Madame Butterfly
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Posts posted by Madame Butterfly
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I didn't like her on TNG, too wooden for me.
But I did enjoy her on LA Law.
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Just in from playing tennis.
Listening to music
Looking over some new family records.
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Relaxing after an excellent win tonight in softball.
Just finished reading a dream interpretation a friend did for me.
Yawning, and considering what to read when I go lay in bed.
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LOL, my dog is the same way.
I walk in and say "were you a good boy or a naughty boy today", the look he gives or doesn't give says it all.
He often just walks himself to his kennel after he's "confessed".
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:blink:
That's a tough one.
Nothing that I heard qualifies.
Nothing that I felt.
Today it was the beebalm in the garden, bright and red.
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Identical Twins Not So Identical
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 08 July 2005
10:02 am ET
Identical twins are not quite as identical as once thought, according to a new study of DNA.
Life, it seems, changes everyone in unique ways.
One twin might get cancer while the the other is not susceptible, for example. Many identical twins clearly behave differently as they grow older, and some even grow to look less alike.
Such differences have to do not with the twins' identical DNA, which is the software of life, but in how genes express themselves, the research found. The differences stem from chemical modifications in the genes over the years.
These epigenetic effects, as they are called, are the result of chemical exposure, dietary habits and other environmental factors, the scientists believe.
The study is detailed in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Further investigation into the process might shed light on how cancers develop, said Ohio State University researcher Christoph Plass, a co-author of the report.
The idea that twins grow apart is not new.
In 2001, scientists documented that identical twins with different diets had corresponding differences in blood cholesterol measures. A study in 2002 found that identical twins tend to differ greatly in their levels of emotional distress, depending on how close each was to their mother or whether they attended church, among other social factors.
Research last year at Duke University found that identical twins both develop Alzheimer's by their late 70s only about 40 percent of the time. In many cases, one does and one does not.
Other studies have shown that the brains of identical twins look different upon close inspection of the wiring.
The new research, among the first to provide a detailed look at such differences at the genetic level, was led by Manel Esteller of the Spanish National Cancer Center in Madrid. The scientists studied 40 pairs of twins in Spain, Denmark and the United Kingdom, aged three through 74. The participants were surveyed on a range of health, exercise, eating habits and other lifestyle issues. Their blood was analyzed for epigenetic differences.
The youngest set of twins had the most identical genomes. Genetically, the oldest twins were the least alike.
Gene expression and behavior is altered by a process called methylation. Scientists think a better understanding of methylation could aid cancer research.
"One would expect identical twins to develop and express genes at the same levels, but in fact this changes over time," Plass said. "We think that methylation plays a genome-wide role in these changes."
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King is ok, I spoke to him today.
His comp is in the shop for repairs.
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Precocious parrot grasps the concept of zero
Bird seems to match the mathematical prowess of toddlers
Brandeis University
Updated: 6:44 p.m. ET July 8, 2005
A parrot has grasped the concept of zero, something humans can't do until at least the toddler phase, researchers say.
Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has a brain the size of a walnut. But when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says "none."
Zero is thought to be a rather abstract concept even for people. Children typically don't grasp it until age 3 or 4, Brandeis researchers say. Some ancient cultures lacked a formal term for zilch, even as recently as the Middle Ages.
Feathered phenom
Alex is a fairly skilled counter. In a test, he said "none" when items on his tray were cleared. More trials were done, and the avian Einstein "consistently demonstrated the ability to identify zero quantity by saying the label 'none,'" the study concluded.
Alex's null may be slightly different than your nada.
"Alex has a zerolike concept; it's not identical to ours, but he repeatedly showed us that he understands an absence of quantity," said Irene Pepperberg, who led the research
The result, published in the current issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, adds to growing evidence that birds and other animals are smarter than we thought.
A 2003 study in the journal Nature, for example, found that common marsh birds called coots can recognize and count their own eggs, even when other eggs are in the nest.
Black-capped chickadees were recently found to warn colleagues of danger by chirping about the size and actual threat of individual predators. The language of prairie dogs includes a word for humans.
Some animal intelligence is hauntingly familiar, like the male monkeys that pay to see female monkey bottoms. And studies show that monkeys, dogs and rats all know how to laugh.
There are obvious limits to animal intelligence, of course. Take the 450 sheep who recently jumped to their deaths for no apparent reason.
Parroting behavior?
One question that dogs animal intelligence research is whether remarkable, humanlike behaviors are innate and truly cerebral or if a creature is just parroting a trainer.
"It is doubtful that Alex's achievement, or those of some other animals such as chimps, can be completely trained," Pepperberg said. "Rather, it seems likely that these skills are based on simpler cognitive abilities they need for survival, such as recognition of more versus less."
