Scotland on Sunday;

IT IS straight out of a nightmare: a wave almost 100ft high bears down on your helpless vessel miles from the safety of the shore.
But that is exactly what a team of British scientists faced while conducting experiments off the west coast of Scotland.
[…]
The significance of the Rockall event is that the height of the sea was measured by an onboard wave recorder, making it officially the biggest ever.
The NOC’s boat, RSS Discovery, a successor vessel to Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ship, was stranded by storms for five days, with waves averaging 61ft. Wind speeds hit the severe gale category.
The 295ft-long vessel was in the area to conduct experiments on global warming, but the onboard instruments were also capable of accurately measuring wave height.
Holliday said: “Very strong winds are common here all the year round. The point is that all of these previously high measured waves were under hurricane conditions – really extreme conditions, but our big waves weren’t. These are not especially unusual conditions. It wasn’t just a one-off.”

The event happened in 2000, but was recently published in Geophysical Research Letters Journal.

The researchers believe the discovery of such a huge wave amid relatively low, non-hurricane wind speeds could have implications for oil exploration on Britain’s Atlantic shelf.
Holliday believes the extreme waves were caused by a resonance effect.
It occurs when the wind velocity matches the speed of the waves, resulting in wind continually feeding energy into the sea.
She said: “Energy was continually being put into this wave group. This was pretty close to the maximum height that the waves could have got to. This is the edge of the Atlantic Shelf where a lot of exploration is going on.
“These new figures are going to be quite significant. Engineers who are trying to design ships and oil platforms will have to think again.”

Emphasis mine. It’s another story that features what appear to be qualified researchers who are seemingly unaware of duplicate research in their own or related fields. It’s a phenomenon I first came across in the course of breeding dogs and tracking developments in genetic research – often, breeders have a better grasp on the current state of research in their breeds than the veterinary specialists they consult.
In July of 2004, I mentioned this item, “Seas Awash With Monster Waves”

Rogue waves that rise as high as 10-storey buildings and can sink large ships are far more common than previously thought, satellite images show.
Two European Space Agency (ESA) satellites have monitored the world’s oceans to test the frequency of monster waves that were once dismissed as a nautical myth.
Three weeks of data from the early months of 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe over 25 metres high.
Previously, ESA said, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years.
“Having proved they existed in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyse if they can be forecasted,” said Dr Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the GKSS research centre in Geesthacht, Germany.

One would think the existence of well-publicized data such as this would preclude statements that claim “discovery” – especially in an era when simply entering the words “monster waves” into a Google search can pull up multiple references.

We need a Paul Martin drinking game. I’d create one myself, but it’s been over thirteen years since my last drink so I’m a bit handicapped here. (I can’t even remember what rum tastes like.) Anyhow, the idea is to listen to Paul Martin on the news. If he says ‘very, very’, that’s one shot. If he blames the Conservative ‘hidden agenda’, that’s two shots.

And so on.

Does someone want to step up to the plate on this?

Not what you think this is about, either.
A few years ago, the paleoanthropologists got together with molecular geneticists and made a startling discovery – that all modern humans descend from a common female ancestor, who originated in Africa. They named her “Eve”, which, while not entirely original, was clever and easy to remember. (Though I wish I were a fly on the wall when the wailing began that the choice of this particular name might dovetail a little too conveniently with the competing theory in Genesis – but I digress…)
The discovery was based upon studies of mitochondrial dna – located outside the cell nucleus and inherited only from one’s mother. A more thorough discussion of mitochondrial dna and how it is used to track evolutionary branches is here. (Heh – check it out. I’m such a mind reader.)
Once the genetics geeks got their hands on mitochondrial dna they were hooked. In addition to finding “Eve”, they went to work on a timeline showing when dogs emerged from wolves, and wolves from older versions of wolves and so forth. They’ve been using it to plot these evolutionary timelines for species divergence, crime solving, disease research ever since. It’s a slick little tool.
Or it would be, if that part about “only inherited from the maternal ancestor line” were true.
Oops.

For decades biologists have assumed that mitochondria – the cells’ power stations – are inherited solely through the maternal line.
Mitochondria in the sperm from the father were presumed to be destroyed immediately after conception, leaving behind only those from the mother. But Marianne Schwartz and John Vissing from the University Hospital Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, have discovered that one of their patients inherited the majority of his mitochondria from his father.
[…]
The researchers think inheritance of paternal mitochondrial DNA is probably very rare. But the findings will have implications for a number of branches of biology. Evolutionary biologists often date the divergence of species by the differences in genetic sequences in mitochondrial DNA. Even if paternal DNA is inherited very rarely, it could invalidate many of their findings. It will also have implications for scientists investigating inherited metabolic diseases.

Damn. Well, that sucks, doesn’t it?
But let’s not let that get anyone down.. regroup, refocus and charge!

Using a computer model, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attempted to trace back the most recent common ancestor using estimated patterns of migration throughout history.
They calculated that the ancestor’s location in eastern Asia allowed his or her descendants to spread to Europe, Asia, remote Pacific Islands and the Americas. Going back a few thousand years more, the researchers found a time when a large fraction of people in the world were the common ancestors of everybody alive today – while the rest were ancestors of no one alive. That date was 5,353BC, the team reports in Nature.

No word on whether or not they’ve named the lucky dude, but I’m guessing “Adam” is high on the list.

Reuters:

Three weeks of imaging data by the agency’s satellites from early 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe of more than 25 metres in height. Previously, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years.

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