You're hiking in the Himalayas, one of tallest mountain ranges in the world, and you are struggling. You're miles above sea-level, your head is in a fog—both the literal one and the disorienting sensation—and it is getting hard to breathe. Altitude sickness is setting in, and you are starting to wish that you had spent more time acclimating to the thin air. As your body fights every step, the Tibetan guide ahead has a smoke, waiting for you to catch up.
But you shouldn't feel too inadequate. Thousands of years of natural selection have given Tibetans an advantage—they have evolved to cope with their extreme environment.
With an average elevation of 13,000 feet above sea level, Tibet has some of the thinnest air on the planet, with 40 percent less oxygen than is found at sea level. When foreigners travel there, after suffering through mountain sickness, their bodies adapt by producing more of the oxygen-carrying pigment hemoglobin, and when they return to sea level they can make more of every breath. But if a lowlander stays in this high-altitude environment for too long, the adaptation starts to turn against his or her health. Elevated hemoglobin levels thicken the blood, and the heart struggles to pump it around the body. This can cause swelling of the heart and lungs and a loss of fertility. However, indigenous Tibetans have none of these problems.
Recent research shows that Tibetans, who have lived isolated in these high altitudes for thousands of years, enjoy a genetic variation that keeps their hemoglobin levels in a normal range. A variation of EPAS1, a gene that is sometimes associated with increased athleticism, causes an enzymatic change in the way oxygen binds to blood and is transported around the body. Compared to lowland Chinese, Tibetans thrive in high altitude—they do not suffer from chronic altitude sickness and their children are born with normal weight.
"It makes them super athletes at altitude, without a doubt," says Ken Kamler, a surgeon, author of Surviving the Extremes and an editorial advisor to Popular Mechanics. "I've been on climbs with these guys, and I'm maybe a foot taller than some of them, and they carry loads on their backs that I can't even lift off the ground, and they will carry them way faster than I'm climbing with a much lighter load."
Even with rigorous training, a person from sea level will almost always lag behind the Sherpas at altitude, Kamler says. "They climb steadily and rapidly to the point where they are getting, and then they wait," he says. "These guys are obviously different from us."
The EPAS1 found in Tibetans is the fastest example of human adaptation ever recorded—in 3000 years, the frequency of the gene grew from 10 percent to 90 percent in Tibetans, says Rasmus Nielsen, an evolutionary biologist at University of California–Berkeley. To put that time frame in perspective, lactose tolerance in humans, a trait that about 80 percent of Europeans have, developed over a 7500-year period. "The interesting thing to think about is that a lot of people would have had to die in that period for the allele frequency to change like that," Nielsen says—making it one of the clearest examples of natural selection in humans.
In the future, the benefits of these "fit" genes might be extended to the general population through gene therapy—the use of pharmaceuticals to change the DNA structure of a living person. Any patients whose oxygen transport has been compromised—diabetics and sufferers of heart and lung diseases—would be the beneficiaries of such treatment, Kamler says. Replacing such patients' EPAS1 with that of the Tibetans would allow their red blood cells to use oxygen more efficiently and nourish bodies starved of O2.
Scientists are a long way from making such procedures a reality, but they are now using Tibetans as a model to study the mechanisms of oxygen transport and human adaptation. And while lowlanders may never match the inborn oxygen-carrying capacity of the Tibetans, that has not stopped some of them from summiting the highest mountains in the world. It just takes a lot of training and a bit more time.
When the creepy robot dog chases you, successfully traverses icy terrain and counter-balances to right itself when you try to kick it down, it would not be unreasonable to assume that you might be able to escape it by climbing a tree. Until they send the robot snake up after you.
Forget Zombies; people should be terrified of the inevitable robot uprising. I for one am going to settle on a secluded island somewhere in the pacific. Who's with me?
Do we get to make up a bunch of phony, obviously incorrect theories as to what will happen when they go supersonic? Or do we just take bets on who makes it first and/or whether or not they die horribly?
It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.
Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is orbiting a star about 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra.
But if the finding is confirmed by other astronomers, the planet, which has three to four times the mass of Earth, would be the most Earthlike planet yet discovered, and the first to meet the criteria for being potentially habitable.
“It’s been a long haul,” said Steven S. Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who, along with R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, led the team that made the discovery. “This is the first exoplanet that has the right conditions for water to exist on its surface.”
In a recent report for the National Academy of Science, astronomers declared the finding of such planets one of the major goals of this decade. NASA’s Kepler satellite — which was launched in March 2009 as a way to detect Earthlike bodies — is expected to harvest dozens or hundreds.
