'I could've died soon,' Weezy tells L.A. radio station, clearing up rumors about his health and weighing in on 2013 'Hottest MCs.'
By Rob Markman
Lil Wayne
Photo: Christopher Polk/ Getty Images
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1704571/lil-wayne-epileptic.jhtml
gsa scandal kelis dick clark dies ibogaine jamie moyer bone cancer hossa
Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/at_Pv4PrqZI/
college board nyc.gov SAT Notre Dame Football Schedule detroit tigers Tsunami Lil Reese
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/IkmfkRMfInA/whats-your-least-favorite-emoji
groundhog phil pee wee herman ketamine ground hogs day 2012 goundhog day punxsutawney egypt soccer riot
Shaoni Bhattacharya, consultant
(Image: Ray Tang/Rex)
?My parents took me to a butterfly house when I was 6. That Christmas, I asked for a greenhouse.? By the age of 8, Luke Brown had bred his first butterfly, the zebra longwing, Heliconius charithonia. Now as manager of the Sensational Butterflies exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, it is that child?s delight he hopes to inspire.
And he succeeds. Against the backdrop of the museum?s towers, a heated marquee attracts visitors to walk around an evocation of a butterfly?s life cycle, with up to 1500 tropical and semi-tropical butterflies and moths dancing around them. Especially exciting is a glass-fronted warm room, where nascent butterflies emerge from chrysalises and gingerly unfurl their wings.
The romance of butterflies is also captured in William Leach?s book Butterfly People: An American encounter with the beauty of the world. He reminds us of the duality of these ?flying jewels?, initially desired as objects of beauty, and later representing the spirituality of nature versus emergent capitalism.
Leach voyages from 18th to the early 20th century, telling the strange stories of America?s obsessive ?butterfly people?. We meet, for example, the owner of a coal mine turned eminent lepidopterist, and a Shakespearean actor who entertained gold miners panning the Wild West, while also netting his own lepidopteral gold.
Through these characters Leach captures a passion bordering on fanaticism. But their obsessional pursuit of butterflies resonates outside their field, their stories criss-crossing that of the early US scientific establishment, the journals Science and The American Naturalist, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fascinating, too, is the background against which these early naturalists and their butterfly stories unfold, with the frontier spirit permeating their explorations. Butterfly hunting went hand in hand with the gold rush, and the steady advance of the railroads into uncharted wilds opened up new frontiers into nature.
That was not without a big price tag, however: in just 20 years the US achieved a level of environmental exploitation that had taken centuries in Europe.
Meanwhile in Europe the influence of the Romantic poets, with their appreciation of the natural world, and the spread of empires opened up new windows on nature.
In many ways, Butterfly People is a boys? adventure story in which gun-toting naturalists imperil their lives just to touch the wing of a rare species. Today?s butterfly people will be enthralled, though outsiders perhaps less so. But the wonder Leach evokes will captivate all who appreciate the natural world.
Sensational Butterflies is at London?s Natural History Museum until 15?September
Book information
Butterfly People: An American encounter with the beauty of the world by William R. Leach
Random House
$32.50
louis oosthuizen phil mickelson 10 year old gives birth c. difficile carmelo anthony nurse jackie nurse jackie
3366.Com
There could be a situation where you are can not pay back the complete level of the amount of money improve to the payday cash advances firm. In such a predicament, the actual pay day loans organization generally charges the payday advances finance payment as well as defers the primary transaction more than a extended period of time, typically yet another 14 days.
northern mariana islands summer time coolio ricky rubio day light savings time peter paul and mary edgar rice burroughs
Mar. 27, 2013 ? An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and from the University of Cologne, successfully identified two titanium oxides in the extended atmosphere around a giant star. The object VY Canis Major is one of the largest stars in the known universe and close to the end of its life. The detection was made using telescope arrays in the USA and in France.
The discovery was made in the course of a study of a spectacular star, VY Canis Majoris or VY CMa for short, which is a variable star located in the constellation Canis Major (Greater Dog). "VY CMa is not an ordinary star, it is one of the largest stars known, and it is close the end of its life," says Tomasz Kami?ski from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR). In fact, with a size of about one to two thousand times that of the Sun, it could extend out to the orbit of Saturn if it were placed in the centre of our Solar System.
