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Neanderthal sex boosted immunity in modern humans

Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day, they conclude.

Previous research had indicated that prehistoric interbreeding led to up to 4% of the modern human genome.

The new work identifies stretches of DNA derived from our distant relatives.

In the human immune system, the HLA (human leucocyte antigen) family of genes plays an important role in defending against foreign invaders such as viruses.

The authors say that the origins of some HLA class 1 genes are proof that our ancient relatives interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans for a period.

via www.bbc.co.uk

Short Sharp Science: Exploding star coming to a telescope near you

Over the next few days, those of us in the nothern hemisphere will have the rare chance to watch a star explode - hopefully via nothing more than a small telescope.

A supernova has been spotted in a nearby galaxy, located in the Ursa Major constellation, a find that might even help the study of dark energy. An automated telescope detected the blast on 25 August as part of the Palomar Transient Factory sky survey.

The explosion is taking place about 25 million light years from Earth, in a spiral galaxy called the Pinwheel, also known as M101. It is still increasing in brightness, and may eventually be visible with small telescopes.

via www.newscientist.com

End of the Era, but "Antiques Garage Gets a Little More Time"

[W]here Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag and Greta Garbo once wandered through the flea markets along a four-block stretch of Avenue of the Americas stuffed with more than 700 hustler’s booths, there is now only the Antiques Garage, home to 100 booths on a busy weekend. And the clock is ticking for the Garage as well.

The Garage, a two-story playland of antique ephemera, was set to close at the end of the month to make way for development, a victim of the Chelsea gentrification that it helped usher in. But this week, its founder announced that it would be able to stay on a bit longer, after agreeing to a new month-to-month lease.

via www.nytimes.com

The sterilizing, corporatizing, small business-obliterating, middle-class squeezing gentrification of Manhattan has been well underway for nearly 20 years now, and The Garage--a weekend indoor flea market set up in a 2-story parking garage--is one of the last holdouts in Chelsea, a neighborhood roughly between W. 28th St. and W. 14th St. and between Broadway and the Hudson River). But, its days are numbered.

From the article:

The [Garage's] second floor often feels less frenetic than downstairs, but customers can find an eclectic mix of merchandise, from fabric, statuary and paintings like these to 17th-century works on paper.

(Image: Photo by Yana Paskova for The New York Times; caption:

Kanae Matsuda shops for vintage mirrors amid the paintings, prints, jewelry, handbags, rugs, fabrics and furniture available on two floors of the garage, on 25th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue.")

Another "Why" of the UK riots - Society without solidarity - Kenan Malik

Having broken communities and eroded social bonds through the unremitting promotion of the market, politicians responded both by, ironically, expanding the state and by blaming the poor. Where once families, and communities and collective institutions helped define right and wrong, increasingly the state has stepped in to impose such social norms, through everything from citizenship classes for children to parenting courses for adults. As a result, morality has come to be seen not as difficult choices one has to wrestle with, or norms one works through within a collective setting, but as a set of predetermined rules provided as a state hand-out. Morality has ceased to be ours.

At the same time, politicians have increasingly taken to blaming the poor themselves, rather than their social and economic policies, for the breakdown of family life, a lack of social values, a selfish disregard for the needs of others, and a rampant consumerism. The same values that many tolerate among bankers are condemned in the unemployed and the poor. And with condemnation has come repression, from increased CCTV surveillance to punitive workfare rules.

Because the Right has appropriated the arguments about moral failure, many on the Left have rejected moral arguments altogether. The Left talks much about the social and economic impact of neo-liberal policies. But little about its moral impact. Such willful blindness is dangerous. Morality is as important to the Left as it is to the right, though for different reasons. There can be no possibility of a political or economic vision of a different society without a moral vision too.

via www.eurozine.com

Starkey on UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture... and this is only the beginning - Telegraph

Condemned as a racist for his comments on 'Newsnight' following the riots, the historian David Starkey speaks out against those who tried to silence him for confronting the gangster culture that has ruptured our society.

via www.telegraph.co.uk

From Starkey's article, where he also lashes back at Piers Morgan:

One of the most striking things about the England riots is where they did not happen: Yorkshire, the North East, Wales and Scotland. These areas contain some of the worst pockets of unemployment in the country. But they are also characterised by a powerful sense of regional or national identity and difference that cuts across all classes and binds them together. And it is this, I am sure, which has inoculated them against the disease of “gangsta” culture and its attendant, indiscriminate violence.
.....
Fortunately, there is a powerful narrative of freedom that runs like a golden thread through our history. “The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe in,” counsel declared repeatedly in Somersett’s Case, about the legality of slavery in England, in 1772.

