up to 40 mph, fire spokesman Manuel Madrigal said.

More than 600 firefighters, supported by a dozen aircraft, were on the lines about 10 miles northwest of downtown Santa Barbara.

At the fire's height, thousands of campers and day visitors scrambled out of the forest on the Memorial Day holiday. The fire also prompted the evacuation of about 50 homes, mainly cabins and vacation rentals, but residents were allowed to return home Tuesday night.

The fire, which remained under investigation, burned two vehicles and a U.S. Forest Service garage.

Winds were calm through midday, and the blaze was moving east along the Santa Ynez Mountains northwest of Santa Barbara.

Crews were worried, however, that a wind change could push the fire south toward the scenic coastal city, county fire Capt. David Sadecki said.

"There's a lot of dry vegetation in its path," Sadecki said. "It's still spring ? it's not even summer ? and it's burning like it's August or September."

The fire was burning near Paradise Road, which meanders along the north side of the Santa Ynez Mountains. Santa Barbara and neighboring communities sit on the other side of the coastal range, which rises quickly from near the Pacific shoreline to peaks topping 3,000 feet.

Later Tuesday, a second wildfire broke out in the nearby wine country hills of Santa Ynez at about 3:30 p.m.

It quickly grew to 170 acres, jumping Highway 154 and 246, but dozens of firefighters and two water-dropping helicopters stopped its forward movement, Sadecki said.

The Sheriff's Department sent out an evacuation warning to roughly 2,000 people living in the city that is home to many horse ranches and vineyards.

Despite its bucolic setting, the area 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles has seen terrible wildfires, including a 1990 blaze that destroyed 641 structures, most of them homes. The summer of 2007 was marred by a gigantic fire that erupted on July 4 and burned for months.

A new blaze flared just before noon Tuesday near the Magic Mountain theme park and Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. It quickly consumed 55 acres of brush, but was 80 percent contained and expected to be surrounded after hundreds of Los Angeles County firefighters responded with air support.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lull-winds-aids-fight-against-calif-wildfire-200821880.html

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Century-old ocean data provides further confirmation of global warming

May 28, 2013 ? A new NASA and university analysis of ocean data collected more than 135 years ago by the crew of the HMS Challenger oceanographic expedition provides further confirmation that human activities have warmed our planet over the past century.

Researchers from the University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay, Australia; and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., combined the ship's measurements of ocean temperatures with modern observations from the international Argo array of ocean profiling floats. They used both as inputs to state-of-the-art climate models, to get a picture of how the world's oceans have changed since the Challenger's voyage.

The Challenger expedition, from 1872 to 1876, was the world's first global scientific survey of life beneath the ocean surface. Along the way, scientists measured ocean temperatures, lowering thermometers hundreds of meters deep on ropes.

"The key to this research was to determine the range of uncertainty for the measurements taken by the crew of the Challenger," said Josh Willis, a JPL climate scientist and NASA project scientist for the upcoming U.S./European Jason-3 oceanography satellite, scheduled to launch in 2015. "After we had taken all these uncertainties into account, it became apparent that the rate of warming we saw across the oceans far exceeded the degree of uncertainty around the measurements. So, while the uncertainty was large, the warming signal detected was far greater."

Uncertainties around the Challenger's measurements were caused by the limited areas measured during the voyage; the actual depths the thermometers descended to; and the likely natural variation in temperature that could occur in each region during the voyage.

"Our research revealed warming of the planet can be clearly detected since 1873 and that our oceans continue to absorb the great majority of this heat," said researcher and lead author Will Hobbs of the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science. "Currently, scientists estimate the oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and we attribute the global warming to anthropogenic (human-produced) causes."

The Challenger expedition measurements also revealed that thermal expansion of sea water caused by global warming contributed about 40 percent of the total sea level rise seen in tide gauges from 1873 to 1955. The remaining 60 percent was likely to have come from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers. Prior to this research, climate models offered the only way to estimate the change before the 1950s.

Results of the study are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

For more on the study, visit: http://www.imas.utas.edu.au/right-column-content/whats-new3/news/century-old-science-helps-confirm-global-warming .

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/DBgPvHcp73w/130528104542.htm

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Krups EA9000 Automated Espresso Machine: Turn Your Kitchen into a Private Starbucks

You've been standing in line for 15 minutes already as the neck-beards behind the counter discuss the high points of the latest Vampire Weekend release. Do you really pay $5 a cup to put up with this shit? Instead, invest your hard-earned cash in a barista that will get your order right every, single, time.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/FJ6G2VGp3G4/krups-ea9000-automated-espresso-machine-turn-your-kitc-506708953

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Do it (Tomorrow) for iPhone and iPad review: Productive procrastinating, at last!

Are you a procrastinator who tries time and time againt to make use of an elaborate "get things done" system in order to bring some organization into your life to only put off using said system? Then Do it (Tomorrow) for iPhone is for you! Do it (Tomorrow) is simply two lists, Today and Tomorrow, with the ability to move tasks between lists with just one quick tap.

There are only three different screens in To it (Tomorrow). A "Today" list, a "Tomorrow" list, and the settings screen. You simply swipe left and right to move between screens. The lists look like notebooks and the Tomorrow list even has a fake coffee stain on it. Next to each task, there is an arrow that will move it to the other list.

Do it (Tomorrow) includes two fonts, one that looks like handwriting and another that is a more traditional.

Do it (Tomorrow) for iPhone is free with the option to purchase Cloud sync for $4.99. The univeral version is $4.99 and automatically includes Cloud sync.

The good

• Simple design
• Two font options
• Move tasks between lists with just one tap
• Cloud sync available for $4.99

The bad

• Soon and Someday lists would be a great addition

The bottom line

If there was an Olympic competition in procrastination, I'd hold the gold medal, and it feels like Do it (Tomorrow) was designed specifically for me. No due dates; no annoying alarms that make me feel guilty. Just two simple lists of what I need to do today and tomorrow... and the ability to push things back to "tomorrow" indefinitely.

• Free for iPhone - Download now
• $4.99 for iPhone and iPad (includes sync) - Download now

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/8Y_ZjB6OMYA/story01.htm

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