Day: December 3, 2010

A rip-roaring Friday afternoon

~ Jeremy ~ 1 Comment

I hope you’re having a rip-roaring Friday afternoon.

Tina and I are headed back to shoot an event downtown today. We shot last night, and came up with some fun shots that I’m proud of.

Tonight it’s supposed to snow. We’ve had snow, just not enough to cover the ground. I even had an alert message arrive on my iPhone, so you know it’s gotta do something.

Some recent comments in my About section and on this post have been nothing short of entertaining and ridiculous. I’m not sure how some people breathe and generate saliva at the same time without a complete body shut down. Am I that naive or are people so opposed to free thought and self-education than I ever imagined possible?

Anyway, chime in if you get a second. Or don’t. It’s a fun ride even without you riding along.

Cheers. Happy Friday. Eat and drink something out of the ordinary today. You deserve it.

NASA Scientists Disover New Life Form

~ Jeremy ~ 4 Comments

Complete reblog from Atheist Media.

From Gizmodo:

NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything. Updated.

NASA is saying that this is “life as we do not know it”. The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

That was true until today. In a surprising revelation, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today, working differently than the rest of the organisms in the planet. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks. Arsenic is an element poisonous to every other living creature in the planet except for a few specialized microscopic creatures.
Read more

Via Atheist Media

***UPDATE***

As Kilre so helpfully pointed out in the comments, this discovery isn’t as big as it’s purported to be. PZ Myers explains it here. I should have been a little more skeptical after I saw comments from AatRB Julie on facebook. That’s what I get for not researching what I post.

I should have also red flagged that the story came from Gizmodo, a web site with a penchant for yellow journalism worse than Fox News.

Two cool-ass videos from The Daily Wh.at

~ Jeremy ~ Leave a comment

I hate re-posting too much from the same source, but I’m going to post these two videos.

One is a steampunk record player, that you may find as amazing as we did. And the other is a remote control plane flying around NYC. Brilliant.

Tina made the comment this morning after watching a video of a girl on a bad drug trip asking for a Harry Potter character, whom I don’t really know, but understand exists in literary (used loosely) terms. She said, “Big brother isn’t going to be the government; it’s going to be us.”

She’s right.