discoverer 3000

Awesome New Discoveries in Blood Pressure Treatments

2010-06-29T23:07:00.001+08:00

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1/3 of adults in the United States have high blood pressure, which increases the risk for heart disease and stroke, the first and third leading causes of death in the United States. Researchers have found that increasing certain proteins in the blood vessels of mice lowers the animal’s blood pressure. This study may lead to new treatments for hypertension.

“The cytochrome P450 plays an important role in the management of high blood pressure, a disease of enormous public health concern,” said Darryl Zeldin, M.D., acting clinical director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

The researchers created animal models that had a human cytochrome P450 in their cells that line the blood vessels. The mice with the P450 generated more epoxyeicosatrienoic acids or EETs, which relax and dilate the blood vessels and fight inflammation. EETS protect our cardiovascular system.

“We found that when the animals were exposed to substances known to increase blood pressure, the animals with the P450 had lower blood pressure and less damage to the kidneys compared to normal mice,” said Craig R. Lee, Pharm.D., Ph.D., assistant professor at UNC and lead author on the paper.

This could open new doors to find treatments for hypertension and high blood pressure.

Spotting planets for lower prices

2010-01-03T09:42:00.000+08:00

By Tom Beal

Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 01.02.2010

The first asteroid glimpsed by astronomers before it crashed into Earth was spotted with a couple of refurbished telescopes hooked up to some digital cameras by the the Catalina Sky Survey.

The closest thing to an Earthlike exoplanet was found recently with a telescope at Whipple Observatory that an avid amateur might have in his backyard.

From that same ridge in the Santa Ritas, an astronomer has discovered 13 exoplanets orbiting distant stars with the kind of telephoto lenses you would use to snap pictures of a high school football game.

Giant land-based telescopes and space missions gobble up most of the money available each year for astronomical exploration. But innovative astronomers are proving that you don't need a multibillion-dollar orbiting telescope to find planets or even save the world.

Lately, they have been making headlines and making the point that the worth of a discovery is not directly related to the size of investment.

HATNet

Gàspàr Bakos started his planet search with a $350 Nikon telephoto lens from a used-camera store in Manhattan.

His current arrays — including four HAT telescopes at Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona — are a bit pricier. Once you add the fancy digital technology and mounting hardware, each telescope costs about $50,000.

The design, developed by Bakos and three amateur astronomers in Hungary, still employs a relatively modest telephoto lens, hooked up to a CCD camera and set on a movable, robotically controlled mount.

They scan the night sky in a wide field, searching for the periodic dimming of stars, signs that a planet is passing.

Bakos, an astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has now found 13 planets — mostly big balls of gas. Some demonstrate novel properties. One, bigger than Jupiter but with half that planet's mass, has been called "the puffy planet." It would float in water, if you had a very large bathtub.

Bakos' program, now at sites in Arizona and Hawaii, is called HATnet, the Hungarian-made Automatic Telescope network. Bakos was honored as one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10" in 2007 for his accomplishments.

MEarth

Astronomers such as Bakos and Harvard-Smithsonian colleague David Charbonneau, who developed the moderately priced MEarth array on Mount Hopkins, are good "advocates for small telescopes," said astronomer Emilio Falco, science director for several programs at Whipple Observatory.

Falco, who helped build and provides technical support for the HAT and MEarth arrays, said "there is still a trend toward the larger telescopes, with all the funding diverted to these huge projects. However, as Gaspar and other groups have shown, you can do a lot with these small telescopes."

Charbonneau pioneered the technique of searching for planets around distant stars by measuring the light lost when the planet orbited or transited in front of the star.

Then he got the idea to use an array of off-the-shelf telescopes to search the sky for such reductions in the light emitted by nearby stars. He chose 2,000 of the smallest ones, known as M stars, and began to look for rocky planets similar to Earth but about twice its size.

He's searching for "earths" around M stars, hence the name MEarth. It is pronounced "mirth," said Charbonneau, "because it makes us happy."

Eight of MEarth's telescopes sit in a boxcar-sized enclosure known as "the shed" on Mount Hopkins. They click automatically to life when the shed roof rolls back at twilight, feeding data to Cambridge, Mass., where Charbonneau and his colleagues look for signs of a transit.

Finding a rocky planet in a habitable zone near its star would be a coup. Most of the 400 exoplanets discovered so far are big gassy giants like Jupiter.

Charbonneau said he chose his targets to match the limits of his viewing technique. Did such things exist? He didn't know, but he expected they did and predicted it mathematically.

Sure enough, he recently announced a startling discovery in the scientific journal Nature — the most Earthlike planet discovered so far.

It's a little close to its sun and a bit too hot for life as we know it, but it's made of rock and water and has an atmosphere.

Not a bad find for an $8,000 telescope with a 16-inch mirror.

Catalina Sky Survey

Astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey adopted an age-old marketing strategy to reduce the price of their science — volume, volume, volume.

The group, based at the University of Arizona, refurbished two of the Steward Observatory's outmoded telescopes on Mount Lemmon and Mount Bigelow in the Santa Catalina Mountains and began clicking away at the night sky six years ago with digital cameras, feeding a computer program that looks for moving objects.

With those relatively modest 60-inch and 28-inch telescopes, they quickly became the world's leader in discovering NEOs, near-earth objects that could crash into our planet.

They counted 565 in 2008 and will better that record in 2009, using an annual budget from NASA of $1 million.

"We are the Wal-Mart of astronomy. Actually, we're the Dollar Store," said Sky Survey Director Ed Beshore.

"If you figure a cost per asteroid, our price keeps going down," Beshore said.

In 2008, the year Catalina Sky Survey gained fame by predicting the path of a meteor that crashed in Sudan, the price per asteroid was $1,758.

And — as they say in the infomercials — that's not all.

The Catalina Sky Survey is now wholesaling its unexamined data to other astronomers. A pilot program with CalTech recently yielded 877 sightings of peculiar objects — active galactic nuclei, stellar flares, supernovae and optical transients.

Now the folks at Caltech have snared a grant to combine those data with results from Catalina's Southern Hemisphere observatory at Sliding Spring in Australia. Then they plan to put real-time images from the three telescopes online, along with a library of the same portions of the sky taken in past viewing. The data will be made available for searching to armchair astronomers everywhere.

It is a low-budget version of the type of "synoptic" sky survey envisioned by more grandiose astronomical endeavors, such as the $390 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

The limits of cheap

None of these astronomers argues for an end to the big telescope projects. In fact, most of their discoveries must be verified by bigger and better telescopes.

Charbonneau, for instance, has partners in his "super Earth" search who used a giant telescope in Chile to verify his discovery. To learn more about it, he has applied for time on the Hubble space telescope, which is expected to burn through about $6 billion in its 10 years of operation.

Falco, meanwhile, has been busy verifying HAT discoveries on two larger scopes on Mount Hopkins.

"The immediate next step is to use our 1.2 meter, do follow-up to refine the light curves — the variation of brightness that gives you the transit measurement," Falco said.

Then he uses a nearby 1.5-meter telescope that is equipped to do spectroscopy to "get a basic description of the system."

Then it's on to the twin 10-meter Keck Telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

"That's when you hit the jackpot. You get exquisite detail," he said.

At a price. Those Keck twins cost $200 million to bring into the world.

Scientists visualize how bacteria talk to one another

2009-11-10T13:12:00.000+08:00

Using imaging mass spectrometry, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed tools that will enable scientists to visualize how different cell populations of cells communicate. Their study shows how bacteria talk to one another – an understanding that may lead to new therapeutic discoveries for diseases ranging from cancer to diabetes and allergies.

In the paper published in the November 8 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, Pieter C. Dorrestein, PhD, assistant professor at UC San Diego's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and colleagues describe an approach they developed to describe how bacteria interface with other bacteria in a laboratory setting. Dorrestein and post-doctoral students Yu-Liang Yang and Yuquan Xu, along with Paul Straight from Texas A&M University, utilized technology called natural product MALDI-TOF (Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization-Time of Flight) imaging mass spectrometry to uniquely translate the language of bacteria.

Microbial interactions, such as signaling, have generally been considered by scientists in terms of an individual, predominant chemical activity. However, a single bacterial species is capable of producing many bioactive compounds that can alter neighboring organisms. The approach developed by the UCSD research team enabled them to observe the effects of multiple microbial signals in an interspecies interaction, revealing that chemical "conversations" between bacteria involve many signals that function simultaneously.

"Scientists tend to study the metabolic exchange of bacteria, for example penicillin, one molecule at a time," said Dorrestein. "Actually, such exchanges by microbes are much more complex, involving 10, 20 or even 50 molecules at one time. Now scientists can capture that complexity."

The researchers anticipate that this tool will enable development of a bacterial dictionary that translates the output signals. "Our ability to translate the metabolic output of microbes is becoming more important, as they outnumber other cells in our body by a 10 to one margin," Dorrestein explain. "We want to begin to understand how those bacteria interact with our cells. This is a powerful tool that may ultimately aid in understanding these interactions."
In order to communicate, bacteria secrete molecules that tell other microbes, in effect, "I am irritated, stop growing," "I need more nutrients" or "come closer, I can supply you with nutrients." Other molecules are secreted that may turn off the body's defense mechanisms. The team is currently mapping hundreds of such bacterial interactions. Their hope is that this approach will also enable them to translate these bacterial-mediated mechanisms in the future.

Understanding the means by which microorganism cells talk to one another will facilitate therapeutic discovery, according to Dorrestein. For instance, knowing how microbes interact with human immune cells could lead to discovery of novel immune system modulators, and how these molecules control bacterial growth may lead to new anti-invectives. Both are active areas of investigation in his laboratory.

Production tells story of what Galileo saw

2009-11-02T21:35:00.002+08:00

He looked into the heavens and saw more than anyone had seen before. Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei took two curved pieces of glass, made them into lenses and looked through them to create a telescope.
Now a new original production, "Galileo: The Power of the Telescope," takes over the Daniel M. Soref Planetarium, 800 W. Wells St., and tells the story about how Galileo's discoveries changed Western culture's view of the cosmos.
The program turns the Soref into a time machine, traveling back to Pisa, Italy, to look at Galileo's ground-breaking idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. The show is narrated by Dava Sobel, author of the award-winning "Galileo's Daughter."
"Galileo" runs daily at 12:30 p.m. through March 19. Call (414) 319-4629 for ticket information.
- Jackie Loohauis-Bennett

New drug for cancer in 5 years

2008-05-12T14:14:00.000+08:00

Published Date: 04 May 2008
By Kate Foster

THE lives of half of all cancer victims could be saved or prolonged as a result of clinical trials set to start within five years, Scotland's leading researcher in the field revealed last night.
Professor Sir David Lane said work on his earlier discoveries into the link between genes and cancer had reached the stage where drug trials in humans were likely to begin in "four to five years".Lane, in his first interview since returning to Scotland from a three-year post in Singapore, predicted that if the trials were successful up to 7,000 Scottish cancer sufferers annually could be saved, 10 times as many in the UK and millions across the world.

Lane, who is based at Dundee University, is revered in scientific circles for his discovery of the p53 gene and work on how it helps prevent cancer by "switching off" the damaged cells that can cause tumours.Speaking exclusively to Scotland on Sunday, he revealed that his own groundbreaking experiments, as well as research by other scientists across the world, had reached a "very exciting" stage.Many tumours begin when p53 is prevented from doing its vital anti-cancer work by other chemicals in the body.

According to Lane, a molecule has been created which allows p53 to carry on fighting the disease. The molecule, Nutlin 3, works by blocking a protein called MDM2 which itself can inhibit p53.Theoretically, a drug containing Nutlin 3 could be used to help treat virtually all types of cancer, including lung, leukaemia, breast and colon. Approximately half of all cancers involve the p53 gene being blocked by MDM2.Lane said: "There are things coming to clinical trial soon and that's very exciting. I expect in the next four or five years there will be clinical trials of drugs that work by turning on p53.

It's very clear that it's getting very close now and that's a big excitement."He added: "The thing we would start with would be trials of leukaemia because it's easier to monitor how drugs are working there by taking tumour cells from the blood and seeing if they are being damaged."Lane predicted: "Cancer will become more and more a treatable disease where the expected outcome is a successful treatment. We are getting towards that already with breast cancer. It's a combination of early detection, trials, and treatments."The difference I feel now is that it feels like we are really on the right track. You can feel the progress. There were times 20 years ago when there weren't drugs coming though and this was such a difficult disease to treat.

Now we know we are doing the right things. That's not to be complacent because with the ageing population cancer is going to be a major disease but I am really optimistic about what we are doing."Lane called on the scientific community to work together. "There are a lot of hurdles and the costs go up enormously, hundreds of millions to do full clinical approval, so it's a long staircase," he said. "In the end it's not just one person that gets it there, it's a combination of the scientists, the clinicians, the patients and the public who fund it."Lane discovered the importance of p53 – since dubbed the 'tumour suppressor gene' or the 'guardian of the genome' – in 1979. It is hoped that new treatments based on p53 will be more effective and less toxic than traditional therapies such as chemotherapy.

Although cancer deaths are falling in Scotland, the disease remains the nation's biggest killer, claiming 15,000 lives in 2006.Dr Karen Vousden, director of the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, said: "There are very few types of cancer that would not be helped by this. It could benefit up to 50% of all cancer cases."Potentially this could have an enormous impact. There are still hurdles to overcome.

But you can't help but be excited by this."Andrea Stiglianou, coordinator of the Leukaemia Society, said: "Anything that leads towards better treatments and enables people to lead better quality lives is really gladly welcomed. Sadly, we are still losing patients, so this is welcomed 100%."Lane has returned to Dundee after three years at Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology.He will now spend most of his time at his research base in Dundee University as well as taking a strategic role with Cancer Research UK, steering its research and investment.

New engravings and sculptures uncovered in Raidan Temple

2008-04-08T18:23:00.000+08:00

New engravings, sculptures and drawings have been found recently in the Raidan Temple archaeological site in Dhafar. The temple was discovered last year, and the new findings were uncovered by a German mission headed by Professor Paul Yule, an archaeology expert from Heidelberg University.

