on 4-19-2009 Family guy does it again. A singing and opera like performance at first promoting marijuana use then taking it away for Brians Oprah book club deal. A very educational look at how hemp and smokable marijuana differ. All in all a classic family guy episode to celebrate 4/20 on 4:20. enjoy

As the faux conservative pundit Stephen Colbert warned President Bush, reality has a bias to the left. And interestingly enough, so does all life on Earth. We’ve know that all amino acids, the essential components for any terrestrial organism, have left-handed chiralities. Or to translate from science-speak, their molecules wind to the left. This is why genetic engineering experiments can splice genes from very different species in a lab. The molecules will line up and assemble correctly because they’re all wound in the same direction.

But for many years, there’s been a nagging problem. Why does all life on our planet have these left-handed amino acids? You could very easily wind them to the right and they’d work just as well. In fact, you could get an identical biosphere with a different chirality. Of course you would have a very hard time finding a viable organism with both chiralities since the molecules it had to produce couldn’t match up. It would be like fitting together two different jigsaw puzzles and that means somewhere along the line, there had to be a process which resulted in our present day left-hand chirality gaining dominance over its rightward-wound counterparts. Could it be one the earliest cases of natural selection at work? Actually, it seems that primordial chemistry in the vacuum of space played a major role in what life could evolve on our world.

This is the conclusion of NASA astrobiologists Daniel Garvin and Jason Dworkin who examined meteorites rich in carbon to find the amino acid isovaline. Since isovaline isn’t actively used by living things on Earth and maintains the same chirality over billions of years, scientists can use it to take a look back at the dawn of the solar system and determine the ratio of left-handed to right-handed molecules without the threat of biological contamination. As it turns out, when a meteorite is rich with water, it has up to 18% more left-handed isovaline so when meteors with disproportionate amounts of left-handed amino acids fell to Earth and deposited their organic cargo, they would’ve created a bias towards organisms with our current chirality.

Once again, we’re finding evidence of life on our world coming from the depths of outer space as organic compounds ready to combine into functional organisms and just take it from there. And that raises some curious questions. Could life on other planets be very similar to ours? Is there a chance that alien and terrestrial hereditary mechanisms would be similar since they’re built from the same pool of left-handed organics? To be perfectly clear, being made of similar compounds doesn’t mean aliens would look anything like us. Evolution and the environment of their home world would shape their anatomy. Just look at the variety of life that evolved on our planet from the same 20 amino acids. Who knows what the conditions on another planet could do with the same basic mix of chemical compounds?

Glavin, D., & Dworkin, J. (2009). Enrichment of the amino acid L-isovaline by aqueous alteration on CI and CM meteorite parent bodies Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (14), 5487-5492 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0811618106

from: World of Weird Things

see also: Life’s 20 Amino Acids - What all life from earth came from

The Bible must be either 100% true or 100% false.
The Bible says the Earth is was created by God in 4004 BC.

Ten Commandments of Evolution/Atheism:
Thou shalt have no theories before me, for they are pseudoscience.
Thou shalt be sexy and pass on thy genes to thy species, but not to thine immediate nor extended family.
Thou shalt adapt and overcome problems.
Thou shalt live in harmony with thy fellow beings.
Thou shalt not overproduce.
Thou shalt not genocide other creatures.
Thou shalt be intelligent and not gullible.
Thou shalt live only a short time, and better creatures shall take thy place.
Thou shalt spread throughout the universe.
Thou shalt not make the world inhospitable for other creatures.

“Otzi was frozen 5,300 years ago and he was found in an unprecedented conservation state for its age. Researchers took 150,000 high definition images from 12 different angles, including 3D and UV views.” (icemanphotoscan.eu)

Ötzi the Iceman (pronounced  [ˈœtsi] (help·info)), and Similaun Man are modern names of a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC (53 centuries ago).[1] The mummy was found in 1991 in the Schnalstal glacier in the Ötztal Alps, near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. The nickname comes from Ötztal (Ötz valley), the region in which he was discovered. He is Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans. The body and his belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, northern Italy.

"History of the internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.
The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.
Voice-over by Steve Taylor http://voice-pool.com

You can get more information on this movie on my website
http://www.lonja.de/motion/mo_history…
or on the PICOL-Project site where you can download a pre-release of the icons.
http://blog.picol.org/

Credits for subtitles:
(The correctness of the subtiles depends on the people listed down here)
English: Stefan Badragan | youtube.com/StevXtreme
Italian: Stefan Badragan
German: me
French: Arnaud ‘dehy’ DE MOUHY
Bulgarian: Andrian Georgiev
Chinese: Terry Lee
Portuguese (Brazilian): Guilherme Euler
Also thanks to: Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,
The Associated Press reports your new contract with Premiere Radio Networks will enrich you with at least $38 million a year over the next eight years. You are making this money on the public property of the American people for which you pay no rent.

You, Rush Limbaugh, are on welfare.

As you know, the public airwaves belong to the American people. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is supposed to be our trustee in managing this property. The people are the landlords and the radio and TV stations and affiliated companies are the tenants.

