From Discovery:

Eggert and his colleagues took a small, natural, clear diamond, about a tenth of a carat by weight and half a millimeter thick, and blasted it with lasers at ultrahigh pressures like those found on gas giants like Neptune and Uranus.

The scientists liquefied the diamond at pressures 40 million times greater than what a person feels when standing at sea level on Earth. From there they slowly reduced the temperature and pressure.

When the pressure dropped to about 11 million times the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth and the temperature dropped to about 50,000 degrees, solid chunks of diamond began to appear. The pressure kept dropping, but the temperature of the diamond remained the same, with more and more chunks of diamond forming.

Diamond Oceans Possible on Uranus, Neptune

From ReadWriteWeb:

Five Sundance films have been selected for this venture. It’s what we’d consider a test run to see how users will respond to paid content on the site, and whether this could be a new revenue stream for the web video giant, which has historically struggled with profitability.

The films include The Cove, an underwater adventure about dolphin capturing in Japan; Bass Ackwards, which chronicles an improvised road trip; Children of Invention, about two Bostonian orphans; One Too Many Mornings, a “coming of age comedy about two guys who are too old to be coming of age”; and Homewrecker, a comedy about a locksmith. The filmmakers will determine the exact asking price for viewing each movie, but all will be in the range of $5.

YouTube Will Start Charging for Some Videos

From the LA Times:

The site has spent months studying how to strike a balance between what people expect to watch free online and what they would be willing to pay for, said people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

One plan being considered would allow users to view the five most recent episodes of TV shows free but would require a subscription of $4.99 a month to watch older episodes. Hulu believes it will need at least 20 TV series — both current ones and those no longer on the air — to make such a pay service attractive to users. A firm pricing model could emerge within six months, the sources said.

At Hulu, ‘free’ may soon turn into ‘fee’

Hulu will not become pay for play. Sorta

Hulu to become paysite in 2010?

Image courtesy Flickr

From Times Online (UK):

After a mere six generations of this selective breeding for tameness, the foxes had changed so much that the experimenters felt obliged to name a new category, the “domesticated elite” class, which were “eager to establish human contact, whimpering to attract attention and sniffing and licking experimenters like dogs”. At the beginning of the experiment, none of the foxes were in the elite class. After ten generations of breeding for tameness, 18 per cent were “elite”; after 20 generations, 35 per cent; and after 30 to 35 generations, “domesticated elite” individuals constituted between 70 and 80 per cent of the experimental population.

Not only did the foxes change behaviorally, physiological changes similar to domesticated dogs began to appear.

From Wikipedia:

The domesticated foxes exhibit both behavioral and physiological changes from their wild forebears. They are friendlier with humans, put their ears down (like dogs), wag their tails when happy, and have begun to vocalize and bark like domesticated dogs. They have also developed color patterns like domesticated dogs and have lost their distinctive musky ‘fox smell’.

More recently, a microarray analysis has shown that only a handful of genes expressed in the brain are altered by behavioral selection. Small genetic changes can have a large effect.

From ScienceDirect:

The widespread changes seen in the farmed foxes following selection for tameness have been interpreted as a model of what may have taken place during the domestication process for other mammals [4 L.N. Trut, I.Z. Pliusnina and I.N. Os’kina, An experiment on fox domestication and debatable issues of evolution of the dog, Genetika 40 (2004), pp. 794–807. View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (7)4]. Our results suggest that the striking and widespread differences between NS and S animals are accompanied by limited amount of gene expression divergence compared to that between wild and farmed animals. As the S line had been founded by a small number of individuals, founder effects might have increased the differentiation between NS and S foxes; if this were the case, however, the real effect of behavioural selection would be even smaller than that reported here. As the NS and S foxes lived in identical environments, the observed differences most probably reflect the consequences of behavioural selection, with perhaps some contribution from founder effects, whereas the differences between farm and wild animals are likely to derive from both genetic (adaptation to captivity) and environmental differences. These combined results suggest that the dramatic behavioural and physiological changes caused by selection for tameness may be associated with only limited changes in the brain transcriptome. This contrasts with studies with Drosophila melanogaster [10] which have shown that selection for behavioural traits can result in much larger transcriptome changes. Further research will help to elucidate to what extent the observed expression divergence causes tameness in the foxes, or whether it reflects down-stream alterations produced by adaptive changes to the life with humans.

