Ok, read this and see what you think. It’s about the damage sonar likely causes whales. There are plenty of sites out there to give you a pretty balanced perspective on this issue. I know only some people will care, or even believe that sonar is harming whales. Some in that group figure it’s always acceptable to give the military whatever it needs whenever it wants it for our protection. Well, Bush is on their side, as usual. I’m someone who thinks there are limits to the destruction we should cause the environment and the creatures in it.

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It seems that there are about 10 hypervelocity stars detected speeding away form our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of these stars, HE 0437-5439, has been analyzed and found to be too young to have been ejected from our galaxy. So, where did it come from? It appears likely that it was part of a binary pair that got ejected from one of our neighboring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). What did the ejecting? It’s a likely scenario that the binary pair came close to a black hole, which whipped the pair around, consuming one and ejecting the other out of the galaxy at high speed. If so, this would be the first observational evidence of a black hole at the center of the LMC, a close-by galaxy with a known metallicity that is estimated to be about 40% that of our own galaxy.

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I have a link below to an excellent article in the Economist discussing a possibly new era, ‘The End of Cheap Food‘. Many Americans have a complicated relationship with the stuff that is our daily sustenance, and, why not? We have so much of it, so much variety and most of us can afford to buy more than we need. So, going to the store can be like going on a little adventure, wondering what new and tasty thing we might try for dinner tonight. The other side of our complex relationship with food is darker. Have we had too much? Do we need to lose weight? What the hell are we eating, anyway? Some of the ingredients require serious googling to understand why company X even put them in our snacks, let alone the implications for eating them on a regular basis. One ingredient, corn syrup, goes to the heart of our modern food world. It’s in EVERYTHING! Why, you ask? Well, it’s, as I said, complicated. Practical-minded folks remember that there is no civilization without food, not without adequate food anyway. So, it’s important to make sure that your country always has a reliable food supply, either by growing it in-country, or importing it from a very reliable source. So, many countries indulge in subsidies to their farmers. It keeps the land prepared and ready for agriculture, keeps you in the game so to speak. The United States does this, of course. This has not resulted in assuring Americans food diversity. Nope. We grow a lot of corn and wheat and soybeans. This has not saved the small farmer, which means jobs for a local economy. Nope. Instead, large industrial operations are steadily the only farms that can afford to do business these days. So, for us, we get lots of corn and corn by-products (corn syrup) in our food, reduced variety, and lots of questions about the quality of our diets. We also get industrial farming, which is very bad for the environment.

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The environmental cost of producing and eating meat has been something I’ve been reading and thinking about for a long time now. I understand that, as a person deeply concerned about the environment and the conservation of our natural resources, I need to make my lifestyle work in harmony with those concerns. I try to run an energy-efficient household, try to use natural products around the house and try to clean it using environmentally friendly solutions. I understand that each time I go out and buy something that can’t be easily recycled, I’m giving my personal OK to the industries that produced those products without any concern for how it may add to the growing junk piles and landfills here on our Earth.

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Well, when they said that the 21st century was going to be all about biology, they weren’t kidding. It seems that a team of 17 scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created the first synthetic bacterial genome. The largest to-date man-made DNA structure was created “by synthesizing and assembling the 582,970 base pair genome of a bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0″. This bacterium was chosen because it has the smallest genome that can be grown in a pure culture. Before Thursday’s press announcement, the largest synthesized DNA structure had 32,000 base pairs. The basic process they followed had several steps and began with resequencing the bacterium’s genome, just to make sure it was accurately known. They then designed fragments of chemically synthesized DNA “to build 101 “cassettes” of 5,000 to 7,000 base pairs of genetic code”. The synthetic fragments of the bacterium were distinguished from the real thing by watermarks inserted into the synthetic sequences. The processes thereafter involved stitching these fragments until all 582,920 base pairs were joined together. Their next goal is to incorporate the synthetic DNA sequence into a cell, and thereby create the first synthetic life form.