Gliese 581g (whose first name is pronounced GLEE-za) circles a dim red star known as Gliese 581, once every 37 days, at a distance of about 14 million miles. That is smack in the middle of the so-called Goldilocks zone, where the heat from the star is neither too cold nor too hot for water to exist in liquid form on its surface.
“This is really the first Goldilocks planet,” Dr. Butler said.
Other astronomers hailed the news as another harbinger that the search for “living planets,” as Dimitar D. Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calls them, is on the right track.
“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Caleb Scharf of Columbia University.
But they expressed caution about this particular planet, noting uncertainties about its density, composition and atmosphere, and the need for another generation of giant telescopes and spacecraft in order to find out anything more about it. Other Goldilocks planets have come and gone in recent years.
The discovery was announced at a news conference Wednesday in Washington, and the findings have been posted on the National Science Foundation’s Web site and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The authors said the relative ease by which planet was found — in only 11 years — led them to believe that such planets must be common.
“Either we have just been incredibly lucky in this early detection, or we are truly on the threshold of a second Age of Discovery,” they wrote in their paper.
Pressed during the news conference about the possibility of life on Gliese 581g, Dr. Vogt protested that he was an astronomer, not a biologist. Then he relented, saying that, speaking strictly personally, he believed that “the chances of life on this planet are almost 100 percent.”
Asked the same question, Dr. Butler squirmed and said, “I like data.” After a pause he added: “And what the data say is that the planet is the right distance from the star to have water and the right mass to hold an atmosphere. What is needed simply to find lots and lots of these things is lots and lots of telescope time.”
The latest results from Gliese 581 were harvested from observations by two often competing teams, using telescopes in Chile and Hawaii to measure the slight gravitational tugs the star gets as its planets swing by.
This is hardly the first time around the block for Gliese 581, which is a longtime favorite of planet hunters and now is known to have six planets in its retinue. It is a dwarf star about one-third the mass of the Sun and only about one-hundredth as bright, allowing planets to huddle closer to the campfire. “It hauntingly reminds us of our own solar system,” Dr. Butler said.
Two of Gliese’s planets have already had their moment in the limelight as possible Goldilocks planets. One, known as Gliese 581c, circles just on the inner edge of the habitable zone and was thus thought to be habitable three years ago. But further analysis suggested that the greenhouse effect would turn it into a stifling hell. Another planet, just on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone, is probably too cold.
“One is on the hot side, the other is on cold side,” and the new planet is right in between, Dr. Vogt said. “It’s bookended.”
He and his colleagues estimated the average temperature on the surface of Gliese 581g to be between 10 and minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit, about the same as a summer day in Antarctica.
But that means very little, he said, because the planet, like all the others in that system, keeps the same face to the star all the time. So the temperature could vary wildly from the day-side to the night-side of the planet, meaning that an organism could perhaps find a comfortable zone to live in.
But nobody really knows what is going on on Gliese 581g, said Sara Seager, a planetary astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it was all carbon dioxide, like Venus, it would be pretty hot,” she said, adding that she would give the planet a 90 percent chance of holding water.
That, she pointed out, is faint praise in scientific circles. “Sounds high, but would you fly on a plane that only had an 8 or 9 chance out of 10 of making it?” she asked.
“Everyone is so primed to say here’s the next place we’re going to find life,” Dr. Seager said, “but this isn’t a good planet for follow-up.”
How would they test to see if there is life there? It's close compared to everything else in the goddamned universe, but 20 light years is still well beyond our technological capabilities in terms of sending a probe to investigate. I'm guessing we'd have to develop a satellite strong enough to zoom in on its surface to see if there's anything growing or moving around on it?
(Sep 28th 2010, 16:03 by N.L.) LAST Sunday, it emerged that the UN was set to appoint a Malaysian astrophysicist called Mazlan Othman to lead international efforts to respond to visitors from outer space. As the article in the Sunday Times explained, Dr Othman is the head of the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa). But then an article on the Guardian’s News Blog seemed to pour cold green slime over the whole story. The Guardian reports that Dr Othman said, "it sounds really cool but I have to deny it”. Dr Othman is quoted as saying she is attending a conference next week on how the world deals with “near-Earth objects”.
This cannot be correct unless Unoosa considers aliens to be near-earth objects (like comets and asteroids). The Guardian did not contact the author of the original piece. Yet it is a matter of record that Dr Othman is due to attend a meeting at the Royal Society next Monday about how science and society should respond to aliens. If she turns up to talk about near-Earth objects, she’ll be politely shown to the transporter chamber.
