Introduction

Kichi and Kika, best friends and cousins, have started this blog as a means to discuss new discoveries we make in any subject area that catches our attention. As such, we simply serve as observers of the unveiling news, students of flashing pieces of knowledge, hobbyists at the most.

At the top of this page, the science and humanities sections can be accessed. This page, though, will work as a main page for updates on both sections and for occasional posts of quotes, quick facts through twitter, or curious news.

The road to immortality... Why lobsters never age.

Written by Matthew Koh for Chimes, at Calvin College

September 17, 2010 - Volume 105, Issue 3

Many have spent their whole lives searching for the secret to eternal youth, travelling far and wide and wasting their fortunes — all in vain. In modern times, that mad quest has been replaced by a slightly more attainable goal: to slow, if not stop, time’s marking of flesh by means of pills, superstition and surgery. Unfortunately, as Cher and Dolly Parton bear unwitting witness, the key word in the above sentence is “slightly.”

What would these people have done if they realized their holy grails were right beneath their noses?

Or more appropriately, on their plates.

The key to eternal youth is held by none other than the common lobster. Yes, the lobster: red-shelled, big-clawed and six-legged. The same animal whose presence on the menu always drew furtive glances from you, which always ended in disappointment, either because you couldn’t buy such a dish or you did and found it less than valuable. Look into their beady eyes and know the secrets of immortality.

Lobsters never age, they just grow. Their bodies don’t become frailer in time, they don’t need more and more medicine to keep their hearts going and they don’t even lose their sexual potency. In fact, the older a lobster, the more fertile it becomes.

The secret to these oceanic Dorian Grays is an enzyme by the name of telomerase. Telomerase affects telomeres, which are found on the end of all chromosomes and protect these chromosomes from deterioration. However, each time a cell divides, its telomeres are shortened. Eventually, the telomeres become too short to protect the chromosomes and cells begin to lose their ability to divide (known as the Hayflick Limit).

Telomerase acts as a sort of add-on, restoring length to telomeres and thus enabling them to continue protecting the cell. In most animals (including humans), telomerase production rapidly declines with age — hence, the whole dying part.

Lobsters, however, don’t stop producing telomerase; in fact, while most animals show higher levels of telomerase in certain areas of their bodies, lobsters have the enzyme in abundance throughout their body. Couple that with the fact that lobsters shed and recreate their exoskeletons, and there’s nothing to stop a lobster from growing indefinitely.

Except for things eating them, which tends to happen a lot. In fact, after a certain point, the larger a lobster grows the harder it is for the creature to stay alive, since the places it hides from predators become increasingly inaccessible the bigger the lobster gets.

Protected, lobsters have been proven to be incredibly long lived. January of 2009, a New York restaurant freed an allegedly 140-year-old lobster that weighed in at a whopping 20 lbs (which essentially means “Giant George” — as he was affectionately known — was given a death sentence). Currently, Boston University professor Jelle Atema is keeping a lobster to see how big it can grow.

I can hear some of your minds whirring. You’re thinking: “I’m not in any danger of being eaten, so give me some of that lobster juice.” Unfortunately (or maybe not), the lobster path to immortality is strictly inaccessible for humans. It turns out cell deterioration in the human body is a relatively good thing. In humans, cells that surpass the Hayflick Limit tend to become cancerous. So where lobsters get eaten from the outside, we’d be devoured from within.

There you have it. The secret to immortality is useless for humans. If you’re feeling particularly vengeful, go buy a lobster dinner and console yourself with the thought that even though you’ll never live forever, neither will that particular lobster. Or you might go to an aquarium and gaze upon this red crustacean with a little bit more awe. Or you could do what I do, which is to buy a lobster, sit with it in public places, stroke its shell and whisper, “Soon ... soon, my precious.”

Whatever you do, I hope a little bit of your mind was blown by the immortal lobster.

©2007 All Rights Reserved. Calvin College Chimes.

English Pronunciation

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

(This is not my poem!)

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Beautiful Illustrations

Aquí coloco algunas ilustraciones que me gustaron bastante, tienen una inocencia y una sutileza que me cautivo, espero sea de su agrado.

~
Here I place a few pictures that caught my eye, they have an innocence and a sense of subtlety that captivated me, I hope you enjoy it.

Chinese villagers 'descended from Roman soldiers'

Genetic testing of villagers in a remote part of China has shown that nearly two thirds of their DNA is of Caucasian origin, lending support to the theory that they may be descended from a 'lost legion' of Roman soldiers.