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Here is an interesting and very informative article on water usage, specifically, how Americans in certain regions of the United States, especially the  west will have to adjust to getting their drinking water from treated sewage water. It has been happening for a while in Texas and Virginia, and in the country of Namibia, Africa, and it is about to happen in Orange County, California. Some studies indicate that the treated sewage water is of a higher quality than water garnered from a “fresh” source, and that there are fewer contaminants to worry about, including bacteria and hormones and pharmaceuticals. These things go in one end and get excreted out the other, right? Other things to worry about in water include agricultural run-off which includes fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and industrial run-off which includes all kinds of things, including heavy metals. Some studies by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) indicate that the treated water sewage water is better than that obtained by water allowed to percolate through a natural aquifer, as the water tends to pick up pollutants (man-made and otherwise) along the way. I don’t know, I guess a battery of tests will have to be done from a range of trustworthy sources to fully convince me that they are able to get all of the human-excreted hormones and pharmaceuticals out of the water supply. I do worry about that.   Unfortunately, desalination at this point is very expensive, energy intensive, and environmentally insensitive (couldn’t resist).  Just like the organisms that get exterminated in the cooling water for nuclear power plants, desalination would have an adverse affect on the flora and fauna in oceans.

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One of the two favorite subjects of this blog is conservation and water, so we get to do two for the price of one today. The drought in the southern United States is very bad these last few years (see the blog entry on Atlanta, Georgia), and it looks like it may be even worse in 2008, if something big in the precipitation department doesn’t come their way. Yes, for the skeptics, droughts do happen naturally, but, come on, it’s pretty much common knowledge that most Americans don’t conserve water, or energy for that matter. We embrace profligate waste, and the only time we begrudgingly consider being more modest with water and energy is if we are absolutely forced to do so. This usually means that the price goes up, and we try a little, but so most of us haven’t been really challenged with respect to our usage to the point where we radically change our lifestyle in order to get by. I believe most Americans simply do not want to contemplate the idea that our natural resources aren’t infinite, or that a very convenient technological fix won’t come along and give us everything we need, and fix all of our environmental damage as a side benefit. We want to believe in a miracle. Well, we shall see, but meanwhile, extinctions are happening, and they are significant, so that miracle has to come very, very soon.

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As a scientist, I have of course followed the evolution of global warming‘, or now, ‘climate change’ for many years. Before it became politicized, not many people even knew about it, or took it seriously. These days, many people have an opinion, and I can say for certain, that and $5 will buy you a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, most don’t bother to actually read any actual scientific journal articles to really back up their opinion, one way or the other, and instead base it on politics. You know the drill, those who don’t like Al Gore, don’t ‘believe’ in climate change. Well, I for one am tired of people saying they don’t ‘believe’ in climate change. It’s not a religion to be believed in, it’s science, and the only way to arrive at a conclusion worth anything is if you do your homework. That means reading papers and thinking, and then you are entitled to your opinion, but that doesn’t guarantee that you are correct.

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It seems that a fossilized fish found about four years ago in the Arctic had wrists, forearms, elbows and shoulders that may have been the precursors for the equivalent arm parts that we humans enjoy today. I enjoy my arms, don’t you? Anyway, it seems that more and more of biology is discovering the great number of genetic similarities that living beings on this planet share, as mentioned in my last post ‘The Tree of Life Gets a Pruning’. One suggestion from the work concerning the Tiktaalik performed by Neil Shubin, professor of anatomy at Chicago University, is that the fin in fish is a refinement of the original, or older hand structure. Indeed, Shubin found that the genes exist in modern fish for this arm development, but are turned off. Clearly, very small changes in genes can manifest as very large differences in outward appearance in living beings. For instance, research has shown that some genes involved in the development of the human eye and vision, are also involved in jellyfish metabolism. How about that? Shubin has written what sounds to be an interesting book on the subject, titled “Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 billion-year History of the Human Body”. You might want to use your wrists for a little book-reading enlightenment.

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‘Genetic archeologists’ (see link below) in Norway and Switzerland have simplified one of the two supergroups into which evolutionary biologists have divided all life on Earth. The two main groups are prokaryotes, organisms that do not arrange their genetic material into a nucleus (bacteria) and eukaryotes, such as humans. The eukaryotes have been divided into four subgroups now, instead of five, which include: plants (including red and green algae), opisthokonts (humans, fungi, amoebas), excavates (parasites and free-living organisms) and the new group, SAR. The acronym stands for Stramenophiles, Alveolates, and Rhizaria (SAR), and has been redefined due to the effort to examine 5000 genes, the largest number of genes from higher organisms to be studied at one time. Of those 5000 genes, 123 were found to be common among them all, and were given extra research attention. This new data forced the reorganization of the eukaryote branch.

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