Jeff Sharlett, author of “The Family” and Rachel Maddow discuss the secretive Republican “C Street House” run by a bizarre conservative Christian group.
As an addition to the earlier post on this blog about United States Christian fundamentalists The Family, also known as The Fellowship; from Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, 6 February 2010, paper edition, page 4, article “Het geheime netwerk van Christus” (Christ’s secret network):
A top university has announced plans to honour a senior Scottish Catholic churchmen who has been accused of homophobia: here.
USA: Escalating their opposition to gay and lesbian Vietnamese participating in the Tet Parade in Westminster, a group of Viet religious leaders and activists assert they will boycott the event, and several Catholic organizations have pulled out: here.
The world’s biggest gay festival, Sydney Mardi Gras, has been criticised for being too interested in corporate relationships, rather than community values and local activism: here.
Behind the Exclusive Brethren. By Michael Bachelard. Scribe, 2008298 pp, $27.95. Book review here.
Study finds surprising new branches on arthropod family tree
February 10, 2010
Any way you look at it — by sheer weight, species diversity or population — the hard-shelled, joint-legged creepy crawlies called arthropods dominate planet Earth. Because of their success and importance, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the family relationships that link lobsters to millipedes and cockroaches to tarantulas [see also here] and find which might have come first.
In a scientific and technological tour de force that was nearly a decade in the making, a team of scientists from Duke University, the University of Maryland and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County have compared genetic sequences from 75 different species to draw a new family tree that includes every major arthropod lineage. Some of the relationships are so surprising that new names had to be coined for five newly-discovered groupings.
The work, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, appears early online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A big surprise to tumble out of the new tree is that the closest living relatives of insects include a small and obscure group of creatures called remipedes that were only discovered in the late 1970s living in a watery cave in the Bahamas. With linear bodies like centipedes, simple legs and no eyes, it was thought that this small group — now placed with cephalocarids in the newly-named Xenocarida or “strange shrimp” — would be found at the base of the crustacean family tree.
Now, after analyzing 62 shared genetic sequences across all the arthropods, the researchers are putting the strange shrimp together with the six-legged insects, Hexapoda, to form a new group they dubbed Miracrustacea, or “surprising crustaceans.” As a “sister clade” to hexapods, the Xenocarida likely represent the sort of creature that came onto land to start the spectacular flowering of the insect lineage, said Cliff Cunningham, a professor of biology at Duke who led the study.
Triops, a 2-inch crustacean that looks like a cross between a horseshoe crab and a mayfly, had also been thought of as an early crustacean, but it too was shown to have a relatively modern origin in the new analysis, Cunningham said.
“Taxonomists have been arguing about these things for decades, and people kept coming at this with one data set after another,” Cunningham said. This latest study has created a fuller picture of the arthropod family tree by using more species and more genes, he said.
Beginning in 2001, Jeffrey Shultz, an associate professor of entomology at Maryland, led the efforts to figure out which species needed to be sequenced for a robust comparison, and then to round up suitable specimens of each. The study included nematodes, scorpions, dragonflies, barnacles, copepods and centipedes.
Remipedes, one of the two species of Xenocarida in the study, had to be fetched from partially submerged limestone caves in the Yucatan Peninsula and preserved just so. Bitty creatures called mystacocarids that live between grains of sand were captured by the Natural History Museum’s Regina Wetzer, using a microscope on a Massachusetts beach. …
The spiders, ticks and scorpions of the subgroup Chelicerata are shown to have split from the line leading to insects and crustaceans even before the millipedes and centipedes of the subphylum Myriapoda. Most recent molecular studies had grouped these arachnids in Chelicerata together with millipedes and centipedes of the Myriapoda. But the new analysis puts millipedes and centipedes together with crustaceans and insects in a group taxonomists had long ago named Mandibulata.
“The only thing people thought they knew before molecular data was available was that the Myriapods were with the insects,” Shultz said. But that turned out to be wrong. Even the grouping Crustacea is no longer correct, since it includes the six-legged insects.
Within the insect group Hexapoda, the good news for taxonomists who have grouped insects according to body shape and features is that they were pretty much on the mark, Shultz added.
New fossils from the Middle Jurassic period show what at least one species of spider, Eoplectreurys gertschi, looked like when dinosaurs dominated the planet: here.
Nicknamed ‘Crabzilla’ after the fictional giant monster, the Japanese Spider Crab has a body the size of a basketball and its legs can straddle a car. They will eventually measure a massive 15ft: here.
Shrimp in Drinking Water Are Microscopic and Harmless: here.
Discovering Tiny Juvenile Horseshoe Crab on First Day of Spring: here.
Horseshoe Crab Mating in Full Swing on Outer Cape Cod: here.
CAMBRIDGE: An international team of paleontologists may have found the evolutionary key to the most diverse species on earth – in the form of a walking, sea-dwelling, armoured ‘cactus’.
