New Videogame Lets Amateur Researchers Mess With RNA

Jessica Fournier has a job that makes poor use of her talents. She spends her days stocking sneakers at a warehouse outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. A decade ago she was an astrophysics student at Michigan State University, where she coauthored a paper on RR Lyrae, a low-mass star that pulsates light. But having failed to secure long-term employment in her arcane field, today she pays her bills by cataloging shoe sizes.

She may have given up astrophysics, but Fournier still has a deep love of science. As soon as she gets home from work each night, she boots up her Asus laptop and begins what she calls “my second job”: designing molecules of ribonucleic acid—RNA—that have the power to build proteins or regulate genes. It is a job that she happens to perform better than almost anyone else on earth.

Under the fitting nickname “starryjess,” Fournier is the world’s second-ranked player of EteRNA, an online game with more than 38,000 registered users. Featuring an array of clickable candy-colored pieces, EteRNA looks a little like the popular game Bejeweled. But instead of combining jewel shapes in Tetris-like levels, EteRNA players manipulate nucleotides, the fundamental building blocks of RNA, to coax molecules into shapes specified by the game. Those shapes, which typically look like haphazardly mowed crop circles or jumbled chain-link necklaces, represent how RNA appears in nature while it goes about its work as one of life’s most essential ingredients. No self-sustaining organism gets made without the involvement of RNA.

Tweaking molecular models in this fashion is surprisingly fun—and, it turns out, useful. EteRNA was developed by scientists at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities, who use the designs created by players to decipher how real RNA works. The game is a direct descendant of Foldit—another science crowdsourcing tool disguised as entertainment—which gets players to help figure out the folding structures of proteins. EteRNA, though, goes much further than its predecessor.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/ff_rnagame/

San Diego fireworks show blows up all at once

First Photo of Shadow of Single Atom

ScienceDaily (July 3, 2012) — In an international scientific breakthrough, a Griffith University research team has been able to photograph the shadow of a single atom for the first time.



"We have reached the extreme limit of microscopy; you can not see anything smaller than an atom using visible light," Professor Dave Kielpinski of Griffith University's Centre for Quantum Dynamics in Brisbane, Australia.

"We wanted to investigate how few atoms are required to cast a shadow and we proved it takes just one," Professor Kielpinski said.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120703172543.htm

Published this week in Nature Communications, "Absorption imaging of a single atom "is the result of work over the last 5 years by the Kielpinski/Streed research team.

TOM THE DANCING BUG: Judge Scalia - Robed Rage!!

Non Sequitur toon: Free Markets

Toon: Crossing the Delaware, 2012 version

Toon: Day One

Fans Howl After Weather Site Buys Out Rival

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and BRIAN STELTER
Published: July 3, 2012

It’s stormy out there.


The announcement on Monday that the Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and weather.com, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the nation. The purchase price was not disclosed.

In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal: “Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.

“It seems to happen all the time,” he said. “Something great gets invented and sold in the United States, and it gets bought up and destroyed.”

Weather Underground was founded in 1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online weather database. The name was a winking reference to the radical group that also had its roots in Ann Arbor. Mr. Maxwell said he appreciated Weather Underground’s fanatical devotion to data, and how it drew information from so many thousands of weather stations run by users that he is able to determine “microclimates” of variation that can prove important in getting the most out of a new solar installation.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys-weather-underground-fans-fear-change.html?hp

Too Quiet, Again, on Health Care

Nearly two dozen Pennsylvania residents, interviewed recently by Abby Goodnough of The Times, said they were opposed to President Obama’s health care reform law. Though almost all of them would benefit from it, they expressed fears about a loss of control over their health care that is nowhere in the law.


There are two reasons for this situation, which is repeated around the country. Business groups allied with Republicans have spent $235 million on television ads attacking the law with false accusations, with the vigorous aid of Mitt Romney and his campaign. Meanwhile, Democrats and the Obama campaign have been amazingly reluctant to speak up for the president’s biggest accomplishment and tell voters what’s in it.

The president has not even capitalized on his victory in the Supreme Court last week over his opponents’ attempt to dismantle the law on constitutional grounds. He listed some of its benefits in a low-key East Room speech after the ruling, and the campaign has sent out several direct-mail fliers on the subject to women. But the campaign has broadcast no television ads about health care, except for one in Spanish. Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, said on “Fox News Sunday” that it was time “for the divisive debate on health care to stop,” suggesting Democrats want to move on.

Mr. Lew might consider going to a swing state and turning on the television because the debate isn’t going to stop. Republicans are happy to continue it with obvious propaganda like “Obamacare is the largest tax increase in U.S. history.” Countering this attack and, more important, building a foundation of support for a vastly important social change, will require the president and other Democrats to spend more time and more money explaining the law’s benefits, and pointing out that Republicans have no useful ideas to replace it.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/opinion/too-quiet-again-on-health-care.html?hp

Fire chief shoots safety expert in foot with fireworks

By Jonathan Bullington
Tribune reporter
1:25 p.m. CDT, July 3, 2012

A fire chief’s demonstration of the dangers of fireworks became a teachable moment this morning when a canister tipped over and shot fireworks into a crowd, injuring a director of a fire safety group.

Laura Barros, assistant executive director of the Illinois Fire Safety Alliance, suffered a small burn on her left foot. Before heading off to the hospital, Barros said the episode illustrated how dangerous fireworks can be no matter who handles them.

The incident happened during a press conference at alliance headquarters in Mount Prospect.

At the tail end of the conference, Hillside Fire Chief Michael Kuryla demonstrated the power of legally purchased novelty fireworks by lighting a sparkler and then igniting two fireworks canisters placed on a wooden pallet in the parking lot.
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/suburbs/mt_prospect/chi-fire-chief-fireworks-20120703,0,2116678.story