The joint mission undertaking the excavation at Dhafar consists of both German and Yemeni experts. The new findings consist of drawings on horizontal strips. On the bottom, there is a row of drawings of bulls’ heads. Above this strip there is an embroidery-like inscription of leaves and grapes, and on the top level there is a strip of animal drawings such as deer, gazelles, tigers and some mythical winged animals engraved on stones that constitute one side of the temple’s wall.

On the wall of the other side of the temple there is a block of stone 135 centimeters tall on which a full picture of a king with a crown on his head and a sword at his side, holding an engraved scepter and a bunch of plants in his hand. The findings are estimated to be dated between 100 and 300 AD, for the facial engraving is similar to those found in south-west Iran dating from this period, and the temple was built around the same time. “Though there is a word engraved in an ancient language above the king’s picture, pronounced ‘wedan’, it is not the name of the king.

It may have a religious meaning which specialists and future findings may shed light on this,” said Fuad al-Qashm, general manager of the Ibb bureau of archaeology and antiquities museums. Al-Qashm believes that the new discoveries are rare and that they have great importance, for they reveal an important period of Yemen’s history and civilization. Officials think that the findings are only a glimpse of what lies beneath the earth, as this region was the headquarters and capital of the Himyarite Kingdom established by King Thi Raidan in 115 BCE which lasted for 650 years.

The Himyarite Kingdom was the largest and most powerful ancient Yemeni state in southern Arabia between 300 and 525 BCE, because it expanded its power to the north and annexed the Saba state in Marib.

This created the first united kingdom in history 2000 years ago; called ‘Saba-Tho-Raidan’, headed by King Sharhabil Bin Ya’for Bin Abdo Karb Asa’d Asa’d al-Kamil, which controlled much of the east-west perfume and incense trade. The Ibb governorate witnessed the rise and fall of almost all Yemeni civilizations. Most state and kingdom capitals were there, with many remains surviving the wear of time.

New probe data sheds light on dark matter

2008-03-17T20:12:00.001+08:00

By Josephine Wolff

Data transmissions by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) provide multiple insights into the formation of the universe and its infancy, said several University researchers who were involved in designing and launching the satellite. The probe’s mission is led by a partnership between NASA and the University, in collaboration with scientists at several other institutions.
The data allowed researchers to calculate a more precise estimate of the age of the universe, now thought to be 13.7 billion years old, with only a 120 million year margin of error, said physics professor Lyman Page, one of the team’s lead researchers. Page added that the satellite has also helped scientists determine what actual processes were going on when the universe was less than a billionth of a billionth of a second old.
“We can start to probe those earliest times with a new degree of confidence,” he said.
The pictures transmitted by the probe have also helped the researchers make important discoveries about the formation of the first stars.
“Currently the WMAP data is pretty much the only way to gain information as to when the universe was ionized by the first generation of stars,” said Eiichiro Komatsu, an astronomy professor at the University of Texas-Austin who worked on the WMAP project from 2001 to 2003, when he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton.
The data showed that the first stars must have formed during the first 500 million years after the Big Bang, astrophysics professor David Spergel ’82 said.
This discovery will have important implications for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2013 by NASA, Komatsu said.
“One of [the Webb Telescope’s] prime science goals is to see the sources of ... the first generation of stars directly,” Komatsu said. “It is important to know when a significant fraction of these sources were around, so that we know where to look using this telescope.”
Discovering dark matter
The WMAP transmissions also provide the first evidence for the existence of the mysterious dark matter astrophysicists have long suspected composes much of the universe.
“[WMAP data] implies that atoms make up only 5% of the universe,” Spergel said in an e-mail. “The next roughly 20% is made up of ‘dark matter,’ most likely a new class of subatomic particles that interact[s] only extremely weakly with normal matter. The remaining 75% is made up of ‘dark energy’ associated with empty space.”
Many scientists have suspected that dark matter exists, specifically particles called neutrinos, but its existence was never before confirmed by evidence, said Charles Bennett, WMAP’s principal investigator and a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins.
“Dark matter has never been detected directly in the laboratory; we’ve only inferred its existence from astronomical observations,” said Gary Hinshaw, an astrophysicist with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Neutrinos have been detected, but not this kind. These are produced shortly after the Big Bang.”
The cosmic neutrino background that the probe shows is only a small fraction of the total dark matter in the universe, Hinshaw added.
“[The neutrino background] has always been assumed to be there ... [The] challenge was to actually see it in the data,” Komatsu said. “Particle physicists are detecting neutrinos on the ground, but those neutrinos are from the atmosphere, sun, or nuclear reactors. The energy of the cosmic neutrino background is at least a million times smaller than their neutrinos, which means that it is extremely difficult to detect them ... with the current technology.” Though the WMAP has helped clarify questions about dark matter, dark energy remains an unknown and unexpected quantity that the WMAP may help explain in the future, Bennett said.

DISCOVERIES: NEW SCIENCE FINDINGS

2007-11-04T13:39:00.000+08:00

A toast to your lungs

Drinking is good for you, and drinking is bad for you. Today, it's good. Though excess drinking was detrimental, people who drank some alcohol daily, but fewer than two drinks, had a 20 percent reduction in risk of lung disease, including asthma and emphysema, according to a study at Permanente Hospital in Oakland. This included smokers.

Vegetables for the skin

Scientists have discovered that a derivative of broccoli-sprout extract protects the skin against the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. The compound is called sulforaphane, according to the researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The highest doses of UV-induced redness and inflammation were reduced by an average of 37 percent. The practical application needs more work.

Body resists time change

Calling it one of the "human arrogances," a researcher at the University of Munich has found that the body never really accepts the change to Daylight Saving Time, instead abiding by its more natural inclination to be guided by the sun. The good news is that people adjusted easily to the change back to standard time. Next weekend, enjoy.

Lung cancer survival rate

Despite considerable expense, overall survival from lung cancer increased only a month between 1983 and 1997, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The five-year survival rate remains the same as it was in the late 1970s, about 16 percent. The team found that with metastic lung cancer, each year of life after diagnosis cost more than $1 million for treatment.

Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence

2007-10-12T15:31:00.000+08:00

Science Daily — The University of California, Berkeley and the SETI Institute have announced that the first 42 radio dishes of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) have been activated and collecting scientific data from the far reaches of the universe. This is the first phase of a planned 350 radio dishes that will advance the capabilities of radio astronomy research. Paul G. Allen, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist whose foundation donated seed money that started the project in 2001, joined representatives of UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute to launch the array.

The Allen Telescope Array. (Credit: Image courtesy of SETI Institute)

“This is a great day for the science of radio astronomy and the study of the cosmos,” said Leo Blitz, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and director of the university’s Radio Astronomy Laboratory, which is building the ATA with the SETI Institute. “Thanks to a unique intersection between the best in science, advanced, innovative technology and bold philanthropy, many secrets of the universe are a little closer to being revealed.”

"This project represents a potential breakthrough in building large arrays of radio telescopes that are extremely cost effective,” said Paul G. Allen, primary funder of the ATA. “As now deployed and with plenty of room for growth in the future, the telescope can fulfill a multitude of uses, including broad radio sky surveys and the search for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. I’m pleased to be able to contribute to such an important advancement and help build on the work this new telescope will do in the future. My hat is off to the team that worked so hard these last seven years to accomplish this significant milestone.”

Every object in space emits radio waves that can be collected and studied. From observation of these signals, radio astronomers can create a picture of astronomical bodies and events at great distances, revealing detail not discernable by telescopes operating at other wavelengths. The ATA will acquire data in a new way, imaging a large piece of the sky at once. What sets the ATA apart from earlier radio telescopes is its ability to collect and, analyze more information about celestial objects, and do this simultaneously for several projects. In addition, observational surveys can be made with greater speed than any previous or existing radio device.

“For SETI, the ATA’s technical capabilities exponentially increase our ability to search for intelligent signals, and may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the universe,” said astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “It is the first major telescope in the world built specifically for undertaking a search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”

The ATA opens the doors to a new era of scientific progress. The telescope’s potential discoveries include a better understanding of exploding stars (supernovas), black holes, and new, exotic astronomical objects that are predicted but not yet observed. It will also provide expanded search capabilities to determine if intelligent civilizations have evolved around other stars. The ATA is the first panchromatic, wide-angle, snapshot, radio camera ever built. It is the most effective tool to create radio images of a vast area of the sky ever placed in the hands of researchers.

Located in an arid valley near the town of Hat Creek, just north of Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California, the new array is already collecting important data. The first test images, released today from data gathered by the 42 ATA telescopes, include a radio map of the nearby Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33).

Beyond its speed and ability to both garner and analyze data, the ATA is also the first centimeter wavelength radio telescope with the ability to multi-task. While making innovative observations for radio astronomy, it can simultaneously interrogate solar-type stars for artificially produced signals that would reveal the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

This new capability increases many-fold the time astronomers can devote to large-scale surveys of the stars, as well as expanding the radio frequency band over which they can search. For SETI, in particular, this means that over the next two-dozen-years, the ATA will get a thousand times more data than has been accumulated in the past 45 years.

The ATA uses mass-produced, 20-foot diameter radio dishes and commercial telecommunications technologies combined with an innovative receiver design, and state-of-the-art digital signal processing technology. Working together, these small dishes create a telescope with a wide field of view ideally suited to rapidly surveying the sky. The layout of the 42 dishes was created by a computer model and is optimized to provide high quality radio imagery of the sky. The ATA can also filter out noise from man-made interference that in many radio telescopes would render much of the data unusable. The array can be easily upgraded as new advances in computer or telecommunications technology become available.

The total cost of the project to date, including research, development and construction costs for the array and the necessary radio astronomy and SETI signal detectors, is $50 million. The first phase of this project was funded through generous grants from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation totaling $25 million. UC Berkeley, the SETI Institute, the National Science Foundation, Xilinx, Nathan Myhrvold, Greg Papadopoulos, and other corporations and individual donors contributed additional funding. Both UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute are engaging in additional fundraising efforts to complete the full 350-dish array.

The full 350-dish array, when completed in approximately three years, will have unprecedented research capabilities. Capitalizing on constant advancements in computer technology, the ATA will be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of traditional instruments. The ATA team is prepared to install more dishes as additional funding is secured.

The Scientists Discovered Skull of New Amazing Dinosaur

2007-10-07T19:05:00.000+08:00

The Scientists Discovered Skull of New Amazing Dinosaur

by Alexander Toldt

13:23, October 4th 2007

A group of scientists have unveiled on Wednesday the skull of a new amazing species of duckbill dinosaur. The skull, or in fact the dinosaur that possessed it, has really amazed the scientists, who have already called it “one of the most magnificent” ever! The new discovery is very important because it provides quite important clues about the evolution of the huge long gone plant-eaters.

The skull has been found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and that is why the new species of dinosaur has been called the Gryposaurus monumentensis. The scientists have introduced it to the whole world on Wednesday during a press conference at Grand Staircase-Escalante, as well as through the pages of the Linnean Society’s “Zoological Journal”. The Gryposaurus monumentensis appears to have been a rugged and thick-boned huge dinosaur, having also no less than 800 teeth! Terry Gates, a paleontologist with the Utah Museum of Natural History from the University of Utah, has simply said that the Gryposaurus monumentensis “was a monster”.

Monster or not, however, the new found amazing dinosaur is only one of the three dinosaur species that have been discovered in Utah and are now earning special renown. A therizinosaur, for example, which was a sickle-clawed dinosaur, has been discovered in the badlands near Big Water, Kane County, and now it is the subject of an important new exhibit from the Museum of Northern Arizona.

The new discoveries are very important for the scientists because they bring new information about the extinct huge animals that lived on Earth long time ago.

The Genetic Code Of Parasitic Worm That Causes Elephantiasis Revealed

2007-09-25T17:45:00.000+08:00

Science Daily — More than 150 million people worldwide are infected with filarial parasites -- long, thread-like worms that can live for years inside the human body and cause severe, debilitating diseases such as elephantiasis.

Mosquitoes spread the larvae of these parasitic nematodes from human to human, placing at risk more than a billion people who live in places in Africa, Asia and Latin America where filarial parasites thrive.

Now, a team of researchers funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has revealed the genetic secrets of one of these parasites.

In the September 21, 2007 issue of Science, the researchers report solving the complete genome of Brugia malayi, one of the worms that causes the often debilitating disease elephantiasis.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 40 million people around the world are seriously incapacitated and disfigured by elephantiasis. The WHO also estimates that about half a million people around the world have lost their vision due to onchocerciasis, or river blindness, which is caused by another type of filarial parasite.

"Filarial diseases are treatable, but the current treatments were discovered decades ago," says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "There is an urgent need for new discoveries in this area because of the limitations of the current drugs, including toxicities and the development of resistance." The B. malayi genome reveals dozens of potential new targets for drugs or vaccines and should provide new opportunities for understanding, treating and preventing elephantiasis and similar diseases.

"Having a complete genetic blueprint gives us a better understanding of what genes are important for different processes so you can target them more specifically," says Elodie Ghedin, Ph.D., who led the sequencing project while at the Institute for Genomic Research, now part of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a not-for-profit research organization based in Rockville, Maryland. Dr. Ghedin is now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
When a mosquito bites someone infected with B. malayi, it ingests microscopic worms that develop into infectious larvae. These larvae are then deposited onto the skin of the next person bitten. Once the parasites penetrate the skin, they wend their way to the body's lymphatic system--a network of fine vessels and organs that drains fluid from the body's tissues and plays a key role in coordinating the immune response by concentrating immune cells in the lymph nodes.

Male and female worms cluster, intertwining in the draining vessels just below the lymph nodes, and mate. A fertile female may produce 1,000 or more larvae a day and grow to be three or four inches long.

This filarial union can cause severe disease. Because they most often position themselves in front of vessels draining liquid from the lymph nodes, the worms can effectively obstruct the drainage. This causes the surrounding tissues to fill with fluid and swell to elephantine proportions.

