Finlandia: Claves del mejor sistema educativo del mundo

ORIGINAL: Al Salir del Cole

JULIA 

12/12/2012

Ya hemos hablado en alsalirdelcole del éxito educativo en Finlandia. Desde que la OCDE comenzara en el año 2000 a elaborar su informe PISA, Finlandia ha acaparado los primeros puestos del podio en Europa por su excelente nivel educativo.

¿Por qué? Por estas 5 razones:

1. El profesor

• Ser profesor de escuela es una de las profesiones de mayor prestigio en Finlandia.
• Para ser profesor hace falta estudiar una carrera de 3 años más 2 años de máster.
• Sólo un 10% de los aspirantes consigue entrar en la carrera.
• Para estudiar Magisterio hace falta más de un 9/10 en bachillerato y reválida.
• Se requiere además una gran dosis de sensibilidad social.
• La gente pide consejo al profesor sobre todo tipo de asuntos debido a su alta preparación.

2. El método educativo

• Los niños empiezan a estudiar a la edad de 7 años cuando tienen madurez intelectual.
• Los 2 primeros años de colegio los alumnos van a clase 4-5 horas al día y tienen pocos deberes.
• Hasta 6º de primaria los niños suelen tener en la mayoría de asignaturas el mismo maestro.
• Hasta 5º no hay calificaciones numéricas para no fomentar la competencia ni las comparaciones.
• La relación con el profesor es muy cercana porque no hay más de 20 alumnos por clase.
• No se persigue la memorización sino la curiosidad, la creatividad y la experimentación.
• No se quiere transmitir información sino que es más importante aprender a pensar.
• Los profesores trabajan en grupo, buscan la participación y la retroalimentación de los alumnos.
• El profesor es evaluado y recibe feedback por parte de otros profesores más experimentados.

Educación Finlandia

3. Los centros educativos

• Cada colegio tiene autonomía para organizar su propio programa de estudios.
• La planificación educativa es consensuada entre los profesores y los alumnos.
• El trabajo es integrado en los niveles del sistema educativo (primaria, secundaria y universidad).

4. Cultura educativa

• En Finlandia el 80% de las familias van a la biblioteca el fin de semana.
• Los finlandeses valoran la cultura luterana de la disciplina y el esfuerzo.
• Los padres creen que son los responsables de la educación de sus hijos por delante de la escuela.

5. La política educativa

• El gasto en educación en Finlandia fue del 6,8% del PIB en 2009 (5% en España).
• La enseñanza obligatoria es gratuita desde el material escolar hasta el transporte.
• En Finlandia existe estabilidad en el sistema educativo debido al consenso político existente.
• El sistema social dota de numerosas ayudas para la concilación familiar y laboral.

Vía | unitedexplanations.org

Going below 0K, genomic editing, molecular motors, mechanochemistry, cellular reprogramming, and others.

ORIGINAL: SciTechDigest

SciTech #ScienceSunday Digest 1 - 

6th Jan 2013

1. Conceptualising Negative “Absolute” Temperatures.

Physicists have used finely controlled magnetic fields and lasers to force the temperature of a gas to be colder than absolute zero, i.e.minus a few billionths of a degree below zero Kelvinhttp://phys.org/news/2013-01-gas-temperature-absolute.html andhttp://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-zero-1.12146. This is of course intriguing, but depends crucially on the definition of temperature and entropy. The matter itself is apparently not at temperatures below zero Kelvin but rather on average the system as a whole exhibits an average temperature that can be measured as below zero - this actually depends on heating the particles up while driving their entropy down. Negative temperatures imply negative pressures and so this naturally leads to stimulating speculation on how this finding might be applied to things like dark energy, new forms of matter, repulsive gravity and mass, warping space, wormholes, and Alcubierre drives. h/t +Ninja On Rye