Cai Junnian's green eyes give a hint he may be a descendant of Roman mercenaries who allegedly fought the Han Chinese 2,000 years ago Photo: NATALIE BEHRING

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By Nick Squires in Rome 9:00PM GMT 23 Nov 2010

Tests found that the DNA of some villagers in Liqian, on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in north-western China, was 56 per cent Caucasian in origin.

Many of the villagers have blue or green eyes, long noses and even fair hair, prompting speculation that they have European blood.

A local man, Cai Junnian, is nicknamed by his friends and relatives Cai Luoma, or Cai the Roman, and is one of many villagers convinced that he is descended from the lost legion.

Archeologists plan to conduct digs in the region, along the ancient Silk Route, to search for remains of forts or other structures built by the fabled army.

"We hope to prove the legend by digging and discovering more evidence of China's early contacts with the Roman Empire," Yuan Honggeng, the head of a newly-established Italian Studies Centre at Lanzhou University in Gansu province, told the China Daily newspaper.

The genetic tests have leant weight to the theory that Roman legionaries settled in the area in the first century BC after fleeing a disastrous battle.

The clash took place in 53BC between an army led by Marcus Crassus, a Roman general, and a larger force of Parthians, from what is now Iran, bringing to an abrupt halt the Roman Empire's eastwards expansion.

Thousands of Romans were slaughtered and Crassus himself was beheaded, but some legionaries were said to have escaped the fighting and marched east to elude the enemy.

They supposedly fought as mercenaries in a war between the Huns and the Chinese in 36BC – Chinese chroniclers refer to the capture of a "fish-scale formation" of troops, a possible reference to the "tortoise" phalanx formation perfected by legionnaries. The wandering Roman soldiers are thought to have been released and to have settled on the steppes of western China.

The theory was first put forward in the 1950s by Homer Dubs, a professor of Chinese history at Oxford University.

The Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent under the Emperor Trajan in the 2nd century AD, just as the Han empire was beginning to decline.

Most historians believe that the two empires had only indirect contact, as silk and spices were traded along the Silk Road through merchants in exchange for Roman goods such as glassware.

But some experts believe they could instead be descended from the armies of Huns that marauded through central Asia, which included soldiers of Caucasian origin.

Maurizio Bettini, a classicist and anthropologist from Siena University, dismissed the theory as "a fairy tale".

"For it to be indisputable, one would need to find items such as Roman money or weapons that were typical of Roman legionaries," he told La Repubblica. "Without proof of this kind, the story of the lost legions is just a legend.

Nikon's Small World Photomicrography Competition

Possibly one of my favorite photography contests, Nikon's Small World Photomicrography Competition rewards the world's best photomicrographers who make critically important scientific contributions to life sciences, bio-research and materials science.

This year's winner, awarded last month, was Jonas King with an image of an Anopheles gambiae (mosquito) heart at 100x magnification (above). Essential in the ongoing research of malaria, an infectious disease causing an estimated 1.5-2.5 million annual deaths [1] is the study of its carriers, mosquitoes, and how they carry and transmit disease and other pathogens. The image in itself provides insight into how mosquitoes move blood to all regions of their bodies.

[1] source: The CIA World Factbook

The world's 25 greatest modern buildings

source: CNNGo.com (by Winnie So)

A building buff and an architect choose the most exceptional edifices from the past century

The compilation aims at telling the "story of Modernism's influences on the ways in which we experience the space around us."

Criteria:
Time period:

Last 100 years. No building completed earlier than 1910.
Style:

Modern
Definition of architecture:

In its most minimal form, it provides shelter.

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” — Daniel Boorstin

The Scale of the Universe

I thought this was a nice reference tool x3



A flash animation on newgrounds.com:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347

Lady Ilustrators from Japan

I came across some really interesting pictures, all of them made by female ilustrators from Japan, and wanted to share them:

by: Zain7


by: Aya Kato


by: Geco Hirasawa

Logical Paradoxes

Achilles and the Tortoise

Achilles and the Tortoise is one of Zeno’s paradoxes. It appears to demonstrate that even the fastest of runners, Achilles, could not catch the slowest of creatures, the tortoise, if the tortoise were given a head start.

