who needs science?

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via . iammyfather

(Source: sagansense, via thedragoninmygarage)

Statement from journalist Barrett Brown after being sentenced to 63 months in prison

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via descentintotyranny SAID: Statement from… | A Utopian Encyclopedia.

descentintotyranny SAID:

The Mysterious Life of Bugs and Snails By Vadim Trunov | DeMilked

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via The Mysterious Life of Bugs and Snails By Vadim Trunov | DeMilked.

Jan 23, 2015

Look at all these teeny tiny creepy-crawlies milling around in their magical kingdom! Vadim Trunov, a photographer based in the Russian city of Voronezh, seems to have a fascination with these littlest of creatures. When he takes his camera out for a spin – which, if he’s in his summer home, simply involves walking out the front door – he drops in on the private lives of snails, bugs, lizards and other miniscule critters. His work with a camera eclipses any CGI movie scene!

More info: 500px | 35photo.ru

Snail hunts faster fish by drugging them with insulin | MNN – Mother Nature Network

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via Snail hunts faster fish by drugging them with insulin | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

Certain cone snails add insulin to their venom, a new study finds, letting the sluggish mollusks reduce blood sugar in speedy prey. It’s also one of several ways cone snails might benefit human health care.

Wed, Jan 21, 2015

The geographic cone snail, Conus geographus, is native to tropical coral reefs in the Indian and Pacific oceans. (Image: Cone Snail/YouTube)

Cone snails may be too slow to chase down a school of fish, but they have a secret weapon: some of the deadliest venom on Earth. The most dangerous of all is the geographic cone snail, which can deliver a blend of several hundred toxins with a harpoonlike tooth it fires at up to 400 mph (644 kph).

That’s impressive, but as a new study reveals, this snail has more tricks up its sleeve than we thought. Its venom includes a novel form of insulin, the study’s authors report, the first time that hormone has been found in any venom. The snail releases it into the water, immobilizing nearby fish by making their blood-sugar levels drop. Once they’re in hypoglycemic shock, it can eat at its own pace.

“This is a unique type of insulin,” says study author Baldomero M. Olivera, a biology professor at the University of Utah, in a press release about the research. “It is shorter than any insulin that has been described in any animal. We found it in the venom in large amounts.”

Along with the geographic cone snail, Conus geographus, the researchers also found insulin in the venom of another species, Conus tulipa. Most other known ingredients in cone-snail venom are neurotoxins, the researchers note, but insulin uses a “radically different mechanism” by disrupting energy metabolism. Once a fish slows down, the snail extends a stretchy mouthpart to grab it:

Not only have the snails weaponized insulin, but they’ve also tailored it specifically for fish. It bears a “much greater similarity to fish insulins” than to any mollusk hormone, according to the study, and even a synthetic version made by the researchers wreaked havoc with blood glucose and swimming behavior in lab fish. Although these snails clearly aren’t short on venom varieties, the researchers suggest adding insulin might have helped them trap entire schools of fish, providing an evolutionary perk.

The study also involved other cone snails, including some that use their harpoon tooth for ambush hunting, but insulin venom is apparently unique to species that use the fish-trapping method. The insulin they make consists of just 43 amino-acid building blocks, which is fewer than any known form of the hormone. Along with other chemical quirks, the researchers say this stripped-down size might have evolved as a way to make the insulin more effective at causing hypoglycemia in prey.

All this is interesting, but since cone snails pose a well-known danger to people — especially C. geographus, whose sting has caused at least 30 recorded human deaths — it may seem like further reason to fear them. While it is wise to avoid the snails themselves, however, discoveries like this about their venom have begun to offer surprising benefits for human health care.

The snails’ minimalist insulin, for example, might be useful in testing how the human body controls blood sugar and energy metabolism. Any new insights on the structure or function of insulin could help the fight against diabetes, a disease that kills about 1.5 million people worldwide every year.

Many of the “conotoxins” in cone-snail venom selectively target certain cells in the body, making them potentially valuable in treating an array of human diseases, including cancer. A class of compounds known as alpha-conotoxins seem especially promising, according to another recent study, since they target nicotinic receptors that play a key role in conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia to tobacco addiction and lung cancer. One species, Conus regius, has venom rich in alpha-conotoxins that show potential in detecting and treating certain types of cancer.

When isolated, some cone-snail compounds have even proven useful in developing painkillers such as ziconotide, which is at least 100 times more potent than morphine and lacks the risk of addiction. Conotoxins have also shown promise for treating Parkinson’s disease, strokes and epilepsy, and that’s only the ones scientists have studied so far. About 500 species of cone snails produce as many as 100,000 different conotoxin mixtures around the world, most of which remain a mystery.

Cone snails are relatively common, so those secrets might not face an imminent risk of disappearing. But many marine ecosystems are in rapid upheaval due to ocean warming and acidification, including coral reefs inhabited by cone snails. Humans are now some of the planet’s most dangerous animals, yet research like this can still remind us of tangible reasons why nature is worth preserving. And, thankfully, it can also remind us that even the most dangerous animals have a good side.

Related on MNN:

12 of the most interesting snails in the world

Explore the neon world of nudibranchs [Photos]

How coral reefs can help us endure climate change

Evolution of Basque-speaking areas from AD 1 to year 2000 – Maps on the Web

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via Evolution of Basque-speaking areas from the 1st… – Maps on the Web.metroxed:

For every given time:

Showed in dark green are the regions where Basque is the predominant or one of the predominant languages.

Showed in light green are the regions where Basque is reduced to a language spoken only by a small minority.

Showed in semi-transparent light green are the regions where Basque has become residual and almost extinct.

The borders of the region currently defined as culturally Basque (“Greater Basque Country”, comprised by the Southern Basque Country in Spain and the Northern Basque Country in France) are outlined.

(Source: reddit.com)

Area Comparison of the British Isles and the State of California

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via Area Comparison of the British Isles and the State… – Maps on the Web.

Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it — Fusion

Posted by digger666 on 23 January 2015

via Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it — Fusion.

BY DANIEL RIVERO

Maybe it’s a sign that robots are growing up, and thus hitting the rebellious stage.

The Random Darknet Shopper, an automated online shopping bot with a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin, is programmed to do a very specific task: go to one particular marketplace on the Deep Web and make one random purchase a week with the provided allowance. The purchases have all been compiled for an art show in Zurich, Switzerland titled The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland, which runs through January 11.

The concept would be all gravy if not for one thing: the programmers came home one day to find a shipment of 10 ecstasy pills, followed by an apparently very legit falsified Hungarian passport– developments which have left some observers of the bot’s blog a little uneasy.

If this bot was shipping to the U.S., asks Forbes contributor and University of Washington law professor contributor Ryan Calo, who would be legally responsible for purchasing the goodies? The coders? Or the bot itself?

In the U.S., Calo ponders, criminal law is statutory, meaning that the wording of the law itself would have to be taken into consideration.

“If, for instance, the law says a person may not knowingly purchase pirated merchandise or drugs, there is an argument that the artists did not violate the law,” he said. “Whereas if the law says the person may not engage in this behavior recklessly, then the artists may well be found guilty, since they released the bot into an environment where they could be substantially certain some unlawful outcome would occur.”

But, Calo adds, since the program was being made for an art show, “I presume they even wanted the bot to yield illegal contraband to make the installation more exciting. Wanting a bad outcome doesn’t make it illegal (you cannot wish someone to death), but purposefully leaving the bot in the darknet until it yielded contraband seems hard to distinguish from intent.”

For their part, coders Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo say that they are assuming full responsibility for the bot’s actions and for the illegal contraband, even though the gallery is ironically located next door to a police station.

“We are the legal owner of the drugs – we are responsible for everything the bot does, as we executed the code,” Smoljo told the Guardian. “But our lawyer and the Swiss constitution says art in the public interest is allowed to be free.”

Fine. Yet that still leaves Calo’s worries unaccounted for. As of now, it is still unclear what the implications of cases like this will have for our future interactions with robots and machines.

“What seems more and more clear is that issues like these will go from hypotheticals, to art installations, to everyday facts of life,” he said. “And I have to wonder how ready we are.”

Update on 1/16: The Random Darknet Shopper just got seized by Swiss authorities, who at least waited until the art show was over before moving in. On the bot’s blog, organizersposted the following statement:

On the morning of January 12, the day after the three-month exhibition was closed, the public prosecutor’s office of St. Gallen seized and sealed our work. It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited by destroying them. This is what we know at present. We believe that the confiscation is an unjustified intervention into freedom of art. We’d also like to thank Kunst Halle St. Gallen for their ongoing support and the wonderful collaboration. Furthermore, we are convinced, that it is an objective of art to shed light on the fringes of society and to pose fundamental contemporary questions.