The problem is that since the Radio Act of 1927 these corporate tenants have been massively more powerful in Washington, DC than the tens of millions of listeners and viewers. The result has been no payment of rent by the stations for the value of their license to broadcast. You and your company are using the public’s valuable property for free. This freeloading on the backs of the American people is called corporate welfare.

It is way past due for the super-rich capitalist–Rush Limbaugh from Cape Girardeau, Missouri–to get himself off big time welfare. It is way past due for Rush Limbaugh as the Kingboy of corporatist radio to set a capitalist example for his peers and pay rent to the American people for the very lucrative use of their property.

You need not wait for the broadcast industry-indentured FCC and Congress to do the right thing. You can lead by paying a voluntary rent–determined by a reputable appraisal organization–for the time you use on the hundreds of stations that carry your words each weekday.
Payment of rent for the use of public airwaves owned by the American people is the conservative position. Real conservatives oppose corporate welfare. Real corporatists feed voraciously from hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare gushing out of Washington, DC yearly.
Whose side are you on? Freeloading? Or paying rent for the public property you have been using free for many years?

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely yours,
Ralph Nader
PO Box 19312
Washington, DC 20036

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Digital X-rays have turned Lucy, perhaps the world’s best-known pre-human, inside out, and may answer questions about how our ancestors came down from the trees and walked, scientists said on Friday.

The team at the University of Texas in Austin, in collaboration with the Ethiopian government, completed the first high-resolution computed tomography or CT scan of the human ancestor, who lived 3.2 million years ago.

"These scans we’ve completed at the University of Texas permit us to look at the internal architecture — how her bones are built,"anthropology professor John Kappelman, who helped lead the work scanning all 80 pieces of the skeleton, told Reuters in an interview.

Scientists hope studying a "virtual" Lucy will offer further clues about the human ancestor’s lifestyle. Lucy, found in Ethiopia in 1974, is the best-preserved example of Australopithecus, a species of pre-human.

"It opens it up to people who, instead of having to travel to some distant museum to see the original, can actually call it up on the desktop," Kappelman said.

Kappelman said the scans could tell more about how Lucy’s bones fit together — and thus whether she and her kind climbed trees as well as walked.

"We’re quite certain this set of studies we’re going to be conducting here with the CT data are going to go some distance to resolving this long-standing question," Kappelman said.

Lucy’s fossil is visiting the United States as part of a world premiere exhibit organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The 3-foot- (1-meter) tall skeleton is about 40 percent complete.

"It’s going to help us fill us in what was one of the earlier stages … of our evolution to really better understand the behaviors of an extinct cousin. In some ways it’s like … being able to tune the time machine back to 3 million years ago, jump in and pop back and be able to reconstruct what this fossil was doing on a day-to-day basis," Kappelman said.

"She’s arguably now and I think will be for a long time, the most famous fossil on planet Earth," he added.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Peter Cooney)  From Yahoo Tech

Stephen Colbert dishes it on republicans, on 1/29.

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A record number of active-duty soldiers killed themselves last year, top Army leaders reported Thursday, acknowledging that they are losing a battle to reverse a years-long rise in suicides, many of them by soldiers deployed to Afghanistan 0or Iraq.

The 128 confirmed suicides last year — with 15 others pending confirmation — mark a new high since the Army began tracking them in 1980. Soldier suicides have risen each year since they totaled 67 in 2004, the first full year of the Iraq war. At least 171 soldiers, including those in the Army Reserve and National Guard, have killed themselves while deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq from the start of the military operations there in 2001 and 2003, the Army reported.

On Thursday, Army Secretary Pete Geren and other top Army officials unveiled training programs and initiatives aimed at reaching soldiers on the brink. They noted that, for the first time, the Army suicide rate exceeded the adjusted national suicide rate of about 19.5 people per 100,000.

“This is not business as usual. We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse this very disturbing number of suicides,” said Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army vice chief of staff. “We need to help our soldiers and their families understand that it’s OK to ask for help.”

Defense officials have not released overall suicide statistics in the military, but the numbers for Marines also reportedly rose in 2008. Army doctors said that troubles with intimate relationships, poor job performance, alcohol or drug abuse sparked some of the suicides. Stress from long deployments and multiple tours can play a role, often straining relationships at home; some soldiers have killed themselves after returning home and receiving new deployment orders, the Army confirmed.

However, officials also said that most of the suicides for deployed soldiers came during their initial deployments. Overall, the suicides were split about evenly among deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq, soldiers who had returned from deployment and those who never deployed.

“The numbers represent tragedies that have taken place across our Army,” Geren said. “As long as there is a single soldier out there struggling with this personal crisis, we are going to consider that a crisis of our Army family.”

In October, the Army announced it would embark on a $50 million study with the National Institute of Mental Health — the largest suicide study ever by the military. On Thursday it announced plans to step up its suicide training regimen, and ordered a “Stand Down” for suicide outreach beginning Feb. 15 that is designed to reach every soldier. However, the Army already has added hundreds of psychiatrists and psychologists and pushed videos and training through the ranks, with no sign of a turnaround. continued at Mercury News.