Classification des espèces - Un rappel

From the Mensa Archeology group
Brushing up on taxonomy I came up with this nice mnemonics;
"King Philips Came Over For Good Sex".
That's for:
Kingdom - Phylum - Class - Order - Family - Genus - Species.
Règne, Embranchement, Classe, Ordre, Famille, Genre, Espèce dans la langue de Molière.
On dirait quoi comme outil mnémonique? RECOFGE est classique mais manque d'humour...

For humans:
▪ Kingdom: Animalia (all animals, which are heterotrophs)
▪ Phylum: Chordata (all animals with a notochord)
▪ Subphylum: Vertebrata (all vertebrates, i.e., with a spinal column)
▪ Class: Mammalia (all vertebrates whose females secrete milk to nourish young)
▪ Subclass: Placentalia (Eutheria) (mammals who are nourished in utero through a placenta)
▪ Order: Primates (mammals with five opposable digits, binocular vision, and large brains)
▪ Family: Hominidae (all hominids, current and ancestral)
▪ Genus: Homo (upright primates; 'man')
▪ Species: Homo sapiens (humanity; 'wise man')
▪ Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens

Phénomène Blog - Wow!

Radio-Canada.ca

Le succès phénoménal des blogues
Selon une analyse de Technorati, le mois dernier, il y aurait eu une moyenne de 900 000 messages publiés quotidiennement dans les carnets Web de la blogosphère. Ça signifie 37 500 messages par heure ou 10,4 à la seconde. Toujours selon l'analyse de Technorati, qui recense plus de 14 millions de blogues, un nouveau carnet Web verrait le jour à chaque seconde, pour une moyenne quotidienne de 80 000 blogues. Alors, pas surprenant de voir que la blogosphère double sa taille tous les 5,5 mois.

Evolution and Intelligent Design

A good article from the Archeology Mensa Yahoo group.
I really like the last paragraph...

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: August 23, 2005

Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old - some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us.

I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.

The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this.

One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.

It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first originated on this planet. That is not an unimaginable number in itself, if you're thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or grains of sand. But 3.5 billion years of biological history is different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time. That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time that has allowed the making of us.

The idea of such quantities of time is extremely new. Humans began to understand the true scale of geological time in the early 19th century. The probable depth of cosmological time and the extent of the history of the human species have come to light only within our own lifetimes.

That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time.

Humans feel much more content imagining a world of more human proportions, with a shorter time scale and a simple narrative sense of cause and effect. But what we prefer to believe makes no difference. The fact that life on Earth has arrived at a point where it is possible for humans to have beliefs is due to the steady ticking away of eons and the trial and error of natural selection.

Evolution is a robust theory, in the scientific sense, that has been tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design is not a theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-financed political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic proposition - the intervention of a designer, a k a God - cannot be tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions that humans were divinely created are the same as its conclusions. Its objections to evolution are based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective treatment of the physical evidence.

Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education.

The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation.

The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.

Chatelaine.qc.ca Cancer : les légumes contre-attaquent

http://www.chatelaine.qc.ca/sante/article.jsp?content=20050623_101047_3652&page=1
En mai 2004, au très sérieux Laboratoire de médecine moléculaire de l'Hôpital Sainte-Justine/Université du Québec à Montréal, on a sorti un extracteur à jus. Les chercheurs ont préparé un cocktail de légumes : tomate, chou, ail, betterave et kale (chou vert non pommé). Puis, ils y ont exposé des cellules de médulloblastome, un cancer du cerveau très agressif chez l'enfant, contre lequel il n'existe aucun traitement.

« Le jus de légumes a freiné le développement des cellules cancéreuses », raconte le docteur Richard Béliveau, oncologue, chercheur et directeur du Laboratoire. Rien de moins !

Etc. À lire! C'est réjouissant de lire ces lignes dans une revue aussi "mainstream" que le Chatelaine.

