Quick Takes 04.29.2009

• Dietary fats trigger long-term memory formation – U. C. Irvine via EurekAlert!

“OEA is part of the molecular glue that makes memories stick,” Piomelli said. “By helping mammals remember where and when they have eaten a fatty meal, OEA’s memory-enhancing activity seems to have been an important evolutionary tool for early humans and other mammals.”

Dietary fats are important for overall health, helping with the absorption of vitamins and the protection of vital organs. While the human diet is now rich in fats, this was not the case for early humans. In fact, fat-rich foods in nature are quite rare.

The desert hosts an unexpected light show in the latest Insight Hybrid television commercial created by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam for Honda Motor Europe.

The contemporary notion of the Singularity got started with legendary SF writer Vernor Vinge, whose 1981 novella True Names pictured a society on the verge of this “event.” In a 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Vinge made his vision clear, writing that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

While investigating the chemical make-up of comets, Prof. Akiva Bar-Nun of the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences at Tel Aviv University found they were the source of missing ingredients needed for life in Earth’s ancient primordial soup. “When comets slammed into the Earth through the atmosphere about four billion years ago, they delivered a payload of organic materials to the young Earth, adding materials that combined with Earth’s own large reservoir of organics and led to the emergence of life,” says Prof. Bar-Nun.

Scientists are reporting evidence that contrary to our current beliefs about what is possible, intact double-stranded DNA has the “amazing” ability to recognize similarities in other DNA strands from a distance. Somehow they are able to identify one another, and the tiny bits of genetic material tend to congregate with similar DNA. The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.

My emphasis in bold added to the above entries.

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