2. More Precise Genomic Editing.

By modifying a set of bacterial proteins that normally defend against viral invaders researchers created a system that can alter several genome sites simultaneously and can achieve much greater control over where new genes are insertedhttp://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/editing-the-genome-with-high-precision-0103.html. This approach can be used to disrupt a gene or replace it with a new one; the specific sequence of the RNA component allows the easy programming of a nuclease to target one or more positions in the genome. The genetic components have been deposited with a nonprofit to be made widely available to other researchers via http://crispr.genome-engineering.org/ and so we now have a cheaper, easier-to-use, more precise and accurate, widely available system that can be used to engineer a wide range of organisms for countless biotechnology and synthetic biology applications. I’ve gotten the occasional cold sore since I was a child and so would love something like this to target the HSV code buried in some cells. 

3. A Molecular Motor Rotating on an Atomic Ball Bearing.

Title says it all. Some very clever chemists created two complex individual molecules (i) a base with three legs joined to a boron and ruthenium atom, and (ii) a top with five arms joined to a five atom ring in the centre http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/single-molecule-motor-sits-on-a-single-atom-ball-bearing/ (image 2). When the 5-armed molecule was placed on the ruthenium atom a scanning tunnelling microscope was used to inject electrons into the system and controllably cause the top molecule to rotate clockwise and anticlockwise. I’m wondering whether this little molecular motor might be used as a switch (it can be moved in one-arm increments) in some form of ultra-dense mechanical computer memory or processing element? h/t +iPan Baal

4. On Progress to Superhuman Immune Systems.

In a type of study that is becoming increasingly common, researchers took mature immune cells from a patient, treated them with a known cocktail of factors to turn them into induced pluripotent stem cells, replicated / expanded the population of cells, and turned them back into the same type of cell but these new cells exhibited rejuvenated characteristics of lifespan and growth potential while retaining the ability to target cancer cells and HIV-infected cellshttp://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/01/why-not-infuse-a-person-with-many-many-many-immune-cells.php. Reason from FightAging! posits that it is surely only a matter of time before we safely imbue a person with rejuvenated populations of 2, 5, or even 10 times as many immune cells as we normally have. 

5. A Topological Recipe Book for New Materials.

Researchers showed that they can create a recipe book to build new materials using the mathematics of topology (whose properties that do not change when an object is continuously deformed)http://www.colorado.edu/news/features/physicists-research-creates-recipe-book-new-materials (image 1). They created a colloid by injecting tiny differently-shaped particles (that represent fundamental building-block shapes in topology) into a liquid crystal to create a novel substance that behaves somewhat like a liquid and somewhat like a solid. The new material adhered to existing mathematical topology theorems and should open the door to a range of new materials in this space. 

6. Uncovering Drug Side Effects Before Drug Trials.

A research group has created a computational / simulation tool that rapidly screens drug structures against a library of known protein structures in order to identify likely unwanted interactions and deleterious side-effects http://phys.org/news/2013-01-method-uncovering-side-effects-drug.html. The proof-of-concept correctly predicted 969 side-effects of 658 drugs that are in widespread medical use, and also identified possible side effects for many uncharacterized experimental molecules. The new method could be helpful in uncovering serious side effects early in the development and testing of new drugs and so avoid costly investment in trials and marketing, ideally leading to cheaper medications and a quicker and improved regulatory process. 

7. Smart Drug Design Reverses Alzheimer’s Symptoms and Restores Memory Loss.

A new drug candidate derived from the regulator of a key brain enzyme called Cdk5 - overactivation of which is implicated in plaque formation - was shown to restore memory loss and reverse symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice (engineered to develop the disease) when injected http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-01/foas-pcr010213.php. The mice experienced no signs of side-effects and the group is planning to conduct human trials with the hope of demonstrating the same effect in humans. The more we understand biology, the greater mechanistic insight we uncover into the workings of various molecular pathways and the structure of the molecules involved the more advances like this will be uncovered and developed: rationally designed molecular mimics or segments of natural molecules designed to plug and interfere with diseased proteins and enzymes. 

