A Bit More Detail

• Arctic Progress observes that northwestern European Russia and northern Norden are entering a resources-driven economic boom.


• At blogTO, Derek Flack walks along the former course of Garrison Creek, a buried watercourse that incidentally has always been near my residences.


• Burgh Diaspora observes that post-crackdown Arizona is hemorrhaging Hispanics of all citizenship statuses.


• Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell cuts-and-pastes an essay together out of two economists who argue that the particular nature of Ireland's political economy--weak budget management driven the ideological preferences on taxation, networks between builders and government officials, ad peculiar union restructuring of the workforce--caused the meltdown.


• Eastern Approaches comments on the politics of naming Balkan airports.


• Landscape+Urbanism celebrates the rise of the urban turkey, which can apparently thrive in urban and suburban areas.


• Language Log comments on some unusual free speech cases in the United Kingdom and Ireland, arguing that common sense rather than the sorts of overreaction that leads to judicial prosecution would be preferable.


• Personal Reflection's Jim Belshaw suggests that one reason New Zealand living standards are comparable to the Australian despite significantly lower FDP per capita comes from a truncated income pyramid (fewer wealthy people, since a smaller and more distant market provided fewer high-paying jobs). He's skeptical that GDP per capita can converge given current paradigms.


• At The Search, Douglas Todd blogs about self-righteous activists from the left and right--he mentions Greens, here--whose self-righteousness masks personal concerns.


• Torontoist reposted photos of female strippers (and others) who used the roof of strip club Zanzibar for smoke breaks. Controversy ensued.


• At The Zeds, Michael Steeleworthy shows some of the video tutorials that he and his fellow librarians have developed for new users of the Dalhousie University library system.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great,
And would suffice.

Some of the most popular theories suggest that life began in a hellish setting, in rocky undersea vents that churn out superheated water from deep within the earth. But a new paper suggests an alternative backdrop, and one that seems like the polar opposite (pun intended) of the hot vents –ice.

[. . .]

RNA can store information, speed up chemical reactions, and make copies of itself without any outside help. It evolves too – stick it in a test tube with the right raw materials and a source of energy and it eventually gets better and better at copying itself. This ability was first demonstrated in 1972 by Sol Spiegelman and the brutally efficient RNA strand that resulted was melodramatically known as Spiegelman’s monster.

[. . .]

But RNA’s unique physical properties aren’t enough. The molecule is also very fragile and it would rapidly degrade under all but the gentlest environmental conditions. It also needs to be concentrated in some way. A molecule that makes copies of itself needs to be kept in the same place as its constituent chemicals; if the parts are allowed to disperse, the whole will never come together. So RNA may have the right qualities, but it needs a stable and confined space to make the RNA world a reality. Attwater thinks that ice provides just such a space.

At first glance, this seems like a bizarre idea. For a start, cold temperatures can slow many chemical reactions to a crawl. Proteins that piece together RNA molecules stop working when they’re frozen. But remember, RNA in the form of ribozymes can speed up its own creation without any proteins. And Attwater found that one such ribozyme called R18 is still active at subzero temperatures. In fact, ice actually stabilised the ribozyme, preventing it from breaking down. On ice, the ribozyme was slower than at room temperature but it also carried on working for longer. As a result, it was actually more productive, creating longer lengths of RNA with no less accuracy.

That’s one problem down, but there’s also the fact that ice is solid. You might think that this would prevent molecules from meeting each other with ease, but ice isn’t completely solid. At a microscopic level, weaving their way between the crystals, there’s a complicated network of channels and spaces that haven’t frozen completely.

The water in these spaces is salty; as the surrounding molecules froze, any dissolved impurities were pushed away and became concentrated in the remaining liquid. Attwater found that this process boosts the concentration of ions, nucleotides and other chemicals in the liquid compartments by over 200 times. That accelerates the work of the ribozymes, and more than compensates for the slowing effects of the cold.