spontaneous parametric down-conversion

if you shine a light through a certain class of crystal. of course you see the light that passes, but if you examine closer you will see this crystal develops a halo around it if you increase the intensity with the whole spectrum of colours present. this is a beautiful phenomenon but it is actually demonstrating a physical effect. a majority of photons pass through but a very small minority undergoes a bizarre transformation. the minority photons 'break down' into two photons. this is not well understood yet but what is formed is a pair of photons. the photon pairs produced in this way are entangled.

substitute a laser 'pump' as your photon source, using Lithium niobate LiNbO3 or barium borate β-BaB2O4 as your crystal lattice, one can produce predictable numbers of entangled pairs of photon. for every 100 billion or so photons that escape unhindered one will 'down-convert into pairs. {meaning they are bumped down in frequency 'colour' that add up to the original frequenc}). these crystals are known as non-linear crystals because the math used to describe their structure contain squared terms.

so... we have a way to predictably produce entangle pairs of photons for research right on our kitchen tables. no need for accelerators or colliders. the pairs produced in way are not only entangled in polarization {spin} but also in direction.

is that not moogly?

¡Mi nuevo automobile!


But seriously. I am sexy all the time, no?

Working for "the man" is hardly the career of choice I'd have given myself had I taken one of those 'where will you be in ten years time?' questionnaires so popular these days. Working for "the man".. especially as "the man" in this case is a most bossy little girl.

No more botanical specimens have been found to work with. Instead, I spent the better part of the day playing plumber, as everything in Silent Hill is in various states of disrepair.Hell, I tell you now, is going crazy trying to fix a toilet. All online help pages say it should be easy, 1-2 hours. The only thing keeping me from ripping the whole thing out and leaving a hole in the floor {hey, they do it in Japan!} is seeing terminology like "spud nut" and "ballcock."

Madre di dios..

The Pitcher plant is a carnivorous plant that I have always been fond of. The sheer design and functions of it are amazing for being just a plant. The new plant has some characteristics in common with it, and that to me is most impressive. By the leaves being in a "pitcher" shape, it can then catch rainwater and hold it inside. The fibers of the modified leaf-stalk contract, thus drawing the end of the leaf down over the opening.

Various small creatures are attracted to the idea of a fresh drink, but once they enter they cannot climb back out and drown. The collected water has anaerobic bacteria that lives in the water that helps the Pitcher plant to digest their prey.

But so much more to worry about than collecting samples of the carnivorous plant, unfortunately..

There was an incident to-day. One of the local girls who had been infected has attacked Señor Snape. We have antidote to give him, but his wound may still become septic. In the meantime the girl is in custody, and we will have to monitor both of them.

Upton, what are you planning? ¿¡Pero qué diantres has hecho!?

Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.

Why, I am given cause to wonder, would anyone want to make zombies in the first place? As weapons go, they are pretty uncontrollable, really unreliable, and had I mentioned contagious? Zombies are quite hard to kill. That said, zombies are dumber than dirt, and usually pretty easy to outrun, assuming you can run somewhere there are not more zombies, of course. While many zombies seem to favour brains, they usually will eat whatever part of your body they can fit in their mouth, and will not really care much if you are still alive while they are doing it. What's really weird? They cooperate with one another. They always seem to form a gang to hunt down any non-zombies in the area without fighting amongst themselves. They must have some kind of secret zombie handshake or pheromone that lets them know who is cool to eat and who isn't. Generally, zombies will stand around until they see prey, at which point they lurch after it, kill it, eat it, and then stand around some more. You can stab them, shoot them, set them on fire.. but inevitably if there are more infected this is bound to lead to more zombies, and the whole problem perpetuating itself time and again.

You have to wonder, really, if there's much of a future as it stands now that the zombies even exist. Their drive to exterminate the human race is relentless and pitiless. The best we can do is slow them down for a while, but eventually I suspect zombies will rule the world.

It sucks, no?

De perdidos, al río.

The bees have been dying. Scientists call it Colony Collapse Disorder, which sounds like something curable with a serotonin uptake inhibitor, no?

The bee colonies look fine from the outside, with bees wandering in and out the hive, but when the hives are opened, most of the bees are gone. Not dead. Gone.

I guess I should consider myself lucky, considering the last few times I got stuck inspecting the bees a number of them got in my suit, and I wound up with more stings than I happen to enjoy receiving- for the record, I don't like being stung at all, so any amount is more than I would like.