Pepperberg said the study could help shed light on human learning disabilities.
She now plans to find out how well Alex can add and subtract.
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I voted for DrWho, who I nominated.
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What a horrible thing to wake up and hear has happened after such happiness yesterday over the Olympic news.
My sincerest condolences to the families of those victims.
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NewKerala, India : Archaeologists unearth new structure near Shahjehan’s Taj Mahal
Archaeologists unearth new structure near Shahjehan’s Taj Mahal
Agra: Archaeologists have found a new structure adjoining the Taj Mahal which according to preliminary investigations served as a rest house for travellers. The discovery was made during excavations to determine original water-levels surrounding the Taj Mahal.
“Excavations were being conducted to study original water-levels here. We have found one tank in the center of the hall, and a whole water channel system. There was a riverbank here and travellers would have come down to this rest house that consists of a water system. We are making further excavations to enable us to review the entire system and find out the actual purpose of the place,” said D.Dabhalan, chief archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey of India(ASI), Excavations are being done since April this year and the ASI has employed nearly 35 assistants to conduct the them.
Shyam Singh, who retired as an archaeologist with the ASI, said there was a likelihood of finding more such structures.
“There is a possibility that we find more structures on the eastern side and on the other bank of the Yamuna. While there has been talk of the Black Taj Mahal, we have actually found evidence of the pleasure gardens and several other elements like the central tanks. These have been developed after 1996. It is possibile that we may find more structures on both sides,” he said.
Many people believe that corresponding to the sparkling white Taj, Shah Jehan had planned to build another Taj Mahal in black marble, which was to be his own tomb on the opposite bank of the river Yamuna.
The irregular position of the cenotaph of Shah Jehan as compared to that of Mumtaz Mahal is said to be proof of this assumption.
Many Scholars, however, believe that this is a myth and has no relation to truth.
Archaeologists have also ruled out the possibility of the structure being excavated resembling the “Sheesh Mahal” or Glass Palace inside the Taj. At present there is no evidence to suggest the same.
The Taj, which stands on the banks of the Yamuna river, was built by the fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan in 1631 in memory of his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died while giving birth to their 14th child.
No cost was spared to make it the most beautiful monument the world had ever seen. White marble and red sandstone, silver and gold, carnelian and jasper, moonstone and jade, lapis lazuli and coral were fashioned by 20,000 skilled workers to make the emperor’s dream a reality. It’s Chief architect was Ustad Isa Afandi who belonged to Iran.
It took 17 years years to complete this symbol of eternal love where Shahjehan too lies buried, re-united at last with his beloved Mumtaz.
Today, the Taj Mahal stands serene and perfect in its garden of cypresses on the banks of the River Yamuna. Its pure white marble shimmers silvery white in the moonlight, soft pink at dawn, and at close of the day reflects the fiery tints of the setting sun. The Taj in all its timeless beauty still inspires poets and painters, writers and photographers. And lovers still meet here in the moonlight in the shadow of the world’s most famous monument to love.
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^has a good sense of humor
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Never smelled it on anyone to know if the ads are true.
However, I must say Old Spice's new Red Zone series, they are like a bug repellent to me. I can smell it a mile away, [only a slight exaggeration], and it makes me ill.
It's WAY to overpowering.
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Saturn rings have own atmosphere
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter
Many mysteries about the ringed planet remain to be resolved
Saturn's vast and majestic ring system has its own atmosphere - separate from that of the planet itself, according to data from the Cassini spacecraft.
And Saturn is rotating seven minutes more slowly than when probes measured its spin in the 70s and 80s - an observation experts cannot yet explain.
Cassini-Huygens mission scientists are celebrating the spacecraft's first year in orbit around the ringed planet.
Details were unveiled at the British Festival of Space 2005 in Birmingham.
By making close flybys of the ring system, Cassini has been able to determine that the atmosphere around the rings is composed principally of molecular oxygen (O2).
Welcome confirmation
The finding was made by two experiments on Cassini: the Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS) and Cassini Plasma Science (Caps) instrument.
"The INMS sees the neutral oxygen gas, Caps sees the ionised products of that oxygen and the electrons associated with it. There is an enhancement over the rings," said Dr Andrew Coates, co-investigator for the Caps instrument, told the BBC News website.
Dr Coates, from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) at University College London, said the atmosphere was very similar to that of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.
"As water comes off the rings, the hydrogen is lost from it, leaving the oxygen," he explained.
Saturn's rings consist largely of water-ice mixed with smaller amounts of rocky matter. Dr Coates said the ring atmosphere was probably kept in check by gravitational forces and a balance between loss of material from the ring system and a re-supply of material from elsewhere.
