The evolution of the ribosome, a large molecular structure found in the cells of all species, has been revealed in unprecedented detail in a new study.
Around 4 billion years ago, the first molecules of life came together on the early Earth and formed precursors of modern proteins and RNA. Scientists studying the origin of life have been searching for clues about how these reactions happened. Some of those clues have been found in the ribosome.
The core of the ribosome is essentially the same in all living systems, while the outer regions expand and become complicated as species gain complexity. By digitally peeling back the layers of modern ribosomes in the new study, scientists were able to model the structures of primordial ribosomes.
"The history of the ribosome is tells us about the origin of life," said Loren Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We have worked out on a fine level of detail how the ribosome originated and evolved."
The study was sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the Center for Ribosomal Origins and Evolution at Georgia Tech. The results were published June 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In biology, the genetic information stored in DNA is transcribed into mRNA, which is then shipped out of the cell nucleus. Ribosomes, in all species use mRNA as a blueprint for building all the proteins and enzymes essential to life. The ribosome's job is called translation.
The common core of the ribosome is essentially the same in humans, yeast, bacteria and archaea -- in all living systems. The Georgia Tech team has shown that as organisms evolve and become more complex, so do their ribosomes. Humans have the largest and most complex ribosomes. But the changes are on the surface -- the heart of a human ribosome the same as in a bacterial ribosome.
"The translation system is the operating system of life," Williams said. "At its core the ribosome is the same everywhere. The ribosome is universal biology."
In the new study, Williams and Research Scientist Anton Petrov compared three-dimensional structures of ribosomes from a variety of species of varying biological complexity, including humans, yeast, bacteria and archaea. The researchers found distinct fingerprints in the ribosomes where new structures were added to the ribosomal surface without altering the pre-existing core.
Additions to the ribosome cause insertion fingerprints. Much like a botanist can carve back twigs and branches on a tree to learn about its growth and age, Petrov and Williams show how segments were continually added to the ribosome without changing the underlying structure. The research team extrapolated the process backwards in time to generate models of simple, primordial ribosomes.
"We learned some of the rules of the ribosome, that evolution can change the ribosome as long as it does not mess with its core," Williams said. "Evolution can add things on, but it can't change what was already there."
For a video on the origins and evolution of the ribosome, visit: http://ift.tt/1vq2sfW
This research is supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute under award number NNA09DA78A. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agency.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Georgia Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Brett Israel. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Like human societies--think New York City--bacterial colonies have immense diversity among their inhabitants, often generated in the absence of specific selection pressures, according to a paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Bacteriology.
Microbiologists have long been aware of this phenomenon, and they credit it as a reason microbes have been able to colonize almost every conceivable terrestrial habitat from underground Antarctic lakes to hot springs to intensely radioactive pools, says corresponding author Ivan Matic, of INSERM, Paris. But none had tried to track it at the level of single cells.
"By using up to date experimental tools that allowed us to follow individual living cells, we were able to enter into this amazing, beautiful world of bacterial multicellular structures," says Matic. "We observed massive phenotypic diversification in aging Escherichia coli colonies. Some variants showed improved capacity to produce biofilms, whereas others were able to use different nutrients, or to tolerate antibiotics, or oxidative stress, compared to the ancestral strain."
In the study, the researchers started each colony with a small number of identical cells, and observed them as they grew and as the colony aged. An aging colony is one where growth has stopped, because nutrients have been exhausted and/or toxins have accumulated.
"At this point most cells in the colony stop dividing and dead cells accumulate," says Matic.
Even in the growth phase, a colony is environmentally diverse. For example, since it grows on a solid medium, nutrients diffuse from the bottom up, resulting in a nutritional gradient with lower levels at greater elevation above the medium. Similarly, oxygen and UV radiation decline with distance from the colony's surface, so that cells close to the top have ample oxygen, while those well below exist under anaerobic conditions.
In the elderly colony, the rising toxins and falling nutrients are also not homogeneously distributed. For example, despite general nutrient depletion, new nutrients become available from dead cells.
"We showed that the rare survivors of a senescent colony are very diverse and are different from their ancestors," says Matic. "We found different metabolic capacities, different levels of stress resistance, improved capacity to produce biofilms, and the ability to use different nutrients. Some of these capacities probably evolved due to obvious selection pressures, such as utilization of alternative energy sources."
