Quote for the day

You Won't Be the Same Person

When You Wake Up Next Year

Sunny Biswas, at The Awl: It turns out that in a couple of parts of the brain, neural stem cells are constantly giving birth to new neurons that travel around and plug into already existing networks. Sometimes they're replacing dying neurons and sometimes they're just helping a part of the brain grow... There's a body of recent literature that suggests that this is how adults form new memories...

I read about neural stem cells and think about how different I am from even a few years ago, and I get the weird feeling that I was right when I was little, that I'm the most recent in a long line of not very good impersonators of myself. Science (science!) confirms that parts of me are here now that weren't there even a little while ago (and that parts of me that were there before are gone forever). In other words: one night someone else went to sleep and woke up as me.

Mysterious cases: jack pine, Tom Thomson

Canada's jack pine tree holds secrets in its branches

Vancouver Sun: It's arguably Canada's most recognizable artwork, a classic Tom Thomson landscape showing a lonely tree with drooping branches, toughing out its fragile existence on a rocky northern lakeshore. But The Jack Pine, a priceless public treasure that's been on permanent display in the National Gallery of Canada for almost a century, depicts a species with long-held secrets that a team of Canadian scientists has just now unravelled.

After a comprehensive study of the boreal forest's most iconic tree, three Quebec botanists... have determined that the trees found in Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan each represent genetically distinct families with separate histories shaped by glaciers from the last Ice Age... [They] evolved independently over the past 10 millenniums or so from the Ontario specimen that Thomson immortalized in his 1917 masterpiece from the shore of Algonquin Park's Grand Lake.

The vast ice sheets that covered North America during the last continental freeze-up forced a general southward retreat of jack pine forests, fragmented their populations and 'profoundly influenced their present-day distribution and genetic diversity,' the researchers, led by Universite de Laval scientist Julie Godbout, conclude in a summary of the study, published in the American Journal of Botany...

'Even if it looks like an old bonsai, jack pine is real tough,' she said. 'It regenerates through fire -- so each baby tree is an orphan. It's a real fast grower, and it can grow on rock and sand in difficult conditions.'... At first glance, she observed, 'it feels lonely and sad, 'but the tree is really more like 'an old sage that knows a lot about life and death.'

Related:

A break in the mysterious case of Tom Thomson

Globe and Mail: Tom Thomson's untimely death has haunted author Roy McGregor for decades. Now, 21st-century forensics may have helped solve one of our defining riddles.

Image source here.

Vancouver on a winter day

Photo gallery: Vancouver is glorious

Personal holiday

Name Day: 40 years ālīesan

Old English verb

1. to loosen, deliver, set free, let loose; liberate

2. to redeem, ransom

And happy birthday to Wren House: 25 years

Journey through the US: 'untouchable subjects'

Through a Windshield Darkly

Canadian writers drive in search of the American identity

An empire rarely changes its mind simply because it fails. It is driven by a larger sense of its own destiny, no matter how stupid that is. -- John Ralston Saul

Excerpts from a review by Mark Frutkin, in the Literary Review of Canada (Dec. 2010):

Most Canadians will admit to considerable ambivalence in their feelings about America... In Breakfast at the Exit Cafe, an engaging travelogue by two of Canada's esteemed writers, we gain a front-seat view, literally through the windshield... Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds begin their journey in Vancouver, deciding to return to their home in eastern Ontario by driving their Toyota Echo through America in a 15,000 kilometre U, passing through 22 states, taking in much of the western and southern and some of the eastern United States...

Simonds and Grady point out that Americans manifest one distinct difference [from Canadians] -- many tend to remain blind to the rest of the world, which neatly dovetails with their belief that the U.S. is the centre of the universe, the only remaining great power, the world's saviour. Manifest destiny is still the guiding spirit of America. It is God's country, after all. Why would anyone ever want to live anywhere else? Isn't this, they insist, not only the greatest nation in the world, but (as I have heard it expressed) the greatest in the history of the world?...

A subtext, a dark undercurrent, informs their meetings with Americans. This is something anyone can notice travelling in the U.S., especially in the South. A hearty friendliness is apparent on the surface, and a genuine generosity tends to prevail. However, certain untouchable subjects must not be broached: religion, race, politics, sexuality. And one must never question the place of America in the world. Touch on these subjects and the smile dissolves. They are not up for rational discussion.

Near the end of the book and their journey, Grady writes: 'Partly, I still think what I thought before we made this trip, because those thoughts were based on the image America projects to the outside world: its overweening sense of its own rightness, its casual assumption that it can buy or sell whatever it wants, its ability to proceed as though everything were on the table, its refusal to learn from its own history... It is not anti-American to wish America had been better than it was, or to want it to be better than it is.'