Scientists admitted they were surprised by the finding that Saturn's rotation was slowing.
"The rotation seems to have slowed down by about seven minutes compared with what was inferred from the Pioneer and Voyager data, but we don't actually understand why," said Professor Michele Dougherty, principal investigator for Cassini's magnetometer instrument.
Surprise finding
Data from the magnetometer and Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument both seem to show the slow down in Saturn's rotation.
"You would expect the rotation of the planet to slow down if its internal dynamo had stopped, but that does not seem to be the case with Saturn," Professor Dougherty, from Imperial College London, told the BBC News website.
The internal dynamo is the source of a planet's magnetic field and requires rotation and a fluid core. Professor Dougherty said it was possible the instruments were observing "rotational regions" closer to the surface of Saturn rather than anything to do with the dynamo itself.
"If you sit down and think about it, it's very difficult to come up with a scenario where the interior of the planet is slowing down," she said.
UK science and innovation minister Lord Sainsbury, who was at the briefing in Birmingham, praised UK scientists involved in Cassini-Huygens as the orbiter celebrated its first year in orbit around Saturn.
"The scientists and engineers in this country have played an integral role, making it the biggest British success story in space of the last 12 months," Lord Sainsbury said.
Cassini performed its Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) on 1 July 2004 after a six-year, three-billion-kilometre trek.
In December 2004, it released its piggybacked Huygens probe, which performed a successful touchdown on Saturn's moon Titan in January this year.
The mission is a co-operative venture between the US space agency (Nasa), the European Space Agency (Esa) and the Italian Space Agency (Asi).
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New Dolphin Species Found in Australia
SYDNEY, Australia (July 5) - Australian researchers said Tuesday they have identified a new species of dolphin living in the coastal waters of northern Australia.
The Australian Snubfin Dolphin, which is related to Irrawaddy dolphins found along the coasts and major rivers of Asia and northern Australia, was formally identified as a new species thanks to genetic research carried out in California, Queensland state researchers said in a statement.
''There are clear differences between the two populations that had not been previously recognized and these were confirmed by the studies on DNA,'' said Isabel Beasley, a doctoral student at James Cook University's School of Tropical Environmental Studies and Geography.
Beasley and Peter Arnold from the Museum of Tropical Queensland examined the skulls and external measurements of both species, as well as observations of the dolphins in seven countries.
A separate genetic study was also undertaken by Kelly Robertson from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.
Beasley warned that the dolphins are under threat from humans because they live in shallow coastal waters.
''Unfortunately, because they live in these environments, they are susceptible to many human threats including accidental catch in shark and fishing nets as well as effects of coastal development,'' Beasley said.
The dolphin's scientific name is Orcaella heinsohni to honor the work of James Cook University researcher George Heinsohn, who examined dolphin carcasses that were found stranded or caught in shark nets in the 1960s and 1970s. Those dolphins provided data that helped formally identify them as a separate species.
07-05-05 1455EDT
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Dinosaur Track Found in Alaska Park
Footpath May Be 70 Million Years Old
By DAN JOLING, AP
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Jully 6) - A track from a three-toed dinosaur believed to be about 70 million years old has been discovered in Denali National Park, the first evidence that the animals roamed there, scientists said.
The footprint was found June 27 by a University of Alaska Fairbanks student taking a geology field course.
The fossil is 9 inches long and 6 inches wide, officials said.
The discovery's importance was its location in Interior Alaska, far from the coastline where other tracks have been found, said Anthony Fiorillo, curator of earth sciences at the Dallas Museum of Natural History.
"It's not necessarily the track itself that's significant,'' he said. "It's where it is that's got us all excited.''
From the size of the track, he estimates the meat-eater was 9 to 13 feet long.
"You are looking at a very large, birdlike animal except it has teeth and a tail and instead of wings, it has arms,'' he said. A rough comparison, he said, would be a scaled-down Tyrannosaurus rex.
Susi Tomsich, an undergraduate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, spotted the track on the underside of a ledge.
"Something told me to look around and I did and I spotted this one,'' she said.
She pointed it out to Paul McCarthy, associate professor of geology, who instantly recognized what she had found.
"I gave a little howl,'' McCarthy said. "It was a big rush.
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I'm sorry but that sounds like political correctness run amock.
Unless they can provide something that convinces me as otherwise, I'm going to think the cops in England are over reacting to something that is considered pride elsewhere in the world.
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I don't understand that thought process, you're showing pride for your country and support.
It has nothing to do with race because your country is comprised of many cultures.
