I Will Never Complain About Traffic Again – Wait, That’s Not True…

Beijing currently has cars stuck on stretches of highway for the ninth day in a row.

According the Wired.Com blog, Autotopia:

“Whatever traffic hell you endured getting to work this morning is nothing compared to what’s happening in Beijing, where a mammoth traffic jam is entering its ninth day with no relief in sight.

Thousands of trucks have jammed National Expressway 110 since Aug. 14, creating a traffic jam stretching 100 kilometers. Authorities attribute the mess to highway construction exacerbated by accidents and breakdowns. Police are trying to keep tempers from flaring in what is the second massive jam to tie up the highway in the past month.”

Wonder if this is a valid excuse for missing work for a couple weeks…

Reposted From Wired.com: “Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA”

The below posted is content copied directly from this recent and fasincating post on wired.com that was too fascinating not to share:

By Bryan Gardiner March 22, 2010  |12:00 pm  |Wired April 2010

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher
Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply
Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem
After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA
Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish.

Blecccchhh – New Spider Species Discovered – and It’s Big

I should like spiders, as a self-respecting biologist, I should. But, there are so many legs and crunchy body parts… *shudder* But we tend to have an understanding, you and I.  You pretend there aren’t hundreds to thousands  or so of you per sq meter (this better be pertaining to the good ole outdoors!), and I will pretend I have never heard that fact carelessly tossed around often and somehow involved with the question some smart-ass kid always needs to ask: “How many spiders do we swallow in  our sleep?”

So, now that I’ve managed to scare away the faint of heart, time to mention a new species of spider recently discovered in the Middle East. According to the Wired.com article:

“Scientists have unearthed a completely new species of spider hiding in sand dunes on the Israel-Jordan border.

With a legspan that stretches 5.5 inches, the spider, called Cerbalus aravensis, is the biggest of its type in the Middle East. “It is rare to find a new species of spider — at least around this part of the world — which is so big,” said biologist Uri Shanas of the University of Haifa-Oranim in Israel, who discovered the arachnid.

Most of Cerbalus aravensis’s habits remain a mystery, but the researchers say it is nocturnal and most active during the blazing summer heat. The spider lives in an underground den, hidden by a door that swings upwards to welcome unsuspecting prey like lizards and insects. To make the camouflage door, the spider patches together bits of sand.

The researchers believe the spider uses a “sit-and-wait” hunting strategy, biding its time till prey approach, Shanas said.

Unfortunately, the spider’s habitat is under immediate threat, he said. The Israeli government recently approved mining operations in the region, which could wipe out the creature.”

One sharp commenter did note however, that the feature says the spider is both nocturnal AND active during the blazing summer heat. I sense a spell of fact checking coming on…