Wildclickers moms and dads, or grandparents...
probably one of the best childrens movies, imo
Check out the site at: (the website could win an award for content w/ beautiful graphics and color)
http://wherethewildthingsare.warnerbros.com/
@Stradee,
G'Day to ya, too - Mate.
Hope all have a good week ahead - and, that ehBeth isn't frozen in.
@danon5,
we're back! not frozen
a wonderful wonderful weekend with A2k friends up on Pigeon Lake (my photos are still in the camera - but I found some nice pix online)
@ehBeth,
georgous scenery, Beth....a gathering to remember
a road trip to daughters for monday night football, mexican food, and beer
(bribing mom to leave the mountain - daughter knows me so well - luv her)
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
@Stradee,
Great fun, ehBeth.....
Stradee, you reminded me of why I married my Patti - she loved those little 25 cent burgers at the AM/PM stations in and around Seattle, and, her favorite hobby was collecting rocks from where ever we went. She was a cheap date. Not much has changed except I still love her. Oh, last visit to Europe she started collecting leaves and other items of vegetation at the different sites we visited. That was a good thing. The visit prior to that, we met in Italy with her brother from Seattle and once he offered to load her luggage. When he picked up a suitcase he said, "My God, what do you have in here, ROCKS!!" My Patti said back, "As a matter of fact, I do!!"
Ah, the good old days.
@danon5,
Rocks! doesn't everyone collect rocks? I'm certainly a lot more discriminating about what I bring home but ... when I traded in the old Civic this summer ... mmm ... there were more than a few stones and rocks in there ... remember when we picked that one up? how about that one? hunh?
clicked!
@danon5,
My Donna & Marvin are such good people, and my Sami (granddaughter golden lab) is such a joy too. A lovely visit.
Patti sounds like my kind of person. I've collected rocks from most of the states, plus have a driftwood planter from the coast - decorating the gardens and walkways. Hamburgers i can do without - but there's a bakery from the old neighborhood that i can't walk past without buying a boston cream pie. My weakness - and thankfully the bakery lives about 5 hours from here. However, my Donna remembers her moms sweet tooth, and after munching dinner, my face lit up when she presented me with a nuked butter smothered apple filled pastery to die for.
My Sami did not want me to leave, so i almost brought her home cept she'd eat the cats. We chat her and I ~ a very intelligent granddog if i say so myself - she's about as close to human as a dog can be, imo, and such a dolly!
Family night was fun
Beth, finding rock treasures is way cool.
@ehBeth,
good earthturn all ~
enjoying milder weather n'
all clicked
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
@Stradee,
Most times the simplest things in life are the best.
Like this, CLICKED!
Clicked, and a couple of brain stimulators for the wildclicking crew.
October 20, 2009
Researchers Create Artificial Memories in the Brain of a Fruitfly
By NICHOLAS WADE
As part of a project to understand how the brain learns, biologists have written memories into the cells of a fruitfly’s brain, making it think it had a terrible experience.
The memory trace was written by shining light into the fly’s brain and activating a special class of cells involved in learning how to avoid an electric shock.
The goal of the research is not to give flies nightmares but rather to understand how learning in general works, from flies to people. “In the case of the fly, where we have a numerically rather simple nervous system that does something rather complex, I think we have a chance to break open the black box and understand it,” said Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford, leader of the team that has developed the new technique.
Psychologists study learning by running rats through mazes, but biologists want to learn the actual mechanics of how a memory trace is laid down in a nerve cell or neuron. So they need an organism whose genes can be easily manipulated.
In the early days of molecular biology, when others were working on DNA, the biologist Seymour Benzer decided to dissect behavior by studying the fruitfly. His student Chip Quinn discovered in the early 1970s that fruitflies, surprisingly, could learn. If exposed to a chemical odor and at the same time given an electric jolt big enough to kill a person, the fruitflies associated the two and would in the future avoid the odor.
Of the two chemicals that Mr. Quinn picked, one smelled like licorice and the other “a lot like tennis shoes in July,” according to Jonathan Weiner, author of “Time, Love, Memory,” an entrancing history of Benzer’s work. Biologists ever since have used the same system to train fruitflies. With the aid of the licorice and tennis shoe odors, Dr. Miesenböck’s team has now managed to peer deep inside the black box of the fly’s learning system.