Leading immunologists expect to see some clear advances in the fight against tuberculosis, an infectious disease that is widespread the world over. Professor Stefan Kaufmann, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, echoed these sentiments at today's launch of the scientific programme for the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau, Germany. "In the past ten years, numerous attempts have been made to develop an improved vaccine. We are now justified in hoping that our vaccine will be effective," explained Professor Kaufmann. The vaccine developed by Kaufmann's research group is already undergoing Phase IIa clinical trials, during which its effectiveness and tolerability will be tested by trial participants. One-third of the world's population is infected with the tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and the disease claims 1.3 million lives each year.
Kaufmann attributes advances such as this in the fight against infectious diseases to the greater depth of knowledge acquired in recent decades about the body's own immune system defences. No fewer than three Nobel laureates who have played a major part in these discoveries are currently participating in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which opened on Sunday. Jules Hoffmann from France, Bruce Beutler of the USA and Rolf Zinkernagel of Switzerland will be delivering presentations on the challenges facing modern immunology, one of the main emphases of the week-long programme. Between now and Friday, a total of 37 Nobel laureates will be engaged in an exchange of ideas with aspiring young scientists: over 600 selected undergraduates, doctoral students and post-docs from 80 countries, with the focus on physiology and medicine.
The complexity of the biological and biochemical foundations that underlie the human immune system is one reason why tuberculosis, which has existed for thousands of years, is still being combated with a vaccine that is itself almost a hundred years old, and has proven to be of little effect; and why a six-month course of antibiotics is required to treat infected patients. The pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis skilfully evades the weapons available to the body, as well as to medicine. "The pathogen establishes itself in macrophages and obstructs an efficient immune response," Stefan Kaufmann explains. Inside these phagocytes, which actually support the body's immune system defences, the bacteria can remain inactive and survive for long periods of time, and so escape the majority of antibiotics. The thick, impermeable fat layer in the cell wall also provides protection for the pathogen.
"The old BCG vaccine against tuberculosis primarily activates only helper cells. The trick with our new vaccine is to additionally activate the killer cells, which enables us to trigger an improved immune system response," Kaufmann continues. In addition to research into vaccines, innovative treatments are also being investigated which attempt to entice the bacteria out of their macrophage hiding places.
The ability of microorganisms to overcome antibiotic treatments is one of the top concerns of modern medicine. The effectiveness of many antibiotics has been reduced by bacteria's ability to rapidly evolve and develop strategies to resist antibiotics. Bacteria achieve this by specific mechanisms that are tailored to the molecular structure or function of a particular antibiotic. For example, bacteria would typically develop drug resistance by evolving a mutation that breaks down the drug.
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem set out to determine if they could predict a different evolutionary process and follow it in real time. Using the quantitative approach of physicists, the team developed experimental tools to measure precisely the bacterial response to antibiotics, and developed a mathematical model of the process. The model led them to hypothesize that a daily three-hour dose would enable the bacteria to predict delivery of the drug, and go dormant for that period in order to survive.
The research was led by Prof. Nathalie Q. Balaban at the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University's Faculty of Science, working with colleagues at the Racah Institute, the Hebrew University's Sudarsky Center for Computational Biology, and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. The research paper, "Optimization of lag time underlies tolerance in bacterial populations evolved under intermittent antibiotic exposure," appears in the June 25 edition of the journal Nature.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers delivered antibiotics to bacterial populations in the lab for precisely three hours each day. After only ten days they were able to observe the bacteria using a new survival tactic. When exposed to these repeated cycles of antibiotic treatments, the bacteria evolved an adaptation to the duration of the antibiotic stress by remaining dormant for the treatment period.
The results demonstrated that bacteria can evolve within days. Most significantly, it showed for the first time that bacteria can develop a biological timer to survive under antibiotic exposure.
To further test their hypothesis, the researchers delivered antibiotics for different periods, exposing three different bacteria populations to repeated daily antibiotic exposures lasting 3, 5, or 8 hours. Remarkably, each of the populations adapted by prolonging their dormant stage to match the exposure duration.
With this new understanding of how bacterial populations evolve survival strategies against antibiotics, scientists could develop new approaches for slowing the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
Now that they have identified the mutation responsible for the biological timer, the researchers want to gather clinical data to see if a similar timed response to antibiotics is active in people, allowing bacteria to render less effective the antibiotics people take on a fixed schedule. If this is discovered to be the case, it may explain the failure of antibiotic treatments observed in several diseases. In the future, it may help doctors to recommend different treatment schedules. It could also lead to the development and greater use of drugs that can maintain constant levels in the body.
