Scott from Scott’s Pizza Tours is obsessed with pizza box engineering, and posts YouTube videos about the pizza boxes people send him from all over the world. In this installment, he explores a fantastic box from Eataly that is coated with a recyclable, reflective finish that keeps the food hot and prevents the grease from getting on the cardboard. Pizza boxes with grease on them can’t be recycled (and they really screw up the recycling system if they slip through!), so this is a major breakthrough.
The Flavor Of Your OJ Is A Chemically-Induced Mirage
Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren't listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor.
A Canoe That Can Fit Inside a Backpack
Ori Levin designed a full sized canoe that's completely collapsable and can be stored in a bag that's only 5 x 9 x 28 inches big. Basically, you can have a boat in your backpack.
Called the Adhoc Canoe, it only weighs 9 pounds and takes 5 minutes to assemble. The frame of the canoe is made with carbon fiber and the hull is made of aramid (a synthetic fabric used in racing sails). The boat comes together in a "double wishbone-like structure" formed using telescopic poles. Probably not comfy but certainly clever. Sadly, Levin has no plans to bring the Adhoc Canoe to the mass market. [Design Boom via Wired]
Apple Has More Dollars and Cents Than the US Government
You know something is wrong when the US Government has an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion at the end of the day and Apple has $76.3 billion. [The Atlantic;Shutterstock/bioraven]
Firefighters Rescue 1,000-Year-Old Tree From Drought
The Big Tree, with its huge, sprawling branches, is believed to have first sprouted over a millennia ago, making it quite possibly the oldest and largest tree in Texas -- and its history is equally as remarkable. The oak's location, a stones throw from the Gulf coast, exposed it to countless storms over the centuries, and at least one unnatural disaster, too. During one battle of the Civil War, the town around the Big Oak was almost completely destroyed; the tree was among the few things left standing. 
Polara Ultimate Straight Golf Balls
We're pretty sure they're not USGA approved, but if you simply want to go out and enjoy a round or five of golf without needing to venture into the fairways and forest surrounding your hole, pick up a pack of Polara Ultimate Straight Golf Balls ($25-$35). Thanks to the company's Self Correcting technology that incorporates different sizes and depths of dimples, these WonderBalls™ correct slices and hooks by up to 75 percent and up your enjoyment of the game by at least as much.
[Scouted by Bobby]
'Time' not necessarily deeply rooted in our brains
Hidden away in the Amazonian rainforest a small tribe have successfully managed what so many dream of being able to do – to ignore the pressures of time so successfully that they don’t even have a word for it.
It is the first time scientists have been able to prove ‘time’ is not a deeply entrenched human universal concept as previously thought.Researchers, led by Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth Department of Psychology, studied the way in which time was talked about and thought about by the Amondawa people of Brazil. Their research is published in the journal Language and Cognition.Professor Sinha said: “For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn’t mean that the Amondawa are ‘people outside time’, but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time.”
(Medical Xpress) -- Hidden away in the Amazonian rainforest a small tribe have successfully managed what so many dream of being able to do – to ignore the pressures of time so successfully that they don’t even have a word for it.
It is the first time scientists have been able to prove 'time' is not a deeply entrenched human universal concept as previously thought.
Researchers, led by Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth Department of Psychology, studied the way in which time was talked about and thought about by the Amondawa people of Brazil. Their research is published in the journal Language and Cognition.
Professor Sinha said: "For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are 'people outside time', but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time."
Team members including linguist Wany Sampaio and anthropologist Vera da Silva Sinha, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like 'next week' or 'last year'. There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons. They also found nobody in the community has an age. Instead, they change their names to reflect their life stage and position within their society, so that for example a little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling, and take on a new one.
Professor Sinha said: "We have so many metaphors for time and its passing – we think of time as a 'thing' – we say 'the weekend is nearly gone'; 'she's coming up to her exams'; 'I haven't got the time', and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren't. We've created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don't talk like this and don't think like this, unless they learn another language.
"We didn't expect to find this – we had studied the same language earlier and were going back to further our understanding of its metaphors. We were surprised to find that space metaphors for time and the abstract concept of time are simply absent from the language and culture.