As the disease progresses, tissues in the swelling arms, legs or scrotum can die or become infected, turning black and oozing puss. To make matters worse, the fluid accumulation can lead to permanent disfigurement over time as the swollen limbs become solid masses with connective tissue, blood vessels and nerve endings. Reducing the bulbous tissue may require major surgery.

Female B. malayi worms can live up to eight years in the human body. This longevity complicates elephantiasis treatment because existing drugs for treating the disease target the larvae only and do not completely kill the adult worms. The drugs often must be taken for years, and the worms can cause massive immune reactions when they die, releasing foreign molecules in the body.

The worm's longevity is curious because it lives for years in the shadow of the lymph node, where immune cells meant to clear the body of infections congregate. One way the worm survives is by releasing chemicals that dampen the human immune response. B. malayi is so good at this that most people who are infected have no symptoms: The worms can live in their bodies for years without their even knowing it.

Understanding how this particular parasite has adapted to humans may yield medical benefits far beyond those places where elephantiasis is common, according to collaborator Alan L. Scott, Ph.D., of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Worms can be viewed as foreign tissue transplanted into the human body. But unlike baboon hearts or pig kidneys, which the immune system quickly rejects, worms can survive for years in the body.

Discovering how they do so may someday benefit transplant surgery, according to Dr. Scott.
Along with NIAID, J. Craig Venter Institute, and Johns Hopkins, collaborators on the project included researchers from the University of Edinburgh; New England Biolabs; the University of California, Davis Genome Center; Smith College; Imperial College, London; the University of Dundee; Divergence, Inc; Washington University; Lyon College; The Australian National University; the University of Toledo; the New York Blood Center; the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto; the University of Göttingen; and the University of Alabama.

SCIENCE: Geneticists Crack the Species Code

2007-09-18T18:49:00.000+08:00

BROOKLIN, Canada, Sep 14 (IPS) - Scientists are enthusiastic about a new DNA barcoding technology that will help keep illegal fish and timber out of global markets, slow the spread of invasive pests, and improve food safety and disease prevention and offer better environmental monitoring.

U.S. government regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are beginning to utilise the three-year-old technology. "It's now a proven technology, everyone wants to use it," said David Schindel, executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, comprised of 160 scientific and regulatory organisations from 50 countries and based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "It's also an incredibly important technology for developing countries to research and protect their biodversity," Schindel told IPS.

DNA barcoding is a fast, low-cost tool to identify plant and animal species developed in 2003 by Paul Herbert of the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario at Canada's University of Guelph. DNA is found in all living things, and is a complex molecule that contains all the genetic instructions for an organism to develop. Not surprisingly, the DNA of a human is different and more complex than that of a worm -- although mouse DNA is similar to human DNA. The genetic differences within the millions of pieces that make up DNA among animal species were very hard to find. Herbert's breakthrough was the discovery of a portion of a gene that is unique to each animal species -- its "DNA barcode".

This week, 350 DNA experts from 46 nations are meeting in Taipei with health officials, government agencies and others to get a better understanding of how to use this new technology to improve consumer protection and food safety, prevent disease, monitor changes in the environment, and more. Barcoding the world's several thousand species of mosquitoes is expected to become a priority since they are responsible for 500 million human malarial infections and a million deaths each year.

Mosquitoes also transmit many other devastating diseases, like West Nile virus and dengue, as well as parasites. "Key to disease management is vector control," said scientist Yvonne-Marie Linton of London's Natural History Museum, and leader of the Mosquito Barcoding Initiative (MBI). Until now, control efforts have been consistently undermined by species misidentification.

DNA barcoding can tremendously assist the world's expert mosquito taxonomists struggling to keep up with new species discoveries, she added. Researchers elsewhere worldwide are focused on barcoding other biting insects -- blood-sucking pests to birds, people and other mammals alike -- causing diseases, stress and allergic reactions. Another priority is fungi. Ecologically important for life on Earth, some 90-99 percent of fungi remain undocumented. Identifying both disease-producing and medically-useful fungi is important.

Previous meetings in Africa have identified other priorities such as barcoding insect pests that affect crops, fish species and insect pollinators, said Schindel. Networks are being established so that a biologist in Cameroon can take a sample, extract the DNA and send it to a lab there or elsewhere in Africa, where the sample's genes can be sequenced. That gene sequence is then compared with others in Genbank, a massive online database containing nearly 300,000 gene sequences. "If there is no match, then it might be a previously unidentified species, but the sequence will reveal related species," Schindel explained.

There is no cost to access these databanks, and the Consortium is committed to keeping the databases free and open to all, he said. Barcoding is also playing an important role in protecting biodiversity, the complex web of plants and animals that keeps ecosystems healthy. It's impossible to protect countries' biodiversity without knowing what's there, Schindel noted. Moorea, an island in French Polynesia, has become a laboratory for a French-U.S. collaboration that is building a barcode library for all terrestrial and marine species.

In South America, scientists and regulators want to use the technology to identify fish species to better monitor fish stocks and quotas and prevent sales of threatened or endangered species. Equally urgent for countries like Brazil is the ability to quickly identify the species of hardwood tree that a piece of lumber is made from. "When a tree has been turned into a pile of lumber it's very hard to know what species it was," Schindel said.

In the United States, the FDA has already barcoded 100 commercial fish species, following several fatal cases of toxic puffer fish sold as monk fish. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plans to use barcoding to better regulate commercial fish catches and do research on what fish are eating by analysing the contents of their guts. DNA barcoding also allows for fast identification of invasive species, says Scott Miller, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

"Invasive species can now come from anywhere in the world because of global transport systems," Miller told IPS. Preventing the spread of invasives is best done early before they become widely established, and the key to early action is identification. "That identification is vital in a region like the Galapagos Islands with so many endemic species easily disrupted by invasives," Miller said.

In 10 years' time or less, Galapagos port officials and inspectors will have a wireless DNA barcoder on their belts to identify species on the spot, he hopes. "Barcoding is expanding our knowledge of nature and is simultaneously providing tangible, specific and significant benefits to society," concluded Schindel.

Garlic and Cow Belching: A Global Warming Cure?

2007-09-16T22:41:00.000+08:00

Weird But Possibly True: Garlic Nixes Farm Animals’ Methane Gas

Who knew? Besides the vegan-eatin’ PETA folks that is.

Belching farm animals account for 16% of our planet’s methane, a gas even more responsible for global warming than carbon dioxide. As Popular Science reports in October, a new study has found that lacing the diets of cows with garlic can decrease their, uh, emissions, by up to 50%.

Shaun Lowe/iStock

Time to try this out on family and friends, too!

The question is … will the eventual meat be pre-infused with the fragrance and flavor of garlic?

Radiation Absorbing Mineral Found In the Arctic

2007-09-09T19:38:00.000+08:00

"A mineral has recently been found that exhibits the astounding property of being able to remove radiation from water-based solutions. 'After coming into contact with the mineral, radioactive water becomes completely safe. Had this mineral been available to physicists after the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island disasters, the consequences might have been very different, as both accidents resulted in contamination from radioactive water.' Also, the article notes that although only grams of the material have been found, tons of it are needed; they are confident they could artificially reproduce it."

Arctic’s microbes being studied for new discoveries

2007-09-03T12:24:00.000+08:00

Y. Mallikarjun

— Photo: Special Arrangement

Microbes from the Arctic could serve as workhorses of biotechnology to catalyse reactions at low temperature.

HYDERABAD: After finding 25 bacterial species in the Antarctica, a scientist here has begun studying the microbial diversity in the Arctic region for discovering new genes, bio-molecules and enzymes with potential applications for biotechnology, pharmaceutical and detergent industries.

S. Shivaji, director-grade scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), who collected soil, water and sediment samples from the numerous glaciers and the Arctic ocean to prospect the microbial diversity, told The Hindu here on Wednesday that the microbes from the Arctic could serve as workhorses of biotechnology to catalyse reactions at low temperature. He was part of the five-member First Indian Scientific Expedition to Arctic that returned recently after a trip to the North Pole.

He would look into whether the microbes living in the pristine glaciers of the Arctic are similar to those on the icy continent of Antarctica or unique to their environment. He would also study how they thrive in sub-freezing temperatures when organisms living in tropical conditions cannot survive below 8 degrees C.

Genes identified

Many of the of the discovered species in the Antartica were named in honour of that continent, India and the two Indian permanent stations, Dakshin Gangotri and Maitri located there. Using these organisms, he identified genes required for survival of micro-organisms at sub-zero temperatures and enzymes of biotechnological potential.

Describing the expedition’s experience, he said: “The pristine cold environment embraced us with its purity, cleanliness, glaciers and the colourful ocean. It was literally a top-of-the-world feeling. I was so excited that I wanted to work from the very day of arrival and then realised that during this period, the Arctic was one long day without any night since the sun does not set in the Arctic between May and August. I could sample the numerous glaciers dotting the Ny-Alesund, where we set up our camp”

Explaining the uniqueness of sampling the glaciers in North Pole, he said there was no anthropogenic influence there, unlike anywhere else in the world. Another striking feature of the Arctic, unlike Antarctica, was that 6-7 per cent of the land area was covered with vegetation, including a number of beautiful flowers.

These life forms could serve as excellent model systems to unravel the biological basis of adaptation to low temperature and reveal the various strategies adapted by them to survive and reproduce.

Scientists' plea to use new hybrid embryos

2007-08-28T10:00:00.000+08:00

· Animal-human link to aid research
· Pro-life groups voice opposition

Jo Revill, Whitehall editor
The Observer
Sunday August 26 2007

Cloned embryo

Britain's leading scientists have made a final plea for the right to create the first animal-human embryos for medical research using eggs taken from dead cows.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority will announce its decision next week on whether to give permission to UK laboratories to create the hybrid embryos to advance the understanding of genetic diseases.

The issue is controversial because it involves scientists taking an animal egg, removing its genetic material and putting DNA from a human cell into it. This can be used to create lines of stem cells which can then be made part of studies into incurable genetic diseases such as motor neurone disease.

However, it has caused controversy as some campaigners and religious groups argue that it is unethical to mix human and animal cells in this way.

Dr Stephen Minger has applied for a licence to do work using hybrids, in order to understand more about a range of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and motor neurone disease.

He said: 'I'm cautiously optimistic that the authority will allow us a licence. I hope we have made the case that by doing this research, we can study a number of genetic diseases far more clearly. The cell discoveries we make could then be used to develop therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer's which affect so many people, but for which we now have almost no therapy to offer.'

Minger, senior lecturer in stem cell biology at King's College London, believes it makes far more sense to use a hybrid than taking a human embryo, created using a human egg and sperm, because scientists could use eggs taken from ovaries of thousands of cows that are slaughtered every day.

To do this work they would need a large number of embryos to make stem cells, far more than could be achieved by asking women to donate their eggs for research. Stem cells are immature cells that can be engineered to develop into many different kinds of tissue, which is important for medical research.

'When I start talking to people about it, sometime there is a "yuck factor" and they think it's weird,' said Minger. 'But once you've explained how it works, and why we are doing it, they do see the point of it, and actually think it's a good idea.

'To me, it seems just very practical to use the cows' eggs, as a by-product of a process [the animals' slaughter] that is already happening.' Another scientist, Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, head of genetics at the National Institute of Medical Research in London, said: 'I can see absolutely no reason why these sorts of experiments shouldn't proceed. I think the scientists wishing to carry them out have made a very clear case for them.'

The government recently shifted its position on animal-human hybrid embryos: having been initially against the concept, it is now proposing to allow partial hybrids, where a complete set of human genes is inserted into an animal's egg cell, for research purposes only, through a new Human Tissue and Embryo Bill aimed at overhauling the laws surrounding fertility treatment.

The move has prompted strong protests from some religious and anti-abortion groups that oppose any such research. Anti-embryo campaigners had said earlier this year it was appalling that the government had, in their view, bowed to pressure from 'a random collection of self-interested scientists'.

The Catholic Church has made clear its opposition. Bishops told the parliamentary committee scrutinising a draft bill to allow the research to go ahead, that they opposed the creation of any embryo solely for research - they believe that all life begins at conception. They said they were also anxious to limit the destruction of such life once it had been brought into existence.

In a submission to the committee, they said: 'At the very least, embryos with a preponderance of human genes should be assumed to be embryonic human beings, and be treated accordingly.'

Unique New Species of Light-Harvesting Bacteria

2007-07-30T13:58:00.000+08:00

Scientists have identified a new species of light harvesting bacteria in Mushroom Spring in Yellowstone National Park, pictured here. The spring gets its unique color from thick microbial mats living on the surface--a cross section of the mat is shown in the inset.
Credit: David Ward, Montana State University

n the bubbling muck of Yellowstone National Park, scientists have discovered a new species of bacteria that uses light for energy. Known as Candidatus Chloracidobacterium thermophilium, the new species is different than other types of photosynthetic bacteria, such as cyanobacteria (also called blue-green algae): it carries an antenna loaded with the light-harvesting molecule chlorophyll, which allows it to compete with other species living in the hot springs' brightly colored microbial mats. The findings are published today in the journal Science.

Scientists discovered the bacterium using metagenomics, a variation on genomics that entails sequencing the genomes of entire microbial communities in order to identify new species. Metagenomics provides microbiologists with a new way to identify novel bacterial species, the vast majority of which can't be grown in the lab. (See "Our Microbial Menagerie" and "Why Termite Guts Could Bring Better Biofuels.")

The steaming pools of Yellowstone, which can reach higher than 150 ºF, were also the site of one of the most important microbial discoveries of molecular biology: Thermus aquaticus, a heat-loving bacterium that gave scientists an enzyme crucial for efficiently replicating DNA. Researchers hope that the recent discovery will shed light on how bacteria efficiently harvest light, perhaps inspiring new ways to make energy.

UH astronomer is recognized for discovery about the universe

2007-07-29T13:55:00.000+08:00

By Helen Altonn / haltonn@starbulletin.com

A University of Hawaii astronomer won a share of a prestigious international science award yesterday for his role in the astonishing discovery that the universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate.

Astronomer John L. Tonry was part of a research team working on Mauna Kea that won the $500,000 Gruber Cosmology Prize, awarded annually for discoveries that alter our perception and comprehension of the universe.

