Dispatches From the Republican National Convention

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

I've just taken my seat inside the convention hall for the first time. For your navigational needs, the Slate seat on the writing platform is in Section 106, located between Salon and Yahoo Espa?ol. For home viewers, we're off in the third section of laptop jockeys off to stage-left, up behind the Kansas delegation. We'll do our best to respectably represent Slate in panoramic tracking shots.

For all the press will obsess over staging in the next three days, the vagaries of our seating arrangements mean that none of the journalists in the hall can actually see the stage in its entirety from our seats. We're looking at speakers in profile from over their left shoulder. We can't see the backdrop of screens behind them, and only a tranche of the apr?s-ski furnishings that John found so fetching.

While we're dwelling on aesthetics, I was wondering if you guys had ideas about how to most artfully pull off the role of convention-week apostate. I got to wondering about this because the daily joint magazine of the Weekly Standard and Washington Examiner (a publishing model apparently sustained by ads for Liberty University, Weekly Standard cruises, and the new Dinesh D'Souza theatrical) ran back-to-back pieces today on former Democrat Artur Davis and former Republican Charlie Crist. ?

Naturally, the Standard interprets Davis' role at the convention as affirmation of the notion that "it's OK to have changed your mind about Obama." Crist's recent endorsement of Obama, however, is interpreted with no such benefit of the doubt: The piece about him is headlined "The Turncoat. "As hard as it is to stand on principle," David Freddoso writes, "It's a much harder political world for someone who doesn't believe in anything."

Neither Davis nor Crist has sold me on any kind of convincing conversion narrative, which makes situational opportunism the most plausible explanation for how and why they switched sides when they did. But it's gotten me wondering: Could either of these guys say anything now that made their conversion seem less than craven? What's the right way to pull off election-season apostasy??

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=4de6be1faf859f5de81ac4751f242217

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Selective imprinting: How the wallaby controls growth of its young

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Marsupial mothers regulate the composition of their milk so that it is optimal for the development stage of their young. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Epigenetics & Chromatin shows that, similar to the human placenta, which regulates embryonic growth and development, insulin appears to be imprinted in the marsupial mammary gland.

Insulin is well known as the hormone which regulates blood sugar levels but it also essential for proper functioning of the nervous system, protein synthesis, and for cell growth and survival. It is also required for lactation in mammals and, along with insulin growth factor 2 (IGF2), is present in milk.

Imprinting is a way of controlling gene expression. To ensure only one copy of a certain gene is active (monoallelic), the other copy is silenced, usually by methylation. Imprinting is established during sperm or egg production so that the developing embryo inherits paternally imprinted genes from its father, and maternally imprinted from its mother. Consequently the active copy is inherited only from either the mother or father. However this is complicated by imprinting being both tissue specific and dependent on the stage of development.

Insulin was thought to be only imprinted in the yolk sac of mice, and only in the wallaby yolk sac placenta, however, in marsupials much of this growth and development occurs after birth and is controlled instead by milk that changes composition throughout lactation. The University of Melbourne looked at whether the gene wallaby mammary gland is similarly imprinted, if it was also imprinted in the pouch young (joey), and whether this imprinting was maternally or paternally inherited.

The team found that insulin gene (INS) expression in the adult tammar wallaby mammary gland was monoallelic (one active copy), indicating imprinting and that this active copy came from the father. Paternally inherited monoallelic INS expression was also discovered in both the adult and the young tammar liver, but not in other tissues tested. IGF2 was also monoallelic in the mammary gland but the relative expression of INS and IGF2 differed during lactation. IGF2 expression in the mammary gland decreased after the first few days but INS expression increased as the babies became more mature especially between 5 and 14 weeks of age.

Prof Marilyn Renfree, who led this project commented, "This is the first indication that genomic imprinting occurs in the marsupial mammary gland and suggests that genomic imprinting in the mammary gland may be as critical for regulating post-natal growth as it is for regulating pre-natal growth in the placenta in all mammals."

###

Selected imprinting of INS in the marsupial Jessica M Stringer, Shunsuke Suzuki, Andrew J Pask, Geoff Shaw and Marilyn B Renfree Epigenetics & Chromatin (in press)

BioMed Central: http://www.biomedcentral.com

Thanks to BioMed Central for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/123000/Selective_imprinting__How_the_wallaby_controls_growth_of_its_young

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Romney arrives in Tampa (CNN)

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Climate landmark as Arctic ice melts to record low

The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its smallest point ever in a milestone that may show that worst-case forecasts on climate change are coming true, US scientists said.

The extent of ice observed on Sunday broke a record set in 2007 and will likely melt further with several weeks of summer still to come, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the NASA space agency.

The government-backed ice center, based at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said in a statement that the decline in summer Arctic sea ice "is considered a strong signal of long-term climate warming."

The sea ice fell to 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles), some 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) less than the earlier record charted on September 18, 2007, the center said.

Scientists said the record was all the more striking as 2007 had near perfect climate patterns for melting ice, but that the weather this year was unremarkable other than a storm in early August.

