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Otago Daily Times
21-05-2025
- General
- Otago Daily Times
A vision of the future
John Logie Baird peers into a receiving machine to view an image of a living and moving face, in his experiments which later lead to the development of television. — Otago Witness, 28.4.1925 By train to Tahuna Park "I have lately been privileged to witness two demonstrations of television, or seeing by wireless (or wires)," says Rados in an English exchange. "The subject has received a vast amount of attention since the inception of broadcasting, as it is realised what an immense boon it would be, if we could both see and hear at the same time over the ether. Television is an accomplished fact. I have seen it demonstrated. But let me hasten to add that I don't expect to see it in commercial use for at least five years, and then only as a scientific novelty. That it will eventually be made possible for commercial use I have no doubt, but what has been done so far is not in a fraction of the advanced state that was Bell's telephone when he first published to the world the fact that he had been able to speak over a few hundred yards of wire." At the monthly meeting of the Otago A and P Society, the Secretary read correspondence with the town clerk in regard to the question of the society being able to use the railway line from the goods yard to Queen's drive for the conveyance of stock, to which the City Council replied as follows: "With regard to the Ocean Beach Railway I am to say that the committee can conceive of no reason why your society should ever be deprived of the use of this railway, as at present for the conveyance of livestock to the show. Your society need be under no misapprehension in regard to this last-mentioned matter." 'Cold Lakes' To the editor: Sir, I regret to note in your issue of today an account of the activities of some enterprising Dunedin gentlemen in improving the transport and residential facilities at Lake Wanaka and Hawea under the above most objectionable title. For many years the Otago Expansion League has battled against this misnomer and has succeeded in convincing the Tourist Department that the terms "Hot Lakes" and "Cold Lakes" should not be used. When it is pointed out that the temperature of Lake Rotorua is only a few degrees higher than that of Lake Wakatipu it will be seen that there is no obvious reason for the distinctive appellation. The trouble created by such a title is that it convoys a totally erroneous impression to strangers and fosters the almost unkillable belief held in many places in the dominion that Otago and Antarctica are inter-changeable terms. May we, therefore, crave your valued assistance in eliminating the frigid adjective and substituting "Southern" or any other suitable description for the one unfortunately chosen? — I am, etc, Secretary, Otago Expansion League Oil, that is The world's total production of petroleum in 1924 is estimated at 137,642,000 tons. Of this the United States produced 93,378,000 tons, Mexico 21,642,000, Russia 6,000,000, Persia 4,253,000, the Dutch East Indies 2,084,000. Rumania 1,811,000, Venezuela 1,223,000 and India 1,135,000 tons. The Americans have control of more than 80 percent of the world's total output. Holland, through the operations of the Royal Dutch-Shell combination, in which Dutch interests exercise a 60 percent authority, has control of a very large production, much of which is in the United States. This production is estimated at more than 10 percent of the world total. — ODT, 22.5.1925 Compiled by Peter Dowden
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
This Single-Celled Microbe Can Transform Into a Multicellular Creature
A single-celled microbe that revels in Earth's most hostile salt lakes has the remarkable ability to transform its mote of a body into multicellular tissue when the pressure's on. "The advent of clonal multicellularity is a critical evolutionary milestone," the international team who made this discovery, led by Brandeis University pathobiologist Theopi Rados, write in their new paper. Haloferax volcanii is a member of the often-overlooked archaea domain, which looks quite similar to bacteria and yet have more in common with our own domain, eukaryota. Multicellularity is common in eukaryotes and rare among bacteria, and as far as we know, H. volcanii is only the second archaeon found to take this multicellular leap. We know H. volcanii has some impressive shape-shifting techniques up its tiny sleeves to help it thrive in such extreme environments as the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake. When H. volcanii's outer layer is pulled taut by physical forces, Rados and her team found, the microbe takes on a form even more reminiscent of complex organisms: it goes multicellular. Rados first stumbled across this strange new strategy by tucking a single H. volcanii cell under a pad of jelly, which applied just 10 kPa of pressure – roughly what you experience at one meter below water. This weighted jelly blanket flattened the malleable cell in around two and a half hours, before the microbe even had a chance to clone itself. To see what would happen under forces more similar to the microbe's natural habitat, the researchers next placed H. volcanii under pressure of more than 100 kPa, which is equivalent to conditions around 10 meters underwater. Not only did the organism flatten like a pancake, but over 12 hours its cells, each containing multiple sets of genetic information, grew larger and organized into a fused cluster resembling the tissue of multicellular organisms. The microbes' flexible proteinaceous surface layer, more similar to animal cell membranes than the rigid cell walls of plants and fungi, seems key to its metamorphic ways. "The absence of a covalent-bound cell wall suggests a more dynamic, but less rigid structure, leading to the hypothesis that archaea might be 'squishy' and sensitive to mechanical stimuli," says Brandeis University archaea biologist, Alex Bisson. "It's as if the cells were squished down and then encouraged to grow wider and taller, more like a rising sourdough loaf than traditional cell division." The resulting tissues have physical properties distinct from the microbe's single-celled form, with elasticity between cells comparable to that of animal cells. That tension creates two different cell types in a layout reminiscent of a turtle's shell: wedge-like peripheral cells, named as such because they form at the edge of the tissue, are flatter and wider, while tightly-packed geometric scutoid cells are taller. The scutoid cells are most reminiscent of eukaryote bodies, where cells of this shape abound in the curves of epithelial tissue (like the surfaces of our gut and our skin) to evenly distribute membrane tension. Finding these shapes in an organism whose body plan predates eukaryotes suggests that scutoid cells might be older – and more fundamental to multicellularity – than we realized. "The fact that archaea can orchestrate complex tissue-like structures suggests that nature can emerge complex traits from seemingly unsophisticated raw materials," says Bisson. This research was published in Cell Biology, alongside a related perspective. Scientists Spotted Signs of a Hidden Structure Inside Earth's Core 'Bone Collector' Caterpillar Wears Dead Bugs to Steal Prey From Spiders 113 Million-Year-Old 'Hell Ant' Discovery Is Oldest Ever Found
