In 1862 Pottinger was made an inspector of police for the Western District of New South Wales. In April 1862 he arrested Ben Hall at Forbes on a charge of robbery. Hall he was released because there was not enough evidence to prove he was a robber. Soon afterward Hall joined Frank Gardiner's gang. On June 15, 1862, they robbed the Lachlan gold escort of some £14,000 at Eugowra. This was Australia's biggest gold robbery. Pottinger was able to capture two of the bushrangers quickly. They escaped several days later in a gun battle. Pottinger got back some of the stolen gold.
People thought Pottinger made a lot of mistakes. He was in trouble for not having enough police guards on the gold escort and letting his prisoners escape. On the night of August 9, Pottinger and a group of police surrounded the house of Gardiner's mistress, Kate Brown. The bushranger escaped when Pottinger's pistol fired accidentally. They arrested a young boy who they thought was a friend of the bushrangers. When he died from a fever in gaol in March 1863, this was seen to be caused by Pottinger's cruelty. In February 1862 Pottinger was in court at Yass for assault. During a game of billiards he had been called a cheat, a liar and a scoundrel. He hit the person with the billiard cue and smashed his head through a window. On September 27, 1862, Pottinger had appeared before a Bathurst court on a charge of assault. In February 1863 Pottinger went to Sydney for the trial of the escort robbers. He was pushed in the street by people in the crowd. He also threatened a Member of Parliament, J. J. Harpur, with his whip. He didn't like things that Harpur had said about him.
The bushrangers in his area became more active. He captured Patrick Daley. On August 17, 1864, he nearly caught James Alpin McPherson.
In May 1863 the inspector-general told police to think of new ways to catch the bushrangers. Early in January 1865 Pottinger rode a horse in the Wowingragong races. This was against the rules of the police force. He was sacked (lost his job) on February 16, 1865. Pottinger said that he was just trying to get Ben Hall and John Dunn to come out of hiding. His plan worked and the bushrangers went to the races, only Pottinger didn't see them. Protest meetings against his sacking were held on the gold diggings and in the towns. People signed petitions for him to get his job back. He was regarded as a brave and tireless policeman. Pottinger went to Sydney to try and get back his job. On March 5, 1865, at Wascoe's Inn in the Blue Mountains Pottinger accidentally shot himself in the stomach while trying to get onto a moving coach. He was moved to the Victoria Club in Sydney where he died on April 9, 1865. His brother Henry became the 3rd Baronet. He was buried at St Jude's Anglican Church, Randwick.
Bushfire
A bushfire is a wildfire that happens mostly in the Australian bush. Bush is the word for scrub, woodland or grassland of Australia and New Zealand. In south east and south west of Australia, bushfires are most common in the summer and early autumn. In the north of Australia, bushfires usually happen during winter which is the dry season. Many Australian plants burn easily. Eucalyptus trees have a high oil content which makes them burn. Over the last 40 years, Australian bushfires have cost around 2.5 billion Australian dollars. In the same period, Australian bushfires caused the death of around 250 people and the destruction of 4,554 homes.But these figures do not include the 173 people who died and the 2000 homes destroyed in the 2009 Victorian bushfires. They can also kill wildlife including rare koalas.
Artificial selection
Artificial selection is the intentional breeding of plants or animals. It means the same thing as selective breeding and is an ancient method of genetic engineering.
Selective breeding is a technique used when breeding domesticated animals, such as dogs, pigeons or cattle. Some of these animals may have traits that a breeder will want to carry over to the next generation. The breeder will therefore select those animals to breed which have that quality, rather than those that do not.
Inbreeding is a particular kind of selective breeding, designed to produce a population which is genetically virtually identical. Such populations are rarely viable outside the laboratory. They lose fertility. To control this, most breeds are outcrossed or backcrossed to wild-type individuals, or at least less inbred stock. The details differ from breed to breed. The improvement when outcrossing is done is called hybrid vigour.
Charles Darwin used the example of artificial selection to introduce his idea of natural selection. Artificial selection may be contrasted with the process of natural selection. In natural selection, the differential reproduction of organisms with certain traits happens. This is because some variations help the organism to have better survival and reproduction. The process maintains or enhances the fitness of a population in its natural habitat.
Artificial selection may sometimes be unintentional; it is thought that domestication of crops by early humans was largely unintentional.
Selectable marker
A selectable marker is a reporter gene introduced into a cell along with a gene insert. What this means is, the experimenter can tell the right gene is in the cell because the marker can be seen or detected.
Most often, this is used for bacteria or for cells in culture. Selectable markers show the success of a transfection or other procedure meant to introduce foreign DNA into a cell. It is a technique in gene targeting and gene knockout.
Selectable markers are often antibiotic resistance genes; bacteria that have been subjected to a procedure to introduce foreign DNA are grown on a medium containing an antibiotic. The antibiotic knocks out cells which do not have the resistant marker. Those bacterial colonies that can grow have successfully taken up and expressed the introduced genetic material.
An alternative to a selectable marker is a screenable marker, which allows the researcher to distinguish between wanted and unwanted cells.
Examples of selectable markers include:
Evolutionary algorithm
In Computer Science, especially in artificial intelligence, evolutionary algorithms are a kind of algorithm that simulate evolution to optimise something. Each generation of solution is subjected to some kind of fitness function; those that "survive" are then recombined in some way to make the next generation of solution. This is done until a certain level of fitness is reached, or a determined number of generations have been used.
Artificial life
Artificial life (commonly Alife or alife) is a field of study which examines systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution. This is done with simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: "soft", from software; "hard", from hardware; and "wet", from biochemistry. Artificial life imitates traditional biology by trying to "recreate" biological phenomena. The term "artificial life" is often used to specifically refer to soft alife.
Nils Aall Barricelli
Nils Aall Barricelli (born 1912, died 1993) was a Norwegian-Italian mathematician.
Barricelli's early computer-assisted experiments in symbiogenesis and evolution are considered pioneering in artificial life research. Barricelli, who was independently rich, held an unpaid residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1953, 1954. and 1956. He later worked at the University of California, Los Angeles, at Vanderbilt University (until 1964), in the Department of Genetics of the University of Washington, Seattle (until 1968) and then at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Oslo. Barricelli published in a variety of fields including virus genetics, DNA, theoretical biology, space flight, theoretical physics and mathematical language.
Genetic algorithm