Much as I know Ashley's friends aren't into bee husbandry for kicks, I can't help but wonder how much of this is about the mead.

Hijo de mil putas, I hope they get sick sometimes, I honestly do.
( death ~bee~ not proud )

A small purple microbe that spent more than 120,000 years in hibernation deep beneath a Greenland ice sheet is alive again. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University revived the bug in a lab by warming it in an incubator over the course of 11 months, Scientific American reported.
The bacterium, which was found under nearly two miles of ice, began producing fresh colonies when it was reawakened.

Dubbed Herminiimonas glaciei, the bug is ten to 50 times smaller than E. coli and is not harmful to humans, one researcher told the Daily Mail.
Scientists say the discovery suggests that dormant life could be revived from ice particles taken from Mars sometime in the future.
"These extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats," a scientist told the Daily Mail.
~*~


FrsAshl wrote: one of these days these scientists are going to awaken something that will kill us all!! or maybe that will be the new way of population control! i am all for studies in science but why would you want to take the chance of waking something from so many years ago that could possibly have killed us? does the human race mean that little? we may have some evil through out our race but we don't deserve to have our lives possibly put on the line for the sake of their little experiments!

GreyhoundBabe wrote: And they needed to warm it up and let it reproduce why? Maybe this particular species of bacteria is harmless.....maybe when it mixes with other bateria or viruses it becomes lethal..... Are they going to use this new 're-awakening' technique on other, possible unknown and dangerous bacterias they may find? Several years ago, they were diigging up frozen bodies of flu victims from 1918.......they could have unleashed that form of the flu again.... Scientists may have book smarts. but many don't have common sense!!!
~*~


And.. enough from the peanut gallery.

Herminiimonas glaciei, a Gram-negative ultramicrobacterium (designated strain UMB49T) was isolated from a 120 000-year-old, 3042 m deep Greenland glacier ice core using a 0.2 µm filtration enrichment procedure. Phylogenetic analysis of the 16S rRNA gene sequence indicated that this strain belonged to the genus Herminiimonas of the family Oxalobacteraceae of the class Betaproteobacteria.

Cells of strain UMB49T were small thin rods with a mean volume of 0.043 µm3 and possessed 1 or 2 polar and/or 1–3 lateral very long flagella. The original colony pigmentation was brown-purple but after recultivation the colonies were translucent white to tan coloured. Strain UMB49T grew aerobically and under microaerophilic conditions.

Before Agent Mulder gets back and goes to town with this story I thought I'd present the facts first. Facts help you grow big and strong, you see, children.

The last year cycle of the Mayan calendar does indeed end on December 21, 2012, but the reason for this is less mysterious than one might think. First we have to understand how the Mayans kept time, which is largely more complex than our own. They two systems, but the one of importance is known as the "Long Count", which dates using five values:

Kin = 1 day
Uinal = 20 days
Tun = 360 days
Katun = 7200 days
Baktun = 144000 days

A Mayan date like 6.3.3.8.0 would be 6 baktuns, 3 katuns, 3 tuns, 8 uinals and 0 days. A full Mayan cycle is 13 baktuns, which means it would end on 13.0.0.0.0, which would be 1,872,000 days from the initial date of 0.0.0.0.0, or more commonly known as the "Zero Date". Through some crafty archeological work, most experts agree that the Zero Date is August 11th, 3114 C.E. on the Gregorian Calendar.

What's interesting, however, is that the Zero Date was initially of little relevance to the Mayans because their calendar system was based on its end rather than its beginning, meaning that the 2012 date was chosen first, then the cycle was retroactively applied to give the current date.

The Mayans and other Mesoamericans were concerned on many levels the concept of emptiness, death, etc., which may help explain why they were the first to develop the number 0 and have still the only calendar system that incorporates it. Their astronomical observations are often based on the voids between star movements, like the the northern void where Polaris now resides today. 2012 marks the end of another age, but why was this date chosen in particular, if it is to be assumed at all?

The most conventional explanation is that on this date the winter solstice sun aligns through the "dark rift" in the Milky Way galaxy, a rare phenomenon. Why this phenomenon is significant has its origins in Mayan mythology, namely the Sacred Tree, an image heavily referenced in their culture. Astronomically, the Sacred Tree is represented by the intersection of the band of the Milky Way galaxy with the ecliptic of the sun. This intersection is considered the doorway between life and death, among other things.