"For these fortunate people time isn't money, they aren't racing against the clock to complete anything, and nobody is discussing next week or next year; they don't even have words for 'week', 'month' or 'year'. You could say they enjoy a certain freedom.
"It strikes us as strange that such 'time-free' cultures exist," says Professor Sinha, "but many Amazonian languages, including Amondawa, don't have numbers beyond four or five, and if you don't have the numbers, you don't have time as an abstract, measurable 'thing'.
"Time is more to do with experience than being inborn in us. The only real biological clock is the ageing of our bodies. All our complex concepts of time are cultural inventions, a kind of technology of the mind.
"The Babylonians invented the 24-hour day, and the convention of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and we're so used to being ruled by the calendar and clock that we don't reflect on it. But our notion of time is a double-edged sword. We wouldn't have the benefits of our socially and technologically complex society without it. But it's also, as we know, a burden and a source of increasing stress in our modern 24/7 lifestyle."
Time catches up with us all in the end, though. First contacted by the outside world in 1986, the Amondawa continue their traditional way of life, hunting, fishing and growing crops. But along with health care, electricity and television has come the Portuguese language. Like many of the world's 7,000 or so languages, Amondawa is threatened with extinction.
"We are now aware of the great riches still to be discovered in the world's biodiversity, and we know we should preserve this for future generations," says Professor Sinha. "But linguistic and cultural diversity is also a treasure trove, not just for scientists, but for everyone's understanding of what it means to be human. We can't and shouldn't try to stop change, but we should help empower people like the Amondawa to determine their own future and keep their language and traditions alive. That's why work like that of Wany and Vera, who helped the community set up a native-language based school, is so important."
Williams syndrome - Wikipedia
Most individuals with Williams syndrome are highly verbal and overly sociable, having what has been described as a "cocktail party" type personality, and exhibit a remarkable blend of cognitive strengths and weaknesses.[3] Individuals with WS hyperfocus on the eyes of others in social engagements
Furthermore, individuals with Williams syndrome have problems with visual processing, but this is related to difficulty in dealing with complex spatial relationships rather than to issues with depth perception.[15]
In an experiment, a group of children with Williams syndrome showed no signs of inherent racial bias, unlike children without the syndrome.[16]
While patients with Williams syndrome often have abnormal proficiency in verbal skills, they do not perform better on verbal tasks than average. This syndrome is characterized more by a deficiency in other areas of processing. Williams syndrome is notable in that respect in that it represents a double dissociation between verbal and spatial processing.
Evolution machine
IT IS a strange combination of clumsiness and beauty. Sitting on a cheap-looking worktop is a motley ensemble of flasks, trays and tubes squeezed onto a home-made frame. Arrays of empty pipette tips wait expectantly. Bunches of black and grey wires adorn its corners. On the top, robotic arms slide purposefully back and forth along metal tracks, dropping liquids from one compartment to another in an intricately choreographed dance. Inside, bacteria are shunted through slim plastic tubes, and alternately coddled, chilled and electrocuted. The whole assembly is about a metre and a half across, and controlled by an ordinary computer.
Say hello to the evolution machine. It can achieve in days what takes genetic engineers years. So far it is just a prototype, but if its proponents are to be believed, future versions could revolutionise biology, allowing us to evolve new organisms or rewrite whole genomes with ease. It might even transform humanity itself.
These days everything from your food and clothes to the medicines you take may well come from genetically modified plants or bacteria. The first generation of engineered organisms has been a huge hit with farmers and manufacturers - if not consumers. And this is just the start. So far organisms have only been changed in relatively crude and simple ways, often involving just one or two genes. To achieve their grander ambitions, such as creating algae capable of churning out fuel for cars, genetic engineers are now trying to make far more sweeping changes.
Grand ambitions
Yet changing even a handful of genes takes huge amounts of time and money. For instance, a yeast engineered to churn out the antimalarial drug artemisinin has been hailed as one of the great success stories of synthetic biology. However, it took 150 person-years and cost $25 million to add or tweak around a dozen genes - and commercial production has yet to begin.
