xerula

The article explains X-inactivation, and it doesn't play the role you think here: both copies are broadly equally expressed among retinal cells. Also even if all cells in a retina used the same X-chromosome copy it doesn't predict color-blindness, since we would still have a trichromatic system.

The answer to the question posed by the title is simply that all mutant fourth cone types are not created equal. Most have a spectral response curve similar enough to an existing type not to make a real difference; a few have peak responses more squarely in-between those of the usual trichromat photopigments, allowing more finely graded color perception. (The article takes its time getting round to explaining this, but it's all there.)

Hopefully one thing this work will lead to is more physically accurate iridescence shaders for 3D render engines. The ones I've seen so far only attempt to fake iridescence at an approximate level, and the results are not very convincing.

There's a whole world of fine and unusual teas to discover and enjoy. When I fast, I want a tea that provides more meaty aromas and a more complex taste experience – a food substitute that also gives a 'cleansing' sensation. (It's hard to be precise about what I mean by 'cleansing', but something like the opposite of the typical cloying English breakfast black tea). A fine kabusecha or gyokuro with their intense umami flavors can provide that. At the moment I have some Japanese 'bancha goishicha', a wildly different style from the green teas made from the same plants, a strange and strangely delicious double-fermented tea with tangy seaweed and mushroomy notes that is like a meal in itself.

Perhaps it's to do with the fact that these particular bamboo species are monocarpic, i.e. in one life-cycle they set seed just once and then die. So the timing of this event is more crucial for their reproductive success than for typical trees (which are polycarpic and not grasses).

Total forest cover is a crude statistic. Primary forests in Asia, where the majority of biodiversity resides, continue to be felled at alarming rates.

Apart from the Romanesque cauliflower, these images mostly just show examples of phyllotactic spirals, which are not really fractals.

Fractal models can generate patterns reminiscent of some organic structures, particularly branching structures, but their importance in doing so is often overstated. Generally speaking, they don't capture the underlying biological processes giving rise to the structures; models that do (reaction-diffusion, optimal transport networks, models of specific genetic developmental programmes...) achieve more realism.

"The problem with a field such as fractal theory, which can be visually dramatic and practised without much background and sophistication, is that uninformed proselytising and inappropriate use can raise unrealistic expectations as to its relevance and applicability. ...Although chaos and fractal theory have been proposed by some as biological panaceas fortunately there are enough realists to counter this view and generally keep them in perspective." –– JD Murray, Mathematical Biology

Better information on the actual site: http://www.coelux.com/

It still seems like a problem to me, if your subject (and potentially background) are moving around a lot. I shoot a lot of macro shots of bugs that are always about to jump off plants that are swaying in the wind... Not to say this tech isn't impressive and useful, but it doesn't solve DoF problems for tiny cameras in every situation.

You lack imagination about all the different things that can be done with uniformly black, straight, fine hair. Length is not the only variable, and there is still a huge range of hairstyles that people could choose from if they were free to do so.

Also, if I was subject to an edict requiring me to trim my fingernails, that would be a pretty big deal to me. A big, intolerable deal. You imply that from their perspective it wouldn't be, but are you so much of a cultural relativist that you think such a perspective isn't seriously unhealthy?

Simplistic. There's not enough land/resources on the planet to sustain everyone living a first world lifestyle at our current rates of energy consumption and waste production.

I would say it depends on precisely what scientific work you need to do. E.g. for phylogenetic statistics there are some nice R packages that bundle simulation techniques and measures that are so far not implemented as conveniently, or at all, in Python. So you need to explore what packages/libraries are out there that fulfill your needs (and also consider how much time/skill/interest you have to code your own packages/libraries where needed). R is still really popular for stats/prototyping/data viz and a useful language to have up your sleeve.

Also "=" is compulsory for setting some named function arguments that have a default value. E.g. format(pi, digits <- 16) only prints with the default number of digits, format(pi, digits=16) works as expected. I think it's nice to have a syntax that distinguishes between object and argument assignment.

Also you can do things like this when you're bored:

((a <- b <- 1) + 1 -> c) + 1 -> d

(Someone also once told me that "=" for normal assignment sometimes fails in unexpected ways in tryCatch blocks, but I don't know how or why.)

When our great deposits of fossil fuels were being laid down in the Carboniferous, efficient decomposers / recyclers of dead wood and plant material (chiefly higher basidiomycete fungi) had not yet evolved. Nowadays there is much less opportunity for dead organic material to accumulate in the kind of quantities that geological processes can turn into significant oil reserves.

Also arts and crafts, personalized poetry and short stories, foodstuffs, homemade clothing...

I've withdrawn from mtgox to a UK account via SEPA many times. It's never taken less than two weeks, and last time (about four months ago), it took nearly five weeks. Communication and transparency about waiting times has always been pretty bad. I'm lucky to have contact info for senior staff, who I can pester for assurances that they are just very backed up rather than in a meltdown situation. Were I an average customer I'd've assumed the worst.

He had probably previously encountered Cantor's diagonalization technique for proving the uncountability of the reals. He just saw how to apply the same technique to the question of describability.