It must be assumed that the Maya were able to predict the precession of the equinoxes, which is becoming increasingly more accepted amongst archeologists. It's not too surprising, seeing as their calender can be used to predict just about everything else. The relationship between the ecliptic and the Galactic Equator is one heavily referenced in Mayan mythology, so it's not much of a stretch to assume that the Maya would set the end of their calendar to correspond with what they viewed as a significant celestial event.

The band of the sun passing through the dark region in the Milky Way represents a passing through the void, resetting the relationship between the worlds of the living and the dead. What most conspiracy and apocalyptic types fail to understand, however, is that this event doesn't hail the end of the world so much as it is the resetting of the cosmos so that a new age may begin.

All of the above, naturally, is a complete lie.

People are silly creatures. One day they're looking for a guardian angel, the other day they want all angels to die.. why? Well, because ANGELS DESERVE TO DIE, the disgusting self-righteous bastards they are. Autumn, blow me away to the sky, wash me away to the sea, pound me with hail into the ground, or burn me on a cross on the dio de los muertes, I'll take whatever you dish, for I deserve it!

A short lesson of history: animals did not first appear with the Cambrian. The first true animals appeared a short time before the first of the pre-Cambrian ice ages, being descended from one of the eukaryotic slime molds. Like their slime mold ancestors these were very basic worms with no real organs, or even basic structures of any sort. They are called animals because they began as organised individuals, instead of the loose
masses of protiens slime molds begin as. As the eras passed these basal animals changed. Organs appeared as specialized cells developed. As did new structures binding the cells together, imparting new strengths, new capabilities to creatures once restricted to the tube like shape of their forebears.

As time passed their descendents became more complex. Development changed, leading to new phyla. Molluscs, crustaceans, chordates among numerous others. The tight and violent environment they were forced to live in also gave rise to structures the cnidarians could not develop, that of hard parts. Skeletons and plates in other words.

Molluscs developed shells, crustaceans an exoskeleton. While among the chordates appeared the very beginnings of what would later become the vertebrate skeleton.

And in all this, what? The gods had their moment where they had to touch down in all this mess, or so this religion, all religions, have us know. Why would they come to this barren earth? Watching the floor show? A rave review of the primordial soup, what, what? I guess just as I do not understand Umbrella's insidious need to play at being God, I also do not understand this god, the one right here, who we are told will eat this small town, this Silent Hill, whole? and for what? Sense is what I'm seeking here, I guess, I am a scientist. It just seems silly, and no reason to die, all this..

You know that you've been thinking too much about paleontology when you realize that most cladistic terminology could make decent band names. For example: Basal Tetanurae, Tiktaalik, crown clade... yeah.

Anyway. We're going to need more vaccine. That is all.

Obviously the primary purpose for all biotics is their own sustenance, but, as is incident to their living, they are chemically signaling their way through all of existence. The common genetic markers shared by all lifeforms are known to enable the formation of symbiotic relations {communications/cooperation}. Biologists have discovered several examples of symbiotic relations that humans share with micro-organisms. Our conditioned habits and logics must induce the same appetites for our unicellular dependents. If our cells are capable of translating amino and protein based signaling from micro-organisms, what are the limits for the expression of these processes by us as human amplifiers... And further, to what extent have the reciprocators of historic human conditioning and genetic modifications enabled, at minimum, subconscious responses to other amplifiers?

I guess what I am trying to say is right now we are going to try negotiating with the Umbrella people once more. Because the alternative may be too dreadful to contemplate, what with some sort of armaggedon coming or what have you.

Last thing we'd need is more zombies on top of that.

¿¿¿quién es ese hombre???

Quiere cogerlo todo, atraparlo todo.No sabe renunciar a nada. Cambia de camino cada día por miedo a perder el bueno.
With friends like these, I sure don't need any enemies right now.

The technical meaning of the Spanish verb entregar is "to deliver, to surrender, to give up" and a host of similar meanings. You can entregar a package, your homework, or your virginity. Likewise tho, in dance, it's that
moment where everything comes together, the music, your motion, your bodies.

We had one of those moments,I think, dodging the monsters and dodging the- I
don't know what those loco bastards were using as weapons, but there were flashes of light.

On a more speculative note, I thought to myself: psychology would be the perfect major for a zombie college student.