To get from one place to another takes time. If the distance between the two is very small, or the speed of travel is very fast, then it may take a very short amount of time, but it will take some time nevertheless. It is impossible to move from one point to another instantaneously.

To catch someone, you need to cross the distance between you and them, you need to move from where you are to where they are. If there is any distance between you at all, then this will take time.

Suppose that the person that you are trying to catch is moving away from you, then in the time that it takes you to get from where you are to where they are, they will have moved on. If you begin at point A, and they begin at point B, then by the time you reach point B they will be at point C. The person that you are trying to catch will no longer be at the point that you have reached.

To catch them, then, you will need to reach the point that they are now at, you will have to get from point B to point C. Doing so, though, will again take time. Point C is at a distance from point B, and so by the time you have reached point C, your target will have reached point D. This process can be repeated ad infinitum, without you ever catching your target.

Zeno illustrated this with the example of Achilles and the tortoise. If, in a race, the tortoise, who moves slowly, is given a head-start on Achilles, then no matter how quickly Achilles runs he will never catch the tortoise.

The Paradox of the Stone

God is all-powerful, or as theologians put it, “omnipotent”; there is nothing that he cannot do. This is part of the definition of “God”.

So can God create a stone that is so heavy that he cannot lift it? Either he can or he can’t.

If God can’t, then he isn’t all-powerful. If God can’t create a stone that he can’t lift, then there is something that he can’t do: create the stone.

If God can create a stone that is so heavy that he can’t lift it, though, then he also isn’t all-powerful. If God can create a stone that is so heavy that he can’t lift it, then there’s something that he can’t do: lift that stone.

There is, therefore, no way of answering the question above that preserves God’s omnipotence. If there is an omnipotent God, then he neither can nor can’t create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it. This, though, is absurd; he must be either able or unable to perform this feat.

This is the paradox of omnipotence. Many critics of theism have used it to argue that the concept of omnipotence is self-contradictory, that there can be no omnipotent being, and so that God cannot exist.

2012

I think that a bit of humor has never hurt anyone, have a nice day =)

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci
~
"El más noble placer es la alegría de comprender." - Leonardo da Vinci

Family Accidentally Discover Church Under Home

An inquisitive family have uncovered a bizarre church which has been hidden under their Victorian home in Shropshire for 100 years.

The Farla family made the discovery while investigating what was under a metre-long rectangle metal grid in their hallway.

The hole under the grid was just big enough for son Gareth, 20, to squeeze down and see what was under their living room.

And he couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the dark chapel complete with a large wooden cross on the floor.

But that was nothing compared the the shock the rest of the family got when he followed a staircase in the chapel and came out of a cupboard in the dining room.

There was also large chest which was filled with old newspapers dating back to the early 1900's and old wine and sherry bottles.

Speaking of the find Matthew Lathan, who also managed to squeeze down, said: "We only discovered it because we were drunkenly fooling around and decided to have a look at what was beneath the grid - It was amazing.

"The first thing we came across in the middle of the basement was an old, open chest and in it were old newspapers and bottles dating back to the 1930s.

"There were also some sort of brick seats around the walls which looked like something you might find in a church."

It's thought the room dates back to the 1700s and could have been used as a clandestine Catholic church.

This is what I consider a personal paradise =)
~
Esto es lo que yo considero un paraíso personal =)

News: Australian physicist spots dictionary error

Source: Yahoo! News

University of Queensland academic Stephen Hughes found that entries for the word 'siphon' incorrectly said atmospheric pressure is the force that allows the device to move liquids from one place to another, having first spotted the error in the Oxford English Dictionary last year.

"It is gravity that moves the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer arm pulling the water up the shorter arm," he said.

"An extensive check of online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force in a siphon," he added.

He said a spokeswoman for the Oxford English Dictionary had told him he was the first person to question said definition, which dated from 1911 and had been written by non-scientists. She said his views would be taken into account as they updated the entire reference book, (which, according to their website, is now up to letter R).

A siphon is a tube -- often u- or v-shaped -- that is used to move liquids from one container to another. It is commonly used to drain fish tanks or petrol tanks.

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Discussion:

At times I'd be reading over some entries in the dictionary and pondered about the text's accuracy... I mean, have you ever wondered whether there'd be errors, and how many could there be, in a reference text of such magnitude? (And the idea that they could've remained unnoticed for so long o.o)

Even with constant revisions through the years, there's still room for human error... (Especially when it comes to scientific misconceptions).