For the other pernicious legacy of the reaction to [Enoch] Powell['s 20 April 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech about immigration] has been an enforced silence on the matter of race. The subject has become unmentionable, by whites at any rate. And any breach has been punished by ostracism and worse. As the hysterical reaction to my remarks shows, the witch-finders already have their sights on me, led by that pillar of probity and public rectitude, Piers Morgan, who called on Twitter for the ending of my television career within moments of the Newsnight broadcast.

From one reader comment:

I believe Mr. Starkey is right and the only way to reverse that trend is by...honestly voicing our opinions about race. I'm well aware that I'm creating a charter for ignorant racially-biased cretins to spew thinly-veiled hatred but I would much rather deal with that than have to continue to live in this mute and mutant condition we have endured for so long.

Another reader's observation:

There are moments when the Celtic/Saxon divide in British politics is manifest. The raging Scottish accent is a leit motif of militant unionism, and almost every Labour Party leader has been Scottish or otherwise [C]eltic.... The Conservatives do well in England, England is currently almost entirely blue,* but the [C]eltic fringe, and the immigrant populated inner cities, vote, as a population, for 'anyone but' the Tories.** There is not one single Scottish Tory MP.

More from The Coffee House, the blog of the British publication, The Spectator (est. 1828).

*the color of the Conservative Party
**the Conservative Party

Henrietta Leavitt, the age of the universe, and Hubble variable number one

A century ago, Henrietta Leavitt made one of the most important astronomical discoveries ever. She had earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1892, then worked for a decade as a volunteer at the Harvard College Observatory before being hired in 1902 to identify variable stars on photographs in the growing Harvard photographic plate collection. Even though she had managed to publish a paper under her own name in 1908, her data reporting what astronomers now call the period-luminosity (P-L) relationship for Cepheid variable stars were published in 1912 under the name of the director of the Harvard College Observatory, Edward Pickering. He was kind enough to acknowledge her contributions in the first sentence of the paper, writing “the following paper has been prepared by Miss Leavitt.” Notably, he did not write “all of the work presented herein is solely to the credit of Miss Leavitt.” History, however, bears witness to Leavitt as the scientist behind this work

via www.wondersandmarvels.com

From SpaceSpin.com:

Though the universe is filled with billions upon billions of stars, the discovery of a single variable star in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy.

And, at least one famous astronomer of the time lamented that the discovery had shattered his world view.

The star goes by the inauspicious name of Hubble variable number one, or V1
.....
Edwin Hubble found a star in Andromeda that brightened and faded in a predictable pattern, like a lighthouse beacon, and identified it as V1, a Cepheid variable. This special type of star had already been proven to be a reliable distance marker within our galaxy.

The star helped Hubble show that Andromeda was beyond our galaxy and settled the debate over the status of the spiral nebulae. The universe became a much bigger place after Hubble's discovery, much to the dismay of astronomer Harlow Shapley, who believed the fuzzy nebulae were part of our Milky Way.

Nearly 90 years later, V1 is in the spotlight again. Astronomers pointed Edwin Hubble's namesake, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, at the star once again, in a symbolic tribute to the legendary astronomer's milestone observation.

Astronomers with the Space Telescope Science Institute's Hubble Heritage Project partnered with the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) to study the star. AAVSO observers followed V1 for six months, producing a plot, or light curve, of the rhythmic rise and fall of the star's light. Based on this light curve, the Hubble Heritage team scheduled telescope time to capture images of the star.

Image of the plotting of V1: click to enlarge. High-res version.