He couldn't be reached immediately for comment, but UH astronomer Gareth Wynn-Williams said the idea that expansion of the universe is accelerating is "one of the biggest discoveries in science in the last few years. A very important part of the evidence comes from the work this prize is awarded for."

Tonry discovered supernovae explosions in distant galaxies using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in 1997.

He said in an Institute for Astronomy news release that the CFHT data coupled with data from the Keck Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope "were the key to identifying the accelerating universe."

Wynn-Williams said the $500,000 will be split between two groups that were working independently using different telescopes and came up with the same answer.

He said the acceleration of the universe's expansion implies "a new constituent of the universe which we call dark energy. We have no real idea of what it is at all. But it seems to resemble matter in the way that it follows the laws of gravity."

Brian Schmidt of Australian National University led one team; Saul Perlmutter of the University of California-Berkeley headed the other one.

The big surprise, Wynn-Williams said, is the astronomers expected to find the universe slowing down as it expands because of gravitational forces between galaxies.

Their finding that the expansion actually is accelerating instead was accepted quickly because it fits into Einstein's general theory of relativity, he said. "It was a very successful theory. It contained an odd little term that people kind of ignored. Even Einstein sort of ignored it. ... So this is perhaps why this was accepted. It hasn't required us to throw out a major theory. We just looked at it more carefully."

The Gruber Foundation in a news release said, "An accelerating universe was a crazy result that was hard to accept. Yet, two teams, racing neck and neck, simultaneously, came to the same conclusion. Their discovery led to the idea of an expansion force, dubbed dark energy. And it suggests that the fate of the universe is to just keep expanding faster and faster."

Top Ten Discoveries of the Mars Rovers

2007-07-28T13:52:00.000+08:00

"Space.com brings us the top ten discoveries of the Martian rovers that landed there in 2004. They were expected to last three months but, as Slashdot has covered time and time again, they have lasted over three years. From minor discoveries about the formation of Mars to images of atmospheric phenomena, to final and definitive proof of a Mars with water, these two robots have definitely reserved themselves a place in the history books. Pending a dust storm, they may not even be done with their mission yet."

[+] mars, nasa, science, space, rovers (tagging beta)

What Came Before Alexander The Great? A Multidisciplinary Approach

2007-07-27T13:48:00.000+08:00

Science Daily — Our modern western civilization traces its roots to the Mediterranean region, and determining exactly when and where civilizations took hold remains an ongoing quest.

For example, the armies of Alexander the Great swept across the region, leading to the establishment of the city of Alexandria on the shores of the Mediterranean in BC 332. But what came before Alexander?

Was there a settlement that preceded Alexandria, and if so, what can we learn about the people who lived and died there?

These are some of the questions addressed by Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and his co-workers in a paper in the August GSA Today.

By applying a multidisciplinary approach, involving archeology, sedimentology and geochemistry, to the study of sediment cores collected from Alexandria's Eastern Harbor, Stanley and his colleagues have demonstrated that a settlement occupied the region for at least seven centuries prior to the arrival of Alexander.

Ceramic shards, high lead levels, and the use of building stones imported from other regions all attest to a once flourishing urban center as far back as BC 1000. These discoveries indicate that much is still to be learned about the early development of western civilization, and an effective means of achieving this is by integrating geologic and archaeological methodologies.

Study Shows Dinosaurs Lived Alongside Their Precursors

2007-07-26T13:44:00.000+08:00

Graduate Students’ Findings From Dig in New Mexico Contradict Widely Held Theory
BY Erin Olivella-Wright
Contributing Writer
Monday, July 23, 2007

After years of excavating fossils in the arroyos of New Mexico, researchers published a report Friday in the journal Science explaining that dinosaurs and their precursors lived contemporaneously, despite what scholars had previously thought.

In the summer of 2005, lead excavators Randall Irmis and Sterling Nesbitt, graduate students at UC Berkeley and Columbia University, respectively, launched the project after visiting the site at Hayden Quarry. The quarry became a hotspot for archeological activity after a group of hikers discovered some fossils there in 2002.

The excavators returned in the summer of 2006 with funding from the National Geographic Society, the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Fund and the Jurassic Foundation and came away with new discoveries about dinosaurs in the Late Triassic Period.

Before the graduate students’ discoveries, academics thought that the precursors to dinosaurs had died out before the reign of the dinosaurs, but the report says that new evidence proves this to be false.

Using uranium and lead dating from nearby sites, the researchers were able to conclude that dinosaurs were living in New Mexico alongside the basal dinosauromorphs, the precursors to the dinosaurs, for between 15 million and 20 million years.

As there are no radioactive materials in the Hayden Quarry, the authors are giving themselves a 5 million year margin of error, Irmis said.

Irmis said he is excited by the findings, as they are the first of their kind.

“This has never been found anywhere else in the world,” he said.

He stressed that while the team never found a full skeleton, there were enough fossils to deduce the differences between the dinosaurs and the basal dinosauromorphs.

“Overall, they look a lot like dinosaurs, but there are a few anatomical features that are found in the hip and the leg that are found in the dinosaurs but not the dinosaur precursors,” he said.

Nesbitt, a UC Berkeley alumnus, also said he is impressed with the results, especially given the location of the fossils.

“It’s pretty incredible because we found something that everyone didn’t expect in North America. (Now) North America is just as important for dinosaur origins as South America,” he said.

Irmis said the results of the study show that dinosaurs are prime examples of adaptive radiation and added that perhaps the most significant result of the findings is further support for the theory of evolution.

“I hope that the findings encourage other people to accept evolution as a scientific process,” he said.

Nesbitt said overall that he is pleased to have generated findings that could lead to other discoveries .

“To start the sequence of discovery is pretty neat,” he said. “(We are) going from one leg bone to revising what we know about early dinosaur evolution.”

Ascent of dinosaurs more gradual than once thought

2007-07-25T13:40:00.000+08:00

View Larger Image

This illustration shows four extinct animals -- two dinosaurs and two more primitive dinosaur relatives -- found at a site in northern New Mexico. Shown are the dinosaur precursors Dromomeron romeri (lower left) and a Silesaurus-like animal (bottom center), and the dinosaurs Chindesaurus bryansmalli (top center, with prey in its mouth) and a coelophysoid theropod (upper right). REUTERS/Science/Artwork by Donna Braginetz/Handout

More pictures: <> | Next >

Will Dunham, Reuters

Published: Thursday, July 19, 2007

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ascent of the dinosaurs to the throne of the animal kingdom may have been more gradual than previously believed, scientists said on Thursday.

New fossil discoveries dating from about 215 million years ago showed some of the earliest dinosaurs lived for millions of years side by side with related animals long seen as their ancestors and precursors, scientists said on Thursday.

Many scientists had thought these reptiles -- very much like dinosaurs, but more primitive -- died out around the time of the appearance of the first true dinosaurs, which were dog-sized beasts not giants, roughly 230 million years ago.

"When dinosaurs first evolved, they were not very common and they were pretty small," said Randall Irmis of the University of California-Berkeley, who worked on the study.

"So they're not the dominant predators or creatures on land at all during most of the Triassic. And it's only really until the Jurassic when they really explode in diversity and reach these huge sizes that we're so familiar with," Irmis added.

Scientists previously hypothesized that the first dinosaurs quickly out-competed their more primitive cousins, known as "basal dinosauromorphs," condemning them to extinction. But the new findings indicate that any such competition was prolonged.

The newly found fossils from New Mexico dating from the Triassic period showed that the first dinosaurs co-existed with these animals -- "dinosaur wannabes," as one scientist called them -- for perhaps 15 to 20 million years.

"For the first time, we're finding the earliest dinosaurs and their closest relatives together," paleontologist Kevin Padian of the University of California-Berkeley, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.

"That tells us that the transition to the beginning of the age of dinosaurs was not a very-rapid affair and that, therefore, it wasn't instant competitive superiority."

Irmis said these dinosaur precursors are not thought to have been direct evolutionary ancestors of the dinosaurs but rather having shared a close common ancestor.

NEWLY DISCOVERED BEASTS

The scientists discovered new dinosaur precursors including one 3 to 5 feet long called Dromomeron and another unnamed one about three times larger that walked on four legs and ate plants with a beaked snout.

Relatively small bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs also were found, including Chindesaurus, which measured about 6 feet (2 meters) long, as well as remains of an apparent close relative of the well-known Triassic dinosaur carnivore Coelophysis.

The fossils were found at the Hayden Quarry at Ghost Ranch, a site that over the decades has yielded many exquisite fossils. For example, hundreds of Coelophysis fossils were found in the 1940s at Ghost Ranch, making it among the best documented of all dinosaurs.

Mythical satyr may be preserved in salt

2007-07-24T13:39:00.000+08:00

Unicorns, giants and fairies — the UFOs of antiquity — have yet to turn up in any archaeologist's shovel.

Aside from their frequent appearances on ancient frescoes, statuary and artwork, such fanciful creatures of mythology don't have a clear origin, although some have linked the mermaid to lonely sailors who glimpsed dugongs (also known as sea cows) in the distance and made a giant leap.

But a recent discovery in an Iranian salt mine, one scholar suggests, may shed light on the origins of a famous satyr of antiquity, one so well known that it merited a visit from the emperor himself. The satyr is a goat-man in Greek legend who dances and frolics, playing pipes and chasing nymphs all day, living in a woodsy version of the Playboy Mansion.

In June, a man's body, naturally mummified within an ancient salt mine, was found outside the Iranian city of Zanjan. Six such discoveries have been made since 1993, according to the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies foundation based in London. Earlier salt man finds go back as far as 540 B.C., around the time of the ancient Achaemenid dynasty.

Archaeologists treasure natural mummy discoveries — such as "Otzi," the ice-entombed man preserved in an Alpine glacier and uncovered in 1991 — because preservation of soft tissues, even beards in the case of the salt men, allows for DNA analysis and other tools of forensic science.

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Stanford University's Adrienne Mayor, a folklorist, specializes in analyzing how fossil discoveries in prehistory may have contributed to legends such as the Titans of Greek mythology (botched reconstructions of mammoth bones) or mystic water serpents in Native American legends (fossilized fish-tailed crocodiles preserved in desert rock deposits).

As far back as the era of the great Roman emperor Constantine, who reigned from 312 to 337, cities had their own special attractions, Mayor explains. The early Christian writer St. Jerome (the patron saint of librarians in the Roman Catholic Church, who died in the year 420) recounted that Constantine made a special trip from Constantinople (Istanbul today) to Antioch, once a great city of his empire, to view an exhibit of a "satyr" that had been extremely well-preserved in salt.

In an earlier book, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times, Mayor suggested that the "satyr" was likely a fake, the patched-together bodies of a man and goat. But now she thinks the recently discovered salt man might provide another explanation. "Obviously, satyrs are mythic creatures," Mayor says. But the head of the man preserved in salt since about 540-300 B.C. "bears a striking resemblance to ancient Greek and Roman depictions of satyrs," she says, which are shown to have similar hair and beard, a snub nose and protruding jaw.

"I think it's very likely that an ancient discovery of a similarly preserved 'salt man' in northwestern Iran is the basis for St. Jerome's account of the 'satyr' preserved in salt and examined by the Emperor Constantine and numerous other curious visitors in Antioch," Mayor concludes.

Expert opinions are mixed. Roman historian Andrew Merrills of England's University of Leicester, says in an e-mail: "Overall, it sounds like a great big 'maybe' to me. Interesting story, fabulous idea, but I wouldn't want to build too much of an argument on it." But archaeologist Bruce Hitchner at Tufts University in Massachusetts calls the idea credible.

The 540 B.C. salt man from Iran most resembles an elderly satyr figure commonly seen in Greek art, called Silenus, says Mayor. Silenus was usually depicted with long golden hair, a beard, a bulging forehead, a snub nose and an open mouth. Mayor suspects the early images of satyrs may have sprung from such discoveries, transformed into art (with the addition of a goat's body) in stories traded by travelers of the ancient world.

"When I saw the picture of the salt man, I was just struck by how much like a satyr he looks," Mayor says. "Satyr plays were very popular in antiquity, so everyone knew what satyrs looked like. There's no reason to think people back then wouldn't have made the same connection."

New discoveries about red planet keeps professor well read

2007-07-23T15:56:00.000+08:00

Every time NASA sends a probe to Mars, Sacramento State Professor Chris Taylor has to toss out his text book.

Taylor teaches astrophysics at the university. His specialty is galaxy formation but he also teaches planetary science. With all the attention given to Mars lately, the text books he uses are outdated almost as soon as they are printed.

“The Mars missions do not directly influence my research, but they do influence what I teach because what we know about Mars changes so rapidly,” Taylor says. “I just switched text books because the one I had was published in 2000, and now it’s just about useless.”

He’ll need an even newer text book in a few years. Next month, NASA will launch a new probe that will continue the search for water, and possibly life, on the red planet. The probe, called Phoenix, will explore an area near the northern polar cap, and new discoveries can be expected, Taylor says. “The entire thrust of NASA’s missions to Mars has been figuring out whether or not there was life on Mars at one point. So each mission brings us a new piece of the puzzle,” he says.

Phoenix will dig into the icy soil to determine whether frozen water near the surface was ever liquid enough to sustain a livable environment for microbes, according to NASA. “The theory is that if there were once large oceans or lakes there may have been life in those environments. If the water retreated and went underground, life may have adapted to those conditions and gone there as well,” Taylor says.

Meanwhile, the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which were sent to Mars in 2003, continue to patrol the planet and provide new information. The rovers were expected to function for about 90 days, Taylor says, but they are still sending back information, even though they are a little beaten up by the Martian terrain, harsh climate and age. “A wheel on one of the rovers is broken, so it drags as it moves,” Taylor says. “Technicians turned the onboard camera around to look at the track and saw that the wheel had dug out a trench a few millimeters deep exposing a layer containing silica. When you see this mineral on earth that means there is water. So even when you make a mistake you discover something new on Mars.” Those discoveries and others like it are helping rewrite the book on Mars and that’s okay with Taylor. “Planetary science, at its most basic level, tells us more about the Earth and directly impacts our knowledge of things like the greenhouse effect. By studying other planets we can learn more about what could happen here on Earth,” he says.