8. Mechanochemistry and Molecular Levers.

Researchers exploring stress-responsive materials discovered a particular molecular backbone that can act like a lever to open a molecular ring embedded within it when microscopic tweezers are used to grab onto two parts of the atomic chains and pull them so that they break open and react in certain spots http://phys.org/news/2012-12-molecular-levers-materials.html. In some cases these mechanically-induced chemical reactions occurred orders of magnitude faster than predicted. Advances like this obviously bring to mind Drexler’s nanomachanical chemical fabricators - a billion pushes and pulls per second producing a billion new molecular products. 

9. Instructing Scar Tissue to Change Itself into Healthy Tissue.

By using a cocktail of three specific genes researchers have used gene therapy to reprogram the scar tissue cells on a damaged heart into functional muscle cells, while the addition of a fourth gene stimulated the growth of blood vessels to enhance the effect 

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/01/instructing-scar-tissue-to-change-itself-into-healthy-tissue.php. So here we have a specific gene therapy, targeted to a specific population of cells (heart scar tissue) and turning these cells into more useful cells in order to repair an organ (the heart) and attain a close-to-normal healthy functioning organ. No cells, no drugs, just injected remote cellular reprogramming. 

10. Nanowire Arrays for Better Piezoelectric Energy Generators.

Researchers developed a nanogenerator consisting of an array of vertically aligned nanowires that, when deformed by an impact or twist induces a piezoelectric production of electronshttp://phys.org/news/2013-01-nanogenerator-output-triples-previous.html. The proof-of-concept work included producing enough energy to turn on an LED light, and the much more interesting case of the flick of a finger being enough to activate the nerves of a frog’s leg and cause a kick - the embedded video in the linked page is worth a watch. 

An archive of 2012 SciTech Digests can be found here: http://www.scitechdigest.net/

Robotic Shades will Keep Korean R&D Center Looking and Feeling Cool

ORIGINAL: Advanced Technology Korea

Jan 4, 2013

CJ Corporation seems to know that the right pair of shades can change your whole look. For its new Research & Development Center south of Seoul in Suwon, the Korean biotech company will embrace a unique and futuristic method of providing shade from the sun.

Yazdani Studio developed a “kinetic façade” that responds to both user commands as well as the environment. You can think of it as a giant metal façade that wraps around the building. Depending on the sun’s intensity and angle, the perforated metal covering can mechanically fold out to provide shade. It works similarly to the mechanical motion of folding an umbrella.

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/XkQGI3

This technology helps to regulate temperature as well as save on heating costs. To maximize the use of natural light, work stations will be located near the windows. Lab areas that need tighter control over light – they are a biotech company, after all – will be smartly placed deep inside the building.

The entire building’s design was inspired by CJ’s logo. The three oval towers mimic the logo’s three petals and the facility offers 135,000 square meters of space. A gym, café, restaurant and childcare facilities will also be located on site for employees. The fact that CJ’s scattered R&D facilities will now be in one location is expected to improve innovation and collaboration.

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/YVHm9f

Here’s what the shades will look like from the inside as well as some more concept images. The building is currently under construction and expected to open in 2013.

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/S62wEk

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/XkQGI3

Photo Credit: http://bit.ly/XkQGI3

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

ORIGINAL: Mother Jones

By Kevin Drum

January/February 2013 Issue 141

New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

Illustration: Gérard DuBois

WHEN RUDY GIULIANI RAN FOR MAYOR of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.

Is There Lead In Your House?

An Interview With Pioneering Toxicologist Howard Mielke

How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?

Why Has the Crime Decline in Los Angeles Slowed Down?

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an influential article in The Atlantic. "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they observed, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.

Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD's new commissioner. Bratton had made his reputation as head of the New York City Transit Police, where he aggressively applied broken-windows policing to turnstile jumpers and vagrants in subway stations. With Giuliani's eager support, he began applying the same lessons to the entire city, going after panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and the city's hated squeegee men. And more: He decentralized police operations and gave precinct commanders more control, keeping them accountable with a pioneering system called CompStat that tracked crime hot spots in real time.

