Back to your Regularly Scheduled Programming….

Politics: Barack Obama

I can’t believe what I saw here:

Yes, that is Pat Buchanan praising Barack Obama’s speech.

To see other blog reactions to Obama’s speech:

Cosmic Variance

Mano Singham’s Web Journal

Mathemaics
Strangely enough, seemingly unrelated branches of mathematics can lead to insights in science. Here is an example.

As academics work to understand the architecture of the universe, they sometimes uncover connections in mysterious places. So it is with Smith professor of mathematics Richard L. Taylor, whose work connects two discrete domains of mathematics: curved spaces, from geometry, and modular arithmetic, which has to do with counting. Taylor has spent his career studying this nexus, and recently proved it is possible to use one domain to solve complex problems in the other. “It just astounded me,” he says, “that there should be a connection between these two things, when nobody could see any real reason why there should be.”

This has happened in other instances. For example in knot theory, the Jones polynomial was discovered when something called the “trace” of a braid representation of certain models in statistical mechanics yielded something unexpected; eventually a far simpler way of calculating the polynomial was discovered.

Evolution An “armored fish” evolved so as to lose its armor to gain an evolutionary advantage.

Shedding some genetically induced excess baggage may have helped a tiny fish thrive in freshwater and outsize its marine ancestors, according to a UBC study published today in Science Express.

Measuring three to 10 centimetres long, stickleback fish originated in the ocean but began populating freshwater lakes and streams following the last ice age. Over the past 20,000 years – a relatively short time span in evolutionary terms – freshwater sticklebacks have lost their bony lateral plates, or “armour,” in these new environments.

“Scientists have identified a mutant form of a gene, or allele, that prohibits the growth of armour,” says UBC Zoology PhD candidate Rowan Barrett. Found in fewer than one per cent of marine sticklebacks, this allele is very common in freshwater populations.

Barrett and co-authors UBC post-doctoral fellow Sean Rogers and Prof. Dolph Schluter set out to investigate whether the armour gene may have helped sticklebacks “invade” freshwater environments. They relocated 200 marine sticklebacks with the rare armour reduction allele to freshwater experimental ponds.

“By documenting the physical traits and genetic makeup of the offspring produced by these marine sticklebacks in freshwater, we were able to track how natural selection operates on this gene,” says Rogers.

“We found a significant increase in the frequency of this allele in their offspring, evidence that natural selection favours reduced armour in freshwater,” says Barrett. [...]