Cop Car's Beat

More from Slashdot.org - another tool for criminal defense?

Chimeric Mouse with Pups by Staff at NIMH's Transgenic Core Facility - http://intramural.nimh.nih.gov/tgc/photogallery.html, Public Domain, Link

 

When a DNA Test Says You're a Younger Man, Who Lives 5,000 Miles Away (nytimes.com) 56

Posted by msmash on Monday December 09, 2019 @02:30PM from the how-about-that dept.

After a bone marrow transplant, a man with leukemia found that his donor's DNA traveled to unexpected parts of his body. A crime lab is now studying the case. From a report: Three months after his bone marrow transplant, Chris Long of Reno, Nev., learned that the DNA in his blood had changed. It had all been replaced by the DNA of his donor, a German man he had exchanged just a handful of messages with. He'd been encouraged to test his blood by a colleague at the Sheriff's Office, where he worked. She had an inkling this might happen. It's the goal of the procedure, after all: Weak blood is replaced by healthy blood, and with it, the DNA it contains. But four years after his lifesaving procedure, it was not only Mr. Long's blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained his DNA -- but also that of his donor.

Even more surprising to Mr. Long and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor. "I thought that it was pretty incredible that I can disappear and someone else can appear," he said. Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts. Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donor's DNA shows up -- beyond blood -- has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.

 

The Dzhanibekov Effect

Please credit Chuck Pergiel for having posted the following video on Pergelator. Be forewarned that the video includes a reasonable amount of advertising (for its sponsor) at the beginning and at the end. (The video is 14:48 minutes long.)

The YouTube posting of the video includes a comment from which the following is exerpted.

 

Published on Sep 19, 2019

Spinning objects have strange instabilities known as The Dzhanibekov Effect or Tennis Racket Theorem - this video offers an intuitive explanation."

 

Sounds bad, does good

When first I saw this embedded video from YouTube at Ronni's Time Goes By, I could think of several reasons why the system would be a bad idea. The people in the video answered each of my concerns. Enjoy! Note the spontaneous formation of hexagonal close-pack by the balls.

 

More from Slashdot.org - Do Sonic Waves Carry Mass?

I don't know about you, but this puts me into "mull mode". The following item is from Slashdot.org.

Surprising Discovery Hints Sonic Waves Carry Mass (scientificamerican.com) 188

Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:00AM from the say-it-ain't-so dept.

 

jbmartin6 shares a report from Scientific American: In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a group of scientists has theorized that sound waves possess mass, meaning sounds would be directly affected by gravity. They suggest phonons, particle-like collective excitations responsible for transporting sound waves across a medium, might exhibit a tiny amount of mass in a gravitational field. "You would expect classical physics results like this one to have been known for a long time by now," says Angelo Esposito from Columbia University, the lead author on the paper. "It's something we stumbled upon almost by chance."

Esposito and his colleagues built on a previous paper published last year, in which Alberto Nicolis of Columbia and Riccardo Penco from Carnegie Mellon University first suggested phonons could have mass in a superfluid. The latest study, however, shows this effect should hold true for other materials, too, including regular liquids and solids, and even air itself. And although the amount of mass carried by the phonons is expected to be tiny -- comparable with a hydrogen atom, about 10^-24 grams -- it may actually be measurable. Except, if you were to measure it, you would find something deeply counterintuitive: The mass of the phonons would be negative, meaning they would fall "up." Over time their trajectory would gradually move away from a gravitational source such as Earth. "If their gravitational mass was positive, they would fall downward," Penco says. "Because their gravitational mass is negative, phonons fall upwards." And the amount they would "fall" is equally small, varying depending on the medium the phonon is traveling through. In water, where sound moves at 1.5 kilometers per second, the negative mass of the phonon would cause it to drift at about 1 degree per second. But this corresponds to a change of 1 degree over 15 kilometers, which would be exceedingly difficult to measure.

I sorta liked this posting

Ignoble Research posted the following piece concerning speech patterns that some of us rather use. I held up my hand to indicate my own guilt.

Kinda Sorta Linguistic Research

October 6th, 2018

If you ever say “kinda” or “sorta”, there’s a good chance you’ve been using ‘Pragmatic Halos’ without even knowing about it. Linguistically speaking, ‘Pragmatic Halos’ can include phrases that are not strictly true (but that are neither lies or mistakes) and which are a normal part of honest, error-free discourse.

“It is a truism that people speak ‘loosely’- that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes.”