The results were dramatic. In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993, rape rates had dropped 17 percent, assault 27 percent, robbery 42 percent, and murder an astonishing 49 percent. Giuliani was on his way to becoming America's Mayor and Bratton was on the cover of Time. It was a remarkable public policy victory.

But even more remarkable is what happened next. Shortly after Bratton's star turn, political scientist John DiIulio warned that the echo of the baby boom would soon produce a demographic bulge of millions of young males that he famously dubbed "juvenile super-predators." Other criminologists nodded along. But even though the demographic bulge came right on schedule, crime continued to drop. And drop. And drop. By 2010, violent crime rates in New York City had plunged 75 percent from their peak in the early '90s.

All in all, it seemed to be a story with a happy ending, a triumph for Wilson and Kelling's theory and Giuliani and Bratton's practice. And yet, doubts remained. For one thing, violent crime actually peaked in New York City in 1990, four years before the Giuliani-Bratton era. By the time they took office, it had already dropped 12 percent.

THE PB EFFECT

What happens when you expose a generation of kids to high lead levels? Crime and teen pregnancy data two decades later tell a startling story.

Second, and far more puzzling, it's not just New York that has seen a big drop in crime. In city after city, violent crime peaked in the early '90s and then began a steady and spectacular decline. Washington, DC, didn't have either Giuliani or Bratton, but its violent crime rate has dropped 58 percent since its peak. Dallas' has fallen 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los Angeles: 78 percent.

There must be more going on here than just a change in policing tactics in one city. But what?

THERE ARE, IT TURNS OUT, plenty of theories. When I started research for this story, I worked my way through a pair of thick criminology tomes. One chapter regaled me with the "exciting possibility" that it's mostly a matter of economics: Crime goes down when the economy is booming and goes up when it's in a slump. Unfortunately, the theory doesn't seem to hold water—for example, crime rates have continued to drop recently despite our prolonged downturn.

Another chapter suggested that crime drops in big cities were mostly a reflection of the crack epidemic of the '80s finally burning itself out. A trio of authors identified three major "drug eras" in New York City, the first dominated by heroin, which produced limited violence, and the second by crack, which generated spectacular levels of it. In the early '90s, these researchers proposed, the children of CrackGen switched to marijuana, choosing a less violent and more law-abiding lifestyle. As they did, crime rates in New York and other cities went down.

Another chapter told a story of demographics: As the number of young men increases, so does crime. Unfortunately for this theory, the number of young men increased during the '90s, but crime dropped anyway.

There were chapters in my tomes on the effect of prison expansion. On guns and gun control. On family. On race. On parole and probation. On the raw number of police officers. It seemed as if everyone had a pet theory. In 1999, economist Steven Levitt, later famous as the coauthor of Freakonomics, teamed up with John Donohue to suggest that crime dropped because of Roe v. Wade; legalized abortion, they argued, led to fewer unwanted babies, which meant fewer maladjusted and violent young men two decades later.

But there's a problem common to all of these theories: It's hard to tease out actual proof. Maybe the end of the crack epidemic contributed to a decline in inner-city crime, but then again, maybe it was really the effect of increased incarceration, more cops on the beat, broken-windows policing, and a rise in abortion rates 20 years earlier. After all, they all happened at the same time.

To address this problem, the field of econometrics gives researchers an enormous toolbox of sophisticated statistical techniques. But, notes statistician and conservative commentator Jim Manzi in his recent book Uncontrolled, econometrics consistently fails to explain most of the variation in crime rates. After reviewing 122 known field tests, Manzi found that only 20 percent demonstrated positive results for specific crime-fighting strategies, and none of those positive results were replicated in follow-up studies.

DID LEAD MAKE YOU DUMBER?

Even low levels have a significant effect.

