Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.
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In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the ‘Californian large’, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.
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While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct. But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
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The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony.
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But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce Monday that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics.
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“We give them the oxygen, we get very pure carbon dioxide, and the output is very cheap ethanol,” said Mr. Woods, who said the target price was $1 a gallon.

Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.
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The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.

Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant.

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s business industry workers are on average 30% more productive than their 1998 counterparts (productivity growth of roughly 2.6% per year).
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The most dramatic gains, however, have occurred within software development.

Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!
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In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains the population as a whole is making.

In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you’ve seen before.

By keeping the clocks at altitude for a weekend we were able to detect and measure the effects of relativistic time dilation compared to atomic clocks we left at home. The amazing thing is that the experiment worked! The predicted and measured effect was just over 20 nanoseconds.
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But the time dilation was somewhere in the 20 to 30 ns range. The number we expected was 23 ns so I’m very pleased with the result.

It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat is the most popular pet in the world. A third of American households have feline members, and more than 600 million cats live among humans worldwide.
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Together the transport of cats to the island and the burial of the human with a cat indicate that people had a special, intentional relationship with cats nearly 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. This locale is consistent with the geographic origin we arrived at through our genetic analyses. It appears, then, that cats were being tamed just as humankind was establishing the first settlements in the part of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.
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Over time, wildcats more tolerant of living in human-dominated environments began to proliferate in villages throughout the Fertile Crescent. Selection in this new niche would have been principally for tameness, but competition among cats would also have continued to influence their evolution and limit how pliant they became. Because these proto–domestic cats were undoubtedly mostly left to fend for themselves, their hunting and scavenging skills remained sharp. Even today most domesticated cats are free agents that can easily survive independently of humans, as evinced by the plethora of feral cats in cities, towns and countrysides the world over.
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So are today’s cats truly domesticated? Well, yes—but perhaps only just. Although they satisfy the criterion of tolerating people, most domestic cats are feral and do not rely on people to feed them or to find them mates. And whereas other domesticates, like dogs, look quite distinct from their wild ancestors, the average domestic cat largely retains the wild body plan. It does exhibit a few morphological differences, however—namely, slightly shorter legs, a smaller brain and, as Charles Darwin noted, a longer intestine, which may have been an adaptation to scavenging kitchen scraps.

Located on an island in the Guadalquivir river, 10 miles (16km) inland from the Atlantic, Veta la Palma produces 1,200 tons of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. Yet unlike most of the world’s fish farms, it does so not by interfering with nature, but by improving upon it. “Veta la Palma raises fish sustainably and promotes the conservation of birdlife at the same time,” says Daniel Lee, best practices director for the U.S.-based Global Aquaculture Alliance. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

With wild fish stocks declining precipitously around the globe, thanks to overfishing and climate change, aquaculture has emerged as perhaps the only viable way to satisfy the world’s appetite for fish fingers and maki rolls. In the next few years, consumption of farm-raised fish will surpass that caught in the wild for the first time, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. But most fish farms — even ones heralded as “sustainable” — create as many problems as they solve, from fecal contamination to the threat that escaped cultivated fish pose to the gene pool of their wild cousins.

Veta la Palama is different. In 1982, the family that owns the Spanish food conglomerate Hisaparroz bought wetlands that had been drained for cattle-farming and reflooded them. “They used the same channels built originally to empty water into the Atlantic,” explains Medialdea. “Just reversed the flow.” Today, that neat little feat of engineering allows the tides to sweep in estuary water, which a pumping station distributes throughout the farm’s 45 ponds. Because it comes directly from the ocean, that water teems with microalgae and tiny translucent shrimp, which provide natural food for the fish that Veta la Palma raises.

By hewing as closely as possible to nature, the farm avoids many of the problems that that plague other aquaculture projects. Low density — roughly 9 lb. (4 kg) of fish to every 35 cu. ft. (1 cu m) of water — helps keep the fish free of parasites (the farm loses only 0.5% of its annual yield to them). And the abundant plant life circling each pond acts as a filter, cleansing the water of nitrogen and phosphates.

Fellows will be selected competitively by each organization. Each fellowship will have a three-year term. When the initiative is at full capacity, HHMI will be supporting 96 postdoctoral fellows at an anticipated annual cost of about $5 million. The program began in 2007 when HHMI announced it would fund up to 16 postdoctoral fellows in HHMI labs each year. There is no requirement that future fellows be appointed in HHMI labs.

