Here is how gorillas grieve:

Gorillas are known to hold wakes for dead friends, something that some zoos have formalized in a ceremony when one of their gorillas passes away. Donna Fernandes, now president of the Buffalo Zoo, tells the story of being at Boston's Franklin Park Zoo ten years ago during the wake for a female gorilla, Babs, who had died of cancer. She describes seeing the gorilla's longtime mate say good-bye: "He was howling and banging his chest,... and he picked up a piece of her favorite food — celery — and put it in her hand and tried to get her to wake up. I was weeping, it was so emotional." Later, the scene at Babs's December funeral was similarly moving. As reported by local news, gorilla family members "one by one ... filed into" the room where "Babs's body lay," approaching their "beloved leader" and "gently sniffing the body."

Here is how elephants express their grief:

[These] are the actions of the members of an elephant family... after a group member had been shot: "Teresia and Trista became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and Tullulah even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it in her mouth."

Finally, wolves:

[A] wolf pack after the loss of the low-ranking omega female wolf, Motaki, to a mountain lion. The pack lost their spirit and their playfulness. They no longer howled as a group, but rather they "sang alone in a slow mournful cry." They were depressed — tails and heads held low and walking softly and slowly — when they came upon the place where Motaki was killed. They inspected the area and pinned their ears back and dropped their tails, a gesture that usually means submission. It took about six weeks for the pack to return to normal. The Dutchers also tell of a wolf pack in Canada in which one pack member died and the others wandered about in a figure eight as if searching for her. They also howled long and mournfully.

As for humans, some of us can completely contain our emotions and turn the grief into a dark, inner sea that's wide and deep. We know the depths of death. No crying, no smelling, no stomping about—just the silent sea of grief.

Just 5% of everything is normal:

A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and by Walter Gear, of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. These measurements of the cosmic microwave background — a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe — put limits on proposed alternatives to the standard model of cosmology and provide further support for the standard cosmological model, confirming that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence, while ordinary matter makes up just 5%

From the accident of the universe, the sublime negativity itself, we get this other accidental universe, the accident of Miss Universe 2009:

If you hate mosquitoes as much as I do, you will draw as much pleasure as I did from this image for this Science News story:

A jumping spider feasts on a mosquito, living up to researchers' nickname of "Mosquito Terminator" for this Evarcha culicivora spider. Eating a mosquito engorged on blood makes both males and females of this species more appealing to potential mates

Nonstop is the news about diseases jumping from other animals (birds, pigs) to us (frightful!). For once, a story about diseases jumping from us to other animals:

Researchers from The Roslin Institute of the University of Edinburgh have shown that a strain of bacteria has jumped from humans to chickens.

It is believed to be the first clear evidence of bacterial pathogens crossing over from humans to animals and then spreading since animals were first domesticated some 10,000 years ago.

The study identified a form of the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus — of which MRSA is a subtype — in chickens, and found that the bacteria originally came from humans.

The Vancouver Sun reports:

There is life in the planet's expanding dead zones, say researchers, who have uncovered a remarkable microbe thriving in toxic waters off the B.C. coast.

The bacteria takes up carbon dioxide like a plant, consumes sulphide that is deadly to most other lifeforms, and exhales nitrous oxide which is a potent greenhouse gas.

The microbe may be small but it appears to be an important global player impacting the chemistry of both the atmosphere and the oceans, says lead researcher Steven Hallam, of the University of British Columbia, who likes to point out that it is microbes that "really rule the world."

The Ares 1-X rocket rumbled out to Launch Pad 39B in preps for an absolutely critical test launch next week. The Ares rocket is meant to replace the shuttle and provide a safer way to send people into orbit—cannibalizing components from both the shuttle program and the Saturn V rockets. This will be the tallest rocket launched since the Saturn V during the Apollo era.

Keep your eyes peeled on October 27th for the launch. It should be a good show, either way.

This passage about the epigenome, "the first manual to show how genes are orchestrated inside cells" (it appeared today in a science article in the Guardian)...

If the genetic code were a keyboard, the epigenome would be the pianist. Different chords become the various cell types, and all the notes have to be played perfectly to produce a healthy human being. Damage to the epigenome — the pattern of chemicals that controls our genes — has been linked to medical conditions as diverse as asthma, schizophrenia and cancer.

So the particles we see in nature are musical notes; if the rubber bands vibrate one way, it’s called an electron; if it vibrates another way, it’s called a quark; if it vibrates another way, it’s called a neutrino. So we have a musical analogy. So, the melodies you could play on the string is the laws of chemistry; the harmonies of the string is what we call physics. The universe is a symphony of strings. And then the mind of God; the mind of God that so fascinated Einstein for the last 30 years of his life — the mind of God — we now have a candidate for it, believe it or not; it is cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

And also a passage from Gilles Delueze's short but brilliant essay "Spinoza and Us":

The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of each living individuality, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slowness on a plane of immanence. In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relationship between speeds and slownesses of sound particles...

Biology, physics, and philosophy—it all comes down to music:

Question: Is there water on the moon?

Experiment:

The main LCROSS mission objective is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater near a lunar polar region.

LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 18, 2009 at 2:32 p.m. PDT. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009 (LCROSS lunar swingby video stream coverage) and entered into an elongated Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole. On final approach, the shepherding spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will act as a heavy impactor to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface. Projected impact at the lunar South Pole is currently: Oct 9, 2009 at 4:30 a.m. PDT. Following four minutes behind, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before impacting the lunar surface and creating a second debris plume.

The debris plumes are expected to be visible from Earth- and space-based telescopes 10-to-12 inches and larger.

A small group is gathering at Cal Anderson park to observe. Bring your telescope and join in!

Updated:
At 6:40pm PDT, the Centaur will separate from the rest of the ship. You'll be able to watch it live, via NASA!

The countdown has begun.

Remember this post? And remember the last sentence in that post?

I would rather be shot down by a robber than be in a situation where I'm exchanging gunfire with a robber.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. The study estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun.

What Penn researchers found was alarming — almost five Philadelphians were shot every day over the course of the study and about 1 of these 5 people died. The research team concluded that, although successful defensive gun uses are possible and do occur each year, the chances of success are low.

Episode 61 of the Brain Science Podcast features the Chief Science Officer (Allen Jones) of the Allen Institute for Brain Research.

The brain is really all about those functional divisions, and it’s very important to understand how those functional divisions relate to the underlying biochemistry of those places. The underlying biochemistry of those places is driven by the genes that are turned on in them.

I would say that every aspect poses its own unique challenge in scaling to the human brain. Right out of the gate it’s just getting human brain tissue. Obviously human brain tissue is coming to us postmortem, and the postmortem tissue—especially from what we’re gunning for, which is normal human brain tissue from people that are between the ages of 20 and 60—those are typically coming from accidental death of some sort. So, there’s a lot of logistics that have to happen to make sure that you can get high-quality human The longer that a brain is sitting there after death and before we’re actually able to obtain the tissue and freeze it down, you have issues where the tissue is starting to degrade, and the RNAs that we would like to measure—which are telling us at what level a gene is turned on—are starting to degrade. So, there are important things that relate to that.

And what is a normal brain? Meaning, what is not a bad brain?

[One that has] no history of psychiatric disease. You certainly don’t want [one with] a history of drug abuse or a history of alcoholism. So, there are a number of things that we’re screening for up front that we want to avoid.