Amber Amateur __LINK__
Amateur radio operators; amber lights. Removesthe prohibition on using lit amber lights on vehicles used or operatedby federally licensed amateur radio operators in certain situationswhile such vehicles are in motion.
amber amateur
The UAH senior is the current president of the SHC and has been active with the Two-Month Glider Challenge, both the CanSat and Tartarus projects, and acted as the Outreach Manager for the club to share aerospace engineering knowledge with K-12 students. As the Project Lead, she also helped to establish an amateur ham radio contact with the International Space Station.
OREGON An unusual fossil-hunting team has hit upon an unusual discovery: the oldest found mushroom fossil yet, encased in amber along with a striking example of a parasite feeding upon a parasite. Dated to 100 million years ago by the age of material surrounding the amber, the mushroom joins the exclusive company of just a handful of fossilized fleshy fungal bodies ever found.
The chance of finding such a specimen is tiny. But, George Poinar, an Oregon State University zoologist and president of The Amber Institute, in Corvallis, Oregon, and Ron Buckley, a registered nurse and amateur fossil hunter from Florence, Kentucky, were the lucky amber-obsessed duo to discover it.
Poinar also analyzed the amber using nuclear magnetic resonance and compared it to the spectra obtained from modern tree resins. This hints that the amber came from a member of the Araucariaceae family such as kauri pine, leading Poinar to believe this ancient forest was similar to modern forests in northern New Zealand.
The amber also holds the remains of an ancient parasitic relationship. The sample contains a mycoparasite, or fungus growing on the mushroom, and a hyperparasite growing on the mycoparasite. Poinar first noted the characteristic threads of the mycoparasite growing over the mushroom cap, which the parasite uses to enter and consume the mushroom. Then he noticed the strands of a hyperparasite that had invaded the mycelium to absorb its nutrients. "Even a well-trained field mycologist might not recognize that in the field," says Vilgalys. But Buckley knew he had something special the minute he saw it.
Fossils preserved in amber sometimes contain DNA which may beextracted, cloned and sequenced. This technique is proving to be a usefulmethod to explore biological relationships from a time about which there isno direct evidence. The presence of viable DNA in amber that is 25 to 50million years old also raises questions for the definition of life. If lifeis the ability to reproduce when placed in an optimum environment, then theviable, amber-encased DNA is alive. It follows that the oldest known livingthings are very old indeed.
There it remains until 1991. Then, like archaeologists enteringthe tomb of Tutankhamen, molecular biologist break into the mosquito'scoffin, now fossilized into yellow amber, to resurrect what died so long ago.Not for the mosquito, however, is this a freakish chance for a second life.That prize belongs to its last meal. By extracting and cloning DNA from thedinosaur's blood cells, still vital and undigested in the belly of theprehistoric insect, the intrepid biologists bring T. rex hack to life aftermillions of years of crystallized slumber.
Such is the wildly imaginative premise of Michael Crichton's1990 novel, Jurassic Park. Of course as the novel unfolds that premise beginsto seem relatively tame; the plot really gets off the ground when theavailable DNA gets cloned and expressed in a fantastic zoo stocked withprehistoric animals, and the animals prove to be more than their keepers havebargained for. But the thrill-a-second novel, which will he released in afilm version early this summer, has at least one big toe in real biologicalresearch: ancient DNA is indeed being extracted and cloned from extinctorganisms preserved in amber.
I discovered my first piece of amber in 1962, on the western coastof Denmark, and since then I have taken great pleasure in the hobby ofcollecting bits of the semi-precious stone, with their delicate specimens ofbygone life inside. But early in 1982 that hobby transformed itself into alife's work. The turning point came when my wife, Roberta Hess-Poinar,an electron microscopist in the entomology department at the University ofCalifornia at Berkeley, and I examined a forty-million-year-old fungus gnatencased in amber. We expected to see only the outline of the insect'scuticle when we looked at the specimen under a light microscope. Instead weobserved dark areas within the outline, indicating that the body of theorganism itself, not an impression or a fossil, was inside the amber. Excitedby what we saw, we then examined the specimen under the much highermagnification of an electron microscope. We were astonished to behold thecells of the gnat's tissue: striated muscle cells, complete with nucleicontaining what appeared to be chromatin, the part of the cell that carriesthe genes. Miraculously, even more delicate parts of the cell had alsosurvived--ribosomes, mitochondria, the endoplasmic reticulum, lipid dropletsof myofibrils. Suddenly amber was no longer a mere curiosity that enabledcollectors to see shadows of animals from the ancient past; now it was averitable time capsule, delivering real specimens, essentially intact, to thetwentieth century.
