Squirrelled away: seeds survive 30,000-year winter About 30,000 years ago, a squirrel saved some fruits in a burrow that was frozen over, and stayed that way ever since. Now, Russian scientists have not only recovered the seeds – they’ve grown viable plants from them. According to Discovery, the fruits survived at a depth of 38 meters (125 feet), at -7°C until they were …
With seeds frozen, there is zero DNA repair active, so the damage does accumulate - unless seeds have evolved to be tolerant? So if they are able to clone plants from a viable cell, it will have tolerated that accumulated dose. It will be interesting to see how the descendants of this plant flourish. There are a number of extinct plants that might be cultured via this method. I think this is very important news.
whilst I normally deplore any prejudice, Creationists are a bit thick and therefore fair game; bit like shooting caged birds though. Actually that's not right as the caged birds are prevented from helping themselves.
Creationists are like pheasants on the road, too bloody stupid to get out of the way of my car, splat!!!
Too dim realise that they're on to a loser. Evolution has dealt them a flawed life.
One is likely to get mown down and filled full of lead. The other is bed wetting simpleton.
"whilst I normally deplore any prejudice, Creationists are a bit thick "
Meaning you don't normally deplore any prejudice, you only deplore a prejudice against something you agree with. Bigotry disguised as enlightenment is still bigotry. Condemning an entire group of people based on your own prejudice is bigotry no matter how you spin it.
Of course, you'll just hold up your hands and proclaim innocence, after all, those idiot creationists were asking for it by believing such silly things, right? They're just idiots. Maybe they should be required to wear special clothing to show how stupid they are. Maybe we should take their children from them because they're obviously abusing them by filling their heads with such idiotic beliefs. Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to breed at all. Maybe they should be forcibly sterilised. Maybe any country where they have dominance should be placed under sanctions until it deals with the "threat" they pose. Maybe we should just go right ahead and invade the place to be sure they can't become a threat to begin with. Maybe we should just wipe them out now before they can destroy us.
After all, they had it coming. They're too stupid to get out of the way..
Actually, "Noah" there has a point about prejudice that we ignore at our peril.
Just because we think that someone else is a nut because of their "wrong" opinion does not give us license to harass them and then pretend moral superiority. If you deplore prejudice, you should deplore *all* prejudice -- or you are not only prejudiced, but also hypocritical. There is no "good" prejudice.
You always have to take care that you do not become that which you deplore.
Not sure you read the same posting I did.
Poster wasn't advocating or even talking about educating children into creationism. He was describing so-called "good" prejudice being used to justify oppressing people with "wrong" opinions, using known examples of oppression from history to prove a point. That's not "over the top" -- especially when people subsequently mis-cast that into something else because of the repugnance they feel towards the subject.
Maybe you can twist teaching children creationism into child abuse -- but pushing that particular belief system on children pales in comparison to actual child abuse. You're treating creationism as a thought crime -- not just an illogical belief system -- and you don't grok the horror in oppressing people in order to stop it, because you see it as a crime.
Fair disclaimer -- I think creationism is claptrap -- like a lot of creation mythos. Most likely, at the time that it was originally cooked up, it gave a people a sense of identity -- a 'who we are and where we came from' -- that modern archaeology/paleontology/geology handily disproves. A child may not completely understand evolution -- so we explain it in terms they understand, and we are often amused by the wild ways they repeat their understanding among their friends. Why would societies not also have an evolution in thought that progresses from mythology to science? That view isn't even incompatible with religion per se -- there is no reason that a creator would not use his/her/its noodly appendages to write a Book that his/her/its creations could understand, and leave the evidence otherwise out there to be discovered at a later date when they are ready for it.
I cannot justify abusing people for the thoughts in their heads.
"I cannot justify abusing people for the thoughts in their heads."
How about abusing them for trying top ram those 'delusional' thoughts down all our kids throats.
If you don't know what I am referring to a good start is to search for the term 'cdesign proponentsists'
Shockingly enough I (being the previous anon, if you can believe it) agree. Publicly funded schools (which includes all of those wonderful "private" PFI-funded "academies" that the last lot set up) should stick to teaching science in the science lab and put creationism in with religious education in general. It's not science. I have always professed that it's not science. Actual private schools are another matter of course - they're not paid for by taxes so the only people who should get to say how they're run are the people who actually pay for them. But, again, I'd be rather annoyed if I was sending my non-existant children to a school that thought it was appropriate to teach religion in a science class.
And you'll find that the majority of creationist-leaning sorts would actually agree with this. We aren't nearly as stupid as you seem to believe, mr Goode, so you can take your prejudice and stuff it up your arse.
campion are annuals and probably have small seeds. Was looking for pics of seeds and came across this, about white campion:
"Persistence and Spread: Seed recovered from archaeological digs and house demolitions is said to have germinated after 70 years burial. Seed buried in mineral soil retained up to 52% viability after 4 years depending on burial depth but had only 1-2% viability after 20 years. Seed buried in a peat soil at 26 cm retained little viability after just 1 year. Seed stored under granary conditions had 27% viability after 1 year but was no longer viable after 20 years. "
Loads radiation and sod all energy input for an ice age or so and they're still *viable*? And they even fairly closely resemble their living relatives after 30,000 generations (them being annuals, 1 lifespan = 1 year). Long-lived fauna has changed remarkably more in the same period q.v. mammoth, fecking huge wooly rhinos, aurochs, european lions, giant armadillos (giant sloth too?), etc. but these are 'subtly different'. Very, very hard to believe.