The star ejects large quantities of material which forms a dusty nebula. It becomes visible because of the small dust particles that form around it which reflect light from the central star. The complexity of this nebula has been puzzling astronomers for decades. It has been formed as a result of stellar wind, but it is not understood well why it is so far from having a spherical shape.
Neither is known what physical process blows the wind, i.e. what lifts the material up from the stellar surface and makes it expand. "The fate of VY CMa is to explode as a supernova, but it is not known exactly when it will happen," adds Karl Menten, head of the "Millimetre and Submillimetre Astronomy" Department at MPIfR.
Observations at different wavelengths provide different pieces of information which is characteristic for atomic and molecular gas and from which physical properties of an astronomical object can be derived. Each molecule has a characteristic set of lines, something like a 'bar code', that allows to identify what molecules exist in the nebula.
"Emission at short radio wavelengths, in so-called submillimetre waves, is particularly useful for such studies of molecules," says Sandra Br?nken from the University of Cologne. "The identification of molecules is easier and usually a larger abundance of molecules can be observed than at other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum."
The research team observed TiO and TiO2 for the first time at radio wavelengths. In fact, titanium dioxide has been seen in space unambiguously for the first time. It is known from every-day life as the main component of the commercially most important white pigment (known by painters as "titanium white") or as an ingredient in sunscreens. It is also quite possible that the reader consumed some amounts of it as it is used to colour food (coded as E171 in the labels).
However, stars, especially the coolest of them, are expected to eject large quantities of titanium oxides, which, according to theory, form at relatively high temperatures close to the star. "They tend to cluster together to form dust particles visible in the optical or in the infrared," says Nimesh Patel from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "And the catalytic properties of TiO2 may influence the chemical processes taking place on these dust particles, which are very important for forming larger molecules in space," adds Holger M?ller from the University of Cologne.
Absorption features of TiO have been known from spectra in the visible region for more than a hundred years. In fact, these features are used in part to classify some types of stars with low surface temperatures (M- and S-type stars). The pulsation of Mira stars, one specific class of variable stars, is thought to be caused by titanium oxide. Mira stars, supergiant variable stars in a late stage of their evolution, are named after their prototype star "Mira" (the wonderful) in the constellation of Cetus (the 'sea monster' or the 'whale').
The observations of TiO and TiO2 show that the two molecules are easily formed around VY CMa at a location that is more or less as predicted by theory. It seems, however, that some portion of those molecules avoid forming dust and are observable as gas phase species. Another possibility is that the dust is destroyed in the nebula and releases fresh TiO molecules back to the gas. The latter scenario is quite likely as parts of the wind in VY CMa seem to collide with each other.
The new detections at submillimetre wavelengths are particularly important because they allow studying the process of dust formation. Also, at optical wavelengths, the radiation emitted by the molecules is scattered by dust present in the extended nebula which blurs the picture, while this effect is negligible at radio wavelengths allowing for more precise measurements.
The discoveries of TiO and TiO2 in the spectrum of VY CMa have been made with the Submillimetre Array (SMA), a radio interferometer located at Hawaii, USA. Because the instrument combines eight antennas which worked together as one big telescope 226-meters in size, astronomers were able to make observations at unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. A confirmation of the new detections was successively made later with the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer (PdBI) located in the French Alps.
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
the borgias the masters warren sapp i robot the big c the visitor king of kings
Mar. 28, 2013 ? When Charles Babbage prototyped the first computing machine in the 19th century, he imagined using mechanical gears and latches to control information. ENIAC, the first modern computer developed in the 1940s, used vacuum tubes and electricity. Today, computers use transistors made from highly engineered semiconducting materials to carry out their logical operations.
And now a team of Stanford University bioengineers has taken computing beyond mechanics and electronics into the living realm of biology. In a paper to be published March 28 in Science, the team details a biological transistor made from genetic material -- DNA and RNA -- in place of gears or electrons. The team calls its biological transistor the "transcriptor."
"Transcriptors are the key component behind amplifying genetic logic -- akin to the transistor and electronics," said Jerome Bonnet, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in bioengineering and the paper's lead author.
The creation of the transcriptor allows engineers to compute inside living cells to record, for instance, when cells have been exposed to certain external stimuli or environmental factors, or even to turn on and off cell reproduction as needed.
