Madame Butterfly

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  1. Posted

    How plants know when to flower

    Studies reveal how it works, why buds spring up in certain spots

    livescience

     

     

    By Robert Roy Britt

     

    Updated: 5:45 p.m. ET Aug. 11, 2005

    Scientists have known since the 1930s that plants sense the length of the days and, somehow, use that information to decide when to flower.

     

    Russian scientists back then speculated that a mysterious substance must be transported from leaves to shoot tips, stimulating the formation of flower buds. They called the mystery chemical "florigen."

     

    A trio of new studies announced today seem to reveal how it works, including why flowers spring forth in certain spots on a plant.

     

     

    "We have now shown that a gene called FT, which is active in the leaf and whose activity is regulated by the day length, produces a messenger molecule that is transported to the shoot tip," said Ove Nilsson at the Umea Plant Science Center at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

     

    Separate research, conducted by a different team, reveals how the messenger molecule works to activate the "gene programs" that lead to the formation of floral buds.

     

    In short, proteins are formed and they talk to other proteins that exist only at the future locations of buds, and flowers are born at just the right time in a preprogrammed location.

     

    Temperature and soil conditions play a role in the timing, too, the scientists said.

     

    "Together these data show that the messenger molecule produced by FT either is the elusive florigen, or is a very important component of florigen," Nilsson told LiveScience.

     

    And why does this matter to scientists?

     

    Daffodils bloom in spring as the days get longer. Roses wait until summer. Rice, on the other hand, flowers in the fall as the days shorten. Nature does fine, of course, but humans sometimes want to fool her.

     

    "It is interesting to speculate that this finding could be used to make early flowering rice," Nilsson said. "Since many of the high yielding varieties are late flowering this could in certain parts of the world allow the production of more than one harvest per year."

     

    The findings are reported by the journal Science.

     

    It has not been clear how plants combine all the information needed to build a flower, writes Spanish researcher Miguel Blazquez in an analysis in the journal. The new studies "reveal the molecular mechanism by which this integration is achieved," he said.

  2. Posted

    NASA: Atlantis launch unlikely in September

    Troubleshooting failed to identify 'any immediate easy fixes' to foam

    Space.com

     

     

    By Brian Berger

     

    Updated: 5:32 p.m. ET Aug. 11, 2005

    WASHINGTON - NASA says a September launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis is unlikely now that a week of intensive troubleshooting failed to identify “any immediate easy fixes” to the foam shedding problems seen during Discovery’s July 26 launch.

     

    About two minutes into Discovery’s July 26 liftoff, a large chunk of insulating foam peeled away from the shuttle’s external fuel tank, missing the orbiter, but setting back NASA’s efforts to resume construction of the International Space Station (ISS).

     

    All told, Discovery’s external tank shed larger than expected pieces of foam from five separate areas, some of which NASA thought it had managed to fix in the two and a half years since an errant chunk of foam led to the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia during its return to Earth on February 1, 2003.

     

     

    NASA’s three remaining shuttle orbiters are grounded until the foam problem is resolved.

     

    Bill Gerstenmaier, the senior NASA official leading the investigation into Discovery’s foam loss incidents, said Thursday that engineers so far have found no solutions to the problem.

     

    “We didn’t find any immediate easy fixes here,” Gerstenmaier said during a teleconference with reporters. He said least some tank modifications appear necessary before NASA can fly the shuttle again.

     

    NASA officials had been holding out hope of resolving the foam issues in time to launch before the end of September. But Gerstenmaier said that no longer appears realistic, given that at least some of parts of Atlantis’ tank will require “minor engineering modifications” before the shuttle can be cleared for flight.

     

    “We will probably not make the September launch window,” he said.

     

    NASA’s next opportunity comes in November. Gerstenmaier said should Atlantis be ready to fly by then, NASA would remain on track for resuming construction of the ISS come March.

  10. Posted

    Teen Piercing Sparks Near-Fatal Infection

    Mother Didn't Bring Girl to Hospital for Weeks After Injury

    By BROOKE DONALD, AP

     

    BOSTON (Aug. 9) - A 13-year-old was in critical condition and her mother faced criminal charges Monday for failing to get medical help after the girl's attempt to pierce her own belly button caused a severe infection lasting weeks.

     

    By the time Deborah Robinson's daughter was taken to the hospital last week, the former middle school track runner weighed about 75 pounds and was near death, authorities said.

     

     

    On Monday, two days after being arrested, Robinson, 38, appeared in court and was ordered to undergo evaluation by a psychiatrist to determine whether she's fit to stand trial.

     

    She faces up to five years in prison on a charge of wantonly and recklessly permitting substantial bodily injury to a child under 14, and up to two years in prison on a child endangerment charge.

     

    A court psychiatrist testified that Robinson had signs of paranoia and a distrust of doctors.

     

    A message left with her lawyer, William Concannon, was not immediately returned Monday.

