danrik - Slashdot User

Submission + - Voyager 2 finds solar system's shape is 'dented' (reuters.com)

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Selikoff

on Tuesday December 11, 2007 @06:34AM

Selikoff writes: "NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has found that our solar system is not round but is "dented" by the local interstellar magnetic field of deep space, space experts said on Monday. The data was gathered by the craft on its 30-year journey into the edge of the solar system when it crossed into a sweeping region called the termination shock, they said. It showed that the southern hemisphere of the solar system's heliosphere is being pushed in or "dented." Voyager 2 is the second spacecraft to enter this region of the solar system behind Voyager 1, which entered the northern region of the heliosheath in December 2004."

The Coevolution of Lice & Their Hosts 179

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 07, 2007 @11:43PM from the lets-be-adults-about-this-everyone dept.

eldavojohn writes "It might be an uncomfortable subject but parasites are an interesting subject when it comes to evolution. Ever wonder if pocket gophers have lice? Well, they do. And most interesting of all is the evolution of these lice mirroring the evolution of gophers. To study the genes of lice may shed just as much light on evolutionary trees as studying the genes of the actual host the lice has evolved to. The most unsettling result from these studies is that human head lice and human pubic lice (crabs) vary so greatly that they are in two separate genera. There were similarities between our pubic lice and the lice found on gorillas. Scientists came to the conclusion, which they published today in BMC Biology, is just as striking as their earlier one about head lice. But it is hardly the same. We did not get pubic lice from other hominids. We got them from the ancestors of gorillas."

Comment Re:Objection, your honor! (Score 2, Insightful) 512

by danrik on Sunday March 04, 2007 @02:39AM (#18224268) Attached to: RIAA's 'Expert' Witness Testimony Now Online

I am sorry, but I have completed four years of undergrad and three years of a PhD program and have never even heard the words mentioned in my education.

As an outside observer reading a transcript, I can infer their meaning from their roots and context, even if I didn't come from a family of attorneys. As someone being paid to defend an untenable posision, in the high pressure situation of a deposition (and make no mistake, having been deposed before, depositions are quite intimidating), I can see why someone didn't make an obvious leap.

A good attorney does not need to make an already hostile witness any more hostile by being a pretentious ass, not that this at all questions the validity of the line of questioning.

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