The task is so difficult and time-consuming because biological systems are so complex. Even simple traits usually involve networks of many different genes, which can behave in unpredictable ways. Changes often do not have the desired effect, and tweaking one gene after another to get things working can be a very slow and painstaking process.
Many biologists think the answer is to try to eliminate the guesswork. They are creating libraries of ready-made "plug-and-play" components that should behave in a reliable way when put together to create biologicial circuits. But George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, thinks there is a far quicker way: let evolution do all the hard work for us. Instead of trying to design every aspect of the genetic circuitry involved in a particular trait down to the last DNA letter, his idea is to come up with a relatively rough design, create lots of variants on this design and select the ones that work best.
The basic idea is hardly original; various forms of directed evolution are already used to design things as diverse as proteins and boats. Church's group, however, has developed a machine for "evolving" entire organisms - and it works at an unprecedented scale and speed. The system has the potential to add, change or switch off thousands of genes at a time - Church calls this "multiplexing" - and it can generate billions of new strains in days.
Of course, there are already plenty of ways to generate mutations in cells, from zapping them with radiation to exposing them to dangerous chemicals. What's different about Church's machine is that it can target the genes that affect a particular characteristic and alter them in specific ways. That greatly increases the odds of success. Effectively, rather than spending years introducing one set of specific changes, bioengineers can try out thousands of combinations at once. Peter Carr, a bioengineer at MIT Media Lab who is part of the group developing the technology, describes it as "highly directed evolution".
The first "evolution machine" was built by Harris Wang, a graduate student in Church's lab. To prove it worked, he started with a strain of the E. colibacterium that produced small quantities of lycopene, the pigment that makes tomatoes red. The strain was also modified to produce some viral enzymes. Next, he synthesised 50,000 DNA strands with sequences that almost matched parts of the 24 genes involved in lycopene production, but with a range of variations that he hoped would affect the amount of lycopene produced. The DNA and the bacteria were then put into the evolution machine.
The machine let the E. coli multiply, mixed them with the DNA strands, and applied an electric shock to open up the bacterial cells and let the DNA get inside. There, some of the added DNA was swapped with the matching target sequences in the cells' genomes. This process, called homologous recombination, is usually very rare, which is where the viral enzymes come in. They trick cells into treating the added DNA as its own, greatly increasing the chance of homologous recombination.
The effect was to create new variants of the targeted genes while leaving the rest of the genome untouched. It was unlikely that all 24 genes would be altered simultaneously in any one bacterium, so the cycle was repeated over and over to increase the proportion of cells with mutations in all 24 genes.
Repeating the cycle 35 times generated an estimated 15 billion new strains, each with a different combination of changes in the target genes. Some made five times as much lycopene as the original strain, Wang's team reported in 2009 ( Nature, vol 460, p 894).
It took Wang just three days to do better than the biosynthesis industry has managed in years. And it was no one-off - he has since repeated the trick for the textile dye indigo.
Church calls this bold approach multiplex automated genome engineering, or MAGE. In essence, he has applied the key principles that have led to the astonishing advances in DNA sequencing - parallel processing and automation - to genetic engineering. And since Church was one of the founders of the human genome project and helped develop modern sequencing methods, he knows what he is doing.
Just as labs all over the world now buy thousands of automated DNA sequencing machines, so Church envisions them buying automated evolution machines. He hopes to sell them relatively cheaply, at around $90,000 apiece. "We're dedicated to bringing the price down for everybody, rather than doing some really big project that nobody can repeat," Church says.
He hopes the machines will greatly accelerate the process of producing novel microbes. LS9, a biofuels company based near San Francisco that was co-founded by Church, has said it hopes to use MAGE to engineer E. coli that can produce renewable fuels. Church and colleagues are also adapting the approach for use with other useful bacteria, including Shewanella, which can convert toxic metals such as uranium into an insoluble form, and cyanobacteria which can extract energy from light using photosynthesis.
A big revolution
In principle, the technique should work with plant and animal cells as well as microbes. New methods will have to be developed for coaxing cells to swap in tailored DNA for each type of organism, but Church and his colleagues say that progress has already been made in yeast and mammalian cells.