Scientists find new links to genetic conditions, including "restless legs syndrome"

2007-07-22T15:54:00.000+08:00

Scientists have uncovered more genetic links to a number of well known diseases, as well as new connections to two health conditions that aren't as well understood.

It's those discoveries that may pack the biggest punch for patients. Among the latest batch of genetic discoveries are new genes for heart disease and new insight into genes linked to macular degeneration.

The first gene links to two common but poorly understood and often questioned conditions, a severe form of premenstrual syndrome called PMDD, and the even more common restless leg syndrome were also discovered.

The hallmark symptom of restless leg syndrome is an uncontrollable urge to move the legs, especially at night. NBC reporter Jaye Watson now knows she can blame a gene for the nighttime kick-fest."It's that feeling in my legs, the unbearable need to move them, and it starts, like that and it starts like every 20 seconds," explained Watson.

Emory University's Dr. David Rye, also a restless leg suffer, helped find the connection.A genetic link can work wonders at validating conditions like PMDD and RLS. It's an endorsement that brings peace of mind for patients,and the potential to revolutionize treatment.

Six new sulphide zones discovered at Argentex Zinc-Indium Pinguino Project, Argentina

2007-07-21T15:50:00.000+08:00

TORONTO, July 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Argentex Mining Corporation announced today that the company has successfully tested six new zones during its fourth drill program at the polymetallic Pinguino property in Santa Cruz, Argentina.

In total, 18 HQ diamond drill holes covering 1,357 meters (4,452 feet) were concluded before the onset of winter conditions in the Patagonia region. The six new zones were drilled to test near-surface gossanous vein in bedrock within newly completed trenches. Visual inspection of the core shows that all zones returned significant intersections of vein sulphides.

"These intersections confirm an increase in the number of known sulphide veins at Pinguino. In addition to Marta Centro and Yvonne we now have a further six sulphide-rich zones that remain open at depth and along strike," said Ken Hicks, President of Argentex. "We are excited about the potential for expansion of mineralization at Pinguino and we look forward to further drill testing of these new discoveries as well as other high-priority targets."

Prior to this latest drill program, drill testing of known mineralization had been limited to the Marta Centro and Yvonne veins, which represent only 10% of the extensive geophysical anomalies defined to date. Preparations for further drilling are scheduled to commence in September.

Following the completion of previous drill programs at the sulphide-rich Marta Centro and Yvonne zones, Argentex intensified exploration work at Pinguino earlier this year to include additional trenching and drilling at Yvonne Sur, Yvonne Norte, Sonia, Kasia, Savary and Luna. Surface targets were identified based on their geological signature, which combines anomalous geophysics and geochemistry, and a total of 20 individual trenches tested these six distinct and previously unexplored overburden-covered zones.

Visual inspection of the HQ diamond drill core shows that significant sulphide intersections were returned in all six of these trenched areas.

Results from previous drill programs at Marta Centro and Yvonne revealed consistent polymetallic zinc-lead-indium-silver-gold-copper mineralization, which remains open-ended along strike and to depth. A total of 23 holes drilled into Marta Centro showed a consistent high-grade base metal core surrounded by wide intervals of disseminated mineralization.

Samples have been submitted to Acme Analytical Labs for analysis and findings will be reported upon receipt and compilation of results.
About Pinguino

Argentex's Pinguino property is located in Argentina's Patagonia region, within the Deseado Massif of Santa Cruz province. Both silver-gold and base metal discoveries have been made through the completion of approximately 9,350 meters (30,675 feet) of diamond drilling to date. Mineralization remains open-ended along strike and at depth, and numerous targets remain to be tested by drilling. Previous exploration has focused on zinc-indium-lead-silver-gold-copper discoveries in the Marta Centro and Yvonne areas of the property. Recent machine trenching and shallow drilling have intersected new sulphide veins at Yvonne Sur, Yvonne Norte, Sonia, Kasia, Savary and Luna.

Pinguino is easily accessible, situated approximately 500 meters (1,640 feet) above sea level in low-relief topography. An existing system of all-weather roads provides year-round access to the property.

Quality Assurance

Exploration on the Pinguino property is being conducted under the supervision of Mr. Kenneth Hicks, P.Geo., Argentex's President and a "qualified person" as defined by Canada's National Instrument 43-101.

Samples selected for analysis are sent to Acme Analytical Laboratories' sample preparation lab in Mendoza, Argentina. From there sample pulps are sent to Santiago, Chile for fire assay gold analysis and to Vancouver, Canada for Group 1DX multi-element MS-ICP analysis. Samples with over-limit zinc, lead, silver and/or copper are reanalyzed using an ore-grade high detection limit 7AR analysis, also conducted in Vancouver. Acme Analytical Laboratories is an accredited ISO 9000:2001 full-service commercial laboratory with its head office in Vancouver. Referee analyses will be carried out by Alex Stewart (assayers) Argentina S.A. in Mendoza, Argentina. Argentex, Acme and Alex Stewart all maintain comprehensive and independent Quality Control/Quality Assurance programs. Drilling was conducted by Connors Drilling, a Canadian company with an office in Mendoza, Argentina.

DNA discovery reveals Greenland's warm past

2007-07-20T22:46:00.000+08:00

Scientists have uncovered evidence that within the past million years southern Greenland was warmer than previously thought, and even covered in lush forests, a discovery suggesting its ice sheet could be more stable than previously thought against climate change temperature rises.
An analysis of DNA found at the bottom of ice cores drilled to a depth of more than a mile (2km) in south Greenland, and dated to between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago, has shown a surprising variety of plant and insect life was present then.

There were trees such as alder, spruce, pine and members of the yew family, and invertebrates related to beetles, flies, spiders, butterflies and moths.
"We have shown for the first time that southern Greenland, which is currently hidden under more than 2km of ice, was once very different to the Greenland we see today," said Eske Willerslev, an archaeologist at the University of Copenhagen. "Back then it was inhabited by a diverse array of conifer trees and insects."

Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta and co-author of the paper, said that the silty ice found underneath the Greenland glacier created a natural freezer that preserved prehistoric DNA - the samples have provided the oldest authenticated DNA obtained to date. "These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken." The area was "significantly warmer than most people thought".

The results of the studies are published today in the journal Science.

Over geological timescales the Earth's temperature rises and falls, leading to ice ages and periods of relative warmth. Between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago it would have been about 10C in summer and -17C in winter. When temperatures later fell the area was covered in ice and this ice sheet seems surprisingly to have remained in place when temperatures rose again about 130,000 years ago. During this last interglacial period temperatures were 5C warmer than today.

"If our data is correct, then this means that the southern Greenland ice cap is more stable than previously thought," said Professor Willerslev. "This may have implications for how the ice sheets respond to global warming."

According to climate change models, a two-degree rise in global temperatures could cause a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and dangerously high sea levels by the end of the century. Recent data suggests the rate of ice loss from Greenland has tripled since 2004.

The results also show that biological molecules from the ice cores can be used to reconstruct environments - the material available is in very low concentrations but the information would be worth the effort, said Enrico Cappellini, of York university. "Given that 10% of the terrestrial surface is covered by thick ice sheets it could open up a world of new discoveries."

NASA looking in wrong places for alien life

2007-07-19T22:45:00.000+08:00

EXTRATERRESTRIAL life may well be so weird we would not immediately recognise it, space experts said yesterday.

Scientists looking for alien life should be seeking the unfamiliar as well as the familiar, they said.

NASA's current approach to "follow the water" is logical assuming alien life is comparable to that on Earth - based on water, carbon and DNA - but the "life as we know it" approach could easily miss something exotic, the US National Academy of Sciences panel advised.

"The purpose of this whole report was to be able to look for life on other planets and moons with an open mind ... and not maybe miss some other life form because we are looking for some obvious life form," said John Baross, professor of oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle, who chaired the committee.

The US space agency commissioned the report from the National Research Council.

The panel of biochemists, planetary scientists, geneticists and other experts considered all possible ways life can arise and exist.

Recent discoveries of extremophiles - organisms living in conditions of heat, cold and dark and using chemicals once thought incompatible with life - have changed ideas of where life can survive.

Prof Baross said lab experiments also showed water did not necessarily have to be the basis for life.

It might be possible for a living organism to use methane, ethane, ammonia or even more bizarre chemicals.

"We had some discussion about how weird to make this because there are so many concepts out here.

"There are so many theories about what life is and what could be a living system."

NASA and other groups are looking hard for extraterrestrial life.

Telescopes search for spectral signatures from other planets that might suggest water is on the surface.

Robots on Mars are seeking evidence of water, past or present.

"We wanted to actually think outside of that box a little bit and at least try to articulate some of the other possibilities besides water-carbon life."

They suggested NASA should return to some of the more promising places in our own solar system to look for evidence of life, such as Saturn's moons Titan and Enceladus, and even steamy Venus.

Understanding how explosions on the Sun affect the Earth

2007-07-18T22:38:00.000+08:00

By Danielle Reeves

Scientists who study violent activity on our Sun are explaining how large explosions of particles from the Sun can affect satellites, space craft and even electrical power lines on Earth, at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition this week.

The exhibit explains what happens when an immense eruption known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) happens on the Sun. CMEs are the largest explosions in the solar system and when they occur a mass of particles weighing roughly the same as Mount Everest is launched out into space. The exhibit was organised by scientists from Imperial College London, University College London, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Armagh Observatory, University of Cambridge, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and The University of Central Lancashire.

If a CME occurs in the direction of the Earth, the particles can cause significant problems to the electrical systems of spacecraft and satellites in orbit around the planet. Some CMEs have also been known to affect electrical power lines on Earth, and the highly energetic particles that are thrown out of the Sun could pose a radiation risk to astronauts in space, and even to passengers in aeroplanes that pass near the Earth’s poles.

The exhibit’s stand at the Royal Society will enable members of the public to talk to scientists involved in research to predict when CMEs are headed towards Earth. There will be 3D videos and posters describing the journey of a CME from its initiation on the Sun to its arrival at the Earth, and models of the satellites scientists use to observe them.

Dr Steve Bradshaw from Imperial’s Department of Physics, one of the scientists involved in the exhibition, explained: "Our best defence against CMEs is to have plenty of warning when one is heading towards the Earth, so that pre-emptive action can be taken to protect ourselves and the sensitive electronic equipment that we depend on."

Two solar observing missions were recently launched that should give scientists significantly more warning and time to be prepared than they have had in the past. The Hinode satellite will help solar physicists to better understand the physical processes taking place on the Sun that lead to CMEs, which will lead to more accurate forecasting of when a CME will erupt. The STEREO satellites will allow researchers to track CMEs in-flight between the Sun and the Earth, and by providing a stereoscopic view of their path through space - in the same way that our two eyes provide us with depth perception – the research team will be more quickly able to determine whether the CME is heading straight for us.

Dr Bradshaw added: "The Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition provides scientists with an ideal opportunity to talk to the public about their work. The research we’re doing on CMEs gives a new insight into some impressive explosions on our nearest star, which are fascinating for both scientists and the public to see, and I’m looking forward to sharing our discoveries this week."

From Recovering T-Rex Blood Cells to New Discoveries in Heredity

2007-07-17T14:53:00.000+08:00

NOVA science

NOW looks at startling new research that has recovered ancient proteins from dinosaur bones. Could dino DNA be next? Speaking of DNA, it may be the master code of life but something else is pulling the switches. Understanding this switching system, called the epigenome, may lead to cancer cures and even an explanation of why identical twins are not identical. Host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson investigates this exciting work in the opening two segments of the latest NOVA scienceNOW, airing Tuesday, July 24 at 8 pm ET/PT on PBS (check local listings).

In other explorations, NOVA scienceNOW takes a trip to the courtyard of CIA headquarters where an enigmatic sculpture displays a coded message that has so far stymied the nation's top code breakers, not to mention legions of amateurs. The show also profiles the amazing rise of a poor kid from Belize to the abstract realm of cosmological research, and Tyson closes with another mind-bending "Cosmic Perspective.

All we know about dinosaurs comes from fossils. Thanks to paleobiologist Mary Schweitzer these old bones are telling us more than ever. Schweitzer defied the long-held belief that it was fruitless to search for preserved soft tissues in dinosaur remains. Most experts held that such structures should have decayed away long ago, but Schweitzer has found evidence of delicate structures such as blood vessels and red blood cells that miraculously survived for millions of years. Recently she examined one cross section of 68-million-year-old bone and confidently announced: What we have here is a pregnant Tyrannosaurus rex!

Once nurture seemed clearly distinct from nature. Now it appears that our diets and lifestyles literally change the expression of our genes. How? By influencing a vast network of chemical switches inside our cells. Called collectively the epigenome, the switches turn genes on and off and may account for the fact that identical twins grow less identical as they age. This new understanding may give us potent new medical therapies and even cures, because many diseases now appear to stem from errors in the epigenome, and such epigenetic errors seem easier to correct than genetic ones. Epigenetic cancer therapy, for example, seems already to be yielding stunning results.

Robot Dives Deep for Sinkhole Slime

2007-07-16T23:29:00.000+08:00

By Henry Bortman

In May, researchers successfully conducted the third and final field test of the autonomous underwater robot, DEPTHX. Their objective was to explore Cenote Zacatón, the world’s deepest water-filled sinkhole.

Zacatón lies near one end of a chain of sinkholes stretching nearly half a mile across Rancho La Azufroza (Sulfur Ranch), located in northeastern México, roughly 20 miles from the Gulf Coast. Even without the sinkholes, the biology of the region would make a fascinating subject of study. The landscape is dotted with a muddle of tropical deciduous trees and bromeliads growing side-by-side with agaves and cacti typical of desert climates. Each day, as dawn approaches, a flock of green parrots takes wing, shrieking and squawking as they circle the rim of Zacatón. Later in the day, the air grows thick with butterflies, more than a dozen different species, some with wingspans exceeding six inches. It is a languid, sun-drenched setting.