His goal is to dissect the neural circuitry through which the fly associates a particular odor with electric shocks, so he began by looking at a class of neurons that generate the chemical messenger known as dopamine.
In the human brain, dopamine signals pleasure and reward but in flies it does the exact opposite: it is the messenger of fear and aversion. The fly has some 200 dopamine-producing neurons, and these must be involved to help the fly associate fragrance of tennis shoe with a really bad scene.
Dr. Miesenböck’s team was able to distinguish, by their genetics, different classes of the dopamine-making neurons. By tagging each class of neurons with a gene that makes a fluorescent protein, they could make the dopamine neurons light up and they could trace their circuitry. Only one class, consisting of just 12 neurons, made the right connections in the fly’s brain to function in learning shock avoidance, they report in the current issue of Cell.
These 12 neurons, which were receiving news of electric shocks and generating dopamine, converge on another group of neurons called Kenyon cells to which they seem to be passing on news of the shock, via dopamine. Since the Kenyon cells also receive messages about odors from receptors on the fly’s antennae, they seemed to be the place where the memory of the experience was laid down.
To test their understanding of the system, Dr. Miesenböck and his colleagues activated the Kenyon cells themselves instead of having the fly experience an electric shock. They genetically engineered a strain of flies whose Kenyon cells would respond to flashes of light. The light releases an injected chemical to which the cells have been made sensitive.
Instead of exposing the flies to an odor and an electric shock, the researchers applied the odor and a flash of light to activate the Kenyon cells. The light was just as good as the shock: by activating the Kenyon cells at the same time as the aroma was sensed, it wrote a message in the fly’s brain that eau de tennis shoe was something to eschew.
With this handle on the learning mechanism, Dr. Miesenböck hopes to trace the rest of the circuitry. He thinks the Kenyon cells may project onto others that control the fly’s movement. So when the fly senses the tennis shoe odor, the Kenyon cells will all send their messages to the motion cells, acting like voters in a ballot to influence the fly’s movement. The stronger the aversive connotation of the odor, the greater the number of Kenyon cells voting to leave in a hurry.
The learning system must also have some method for estimating how well the lesson has been learned, Dr. Miesenböck said in an interview. Once the association between odor and shock has been established, the fly’s model of the world is 100 percent correct and there is no need for further changes to the memory trace; it is not clear, however, how this is accomplished.
When the entire learning circuitry is mapped, will the fly, and other creatures with learning neurons, seem just like biological machines? “If one really sees what interacts with the gears and how the neural clockwork runs, that would be the level of explanation that satisfies me,” Dr. Miesenböck said.
Ralph Greenspan, an expert on fruitfly behavior at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said, “This paper begins to pin down the detailed circuitry that underlies this associative condition pathway in the fruitfly.”
Asked if the technique might help to trace the whole nervous pathway from sensing the odor to flying away, Dr. Greenspan replied, “It would be a miracle at this point because the notion of where this process produces a motor output is as undefined as it could be,” meaning that the neural circuits that drive the fly’s motion are still unknown. The black box of the fruitfly’s brain still holds many dark corners.
October 19, 2009
Many More Planets Found Outside Solar System
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:47 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON(AP) -- European astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop. Scientists using the European Southern Observatory telescope didn't find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.
Six of the newly found planets are several times bigger than Earth, increasing the population of so-called super-Earths by more than 30 percent. Most planets discovered so far are far bigger, Jupiter-sized or even larger.
Two of the newly discovered planets were as small as five times the size of Earth and one was up to five times larger than Jupiter.
Astronomer Stephane Udry of the University of Geneva said the results support the theory that planet formation is common, especially around the most common types of stars.
''I'm pretty confident that there are Earth-like planets everywhere,'' Udry said in a Web-based news briefing from a conference in Portugal. ''Nature doesn't like a vacuum. If there is space to put a planet there, there will be a planet there.''
What astronomers said is especially exciting is that about 40 percent of sun-like stars have planets that are closer to being Earth-sized than the size of Jupiter. Jupiter's mass is more than 300 times that of Earth's.