According to the researchers, the study demonstrates that quantitative approaches from Physics can be used to address fundamental as well as clinically relevant issues in Biology.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered a widely distributed group of marine bacteria that produce compounds nearly identical to toxic man-made fire retardants.
Among the chemicals produced by the ocean-dwelling microbes, which have been found in habitats as diverse as sea grasses, marine sediments and corals, is a potent endocrine disruptor that mimics the human body's most active thyroid hormone.
The study is published in the June 29 online issue of Nature Chemical Biology.
"We find it very surprising and a tad alarming that flame retardant-like chemicals are biologically synthesized by common bacteria in the marine environment," said senior author Bradley Moore, PhD, a professor at the UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The toxic compounds are known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), a subgroup of brominated flame retardants that are combined into foam, textiles and electronics to raise the temperature at which the products will burn.
Certain formulations of PBDEs are no longer used in automobile and home products in the United States, but testing by the Environmental Protection Agency indicates that most Americans and Canadians carry traces of the chemicals. Indeed, levels exceed those of Europeans and others by a factor of ten or more. Californians, in particular, have higher than average "body burdens" of the compounds.
Although the presence, persistence and ability of PBDEs to accumulate in the fatty tissues of marine animals have long been recognized, researchers had previously believed the compounds were anthropogenic in origin and due to ocean pollution.
More recent examinations have shown a pervasiveness of PBDEs in prey and predatory species, suggesting a natural microbial source of the compounds as well as an anthropogenic one.
The study is the first to isolate and identify bacteria that synthesize these compounds and whose presence may help explain the observed distribution pattern of PBDEs in the marine food chain.
In the study, the researchers identified a group of ten genes involved in the synthesis of more than 15 bromine-containing polyaromatic compounds, including some PBDEs. They have since conducted DNA sequencing analyses that will allow them to probe the ocean for other biological sources for these chemicals and to begin to assemble a complete picture of their human health risk.
"The next step is to look more broadly in the marine environment for the distribution of this gene signature and to document how these compounds are entering the food chain," said Vinayak Agarwal, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher with the Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health at UC San Diego.
Co-authors include Abrahim El Gamal, Kazuya Yamanaka, Roland Kersten, Dennis Poth, Michelle Schorn, and Eric Allen, all at UCSD.
Funding for this study was provided, in part, by the National Science Foundation (grant OCE-1313747) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (grant P01-ES021921) through its Oceans and Human Health program.
Staying secure online is a pain. If you really want to protect yourself, you have to create unique passwords for every web service you use, turn on two-factor authentication at every site that supports it, and then encrypt all your files, e-mails, and instant messages.
At the very least, these are tedious tasks. But sometimes they’re worse than tedious. In 1999, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that most users couldn’t figure out how to sign and encrypt messages with PGP, the gold standard in e-mail encryption. In fact, many accidentally sent unencrypted messages that they thought were secured. And follow-up research in 2006 found that the situation hadn’t improved all that much.
As many internet users seek to improve their security in the wake of ex-government contractor Edward Snowden exposing the NSA’s online surveillance programs, these difficulties remain a huge issue. And it’s hard to understand why. Do we really have to sacrifice convenience for security? Is it that security software designers don’t think hard enough about making things easy to use—or is security just inherently a pain? It’s a bit of both, says Lorrie Cranor, an expert in both security and usability and the director of Carnegie Melon’s CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, or CUPS for short. “There isn’t a magic bullet for how to make security usable,” she says. “It’s very much an open research project.”
How to Make Things Usable
A big part of the problem, she says, is that security experts haven’t paid enough attention to the human side of things over the years. “There’s a lot of focus on getting the encryption right and not enough investment in looking at the usability side,” she says. Many security researchers will show her papers on topics like e-mail encryption or secure file transfer and tell her they think it’s “usable” because their friends say it’s easy to use. “But they haven’t done any testing,” she says. “They don’t know how to do testing and there’s no criteria for knowing if these types of things are usable.”
Security tools are notoriously hard to evaluate. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking into sponsoring a crypto usability prize to promote the development of more user-friendly tools. But before it can offer a prize, the organization is conducting research into how to measure the usability of nominated projects. With a normal application, such as a Word processor, a usability tester can just make a list of core tasks and verify whether the user can figure out how to do them in a reasonable amount of time. But with security tools, you need to test whether users make mistakes that undermine security, and what the user experience is like when someone is actively trying to trick them into handing over data.
That often means the interface design needs to be considered from the very beginning of a project. “It’s not the sort of thing you can have the crypto guys build something and then throw it over the fence to the usability people and say ‘make it work,’” Cranor says.