In Latin America, Women Are Breaking Barriers To Entrepreneurship

ORIGINAL: TechCrunch

MARIA ROCIO PANIAGUA

December 22nd, 2012

Maria Rocio Paniagua

Editor’s note: Maria Rocio Paniagua currently works as a project manager at Innku, one of the top mobile and web workshops in Mexico. She is very passionate about all things technology, entrepreneurship and innovation. Follow her on Twitter.

The lack of women in technology in Latin America and the Caribbean is an issue whose cause has deep roots. Latin American women generally are not expected or encouraged to enter the hard sciences and engineering — medicine being one of the biggest exceptions. And unfortunately, private and public programs have yet to be developed or don’t provide the necessary resources to effect change. One exception is Chile, where public and private programs look to foster startups and entrepreneurship.

Contrast this with what’s been happening in the U.S. and Europe: The high positions that women hold, especially in the tech sector, as well as the entrepreneurial support they enjoy, has helped to create a trickle-down effect, resulting in more women in tech. In Latin America and the Caribbean, however, the numbers haven’t moved much. Women who have begun to appear in the startup scene tend to come from urban higher classes, and their numbers remain low. In addition, the number of women in technical positions (namely, CTOs) is also very low, even though entrepreneurship is currently dominated by educated individuals living in cities. Roughly one out of 15 women found in the startup scene is a coder. And, according to Startup Chile, only 1 out of every 10 team members in a startup is a woman.

Still, despite the barriers, there are examples of women disrupting not only businesses, but entire societies all over the continent. They are working hard to solve complex problems in societies where they have a lot working against them. Entrepreneurship has proven to be an area where the few that excel really go the distance, particularly where technology is concerned.

ASSESSING THE PROBLEM

Last month, the UN organized a forum, which was hosted by UN Women in the city of Panamá, the United Nations Development Programme, and the United Nations Population Fund. The forum, entitled “Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Forum: Young Women Leadership and Governance, Sharing Experiences Worldwide,” attracted participants from civil and political organizations involved in the fight for equality and gender rights. And although entrepreneurship and technology were part of the agenda, only two participants and a couple of mentors came from the private industry, and just one represented the technology sector.

During the forum, the gaps between technology and social organizations became very clear. Most participants had very limited knowledge of the current technological resources available to them. Some representatives of indigenous groups were offline altogether. Women 2.0 did not attend the event, and few representatives from countries where the organization had recently launched its Founder Friday events (Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile) had heard about them or what they do.

And some interesting parallels were drawn between female entrepreneurs and activists in Latin America and the Caribbean: both groups strive in the midst of numerous and difficult obstacles and are used to assuming great amounts of responsibility. However, activism is typically an area that many women pursue; entrepreneurship — particularly technological — is not.

ON A MISSION TO SLOW THE SPREAD OF AIDS

Despite the obstacles, examples of women throughout Latin America leading startups and entrepreneurial projects continue to surface. May Alba is a co-founder of Rubberit, a web platform that allows people to buy condoms online through monthly subscriptions. For every condom bought through Rubberit, DKT International donates another one to someone who can’t afford it. Rubberit just received its first shipment of DKT donations, which means they can return to their hometown of Guanajuato, Mexico, to distribute 5,000 condoms in one of the poorest communities in the area.

May says her original idea was not to start a web platform, but rather to develop an NGO to distribute condoms for free after seeing a good friend die from AIDS. Rubberit began with a social vision that matched entrepreneurship perfectly, particularly with the problem they’re facing: disrupting a mostly Catholic country where sex is taboo in many areas. May remained focused on solving her physical distribution problem but was running into all kinds of trouble.

She soon realized that helping people through a startup was easier and made more sense. It became more clear when someone directed her to Dollar Shave Club where she got the idea to develop Rubberit as an online subscription service. She went in search of a technical co-founder and her brother, who had recently begun to code, offered to help. With some luck, they met their current investors when a friend emailed them a link to the application page a couple of days before the closing date. They hustled to get a prototype together and went in for the interview. A few weeks later, they got some good news. “I didn’t over think it,” says May. “I just went with what felt right.”

