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South Pole physician who treated her own breast cancer dies at 57
Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, the physician who treated her own breast cancer while stationed at the South Pole in 1999 has died at age 57.
//////////////////CORPS FCKING US UP
///////////////CEO SPOTTING AND QUESTIONING
////////////////PENITENTIAL SITUPS
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SLF
///////////////////MCHL MOORE-RCST CATCH-AIRLINE 1ST CLASS EXPT
////////////////MSSSPI OTLWD SLVRY IN 1995
/////////////////OUTRAGE FATIGUE
/////////////////A study found no increased fat burning in the 24 hours after exercise vs. after a non-exercise day.
////////////////LV SC=How Earth Got its Oxygen
By Michael Schirber, Astrobiology Magazine
posted: 02 July 2009 09:15 am ET
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Cyanobacteria scum is now considered a nuisance, but these microbes oxygenated our planet over 2 billion years ago. Credit: Washington State Dept. of Health
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The first half of Earth's history was devoid of oxygen, but it was far from lifeless. There is ongoing debate over who the main biological players were in this pre-oxygen world, but researchers are digging up clues in some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on the planet.
Most scientists believe the amount of atmospheric oxygen was insignificant up until about 2.4 billion years ago when the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) occurred. This seemingly sudden jump in oxygen levels was almost certainly due to cyanobacteria – photosynthesizing microbes that exhale oxygen.
When and how the oxygen-exhalers appeared is uncertain, due to the fact that the GOE was a complicated crossroads of global freezing, mineral upheavals and the flourishing of new species.
"We don't know what is cause and what is consequence," says Dominic Papineau of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "Several things happened at the same time, so the story still isn't clear."
To help sort out the geologic plotline, Papineau is studying banded iron formations (BIFs), sedimentary rocks that formed at the bottom of ancient seas.
Papineau's research, which is supported by the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program, is focusing on specific minerals in the BIFs that may be tied to the life (and death) of ancient microbes.
Mining BIFs
The iron minerals within BIFs make up the world's largest source of iron ore. However, these rocks are valuable for more than just making steel. Geologists mine them for their rich historical record that spans from 3.8 billion to 0.8 billion years ago.
The origin of the oldest BIFs is, however, a bit of a mystery. The current consensus is that they required the help of organisms to form, but which ones? These simple single-celled sea creatures didn't leave us any bones or shells to pick through, but Papineau thinks there could still be mineral or geochemical fossils in the BIFs.
He and his colleagues have found carbonaceous material in BIFs associated with apatite, a phosphate mineral that is sometimes tied to biology. The implication is that the BIF builders were entombed in their own handiwork.
To verify this, Papineau's team will be studying the BIF carbon and comparing it to other carbonaceous-mineral associations known to be of non-biological origin, including minerals found in a Martian meteorite.
"This work has the potential to show that microbial biomass was associated and deposited together with the iron minerals," says Andreas Kappler from the University of Tuebingen in Germany, who was not involved in the research.
Early appearance of oxygen-exhalers
It is possible that these microbial BIF builders were cyanobacteria, since the oxygen from these microbes could have caused iron oxidation in the pre-GOE ocean.
But if the cyanobacteria appeared long before the GOE, why did it take several hundreds of millions of years for their oxygen exhalations to build up in the atmosphere?
Papineau and his colleagues may have found part of the answer in a complex interplay of biology and geology.
The early oxygen from cyanobacteria may have been destroyed by a preponderance of methane. The two gases react with each other to produce carbon dioxide and water.
"Oxygen can't accumulate in a methane-rich environment," Papineau says.
The methane is believed to have come from microbes called methanogens that spew out methane as a result of consuming carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
In this scenario, the methanogens and cyanobacteria shared the ancient ocean, but the methanogens had the upper hand – their methane emissions kept oxygen at bay, and also warmed the planet through a greenhouse effect. But then around the time of the GOE, these organisms went into decline, and the resulting methane-depleted atmosphere began to fill with oxygen from cyanobacteria.
No nickel to spare
Connecting the GOE to a methanogen decline has been done before, but there has been little evidence to support this hypothesis. Recently, however, Papineau and his collaborators reported in the journal Nature that the level of nickel in BIFs dropped significantly 2.7 billion years ago.
The implication is that the ocean's nickel abundance fell by 50 percent right before the GOE. This is significant because methanogens rely on nickel: it is a central ingredient to the metabolic enzymes involved in their methane production. When the nickel levels dropped, the methanogens presumably starved.
The nickel-famine scenario makes a pre-GOE evolution of cyanobacteria more plausible, but confirming this will take more evidence.
Kappler believes that studying the origin of the oldest BIFs could tell us when life evolved the ability to breathe out oxygen and thereby change the world forever.
////////////////The Apollo Moon landings have been called the last optimistic act of the twentieth centurY
/////////////////////There is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100% accuracy. First, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 13 billion years.
/////////////////....... often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?
///////////////// often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?
////////////////Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
///////////////////o test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.
For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.
//////////////////health freedom
/////////////////////Bottom line-
1. No Humanity leave aside ethics.
2. Hunger for just nothing but money.
3. No sympathy
NO ONE CARES UNFORTUNATELY back home.
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