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Will Forensic Scientists be able to create visual profiles of suspects from DNA alone?

Then, in June 2015, Monica Quaal, a lead DNA analyst at the lab that works with the sheriff’s office, learned about an intriguing new way of exploiting the information contained in a DNA sample—one that would not require a suspect’s DNA or a match in a database. Called DNA phenotyping, the technique conjures up a physical likeness of the person who left the sample behind, including traits such as geographic ancestry, eye and natural hair color, and even a possible shape for facial features.

@ nationalgeographic.com
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Eat Crickets

The practice of farming crickets for human consumption is still in its infancy in the U.S., and the crickets here are participating in an experiment to discover how to create a better edible insect. Like with most livestock, there are a number of variables—temperature, humidity, feed, water sources, housing—that are constantly adjusted to create a bigger, tastier, and more nutritious product. The crickets live to breed and then meet their deaths at the hands of an industrial freezer. Eventually, they are churned into cricket powder or sold wholesale to restaurants or companies making cricket products, like Exo’s cricket-flour protein bar or Bitty Foods’s cricket baking flour.

@ theatlantic.com
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The Delightful Perversity of Québec’s Catholic Swears

Québec’s swearing vocabulary is one of the weirdest and most entertaining in the entire world. It is almost entirely made up of everyday Catholic terminology—not alternate versions, but straight-up normal words that would be used in Mass to refer to objects or concepts—that have taken on a profane meaning. Many languages have some kind of religious terminology wrapped into profanity (think of English’s “damn” or “goddammit”), but Quebec’s is taken to a totally different level.

@ atlasobscura.com
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Tardigrade

 

Tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations.

@ apod.nasa.gov
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Isolated for 5.5 million years: the bizarre beasts of Romania’s poison cave

In the south-east of Romania, in Constanța county close to the Black Sea and the Bulgarian border, there lies a barren featureless plain. The desolate field is completely unremarkable, except for one thing.
Below it lies a cave that has remained isolated for 5.5 million years. While our ape-like ancestors were coming down from the trees and evolving into modern humans, the inhabitants of this cave were cut off from the rest of the planet.
Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.

@ bbc.com
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Shock Breakout: Exploding Star

The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout” — is illustrated in this cartoon animation. The animation begins with a view of a red supergiant star that is 500 times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our sun. When the star’s internal furnace can no longer sustain nuclear fusion its core to collapses under gravity. A shockwave from the implosion rushes upward through the star’s

@ youtube.com

via http://Vice.com
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