Their biggest challenge has been distribution, since there is a widespread myth about the Mexican postal service not working. They have proved it does, since most of their distribution has been done through the regular national postal service. Getting the packaging right was no easy task, either. They make every package by hand, so it took seven prototypes to get to one that was sturdy enough, discrete, functional, and doable in under four minutes.

May says that their long-term goal for Rubberit is to become the main way condoms are bought (“the way you get water or gas — you get condoms and pay for them every month”). She says failure is an option only if they find another, more effective way to get condoms to everyone who needs them. Either way, they are keeping busy fighting big fights: namely teen pregnancy and AIDS.

FROM BUENOS AIRES TO BOSTON TO SANTIAGO

Born near Buenos Aires, Argentina, and raised by a doctor and a schoolteacher, Vanesa Kolodziej moved to Boston to work during the Argentine economic crisis. While in Boston, she worked briefly at Junior Achievement, a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs develop and scale through best practices. Soon after, she started her MBA at Babson College, though never finished her degree. She also managed Fortune 500 accounts as the Hispanic Director at BzzAgent, a venture-backed ad agency. After , she launched Bumeran. During the dot-com era, she led the creation of a crowd-buying company called Comunia. “It was a very intense period where I learned some of the harder lessons in my life as an entrepreneur,” she says.

Nowadays, after co-founding online tech community Palermo Valley for Argentina, she’s the managing partner and co-founder of Nazca Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund based in Santiago, Chile. It is the first Latin American “founders collective” fund where the five general and all limited partners are entrepreneurs. They started the firm when they identified a gap in the venture capital ecosystem in Latin America: there were hardly any early-stage investments. They are currently in their final stage of fundraising and will start investing in April 2013.

Vanesa considers being a woman in the tech industry in South America an advantage. “It helped me attract amazing talent, access key clients and vendors and develop long lasting partnerships.”

Even though Latin America still has a way to go to increase the opportunities for women in tech, the region has taken steps in the right direction. A lot has been said about the next great company coming from somewhere outside of the U.S. I’d also put my money on it not being founded by a man.

MAN

ORIGINAL: Post Carbon Institute

What would happen if TIM BURTON (Dark Shadows was great, fwiw) directed our '300 Years of Fossil Fuels' video? We think it would look a lot like the mad, dark animated genius of Steve Cutts...

Animation created in Flash and After Effects looking at mans relationship with the natural world.

Who is Frances Ashcroft? (L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards 2012)

ORIGINAL: YouTube

Frances Ashcroft

L'Oréal-UNESCO Laureate for Europe

Breakaway Oil Rig, Filled With Fuel, Runs Aground

ORIGINAL: NYTimes

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: January 1, 2013

An enormous Shell Oil offshore drilling rig ran aground on an island in the Gulf of Alaska on Monday night after it broke free from tow ships in rough seas, officials said.

Petty Officer 1St Class Sara Francis/United States Coast Guard, via Associated Press

The Kulluk is one of two rigs that Shell has used to drill test wells off the North Slope of Alaska as part of the company’s ambitious and expensive effort to open Arctic waters to oil production.

The rig, the Kulluk, which was used for test drilling in the Arctic last summer, is carrying about 139,000 gallons of diesel fuel and 12,000 gallons of lubricating oil and hydraulic fluid, the officials said.

A Coast Guard helicopter flew over the rig after the grounding at 8:48 p.m. and “detected no visible sheen,” said Darci Sinclair, a spokeswoman for a unified command of officials from Shell, Alaskan state agencies and other groups that has been directing the response since the troubles with the rig began last Thursday.

Ms. Sinclair said that more overflights were planned after daybreak on Tuesday, and that the unified command would be monitoring the fuel situation as it planned further actions. “The focus will be around salvage,” she said.