This is especially clear in the case of e-mail. A big part of why PGP is so hard to use is that the earliest e-mail systems weren’t designed with encryption and privacy in mind, and now, software developers are trying to bolt security onto existing systems through plugins. Today, open source teams like Mailpile are trying to create new e-mail clients that are built from the ground up to support PGP, but e-mail remains limited in other ways. For example, even if you encrypt your e-mail it will still be possible for someone who intercepts a message—or seizes an e-mail server—to see who you’ve been sending mail to and receiving mail from.
That has led to a few projects to reinvent private messaging from scratch, such as Darkmail, a collaboration that brings together and Ladar Levison of Lavabit—the email service used by Edward Snowden used and PGP creator Phil Zimmermann. But that even if we start from a clean slate, Cranor says, there’s no clear way of making secure communications software usable, largely because the field has been so neglected for so long.
Why Change Is on the Way
But the problem isn’t just that crypto geeks don’t prioritize usability. There hasn’t been a strong demand for usable security software in the past, Cranor says. One of the best examples of usable security is SSL/TLS, the protocol used to encrypt web traffic. There was a strong business incentive on the part of banks and e-commerce companies to make encryption work well, and work as seamlessly as possible. But other areas, such as personal e-mail encryption, there’s been much less investment. That’s because, until very recently, the primary market for most security software has been the IT departments of large corporations and governments. “[IT professionals] care about usability but not to the extent that users do,” she says. “So they’ll buy something even if it isn’t very usable.”
That’s starting to change in the post-Snowden era, as average users start to worry more about privacy. Startups like Virtu are raising venture capital to make communications both more secure and easier to use. And Google released a preview of End-to-End, a PGP plugin for Chrome earlier this month. But it’s not necessarily in the company’s best interest to have all of its e-mail pass through its servers encrypted because it makes money by scanning e-mails for ad targeting. Therein lies another problem with the security technology market: consumers are often willing to trade privacy not only for convenience, but also in lieu of paying for services.
But with major privacy breaches becoming more common, just about every tech company is at least paying lip service to the idea of privacy. Gone are the days of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg proclaiming that privacy is no longer a social norm and Google chairman Eric Schmidt declaring that: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Facebook has actually been working with CUPS to find ways to encourage users into being more careful about what they post online with the company’s “Privacy Dinosaur” tool, which prompts users to think about their privacy settings. The collaboration is the result of additional CUPS research, which found that minor tweaks can help users make better privacy decisions, such as making users wait 10 seconds after writing something before they can post it, or showing them photos of five of their friends at random to remind them of who is likely to see the post.
These sorts of collaborations between web companies, usability experts, and privacy and security researchers are what we need more of. It may always be at least a little cumbersome to use encryption or secure passwords, but there’s plenty that can be done to make easier on us.
Surfboards come in roughly three shapes: shortboards (“Pro surfers use them like skateboards, for doing tricks, getting air,” Rolandson says), longboards, for cruising, and gun boards, for taking on massive waves. The Octovo x Tilley boards have a shape that’s somewhere in the middle, so surfers can take them along different coastlines, in varying water conditions. Photos by Ammunition
Surfboards come in roughly three shapes: shortboards (“Pro surfers use them like skateboards, for doing tricks, getting air,” Rolandson says), longboards, for cruising, and gun boards, for taking on massive waves. The Octovo x Tilley boards have a shape that’s somewhere in the middle, so surfers can take them along different coastlines, in varying water conditions.
Photos by Ammunition
Jason Tilley, the Oregon-based collaborator, actually specializes in custom sailboats, but he'd been working on a technique for building custom wooden boards. Photos by Ammunition
Jason Tilley, the Oregon-based collaborator, actually specializes in custom sailboats, but he'd been working on a technique for building custom wooden boards.
Photos by Ammunition
For its line of non-tech products, Ammunition, the design studio behind Beats by Dre and other products, teamed with an Oregon surfboard maker. Photos by Ammunition
For its line of non-tech products, Ammunition, the design studio behind Beats by Dre and other products, teamed with an Oregon surfboard maker.
Photos by Ammunition
“We talked about, what would a traveling surfer need?” he says. “We looked about some shapes about boards that could be utilized in several conditions.” Photos by Ammunition
“We talked about, what would a traveling surfer need?” he says. “We looked about some shapes about boards that could be utilized in several conditions.”