Mammoth, wooly rhinos, aurochs, european lions, and giant armadillos share one common feature: they are extinct! Plenty of other species have not changed very much over 30,000 years... crocodiles, coelocanths, squirrels. Homo sapiens arose about 50,000 years ago. Also, small populations can experience genetic drift, and big fauna is likely to have smaller populations than small flora.
Whether they're extinct or not is irrelevant (I think?). Elephants, rhinos, cows, lions and mini-armadillos aren't. So we can reasonably admit some very non-subtle changes.
Also these are *annuals*. they reproduce fast. I'd expect much greater genetic drift (not an expert though) than megafauna with slow gestation. And annuals tend to have small seeds (they are not nuts), so why was a squirrel collecting &stashing them? Here's a photo, no scale given, you decide <http://www.andrewbarrettphotography.co.uk/red-campion-seed-head>
Also, from bbc site <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17100574> the seeds weren't viable: "Back in the lab, near Moscow, the team's attempts to germinate mature seeds failed. Eventually they found success using elements of the fruit itself, which they refer to as "placental tissue" and propagated in laboratory dishes."
Dunno. Skepty-detector twitching.
"Mammoth, wooly rhinos, aurochs, european lions, and giant armadillos share one common feature: they are extinct!"
...and *Awesome!* I mean, seriously, a giant armadillo? You resurrect some of that shit and I'll be on the zoo ticket line before you can say 'Paris Hilton'. The only thing that comes close is a capybara, a giant-ass guinea pig that's so obscure even spell checkers don't recognize it. Google it. You won't be sorry.
Yeah, but your big bonkin' beaver isn't alive any more. I can - and have - actually go to the zoo and see a capybara. And let me tell you, they're just as awesome as I think they are. They're just bad.ass. with a capital bad. Seriously. You cannot find another living animal that's as cool as a capybara.
Aside from my cat.
You are aware that modern elephants did not evolve from mammoths right? To say fauna has changed remarkably in 30,000 years whilst this species of plant has not is fairly ridiculous. The example you give is in fact two distinct species rather than an evolutionary progression of a single species.
> You are aware that modern elephants did not evolve from mammoths right?
good catch.
> To say fauna has changed remarkably in 30,000 years whilst this species of plant has not is fairly ridiculous
It does not strike me as ridiculous. Put it another way, the faunal landscape has changed considerably (so sidestepping the issue of linear descent). True? But the plant is very, very similar to one that is extant. And it's apparently got tiny seeds, which being annuals are probably not evolved for long viability.
And they were preserved in subzero temps (from the link on main page "surrounded by permanently frozen soil ") so they had no liquid water so they survived 30K years dry?
And without germinating, hence without any known energy and mass collection mechanisms (that I'm aware of) they managed to tick over for astonishing period without consuming all their resources and inevitably dying totally?
And they only lasted a mere 16 times longer than the next best survivor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_viable_seed>, you're not suspicious yet? (although I do recall a ~5,000 y/o magnolia seed germinated, so perhaps it's *merely* 6 times older IIRC).
I'd love this to be true but there's this massive reality cliff I can't, quite, tackle yet.
Wikipedia is your friend...
To sum it up, Gray is the less discriminating unit = radiated energy/mass
Sievert is exactly the same thing, as long as the radiation is Gamma rays. Other types of radiation, namely alpha & beta can have significantly worse effects on tissue, and therefore include a coefficient, which compares them to an equivalent dose of Gamma rays.
namely:
Gamma 1x
Beta 2x
Alpha 20x
Thankfully, alpha radiation is generally easy to stop, so unless one gets a source inside his body, (remember Litvinenko in 2006?) one should be relatively safe.
you do exactly that. Polonium has a short 1/2 life and discharges quite a lot of Alpha particles. Go look it up in Google, "polonium in tobacco" :
http://acsa.net/HealthAlert/lungcancer.html
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/sources/tobacco.html
Where does polonium in tobacco come from? Phosphate fertilizers, favored by the tobacco industry, contain Radium and its decay products (including Lead-210 and Polonium-210). When phosphate fertilizer is spread on tobacco fields year after year, the concentration of Lead-210 and Polonium-210 in the soil rises. Unfortunately tobacco absorbs that quite well. Turkish cigarets are probably less dangerous because they can't afford to artificially fertilize.
What does it mean for smokers? They inhale polonium into their lungs and those atoms disintegrate in their lungs with no skin layer to protect them. Tar condensate is probably not the main reason for cancer, rather Polonium.
like that those dastardly climatologists attempt to foist upon us innocents ! This is merely a transparent attempt to convince people that the Siberian permafrost is in the process of melting due to so-called «global warming» ! Good that that we have (at least for the present) the Heartland Institute (http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/02/20/heartland-launches-legal-action-against-climate-change-bloggers-journos/) to fund knights in shining armour to defend our (corporate) interests....
Henri
Then why are the Russian scientists acting so strange now ? Sleeping and waking at exactly the same time, eating meals at the same time, eating the same foods, even if they hated the food before, even breathing and blinking in unison ? It can'tttttttttttttttttttttttt
Soree. Above entirly normul. Nothin to wury about. Ignor prior wurds. Do human things. Seeds harmles. Hav nice dai.
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