– explained Professor Peter Nathan Lasersohn (University of Illinois, Dept. of Linguistics) in a 1999 paper for the journal Language, 75 (3): pp.522-551 which carried the first account of ‘Pragmatic Halos’ and their everyday uses.

For a more recent and specific examination of ‘kinda’ and ‘sorta’ – in the Lasersohnian sense, see: Inherent and coerced gradability across categories: manipulating pragmatic halos with sorta, Curt Anderson, Proceedings of SALT 23. (2013)

If, however, you’d like a less colloquial approach, looking at ‘kind of’ and ‘sort of’ instead of ‘kinda’ and ‘sorta’, then see : This is kind of / sort of interesting: variation in hedging in English, Stefan Th. Gries, and Caroline V. David, Towards multimedia in corpus linguistics, 2007.

posted by Martin Gardiner in Arts and Science, Research News | Comments Off on Kinda Sorta Linguistic Research

Now for a test: IFF you groove on the following paragraph, you should definitely follow the above link to the paper on Pragmatic Halos. I only sorta groove on it.

5.3. MODELS AND DOMAIN MANIPULATION. Quatificational sentences can be judged true or false only relative to a particular domain of quantification, which is normally fixed pragmatically. For example, if, at the beginning of class, a teacher says 'Everyone is here, let's begin'. the first clause will normally be deemed true if everyone enrolled in the class is present and false otherwise; the sentence does not claim that everyone in the entire universe is present.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

It has been a few years since I last posted a book review. There's a reason for that: It is time-consuming, hard work - even when one has read a worthy book. She Has Her Mother's Laugh (SHHML) popped out at me from the shelves of books newly added to my local public library's shelves. Surely, I'm the first to have checked it out. It was added to the shelves in July and, even though it is difficult to lay down once one starts it, it is not a quick read.

Wikipedia starts the author's entry with:

"Carl Zimmer (born 1966) is a popular science writer and blogger who has specialized in the topics of evolution and parasites. He has authored many books and contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University's Morse College." Mr Zimmer's blog may be found at this link.

SHHML comprises 19 chapters (divided among five parts), a short glossary, 22 pages of notes wherein citations are made, 44 pages of bibliography, a few pages of acknowledgments, and 12 pages of densely printed index. You can surely understand why I say it isn't a quick read. 

In wondering if my Mitochondria are up to the task of writing a review, I decided that there was no need for me to write a review: others, more talented in reviewing books, have done that for me. [From the book's glossary, "Mitochondria: Fuel-generating organelles inside the cell containing a small amount of DNA. Mitochondria are inherited only through the maternal line." But you knew that!]

Following, below, is one paragraph lifted from a review by Jennifer Raff for The New York Times. After that paragraph, I merely ramble on about some of the things I learned or noted along the way.

In an Age of Gene Editing and Surrogacy, What Does Heredity Mean? by Jennifer Raff, May 31, 2018

“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh” challenges our conventional wisdom about heredity, especially as we enter the new realms of surrogate pregnancy and gene editing. One of the most astonishing insights is that mothers don’t just pass traits to their children — they receive them as well. I read Zimmer’s book (occasionally out loud) while feeding my baby son. Like Zimmer, I had genetic counseling and my partner and I experienced the same anxieties as he did. But unlike Zimmer, I was able to assuage our fears using a drop of my own blood. That’s because my baby’s DNA, floating freely in my bloodstream, could be tested for hundreds of genetic disorders at an early point in my pregnancy. We took great comfort in the test, without realizing all of its implications. The baby wasn’t just sharing his genetic secrets during the pregnancy. Fetal cells can persist for years after birth; as I sit and write these sentences, I may very well be a chimera: a mixture of some of my son’s cells and my own. This microchimerism may even have eventual effects on my health, although it isn’t fully understood. And he may carry some of my immune cells, too.

SHHML is a story book, telling a history (of sorts) of human understanding and attempted manipulation of genetic heredity. The story is so winningly told that, as Hunky Husband could tell you, I've had a hard time putting down the book during the past week. Starting with the Middle Ages tale of the House of Habsburg (which I've always spelled "Hapsburg"), the family's famous/infamous jaws, and the then-current thinking on heretance, Zimmer introduces the nonsensical identification and labeling of human "races". He explores the Habsburgs' industrious avoidance of tainting their blood with that of lesser beings. Zimmer writes:

"To protect the family's power, Philip II married Maria Manuela, his first cousin. Genetically speaking, though, she was even more closely related than that. Philip's parents, Charles and Isabella, were also first cousins, while Maria Manuela's own parents were Charles and Isabella's siblings."