Fuel Cell Today - Canadian solar energy tower at Weizmann Institute promises to advance use of hydrogen fuel

Canadian solar energy tower at Weizmann Institute promises to advance use of hydrogen fuel

05 August 2005

Author:
Provider: Canada NewsWire



REHOVOT, Israel, Aug. 5, 2005 (Canada NewsWire via COMTEX) -- Innovative solar technology that may offer a "green" solution to the production of hydrogen fuel has been successfully tested on a large scale at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The technology also promises to facilitate the storage and transportation of hydrogen. The chemical process behind the technology was originally developed at Weizmann, and it has been scaled up in collaboration with European scientists. Results of the experiments will be reported in August at the 2005 Solar World Congress of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) in Orlando, Florida.

Hydrogen, the most plentiful element in the universe, is an attractive candidate for becoming a pollution-free fuel of the future. However, nearly all hydrogen used today is produced by means of expensive processes that require combustion of polluting fossil fuels. Moreover, storing and transporting hydrogen is extremely difficult and costly.

The new solar technology tackles these problems by creating an easily storable intermediate energy source form from metal ore, such as zinc oxide. With the help of sunlight concentrated by the Weizmann Institute's Canadian Institute for the Energies and Applied Research Solar Tower, the ore is heated to about 1,200 degrees C in a solar reactor in the presence of wood charcoal. The process splits the ore, releasing oxygen and creating gaseous zinc, which is then condensed to a powder. Zinc powder can later be reacted with water, yielding hydrogen, to be used as fuel, and zinc oxide, which is recycled back to zinc in the solar plant. In recent experiments, the 300-kilowatt installation produced 45 kilograms of zinc powder from zinc oxide in one hour, exceeding projected goals.

The process generates no pollution, and the resultant zinc can be easily stored and transported, and converted to hydrogen on demand. In addition, the zinc can be used directly, for example, in zinc-air batteries, which serve as efficient converters of chemical to electrical energy. Thus, the method offers a way of storing solar energy in chemical form and releasing it as needed.

"After many years of basic research, we are pleased to see the scientific principles developed at the Institute validated by technological development," said Prof. Jacob Karni, Head of the Center for Energy Research at Weizmann."

"The success of our recent experiments brings the approach closer to industrial use," says engineer Michael Epstein, project leader at the Weizmann Institute.

The concept of splitting metal ores with the help of sunlight has been under development over the course of several years at the Weizmann Institute's Canadian Institute for the Energies and Applied Research, one of the most sophisticated solar research facilities in the world, which has a solar tower, a field of 64 mirrors and unique beam-down optics. The process was tested originally on a scale of several kilowatts; it has been scaled up to 300 kilowatt in collaboration with the European researchers.

Weizmann scientists are currently investigating metal ores other than zinc oxide, as well as additional materials that may be used for efficient conversion of sunlight into storable energy.

The solar project is the result of collaboration between scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, Institut de Science et de Genie des Materiaux et Procedes - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, and the ScanArc Plasma Technologies AB in Sweden. The project is supported by the European Union's FP5 program.

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is one of the world's top-ranking multidisciplinary research institutions. Noted for its wide-ranging exploration of the natural and exact sciences, the Institute is home to 2,500 scientists, students, technicians and supporting staff. Institute research efforts include the search for new ways of fighting disease and hunger, examining leading questions in mathematics and computer science, probing the physics of matter and the universe, creating novel materials and developing new strategies for protecting the environment.

The research from this press release will be presented at the ISES 2005 Solar World Congress - Bringing Water to the World - scheduled to take place during August 6-12, 2005 in Orlando, Fl US, http://www.swc2005.org

SOURCE: Weizmann Canada

CONTACT: For dramatic solar tower photos contact: Michael Myer, National Executive Vice

President, Weizmann Canada, (416) 733-9220, michael@weizmann.ca

Copyright (C) 2005 CNW Group. All rights reserved.


(C) 2005 Canada NewsWire. All Rights Reserved