Bonzo[映画『Bedtime for Bonzo』で、人間のしつけをされるチンパンジー]が二次方程式を解けるとか、米Texas Instruments社のグラフ・数式処理電卓『TI-89』をチンパンジーに取り替え可能ということではない。それでも、京都大学霊長類研究所の所長で思考言語分野教授の松沢哲郎氏は、ヒトに対する概念を改めるべきだと考えている。
これは老朽化による自然崩落か？ まあ考えにくいね。 Massive ULF ‘Blast’ Detected In US Bridge Collapse Catastrophe http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1026.htm （引用） Reports from Russia’s Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics located in Irkutsk are reporting today that their Siberian Solar Radio Telescope (SSRT) detected a ‘massive’ ultra low frequency (ULF) ‘blast’ emanating from Latitude: 45° 00' North Longitude: 93° 15' West at the ‘exact’ moment, and location, of a catastrophic collapse of a nearly 2,000 foot long bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. （引用終わり）
シベリアのイルクーツクにあるロシアの太陽地球物理研究所は、Siberian Solar Radio Telescope (SSRT＝写真)が２日、米国のミネアポリスの橋が崩落した場所（北緯45 ° 00'、西経93° 15'）、そしてまさにその時間に大量の極極超長波（ＵＬＦ）の爆発発散を観測したことを明らかにした。
そして、ロシアの軍事報告によると、このような証拠を残さない「音響」兵器を米軍が保持し、かつその音響兵器の研究は、橋から１マイルも離れていないAugsburg College で行われているという。 そして、この橋が選ばれたもうひとつの理由は、全米でイスラム教徒が多く住む地域のひとつであること。とくに米国が支援するエチオピアの侵略でおわれてきたソマリア人が30,000人住んでいるという。
HiRISE公式ページの左下にあるCatalogをクリックし、任意のサムネイル画像（1151枚）を選択して右側の JPEG2000 FOR IAS VIEWERの下の Full image をクリックするとJAVAアプリケーションのIAS Viewerが立ち上がり、サムネイル画像の範囲内で好きな地点の詳細な画像を表示することができます。最大解像度は約３０ｃｍとか。
ダークマターの「波紋」。HSTが撮影した銀河団Cl 0024+17の画像に、重力レンズ効果から計算されたダークマターの分布（青）を重ねたもの。クリックで拡大（提供：NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)）
Cl 0024+17の衝突の概念図。左が横から見たようすで、右が同じ状況を後ろ（あるいは正面）から見たようす。一番上は衝突5000万年前、下が衝突2億年後（現在）。白が「見える物質」、青がダークマターを表している。クリックで拡大（提供：NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee (Johns Hopkins University), and A. Feild (STScI)）
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結論を下すまで、米国ジョンズ・ホプキンス大学の天文学者M. James Jee氏は1年以上にわたってHSTが撮影した画像と格闘していた。
オーストラリア東部を走る大分水嶺山脈の南部、同国最高峰マウント・コジウスコ（2,228m）を中心として広がるのがスノーウィ・マウンテンズである。国立公園に指定されているこの山岳地は、同国随一の高級スキーリゾート地として知られるが、それ以上にスノーウィ・ハイドロ（電源開発公社）が開発した水力発電のダム群とダム湖が数多く存在することで知られている。（この国は豊富な石炭を使った火力発電と水力発電しかなく、原子力発電は行われていない）。インフォメーション・センターはダム群の巨大な工事を伝える写真や資料を提供している。分水嶺を越えたダム湖から長距離の巨大水道管で貯水を反対側のダムに流し込むダイナミックなシステムも紹介されている。「クリーン・エネルギー」がキャッチフレーズだ。ジンバダイン・ダム、カンコーバン・ダム、タンタンガロ・ダム（いずれも重力式）など代表的なダムを、山岳道路に車を走らせて訪ねてみた。案の定、どのダムも水位を大幅に下げたままであった。もうひとつ私が驚いたのは、相次ぐ山火事の何とも無残な惨状である。曲がりくねった山岳道路を車で走ると、燃えて役に立たない原生林の不気味な「死滅した森」が国立公園内にえんえん続く。山岳道路沿いにはその日の山火事の発生危険度を示す標識が立っている。 帰路、枯れ草に覆われた牧場に大きな看板が道路に向いて立っていた。「Don't treat us farmers like a dirt ！」（われわれ農民を汚泥のように扱うな！）と大書されている。干ばつに対する政府の対応に抗議したのだろうか？ 前途を悲観して農業をやめたり、謝金を(原文ママ）苦に自殺した農民も出ていると聞いた。
News Focus AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS MEETING: European Skin Turned Pale Only Recently, Gene Suggests Ann Gibbons PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA--At the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting, held here from 28 to 31 March, a new report on the evolution of a gene for skin color suggested that Europeans acquired pale skin quite recently, perhaps only 6000 to 12,000 years ago. (Read more.)
Researchers have disagreed for decades about an issue that is only skin-deep: How quickly did the first modern humans who swept into Europe acquire pale skin? Now a new report on the evolution of a gene for skin color suggests that Europeans lightened up quite recently, perhaps only 6000 to 12,000 years ago. This contradicts a long-standing hypothesis that modern humans in Europe grew paler about 40,000 years ago, as soon as they migrated into northern latitudes. Under darker skies, pale skin absorbs more sunlight than dark skin, allowing ultraviolet rays to produce more vitamin D for bone growth and calcium absorption. "The [evolution of] light skin occurred long after the arrival of modern humans in Europe," molecular anthropologist Heather Norton of the University of Arizona, Tucson, said in her talk.