Depending on definitions of the size of super-Earths, the discovery suggests that planets that have a mass similar to Earth's are ''extraordinarily commonplace,'' said Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. He was not part of the European team. ''The universe must indeed be crowded with habitable worlds.''
Boss said finding 32 planets at once is a record ''and it really shows that the Europeans have taken the lead'' in finding planets outside the solar system.
The discoveries were made by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, which is an attachment to the European observatory telescope in Chile that looks for slight wobbles in a star's movements. Those changes would be made by the tug of a planet's gravity on the star. There are no photos of these planets.
@sumac,
Hi, all clicked earlier but couldn't connect here.
Interesting stuff sumac - that fruitfly experiment must have been a fast one. Aren't they the ones that only live a few days? Or, is that the May fly??
I'm glad we are finding new places to live in the universe. We may need it some day.
I clicked,....and then, I clicked.
Good reading. Thank you all
Clicked, and some good reading. As always, NYT's editorials are timely and on target.
October 22, 2009
Editorial
Clean Water: Still Elusive
Rightly celebrated as one of this country’s most important environmental statutes, the 1972 Clean Water Act has greatly improved the quality of America’s waters, turning contaminated rivers and lakes into swimmable, fishable and even drinkable waters.
But even its staunchest allies agree that the act has grown old and fallen well short of its goals, crippled by uneven and sometimes nonexistent enforcement by state and federal agencies " particularly during the Bush years, but even before " and by shortcomings in the law itself.
A comprehensive series of investigative articles in The Times by Charles Duhigg makes it clear that the time has come to strengthen enforcement and the law. More than 40 percent of the country’s waters, he found, remain dangerously polluted. Nearly 20 million Americans fall ill every year from drinking water contaminated with parasites, bacteria or viruses. Polluters " public and private, large and small " treat the law with contempt. Violations have jumped significantly. Penalties for noncompliance are small and rarely assessed.
President Obama’s new team seems to be paying attention " chiefly Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the act as well as a related measure, the Safe Drinking Water Act. Ms. Jackson has ordered an assessment of the agency’s shortcomings, promised stronger enforcement, added new chemicals to the long list of contaminants and promised to investigate others. But she agrees that more must be done, by her and by others.
POLICE THE STATES As with most environmental laws, responsibility is shared. Washington sets the health standards; the states write and enforce the permits, which tell polluters what can and cannot be discharged into the water. Some states are tough, others weak, but in all cases the E.P.A. has the authority to intervene and enforce the laws when states fail. Worried about disturbing the federal-state balance, intimidated by industry, the E.P.A. has never used this power the way it should.
CLOSE OBVIOUS LOOPHOLES There are two big gaps in enforcement. Large animal-feeding operations " the huge sheds containing hogs and chickens " are supposed to be regulated as “point sources” just like factories. They are not. In Iowa, not a single confined animal-feeding operation has a clean water act permit telling it what to do.
Power plants are another big loophole. What utilities put into the air is regulated. Not so the toxics " arsenic, lead, cadmium " they discharge into the water. The agency was supposed to have set limits on these pollutants in the 1980s, and never has. That’s disgraceful.
FIX THE LAW The 1972 act focused largely on what was then seen as the most obvious threat: direct discharges from large “point sources” like factories and municipalities. The bigger danger today comes from unregulated sources like runoff from farms, suburban lawns and city streets. The act should be rewritten to give these nonpoint sources higher priority.
FIX THE FINANCING The number of regulated sources has grown enormously, from 100,000 in 1972 to an estimated one million. Adding nonpoint sources would increase the burden on underfinanced and understaffed state agencies, not to mention the E.P.A. itself. The Clean Air Act requires states to collect fees from the largest air polluters. A similar, federally mandated fee system might be considered for water polluters.
There are other problems. Data collection from industry and local authorities is hopelessly outdated. Two misguided Supreme Court decisions have forced the E.P.A. to use precious resources to resolve jurisdictional disputes over its authority to protect wetlands and small streams. But beefing up enforcement, repairing regulatory and legal flaws and putting the entire effort on a firm financial footing are the big ones. Ms. Jackson deserves all the help she can get from the White House and Congress in tackling them.
@danon5,
computer's been a bit urpy lately, but the clicks are getting done - bit by bit
<smooches to the wildclickers>