But what lies below ground, in the dark waters of Zacatón, where only microbial life can survive, is what has piqued the interest of scientists and engineers from Stone Aerospace, the University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, the Colorado School of Mines, and other institutions, who make up the DEPTHX team.

The DEPTHX project was funded by NASA’s ASTEP (Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets) program. ASTEP projects typically involve both technology and science components. The robot incorporates a number of innovative technologies. It is the first underwater vehicle that can be placed in an enclosed water-filled space and, without any previous knowledge, safely navigate its way around, build a three-dimensional map of its environment, and collect samples of scientific interest -- all without human intervention.

Mapping and sampling Zacatón was DEPTHX’s most challenging task to date. In March of this year, the craft explored Poza La Pilita, a smaller sinkhole near Zacatón.

DEPTHX enabled investigators to explore an otherwise inaccessible ecosystem that extends far below the Earth’s surface. The robot had a mechanical arm that could be extended 2 to 3 meters (6.5 to 10 feet); at its end was a spring-loaded penetrator that could sense when it came within a few inches of the cenote’s wall. Once in position, it grabbed a gob of the microbial biofilm that coats the entire interior surface of the sinkhole, and brought it back to the surface for later laboratory analysis. Positioning the 1.5-ton robot precisely -- not too far from the uneven surface of the cenote wall to obtain a sample, but not so close that the penetrator slams into rock and gets bent -- was challenging, particularly when the robot was doing its own navigation. But DEPTHX successfully obtained half a dozen samples of microbial Zacatón wall slime. The deepest of these came from close to the bottom of the cenote, at a depth of 272 meters (892 feet).

Finding the bottom of Zacatón was another of DEPTHX’s accomplishments. Previously, no-one had been able to determine for certain how deep the cenote was. As it turns out, the bottom is sloped, ranging from 315 meters (1033 feet) at its high end down to 320 meters (1050 feet). And it may go even deeper. At the low end of the cenote, the robot found what appeared to be a narrow tunnel that extended outward, and perhaps farther downward. Because the research team was pressed for time, however, and because they wanted to make sure they could safely get the craft back to the surface, they told DEPTHX to come home without exploring the tunnel.

John Spear, the lead microbiologist on the DEPTHX team, speculates that this deep channel is connected to an underground system of thermally heated water. About one million years ago, geologists believe, the Zacatón region was a site of intense hydrothermal activity, not unlike Mammoth Hot Springs in present-day Yellowstone National Park. Although thermal activity around Zacatón has calmed down considerably since those fiery days, there are clear signs that something is still stirring underground: a pervasive scent of sulfur hovers around the cenote, and Zacatón’s water is a constant 30 degrees C (86 degrees F). In fact, says Spears, one of the surprising discoveries made by DEPTHX is that the temperature in Zacatón is constant all the way through its thousand-foot water column. He expected to find temperature variation with depth, a more common scenario.

“If we stuck DepthX in a place like Yellowstone Lake, for example, you would see gradients of change in temperature. It would probably be warm on the surface, cold in the middle, and then down at the thermal vents warm again,” Spear said. But something is keeping Zacatón unusually well-mixed. I asked Spear what caused the mixing. “Don’t know,” he replied, but in a later email he added that “there is a large amount of geothermally heated water flowing through the system.”

Whatever its cause, the unexpected uniformity put a kink in the research team’s sample-collection plans. They had hoped to use gradients in the water’s temperature, in its salinity and in its level of dissolved oxygen to guide DEPTHX toward the best sampling locations. Places where such changes occur are interesting because they are often accompanied by an ecological change. Different types of organisms thrive in cooler water than in warmer water, for example.

Often, there is also a visual indicator of such changes. In Yellowstone, where Spear has worked extensively, “I could walk up to a hot spring and say, ‘I want a sample right there,’ mainly because of my visual interpretation of it, what I see,” he says. Green, for example, indicates the presence of photosynthetic organisms, which can survive only in relatively cool water. Yellow-, orange- and red-hued organisms dominate in hotter waters.

“You’d like the robot to do the same thing, use a visual cue to understand a place,” Spear says. He was hoping to be able to use “color changes on the walls of the cenote,” which “might correlate with chemistry,” to guide the robot toward good places to collect samples. But, apart from a shallow oxygenated zone near Zacatón’s surface, the microbial life that clung to the cenote walls was visually uniform, from top to bottom.

Nevertheless, Spear expects the DNA analysis that his lab will perform over the next few months on the Zacatón samples to yield valuable results. Preliminary analysis of samples collected a couple of years ago by a diver, at a depth of 85 meters (280 feet), turned up “six new groups of bacteria.” And by “six new groups” Spear emphasized, he didn’t mean six new species. “The bacteria domain [one of the three main branches on the tree of life] has about 100 different divisions or phyla in it. So we found six new ones, from here,” he explained. “That’s kind of equivalent to walking out your door in the morning and finding plants for the first time.” To be fair, Spear points out that “you can often find new groups” even in places as pedestrian as common garden soil. “It could even be something that’s living between your teeth.” Still, six is a pretty good haul for one sinkhole. “And we think we can find more,” he adds.

The samples that Spear’s lab will analyze were collected while DEPTHX was under human control. Because the robot’s time in Zacatón was limited, DEPTHX engineers had to choose between pursuing science goals or technology goals, and they decided to tell the robot where to collect its samples, rather than to let the craft’s onboard computers make autonomous choices.

But the robot’s software-engineering team, which hails from Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, also got a chance to put the robot’s sophisticated technology to the test. In Poza Verde (Spanish for “Green Pool”), a wider but shallower cenote near Zacatón, DEPTHX was tested in “exploration mode." In this mode, the robot is not given any instructions about where to go or what to do. It’s dropped into the water and simply told to go find interesting stuff. It is responsible both for navigating its way around and for deciding what is interesting. The engineering team judged this test a success.

That is promising, because exploration mode will have to work well for the next phase of the robot’s life. Later this year, DEPTHX will morph into ENDURANCE, the same robot but with a slightly different configuration, and will transition from exploring balmy semitropical waters to swimming about in chilly ice-covered lakes.

The first such cold-water test will take place in February 2008, in the Midwest. That will be a trail run for an even more challenging mission late in 2008: autonomous exploration of the waters of Antarctica’s Lake Bonney, an ice-covered lake about 3 km (1.8 miles) long and 1.5 km (0.9 miles) wide.

To date, very little is known about Lake Bonney. Peter Doran, a University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor and the principal investigator for the ENDURANCE project, and his colleagues have been studying the lake for several years, measuring its temperature, salinity and a handful of other parameters. But those measurements have all been made “in the center of the lake,” Doran says. “We go back to the same spot every year.” ENDURANCE, he says, will enable researchers for the first time to develop a portrait of the lake - its temperature, its chemistry, and its microbial ecology - in three dimensions.

New Discoveries In Neural Stem Cells Have Implications For The Design Of Brain Therapies

2007-07-15T13:03:00.000+08:00

Scientists have discovered that adult neural stem cells, which exist in the brain throughout life, are not a single, homogeneous group. Instead, they are a diverse group of cells, each capable of giving rise to specific types of neurons. The finding, the team says, significantly shifts the perspective on how these cells could be used to develop cell-based brain therapies.

The results of their study are reported online in Science Express, and will be published in an upcoming issue of Science.

Adult neural stem cells give rise to the three major types of brain cells -- astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and neurons. Their role in producing neurons is of particular interest to scientists because neurons orchestrate brain functions -- thought, feeling and movement. If scientists could figure out how to create specific types of new neurons, they potentially could use them to replace damaged cells, such as the dopamine-producing neurons destroyed in Parkinson's disease.

In recent years, scientists have determined that adult neural stem cells are located primarily in two regions of the brain -- the lining of the brain's fluid-filled cavity, known as the subventricular zone, and a horseshoe shaped area known as the hippocampus. The laboratory of the senior author of the current study, UCSF's Arturo Alvarez-Buylla identified the stem cells in the subventricular zone in 1999 (Cell, June 11, 1999).

While scientists have known that neural stem cells in the developing brain produce particular types of neurons based on where the stem cells are located in the embryo, studies carried out in cell culture have suggested that adult neural stem cells of the fully formed brain can give rise to many types of brain cells.

In the current study, conducted in mice, the team set out to explore whether neural stem cells in different locations of the subventricular zone are all the same. They did so using a method they developed to follow the fate of early neonatal and adult neural stem cells in 15 different regions of the subventricular zone. These cells typically produce young neurons that migrate to the olfactory bulb, where they mature into several distinct types of interneurons, neurons that are essential for the sense of smell.

To the team's surprise, the adult neural stem cells in the various regions of the subventricular zone each gave rise to only very specific subsets of interneurons. Moreover, the stem cells were not susceptible to being re-specified. When they were taken out of their niche and transplanted into another region of the subventricular zone, they continued to produce the same subset of interneurons. Similarly, they retained their specialized production of distinct subtypes of neurons when removed from the animals' brains and exposed to a cocktail of growth factors in a culture dish.

The findings, says the lead author of the study, Florian T. Merkle a graduate student in the Alvarez-Buylla lab, suggests that while adult neural stem cells of the subventricular zone can produce the three major types of brain cells -- astrocytes, neurons and oligodendrocytes -- when it comes to neurons they seem to be specified, or programmed, to produce very specific subtypes.

"The data supporting the finding is remarkably clean and was highly unexpected," says senior author Alvarez-Buylla, UCSF Heather and Melanie Muss Professor of Neurological Surgery. "We've been studying this region of the brain for many years and Florian's data has produced a different scenario, so we have to readjust now."

"We should abandon the idea that these cells are good for making any kind of neuron. This is just not going to be the case unless we find ways to reprogram these cells genetically."

The insight, says Merkle, is a key step toward understanding the molecular mechanisms of neural stem cell potential. "Now you could compare adult stem cells in different regions at the genetic level. Since different neural stem cells make different types of neurons, maybe you could determine which genes are important for making, say, dopaminergic cells. In theory you could activate these genes in embryonic stem cells in the culture dish to try to create the desired type of neuron."

The Alvarez-Buylla lab has identified neural stem cells in the adult human brain, but it is not known if these cells are heterogeneous. If human brains show a similar regionalization of stem cells, it might also be possible, says Alvarez-Buylla, to harvest them from the brains of patients, expand their numbers in the culture dish to obtain a particular neuron type, and transplant them back into patients.

Notably, the distribution of adult neural stem cells throughout the subventricular zone raises the possibility, he says, that the cells' activity is regionally modulated in order to regulate the production of different types of neurons. "This may provide a mechanism for the brain to dynamically fine tune the olfactory bulb circuitry, raising a fascinating basic question about neuronal replacement: Why are so many different types of neurons, with such diverse origins, required for olfactory function?"

"The implication for cell-based therapies might be that it isn't sufficient to replace one neuron," he says. "You might have to replace combinations of different neuronal types when it comes to reestablishing neural function."

The finding, he says, has not been without its hints. In 1996, the lab reported (PNAS, Dec. 1996) what he describes as "an amazing network of pathways" that collect adult neural stem cells from throughout the wall of the lateral ventricle of the subventricular zone.

"It's taken us 10 years," he says, "to figure out that these pathways reflect the transport of young neurons of different types born in unique locations."

Astronomers Find Thousands of New Galaxies

2007-07-08T22:45:00.000+08:00

By SPACE.com

More than a thousand previously unknown dwarf galaxies have been detected in the Coma cluster of galaxies 320 million light-years away by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Though tiny compared to bigger galaxies, dwarf galaxies play a crucial role in cosmic evolution. Astronomers think they were the first galaxies to form, providing the building blocks for larger galaxies. They're also the most numerous type of galaxies around: Computer simulations, in fact, suggest that giant clusters of galaxies should contain more dwarf galaxies than astronomers have observed.

To find the thousands of "missing" galaxies, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, stitched together 288 individual exposures from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Each exposure lasted 70 to 90 seconds, forming a large mosaic covering 1.3 square degrees of sky when combined with the image data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Though a small chunk of the sky, the team found almost 30,000 new objects in a relatively short period of time.

To the team's surprise, many of the new objects turned out to be Coma galaxies, not galaxies beyond the cluster. Leigh Jenkins, a GSFC astronomer, estimates that about 1,200 of the faint objects are dwarf galaxies-many more than have been previously identified.

"We have suddenly been able to detect thousands of faint galaxies that weren't seen before," Jenkins said. Her team's study of the Coma cluster is detailed in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

How can astronomers see such faint galaxies? The universe emits a wealth of visible light, which allows us to se stars with an unaided eye. But most of the light from space is invisible to humans-which is why telescopes like Spitzer that can "see" infrared light help astronomers make new discoveries in well-studied parts of the cosmos.

The team may have found thousands of new objects, but additional Coma dwarf galaxies might be lurking in the Spitzer telescope data, the team said. By using telescopes that can see even "deeper" into the cosmos, the astronomers are currently trying to find out how many of the faintest objects belong to the Coma cluster.

why menthol feels fresh

2007-07-03T19:20:00.000+08:00

Scientists have identified the receptor in cells of the peripheral nervous system that is most responsible for the body's ability to sense cold.

The finding, reported on-line in the journal "Nature" (May 30, 2007), reveals one of the key mechanisms by which the body detects temperature sensation. But in so doing it also illuminates a mechanism that mediates how the body experiences intense stimuli – temperature, in this case – that can cause pain.

As such, the receptor – known as menthol receptor TRPM8 -- provides a target for studying acute and chronic pain, as can result from inflammatory or nerve injury, the researchers say, and a potential new target for treating pain.

"By understanding how sensory receptors work, how thresholds for temperature are determined, we gain insight into how these thresholds change in the setting of injury, such as inflammatory and nerve injury, and how these changes may contribute to chronic pain," says senior author David Julius, PhD, chairman and professor of physiology at UCSF.

The methanol receptor, and other temperature receptors discovered in recent years by the Julius lab, offer potential targets for developing analgesic drugs that act in the peripheral, nervous system, rather than centrally, where opiate receptors act, he says.