Michael E. Mann, a lead author of a major UN report in 2001 on climate change, said the latest data reflected that scientists who were criticized as alarmists may have shown "perhaps too great a degree of reticence."

"I think, unfortunately, this is an example that points more to the worst-case scenario side of things," said Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.

"There are a number of areas where in fact climate change seems to be proceeding faster and with a greater magnitude than what the models predicted," Mann told AFP.

"The sea ice decline is perhaps the most profound of those cautionary tales because the models have basically predicted that we shouldn't see what we're seeing now for several decades," he added.

Arctic ice is considered vital for the planet as it reflects heat from the sun back into space, helping keep down the planet's temperatures.

The Arctic region is now losing about 155,000 square kilometers (60,000 square miles) of ice annually, the equivalent of a US state every two years, said Walt Meier, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"It used to be the Arctic ice cover was a kind of big block of ice. It would melt a little bit from the edges but it was pretty solid," Meier told reporters on a conference call.

"Now it's like crushed ice," he said. "At least parts of the Arctic have become like a giant slushie, and that's a lot easier to melt and melt more quickly."

The planet has charted a slew of record temperatures in recent years, with 13 of the warmest years ever taking place in the past decade and a half, along with extreme weather ranging from severe wildfires in North America to major flooding in Asia.

Researchers have also reported a dramatic melt this summer on the ice sheet in Greenland, which could have major consequences for the planet by raising sea levels.

Scientists believe that climate change is caused by human emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

But efforts to regulate emissions have faced strong political resistance in several nations including the United States, where industry groups have said that regulations would be too costly for the economy.

Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace who on Monday intercepted a Russian ship in the Arctic, said the ice melt showed that the planet was "warming up at a rate that puts billions of people's future in jeopardy."

"These figures are not the result of some freak of nature but the effects of man-made global warming caused by our reliance on dirty fossil fuels," he said in a statement.

Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity pressure group called the record ice melt "a profound -- and profoundly depressing -- moment in the history of our planet."

The melt has rapidly changed the politics and economics of the Arctic region, with shipping companies increasingly eager to save time by sailing through the once-forbidding waters.

Data released Monday by the Washington-based Center for Global Development found that nations including China, India and the United States were reducing the intensity of their carbon emissions but that the effort was overwhelmed by the surge in power consumption in developing nations.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/arctic-ice-melts-record-low-us-researchers-171243395.html

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Survey: 51 percent think 'stormy weather' interferes with online cloud

23 hrs.

Devin Coldewey

Consumers are still a bit hazy on what exactly "the cloud" constitutes when it comes to computers;?51 percent thought inclement weather would interfere with cloud computing, and around the same number claimed never to use it ? and nearly?all of them were wrong.

The survey (PDF), conducted by Wakefield Research for Citrix, suggests that cloud services aren't exactly very well-defined in consumers' minds, even if they use them every day. Of the 54 percent of 1,004 people surveyed who thought they never used the cloud, 95 percent reported doing things like banking online, storing photos on Web services, and using online file-sharing sites.

One in five said they've faked knowing what the cloud is or how it works when they talked about it?during a date or interview, and half said they suspect others are doing the same thing. And that 51 percent who thought storms might mess with the cloud indicates that plenty of people genuinely don't understand it ? unless they were talking about Internet?outages resulting from high winds.

Practically everyone who uses the internet uses cloud-based services in some way or another, whether it's uploading photos to Facebook or searching through old messages in Gmail. So the cloud isn't in danger of losing customers, but those customers just might not know they're using it or even what it is.

Perhaps providers of popular cloud services, like Dropbox and Google, need to make it a little more clear how cloud-oriented they are, both to inform and reassure users who don't understand (and perhaps don't like) the idea.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/survey-51-percent-think-stormy-weather-interferes-online-cloud-968907

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Source: http://informallearning.org/Blog/2012/08/29/air-and-heat-installation-90740-2/

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Solar powered robotic sunfish grooves to the Grateful Dead

1 hr.

John Roach

A proof-of-concept solar-powered robot modeled after the giant ocean sunfish could one day serve as biological sensor capable of keeping tabs on the environment.

A video released this week by the robot?s maker, senior scientist Tom Zambrano at AeroVironment, shows it swimming in Pacific Ocean as it grooves to the Grateful Dead?s Bird Song.

The delightfully chill viewing experience provides a few details about the robot, called Mola, which is derived from the scientific name of the giant ocean sunfish, Mola mola.

The fish are the largest known bony fish. They will sometimes float to the ocean surface and bask on their long, flat sides. That behavior appears to be the inspiration for the robot.

Mola looks as if its little more than flat solar panel with fins. As shown in the video, solar panels can be attached to rear to make a flexible tail that supplies additional power.

The panels collect enough power from the sun to cruise through the water at 2 knots as a data logger records physical, chemical, and biological information.

We?ve reached out to Zambrano for additional information on the robot and will update if we learn more.?

For now, watch the video and enjoy the high notes from the Grateful Dead. Given Jerry Garcia?s fondness for scuba in his later years, the song selection for the video clip feels alright.

?? via IEEE?

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/solar-powered-robotic-sunfish-grooves-grateful-dead-970278

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