The study, published in Nature, documents the discovery of an unusual worm-like creature from Cambrian-era China. The fossil suggests the species to have developed robust, hardened legs before the acquisition of an armoured torso, raising questions about the evolution of arthropods in general, from scorpions to wasps to butterflies.
“Arthropods are the richest species on earth – there are over one million described species. Thus, the origins of arthropods is always a hotly contested issue,” said lead author Jianni Liu, an earth scientist at Northwest University in Xi’an, China. “But until now we didn’t have a single fossil with appendaged joints indicating an early arthropod. Our fossil shows a link – that’s the important point.”
Absence of suggestive fossils
The evolutionary stems of most modern species were born 500 million years ago in the Cambrian explosion – a period of rapid, complex evolution that diversified what was otherwise relatively small and simple life. Mineralised organisms became common for the first time, allowing for fossilisation.
Despite the richness of the era, however, there has been a notable absence of suggestive fossils that connect arthropods to a common ancestor.
Liu and her colleagues suggest that they may have found this link, situating lobopodians – a group of small, sea-faring animals originating in the Early Cambrian, resembling modern velvet worms or water bears – as potential ancestors of arthropods in general.
Arthropod or lobopodian?
Although the ‘walking cactus’ (Diania cactiformis) is, in many ways, a typical lobopodian, it is remarkable for also sharing features with arthropods. Most notably, its limbs are armoured, implying that it is close the point of arthropodisation.
“When I got the fossils, I was so surprised,” said Liu. “I couldn’t understand a creature with a soft body but hardened limbs. It’s really on the way to arthropods.”
The ‘walking cactus’ lived mostly in the sea, no more than 200 metres away from the shore at any given time, Liu said. Although data is not readily available, the researchers speculate that it was a kind of sediment feeder, extracting nutrients from the soil like certain worms today.
Did hard legs precede armour?
Another possibility is that it used its spindly legs to catch creatures and eat them, similar to numerous modern arthropods.
These two potential feeding habits highlight the dilemma of the finding: how far along is the arthropodisation process in this lobopodian? And can we confidently claim it to be a common ancestor for arthropods in general?
Evolution of blindness in scolopendromorph centipedes: insight from an expanded sampling of molecular data: here.
Millipede Taxonomy after 250 Years: Classification and Taxonomic Practices in a Mega-Diverse yet Understudied Arthropod Group: here.
This cartoon video from the USA is called Goldman Sachs to Jobless Jack.
An investigative report published Sunday by the New York Times documents the role of Goldman Sachs in pushing the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) to the brink of bankruptcy: here.
President Barack Obama told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that he does not “begrudge” the bonuses of Wall Street tycoons Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, who together were awarded $26 million last week: here.
As big investors face bankruptcy or walk away from failed real estate deals, renters are joining the many thousands of homeowners in New York City confronting the impact of the foreclosure crisis: here.
A witch-hunt is being conducted against the unemployed in Germany by leading politicians, economic “experts” and sections of the media: here.
ATHENS, Feb 10 – Greek public sector workers will strike on Wednesday in the first major test of the government’s commitment to push through austerity plans and tackle a debt crisis which has shaken the euro zone.
The 24-hour strike will ground flights, shut government offices and schools and leave public hospitals operating only with emergency staff, a day before EU leaders discuss Greece at a special economy summit in Brussels. …
Unions oppose plans to freeze public wages, slash the salary supplements many Greeks get on top of their base pay, and replace only one in five people leaving the civil service. They say tax reforms, which are also part of the EU-backed plan to shore up Greece’s finances, hurt the poor.
The strike comes a day after the socialist government announced fresh measures to further cut the public wage bill and hike taxes, defying unions with plans to save the state 800 million euros ($1.1 billion) this year.
“They had promised the rich would pay but instead they take the money from the poor,” said Ilias Iliopoulos, general secretary of the public sector umbrella union ADEDY. “This is the policy we are fighting, not the effort to get out of the crisis.” …
“The measures regarding civil servants are simply unjust,” said 65-year-old civil servant Panayotis Daskalakos.
“We will strike even if we don’t believe this battle will be won,” he said. “We know that the government is taking these measures to satisfy Brussels but they are not thinking about us.”
ADEDY, which represents half a million workers, said on Tuesday it was likely to join a Feb. 24 private sector strike or stage another strike in March.
Three-hundred thousand trade unionists are set to march through Athens on Wednesday as part of a 24-hour public-sector strike against the Socialist government’s drive to impose an EU-approved austerity programme: here. See also here. And here.
Germany and France have dangled a limited promise of “political support” – but no financial aid – for debt-burdened Greece at a meeting of European Union leaders: here.
Transport staff in Germany have walked off the job, the latest in a series of warning strikes called by unions demanding a 5 per cent pay rise for the country’s two million public sector workers: here.
