Marveling at Changes

(Saw some of this on Colbert last night and have seen a bunch of stuff aluding to a female Thor on i09, TVguide, and other sites)

From EW.Com:

Marvel has some big changes in store for Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man. While their corporate siblings over at Marvel Studios prepare to reunite the Big Three onscreen in next year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel Comics will debut radical new looks for the three most iconic Avengers. It’s all part of a much larger initiative known as Avengers NOW!, which will see the debut of new Big Three books and several other new ongoing series.

In November, Superior Iron Man #1 sends Tony Stark to San Francisco with a new outfit and a new perspective on life. “The Genius Bar costume is there for a reason,” Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso tells EW. “The newly-transformed Superior Iron Man has very ambitious plans for the city that some of its residents embrace, but not all.” Comic book fans will note the very pointed addition of the word “Superior” to the title. The last time that happened, it was Superior Spider-Man, and Doctor Octopus took over Peter Parker’s brain. Doc Ock won’t be invading Tony’s frontal lobe, but Alonso does note, “Like the Superior Spider-Man, Superior Iron Man is a character that’s hard to root for.” The series is written by Tom Taylor and drawn by In a series written by Tom Taylor and drawn by Yildiray Cinar.

Also in November comes All-New Captain America #1. As has been hinted elsewhere, Steve Rogers will find himself unable to take up the mantle of Captain America, leaving someone else to put on the stars and stripes in his place. Because the new Cap appears to be African-American, most experts think it will be Sam Wilson, a.k.a. the Falcon, Cap’s friend and longtime partner. Alonso doesn’t confirm or deny, though he does note that the character in the image above has “what appears to be something that allows him the gift of flight.” He also says that All-New #1—written by Rick Remender and with art by Stuart Immonen—will be “very much a jumping-on point [for people] who both like the Captain America and really enjoyed the second Captain America movie.” (Which featured Anthony Mackie as the Falcon.)

UPDATE: And now The Colbert Report has confirmed that Sam Wilson (Falcon) will be the new Captain America. Go, Captain Falcmerica, go!

But all those changes pale in comparison to what’s going on in October’s Thor #1. In the new series written by Jason Aaron and drawn by Russell Dauterman, there’s a whole new Thunder God–or Goddess, rather. It all comes out of the Original Sin story arc. “For reasons that will be revealed in Original Sin, Thor won’t be able to pick up the hammer,” says Alonso. “Someone has to pick up the hammer. And someone does. And they become Thor.” That someone is a lady—who precise identity won’t be revealed immediately. “There are several women in Thor’s life, and one of them is going to be the new Thor. You aren’t going to find out who it is for some time. This is a slowly unfolding mystery.”

GOT: R+L = J

Pretty good explanation of the common GoT theory along with all of the books' textural evidence.

Floppy Ears and Curly Tails...

From i09:

Why So Many Domesticated Animals Have Floppy Ears

Take a look at several domesticated mammal species and you might spot a number of similarities between them, including those cute floppy ears. The famous naturalist and evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin even observed in the first chapter of his On the Origin of Species that:

Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears […]

And it's not just the ears. Domesticated animals share a fairly consistent set of differences from their wild ancestors such as smaller brains, smaller teeth, shorter curly tails and lighter and blotchy coats: a phenomenon called the "domestication syndrome".

  paper published this week in the journal Genetics poses a new explanation as to why so many domesticated animals have such a similar set of traits.

Adam Wilkins, from South Africa's Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, and colleagues propose that human selection has, in domesticated species, altered the development of the neural crest, an organ system present during embryonic development.

The dog has been befriended by humans for at least 11,000 years, longer than any other domesticated animal. They differ from their wild ancestor wolves in all the above listed features of domestication syndrome.

Dogs aren't the only examples, of course. Humans have also domesticated cattle, horses, sheep, goats … the list goes on.

In the late 1950s, Russian fox-fur-farmer-turned-geneticist [geneticist turned fox fur farmer to obsfuscate that he was a geneticist when it wasn't popular with the Soviets]  Dmitry Belyaev set up a long-term experiment to find out whether he could selectively breed the wildness out of the silver fox, which was hard to breed because of its aggressive nature.  In each generation of foxes, he bred from animals that showed the least aggression towards their captors.

It took him and his successor Lyudmilla Trut just 20 generations – only about 25 years – to create a line of silver foxes who from birth were tame enough to be kept as pets. For those who study evolution, this is an extraordinarily short time span.

But that wasn't the most surprising result. Although selected only for their temperament, the later generations of silver foxes also had shorter faces, smaller teeth, soft and droopy ears, curly tails and altered colour.  {...}

In 1868, the same year that Darwin published an entire monograph on domestication, Swiss anatomist Wilhelm His Sr described what became known as the embryonic neural crest...  { MORE SCIENCE } {...}

Wilkins and colleagues now propose a hypothesis that links the development of the neural crest with the body changes that accompany domestication.

The neural crest produces not only facial skeletal and connective tissues, teeth and external ears but also pigment cells, nerves and adrenal glands, which mediate the "fight or flight" response.  {MORE SCIENCE} {...}

This new hypothesis proposes one intriguing answer to the domestication question originally identified by Darwin and illustrated by Belyaev and Trut: why do all the traits of domestication co-exist in multiple species?

It may be that neural crest contributions are so diverse that it's possible to cherry-pick points of congruence to support any hypothesis. Nevertheless, the researchers suggest several lines of molecular genetic and functional experiments that can further put their ideas to the test...

Full Article:  HERE