"Have you ever been on the subway and seen something that you did not quite recognize, something mysteriously unidentifiable?

Well, there is a good chance scientists do not know what it is either.

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

“People don’t look at a subway pole and think, ‘It’s teeming with life,’ ” said Dr. Christopher E. Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College and the lead author of the study. “After this study, they may. But I want them to think of it the same way you’d look at a rain forest, and be almost in awe and wonder, effectively, that there are all these species present — and that you’ve been healthy all along.”

Dr. Mason said the inspiration for the study struck about four years ago when he was dropping off his daughter at day care. He watched her explore her new surroundings by happily popping objects into her mouth. As is the custom among tiny children, friendships were made on the floor, by passing back and forth toys that made their way from one mouth to the next.

“I couldn’t help thinking, ‘How much is being transferred, and on which kinds of things?’ ” Dr. Mason said. So he considered a place where adults can get a little too close to each other, the subway.

Thus was the project, called PathoMap, born. Over the past 17 months, a team mainly composed of medical students, graduate students and volunteers fanned out across the city, using nylon swabs to collect DNA, in triplicate, from surfaces that included wooden benches, stairway handrails, seats, doors, poles and turnstiles.

In addition to the wealth of mystery DNA — which was not unexpected given that only a few thousand of the world’s genomes have been fully mapped — the study’s other findings reflected New York’s famed diversity, both human and microbial..."====http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/nyregi...metro&_r=1

Everybody loves a good swimming pool. Here's some I can only DREAM about swimming in. "Warning! No horseplay!"

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"Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957) is a classic work of fiction set in a small Illinois town in 1928, loosely based on Bradbury’s own childhood.

The novel gets its title from the main character’s grandfather, who made his own dandelion wine so he could drink it in the cold, overcast winters when it was done fermenting. Drinking it reminded him of hot summer days back when the dandelions, which he refused to get rid of, dotted his lawn. In the novel, which celebrates simpler times, Bradbury’s main character Douglas says, “Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

So, just what might have Bradbury’s grandfather’s wine tasted like?

Jack Keller, who blogs about home-winemaking from Texas says dandelion wine recipes call for as much as two gallons of dandelion flowers per gallon of wine, or as little as half-pint, and describes it as a wine so light in texture that winemakers often boost the body by adding raisins, golden figs or white table grapes to the blend.

Keller writes, “If you omit the body-building ingredient [raisins, etc.], dandelion wine is light and invigorating and suited perfectly for tossed salad and baked fish (especially trout). If you ferment with a body-enhancer but shave the sugar, the wine will serve well with white-sauced pastas, heavier salads, fish, or fowl. Sweetened, it goes well before or after dinner.”

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If it can be made, you can be sure someone on the internet has made it!

http://www.jalapenowine.com/

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/watermel.asp

http://www.thedailymeal.com/how-make-pumpkin-wine

http://www.lovelygreens.com/2012/04/rhub...ecipe.html

http://chickensintheroad.com/farm-bell-r...nana-wine/

http://www.ehow.com/how_4897289_make-red-beet-wine.html

http://www.realfermenting.com/2012/10/maple-wine.html

http://tabletograve.com/putting-swine-wi...-cabernet/

"Pamela Prindle Fierro, the About.com Guide to Twins & Multiples, relates an incident told to her by a friend who has an identical twin. While chatting online one day, the sisters discovered that "they had purchased the exact same pair of pants, in the same color, from the same store, on the same day. Her sister lives in Belgium, while she lives in the United States."

Is this a case of two people who share very similar genetics simply making similar choices? Or is there truly a psychic connection that transcends distance?

Most scientists are naturally skeptical of such anecdotes as evidence of telepathic communication. "We do hear of things like this happening between identical twins more often than fraternal, but it isn't telepathy," says Dr. Nancy Segal, professor of psychology and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University in an article for Lawrence Journal-World. "They're merely coincidences that occur when two people are so much alike in the first place. It's nature and nurture - same heredity, same environment. [Identical twins] come from the same egg, and they tend to have the same general thought patterns, intelligence levels, likes and dislikes."

Coincidence doesn't explain the effects documented in several interesting experiments, however.

EXPERIMENTS

Guy Lyon Playfair, in addition to his book research, has conducted informal experiments of his own to test the psychic connection between twins. These are some of the results:

For a television show in 2003, Playfair set up a test for twins Richard and Damien Powles. Richard was placed in a sound-proof booth with a bucket of ice water while Damien was some distance away in another studio hooked up to a polygraph machine (a "lie detector" machine that measures respiration, muscle and skin response. When Richard plunged his hand into the ice water and let out a gasp, there was an obvious blip on Damien's polygraph that measured his respiration, as if he too had let out a gasp.

During the same experiment, Richard was instructed to open a cardboard box, from which he expected a nice surprise. Instead, a rubber snake popped out, startling him. At that exact moment, the polygraph recorded a jump in Damien's pulse rate, as if he was having the same experience.

In a similar experiment before a live TV audience in 1997, twin teenagers Elaine and Evelyn Dove were likewise separated. Elaine was in the sound-proof booth with a pyramid-shaped box while Evelyn was sequestered in another room with the polygraph. When Elaine was sitting relaxed, suddenly the box exploded in a harmless but shocking pop of sparks, flashes and colored smoke. Evelyn's polygraph recorded her psychic reaction at the same moment, with one of the needles running right off the edge of the paper.
Playfair is quick to admit that these were not experiments conducted with the strictest scientific protocols, yet it is difficult to explain their outcomes.

And there was a reason that Playfair used cold water and the element of surprise in his experiments rather than having the twins try to communicate the number and suit of a specific playing card or other such thing. The physical and emotional response could be the key to making it work. "Telepathy tends to work best when it is needed," he says, "and when sender and receiver are strongly bonded, as with mothers and babies, dogs and their owners, and those with the strongest bond of all - twins."====http://paranormal.about.com/od/espandtel...idence.htm

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/...-compounds

EXCERPT: In a drive to improve the environmental safety of genetically modified organisms, scientists have created the first GM microbes that can only survive in the presence of designer compounds not found in nature. The work represents a major step towards the creation of GM lifeforms that are completely reconfigured to perform an important job and then die without trace when their task is done....

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/...tion-study

EXCERPT: Sugary drinks may be causing girls to start menstruating earlier, research suggests. [...] The difference of a few months is not great, but the researchers say it may be significant because earlier onset menstrual periods are among the factors contributing to an increased risk of breast cancer later in life. However, one expert said the small change may not be hugely biologically relevant....

http://mindhacks.com/2015/01/21/pwned-by...arning-ai/

EXCERPT: Backchannel has a fascinating profile of DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis which although an interesting read in itself, has a link to a brief, barely mentioned study which may herald a quiet revolution in artificial intelligence.

The paper (available online as a pdf) is entitled “Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning” and describes an AI system which, without any prior training, learned to play a series of Atari 2600 games to the point of out-performing humans.

The key here is ‘without any prior training’ as the system was not ‘told’ anything about the games. It worked out how to play them, and how to win them, entirely on its own....

http://scitechdaily.com/transforming-min...er-earths/

EXCERPT: Two phenomena known to inhibit the potential habitability of planets — tidal forces and vigorous stellar activity — might instead help chances for life on certain planets orbiting low-mass stars, University of Washington astronomers have found.

In a paper published this month in the journal Astrobiology, UW doctoral student Rodrigo Luger and co-author Rory Barnes, research assistant professor, say the two forces could combine to transform uninhabitable “mini-Neptunes” — big planets in outer orbits with solid cores and thick hydrogen atmospheres — into closer-in, gas-free, potentially habitable worlds....