Photos by Ammunition
The Octovo x Tilley starts at $3,000 a board and can be found here. Photos by Ammunition
The Octovo x Tilley starts at $3,000 a board and can be found here.
Photos by Ammunition
Most boards have a foam core and fiberglass exterior; the combination is simultaneously lightweight and sturdy. Instead of fiberglass, Tilley’s boards have an exoskeleton of locally milled cedar, that’s layered on the foam core in sheets and then vacuum molded to fit. The result is more sumptuous, and according to Rolandson, stronger. Photos by Ammunition
Most boards have a foam core and fiberglass exterior; the combination is simultaneously lightweight and sturdy. Instead of fiberglass, Tilley’s boards have an exoskeleton of locally milled cedar, that’s layered on the foam core in sheets and then vacuum molded to fit. The result is more sumptuous, and according to Rolandson, stronger.
Photos by Ammunition
The design team at San Francisco-based Ammunition does work for companies with a heavy tech slant: Beats by Dre, Adobe, and Polaroid are all clients. As an antidote to all that hyper-connectivity, last year Ammunition launched Octovo: a spin-off line of travel goods meant to create an experience that, as Ammunition partner Matt Rolandson puts it, “is the complete opposite on the spectrum of checking Twitter.”
The thinking behind Octovo is simple: Our phones and tablets take us on virtual vacations every day, through screens. While actually traveling, however, we should be looking up, taking in our physical surroundings. We already have technology to help us stay wired; therefore, we should have other products that let us focus on our senses. The first Octovo goods were leather wallets and accessories. Now, they’ve partnered with Oregon-based Tilley Surfboards for a line of travel-friendly boards.
Ammunition
Rolandson met Jason Tilley years ago. Tilley, who lives in the coastal Oregon town of Port Orford, is trained in building custom wooden sailboats. His work dovetails philosophically with the Octovo brand. “Wooden sailboats are totally custom in this really intimate way, and they’re all about interacting with travel and the environment,” Rolandson says. Tilley is also a lifelong surfer, and had been working on a technique for building custom wooden surfboards. Most boards have a foam core and fiberglass exterior; the combination is simultaneously lightweight and sturdy. Instead of fiberglass, Tilley’s boards have an exoskeleton of locally milled cedar, that’s layered on the foam core in sheets and then vacuum molded to fit. The result is more sumptuous, and according to Rolandson, stronger.
“We talked about, what would a traveling surfer need?” he says. “We looked about some shapes about boards that could be utilized in several conditions.” Surfboards come in roughly three shapes: shortboards (“Pro surfers use them like skateboards, for doing tricks, getting air,” Rolandson says), longboards, for cruising, and gun boards, for taking on massive waves. The Octovo x Tilley boards have a shape that’s somewhere in the middle, so surfers can take them along different coastlines, in varying water conditions. The Ammunition team also created five bags for each Octovo x Tilley board out of material that’s UV-proof and water resistant.
“The idea of how to directly, viscerally, connect with the world, rather than connect through technology—that’s really heady stuff,” Rolandson says. “But when I look at what Jason is doing, it becomes really clear in how he lives his life outside in the wilderness, and how he’s totally devoted to experiencing wilderness through surfboards.”
The Octovo x Tilley starts at $3,000 a board, and can be found here.
We’ve had a very wet summer so far here in the upper Midwest — the potholes are full of water, our backyard is sodden, the plants are thriving, but that also means that this plague is drifting in vast clouds everywhere.
The idea of sailing around the world seems a bit iffy, even on a huge luxury liner with hot meals, cold alcohol, ample shuffleboard, and a decent bed. The idea turns horrific when you’re talking about doing it on a 65-foot sailing yacht with no fresh food, no shower, a narrow net of a bed, one change of clothes, and a single “toilet” the size and shape of a mixing bowl.
(P.S. You need to share that micro-toilet with seven other people.)
This is what the members of Team Alvimedica have signed up for. Led by skipper Charlie Enright and general manager Mark Towill, they’ll make up one of six competing teams in the Volvo Ocean Race, widely considered the toughest sailing race in the world.
The 2014-15 edition of the race, which takes place every three years, will cover 39,000 miles, hit six continents, and run from October to June. This is the first time it will be a “one-design” race: All entrants must use a specially designed boat—the $6 million Volvo 65—with the same exact specifications. The new carbon-fiber boat, designed by Farr Yacht Design in Annapolis, Md. specifically for the next two Volvo Ocean Races and assembled in different spots around the world, are strong and sturdy.