No, arbitrarily large gaps between prime numbers exist. But there are no efficient methods for locating gaps of a particular length. The largest gap for which the end primes are known, so far, is of length 337,446.

The recent work summarized on the linked page proves something else, namely that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers separated by only 388,284. The goal is to get that number down to two and to prove the twin prime conjecture. (In your interpretation this would be like saying every prime is within 2 of another prime, which is obviously false.)

This is about recent work on a longstanding and famous open question in number theory, called the 'twin prime conjecture'. The conjecture states: there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers just two apart (e.g., 17 and 19 are twin primes, as 19 - 17 = 2). For a few centuries there has not been great (direct) progress on this problem, but in April, Zitang Zhang proved there are infinitely many pairs of primes at most 70 million apart. This breakthrough got everyone really excited, and the linked page shows the assault now being made by the mathematical community on the 70 million limit, using all kinds of techniques based on Zhang's argument, trying to drive the limit downwards, closer and closer to the dream of two.

Here is recent (and much more impressive, to me) footage of a direct hit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LobCDYO78Us

I would say that your worldview is extremely spiritually deficient, if you do not consider that musicians and composers can achieve greatness. Music at its best is extraordinarily enriching, as beautiful and intellectually thrilling as the deepest mathematics, while also speaking to us of all the lightness and darkness of our human condition. At the lowest and most challenging times of my life, it has been music that provided solace and inspiration to find a way forward. I cannot express how impoverished my human condition would be without music.

Computers have not surpassed humans in terms of musical ability. Only someone tone-deaf, unable to let music into their heart, would say so.

(I have read articles saying that computers can now produce compositions indistinguishable from Mozart's, but the context of comparison is always on the level of silly, childlike little themes from very early Mozart pieces, more like extracts from nursery rhymes. And in terms of performance, there is nothing to rival our leading humans.)

In absolute life-or-death situations, yes. But as soon as we move even a tiny bit past that point, history shows we seek universally recognized, convenient mediums of exchange. And for every culture that has access to them, precious metals have fulfilled this role since year dot.

Yes. In related news, Transferwise just banned transfers to bitcoin exchanges.

The universe presents overwhelmingly as a vast void. Of the total space in the universe, what fraction at most do you think is occupied by self-aware minds? What is the maximum percentage of all the matter in the universe that is organized into conscious beings? Regardless of whether life is common or rare on other planets, it is certainly vanishingly scarce overall.

Our yardstick is pretty good. We have characterized a vast range of the objects we share out universe with in immense structural detail, from lifeforms here on earth to astronomical objects billions of light years away. The human brain sticks out.

I wrote my comment precisely because it has become a cliché to say what you're saying – how small, ignorant and insignificant we are in relation to the universe, how we compensate by being arrogant. Taking a different view, that human brains are really quite extraordinary compared to everything we can see out there, is not necessarily egotistic. The more I feel a sense of wonder at the preciousness and privilege of human life, the more I want to spend mine being helpful, nurturing, productive.

:)

On the temporal / spatial scale of the universe we are virtually non-existent. On a scale that ranks everything in the universe according to physical / informational complexity & organization, we appear so far to be quite significant.

There is nothing new about the observation that body mass is correlated with lifespan, at the level of species - why should we be at all surprised that the correlation is described by some power law? There are compelling metabolic explanations for these patterns going back more than a century. What really excites modern biologists – and what the article completely fails to discuss (even to the point of claiming "this rule seems to govern all life") – are the numerous and dramatic exceptions to the rule: naked role rats, tardigrades, certain cnidarians ("immortal" jellyfish & hydra) and planarians, various lichens... In some of these cases, metabolic rate is divorced from body size through a well-characterized, indefinite hibernation 'mode', but more efficient DNA protection, repair and telomere length preservation systems are also important. And there is a substantial literature that explains unusually prolonged life-cycles using Evolutionary Stable Strategy modeling. All of which provide useful perspectives in aging research. Much more interesting would have been an article about how these violations of nature's "death formula" tell us how we might avoid death.

I really enjoyed this too. Would love to see quaternions presented with a similar treatment.

These types of complex mutualistic interaction between multiple species are precisely what biologists predict are most prone to being disrupted by environmental degradation and climate change, leading to high extinction risk for the dependent species. This fascinating flower (one of the few "living fossils" in the yam family) has been successful in persisting over vast evolutionary time scales, yet is now critically endangered. In the face of the mass extinction event we humans seem determined to inflict on our biosphere, conservationists often advocate concentrating our efforts on saving ancient species like Borderea chouardii, because they present relatively isolated, long branches on the tree of life. This means that saving them equates to saving the maximum evolutionary history - and thus the maximum phylogenetic diversity - with the minimum effort. (In practice, many other factors have to be taken into account.)

Editorial support and guidance is traditionally provided by the literary agent, so there is another professional layer between the writer and the market to consider. Big publishers maintain links with literary agencies based on the agencies' reputation for signing and nurturing talent and delivering ready-to-publish manuscripts that will sell. This arrangement persists at least in the world of commercial and literary fiction.

But b"s" + "a" is an error in Py3.