The sight of the muscle cells gave me hope that DNA, too, mighthave survived. The late molecular biologist Alan C. Wilson and I set out toextract DNA from organisms in amber. We were widely thought to be wasting ourtime with such a futuristic project. Several granting agencies refused tofund us: the project was considered too avant-garde. But we could not set theidea aside just yet. Wilson, his graduate student Russell Higuchi and Icontinued with the research on our own time and money, working on weekends,during lunch hours and in spare hours between other projects. We madesporadic progress and discovered many samples that contained DNA. But wenever did the definitive experiments that would determine whether that DNAwas from the organism or was a contaminant.
Around 1987 the investigation ground to a halt, though both Wilsonand Higuchi continued to experiment with DNA from Egyptian mummies and fromdried-out ancient organisms. The story might have ended there but for theinterest of my eldest son. In 1989 Hendrik Poinar, then a student atCalifornia Polytechnic Institute at San Luis Obispo, chose ancient DNA inamber as his senior project. He, working with his adviser, the molecularbiologist Raul J. Cano, devised a method of cracking the amber and extractingand rehydrating the DNA. By 1991 they had obtained their DNA but had yet todetermine whether it belonged to a more recent contaminant. Later that yearour team--Cano, Hendrik and I--isolated, amplified and sequenced DNA from anextinct stingless bee suspended in amber that was between twenty-five millionand forty million years old. After nearly a decade of unfunded research, theback-burner project had finally borne thrilling results. Ours is the oldestDNA reported so far, but future work will undoubtedly push the record muchfurther hack in time.
The discovery of DNA in amber and the finding that it can still bereplicated raise in a novel and stimulating way one of the most venerable andfundamental questions in biology: What is life? I am willing to say, assumingthat DNA from ancient amber will one day be expressed as a protein in aliving cell, that ancient DNA is, in a sense, alive. I am aware that myposition is a controversial one; after all, to most people the oldest livingthing is the bristlecone pine tree, a mere few thousand years old. DNA fromamber, if counted among the living, attests to an incredible longevity, nowmeasured in tens of millions of years.
Until THE ROMAN AUTHOR Pliny set the record straight, the originsof amber were shrouded in mythology and superstition. The ancient Greeksthought it was the solidified urine of a lynx or the tears of the Heliades,mythical sisters who were transformed into trees after the death of theirbrother and wept tears of amber. Pliny correctly traced its beginnings totree resin, the familiar tacky pitch that exudes from pines and otherconifers. The fossilization of amber takes place over millions of years. Theresin solidifies on being exposed to the air, but it retains some pliability.With the passage of a few million years the many small molecules of the resinform a large polymer network, creating a kind of plastic substance calledcopal. In the form of copal the resin is no longer pliable, and it fracturesif it is dropped. But copal is not amber, and geologists can only guess atthe exact details of the process that transforms copal into amber overadditional millions of years. It does seem likely that the copal fossilizesonly if it is protected from the elements but exposed to seawater. Theprocess goes on to this day, and new deposits of amber and copal continue tobe unearthed.
Amber is found all over the world, sifted from the rocky beaches sof the Baltic coasts or chiseled out of buried veins high in the mountains ofLebanon, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. It may have been the first stoneever valued as a semiprecious gem: amber has been worn as jewelry; carried asa talisman into battle; carved into dice, chandeliers and cups; and generallyprized so highly it has led to bloodshed and intrigue throughout history. Inthe Middle Ages the Order of the Teutonic Knights wrested control of theBaltic amber trade from the Prussians and ordered all amber turned over tothem--on pain of death. In the Second World War a room made entirely ofamber, commissioned in 1701 by King Frederick I of Prussia, was stolen by theNazis and remains lost to this day. The S.S. officer in charge of the roomdied in a Polish prison in 1986 at the age of ninety without having revealedits where-abouts. Since then art detectives, passionate amateur collectorsand even the former East German secret police have searched for it in vain:notable in the fruitless quest was a German art dealer found stabbed to deathin a forest near Munich in 1987. 041b061a72