viernes, 25 de febrero de 2011

BLACK SHEEP


This is a short fable about a country whose ethics, in the end, might not be that dissimilar to the one you live in. In a flock of black sheep, it is of course the white one which stands out. Numbers in the Dark is the collection where this story originates:

Black Sheep, by Italo Calvino

There was a country where they were all thieves.

At night everybody would leave home with skeleton keys and shaded lanterns and go and burgle a neighbour’s house. They’d get back at dawn, loaded, to find their own house had been robbed.

So everybody lived happily together, nobody lost out, since each stole from the other, and that other from another again, and so on and on until you got to a last person who stole from the first. Trade in the country inevitably involved cheating on the parts both of the buyer and the seller. The government was a criminal organization that stole from its subjects, and the subjects for their part were only interested in defrauding the government. Thus life went on smoothly, nobody was rich and nobody was poor.

One day, how we don’t know, it so happened that an honest man came to live in the place. At night, instead of going out with his sack and his lantern, he stayed home to smoke and read novels.

The thieves came, saw the light on and didn’t go in.

This went on for a while: then they were obliged to explain to him that even if he wanted to live without doing anything, it was no reason to stop others from doing things. Every night he spent at home meant a family would have nothing to eat the following day.

The honest man could hardly object to such reasoning. He took to going out in the evening and coming back the following morning like they did, but he didn’t steal. He was honest, there was nothing you could do about it. He went as far as the bridge and watched the water flow by beneath. When he got home he found he had been robbed.

In less than a week the honest man found himself penniless, he had nothing to eat and his house was empty. But this was hardly a problem, since it was his own fault; no, the problem was that his behaviour upset everything else. Because he let the others steal everything he had without stealing anything from anybody; so there was always someone who came home at dawn to find their house untouched: the house he should have robbed. In any event after a while the ones who weren’t being robbed found themselves richer than the others and didn’t want to steal any more. To make matters worse, the ones who came to steal from the honest man’s house found it was always empty; so they became poor.

Meanwhile, the ones who had become rich got into the honest man’s habit of going to the bridge at night to watch the water flow by beneath. This increased the confusion because it meant lots of others became rich and lots of others became poor.

Now, the rich people saw that if they went to the bridge every night they’d soon be poor. And they thought: ‘Let’s pay some of the poor to go and rob for us.’ They made contracts, fixed salaries, percentages: they were still thieves of course, and they still tried to swindle each other. But, as tends to happen, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and poorer.

Some of the rich people got so rich that they didn’t need to steal or have others steal for them so as to stay rich. But if they stopped stealing they would get poor because the poor stole from them. So they paid the very poorest of the poor to defend their property from the other poor, and that meant setting up a police force and building prisons.

So it was that only a few years after the appearance of the honest man, people no longer spoke of robbing and being robbed, but only of the rich and the poor; but they were still all thieves.

The only honest man had been the one at the beginning, and he died in very short order, of hunger.

domingo, 20 de febrero de 2011

IJAM



Una ingeniosa campaña de publicidad algo viejuna, pero divertida. Y encima fueron a Apple a devolverlo:

martes, 15 de febrero de 2011

EL SÉPTIMO CONTINENTE

En la Tierra hay cinco continentes que están formados por tierra, uno de hielo, y lamentablemente, uno de plástico generado por nosotros, los humanos.
Se encuentra entre Asia y América del Norte, en el océano Pacífico y tiene una extensión de tres veces España, y creciendo.

Además de cargarnos el medio ambiente, estamos provocando la extinción de numerosas especies. Y es que, en la Era de los Humanos, (como antes hubo la de los mamíferos, de los reptiles o de los peces), se está produciendo una extinción masiva. El meteorito somos nosotros.

Esta y otras muchas más meditaciones, junto con una clara y divertida explicación de cómo surgió la vida y evolucionó hasta las formas que hay ahora, las he leído en este libro que os recomiendo: Elemental Queridos Humanos.
Ciencia combinada con humor. Muy entretenido.

domingo, 13 de febrero de 2011

miércoles, 9 de febrero de 2011

8 MINUTOS

Si el Sol se apagara, tardaríamos en darnos cuenta 8 minutos,
que es el tiempo que tarda en viajar su luz hasta la Tierra


Y hablando del Sol, el día 6 de febrero fue el primer día en que los humanos hemos podido ver nuestra estrella por delante y por detrás al mismo tiempo. La hazaña ha sido posible gracias a los satélites gemelos STEREO, que se han situado en una posición de 180º de diferencia el uno frente al otro y están captando ambas caras del sol a la vez.



El resultado son las imágenes que veis sobre estas líneas. ¿Sirve de algo aparte de la bonita foto?, preguntarán los más escépticos. Pues sí, porque hasta ahora veíamos las tormentas del lado que nos quedaba oculto con retraso, y esta visión global del sol nos permitirá estudiar estos fenómenos con mucha mayor amplitud. Visto en amazings.

jueves, 3 de febrero de 2011

LA MUJER INMORTAL

Se llamaba Henrietta Lacks, pero para los científicos se ha convertido simplemente en HeLa. Era una pobre cultivadora de tabaco del sur de los Estados Unidos, que trabajó en las mismas tierras en las que sus antepasados sufrieron esclavitud. Murió en 1951 a causa de un cáncer de cervix, y aún así, en cierto modo, ha alcanzado la inmortalidad.

Su familia no lo supo entonces, pero cuando Henrietta luchaba contra el tumor que le arrebataría la vida, los médicos le practicaron una biopsia para extraer parte de sus células tumorales. Los doctores decidieron conservarlas sin informar a nadie, costumbre habitual en aquella época. Aquellas células han terminado por convertirse en una de las herramientas más importantes con las que cuenta la medicina a causa de una característica increíble: se mantienen vivas y crecen vigorosamente. Se trata de la primera línea celular humana “inmortal” que se ha podido cultivar a gran escala.

Resulta irónico que parte de su útero siga vivo, cada vez en mayor volumen, a pesar de que en octubre de este año hará 60 años de la muerte de su donante. Para acabar con las células HeLa hay que someterlas a radiación, privarlas de nutrientes o agua, o ponerlas en contacto con otras células que las fagociten. Pero si las condiciones se mantienen estables, las células tumorales, al contrario que las sanas, simplemente no envejecen. Si pudieramos apilar en una báscula a todas las células HeLa cultivadas hasta la fecha, su peso superaría las 50 toneladas métricas.

Gracias a ella...

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but for scientists it has become just in HeLa. It was a poor tiller of snuff in the southern United States, who worked on the same land where their ancestors suffered slavery. He died in 1951 due to cervical cancer, and yet somehow has achieved immortality.

His family did not know then, but when Henrietta was struggling against the tumor that would rob him of life, doctors performed a biopsy to remove part of their tumor cells.The doctors decided to keep them without informing anyone, usual practice at that time. Those cells have ended up becoming one of the most important tools with which the medicine has caused an incredible feature: stay alive and grow vigorously. This is the first human cell line "immortal" who has been cultivating a large scale.

Ironically, part of the uterus to continue to live in ever greater volume, even though in October this year will be 60 years since the death of the donor. To finish with HeLa cells have to undergo radiation, depriving them of nutrients or water, or put them in contact with other cells that phagocyte.
But if conditions are stable, the tumor cells, unlike healthy cells, simply do not age. If we could stack on a scale to all HeLa cells cultured to date, exceed the weight of 50 metric tons.