You thought elections season was over didn’t you? Well…it is for us, but studies have shown that fish seem to “elect” their leaders like we do. They don’t go to a voting center and mark a ballot, but they do tend to vote for the one that looks the best for their leader.

“It turned out that stickleback fish preferred to follow larger over smaller leaders,” said Ashley Ward of Sydney University. “Not only that, but they also preferred fat over thin, healthy over ill, and so on. The part that really caught our eye was that these preferences grew as the group size increased, through some kind of positive social feedback mechanism.”

“Their consensus arises through a simple rule,” said David Sumpter of Uppsala University. “Some fish spot the best choice early on, although others may make a mistake and go the wrong way. The remaining fish assess how many have gone in particular directions. If the number going in one direction outweighs those going the other way, then the undecided fish follow in the direction of the majority.”

This is an interesting study really…a lot of the conclusions are based on something theorized about in the 1700’s. The test for whether a group is reaching its decisions on the basis of consensus originated with the French philosopher Condorcet in the 18th century, Sumpter said. Condorcet justified the jury system by showing that the probability that a majority of independent-minded individuals is correct in a decision between “guilty” and “not guilty” increases with group size.

Now, the researchers find, the same is true in schools of stickleback fish making the decision about which leader to follow. Ward presented groups of three-spined sticklebacks with two fish replicas differing in characteristics, including size, fatness, shade, and spottiness, that reflect something about the health or fitness of the individual. For instance, a plump belly can indicate success in food gathering, while spots may indicate a parasitic infection.

He found that in the majority of trials, as the group size increased, they made more accurate decisions on who should be their leader. This wasn’t the same for all, however. In a substantial minority of trials, all or all but one of the fish followed the less attractive leader which did not follow Condorcet’s philosophical ideal.

“Our results show rather that submission to peers and occasional cascades of incorrect decisions can be explained as a by-product of what is usually accurate consensus decision-making,” the researchers wrote. Indeed, Sumpter said, humans make the same types of errors.

“A good example here is the stock exchange,” he said. “Just now there is a lot of discussion about traders unable to make their own assessment and panic selling because others are selling. In these instances, this behavior seems somewhat irrational. But in lots of other scenarios, such behavior is perfectly rational. Watching others and copying them if enough individuals seem to be doing the same thing is generally a good behavioral strategy.”

I’ve got my money on that fish you hang on the wall that sings songs in las vegas this year. I figure that he still has the crowd appeal we are all looking for ;).

A new study may give children with heart defects perfectly-matched new heart valves built using stem cells from their umbilical cord blood, according to research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2008. How awesome is that?

Here’s a bit of background on the study from Science Daily:

When infants are born with malfunctioning heart valves that can’t be surgically repaired, they rely on replacements from animal tissue, compatible human organ donations or artificial materials. These replacements are lifesaving, but don’t grow and change shape as a child develops; so two or more surgeries may be needed to replace outgrown valves. The animal tissue may also stiffen over time as well and be less durable than a normal human valve. With artificial valves, children also must be treated with blood thinners.

“In our concept, if prenatal testing shows a heart defect, you could collect blood from the umbilical cord at birth, harvest the stem cells, and fabricate a heart valve that is ready when the baby needs it,” said Ralf Sodian, M.D., lead author of the study and a cardiac surgeon at the University Hospital of Munich.

It is just nice to see these studies show some remarkable results. Voters have been kind of split in passing the use of embryonic stem-cell use, but Michigan passed a proposal this past week that will allow it by a narrow margin. More and more people are understanding what this study can do for us, and our kids.

When you are on the net taking a look at some new tape drives take some time to read a little about stem-cell research and see what all the fuss is about.

Talk about an odd study. If you were to get your passport stamped for Sweden recently you may have seen a study about how moving the clock ahead, or back has a slight effect on the risk of hear attack.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have examined how the incidence of myocardial infarction in Sweden has changed with the summer and winter clock-shifts since 1987.

When you move the clock forward your risk is higher according to the study in the week after the change. When the clocks are moved back, as in the Fall, the risk is slightly less.