     

    The girl was found by paramedics in the family's apartment Wednesday morning after they received a 911 call about an ill child. According to a police report, the girl was lying on a couch in the apartment wearing an oxygen mask.

     

    Prosecutors said the girl's infection was caused by her attempt to pierce her navel. The small flesh wound progressed to damage several of her organs.

     

    Prosecutor David Deakin said at Monday's court hearing that a doctor who treated the teenager said she likely would have been in ``incredible pain'' within 24 hours of the onset of the infection. Medical evidence, he said, indicated that the girl was sick for two to four weeks.

     

    Robinson is due to return to court Aug. 26. She did not enter a plea to the two charges she faces, and no bail was set.

     

    AP writer Mark Jewell contributed to this report.

  12. Posted

    Shuttle's Future Unclear After Landing

    Discovery Crew to Reunite With Families in Houston

    By ALICIA CHANG, AP

     

    EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (Aug. 10) - With Discovery safely back on the ground, the astronauts who repaired it in outer space and guided it around the Earth 219 times headed to Houston for a triumphant reunion Wednesday with their families.

     

     

     

     

     

    But as the celebrations continued for what mission controllers called a "truly spectacular test flight," it was still uncertain if and when another space shuttle would return to orbit.

     

    The tense, two-week mission, which ended Tuesday morning when Discovery safely landed in California, exposed how vulnerable the shuttle fleet remains, despite a tremendous amount of money and effort invested in the first U.S. manned space mission in the 2 1/2 years since the Columbia tragedy.

     

    Shortly after Discovery lifted off July 26, a 1-pound chunk of foam insulation fell from the fuel tank _ the very thing that doomed Columbia. The foam missed Discovery, but NASA grounded all shuttle flights until engineers fix the problem.

     

    "We're going to try as hard as we can to get back in space this year," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said at a post-landing news conference. "But we're not going to go until we're ready to go."

     

    Shuttle managers freely acknowledged the foam mistake, while stressing that the inspection, photography and other shuttle data-gathering systems put in place for this flight worked well.

     

    "I hope this shows people that we're coming back," NASA spaceflight chief Bill Readdy said from Cape Canaveral, Fla. "We've got some more work to do. We know what we need to do and we'll do it."

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The Columbia disaster weighed heavily on everyone's minds as the shuttle made its descent to Earth. The 17,000-mph plunge from orbit took Discovery through a passage of the same kind of intense heating that exposed the mortal wound in Columbia's wing and caused the shuttle to disintegrate, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

     

    The shuttle soared across the Pacific and over Southern California, passing just north of Los Angeles on its way to Edwards as it completed a 5.8 million-mile journey. During Discovery's approach, Dr. Jon Clark, a NASA neurologist and husband of Columbia astronaut Laurel Clark, said he quietly remembered his wife and closely compared the two missions.

     

    "I thought, 'This is when the tire light went on,'" Clark said from Kennedy Space Center, referring to an initial sensor reading that Columbia was breaking up. "I was paralleling the two missions."

     

    After Discovery landed, shuttle Commander Eileen Collins said the U.S. should continue launching shuttles until the scheduled completion of the international space station in 2010 _ a sentiment echoed by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin.

     

    "Some people say we should stop flying the shuttle because we had an accident _ frankly we've had two accidents _ but we are people who believe in this mission and we are going to continue it," Collins said.

     

    President Bush congratulated the Discovery team.

     

    "It was a great achievement," Bush said. "It was an important step for NASA as it regains the confidence of the American people and begins to transition to the new mission we've set out for NASA."

     

    NASA said it will be a week before Discovery leaves California, riding piggyback atop a modified Boeing 747 back to Cape Canaveral. The cross-country trip is expected to cost the space agency about $1 million.

     

    NASA officials had scrapped four landing attempts in Florida because of the weather. Of the 111 shuttles that have landed since 1981, 49 came in at Edwards. The last shuttle to land at Edwards was Endeavor in 2002.

     

    Discovery's crew accomplished its main objectives to resupply the international space station and fix broken equipment. The first shuttle to visit the space station since 2002, Discovery spent nine days docked to the orbiting lab.

     

    Astronauts performed two planned spacewalks to test new repair techniques and replace a failed 660-pound, washing machine-sized gyroscope which helped control the station's orientation. It is the first time in three years that all the station's gyroscopes were working simultaneously.

     

     

     

    In a third unprecedented spacewalk, astronaut Stephen Robinson went beneath Discovery's belly to pull out two protruding thermal tile fillers that engineers on the ground feared could cause overheating during re-entry and lead to another Columbia-type disaster. NASA canceled a fourth spacewalk to repair a torn thermal blanket near the cockpit window, saying that it posed little danger to the shuttle.

     

    The switch to landing in California was a big disappointment for the astronauts' families, who had been waiting two weeks to greet their loved ones in Florida.

     

    In Rochester, N.Y., Collins' 79-year-old father, James, a retired postal worker, described it as "the day of my life."

