[Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
- Doing Their Part By Not Doing Their Part – Science News
- [Ivana] Gudelj and postgraduate student Ayari Fuentes-Hernandez created a mathematical model that explains the puzzling result…
…on their own, enzyme-producing yeast [the "cooperators"] make a lot of invertase and quickly burn through their food supply, limiting growth. By taking up any extra glucose, cheater yeast help the other yeast limit expensive invertase production, which forces more efficient use of sucrose and slower, but steadier, growth.
The model predicts that cheaters can be helpful when three conditions apply: resources are squandered when abundant, organisms can’t predict the amount of cooperation needed and cooperators get a greater share of the resources than cheaters do.
…The new study shows that changing environmental conditions can alter the way organisms interact with each other, perhaps even turning a cheater into a cooperator in certain circumstances…
none
- Russia in color, a century ago
- [The Big Picture]
…extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time – when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948. ..(34 photos total)
- The Hobbit (in approximately 115 seconds)
- [io9 - Cyriaque Lamar]
The Brothers Grim and Grimy, who previously condensed Call of the Cthulhu into two minutes, have now Cliff-Noted J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. They play it pretty fast and loose here. Did you know Gollum was a chupacabra?
- As the arctic melts, archaeologists discover a lost civilization
- [io9 - Annalee Newitz]
As the northern ice sheets retreat, perishable items from millennia-old cultures are emerging. Researchers in Norway have discovered everything from shoes to weapons, giving them a glimpse of everyday life thousands of years ago, before the Vikings.
- Elizabeth Moon: Citizenship
- We have always had trouble with immigrants (the native peoples had the most troubles with immigrants!) Every new group that landed on the shore was greeted with distrust (and often responded badly) until it showed that it was willing and able to contribute something those already here wanted.
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
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