We present hybrid images, a technique that produces static images with two interpretations, which change as a function of viewing distance. Hybrid images are based on the multiscale processing of images by the human visual system and are motivated by masking studies in visual perception. These images can be used to create
compelling displays in which the image appears to change as the viewing distance changes. We show that by taking into account perceptual grouping mechanisms it is possible to build compelling hybrid images with stable percepts at each distance.
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Hybrid images, however, contain two coherent global image interpretations, one of which is of the low spatial frequencies, the other of high spatial frequencies.
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For a given distance of viewing, or a given temporal frequency a particular band of spatial frequency dominates visual processing. Visual analysis of the hybrid image still unfolds from global to local perception, but within the selected frequency band, for a given viewing distance, the observer will perceive the global structure of the hybrid first, and take an additional hundred milliseconds to organize the local information into a coherent percept (organization of blobs if the image is viewed at a far distance, or organization of edges for close viewing).

The bubble is the most stable situation for an amount of gas phase in water (liquid phase). A surface tension is associated with the surface between the gas phase and the liquid phase, the surface tension tends to minimize the surface area. This is also described in the section on bubbles in bubble models. Given a volume of gas, the sphere (bubble) shape is the shape that has the smallest surface area with respect to the containing volume.

The situation of a bubble in water is comparable to a balloon. The balloon surface is elastic. The tension of it tries to minimize the surface: if you don’t tie a knot in the balloon after blowing it up, air escapes and the surface of the balloon is minimized to the initial unstretched situation.
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Bubbles do not turn into rings naturally. Something has to be done for that. However, they have long lives and often make it up to the surface. Hence they are stable structures.
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Dolphins create bubble rings by blowing air in a water vortex ring: by flipping a fin they create a vortex ring of water. The then blow air in the ring, which goes to the center of the vortex ring. In the water vortex ring the natural location of the air is in the center of the vortex. When air and water move in a circular path like they do in the vortex ring, air and water are separated due to the centripetal force. Since density of water is larger than air, water moves at the outside, while the air ends up in the middle.

Her doctors, no matter how hard they tried, couldn’t figure out the cause of Jessica’s abdominal distress. Then one day in January, Terry, 18, figured it out on her own.

In her Advanced Placement high school science class, she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue — slides her pathologist had said were completely normal — and spotted an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, a clear indication that she had Crohn’s disease.

“It’s weird I had to solve my own medical problem,” Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. “There were just no answers anywhere. … I was always sick.”
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Crohn’s disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. “Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all,” Siegel said. “I commend Jessica for her meticulous work.”

my advice for budding software engineers is this.

1) Know that you love software before you commit to it. You’ll know when you take your first pseudocode class: a clear division forms between the people who get it and the people who don’t. If you’re in the “don’t” section, choose another career.

2) If you don’t like teaching yourself new things, the skills you learn today will be irrelevant in less than a decade. Accept the commitment to learn throughout your career as a coder, or accept your eventual fate as a has-been.

3) College degrees matter less than hands-on knowledge and time spent at the keyboard. I outpaced my entire class in college because I bought my own programming books that deviated from the coursework, and as a result I learned things they were not teaching in school.
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5) Early on, decide if you want to focus on application development or software engineering. Application development deals with making user interfaces, interfacing different systems together, solving business process problems, and exposing applications to the outside world (i.e. web services and other remoting techniques). Software engineering deals with creation of utilities and processes that support information processing, tends to be more math intensive, requires a lower-level understanding of the trade, and rarely deals with the systems that expose the software to an end user. There are core differences in these two disciplines and 100 shades in between, so figure out what you like.

It’s been a year since Rutgers University launched one of the country’s most ambitious education experiments, a campaign to change the fortunes of urban teenagers
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Adolescents, their parents and public school administrators uniformly praise the Future Scholars Program. Last June, the initiative started 200 disadvantaged seventh-graders along a five-year path of summer workshops, tutoring, social support and cultural outings. Their reward if they keep a B average and meet other requirements: a full ride to Rutgers.

The goal of the Rutgers Future Scholars program is to increase the numbers of academically ambitious high school graduates who come from low-income backgrounds, help them meet the standards to be admitted to colleges and universities, and then provide tuition funding to those who are admitted and choose to attend Rutgers University.

Most students don’t conduct stem-cell research and sit on a national board with a $3 million budget. Tej Nuthulaganti isn’t like most students.

After earning his undergraduate degree in biology from Rutgers-Camden in 2007, Tej is on track to earn his graduate degree in biology this May, thanks to the five-year combined bachelor and master degree program in biology at Rutgers-Camden.
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For the past two years the 2003 graduate of Highland High School has been working with Daniel Shain, an associate professor of biology at Rutgers-Camden and one of the nation’s leading experts on leech research. Nuthulaganti has furthered Shain’s research on identifying key genes that are pivotal in the stem cell formation in the leech, which gives a simple model system for more complicated research. Their research could be beneficial in the early detection of cancerous cells.

In addition to presenting his research at major conferences, including one at the University of California-Berkeley, Nuthulaganti has also made sure that his fellow students who are considering careers in medicine also have a forum to ask questions and think deeply about what kinds of doctors they’d like to be.