The 266-foot diameter rig ran aground on the east coast of Sitkalidak Island, an uninhabited island that is separated by the Sitkalidak Strait from the far larger Kodiak Island to the west. The nearest town, Old Harbor, is across the strait on Kodiak Island; it has a population of about 200 people.

Ms. Sinclair said the coast where the Kulluk ran aground has a combination of rocky and sandy terrain.

Earlier Monday, a Shell spokesman had said that the rig had been brought under control after towlines were reconnected to two ships during a break in what had been several days of extremely rough seas and high winds.

But late Monday afternoon the line from one of the ships, the Aiviq, became separated. Then several hours later, the other ship, the Alert, was ordered to disconnect its towline, out of concern for the safety of the ship’s nine-person crew. At the time, Ms. Sinclair said, swells were as high as 35 feet and winds were gusting up to 65 miles an hour.

The Kulluk, one of two rigs that Shell used to drill test wells off the North Slope of Alaska as part of the company’s ambitious and expensive effort to open Arctic waters to oil production, was being towed by the Aiviq to a Seattle shipyard for off-season maintenance when the towline initially separated during a storm on Thursday.

The Aiviq then lost power, and other support ships and a Coast Guard cutter were brought in to help with engine repairs and to reconnect towlines to the Kulluk, which does not have its own propulsion system. The 18 workers aboard the rig were evacuated by Coast Guard helicopters on Saturday.

Over the weekend, support crews struggled in 25-foot swells to reconnect towlines, succeeding several times. But each time the lines separated again, leaving the rig in danger of drifting toward land.

The Kulluk, which was built in Japan in 1983 and upgraded over the past six years at a cost of $292 million, is designed for icy conditions in the Arctic. It can drill in up to 400 feet of water and up to 20,000 feet deep. During drilling season it carries a crew of about 140 people, Mr. Smith said.

Shell has spent six years and more than $4 billion in its effort to drill in Arctic waters, one of the last untapped oil-producing regions in the United States. But the effort has faced regulatory hurdles and opposition from American Indian and environmental groups.

Last summer, the Kulluk drilled a shallow test well in the Beaufort Sea while another rig drilled a similar hole in the Chukchi Sea to the west.

But Shell announced in September that it would be forced to delay further drilling until this year after a specialized piece of equipment designed to contain oil from a spill was damaged in a testing accident.

The episode was one of a number of setbacks for the Arctic drilling program last year.

Shell now says it hopes to drill five exploratory wells in the region during the 2013 drilling season, which begins in mid-July.

Slideshow: Virgin Birth Not So Miraculous in Animal Kingdom

ORIGINAL: Science

by Carrie Arnold

27 December 2012

‘Tis the season for twinkling lights, wrapping paper, and virgin birth. For billions of Christians around the world, the holidays are a time to celebrate Jesus’s birth to the Virgin Mary. But for many animals, virgin birth is far from a miraculous event. Researchers have discovered a growing number of species that reproduce without assistance from the opposite sex.

Known formally as parthenogenesis, virgin birth occurs when an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg cell. The development of an embryo usually requires genetic material from sperm and egg, as well as a series of chemical changes sparked by fertilization. In some parthenogenetic species, egg cells don’t undergo meiosis, the typical halving of the cell’s chromosomes, before dividing into new cells. These offspring are generally all female and clones of their mother. Other forms of parthenogenesis occur when two egg cells fuse after meiosis.

Biologists think that sexual reproduction evolved as a way to mix the gene pool and reduce the impact of harmful mutations. Still, parthenogenesis can be beneficial if the mother is particularly well adapted to her environment, since all of her offspring will be just as well adapted.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the world’s most recently discovered parthenogenetic species:

Credit: National Prk Service. New Mexico whiptail (Aspidoscelis neomexicana)

Living in the deserts of the U.S. Southwest and parts of northern Mexico, the New Mexico whiptail is an all-female species of lizard. The creatures first arose as hybrids between two closely related species of sexually reproducing lizards: the little striped whiptail (A. inornata) and the tiger whiptail (A. tigris). Male hybrids aren’t viable, making this one of the few all-female species. Adult female New Mexico whiptails reproduce solely through parthenogenesis, laying unfertilized eggs that develop into other female whiptails.