Talk about a double whammy of inbreeding!

 

Lactose Tolerance/Intolerance:

Zimmer writes:

"If you've recently enjoyed a cone of ice cream or a slice of Brie...you are experiencing one of the more bizarre results of the Agricultural Revolution. As a rule, mammals don't consume milk in any form once they stop nursing. After weaning, they stop producing lactase, the enzyme required to break down lactose sugar. The same is true for about two-thirds of people worldwide. For them, consuming milk can be an uncomfortable experience....But the remaining two billion or so people can continue to drink milk and eat dairy foods....They have inherited mutations that lead them to persist in making lactase."

HH is intolerant to lactose while I thrive on it. That said, I recall actually drinking very little milk in my life. Cheese and ice cream are more my speed with milk on the occasional bowl of hot or cold cereal.

Why I have Quirks:

It has always been difficult for me to come up with good excuses for my being, as Stu put it in a recent comment, "pretty odd". (He was kind enough to include himself in the labeling.) After reading SHHML, I came up with a great excuse. It seems that pieces of DNA are much more mobile than many of us had ever considered.

I had known for some time that a woman might take on DNA from her fetus(es). What I had failed to consider is that the DNA so transported might be re-infused into later fetus(es) carried by the woman. So...I'm thinking...my mother was pregnant with and delivered two male children before she had me; thus, I may carry DNA for one or both of those children. My pretty oddness, I lay at the doorstep of Elder Brother. It is all his fault! It is too late to blame the other brother for he survived birth by only minutes.

Any of my pretty goodness I lay at the doorstep of our daughters. Surely I carry some of each of their complements of DNA. Yay!

This also explains my Younger Brother. He was a bright (PhD in GeoPhysics), but sometimes, tortured guy who, at age 70, took his own life - with a long gun, of all things. He might have carried DNA from his two brothers and two sisters. That should be enough to warp anyone, may he rest in peace!

Over-Population:

I find it appalling that, according to Zimmer, "By the early 2000s, over a million children had been born with donated sperm in the United States, alone." He brought out that some sperm donors fathered dozens of children. It's not as if we had a shortage of people in this world, is it? (At this point I hear, in my head, HH asking me to "tell us how you really feel". Well...my blog, my opinions.)

Who called 9-1-1? Not Hunky Husband!

My words concerning Hunky Husband's event (in his words, the deer tried to mate with his car), did not convey the idea of the emergency call that was placed on his behalf very well. The call was made, automatically, by his car's system. Below is an excerpt from a Ford website. Hopefully, it makes plain the use of systems incorporated into the Lincoln cars that HH and I drive. In response to Bogie's comments concerning elderly drivers, I'll note that the average age of Lincoln car drivers is well above that of the general population; so, it is natural that Lincoln might be particularly apt to include such a system in their cars.

Bogie had a valid point, too, that in asking HH's age, the person who answered the emergency call from HH's car, might be helping the emergency responders prioritize their responses. In this case, the second car that hit the deer had worse consequences than did HH's car; but, age of driver may have determined that HH would get first attention.

Post-Crash Response

Post-crash notification technology assists occupants in summoning assistance in an urgent situation through in-vehicle emergency call systems and can give first responders potentially life-saving information.

[Hmmm...the photo that I had posted here of the emergency display showing the latitude and longitude post-crash has been taken down by Lincoln. CC]

Automated Emergency Calls

Vehicles equipped with SYNC^® in-car connectivity, which enables drivers to use cell phones and MP3 players through voice commands, also come with a call-for-help system called SYNC 911 Assist (in the U.S.) or Emergency Assistance (in other markets).

In the event of a severe crash where an airbag is deployed or the fuel pump is shut off, SYNC 911 Assist can make an emergency call using a paired/connected cell phone. This call can be initiated automatically, although a vehicle occupant can opt to cancel the call.

As well as providing the emergency operator with a GPS location, SYNC Enhanced 911 Assist can also provide data such as impact velocity, crash type, whether multiple impacts were sustained, safety belt usage for seating positions with belt reminders, and whether airbags were deployed. Such information could help emergency responders understand the severity of the incident and dispatch the most appropriate response. Enhanced 911 Assist is currently available on vehicles in the U.S. and China that are equipped with SYNC Gen 1.1 or Gen 3, and the offering has recently expanded to include Brazil.

Update on sterile neutrino research

The following excerpts from the Los Alamos National Laboratory website give us an update on the status of sterile neutrino research. [As an aside: Elder Brother spent the last 12-15 years of his career at Los Alamos. He was, however, in the weapons area.]