"So, what are you studying?"
"BRAAAAINS"

"What research topics are you looking at this year?"
"BRAAAAAINS"


IN other news, the lab has a sudden problem with protein gels. We've had to,
since we came here, pour our own (large size, using glass plates). Suddenly we have some sort of hydrophobic film? residual acrylamide? on the glass plates, and it makes parts of the gels stick fast to the glass.


( addendum )

There is a whole school of anthroposophical medicine, of which I am largely ignorant. I know a couple of key points, however, and one of those is the idea that fever is one of the body's main ways of purging itself of unwanted substances, i.e. viruses and bacteria. People who subscribe to this theory recommend not suppressing a fever with drugs, but rather we should simply provide supportive care and allow the fever to run its course.

Well and good when such fevers don't lead to convulsions, death, and zombification, I guess.

And the world expands to take in new effects and those affected.

I am gainfully employed. It's true. I promise. Not getting paid, granted, but doing some good in these labs we've breached.
Worse yet, I seem to both like it and be good at it.
This epidemic is likely to last for a while and I've had prior experience, you could say.

These poor Silent Hill kids. So many of them, green. Some are poised to make irrevocable changes in their lives. Irrevocable not because they can't return to the youthful beliefs that they held before, or the openess and insouciance of being young, but because their priorities are about to change.

Sometimes, I still have the worst kinds of dreams. I feel there is some kind of lesson in that.

Still.I want to laugh harder, smile wider, and grieve less, because the more I try to impress people with a razor sharp wit and a manly deportment, the more stupid I look. The more I try the less I am. The more I relax, the more relaxed others are around me.

An observation: With kinases (a type of enzyme that phosphorylates stuff), it's common to name the kinase by taking the first three letters of the substrate (the chemical it's acting on) then adding "K" on the end. So....you have "fucose" (a sugar) as your substrate, you follow the above formula, and what do you get?

Yes, I suppose my sense of humour could use some work.

---

You Are a Maze

You can be confusing, tiring, and deceptive. But at the end of it all, you're sweet. You believe there are many ways to get to an answer... And you are willing to explore every single one of them!

In honor of spring, I bring you a fact about snowflakes. We all know that, in order for snowflakes to form, there must be a particle in the atmosphere for those water molecules to stick to. When I was learning about precipitation in school those particles were always identified as "dust". But guess what, germophobes: those particles are often bacteria! The most common type of bacteria to serve this function is Pseudomonas syringae, which are the same little buggers that I play with when I worked at the lab at university when I learned all this biochemistry that makes me such a geek.. Syringae, when serving as the nucleus for an ice crystal, can allow the water to enter a solid state at a temperature higher than the normal freezing point. This not only makes them great for making snowflakes; it also makes them dangerous for crops infected by the bacteria, because the infected plants will frost very easily.

There you go. You have learned something today.

In organic chemistry, a heterocycle is any ring molecule containing one or more atoms other than carbon. Adenine (mentioned in a previous post) is quite a good example of a heterocycle.

A lot of these have been searched for in interstellar space, including furan, pyrrole and imidazole. Furan is particularly popular as a target by astrobiologists, due to it's structural similarity to ribose and deoxyribose (better known as the backbone for DNA molecules). Unfortunately, no concrete evidence has been found for any of them. This is strange, because three chemicals found commonly in interstellar space (acetylene, hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide) all contain an isoelectronic triple bond. Theoretically, they should react in very similar ways such that. In concept then, if PAHs are common in the universe, heterocyclic aromatic compounds should also be. Seemingly, unless we're all missing something, they aren't.

Although it's probably a painfully obvious answer (such as a matter of enthalpy or reaction kinetics), I can't help but wonder why.

One man on the network here writes a good deal about aliens. Perhaps that is it? These chemicals may be the most sought after treasures out there.

Or maybe therein lies the key lost ingredient. To what? To whatever you like- the vaccine we all wish Dr.Pierce would hurry up and find. The elixir of life. The recipe for the best churros this side of the border.

I've always been one who cares more about the tiniest of things rather than the big ones; and that hasn't changed. It's my greatest flaw, and the source of my cruellest sins.

I could have stopped what happened, I know I could have. But as said, I was too fasinated by the process to consider the outcome, too taken in by the work to notice the chaos it was giving birth to.

Ashley told me she can't understand all of my entries; "I never realised how scientific you were!" But then, when she met me it was all adventure and cold blood, biohazards and bullets.

You cannot understand me?! If you cannot take time to read it, imagine me, taking time to write it! English is not even my first language, chica.