     

    "We're always the parents of Eileen," he said. "Eileen right now to me belongs to all of us. Right at this point, I can say she belongs to the world."

     

    Associated Press Writer John Antczak contributed to this report.

     

     

    8/10/2005 07:15:35

  22. Posted

    I will remember you

    Will you remember me?

    Don't let your life pass you by

    Weep not for the memories

     

    Remember the good times that we had?

    I let them slip away from us when things got bad

    How clearly I first saw you smilin' in the sun

    Wanna feel your warmth upon me, I wanna be the one

     

    I will remember you

    Will you remember me?

    Don't let your life pass you by

    Weep not for the memories

     

    I'm so tired but I can't sleep

    Standin' on the edge of something much too deep

    It's funny how we feel so much but we cannot say a word

    We are screaming inside, but we can't be heard

     

    But I will remember you

    Will you remember me?

    Don't let your life pass you by

    Weep not for the memories

     

    I'm so afraid to love you, but more afraid to loose

    Clinging to a past that doesn't let me choose

    Once there was a darkness, deep and endless night

    You gave me everything you had, oh you gave me light

     

    And I will remember you

    Will you remember me?

    Don't let your life pass you by

    Weep not for the memories

     

    And I will remember you

    Will you remember me?

    Don't let your life pass you by

    Weep not for the memories

    Weep not for the memories

     

     

     

    I used to love this song.

    Now I just find it depressing. :lol:

  23. Posted

    Aug. 8, 2005 — Plato's account of how the fabled city of Atlantis sank below the surface of the ocean does have scientific grounding, according to a seafloor survey of an island west of the Straits of Gibraltar.

     

    Marc-André Gutscher of the University of Western Brittany in Plouzané, France, performed a detailed mapping of the seafloor on Spartel Island, already proposed as a candidate for the origin of the Atlantis legend in 2001 by French geologist Jacques Collina-Girard.

     

    Lying 60 meters beneath the surface in the Gulf of Cadiz, the island is right "in front of the Pillars of Hercules," or the Straits of Gibraltar, as stated by Plato.

     

     

    Analysis of sedimentary deposits revealed a large earthquake and a tsunami hit the island about 12,000 years ago, roughly the time indicated in the Greek philosopher's writings for the destruction of the city, Gutscher reports in the current issue of Geology.

     

    "Geological records revealed that in the geographic region chosen by Plato for his narrative, there are recurrent great earthquakes (magnitude 8.5-9) which create enormous tsunamis, with waves 5-15 meters in height. One such catastrophic event occurred around 10,000 B.C.," Gutscher told Discovery News.

     

    Even though explorers have searched for the sunken island in no less than 40 different places, no evidence of Atlantis has ever been found. Every clue about the fabled island goes back to Plato's account, written in about 400 B.C.

     

    The philosopher claimed that two centuries earlier, Egyptian priests had told the Greek statesman Solon of a flourishing civilization outside "the pillars of Hercules."

     

    When the people of Atlantis became wicked and decadent, the gods punished them by sending "violent earthquakes and floods."

     

    "The power came forth out the Atlantic Ocean ... In a single day and night of misfortune ... the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea," wrote Plato.

     

    According to Gutscher, the type of destruction described by Plato is a very accurate description of a "sudden, catastrophic destruction associated with a great earthquake," like the famous Great Lisbon earthquake which ravaged the southern Iberian region in 1755, with associated tsunami heights reaching 10 meters (30 feet).

     

    Evidence of Earthquakes

    Indeed, sedimentary records revealed that catastrophic events like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake occur every 1,500-2,000 years in the Gulf of Cadiz.

     

    An unusually thick turbidite, a thick, coarse-grained deposit resulting from sand and mud shaken up by underwater avalanches, was dated to around 10,000 B.C., around the same time as Plato's account.

     

    Layers of turbidite also revealed that eight earthquakes occurred in the area after Atlantis sunk.

     

    Each earthquake would have resulted in a drop of the sea floor by several meters, making Spartel higher by 40 meters (120 feet) by 12,000 years ago. The island could have measured five by two kilometers (three by one miles).

     

     

     

     

     

     

    "If inhabited, it would have probably been by simple fishermen, certainly not the advanced Bronze Age culture described by Plato," Gutscher.

     

    "Atlantis is a myth," Christos Doumas, Director of Akrotiri Excavations in Santorini, summarized at the conference on Atlantis on Milos Island, Greece, last month.

     

    The conference highlighted 24 criteria that a geographical area must satisfy in order to qualify as a site where Atlantis could have existed.

     

    Among several other oddities, the island must have sheltered a literate population with metallurgical and navigational skills, hot springs, northerly winds, elephants, enough people for an army of 10,000 chariots and 1,200 ships, and a ritual of bull sacrifice.

     

    "No single proposed location in the world satisfies all these 24 criteria. At least the Spartel hypothesis offers a geologically plausible scenario for the type of catastrophic destruction described by Plato in this region of the world," Gutscher said.