PHILADELPHIA — In his first public appearance since announcing his retirement, Supreme Court Justice David Souter on Tuesday spoke philosophically about a judge’s place in society and how quickly one may fade into history. ‘For most of us, the very best work that we do sinks into the stream very quickly,’ he said in a 15-minute address to the Third Circuit Judicial Conference. ‘We have to find satisfaction in being part of the great stream.’ Souter, the justice who oversees emergency appeals from the circuit covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, noted that he has been coming to the circuit’s annual judicial conferences for almost two decades. ‘I didn’t intend for (Tuesday’s appearance) to be a sort of farewell conference,’ he said. And then referring to the fact that he believed his decision to retire this summer would have stayed under wraps longer, said to laughter, ‘I swear to you I was not the source of the leak.’ Souter, a 1990 appointee of President George H.W. Bush who had told friends he was intending to retire, made it official when that news became public Thursday night. Souter called President Obama midday Friday. Afterward, Obama said at […]
Huddled at the back of her shed, bleating under a magnificent winter coat and tearing cheerfully at a bale of hay, she is possibly the answer to Japan’s chronic national shortage of organ donors: a sheep with a revolutionary secret. Guided by one of the animal’s lab-coated creators, the visitor’s hand is led to the creature’s underbelly and towards a spot in the middle under eight inches of greasy wool. Lurking there is a spare pancreas. If the science that put it there can be pushed further forward, Japan may be spared an ethical and practical crisis that has split medical and political opinion. As the sheep-based chimera organ technology stands at the moment, says the man who is pioneering it, the only viable destination for the pancreas underneath his sheep would be a diabetic chimpanzee. The organ growing on the sheep was generated from monkey stem cells but the man behind the science, Yutaka Hanazono, believes that the technology could be developed eventually to make sheep into walking organ banks for human livers, hearts, pancreases and skin. It could happen within a decade, he guesses, perhaps two. ‘We have made some very big […]
A Princeton University geoscientist who has stirred controversy with her studies challenging a popular theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs has compiled powerful new evidence asserting her position. Gerta Keller, whose studies of rock formations at many sites in the United States, Mexico and India have led her to conclude that volcanoes, not a vast meteorite, were the more likely culprits in the demise of the Earth’s giant reptiles, is producing new data supporting her claim. Keller, a Princeton professor of geosciences, and several co-authors lay out the case in a paper published April 27 in the Journal of the Geological Society of London. Examinations at several new sites have produced ‘biotic evidence’ — the fossilized traces of plants and animals tied to the period in question — indicating that a massive die-off did not occur directly after the strike but much later. In addition, Keller and other researchers have found ‘aftermath’ sediments that remained undisturbed and showed signs of active life, with burrows formed by creatures colonizing the ocean floor. This would quash a theory advanced by some that a massive tsunami followed the impact, Keller said. ‘Careful documentation of results that are […]
For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations. Now, after painstakingly comparing DNA samples from people in dozens of modern-day Native American and Eurasian groups, an international team of scientists thinks it can put the matter to rest: Virtually without exception the new evidence supports the single ancestral population theory. ‘Our work provides strong evidence that, in general, Native Americans are more closely related to each other than to any other existing Asian populations, except those that live at the very edge of the Bering Strait, said Kari Britt Schroeder, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, and the first author on the paper describing the study. ‘While earlier studies have already supported this conclusion, what’s different about our work is that it provides the first solid data that simply cannot be reconciled with multiple ancestral populations, said Schroeder, who was a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the university when she did the research. The study is published in the […]
Dna47_3_2 DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to. Explanation: None, at least not yet. Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the ‘amazing ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible. Even so, the research published in ACS’ Journal of Physical Chemistry B, shows very clearly that homology recognition between sequences of several hundred nucleotides occurs without physical contact or presence of proteins. Double helixes of DNA can recognize matching molecules from a distance and then gather together, all seemingly without help from any other molecules or chemical signals. In the study, scientists observed the behavior of fluorescently […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