"I think it is a big revolution in genome engineering," says Kristala Jones Prather, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is not part of Church's collaboration. "You don't have to already know what the answer is. You can manipulate multiple things at a time, and let the cell find a solution for you."
Because biological systems are so complex, it is a huge advantage to be able to tweak lots of genes simultaneously, rather than one at a time, she says. "In almost every case you'll get a different solution that's a better solution."
The disadvantage of Church's approach is that the "better solution" is mixed up with millions of poorer solutions. Prather points out that the technique is limited by how easy it is to screen for the characteristics that you want. Wang selected good lycopene producers by growing 100,000 of the strains he had created in culture dishes and simply picking out the brightest red colonies. "Essentially nothing that we use in my lab can be screened so easily," Prather says.
By automating selection and using a few tricks, though, it should be practical to screen for far more subtle characteristics. For instance, biosensors that light up when a particular substance is produced could be built into the starting strain. "The power going forward will have to do with clever selections and screens," says Church.
As revolutionary as this approach is, Church thinks MAGE's most far-reaching potential lies elsewhere. He reckons it will be possible to use the evolution machine to make many thousands of specific changes to a cell's DNA: essentially, to rewrite genomes.
At the moment, making extensive changes to even the smallest genome is extremely costly and laborious. Last year, the biologist and entrepreneur Craig Venter announced that his team had replaced a bacterium's genome with a custom-written one (Science, vol 329, p 52). His team synthesised small pieces of DNA with a specific sequence, and then joined them together to create an entire genome. It was an awesome achievement, but it took 400 person-years of labour and cost around $40 million.
MAGE can do the same job far more cheaply and efficiently by rewriting existing genomes, Church thinks. The idea is that instead of putting DNA strands into the machine with a range of different mutations, you add only DNA with the specific changes you want. Even if you are trying to change hundreds or thousands of genes at once, after a few cycles in the machine, a good proportion of the cells should have all the desired changes. This can be checked by sequencing.
If the idea works it would make feasible some visionary projects that are currently impossibly difficult. Church, needless to say, has something suitably ambitious in mind. In fact, it is the reason he devised MAGE in the first place.
In 2004 he had joined forces with Joseph Jacobson, an engineer at the MIT Media Lab, best known as inventor of the e-ink technology used in e-readers. Searching for a "grand goal" in bioengineering, the pair hit upon the idea of altering life's genetic code. Rather than just alter the sequence of DNA, they want to change the very language in which the instructions for life are written
This is not as alarming as it might sound. Because all existing life uses essentially the same genetic code, organisms that translate DNA using a different code would be behind a "genetic firewall", unable to swap DNA with any normal living thing. If they escaped into the wild, they would not be able to spread any engineered components. Nor would they be able to receive any genes from natural bacteria that would endow them with antibiotic resistance or the ability to make toxins. "Any new DNA coming in or any DNA coming out doesn't work," says Church. "We're hoping that people who are concerned, including us, about escape from industrial processes, will find these safer."
There is another huge advantage: organisms with an altered genetic code would be immune to viruses, which rely on the protein-making machinery of the cells they infect to make copies of themselves. In a cell that uses a different genetic code, the viral blueprints will be mistranslated, and any resulting proteins will be garbled and unable to form new viruses.
Doing this in bacteria or cell lines used for growing chemicals would be of huge importance to industry, where viral infections can shut down entire production lines. And the approach is not necessarily limited to single cells. "It's conceivable that it could be done in animals," says Carr.
Completely virus-proof
Carr and his colleagues have already begun eliminating redundant codons from the genome of E. coli. They are starting with the rarest, the stop codon TAG, which appears 314 times. Each instance will be replaced by a different stop codon, TAA. So far they have used MAGE to create 32 E. coli strains that each have around 10 of the necessary changes, and are now combining them to create a single strain with all the changes. Carr says this should be completed within the next few months, after which he hopes to start replacing another 12 redundant codons. To make a bacterium completely virus-proof will probably require replacing tens of thousands of redundant codons, he says, as well as modifying the protein-making factories so they no longer recognise these codons.