Of course you have to take a study such as this with a grain of salt IMO. The study has been done over a 20 year period. Are we to assume this is valid? In the course of time where Daylight Savings Time has existed isn’t it possible that looking at only a 20 year range may provide many coincidences?

“There’s a small increase in risk for the individual, especially during the first three days of the new week,” says Dr Imre Janszky, one of the researchers behind the study. “The disruption in the chronobiological rhythms, the loss of one hour’s sleep and the resulting sleep disturbance are the probable causes.”

This study may actually be useful for other reasons than the headline. Another win for stress.

According to the scientists, the study provides a conceivable explanation for why heart attacks are most common on Mondays, which previous research has suggested.

“It’s always been thought that it’s mainly due to an increase in stress ahead of the new working week,” says Dr Janszky. “But perhaps it’s also got something to do with the sleep disruption caused by the change in diurnal rhythm at the weekend.”

Even though the increase and decrease in risk are relatively small for the individual, the team believes that the study can improve our understanding of how disruptions to diurnal rhythms impact on our health.

“Roughly 1.5 billion people are subjected to these clock-shifts every year, but it’s hard to make any generalised statement about how many heart attacks they can cause,” adds Dr Rickard Ljung, another member of the research team.

Upon his burial, his men brought in horses to trample evidence of his grave, and just to be absolutely sure he would never be found, they diverted a river to flow over their leader’s final resting place.

So…800 years later, scientists at UC San Diego’s Center for Interdisciplinary Science in Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3), are taking a look to see if they can find it. Interestingly enough they will be using advanced visualization technologies whose origins can be traced back to the time of the Mongolian emperor himself. Too bad they didn’t have as effective acne treatment back then, or decent plumbing for that matter.

“As outrageous as it might sound, we’re looking for the tomb of Genghis Khan,” says Dr. Albert Yu-Min Lin, an affiliated researcher for CISA3. “Genghis Khan was one of the most exceptional men in all of history, but his life is too often dismissed as being that of a bloodthirsty warrior. Few people in the West know about his legacy — that he united warring tribes of Mongolia and merged them into one, that he introduced the East to the West making explorations like those of Marco Polo possible, that he tried to create a central world currency, that he introduced a written language to the Mongol people and created bridges that we still use today within the realm of international relations.

“But as great a man he was, there are few clues and no factual evidence about Genghis Khan’s burial, which is why we need to start using technology to solve this mystery.”

“I think there’s a flight to quality and we believe there’s a flight to solar because of that,” said Tom Werner, the CEO of California-based solar panel manufacturer and installer SunPower. He noted that big solar projects over the past three or four years have created a track record of delivering expected financial returns.

“Now having said that…the credit markets are different and more measured. Banks are studying things more–the risk profiles and the balance sheets of companies,” Werner said.

The solar industry got some help in the Bailout Bill passed a couple weeks back as well as did other green sectors.

• One-year extension for wind and refined coal energy tax credits. A production credit for electricity produced from renewable marine energy sources (meaning through wave power and river power, or by exploiting the differences in ocean temperature). Energy credits for “small wind properties,” geothermal heat pump systems, and energy-efficient residential properties.

• New renewable-energy bonds. Up to $800 billion in energy bonds may be offered to the public, with a third from “public power providers,” a third from governments, and the remainder from “cooperative electric companies.”

• Tax credits for “cellulosic biofuels” and for “carbon dioxide sequestration.” An extension of an alternative fuel credit. Tax credits for “new qualified plug-in electric-drive motor vehicles.” Bicycle commuters get a nod, as do regulations aimed at “residential top-loading clothes washers.”

With the election just a couple weeks away we can all hope that some of the things discussed thus far will come to fruition during the next term. Especially some of the talk about alternative energy vehicles, as well as help to these businesses in the group health insurance department.

The problem was, according to the study, was that only one out of 10,000 cells could be persuaded to turn back the clock. A new team of researchers led by Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, has now succeeded in boosting the reprogramming efficiency more than 100-fold, while cutting the time it takes in half. In fact, they repeatedly generated iPS cells from the tiny number of keratinocytes attached to a single hair plucked from a human scalp. If this works anything like computer memory I guess they are right on schedule in speeding it up everyday.