The idea is that giving everyone the same boat will keep teams from sacrificing safety features at the expense of speed. That’s not an idle worry: The race has claimed the lives of five sailors in its 41-year history. That doesn’t mean the boats are slow. With two sails, the 65-foot long craft can hit 30 knots (34.5 mph).
The identical boats will emphasize sailing skills, which could make this year’s race more competitive than ever. Teams will be evenly matched off the starting line. Once on the water, they monitor the weather to determine the exact route they want to take and which sails to use (Team Alvimedica will bring seven options to choose from). Depending on their choices, the boats may end up close together for some of the legs.
Each of the Volvo Ocean Race’s nine legs is treated as an independent races with points allotted for the top finishers. At each port stop, the boats compete in shorter sprint races. The in-port races are used as tiebreakers if there’s a dead heat in the overall competition.
Volvo Ocean Race
No creature comforts
The boat may be safer than ever this year, but it offers little in the way of temperature control and sleep-friendliness. The cramped innards house a communications center, a video-editing lab, sleeping quarters (basically hammocks), and the head (a very non-private toilet). Enright says the temperature down there is either “really really hot or really really cold.” Carbon fiber doesn’t exactly dampen noise, so the cramped below-deck quarters pound constantly with the sound of waves hitting the hull.
We checked out Team Alvimedica’s boat on a gorgeous 80-degree day in New York City. It was a scorching, claustrophobic slice of hell. A tiny electric fan mounted to the right of the boat’s navigation center—a couple of ThinkPads with a cable-suspended seat in front—provided a sip of relief. It’s hard to imagine what would help if it were cold. There is no fireplace.
Obstacles
Each stage of the race is its own unique flavor of nightmare, from typhoons off the southern coast of China, dodging steamships in Malaysia, pirates near Somalia, and a combination of massive waves, powerful winds, and gigantic icebergs in the southernmost stretch of the competition. The first leg will take the teams Alicante, Spain to Cape Town, South Africa—a 6,487-mile jaunt that will last more than three weeks. The teams will swing so far west after passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, they’ll practically scrape the coast of Brazil. Then they loop back east to Cape Town. It’s not the most-direct route, but it may get them there the fastest thanks to the trade winds. As an added bonus, the route should also steer them clear of potential pirate attacks off the west coast of Africa.
If the competitors can duck and dodge their way through all of that, they’ll still need to make sure they don’t run out of food. That requires careful planning. Too much food will add unwanted weight to the boat. Too little of it would be disastrous during a slower-than-expected leg. During the last Volvo Ocean Race, the American PUMA Ocean Racing team ran out of food a day and a half from port on one leg.
But no matter how much food they bring, it will not be delicious. It’ll be freeze-dried everything, little packets of blech that won’t replenish the crazy amount of calories each crew burns on board. It’s no shock that the first thing the team will do when they get to each port is eat actual food, “or maybe get a blood test,” says Enright.
Tim Moynihan
When things go bad
When you’re stuck on a boat for weeks with a small crew, personnel decisions are a big deal. Substitutions are allowed between legs—and boats rarely finish the race with the same crew they had at the start—but while on the water, you’re stuck with whomever you’ve got. So each team builds a roster loaded with specialists who can deal with whatever happens: An electrician, a sailmaker, a medic, maybe a bowman or a strong grinder for the winches. A media specialist will also be on each boat to edit together video, as well as an embedded onboard reporter who’s only allowed to report, cook, and clean. It’ll be all-hands-on-deck, except for that reporter.
If something does go horribly wrong, the teams are on their own for a little while. The sailing yachts won’t be followed by chase boats and they’re often thousands of miles from land. In 2012, the mast of Team PUMA’s boat snapped in three places in the middle of the Southern Atlantic Ocean and ended up on Tristan da Cunha, the most remote inhabited island on the planet.
The boats are tracked: Every five minutes, Volvo Ocean Race officials will receive an update of each boat’s location, and the boats are certainly equipped for several forms of communication. A few Inmarsat Sailor satellite antennas are in the back of each boat: A large unit used for beefier transmissions, such as sending video from the boat via satellite. A second, smaller Inmarsat Sailor antenna will be used for less-demanding data delivery: Text messages and e-mails back home. Ordering a pizza probably won’t work.
There will also be five video cameras on board, including a pair mounted to the mast, and they’ll be rolling at all times. Not all the footage will be saved, however. Instead, there will be a buffer of at least 30 minutes so that the ship’s media crew member can review footage in case anything goes wrong, and to have more leeway when editing together montages. The mast-mounted cameras are controlled from below the deck, with a panel that can swap cameras, operate the zoom on each of them, and move them around. There’s also a Panasonic Toughpad the team can use on deck to see what’s happening, and remotely control the navigation system below.