Richard Dawkins: the truth dogs reveal about evolution

Domesticated silver fox

Selection for tameness has changed brain gene expression in silver foxes

Image courtesy SibFox.com

From SFWeekly:

Because, you see, the Rahois did what most illicit pot growers do: they jumped their home’s utility box in order to both hide the egregious amount of energy a pot grow requires and to steal some extra juice from the power lines outside. All that extra voltage on wires not designed to handle it creates a fire hazard, and having kids in a fire hazard is, well, against the law.

“If someone is letting their children reside in an unsafe home, whether or not marijuana is involved, that’s a crime,” police spokesman Officer Boaz Marales told SF Weekly. Had the box not been jumped, the endangerment charge wouldn’t have been included, and if the Rahois had recommendations, “no arrests would have been made,” he added.

How Much Pot Is Enough (To Get Your Kids Taken Away From You)? via Digg

Image courtesy Flickr

From USA Today:

Donna Ryan, president of the Obesity Society, a group of weight-loss researchers and professionals, says she believes it may have plateaued for now, but “to level off at 34% obesity is no great achievement. It’s still very, very alarming. And the high rates of childhood obesity are likely to translate into higher rates of extreme obesity when those children reach adulthood.”

Extra weight increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, some types of cancer and other health problems. Americans who are obese cost the country an estimated $147 billion in weight-related medical bills in 2008.

U.S. obesity rate leveling off, at about one-third of adults

Image courtesy Flickr

From Wired:

“We have no idea where they moved on to or why,” said Shelbi Stoudt, who manages a team that helps stranded animals in the San Francisco Bay from the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California.

The sea lions’ disappearance is as strange as their initial colonization of the pier about 20 years ago, in late 1989. They just started showing up one day and as their numbers increased, their traditional hang out, Seal Rocks, became less populated. There are all sorts of theories about why the pier became a favorite haul-out spot for the sea lions, but no one knows for sure why the animals’ behavior changed.

Fast forward a few weeks and it looks like Ashley Harrell from SF Weekly found the missing puzzle piece. Who knew sea lions were such scaredy-cats?

Not the sea lion chasing dog, but terrifying all the same.

From SFWeekly:

“He runs in their direction, barking,” says itinerant fisherman Daniel K. of his dog, a golden retriever–pit bull mix called Rez. “He’s a lot faster than they are on land. That’s what gets ‘em.”

When Daniel K. showed up at the Hyde Street Pier for crab season in early November, he found it covered in sea lions. Although he had heard about the problems with pinniped infestations up and down the West Coast, “San Francisco is the worst I’ve seen,” he says. He never imagined his dog might be a solution. When he got Rez a year ago, the dog was unfazed by sea lions. But on a recent fishing trip, Rez developed an aversion after several aggressive sea lions charged the boat: “It freaked him out. After that, he would bark at them.”

How Hyde Street Pier eliminated its sea lion problem
Famous San Francisco Sea Lions Abandon Their Pier 39 Post
Image of Pier 39 courtesy Gary Soup
Image of Dog Courtesy of Flickr

Source: Business Pundit

From Wired:

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

Image courtesy PNAS.

From Huffington Post:

But the press secretary did rule out one possible SOTU date — much to the delight of a major television network. The speech, Gibbs said, would not take place on the same night as the three-hour premiere of the final season of ABC’s “Lost”.

“I don’t foresee a scenario in which millions people who hope to finally get some conclusion with ‘Lost’ are preempted by the president,” he said. “You can quote a senior administration official.”

Gibbs: State Of The Union Won’t Coincide With Premiere Of ‘Lost’
State of the Union vs Lost. February 2nd Showdown