OK…that’s some pretty scientific language about what this is all about. Certainly very few of us really undeerstand any of these terms fully. I know I certainly don’t. It would help first and foremost just to get a basics of stem cells. At least it gives you an idea of why they are even trying to do any of this in the first place. Maybe even helps you understand the debate about researching stem cells in the first place.

Their method, published ahead of print in the Oct. 17, 2008 online edition of Nature Biotechnology, not only provides a practical and simple alternative for the generation of patient- and disease-specific stem cells, which had been hampered by the low efficiency of the reprogramming process, but also spares patients invasive procedures to collect suitable starting material, since the process only requires a single human hair.

“Having a very efficient and practical way of generating patient-specific stem cells, which unlike human embryonic stem cells, wouldn’t be rejected by the patient’s immune system after transplantation brings us a step closer to the clinical application of stem cell therapy,” says Belmonte, PhD., a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory and director of the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Spain.

The original link in this post is probably going to give you more in depth discussion on this particular experiment than I can. Even so…you are going to need to fire up Google for a lot of these terms as they certainly aren’t things you hear in everyday conversation :).

Nonetheless, during these next three weeks we will be presented with an excellent opportunity to view Mercury in the early morning dawn sky. Mercury is called an “inferior planet” because its orbit is nearer to the sun than the Earth’s. Therefore, it always appears from our vantage point (as Asimov indicated) to be in the same general direction as the sun.

So…if you are an early riser, or you happen to be on a vampire schedule you should be able to see Mercury these next few weeks in the sky. Early morning is when you can see it after you get your dog supplies to get your pooch ready for the day.

Wanting to view it, and actually knowing how to view it are 2 different things entirely. I’m no professional astronomer so it isn’t like I have great tips on how to view this bad boy so taking the advice from Space.com is the way to go if you are going to try and sneak a peek at this elusive planet. Skim down to the last couple sections in that article to find out exactly when to view and how to get the best look.

Ballmer said that “if people want to wait they really can,” ZDNet’s Larry Dignan reports. “But I’d definitely deploy Vista,” he said.

Dignan’s post isn’t all that informative on the issue, but he does says some things that I agree with. He editorializes that companies don’t see the need to upgrade to Vista since computers last far longer than they are expected to and upgrading for every new OS does’t even make sense in most cases. I completely agree. It isn’t like I’m really missing anything with Vista I haven’t been able to do on XP still.

I still remember when i got XP for the first time. I got XP right away since I needed a new computer at the time and it was what was available. XP had just as many problems as Vista did when it came out. Remember the Service Pack 1 problems back then? Depending on your PC manufacturer you might have virtually killed your computer with that upgrade at the time. Heck, my partner and I both had virtually the same computer (Dell Inspirons when they were released I believe. Mine had better hardware, but I believe it was still the same model.) and his was unusable after that upgrade while mine was perfectly fine. All those early patches tend to have problems with XP.

“Our next release of Windows will be compatible with Vista. The key is let’s get on with it. We’ll be ready when you want to deploy Windows 7.”

Big deal. Computers are so cheap now why would I even “upgrade” anyways? For the cost of the Windows OS I may as well just go out and buy a new computer with the OS already installed.

Physicists decided to try and disprove “Lorentz invariance” — Einstein’s prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they’re turned or how fast they go. Their tests won’t get the job done from muon neutrinos, says a consortium of scientists. Time fot them to check out some Brazil vacation packages and go back to the drawing board.

The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below ground. As the Earth does its daily rotation, the neutrino beam rotates too.

“If there’s a field out there that can cause violations of Lorentz invariance, we should be able to see its effects as the beam rotates in space,” said Indiana University Bloomington astrophysicist Stuart Mufson, a project leader. “But we did not. Einsteinian relativity lives to see another day.”

The SABRE (Self-healing cellular Architectures for Biologically-inspired highly Reliable Electronic systems) project. The part of the project to be carried out in Bristol will be based at Bristol Robotics lab (BRL), which is jointly run by the University of Bristol and UWE. Grab your ipods and relax under the sun while you read about this fascinating technology here.