So it appears that the first lab-grown tissue transplant made from a person’s own stem-cells has been completed!
Of course you’ll notice that it didn’t take place in the USA, nor does it look like our scientists and doctors had anything to do with it whatsoever. Why is that? Oh yeah! I remember! Because it was outlawed! Oh well…it is nice to know that there are still people in the world who are interested in progress. 
So it appears that British scientists found the fossilized claw for a giant sea scorpion in some 390 million year old rocks. And by giant I mean eight feet long (the whole bug…not the claw). I find it simply amazing the things we manage to dig up. A lot of people are more interested in dinosaurs, but personally giant insects interest me a lot more since the little ones we have today are so fascinating. This one, though, was a lot bigger than any of the giant roach or millipede fossils I’ve seen pictures of.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m very glad we don’t have too many of the big ones still running around. I guess those African millipedes I see from time to time at the pet store are the biggest ones next to full-sized mantises. Those are plenty big enough for my taste. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to spray for cat sized roaches, much less ones that are bigger than I am.
Call me a freak, but I’ve always been fascinated by complex natural ice formations. I think I got my start on it as a child watching the frost form on the storm windows of my house. There’s just something cool about how ice freezes forming complex crystal lattice structures. Even today I marvel at the ice found in my home town, Buffalo NY, during the winter. Watching how the water travels and the shapes change during the spring thaw is far more interesting to me than the hope that things will warm up.
But that’s just me, I guess.
I was reminded of this while poking through CNN.com this morning. They have a cool story about the antarctic ice melt during 2005:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.
A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze — the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said.
Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, where ice sheets have been breaking apart.
Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado in Boulder measured snowfall accumulation and melt in Antarctica from July 1999 through July 2005.
They found evidence of melting in several areas, including high elevations and far inland in January of 2005, when temperatures got as high as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).
“Increases in snowmelt, such as this in 2005, definitely could have an impact on larger scale melting of Antarctica’s ice sheets if they were severe or sustained over time,” Steffen said in a statement.
“Water from melted snow can penetrate into ice sheets through cracks and narrow, tubular glacial shafts called moulins,” Steffen added.
“If sufficient melt water is available, it may reach the bottom of the ice sheet. This water can lubricate the underside of the ice sheet at the bedrock, causing the ice mass to move toward the ocean faster, increasing sea level.”
I’ve never really seen much on the structures that lie beneath the poles, but I can just imagine how amazing they must look. I haven’t taken any serious study of it, but doing a quick check on moulins on wikipedia is pretty cool. After all, it makes sense that a glacier would have some way of transporting the water formed on top by the sunlight and warm air to the structures underneath since it usually isn’t a cohesive solid block of ice. I guess you’d get a similar effect by dripping water on a regular block of ice…eventually it would melt downward into a hole in the bottom.
Hmmm…I’ll have to try that. 
I do my best to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of Science. I guess it is part of that undying need somewhere within my psyche to understand everything that’s going on around me. Hence my studies in philosophy.
Thinking about things lately I’m finding that I still have a big hole in my understanding of modern physics: indeterminism. It isn’t that I don’t have any actual grasp on what it is all about. The easiest example given is that of radioactive decay, and honestly it makes a lot of sense. That out of any mass of decaying material about half of it will decay in a given period of time known as its half life is easy enough for me to understand. What I’m having issues with is thinking of one particular atom in an unstable state that is going to decay. I want to know of something in particular that actually causes the decay to happen. I know that it isn’t really there, but I still don’t quite grok how that is the case.
I know why people have a difficulty with it in general. We see ourselves as agents of determinism: we perform actions that are the causes to effects we see all of the time. If something happens that isn’t expected we understand that we simply have to come upon a better understanding of the cause and effect relationship involved. Even if we understand the probabilistic nature of things underneath the hood of the Universe, our regular interaction with the world is deterministic. We do things, we expect results. Cause and effect.
So all said I understand that it is a hole in my thinking, but it drives me crazy knowing that it is there and not being particularly able to do anything about it. I know there’s a solution there, but I haven’t found the trigger in my head to put it all together. Hopefully my good friend John, the physicist, stops by town before too long to lend me a hand with that one. His recommendation to me to read the book on Quantum Electrodynamics (or was that Thermodynamics?) really helped me in understanding the experimental evidence behind quantum mechanics. I’ll have to check my shelf when I get home to get a good link for the book for anyone interested in it.