"Biological computers can be used to study and reprogram living systems, monitor environments and improve cellular therapeutics," said Drew Endy, PhD, assistant professor of bioengineering and the paper's senior author.
The biological computer
In electronics, a transistor controls the flow of electrons along a circuit. Similarly, in biologics, a transcriptor controls the flow of a specific protein, RNA polymerase, as it travels along a strand of DNA.
"We have repurposed a group of natural proteins, called integrases, to realize digital control over the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA, which in turn allowed us to engineer amplifying genetic logic," said Endy.
Using transcriptors, the team has created what are known in electrical engineering as logic gates that can derive true-false answers to virtually any biochemical question that might be posed within a cell.
They refer to their transcriptor-based logic gates as "Boolean Integrase Logic," or "BIL gates" for short.
Transcriptor-based gates alone do not constitute a computer, but they are the third and final component of a biological computer that could operate within individual living cells.
Despite their outward differences, all modern computers, from ENIAC to Apple, share three basic functions: storing, transmitting and performing logical operations on information.
Last year, Endy and his team made news in delivering the other two core components of a fully functional genetic computer. The first was a type of rewritable digital data storage within DNA. They also developed a mechanism for transmitting genetic information from cell to cell, a sort of biological Internet.
It all adds up to creating a computer inside a living cell.
Boole's gold
Digital logic is often referred to as "Boolean logic," after George Boole, the mathematician who proposed the system in 1854. Today, Boolean logic typically takes the form of 1s and 0s within a computer. Answer true, gate open; answer false, gate closed. Open. Closed. On. Off. 1. 0. It's that basic. But it turns out that with just these simple tools and ways of thinking you can accomplish quite a lot.
"AND" and "OR" are just two of the most basic Boolean logic gates. An "AND" gate, for instance, is "true" when both of its inputs are true -- when "a" and "b" are true. An "OR" gate, on the other hand, is true when either or both of its inputs are true.
In a biological setting, the possibilities for logic are as limitless as in electronics, Bonnet explained. "You could test whether a given cell had been exposed to any number of external stimuli -- the presence of glucose and caffeine, for instance. BIL gates would allow you to make that determination and to store that information so you could easily identify those which had been exposed and which had not," he said.
By the same token, you could tell the cell to start or stop reproducing if certain factors were present. And, by coupling BIL gates with the team's biological Internet, it is possible to communicate genetic information from cell to cell to orchestrate the behavior of a group of cells.
"The potential applications are limited only by the imagination of the researcher," said co-author Monica Ortiz, a PhD candidate in bioengineering who demonstrated autonomous cell-to-cell communication of DNA encoding various BIL gates.
Building a transcriptor
To create transcriptors and logic gates, the team used carefully calibrated combinations of enzymes -- the integrases mentioned earlier -- that control the flow of RNA polymerase along strands of DNA. If this were electronics, DNA is the wire and RNA polymerase is the electron.
"The choice of enzymes is important," Bonnet said. "We have been careful to select enzymes that function in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, so that bio-computers can be engineered within a variety of organisms."
On the technical side, the transcriptor achieves a key similarity between the biological transistor and its semiconducting cousin: signal amplification.
With transcriptors, a very small change in the expression of an integrase can create a very large change in the expression of any two other genes.
To understand the importance of amplification, consider that the transistor was first conceived as a way to replace expensive, inefficient and unreliable vacuum tubes in the amplification of telephone signals for transcontinental phone calls. Electrical signals traveling along wires get weaker the farther they travel, but if you put an amplifier every so often along the way, you can relay the signal across a great distance. The same would hold in biological systems as signals get transmitted among a group of cells.
"It is a concept similar to transistor radios," said Pakpoom Subsoontorn, a PhD candidate in bioengineering and co-author of the study who developed theoretical models to predict the behavior of BIL gates. "Relatively weak radio waves traveling through the air can get amplified into sound."
Public-domain biotechnology
To bring the age of the biological computer to a much speedier reality, Endy and his team have contributed all of BIL gates to the public domain so that others can immediately harness and improve upon the tools.
"Most of biotechnology has not yet been imagined, let alone made true. By freely sharing important basic tools everyone can work better together," Bonnet said.
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford University Medical Center.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/ED1fLVQ-WsM/130328142400.htm
sheriff joe arpaio limbaugh aaron smith wilt chamberlain joe arpaio cat in the hat green eggs and ham