To ensure novel genes cannot be translated if they get passed on to other organisms, the team would have to go a step further and reassign the freed-up codons so a different amino acid to normal is added to a protein when they occur. This could include amino acids that do not exist in nature, opening the door to new types of chemistry in living cells. Artificial amino acids could be used to create proteins that do not degrade as easily, for example, which could be useful in industry and medicine.
There are potential dangers in making organisms virus-proof, though. Most obviously, they might have an advantage over competing species if they escaped into the wild, allowing them to dominate environments with potentially destructive effects. In the case of E. coli, those environments could include our guts.
"We want to be very careful. The goal is to isolate these organisms from part of the natural sphere with which they normally interact," says Carr. "We shouldn't pretend that we understand all possible ramifications, and we need to study these modified organisms carefully." But he points out that we deal with similar issues already, such as invasive species running riot in countries where they have no natural predators. Additional safeguards could be built in, such as making modified organisms dependent on nutrients they can get only in a lab or factory. And if the worst came to the worst, biologists could create viruses capable of killing their errant organisms. Such viruses would not be able to infect normal cells.
Church argues that with proper safety and regulatory controls, there is no reason why the approach shouldn't be used widely. "I think that to some extent you'd like every organism to be multi-virus resistant," he says. "Or at least industrial microbes, agricultural species and humans."
Yes, humans. Church is already adapting MAGE for genetically modifying human stem cell lines. The work, funded by the US National Human Genome Research Institute, aims to create human cell lines with subtly different genomes in order to test ideas about which mutations cause disease and how. "Sequencing is now a million times cheaper, and there are a million times as many hypotheses being generated," he says. "We'd like to develop the resources so that people can quickly test hypotheses about the human genome by synthesising new versions."
As the technology improves and becomes routine, says Church, it could also be used to alter the cells used for cell-based therapies. Tissue-engineered livers grown from stem cells, say, could have their genetic code altered so that they would be immune to liver-destroying viruses such as hepatitis C.
"Everybody getting stem cell therapies will be given a choice of doing ordinary stem cell therapy - either with their cells or donor cells - or doing stem cells that are resistant to viruses," he says. "There will have to be all kinds of safety checks and FDA approval and so forth, but most people faced with two fairly safe choices, one of which is virus-sensitive and one of which is virus-resistant, are going to take the virus-resistant one."
Of course, there would be enormous experimental and safety hurdles to overcome. Not least the fact that gene targeting using homologous recombination or any other method is not perfect - the added DNA is sometimes inserted into the wrong place in the genome, and the process can trigger other kinds of mutations too. Such off-target changes might be a big problem when making hundreds of targeted changes at a time.
So not surprisingly, Carr describes the move to humans as "fraught with peril". But if we do get to a point where there are lots of people walking around with virus-resistant tissues or organs, and lots of farm animals that are completely virus-resistant, Church thinks it is only a matter of time before clinics create virus-resistant babies. "If it works really well, somebody somewhere will decide to try it in the next generation."
Making changes to the genomes of humans that will get passed on to their children has long been seen as taboo. But Church points out that there was strong resistance to techniques such as in vitro fertilisation and organ transplants when they were new; yet as soon as they were shown to work, they were quickly accepted. "Many technologies start out that way," he says. "But once they work really well, everybody says it's unethical not to use them."
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who advises the US government on reproductive technologies, is sceptical about the idea of making virus-resistant people, because anyone modified in this way would only be able to conceive children naturally with a partner whose genome had been altered in exactly the same way. "You would be denying a hugely important choice to a future modified human."
But, he says, if MAGE really can be used to edit the genome of human cells, it would provide a way to fix the mutations that cause inherited disease. It could be the technology that opens the door to the genetic engineering of humans. We should start debating now how best to use it, Caplan says. Should it be limited to preventing disease, or used for enhancement too? What sort of regulation is needed? Who should be eligible?
This prospect might seem a long way off, but Caplan argues that if the technique works well in other species, it could become feasible to attempt to engineer humans in as little as 10 years. "If you learn to do this in microbes and then in animals, you'll find yourself wondering how we got to humans so fast," he says. "You've got to pay attention to what's going on in lower creatures because that's the steady march to people."