Dr Othman is attending a debate about political issues for the UN that arise from alien life. One of her co-panellists, Frans Von der Dunk, will discuss the role of the UN in representing humanity in “any inter-cosmic ‘discourse’”. The current version of the programme does not say exactly what Dr Othman is there to discuss, but it isn’t a bold voyage into the unknown to wonder whether she will be reprising her words to a similar meeting in January on the consequences of detecting aliens.
In a March version of that talk she wrote, when aliens arrive “we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The United Nations are a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.” It is clear that she is proposing her agency, so why deny it?
So is there going to be an alien ambassador? Well for one thing, distances in space are so vast the chances of anything more than a signal arriving from aliens is fantastically remote. For another, it is more likely that if we discover alien life it will be some form of microbe found under a damp rock on Mars or some pattern in the chemistry of a planet several hundred million years away.
Yet another problem is that there is already another international group competing to manage the issue of alien contact. Run by Paul Davies, an astrobiologist at Arizona State University, the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup operates under the aegis of the International Academy of Astronautics, according to MSNBC.
While the boffins get their tentacles in a twist over who is in charge of alien contact on Earth, the truth of the matter is that it is leaders of big countries like America and China, not the international agencies, who are going to have the final say on what gets said by whom. What is more, if ever there was a story that demonstrated how awful the UN can be at being in charge, it is this. Attempts to reach Dr Othman have failed. Your correspondent will approach Unoosa again tomorrow, this time covered in green face paint and sporting three eyes in the hope of attracting attention.
I'm skeptical about a tidally-locked (and 37 day-long year) planet's potential to sustain life. If one side is always facing its star, you're gonna have one side cooked to a crisp and the other frozen solid. Maybe some form of life could exist on its equator, but there's still variables like the planet's composition and atmosphere. Still, exciting to see planets in Earth-like conditions are not as rare as some have previously thought (2 out of 492 in the Goldilocks zone so far!).
I can't imagine it being that hard to be in the "Goldilocks" zone. It's a pretty big area, in space or otherwise. Now if they have the several hundred other little details that makes sure that we don't all fry, or get hit by large asteroids on a regular basis, that's the tricky part.
At Carnegie-Mellon university, a massive computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, teaching itself English and educating itself in human affairs.
It has been interesting to hear the public's response to NELL. There are many jokes about what will happen when it comes across 4chan or LOLcats, for example. But the reality is, those texts are already available to NELL, and it is largely ignoring them because they are so ill-formed and inconsistent.
Resistance is futile; our sweets shall be assimilated.
Speculative fiction has always been enamored with the concept of the hive mind. The idea of an intelligence borne from the collective thoughts of a thousand different minds appeals to that side of us that longs to be part of something greater. We've seen it before in nature; while the humble bee may be nothing more than a buzzing annoyance for most (and a hazardous nemesis to the allergic), but working together, they can accomplish tasks that would seem daunting for the average human. Based on new research at the Queen Mary University of London and the Royal Holloway, they don't just trump humans; even our most powerful supercomputers are no match for the gestalt intelligence of the Hive.
Queen Mary's Professor Lars Chitkka and his team set up a bunch of computer-controlled artificial flowers to test whether the humble honeybee would determine successive visits based on the order the faux flora are visited, or just map out the quickest route irregardless of sequence. This is a math problem called the Traveling Salesman, and it's the kind of logic puzzle that keeps even the most top-of-the-line supercomputer up at night, calling Mrs. Supercomputer to tell her that he'll be coming home late again. Surprisingly, the bees always managed to find the shortest path on future visits—consuming less power on the way to a solution.
Let's just hope that the later parts of this experiment don't involve hooking up the bees to some sort of military defense computer. With the zombie and robot apocalypses sure to keep us busy in the near future, supercomputer bee overlords is something we just can't deal with right now.
But isn't 20 Bees Man's crippling weakness indecision? If he was able to use his bees to make his decisions for him the whole time, this creates a huge plot hole!
It's calculating, not decision making here. Of course he can't make a decision if it's not presented as a problem he can calculate a solution to. Specifically it must be presented as a traveling salesman type problem.
ETA: If that's not good enough for you I shall distract you with this:
Comments
Tibetans have superhuman genes
What about Zombie Robots?
I kinda hope that one older French guy makes it first, but I doubt that's actually gonna happen.
There are no words. They should've sent a poet...
That's it! That's what Night Lord should name his kid! Laser Cannon!
Sort of a follow up to Jakey's article, from the science and technology blog at the Economist:
Alien diplomacy: The UN’s secretive alien ambassador
ETA: If that's not good enough for you I shall distract you with this: