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I digress.  Wonderful pictures of Earth.  See them here.

A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev volcano (Russia’s Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain and is located on the northwestern end of Matua Island.

In a first-of-its-kind study, a team of investigators led by Justin Garcia, a SUNY Doctoral Diversity Fellow in the laboratory of evolutionary anthropology and health at Binghamton University, State University of New York, has taken a broad look at sexual behavior, matching choices with genes and has come up with a new theory on what makes humans ‘tick’ when it comes to sexual activity. The biggest culprit seems to be the dopamine receptor D4 polymorphism, or DRD4 gene. Already linked to sensation-seeking behavior such as alcohol use and gambling, DRD4 is known to influence the brain’s chemistry and subsequently, an individual’s behavior.

Other reports:

His team discovered that there is a variation in the thrill-seeking gene and those with much longer alleles are more prone to, well, getting prone. (An allele is part of the gene’s DNA sequence responsible for different traits such as eye color or curly hair.)   Those with at least one 7-repeat allele reported a higher rate of promiscuity — that is admitting to a “one-night stand.” The same group had a 50 percent increase in instances of sexual cheating. ”It turns out everyone has got the gene,” said Garcia, who is a doctoral fellow in the laboratory of evolutionary anthropology and health at SUNY Binghamton. “Just as height varies, the amount of information in the gene varies. In those who have more, their alleles are longer and they are more prone to thrill-seeking.”  ”It’s inheritable, too,” he said. “If your parents have it, you have it.”   When the brain is stimulated — drinking alcohol, jumping from planes, having sex — it releases dopamine, the pleasure response hormone.

But that is not all:

Upbringing, experience and culture may actually wield more influence than the risk-taking gene, according to Susan Quilliam, a noted British psychologist and author of the updated “Joy of Sex.” “We are learning more and more about genes implicated in behaviors,” she said. “Every time a genetic study comes out, responsible scientists also stress that we have choice — nature and nurture,” she said. “Not everyone with the gene is promiscuous and not everyone who is promiscuous will have that gene.”

And can’t risk-taking be a good thing? “Sometimes that overlaps with creativity, with entrepreneurship and wanting to push the boundaries,” she said. “In relationships that can be exciting and fulfilling and help the whole couple move into new areas.”

So should a woman have her boyfriend tested before accepting his marriage proposal? “By the time she meets him, unless he is very young, his track record will prove whether he has acted on his infidelity gene or not,” said Quilliam. “If he has been unfaithful in the past, he is likely to do it in the future.”

Why is it that it is assumed that men are the cheaters?  I have never cheated.  I can’t say that about the women I have known.

Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.

There are probably a lot of stories for which this is the sub-text.  Rich man loses everything and must then actually work for a living.  He is successful only when he learns to read and respect the emotions of the people around him.

And I was thinking of an O.Henry story when I wrote that first line.  In the story, a man arranges for his child to meet the right person by paying for a series of happenstances which propel the two people together.  I can’t remember the story title.  But it is still probably true that you can’t buy love for yourself.

IT’S crawling with life down there. A remote expedition to the deepest layer of the Earth’s oceanic crust has revealed a new ecosystem living over a kilometre beneath our feet. It is the first time that life has been found in the crust’s deepest layer, and an analysis of the new biosphere suggests life could exist lower still.

On a hypothetical journey to the centre of the Earth starting at the sea floor, you would travel through sediment, a layer of basalt, and then hit the gabbroic layer, which lies directly above the mantle. Drilling expeditions have reached this layer before, but as the basalt is difficult to pierce it happens rarely.

To facilitate the task, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme set its sights on the Atlantis Massif. Tectonic activity beneath this submerged mountain in the central Atlantic Ocean has pushed the gabbroic layer within 70 metres of the sea floor, making it easier to reach (see diagram). A team led by Stephen Giovannoni of Oregon State University in Corvallis drilled down to 1391 metres, where temperatures reach 102 °C.

There, they found communities of bacteria that were sparse but widespread. The type of bacteria they found came as a surprise to Giovannoni, who has previously found micro-organisms living in the basalt layer. “We expected to find similar organisms in the deeper layer,” he says. “But actually it was very different.”

The planet is alive in ways that we don’t understand.

In 1962, a small community in rural Pennsylvania prepared for a Memorial Day celebration. On the town’s edge, near the Odd Fellows Cemetery, sat an old mining pit turned municipal landfill. To control its smell and vermin, the story goes, volunteer firefighters set a small fire in the trash, let it burn for a few hours, and, after dousing the flames with water, left a smoking pit. Today, on what was once Route 61 just outside town, appears a spray-painted greeting:  “Welcome to Graffiti Highway.” About twenty feet down the road, smoke rises, almost imperceptibly, from a buckle in the paved sea of heart-encircled initials and crossed-out phone numbers. Some believe that Memorial Day trash fire ignited a seam of coal, the Buck Mountain vein, and started an underground inferno that still burns. If no one stops it—and no one plans to—some geologists estimate that it could continue burning for another two centuries.

There is a discussion about the ways that the fires are controlled and sometimes stopped.