If all this sounds wildly implausible, bear in mind that the idea of sequencing an entire human genome in days seemed nigh on impossible just a few years ago. Now it's fast becoming routine. Most biologists would probably agree that it is just a matter of time before we develop the technology needed to rewrite the DNA of living creatures at will. If Church succeeds, this future will happen faster than any imagined.
Kurt Gödel was a brilliant mathematician best known for his incompleteness theorems. He was also, in later days, more than a little bit crazy, and eventually became so paranoid that, when his wife got sick and couldn’t prepare food for him, he refused to eat and starved to death. But in-between upending the foundations of mathematics and going insane he found time to devise a novel solution to the equations of General Relativity known as theGödel metric. The Gödel metric universe is a spinning universe, and it allows for closed timelike curves. That means time travel! The Gödel universe is not identical to our own, but it’s not inconsistent with General Relativity. (More recently, other possibilities that lead to CTCs have been proposed, but Gödel discovered this way back in 1949.)
Image shows the solution of iron oxide in water changing color under amagnetic field, with increasing strength of the field from left to right.
Innovative ideas: Plastic islands
Plastic islands
Even more ambitious than Sowa’s island is architect Ramon Knoester’s plan to buildRecycled Island, a floating island the size of Hawaii made entirely of plastic from the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch. Aside from being composed of recycled plastic, the island would also be completely self-sufficient, supporting its own agriculture and getting its power from solar and wave energy. When it’s complete, Knoester hopes the island will be home to at least half a million residents who can enjoy the artificial island’s seaweed harvest and compost toilets.
lat.ms →
Saturn’s Great White Spot, which occurs about once every 30 Earth years, is a windy, towering cloud of ammonia and water spewing out super jolts of thunder and lightning. The storm is about 10,000 times stronger than those on Earth.
Are primates alone in using logical reasoning?
Not according to a recent study. African grey parrots have demonstrated their logical prowess by deducing the location of treats under cups. Researchers placed treats under two separate cups, and then removed one in sight of the parrot. Then the parrot could choose which cup it thought the treat was under. Several parrots consistently guessed correct over 70% of the time, well better than random chance. Sounds simple right? To spice it up, the researcher obscured the bird’s view of the cups, removed a treat, showed the bird which one was removed, and then allowed the bird to choose a cup. The bird was supposed to “infer by exclusion,” a logical leap that most human 4 year olds make. Most of the test birds reverted to random guessing, but one bird, named Awisa, guessed correctly more than 75% of the time. Studies like these are blowing the lid off the notion that higher reasoning and logic are exclusive to the great apes.
Glow-in-the-dark mushroom rediscovered
It's something you would never expect to go missing, but one of the world's brightest glow-in-the-dark mushrooms has been rediscovered after an absence of more than 170 years, according to USA Today.The bioluminescent shrooms had become a Brazilian legend of sorts. They were first spied in 1840 by an English botanist named George Gardner, who was alarmed after he saw some boys playing with a glowing object in the streets of Vila de Natividad, a village in the Goiás state in central Brazil. After that, no more sightings of the brightly glowing fungus had ever been reported.
The mushroom was nearly forgotten until 2002, when Brazilian chemist Cassius Stevani came across Gardner's early reports. Then, in 2005, a breakthrough occurred. A pair of primatologists, Patricia Izar from São Paulo University in Brazil and Dorothy Fragaszy of the University of Georgia in Athens, were studying a band of monkeys deep in the Brazilian interior when they came across something mysterious glowing at the base of some palm trees.
Izar and Fragaszy scooped up specimens and contacted Stevani, who later confirmed that the mushrooms were indeed Gardner's long lost species. The findings are what led to this month's paper in the journal Mycologia.
Ironically, right after the rediscovery of the mushrooms, scientists came to learn that local people were quite familiar with them. In fact, the mushrooms had a common name, flor-de-coco, or flower of the coconut, since it is commonly found on the rotting fronts of dwarf palm trees. As is often the case, scientists had just never bothered to ask.