According to Enright, the yachts were practically designed around one of the many cameras, a live-stream-capable module above the hatch that’s also equipped with a microphone for chatting. There won’t be a live-stream from the boat’s cameras, so you’re out of luck if you want to follow along with them for nine months straight. But you can follow them with an online map, and the media crew member will be editing videos aboard the ship and can send produced packages to TV stations via satellite.
The toughest part of the race will likely be the fifth and longest leg—the 6,776-mile, iceberg-infested stretch in the Southern Ocean from New Zealand to Brazil. “There, it’s not about going fast, it’s about controlling the crew and the boat,” says Enright, who anticipates filling the boat’s ballast tanks during that leg to slow the boat down and keep it more manageable. “To finish first, you must first finish.”
The prize for finishing first? Zero dollars. Each boat’s crew members are professional sailors that will be paid by their teams, but there’s no jackpot at the end of this grueling race.
The folks at the Long Now Foundation think deep thoughts about humanity’s future—their to-do list includes building a clock that’ll keep time for 10,000 years. But in the meantime they’ve built something more practical: a very nice bar. Located at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, the new lounge, called the Interval, will host events and discussions, and it’ll feature plenty of steampunk treats: custom-designed bottles of spirits stored in overhead racks, a robot that writes specials on a chalkboard, and another that dispenses the botanicals for your gin. But the real attraction will be the library. The Long Now crew calls it the Manual for Civilization—thousands of books recommended by foundation members and more than a dozen celebrity thinkers. So no matter what happens, from climate change to killer asteroids, whoever’s left can rebuild. Or at least have something to read while sipping house-aged whiskey.
STEWART BRAND
Founder: Long Now Foundation, Whole Earth Catalog
Highlights
The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (trans. Robert Fagles)
The Prince by Machiavelli
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al.
Approach
“I’m particularly interested in the continuity of civilization and how it gets better and more refined. It’s better to keep civilization going than to count on it stopping and starting in an interesting way.”
VIOLET BLUE
Journalist, sex educator
Highlights
Guide to Getting It On by Paul Joannides
X: The Erotic Treasury by Susie Bright
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach
Love and Sex With Robots by David Levy
Approach
“I wanted time less books that would help people with a topic that’s been one of the most divisive, political, scary, thrilling, empowering, intimate, shunned, exploited, and smile inducing aspects of being human.”
DANNY HILLIS
Inventor, engineer
Highlights
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville Principia Mathematica
by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman
SR-71 Blackbird Pilot’s Flight Manual
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Approach
“I tried to avoid just putting in my favorite books. The question I asked myself is, what books have information in them that took humanity a while to figure out?”
When it comes to real-time strategy games, there are usually two main gameplay modes: the single-player campaign, where you play through a series of missions and experience the game’s story, and the multiplayer, where you play on balanced maps against an opponent with access to the exact same resources as you.
However, if you wanted to play cooperatively with a friend, at least in the case of the hugely popular StarCraft, you could only do so by playing a team multiplayer match—two versus two, three versus one, etc. Aside from taking turns at the keyboard, there was no way to play the campaign and experience the story together.
That all changes thanks to the StarCraft Co-Op Campaign Mod from the two-person team of “TyrZ” and “r4z0r84.” The mod—which we should note is for the 16-year-old original StarCraft, not its 2010 sequel StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty—makes it so two players can cooperatively play through the entire game’s campaign. Each player controls their own army while working together to complete the game’s objectives. (Think of it as the difference between playing Team Slayer and doing a co-op campaign in Halo.)
For non-base missions where you play through a somewhat linear path and complete objectives rather than setting up a base and expanding out, triggers such as unit-replenishment and cutscene-activation have been scripted for two players so that events happen dynamically, especially depending on the skill and choices of your partner. Base missions provide a unique new challenge, too, as they will not always spawn players near each other (which would prompt the decision to build a singular, defensible position). Sometimes players are spawned on opposite sides of the map, requiring coordinated, long-distance efforts to defeat their common foe. Also, difficulty has been scaled up to compensate for twice as many players fighting their way across the battlefield.
Currently, all three campaigns (Protoss, Terran, and Zerg) have been completed for the base “vanilla” StarCraft game, along with the Terran and Protoss campaigns from the game’s expansion pack StarCraft: Brood War. (The latter of which launched just over a week ago.) The Brood War Zerg campaign is currently under construction.