In the early 20th century, Clemenceau also said: 'America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.' An exaggeration, of course, but one with a disturbing modicum of truth.

Poll of Canadians: 'oil received the poorest score'

Feds should clean up energy sector, poll says

Vancouver Sun: A majority of Canadians believe the energy sector is one of the most important parts of Canada's economy, and the federal government should lead the way in 'cleaning' it up by finding alternatives to oil, says a newly released report.

The study, produced for Natural Resources Canada by Decima Research, found that 88 per cent of Canadians were either 'very concerned' (47 per cent) or 'somewhat concerned' (41 per cent) about the environmental impact of energy use and that 87 per cent were 'very concerned' (46 per cent) or 'somewhat concerned' (41 per cent) about the impact of energy production...

Doug Anderson, senior vice-president for Decima Research [wrote] 'They believe that this may not happen without some sort of leadership, with objectives and time frames in place for this transitional process, and ideally, investments made in facilitating this transition.'...

'Participants tended to recognize that this transition may cost them (as consumers and as taxpayers) some money,' said the report. 'But they believed that an investment in this area has the potential for them, and for the country, to benefit, both economically and environmentally in future.'...

Canadians from every region viewed natural resources as being more important to the economy than the manufacturing and service industries... with a majority of respondents (57 per cent) correctly identifying Canada as a net exporter of energy...

When asked about specific energy sources, oil received the poorest score with 89 per cent of Canadians expressing concerns about its environmental impact... When asked to identify Canada's most important natural resource, without prompting, 46 per cent of respondents said water.

Image source here.

Quote for the day

Paul Woodward, War in Context:

With Mossad conducting operations in Iran, Yemen and Somalia, Israel sees itself as an indispensable partner with the United States in the enduring global conflict through which each nation now defines its identity and upon which each has become economically dependent. No two nations on the planet are more threatened by the possibility of peace.

From 'Israel's central role in 'the new cold war'

Happy hypertext! Twenty years of W3

World Wide Web turns 20

Toronto Star: Almost exactly 20 years ago, physicist Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first web page onto the Internet and started a global revolution. Now, there are at least 255 million active websites across all domains, according to the December Netcraft web survey...

'The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project,' Berners-Lee said.

But it wasn't called the World-Wide Web that day on Dec. 25, 1990 when Berners-Lee and Robert Caillaiu, a systems engineer, created info.cern.ch, which still exists... CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is where Berners-Lee and Caillaiu worked and where, the previous March, Berners-Lee wrote his hypertext proposal.

'The idea was to connect hypertext with the Internet and personal computers, thereby having a single information network to help CERN physicists share all the computer-stored information at the laboratory,' Berners-Lee wrote. 'Hypertext would enable users to browse easily between texts on web pages using links.'...

'The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect,' Berners-Lee said last year.

Image: The historic NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. It was the first web server, hypermedia browser and web editor; source here.

Beautiful ceilings II

Vo Trong Nghia: 'Water and Wind Café,' bamboo dome

Binh Duong province, Vietnam. Gallery here.

The Café showcases the versatility and strength of bamboo. It was built using traditional Vietnamese weaving techniques, without machinery, metal structures, or nails.

Newfound human ancestor roamed Asia

Ancient Bone's DNA Suggests New Human Ancestors

NPR: DNA taken from a pinkie bone at least 30,000 years old is hinting at the existence of a previously unknown population of ancient humans... The pinkie bone in question was unearthed in 2008 from what's called the Denisova Cave. 'The Denisova Cave is in southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains in central Asia,' says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. 'This bone is the bone of a 6- to 7-year old girl.'

Reich says there were several remarkable things about the group of people this girl is from, a group he and his colleagues call Denisovans. 'On the one hand it's a sister group to Neanderthals, which means that it's more closely related to Neanderthals on average than it is to modern humans.'... As he reports in the journal Nature, the other remarkable finding was that the Denisovans' genome was more closely related to humans currently living in New Guinea than it was to genomes of people in Europe or Asia...

New Human Relative: DNA Says 'Denisovans' Roamed Widely in Asia

AP: Apart from the genome, the researchers reported finding a Denisovan upper molar in the cave. Its large size and features differ from teeth of Neanderthals or early modern humans, both of whom lived in the same area at about the same time as the Denisovans...

Of people now living in Melanesia, about 5 percent of their DNA can be traced to Denisovans, a sign of ancient inbreeding... that suggests Denisovans once ranged widely across Asia... Somehow, they or their ancestors had to encounter anatomically modern humans who started leaving Africa some 55,000 years ago and reached New Guinea by some 45,000 years ago.