Main Entry: rac·ism
Pronunciation: 'rA-"si-z&m also -"shi-
Function: noun
Date: 1936
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
- rac·ist /-sist also -shist/ noun or adjective
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Link/Zelda.
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Tis okay, my Dad is one of six, the only one born here, so all my relatives bear a "regal" stance and though they are Americans now, the fondness and love of their home country makes me understand what you've said.
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What about the celebration your country has every November 5?
And as your country once ruled the world, I think just one day wouldn't be enough or perhaps, it wouldn't fit into the pride factor there? :wink2:
At least my Uncle always said that.
"We ruled the world, and the world still knows it"
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Experts unravel DNA of extinct cave bears
Lessons could be applied to study of Neanderthals
Updated: 4:11 p.m. ET June 2, 2005
WASHINGTON - Researchers have sequenced the DNA of two extinct cave bears and say their method is accurate enough to try doing it on extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals, according to a report published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The cave bears are the first extinct animals to have their genes sequenced, and the findings can be used to determine the precise relationship between the 40,000-year-old bears and living species.
But the main message is that the technique should be useful in examining Neanderthal DNA, the researchers report.
"We picked cave bear as an initial test case ancient DNA target because the samples we used in the study are roughly the same age as Neanderthals," said Eddy Rubin of the U.S. Department of Energy, where some of the work was done.
Extracting Neanderthal DNA
"Our real interest is in hominids which include humans and the extinct Neanderthal — the only other hominid species that we have to compare with humans. Our nearest living relative is the chimp, and that's 5 million years of divergence," Rubin added in a statement.
The researchers include Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who first extracted and analyzed DNA from Neanderthal bones in 1997.
Paabo's team worked with mitochondrial DNA, which is found in the body of the cell and is passed down virtually intact from mothers to their children.
Geneticists need nuclear DNA — the kind that is mixed together and passed along from both parents — to get a real idea of a creature's genetic heritage.
To do this, the international team of researchers turned to cave bear remains from Austria.
"We extracted DNA from a cave bear tooth recovered from Ochsenhalt Cave, Austria, and a cave bear bone from Gamssulzen Cave, Austria, dated at 42,290 and 44,160 years before present respectively," they wrote in their report.
Comparisons to modern animals
They compared the sequences with DNA from dogs, modern bears and other animals, and filtered out obvious contamination from microbes and fungi.
"When people hear about our success, they immediately think about how this strategy could work for dinosaurs," Rubin said.
Dinosaur DNA plays a fictional role in Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park," a novel made into a film in which dinosaurs are resurrected using DNA taken from amber-preserved insects and cloning technology.
While experts have found some soft tissue in 70 million-year-old dinosaur fossils, it is not at all clear whether any measurable DNA remains.
Rubin said it may also be possible to extract DNA from the remains found in Indonesia of the Flores Man, a small Homo erectus nicknamed "the hobbit" because of its tiny stature. These remains have been dated to just 18,000 years ago.
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Endangered crocodiles discovered in Laos
Conservationists hopeful hatchlings will survive
Updated: 7:53 p.m. ET May 20, 2005
BANGKOK, Thailand - A nest of baby Siamese crocodiles has been found in southern Laos, raising hopes that the nearly extinct species may yet survive, conservationists said Friday.
Lao and international wildlife specialists found seven hatchlings and an old crocodile nest in a small swamp in the southern Lao province of Savannakhet in March, the Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Program announced in a statement.
Ranked as "critically endangered" by the World Conservation Union, the species is among the world's most threatened crocodiles, the statement said.
The species can still be found in central and southern Laos, but in small and fragmented groups, and in some areas it may already be extinct, it said.
"The discovery of a crocodile breeding population in Savannakhet province is internationally important for conserving this species, especially as no other breeding sites have been confirmed yet," Wildlife Conservation Society biologist Mark Bezuijen was quoted saying. "Urgent efforts and funding are needed to protect this site and propagate this species in the future."
The Lao government has made the conservation of crocodiles a high priority, and is planning to work with villagers to protect the breeding site, said Chanthone Phothitay, an official with the country's forestry department.
A similar survey for endangered crocodiles is being carried out in Vietnam, and conservation activities are ongoing in neighboring Cambodia.
The statement did not provide an estimate of the number of Siamese crocodiles in Laos. But Alvin Lopez, an ecologist for the wetlands program, said that Cambodia, with 200 adults, has the largest wild population of the species.
The Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Program was established last year by the governments of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam to work with U.N. and private agencies on ecology issues.
Is There in Truth No Beauty?
in Star Trek
Posted
Yes, but she was good that entire season, and I liked the way they killed her off, didn't expect it at all.