Magnum's contact sheet exhibition places famous photographs next to the contact sheets they were chosen from by the photographers and their editors. Photos by Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos
Magnum's contact sheet exhibition places famous photographs next to the contact sheets they were chosen from by the photographers and their editors.
Photos by Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos
Contact sheets are often made from the original negatives placed up against photosensitive slides, creating an easy to comprehend account of the entire photo session. Prints can also be generated from them. Photos by Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos
Contact sheets are often made from the original negatives placed up against photosensitive slides, creating an easy to comprehend account of the entire photo session. Prints can also be generated from them.
Photos by Steve McCurry/Magnum Photos
Contact sheets are something of an anachronism, gradually replaced by the tools and techniques of digital photography. Photos by Rene Burri/Magnum Photos
Contact sheets are something of an anachronism, gradually replaced by the tools and techniques of digital photography.
Photos by Rene Burri/Magnum Photos
The contact sheets themselves tell a story, both about the approach of the photographer and the thought process of the editor. It's an added context that the final image alone can't offer. Photos by Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos
The contact sheets themselves tell a story, both about the approach of the photographer and the thought process of the editor. It's an added context that the final image alone can't offer.
Photos by Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos
A new photo exhibit from the storied Magnum Photo agency allows the public to view the contact sheets of 20 renowned Magnum photographers going back to the first days of the agency. That means viewers can see the shots that were taken before and after the photos that they’ve come to know so well.
The exhibition, which opened yesterday at the Milk Gallery in Manhattan, displays prints of the photos alongside the original session’s contact sheets—the pages of un-enlarged thumbnail prints that photo editors use to make selections. It’s a rare look at the shooting process of some of the last century’s best photographers.
“It’s really great to celebrate the old guard, the new guard, everything in between, to be able to look at the contact sheet and really see the labor that goes into capturing things and what that photographer was trying to convey and how they got there,” says Lauren Simon, who curated and organized the event as part of Magnum’s annual general meeting.
Contact sheets have long been a staple of the photo process for publishers around the world. They’re often created as transfers made from direct physical and chemical contact with the negatives. As a result the original format dimensions are retained—a 35mm shot remains 35mm in size. They made for handy organizational and retouching tools, but they’re something of an artifact in the age of digital photos, functionally replaced by an SD card or Photoshop session.
Their borderline extinction is unfortunate since they can be quite revealing. For one, they show a more complete picture of a photographer’s process than the final, chosen shot on its own. Guy Le Querrec’s sheet from shooting Miles Davis in 1969 shows how many ideas he tried, flipping the frame and trying different compositions (it also shows that it was impossible to take an uncool picture of Miles Davis). Seeing the arc of a photo session with James Dean shows that it took a lot of posing to get those pictures with his trademark allure.
Even more, highlights and markings of the photographers and their editors hint at their photographic preferences in a way that the final image might not. The contact sheet that contains Elliott Erwitt’s haunting photo of Jackie Onassis at her husband’s funeral creates another level of the story. Among all the photos from that grim day, a single frame is sharply outlined in red, an ominous image in its own right.
“It’s very rarely a happy coincidence. It usually takes quite a bit of a trained eye to see what they’re getting at, but then being able to select and know which image has the balance, the composition, the right lighting,” says Simon.
Magnum was founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, a street photographer who famously championed a philosophy of what he called the decisive moment. He never cropped his images, and was known to suddenly snap pictures in a fluid and immediate way, rather than laboring over a subject until he got the “perfect shot.” He was also atypical—most photographers must work with their subjects for a period of time before managing to represent them the way they want.
“Sometimes the first shot you take isn’t always the best, sometimes it happens half way down the contact sheet, sometimes it’s the very last frame,” says Simon. “A lot of the iconic images came to be because, at the time, a photo editor at said magazine picked that image. Sometimes it’s a personal choice by someone years ago and now, when we get to reexamine these contact sheets, we get to see all these hidden treasures in them.”
The exhibition runs through July 13. Prints and several contact sheets are for sale, but even if you don’t intend to buy anything it’s worth a visit to see the photographic process laid out this way. Besides that, it’s a group show of some of Magnum’s top photographers, and that doesn’t happen very often.
“I wanted to have a show up where we could have as much of the photographers’ work up as possible,” says Simon, “But being able to see these works all in one place—I think once it’s up on the wall I’m going to be a little starstruck, even though this is what I do all day.”
