我的博客报：科技
记住，千万不要和鲨鱼玩捉迷藏的游戏，因为你肯定会输。鲨鱼的大脑里拥有特殊的细胞，它可以感知其他生物发出的电场。这种能力可以让鲨鱼通过感知猎物肌肉抽动时发出的微弱电信号精确的找到藏在沙子下面的鱼……-
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
-- William Blake (1757-1827)
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Below the fold is video from 1933 of the last Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine. Thylacines, now extinct, were carnivorous marsupials that inhabited Tasmania until they were wiped out by a human campaign of extermination that lasted through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, although thylacines were never a threat to anyone. You can learn more about them at the Thylacine Museum. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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Wow! It seems that all the exciting sience news today are coming from my school: Researchers Find Genes Involved In Nicotine Resistance In Fruit Flies: North Carolina State University researchers have gleaned insight into the genes involved in resistance to nicotine in the lab rat of many gene studies - Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. The research team led by Dr. Greg Gibson, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, and his graduate student, Gisele Passador-Gurgel, found that regulation of levels of a certain enzyme - ornithine amino transferase - plays an important role in establishing how long flies can tolerate nicotine. Gibson says that the amount of enzyme seems to do two things - it influences flies' ability to strip away toxins, and it helps establish how much the drug stimulates them. ----------snip---------- An interesting sidelight in the study was the observation that flies from North Carolina are more resistant to nicotine than flies from California. The researchers found that 30 percent of the North Carolina flies lived longer after exposure to nicotine - thus were more resistant to nicotine - than all but one California fly. Gibson isn't sure why, although he has a few theories. North Carolina flies may garner resistance from living near tobacco fields. California flies may have genetically lost their ability to resist nicotine. Many pesticides are nicotine-based, too, so the flies could have evolved some response to insecticides. 'Buckyballs
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The American Public Health Association is the organizational voice of American public health. I've been a member for almost 40 years and served on its Governing Council and on one of its top policy boards. Admittedly I've not been very active for the last number of years, especially as APHA has become neutered and politically marginalized. But I have a soft spot in my heart for it and its tens of thousands of members, mostly dedicated, hardworking and underpaid public sector professionals. So it pains me to say their just announced pandemic flu "prescription" is a prescription for an obsolete drug, with no indication of dosage or instruction for use: Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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Over at Retrospectacle, Shelley briefly mentions a quote that William F. Buckley has been mumbling for aeons now. "I'm taken with the reply of an elderly scientific scholar to an exuberant young skeptic. 'I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.'" When I first heard it in the 1997 Firing Line Debate, I wondered who the "elderly scientific scholar" and "exuberant young skeptic" were. According to this Time article from 1960, they were Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. If you know anything about this two, this seems a little ... off. Interestingly, here Buckley attributes it to a "crusty academic believer, his back to the wall at the dizzy height of the Darwinian offensive". Hardly a description of Huxley!!! And here it is attributed to C.S. Lewis. So, does anyone know who said this and to whom, or is this another "fact". Read the comments on this post...
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Oh, yes, we all know that Senator John McCain gave a talk today at a luncheon in Seattle hosted by the Discovery Institute. What is said institue (I won't link them, so you can google if you like)? "Despite its self-proclaimed position as an unbiased think tank, the Discovery Institute has played a central role in the religious right's national campaign to undermine science education," Campaign to Defend the Constitution co-director Clark Stevens wrote to McCain Thursday. "Under the guise of 'teaching the controversy' the Institute has strived to discredit the theory of evolution -- a theory that has withstood decades of critical analysis from the scientific community -- and replace it with a religiously motivated pseudo-science with no scientific standing." Yep. Thats a pretty concise summary. (Continued below the fold.) Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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北京的庙会看来每年都在进化中，除了传统的烤串、麦芽糖、天津大麻花、炒肝之类的吃食，现在又多了朝鲜打糕。 我这两天和亲戚一起转了两个庙会，一个是厂甸庙会，一个是所谓的朝阳公园洋庙会。这个洋字的来历不过是多了几个俄国人在唱俄国歌曲，当然还有朝阳公园本来就有的游乐节目。每次逛庙会我都买了一些小玩意，今年最喜欢的是水晶花，10块钱三支，真的很好看。 水晶花当然不会是水晶做的，否则不会这么便宜。水晶花的主要材料是树脂，发源于美国，经过日本传到中国。我们干别的不行，学习的速度是非常快的。我现在没有数码，不能将自己买的水晶花拍出来给大家看，就贴两张网上有的图。我买的水晶花每支的花和叶子的颜色相同，和下面的不一样。一共买了多少颜色？至少有6种吧。 Turok等人的新文章 Generating Ekpyrotic Curvature Perturbations Before the Big Bang 继续他们的cyclic universe密度扰动的讨论。还没时间仔细看。他们号称可以得到蓝谱比较有意思，因为在普通的暴涨模型中红谱更加常见。 Pavon同学推出他的第N篇关于HDE的文章 Holographic dark energy in Brans-Dicke theory 我根本不想仔细看这篇文章，但是还是感谢他们，将我的文章的引用次数在SPIRES推到100次。一个人的怪想有时是其他人的工厂。 对了这个Pavon和皇马的那个Pavon有什么关系？ 刚才偶然看到一个蛮可爱的博客 王朵莱的BLOG 居然将我的博客链接夹在孔庆东和余秋雨之间，这两位可是名人。我很讨厌前者所谓新左派的装腔作势，不喜欢后者“大文化”学者的作势装腔。孔庆东用三表的话来说，在新浪跳钢管舞一场接一场正跳得热汗淋漓，是个当红舞星，算不上头牌，头100牌总是算得上的。 不过，每个人有每个人的口味，这个博客作者是个年轻的女孩，博客写得挺好的。 今天我家的一个亲戚还告诉我他喜欢余秋雨，我听了不便说出我
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The term "fast break" refers to those situations in the game of basketball in which the offense is attempting to push the ball up the court and score quickly, rather than running a play from their normal offensive set. This usually involves a temporary numerical advantage for the offensive team, as the defenders hurry to get back into position. Any given fast break will last no more than a few seconds, but these are some of the most important seconds in a basketball game. Understanding the basics of the fast break is absolutely essential to playing basketball, or even watching it played. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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