Researchers Decipher DNA of Mysterious Human Ancestor

Der Spiegel: Some 300,000 years ago [the Denisovans] split off from the branch which eventually developed into the Neanderthals. Whereas the Neanderthals spread westward into ice-age Europe, the Denisovans moved east...

The scientists compared DNA from the Denisova cave with that of modern man... Clear indications of intermingling were only found among the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea. The two types of hominids, researchers believe, must have encountered each other somewhere in Southeast Asia some 30,000 years ago. The two groups must have interbred, perhaps not as a matter of course, but periodically. Later, the modern humans and their genetic dowry moved further south, whence today's Melanesians developed.

Image: Denisovan molar; source here.

Arctic: 'dramatic changes taking place'

Eastern Arctic warming trend alarms scientists

NunatsiaqOnline: Ice has cracked up -- once in a while taking Nunavut hunters with it. Lakes continue to dry up, while permafrost melts and the tundra is greening... Observations from the ground in the Eastern Arctic, from places like Iqaluit... and views taken by satellites at 500 kilometres above the Earth's surface showed... that ice formation in 2010 is abnormally slow...

• Air temperatures 20C above normal at the beginning of the year in the Baffin Island communities of Clyde River and Qikiqtarjuaq;
• Large ice cracks south of Resolute Bay last January, which caused a hunter to float off on an ice floe;
• Other cracks in land-fast ice spreading throughout the High Arctic islands, endangering research stations, causing problems for polar trekkers and swallowing up a Twin Otter.

This past spring, ice on Hudson Bay broke up three to four weeks earlier, and the Nares Strait between Ellesmere Island and Greenland, which usually freezes fast from February to July, never froze up solid.

Weak ice [can] lead to more storms as ice cracks cause water temperatures to warm and then lead to even more ice breakup and more storms in a frightening loop. What's needed is more monitoring with more remote sensing devices...

More monitoring of lakes and other fresh waterways also needs to be done... said Frederick Wrona from the University of Victoria... 'We have dramatic changes taking place,' with the Arctic becoming a place of rain instead of snow,' said Wrona, who predicted that there will be more extreme events like floods in the Arctic's future.

Image: Frobisher Bay; source here.

Quote for the day

John Punter, in The Vancouver Achievement: Urban Planning and Design (UBC Press, 2003):

The city's spectacular natural setting; its attractive residential vernacular and well-treed streets; its relatively smooth transition from railhead and resource-exporting port to provincial corporate centre and now to high-amenity Pacific Rim metropolis; and its sustained postwar prosperity all have provided a platform for the development of an environmentally conscious planning regime since 1970. This regime has stopped freeway intrusions, promoted neighbourhood conservation, replaced redundant industrial and port lands with new high-density residential neighbourhoods, reclaimed the waterfront for public use, and reinforced the diversity, vitality, and attractiveness of its downtown and inner neighbourhoods. Vancouver has achieved an urban renaissance more comprehensively than any other city in North America.

John Punter is Professor of Urban Design in the Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Wales.

We trashed Mars first

'Are We All Martians?'

DER SPIEGEL: NASA scientists have discovered strange bacteria in California's Mono Lake. The microbes incorporate arsenic, which is usually poisonous for life forms, into their cells. Are they originally from another planet?

Dirk Schulze-Makuch [Geologist, Washington State University]: No, that can be ruled out. The arsenic bacteria also did not arise independently from the other organisms on Earth. Like all microbes, they multiply best when there is enough phosphorus around. They only use arsenic when there is not sufficient phosphorus...

SPIEGEL: What does this discovery mean for the search for extraterrestrial life-forms?

Schulze-Makuch: ... If we can find such exotic organisms on Earth, what strange beings could exist on other planets? We have to free ourselves from the idea that life-forms will resemble what we know from Earth... When we send space probes to other worlds, we should expect the unexpected. Life can appear anywhere: in poisonous seas or in hot clouds.

SPIEGEL: Where could the resistant arsenic bacteria thrive?

Schulze-Makuch: Arsenic-eating microbes would probably feel very at home on our neighboring planet, Mars. Its conditions are well suited to them... However, it could be that any life-forms on Mars aren't actually aliens, but are related to us...

Almost 4 billion years ago, Mars was a planet well suited to sustaining life, with massive rivers and lakes. Back then, the first primitive organisms appeared on Earth. These single-cell life-forms probably made it to our neighboring planet Mars by way of meteorites and established themselves there. It is possible that descendants of these primitive bacteria could have survived in nooks and crannies on Mars until today. Equally fascinating is the opposite possibility: Life could have started on Mars and then, via a meteorite, made its way to Earth. That would raise the question: Are we all Martians?

Image: Mono Lake; source here.

Winter Solstice, Vancouver

The Secret Lantern Society