The finding is a milestone in an investigation the team began several years ago. In 2002, the researchers discovered that the receptor was activated by chemical cooling agents such as menthol, a natural product of mint, and cool air. They reported their discovery, or "cloning," of the receptor in "Nature" (March 7, 2002), hypothesizing that the receptor would play a key role in sensing cold. However, some subsequent papers questioned this theory.

In the current study, the team confirmed their hypothesis by "knocking out" the gene that synthesizes the receptor, both in sensory neurons in cell culture and in mice. The cells in culture were unresponsive to cooling agents, including menthol. The genetically engineered mice did not discriminate between warm and cold surfaces until the temperature dropped to extremes.

"It's been known for years that menthol and related cooling agents evoke the psychophysical sensation of cold – somehow by interacting with the aspect of the sensory nervous system that's related to cold detection," says Julius.

The current study, he says -- led by Diana M. Bautista, PhD, and Jan Siemens, PhD, of the Julius lab and Joshua M. Glazer, PhD, of the lab of co-senior author Cheryl Stucky, PhD, of the Medical College of Wisconsin – puts that question to rest.

As the mice lacking the gene were not completely insensitive to cold -- they avoided contact with surfaces below 10 degrees C, though with reduced efficiency -- the next step, says Julius, will be to illuminate this residual aspect of cold sensation.

The finding is the latest of a series of discoveries led by the Julius lab on the molecular mechanisms of temperature sensation and pain. In 1997, the lab cloned the gene for the capsaicin receptor, the main pungent ingredient in some chili peppers (Nature, Oct. 23, 1997), and in 2000 reported that, in mice, the receptor triggers the nerves to fire pain signals when they are exposed to high ambient heat or the fiery properties of peppery food. (Science, April 14, 2000). The study demonstrated that capsaicin and noxious heat elicit the sensation of burning pain through activation of the same receptor on sensory neurons.

Most recently, they identified the receptor of isothiocyanate compounds, which constitute the pungent ingredients in such plants as wasabi and yellow mustard. In response to high temperatures, the receptor produces pain and irritation.

"All of these studies use natural products to understand pain mechanisms in the periphery of the body, where they are first sensed," says Julius.

Ultimately, pain signals are transmitted from the peripheral nervous system into the body's central nervous system – moving through nerves in the spinal cord and brain stem up to the brain, which prompts a response, or "feeling." Co-author of the current study Allan Basbaum, PhD, also of UCSF, is a pioneer of research into the mechanism of chronic pain within the central nervous system.

The Julius team's complementary work is focused at the level of the sensory nerve fiber, where the signals are first initiated. "We want to know," Julius says, "how do you detect these stimuli to begin with" How do your sensory nerve endings do this to begin with" And what are the biochemical and biophysical mechanisms that account for this""

All three receptors the Julius lab has discovered are members of the TRP family of ion channels expressed on sensory neurons. The latest finding adds to the evidence, says Julius, that TRP channels are the principal transducers of thermal stimuli in the mammalian periphery nervous system.

These planets are way out there

2007-07-02T12:25:00.000+08:00

The discovery of dozens of new "exoplanets" was reported Monday at a meeting of astronomers at the Hawaii Convention Center.

Attendees at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society heard about the discovery of 28 new planets outside our own solar system, raising the total number of known exoplanets 12 percent to 236.

These bodies, previously too distant for Earthbound astronomers to see, have been spotted in part by using the Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea.

Jason Wright and John Asher Johnson of the University of California Berkeley reported the new exoplanets and said they're getting better at finding them, spotting smaller gas giants than they could see before.

"We're just now getting to the point where, if we were observing our own solar system from afar, we would be seeing Jupiter," Wright said.

The California and Carnegie Planet Search team is headed by Geoffrey Marcy of UC Berkeley and also includes Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Steve Vogt of UC Santa Cruz. Discoveries have also been made or confirmed by the Anglo-Australian Planet Search team, headed by Chris Tinney of the University of New South Wales and Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire, and by Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University, Shannon Patel of UC Santa Cruz and Simon O'Toole of the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

Several of these scientists have published discoveries over the past year but the Honolulu conference Monday was the first time they all presented together.

The Keck Observatory, which employs more than 200 on the Big Island, has played a pivotal role in the discovery of planets beyond our local solar system. It is one of several observatories atop Mauna Kea.

A small number of technicians actually work on the top of the mountain, which is more than 13,000 feet high, while the actual astronomers work in Waimea-Kamuela (if working with Keck) or Hilo (if working with some other Mauna Kea facilities) or get telescope data sent via Internet2 to universities in other parts of the world.

Mars Rover Spirit Unearths Surprise Evidence Of Wetter Past

2007-07-01T22:25:00.001+08:00

Science Daily — A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.

Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's arm, had measured a composition of about 90 percent pure silica for this soil.

"You could hear people gasp in astonishment," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the Mars rovers' science instruments. "This is a remarkable discovery. And the fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable. It makes you wonder what else is still out there."

Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer observed the patch, and Steve Ruff of Arizona State University, Tempe, noticed that its spectrum showed a high silica content. The team has laid out plans for further study of the soil patch and surrounding deposits.

Exploring a low range of hills inside a Connecticut-sized basin named Gusev Crater, Spirit had previously found other indicators of long-ago water at the site, such as patches of water-bearing, sulfur-rich soil; alteration of minerals; and evidence of explosive volcanism.

"This is some of the best evidence Spirit has found for water at Gusev," said Albert Yen, a geochemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. One possible origin for the silica could have been interaction of soil with acid vapors produced by volcanic activity in the presence of water. Another could have been from water in a hot spring environment. The latest discovery adds compelling new evidence for ancient conditions that might have been favorable for life, according to members of the rover science team.

David Des Marais, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., said, "What's so exciting is that this could tell us about environments that have similarities to places on Earth that are clement for organisms."

Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, completed their original three-month prime missions in April 2004. Both are still operating, though showing signs of age. One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, so it leaves a deep track as it drags through soil. That churning has exposed several patches of bright soil, leading to some of Spirit's biggest discoveries at Gusev, including this recent discovery.

Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said, "This unexpected new discovery is a reminder that Spirit and Opportunity are still doing cutting-edge exploration more than three years into their extended missions. It also reinforces the fact that significant amounts of water were present in Mars' past, which continues to spur the hope that we can show that Mars was once habitable and possibly supported life."

The newly discovered patch of soil has been given the informal name "Gertrude Weise," after a player in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, according to Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the rovers.

"We've looked at dozens of disturbed soil targets in the rover tracks, and this is the first one that shows a high silica signature," said Ruff, who last month proposed using Spirit's miniature thermal emission spectrometer to observe this soil. That instrument provides mineral composition information about targets viewed from a distance. The indications it found for silica in the overturned soil prompted a decision this month to drive Spirit close enough to touch the soil with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer. Silica commonly occurs on Earth as the crystalline mineral quartz and is the main ingredient in window glass. The Martian silica at the Gertrude Weise patch is non-crystalline, with no detectable quartz.

Spirit worked within about 50 yards or meters of the Gertrude Weise area for more than 18 months before the discovery was made. "This discovery has driven home to me the value of in-depth, careful exploration," Squyres said. "This is a target-rich environment, and it is a good thing we didn't go hurrying through it."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Opportunity has been exploring Victoria Crater for about eight months. "Opportunity has completed the initial survey of the crater's rim and is now headed back to the area called Duck Bay, which may provide a safe path down into the crater," said John Callas, project manager for the rovers at JPL.

NASA's Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Ancient Volcanic Explosion

2007-07-01T22:25:00.000+08:00

PASADENA, Calif., (AScribe Newswire) -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has discovered evidence of an ancient volcanic explosion at "Home Plate," a plateau of layered bedrock approximately 2 meters (6 feet) high within the "Inner Basin" of Columbia Hills, at the rover's landing site in Gusev Crater. This is the first explosive volcanic deposit identified with a high degree of confidence by Spirit or its twin, Opportunity.

There is strong evidence that those layers are from a volcanic explosion, said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. The findings about volcanic activity are reported in a paper published in the May 4 issue of the journal Science.

Evidence shows the area near Home Plate is dominated by basaltic rocks. "When basalt erupts, it often does so as very fluid lava, rather than erupting explosively," Squyres said. "One way for basaltic lava to cause an explosion is for it to come into contact with water - it's the pressure from the steam that causes it to go boom."

Scientists suspect that the explosion that formed Home Plate may have been caused by an interaction of basaltic lava and water. "When you look at composition of the rocks in detail, there are hints that water may have been involved," Squyres said. One example is the high chlorine content of the rocks, which might indicate that basalt had come into contact with a brine.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence for an explosive origin for Home Plate is a "bomb sag" preserved in layered rocks on the lower slopes of the plateau. Bomb sags form in volcanic explosions on Earth when rocks ejected skyward by the explosion fall into soft deposits, deforming them as they land.

Spirit arrived at Home Plate in February 2006 and spent several months exploring it in detail before driving to "Low Ridge" to pass the Martian winter. Spirit has now returned to Home Plate to continue exploration there. "We decided to go back to Home Plate, once the Martian winter ended, because it is one of the most interesting places that we've found on Gusev Crater," Squyres said. "Last year we primarily explored the northern and eastern sides of it.

This time we're hoping to get to the southern and western sides." Spirit's continued exploration of Home Plate will focus largely on testing the idea that water was involved in its formation process.

Spirit and Opportunity are in their fourth year of exploring Mars. They successfully completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004, and the missions have been extended four times. As of April 26, Spirit had spent 1,177 sols, or Martian days, on the surface of Mars and had driven 7,095 meters (4.4 miles), and Opportunity had spent 1,157 sols and driven 10,509 meters (6.5 miles).

"Considering their age, both rovers are in good health. All science instruments are functioning and continuing to return superb science data," said John Callas, project manager of the Mars Exploration Rover mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Gene Identified as Risk Factor for Heart Ills

2007-06-25T16:25:00.000+08:00

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: May 2007

Two rival teams of scientists have discovered a common genetic variation that increases the risk of heart disease up to 60 percent in people of European descent.

The scientists say they hope a test for the variant can be developed to enable doctors to assess patients at risk more accurately and to recommend early interventions like cholesterol-lowering statins and methods to reduce blood pressure. Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.

The genetic variant is so common that some 50 percent of people in European populations carry one copy of it, and about 20 percent of people have inherited two copies, one from each parent. It is much less prevalent in people of African descent, the scientists said.

How it works is not yet known, but carriers of a single copy have a 15 percent to 20 percent greater risk of heart disease, while those with two copies are up to 60 percent more likely to develop heart disease than people who have none. The risk is even higher for people who suffer a heart attack at an early age, defined as men under 50 and women under 60.

The new finding, published online yesterday in the journal Science, is one of a spate of discoveries about the genetic bases of common diseases. Last week seven new genetic variants involved in the most common form of diabetes were identified, and a batch of new genes from other common diseases is expected to be reported in the next few weeks.

These discoveries are a long-promised fruit of the $3 billion Human Genome Project, which was essentially completed in 2003. There have been two principal approaches to scanning the genome for disease genes, which are culminating in photo-finish results by the proponents of each method.

One competitor is DeCode Genetics, a private company based in Reykjavik, Iceland, that has used the comprehensive health care records and known genealogy of the Icelandic population to track disease. DeCode has dominated the gene-finding field for the last several years.

DeCode’s rivals are medical researchers based at universities in the United States and Europe. They have made a slower start because, without an Icelandic-type data set, they have had to wait for construction of the HapMap, a survey of common genetic variations on the human genome in Africans, Asians and Europeans. These common variations, known as SNPs or “snips,” are thought to be the genetic bases of the common diseases.

Both sides have been helped by a technical development, the construction by companies like Affymetrix and Illumina of instruments known as microarrays or chips that can now detect up to 500,000 snips. With the chips, the genomes of patients with a disease can be compared with those of healthy people, allowing snips that seem associated with the disease to be identified.

Last week both DeCode and three academic consortiums reported new diabetes genes. This week’s reports on heart disease come from DeCode and another academic consortium, led by Dr. Ruth McPherson of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and Jonathan Cohen of the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas in Dallas.

Dr. McPherson said that it came as a “complete surprise” that DeCode had submitted its report at the same time to the same journal, but that “at the end of the day we are very happy they came out with the same result.”

Both groups identified snips in a small region of Chromosome 9 (the human genome is packaged into 23 pairs) as being associated with higher risk of heart disease.

But as if to prove how much remains to be understood about human biology, the snips lie in a stretch of DNA that contains no gene or genetic element with known functional purpose. It is only on the basis of rigorous statistics that the two groups believe their snips must be causally associated with heart disease.

This means the researchers still have no idea of the mechanism by which the snips raise the risk of heart disease. When the mechanism comes to light, it may be possible to design drugs that interfere with it so as to avert the risk. For the moment, however, the practical use of the new finding is in diagnostic testing.

DeCode says it will use this and other heart disease-related variants it has found as the basis for a test that gauges the inherited risk.

But Dr. McPherson said, “It would be unfortunate if snips using these tests were patented and physicians couldn’t use them without paying a royalty to DeCode.”

A test would help address the big question in heart disease of for whom the many available interventions should be recommended, Dr. McPherson said. Risk is now assessed on conventional factors like smoking.

But Dr. Christopher O’Donnell, an expert on heart disease genetics at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, said it would be premature to recommend testing until the mechanism of the new variant was known. Figuring out the mechanism would be a major fruit of the new studies, which have produced “one of the few strongly replicated findings that has emerged from the field of heart attack and coronary heart disease,” Dr. O’Donnell said.

The new heart disease risk snip is much less common in Africans and African-Americans and seems not to be correlated with heart disease in these populations, the Ottawa-Dallas team reported.

The idea behind the HapMap, that common genetic variants are associated with common diseases, assumes that natural selection is unable to get rid of disease genes that act only late in life, well after the age of reproduction. But the heart disease risk variant is so extraordinarily common that it may confer some unknown benefit.
“It is clear that this variant must have some advantage or it couldn’t be in 50 percent of the population, so I think it’s likely there has been some selection for it,” said Dr. Kari Stefansson, DeCode’s chief executive.