Los Alamos experiment at Fermilab explores potential ‘dark matter’ link, confirms earlier experiment

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 6, 2018—New research results have potentially identified a fourth type of neutrino, a “sterile neutrino” particle. This particle provides challenges for the Standard Model of particle physics, if found to be a valid result in future experiments. The work, conducted by a multi-institutional team at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago, confirms results found in the 1990s in the Los Alamos Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND).

….

Neutrinos, traditionally understood to come in three “flavors,” electron, muon and tau, have been measured by the Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment (MiniBooNE) for some 15 years. The key to the current result is the existence of more electron-flavored neutrinos than expected. Neutrinos normally oscillate between the three types, but the overpopulation of the electron-flavored ones leads to a theory that some of the muon neutrinos became sterile neutrinos for a time during the regular oscillations. The sterile neutrinos could reasonably be assumed to have transitioned into electron neutrinos in their next oscillation phase, thus explaining the higher electron numbers.

“We cannot say definitively that it’s sterile neutrinos, but we can conclusively say something fundamental is going on,” said Richard Van de Water, the Los Alamos co-lead on the project.

This is how you do science

“Over the past 20 to 30 years, neutrino oscillations have been observed from one flavor to another,” he said. “But in the late 1990s the LSND at Los Alamos saw evidence of electron neutrinos in the beam, and if our observations were correct, a much heavier type of neutrino was also in existence. That’s where the idea of sterile neutrinos came about. So the MiniBooNE experiment, designed very differently from LSND, has shown that the results were valid. But this is how we do science—you have an effect, and you build a new experiment to test the original physics effect. This passes muster; it must be something new.”

“I’m careful about saying it’s sterile neutrinos. It could be, but it could be something else. The same effect has now been observed in two experiments, with a small chance that is is a mistake in both experiments. We still see what shouldn’t be there, and it could be even more exciting. Speculating, I like to think of this as the first hint of the dark sector, perhaps interacting through neutrinos, and this could be a way to probe dark matter and dark energy,” Van de Water said.

_________________________________
 Unless otherwise indicated, this information has been authored by an employee or employees of the Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this information. The public may copy and use this information without charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. Neither the Government nor LANS makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for the use of this information.

More information concerning neutrinos may be found at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's All Things Neutrino.

Black hole on steroids - from Slashdot.com

Astronomers Discovered the Fastest-Growing Black Hole Ever Seen (wral.com) 39

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday May 19, 2018 @01:34PM from the dark-stars dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader Yhcrana shares "some good old fashioned astronomy news." Astronomers have discovered "a black hole 20 billion times the mass of the sun eating the equivalent of a star every two days," reports the New York Times. The black hole is growing so rapidly, said Christian Wolf, of the Australian National University, who led the team that found it in the depths of time, "that it is probably 10,000 times brighter than the galaxy it lives in." So bright, that it is dazzling our view and we can't see the galaxy itself. He and his colleagues announced the discovery in a paper to be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia...

The blaze from material swirling around this newly observed drainpipe into eternity -- known officially as SMSS J215728.21-360215.1 -- is as luminous as 700 trillion suns, according to Wolf and his collaborators. If it were at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it would be 10 times brighter than the moon and bathe the Earth in so many X-rays that life would be impossible. Luckily it's not anywhere nearby. It is in fact 12 billion light years away, which means it took that long for its light to reach us, so we are glimpsing this cataclysm as it appeared at the dawn of time, only 2 billion years after the Big Bang, when stars and galaxies were furiously forming.

Breeding a super plant - from Slashdot.com

Anti-GMO Activists Slow Scientists Breeding a CO2-Reducing Superplant (thebulletin.org) 38

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday May 19, 2018 @03:34PM from the war-on-science dept.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists calls it "a plant that could save civilization, if we let it." Slashdot reader meckdevil writes: A "super chickpea plant" now in development could remove huge amounts of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide and fix it in the soil, greatly diminishing the impacts of climate change (not to mention producing large amounts of tasty hummus). But fear of anti-GMO activists has so far deterred her from using the CRISPR gene-editing tool to speed work on the plant.
The effort is led by Joanne Chory, director of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences -- who according to the article will make much slower progress without CRISPR. "Even with advanced breeding techniques, Chory estimates that developing a super plant in this fashion would take around 10 years..."

"She estimates that if 5 percent of the world's cropland, approximately the total area of Egypt, were devoted to such super plants, they could capture about 50 percent of current global carbon dioxide emissions."