The genetic origin of the spectrum of human skin colors has been one of the big puzzles of biology. Researchers made a major breakthrough in 2005 by discovering a gene, SLC24A5, that apparently causes pale skin in many Europeans, but not in Asians. A team led by geneticist Keith Cheng of Pennsylvania State University (PSU) College of Medicine in Hershey found two variants of the gene that differed by just one amino acid. Nearly all Africans and East Asians had one allele, whereas 98% of the 120 Europeans they studied had the other (Science, 28 October 2005, p. 601). Norton, who worked on the Cheng study as a graduate student, decided to find out when that mutation swept through Europeans. Working as a postdoc with geneticist Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona, she sequenced 9300 base pairs of DNA in the SLC24A5 gene in 41 Europeans, Africans, Asians, and American Indians.
Using variations in the gene that did not cause paling, she calculated the background mutation rate of SLC24A5 and thereby determined that 18,000 years had passed since the light-skin allele was fixed in Europeans. But the error margins were large, so she also analyzed variation in the DNA flanking the gene. She found that Europeans with the allele had a "striking lack of diversity" in this flanking DNA--a sign of very recent genetic change, because not enough time has passed for new mutations to arise. The data suggest that the selective sweep occurred 5300 to 6000 years ago, but given the imprecision of method, the real date could be as far back as 12,000 years ago, Norton said. She added that other, unknown, genes probably also cause paling in Europeans.
As there are several other genes which are involved in skin color, it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that Europeans "suddenly" turned white a few thousand years ago, at least until we're sure that the rest of the mutations responsible are of similarly recent vintage. Still, SLC24A5 accounts for enough of the color variation for us to be able to confidently say that until relatively recently Europeans didn't look distinguishable from the people of northern India or southern Arabia. Either way, the implication is that our European ancestors were brown-skinned for tens of thousands of years--a suggestion made 30 years ago by Stanford University geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. He argued that the early immigrants to Europe, who were hunter-gatherers, herders, and fishers, survived on ready-made sources of vitamin D in their diet. But when farming spread in the past 6000 years, he argued, Europeans had fewer sources of vitamin D in their food and needed to absorb more sunlight to produce the vitamin in their skin. The poor diet of the farmer is to blame! Whether this old hypothesis is correct or not is too early to determine, but this report certainly gives it new life. I imagine that the increased paleness of East Asians is also of relatively new vintage (as are all the other derived, prototypically "Asian" features), perhaps dating back no further than about 5,000 years, when one people* started farming rice somewhere in China and underwent a radical population explosion; similarly, I don't think you'll find any people who look like today's West Africans before ~10,000 years ago. All the external "racial" features people invest so much importance in are of surprisingly recent vintage.
*There's no reason to suppose said people were speakers of proto-Chinese, by the way, as the genetic evidence suggesting that all north-east Asians share very recent common roots also suggests - based on the distribution of languages in the region - that the shared ancestor of the Korean and Japanese languages has its roots in northeast China. The speakers of proto-Chinese likely came from the Himalayan region after rice-growing had become established, and made the original inhabitants of their new homeland drop their old languages in favor of the invaders'.
PS: Any subscribers to Molecular Biology and Evolution out there? From the abstract, we have the following:
Polymorphisms in 2 genes, ASIP and OCA2, may play a shared role in shaping light and dark pigmentation across the globe, whereas SLC24A5, MATP, and TYR have a predominant role in the evolution of light skin in Europeans but not in East Asians. These findings support a case for the recent convergent evolution of a lighter pigmentation phenotype in Europeans and East Asians.
WASHINGTON (AP) - For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."
The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.
There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.
"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."
The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."
The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.
What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.
The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.
The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.
Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.
However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.
Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.
The new planet seems just right - or at least that's what scientists think.
"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."
Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one - simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves - will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.
Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.
"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."
Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.
"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."
The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.
Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.
Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.
But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.
Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.
Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.
The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.
Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.
A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.
"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.
Study: Red planet heating up POSTED: 3:46 p.m. EDT, April 4, 2007
CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- Earth's dusty neighbor Mars is grappling with its own form of climate change as fluctuating solar radiation is kicking up dust and winds that may be melting the planet's southern polar ice cap, scientists said Wednesday.
Researchers have been watching the changing face of Mars for years, studying slight differences in the brightness and darkness of its surface.
These changes in brightness have been generally attributed to the presence of dust, but until now their effect on wind circulation and climate has not been clear.
NASA scientist Lori Fenton and colleagues, reporting this week in the journal Nature, now believe variations in radiation from the surface of Mars are fueling strong winds that stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet's temperature.
By studying changes in light reflected from the surface of Mars -- a measure known as an object's albedo -- they predict the red planet has warmed by around 1 degree Fahrenheit from the 1970s to the 1990s, which may in part have caused the recent retreat of the southern polar ice cap.
On Earth, carbon dioxide traps infrared radiation which can affect global climate. This a phenomenon is known as the greenhouse effect. Fossil fuel emissions add to the problem.
On Mars, it's the red-tinged dust.
Fenton's team compared thermal maps gathered from NASA's Viking mission in the 1970s with maps gathered more than two decades later by the Global Surveyor.
They saw that large swaths of the surface have darkened or brightened over the past three decades.
These albedo changes strengthened winds, picking up and circulating dust, creating a vicious cycle that is warming the planet.
"Our results suggests that documented albedo changes affect recent climate change and large-scale weather patterns on Mars," Fenton's team wrote.
They believe changes in albedo should be an important part of future studies on atmosphere and climate change.