Although glowing fungi are nothing new to science — there are 71 identified species — this particular species (named Neonothopanus gardneri, after the initial discoverer) is notable for its size and the extraordinary strength of its light.
"It glows more brightly than almost all other luminescent mushrooms," said Dennis Desjardin, a fungi expert at San Francisco State University. "If you were in a dark room and you put one on a newspaper, you'd be able to read the words."
Desjardin also noted that these mushrooms can grow up to three inches in diameter, which is giant compared to most bioluminescent fungi.
Stevani is currently working to identify the chemical pathways that allow these mushrooms to produce light, a system that remain a mystery to science. As for why they glow, scientists still aren't sure why it happens. One theory suggests that the mushrooms may glow to attract insects that help to spread their spores. Another theory, also involving the attraction of insects, proposes that the light is a beacon to predatory bugs that feed on insects that threaten the fungus.
One thing researchers are certain of, however, is that these mushrooms are poisonous. So while the mushrooms' glow-in-the-dark properties may be interesting to people, researchers strongly advise that they shouldn't be eaten
20 Things You Need to Know About Einstein
Einstein was slow in learning how to speak. His parents even consulted a doctor. He also had a cheeky rebelliousness toward authority, which led one headmaster to expel him and another to amuse history by saying that he would never amount to much. But these traits helped make him a genius. His cocky contempt for authority led him to question conventional wisdom. His slow verbal development made him curious about ordinary things – such as space and time – that most adults take for granted. His father gave him a compass at age five, and he puzzled over the nature of a magnetic field for the rest of his life. And he tended to think in pictures rather than words.
Did Einstein believe in God? Yes. He defined God in an impersonal, deistic fashion, but he deeply believed that God’s handiwork was reflected in the harmony of nature’s laws and the beauty of all that exists. He often invoked God, such as by saying He wouldn’t play dice, when rejecting quantum mechanics. Einstein’s belief in something larger than himself produced in him a wondrous mixture of confidence and humility. As he famously declared: “A spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort.”
When asked directly if he believed in God, he always insisted he did, and explained it once this way: “We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
Some researchers claim to detect in Einstein’s childhood a mild manifestation of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of the autism research center at Cambridge University, is among those. He writes that autism is associated with a “particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize.” He also notes that this pattern “explains the ‘islets of ability’ that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing -- all skills that benefit from systemizing.”* I do not find such a long-distance diagnosis to be convincing. Even as a teenager, Einstein made close friends, had passionate relationships, enjoyed collegial discussions, communicated well verbally and could empathize with friends and humanity in general.
Yes, his great breakthroughs came from visual experiments performed in his head rather than the lab. They were calledGedankenexperiment -- thought experiments. At age 16, he tried to picture in his mind what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. If you reached the speed of light, wouldn’t the light waves seem stationery to you? But Maxwell’s famous equations describing electromagnetic waves didn’t allow that. He knew that math was the language nature uses to describe her wonders, so he could visualize how equations were reflected in realities. So for the next ten years he wrestled with this thought experiment until he came up with the special theory of relativity.
In 1905, Einstein had graduated from college but had not been able to get a doctoral dissertation accepted or get an academic job. So he was toiling six days a week as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office. During his spare time, he produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc2.
Einstein was interpreted as a relativist by many (including some whose disdain fueled their anti-Semitism.) This was not the case. Beneath all of Einstein’s theories, including relativity, was a quest for certainties and absolutes. In fact, he considered calling his masterwork “Invariance Theory” rather than “Relativity Theory,” because it was based on underlying invariances and certainties. His objection to quantum mechanics was that it assumed that the realities of the universe depended on our observation of it, which conflicted with his own faith that there was a reality that existed independent of our ability to observe it.
Didn’t Einstein reject quantum mechanics?
He believed that quantum mechanics, which has probabilities and uncertainties at its foundation, did not give a complete description of the universe. He spent the second half of his career trying to poke holes in the theory and to subsume it in a unified theory that would restore certainty and determinism to physics. He was not successful, but his lonely and stubborn quest tells us a lot about his personality and mind.
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