Credit: Wikipedia. Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis)

In 2006, staff members at two zoos in the United Kingdom identified two female Komodo dragons that each laid an unusual clutch of eggs. The eggs developed into healthy offspring, even though neither female had been in recent contact with a male of that species. Genetic testing confirmed parthenogenesis. Although most Komodo dragons in the wild continue to reproduce sexually, this giant lizard is one of a growing number of vertebrates that reproduce parthenogenetically in captivity. Scientists still aren’t sure what triggers the switch.

Credit: Wikipedia. Freshwater water flea (Daphnia magna)

Found across North America and Eurasia, Daphnia species mostly reproduce by parthenogenesis. In the spring and summer, a female D. magna will let her all-female offspring partially mature in her abdominal brood pouch. After several molts, these females will produce their own offspring by parthenogenesis. The onset of winter, drought, or other environmental stress will trigger some of D. magna's developing parthenogenetic offspring to become males, who then mate with the parthenogenetic females. This method of sexual reproduction produces eggs with an extra shell layer that lets them survive the stressful period.

Credit: Wim van Egmond/Visuals Unlimited Inc. Bdelloid rotifers (Bdelloidea species)

Like the New Mexico whiptail, bdelloid rotifers are all female and reproduce entirely by parthenogenesis. Despite tens of millions of years of celibacy, these rotifers are an amazingly diverse group with more than 300 species. The animalsappear to offset a loss of genetic diversity by eating any DNA floating in their environment and incorporating it into their genome.

Credit: Wikipedia. Marmorkrebs (marbled crayfish)

The parthenogenetic form of the North American crayfish Procambarus fallax, marmorkrebs are a popular aquarium pet. Their capacity for virgin birth was first discovered in Germany in 2003, when aquarium owners noticed that crayfish housed alone were laying eggs that developed into healthy adults. Genetic analysis and laboratory experiments confirmed that the animals were reproducing through parthenogenesis. Ecologists worry that their accidental release into the wild could seriously harm native crayfish, because a single individual can start a self-sustaining population, leading some states to prohibit their ownership.

Credit: iStockphoto/Thinkstock. Bonnethead shark (Sphyrna tiburo)

In 2001, a captive bonnethead shark (Sphyrna tiburo), a type of hammerhead shark (pictured), gave birth to a normal-appearing female offspring. When the pup died several days later, researchers discovered that the DNA of the pup was identical to its mother’s. Because the mother had not been around any males for the previous 3 years, researchers confirmed that the pup developed through parthenogenesis.

Credit: Tom Brakefield/Stockbyte. Boa constrictor (Boa constrictor)

Until 2010, boas were thought to only reproduce sexually. But when a female boa produced several all-female litters that carried a rare genetic mutation, scientists from North Carolina State University in Raleigh performed a DNA fingerprint analysis. Although the genetic studies indicated that the female offspring were the result of parthenogenesis, researchers have yet to untangle the cellular factors that explain how and why this happened.

Credit: Animals Animals/Superstock. Cape honey bee (Apis mellifera capensis)

This native South African bee reproduces through a specific type of parthenogenesis known as thelytoky, in which diploid females (which carry the normal double set of chromosomes) develop from unfertilized eggs. What’s unusual in these animals is that worker bees can produce offspring by parthenogenesis. Typically, the sexually reproducing queen bee produces all of the eggs in the hive.

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Chef turns to microbiology to enhance cuisine (2:54)

ORIGINAL: Reuters

A top New York Chef teams up with Harvard Scientists to explore the role of bacteria in fermentation. He hopes to better understand and tweak the process in an effort to create new and unique flavours to entice the palette. Sharon Reich reports.