HoodedHawk

Researchers at PennState have published the DNA sequence of an extinct Woolly Mammoth; see the news article at Nature.com, or the November 20, 2008 issue of Nature for a paper by Miller, et al. (Nature 456, 387-390: “Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth“).

Mammoths went extinct some 10,000 years ago, but have been found preserved in Russian permafrost. The hair from one of these preserved (mummified) ancient beasts was used to retrieve DNA. Hair is useful for such extractions as it is relatively easy to wash away contaminating (foreign) DNA.

One tidbit that I found quite interesting: where did the researchers get the Mammoth hair? They bought the hair on Ebay.com! You can too, for only $175.00 for 2.5 grams. Yes, the researchers did verify that this was actual mammoth hair. Anyway, the big question is whether or not we will shortly have a Mammoth clone. Short answer: not any time soon. This is just the first step, but is a major one.

Our ancestors did see live woolly mammoths; here’s a cave painting in France depicting one:

While:

…nanostructures are building blocks for many important technological advances, including high-performance solar cells and batteries, new methods of diagnosing and treating disease, next-generation computer processors and memory, and lightweight composite materials… [from Nanobama.com ]

you can also use them to create nifty structures like the Nanobama above, just for fun. Note that each of the Obama faces shown is made up of about 150 million nanotubes – about one for each person who voted in this election. And for scale: each face is only about 0.5mm wide (about 10 hair-widths). Created by a team at the University of Michigan.

See also: Mechanosynthesis.

A bookseller in London has a first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” for sale; a steal at only $180,000.00

I went to see Jacques Pepin give a talk at the Baird Auditorium (in the National Museum of Natural History) on Wednesday night – one of the Smithsonian Resident Associate presentations. He’s my favorite chef, and I’ve been watching his tv shows, reading his books and cooking his recipes for 15 years or so (since his PBS show, “Today’s Gourmet”).
It was wonderful to get to hear him in person. He was interviewed by Joe Yonan, the editor of the Washington Post Food section. It was so much fun to hear him talk about cooking and doing cooking shows. Oh, and Jacques’ impression of Julia Child (and his anecdotes about doing shows with her) was hysterical.

Cookbooks are heavy, so I only brought 3 for him to sign. :)

Thursday evening Dylan and I went to see Prof. Bob Brier give a talk on the Secret of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. He presented evidence that supports French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin’s theory that an *interior* ramp was built and used to raise the huge blocks to the top of the 480-ft. high Great Pyramid of Giza. A few *million* such blocks (averaging about 2.5 tons each) were used to construct the pyramid. Fascinating talk/slide show.

After the talk Prof. Brier was signing copies of his book, The Secret of the Great Pyramid. He inscribed my copy with the neatest inscription I have yet to get from an author. He wrote an Egyptian prayer – in hieroglyphs. It reads, “May you be given life, stability, and prosperity like Ra, forever.“. Beat that!