Shake the dust off that mind of yours, and I will be less inclined to notice your ballistics foremost.

Besides. This- besides and above shooting ganados- is what I know. You don't want to get me started talking on my opinions or feelings like some of these fellows do.

You won't like what I write.

Ashley! Where you are staying, they have a functional television?

I think we need to talk about something. It is urgent.

A favorite argument of creationists against the abiotic origin of life is the unlikelyness of complex biomolecules assembling at random out of base materials. They frequently focus on proteins and give the example of a 100 amino acid protein. They way they present it, you have 100 amino acids that have to assemble in exactly the right manner to form this protein. Since there are 20 natural amino acids (sort of) that give 20^100 possible combinations. That's 1.26 * 1 with a hundred and thirty zeros behind it. 1.26E130 is a lot of combinations. If you tried one combination per second, you'd be checking them for about 4000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years. (4*10^123.) Needless to say, this would be a grand blow against the argument for abiotic genesis of life. Except for the false premise.

( For each protein, there is only one set of amino acids that works. )

When I first observed the behaviour of a subject infected with Las Plagas, I was too frightened to do anything but watch. The sheer body horror of seeing another being move like that.. it compelled me to come back and study further. Repulsed and fasinated at the same time.

After my first encounter I found that my lunch tasted better than food has ever tasted before, and that I enjoyed a walk in the sun moreso than I had ever previously. To know that such horror could live and yet I could still walk in the normal world, touch, feel, taste the regular things not yet affected by this freak of nature. It was profound.

Science has never for me proved an absence of God, or the primordial first thinker. If anything, it has all but confirmed it to me.

Who else could allow something so perfectly parasitic grow and develop to the form it had?

This I call mimesis, but call it what you will; it stops us in our tracks with the sheer brutality and awe-inspiration as mighty magics come alive through the transfigurment of death illuminating them.

The random objects-or in this case my observance of the subjects and then, later, my own perseptions of the 'normal' world again- are neither talismans of any sort, nor symbolic of anything greater. They simply are in the moment of being observed from with-out, just things crisscrossing back and forth between the animate and the ordinary, with the observer as the crux of mediation.

This sort of breathless witnessing is like a question that only leads to other questions- How is it that the distinction between subject and object, between me and things, is so crucially dependent on life and death? Why is death the harbinger and index of the thing-world, and how can it be that the awareness of death awakens life in things?

I admit it, in my heart of hearts- by doing the work given me I too had become a monster of sorts. I was frightened by the magnitude of it, aware of the underlying sense of wrong. But I was powerless to look away, stop, or help anyone placed in the line of fire, because I simply had to see what would happen next.

Like children coming across a corpse full of maggots, or armed with a magnifying glass and some hapless something to bully. I had to know what we were capable of producing.

But like the old tale of Pandora, once you open that box you cannot get it back- innocense lost.

By the time I realised Lord Saddler too had been infected by the parasite and that his most recent surge of religious zeal was not epiphany but the madness of a dying brain reeling under the invasive cancer of the plagas hivemind, it was too late. Plans were made to subjugate the entire village and infect them, myself and the other researchers included.

My work on a means to destroy the parasite came almost too late. I was able to devise a means of destroying the eggs with high exposure to gamma radiation, and it was a most terrible pain, I can tell you. But I stopped the egg from hatching that was planted in my body. I attempted to steal what research I could before I fled that place. As for the rest..

Ashley would know that tale. This is where you come in, bonita con las grande cojones, no? ;-)

For your reference and in regards to transmittable illnesses that can or may end in necrosis. One in a series.


Food poisoning and anthrax are caused by bacterium in the genus Bacillus. They are gram positive rods that make spores and have exotoxins. In the lecture where I was taught of it there was mention of its marshmallowy capsule containing d-glutamate and that being unusual. The capsule and the exotoxin are plasmid encoded, and this organism is also unique in that it has two plamids.

Bacilli are facultative aerobes--meaning they use oxygen as the final electron acceptor in their electron transport chain, and have catalase and superoxide dismutase. But they can grow in the absence of oxygen by fermenting for energy. The two medically important species of Baccilus are cereus and anthrasis.

B. cereus causes food poisoning similar to that caused by Staphylococcus aureus and produces watery nonbloody diarrhea 6-18 hours after ingesting the poison, or a faster boot out the top end, or both. Bacillus cereus really likes to grow in cooked white rice.
( How are bacteria unlike eukaryotes? Answer behind cut )