The variant lies at a site on Chromosome 9 very close to one of the diabetes variants reported last week. At a news briefing last week, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, commented on the coincidence that a single region of the genome could contain factors for both diabetes and heart disease.

“I think this is a stunner,” Dr. Collins said. “This is like the seat of the soul of the genome.”

Other biologists suggested the link hinted at an unsuspected common biology between the two diseases. But Dr. Stefansson dismissed this idea emphatically, saying he had tested it in thousands of people with both diseases. “I can say with substantial authority that these markers are uncorrelated,” he said, meaning that the two variants lie close to each other only by coincidence.

OSU researchers find pancreatic cancer markers

2007-06-24T19:00:00.000+08:00

By Misti Crane
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

New research led by Ohio State University scientists shows that tiny genes called microRNAs might lead to better ways to treat pancreatic cancer.

The microRNA look different in pancreatic cancer than they do in tissue from a healthy pancreas or one with pancreatitis, a chronic disease.

The research team also found that the genes might help predict how long a cancer patient will live. Most people who have pancreatic cancer die within two years.

The discoveries are preliminary and must be tested further before they will mean anything to people being treated for the disease.

Treatment based on these discoveries “is not decades away, but probably years away,” said Dr. Mark Bloomston, the Ohio State surgeon and assistant professor who led the study.

“If anything, what we've done has generated more questions than it has answers.”

The research is published May 1,2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

New discoveries may lead to ALS cure

2007-05-31T15:57:00.000+08:00

DISEASE REPLICATED, CONTRIBUTING CELL FOUND IN 2 STUDIES

By Jamie Talan
NEWSDAY

Scientists at Columbia University Medical Center have identified a new player in the motor neuron disease that claimed the life of baseball legend Lou Gehrig, and their scientific collaborators at Harvard Medical School have used stem-cell technology to re-create the disease process in a lab dish.

These developments, reported this week in two papers in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could help unravel the causes of the fatal disease and allow scientists to test the effects of drugs against damaged motor neurons grown from stem cells in the lab.

There are 30,000 Americans with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and it is always fatal. The average survival after diagnosis is five years, and there are no treatments that halt or prevent motor neurons in the brain from dying. Paralysis results because the brain no longer can talk to these neurons that control muscles.

Until recently, ALS researchers have focused on the motor neurons themselves.

But Columbia scientist Serge Przedborski, co-director of the Center for Motor Neuron Biology and Disease, and his colleagues showed that non-neuronal support cells called astrocytes that carry the mutant form of the ALS gene can on their own cause normal motor neurons to get sick and die. That means, said Przedborski, that astrocytes are intimately involved in the disease process. If so, this discovery could provide a new route to developing treatments to prevent or slow the disease.

The team identified a toxic molecule in the astrocytes that seems to trigger damage to motor neurons, and scientists are now working to name the rogue molecule. The Columbia researchers are collaborating with Harvard scientists to unravel the puzzle of ALS.

In the Harvard study, Kevin Eggan and Tom Maniatis used embryonic stem cells to make a population of diseased motor neurons grow.

"We thought that embryonic stem cells could provide a system in which to study ALS," said Eggan, of Harvard's Stem Cell Institute. Indeed, the stem cells were coaxed into making motor neurons from the mutant form of the SOD1 gene, the most common familial ALS gene.

The pathology in the Petri dish was similar to that seen in a mouse with the disease. These specialized stem cells can make billions of motor neurons that will succumb to the damage caused by the mutated gene, the scientists said. Motor neurons are labeled with a green fluorescent protein, which makes them easy to identify.

"This is a viable approach," said Eggan, referring to the use of the green protein. "It's difficult to pick out damaged motor neurons from animal models. We will be able to use this system to do drug screening."

Much of the excitement over stem cells has surrounded their role in possible therapies. This study shows that stem cells also can be used to understand diseases, the researchers said. Eggan likens the study of disease to the way investigators used to figure out why a plane crashed.
Engineers would rush to the crash scene and study the broken pieces. Often, there was so much damage that it was impossible to figure out the events that led to the crash. Today, black boxes on planes collect those missing early events and have helped enormously in putting the pieces together.

The embryonic stem cells that carry disease genes, Eggan said, are the equivalent of the plane's black box. "These cells allow us to replay the early events of the disease process."

Know Thyself—Man, Rat or Bot

2007-05-30T17:20:00.000+08:00

By Sharon Begley
Newsweek

April 23, 2007 issue - Whether it is an eerily human bot in a virtual-reality game, an animal looking at you with soulful eyes or a patient in a vegetative state, the question nags and nags and won't go away: is there a thinking, self-aware, conscious mind in there?

Not one that merely exhibits intelligence, since silicon chips do calculations that leave the human brain in the dust and even discover mathematical proofs. And not one merely capable of empathy or grief or cooperation, which chimps, elephants and species in between all manage.

No, the capacity that distinguishes humans has come down to something Augustine identified 1,600 years ago when he asked what "can be the purport of the injunction, know thyself? I suppose it is that the mind should reflect upon itself."

It's called metacognition—the ability to think about your thoughts, to engage in self-reflection, to introspect. It was long thought to be not just something that we have more of or do better than machines or animals, but that we have and they lack.

To know what you know is not only the mark of a skilled game-show contestant who is quick (but not too quick) on the buzzer, but also of consciousness, the last stand for human exceptionalism.

Now, however, this claim is on the rocks as both animals and machines show signs that they can engage in self-reflection.

In the latest study, scientists tested for introspection in rats. Jonathon Crystal and Allison Foote of the University of Georgia trained rats to push one lever when they heard a short burst of static, and a second lever when they heard a long burst. The reward for a right answer was six food pellets.

A wrong answer yielded nothing. But refusing to answer—like a student fleeing an exam room upon seeing the impossible questions—earned the rat a consolation prize of three morsels.

Clearly, the smart strategy was to respond if sure of the answer, but pass if not.
The rats got almost perfect scores when they had to identify two-second or eight-second bursts. But when they heard static of intermediate duration and had to choose "long" or "short," they were twice as likely to decline the test and take the three pellets; they knew what they didn't know.

To make sure the rats were truly introspecting, the scientists then eliminated the opt-out choice and required the rats to choose "long" or "short" for the medium bursts.

The animals got half right, no better than guessing, which suggests that when they opted out it was indeed because they had assessed the contents of their mind—do I know this?—and made the rational choice, the scientists report in Current Biology.

"Rats can reflect on their internal mental states," says Crystal. "They know when they don't know." Other scientists have gotten similar results with dolphins and rhesus monkeys, who also decline to take a test when they don't know the answer. They think about thinking.
CONTINUED

Shoe, diary discoveries spur on search for Earhart

2007-05-24T15:29:00.000+08:00

Clues emerge in '37 mystery
By Richard Pyle, Associated Press April 1, 2007
NEW YORK -- It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet 70 years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up.

Long-dismissed notes of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart . . ."
The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter, surfacing after decades.

And a team that has already found aircraft parts and a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll, hoping to return in July to find more evidence, perhaps DNA.

For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon, navigator Fred J. Noonan marked the time and calculated the remaining distance to Howland Island.

It was July 2, 1937, and the two were near the end of a 2,550-mile trek from Lae, New Guinea, the longest leg of a "World Flight" begun 44 days earlier in Oakland, Calif. At the journey's end there a few days hence, Earhart would become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

Noonan, a former Pan American Airways navigator, estimated when the plane would reach an imaginary "line of position" running northwest-southeast through Howland, where they were to rest and refuel for the onward flight to Hawaii.

" Two hundred miles out," Earhart radioed to the Coast Guard cutter Itasca waiting off Howland.

What nobody knew -- not Earhart and not the Itasca -- was that her plane's radio-reception antenna had been ripped away during takeoff from Lae's bumpy dirt runway. The Itasca could hear Earhart, but she was unable to hear anything.

Also listening aboard the Itasca was James W. Carey, a 23-year-old University of Hawaii student who had been hired by the Associated Press to cover Earhart's Howland stopover.

He had been keeping a diary, a fact unknown to Earhart scholars until September 2006, when a typewritten copy was bought on eBay by a member of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR.

The nonprofit organization rejects the official verdict that the fliers were lost at sea, believing instead that they may have crash-landed on an uninhabited atoll called Gardner Island, in the Phoenix Islands 350 miles south of Howland, and lived for a time as castaways.

"Even though the diary doesn't answer the big question, it's an incredible discovery," said TIGHAR's executive director, Ric Gillespie, who has led eight expeditions to the island since 1989 and plans another one this July if his group can raise enough money.

The diary, he said, presents "a firsthand witness about what went on during those desperate hours and days."
Earhart left Lae on July 1. Early the next day, Carey wrote in his diary: "Up all last night following radio reports -- scanty . . . heard voice for first time 2:48 a.m. -- 'sky overcast.' All I heard. At 6:15 a.m. reported '200 miles out.' "Continued...

100 new deep-sea species found near Australia

2007-05-15T13:52:00.000+08:00

First Published: 00:00 IST(3/1/2007)
Last Updated: 20:26 IST(28/6/2003)

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A joint Australian-New Zealand research voyage has discovered more than 100 new deep-sea species ranging from ferocious-looking fanged creatures to rubber-like bottom dwellers, officials said on Friday.

Australian Environment Minister David Kemp announced the discoveries, which included many species either unrecognised or new to science.

The voyage was conducted on the New Zealand research ship RV Tangaroa, which for the past month explored underwater mountain ranges and peaks off Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands east of Australia.

The exploration found more than 500 fish species and 1,300 invertebrate species, Kemp said.
"Of these, more than 100 species are unrecognised and many represent species new to science," he said.

Discoveries included creatures given names like blobfish, prickly dogfish, viperfish, fangtooths, slickheads, giant sea spiders, goblin shrimp and jewel squid.

The haul also included the fossilised tooth of an extinct "megalodon" -- a shark twice the size of the Great White, according to shark expert Peter Last.

"The tooth had been lying on the seafloor for millions of years before being picked up in a deep-sea bottom sled," Last said.

Research links T-Rex to chicken

2007-05-08T14:50:00.000+08:00

T-Rex fossil yields clues to evolutionary puzzle:
study
AFP

CHICAGO, April 12, 2007 (AFP) - US researchers have identified microscopic traces of soft tissue taken from a 68 million-year-old T-rex fossil in a startling discovery that is yielding clues to evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds, a study released Thursday said.

The tiny protein fragments were extracted from the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that was discovered in the western state of Montana in 2003, but it wasn't until recently that scientists were able to definitively identify them as traces of prehistoric dinosaur collagen.

The collagen should have degraded millions of years before according to conventional wisdom, but paleontologists at North Carolina State University were fairly confident that what they had was the "barely detectable" remains of dinosaur soft tissue based on their chemical and molecular analyses.

However, they could not definitively say that, so they turned to biochemist John Asara at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School in Boston to make that determination.

It took Asara a year and a half, but he was finally able to sequence the amino acids in the collagen proteins - a proxy for DNA analysis - and conclude that the T-rex femur did indeed contain traces of collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.

When the researchers compared those amino acid sequences to those of similar proteins in several contemporary animals, they found that the T-rex sequence had similarities to those of chickens, and to a lesser extent frogs and newts. That finding bolsters a recent and controversial proposal that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related, and change that hypothesis to a theory, the researchers said.

"Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that's all based on the architecture of the bones," said John Asara, who is director of mass spectrometry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School.

"This allows you to get the chance to say Wait, they really are related because their sequences are related.' We didn't get enough sequences to definitively say that, but what sequences we got support that idea."

More broadly, the discovery challenges long-held assumptions about the process of fossilization, which in turn opens up new avenues of investigation in the field, the researchers said.

Until now it was assumed that organic matter such as proteins could not survive past a million years, but this discovery shows that ancient proteins can provide genetic clues to organisms that are millions and millions of years old even if they are only marginally viable as they were in this case.

"For centuries, it was believed that the process of fossilization destroyed any original material, consequently no one looked carefully at really old bones," said Mary Schweitzer, an assistant professor of paleontology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and one of several researchers who worked on the project. But if molecular data from fossils can be retrieved and analyzed, it may be able to verify current ideas about relationships between fossil and living organisms and between groups of distinct organisms that have no modern descendants.

"This interplay between the fossil record and the molecular record is going to become more and more useful in understanding both ends of the evolution of life on this planet," she told journalists on a teleconference.

"It's really exciting." On a more practical level, the findings will probably change the way paleontologists view and treat future fossils, said Lewis Cantley, professor of systems biology at Harvard School of Medicine.

"I think what this says is that when people make new discoveries now, if they want to get maximum information out, they have to immediately handle material in a way that first of all will avoid contamination and second, ensure that whatever is there gets well preserved because it can be interrogated."

Inevitably, a lot will depend on the condition of the fossil. This fossil was preserved in sandstone 60 feet below the ground and the porosity of the sandstone may have been a factor in the survival of these soft tissues, the researchers said.

Even so, it took the biochemists on the team a year and a half to sequence the amino acids in the proteins using highly sensitive mass spectrometry techniques that first broke the proteins down into fragments of 10 to 20 amino acids and then configured them into a sequence.

The study is published in the journal Science and was a collaborative effort between Schweitzer, Cantley and Asara, and Jack Horner, Regents Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University, who provided the fossil.

Book Confirms Einstein's Belief in God

2007-05-03T13:24:00.000+08:00

By
Kevin Jackson
Christian Post Reporter

A book chronicling the life history of Albert Einsten will be released this week and will reveal the deep religiosity of one of history’s greatest minds.

Einstein: His Life and Universe, written by Walter Isaacson, records not only the science behind the genius, but also the humanistic aspects of him, including a deep belief in God. An excerpt from his book was recently published in a Time magazine article titled “Einstein & Faith,” which specifically looked at the famed scientist’s theory on a higher being.

“But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the ‘spirit manifest in the laws of the universe,’” wrote Isaacson in the book, “and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.’”

Through his discoveries in physics and other sciences, Einstein felt that there was undoubtedly a force behind all existence that created all the laws that the world abides by. He even criticized atheists who he argued are missing on the very present link between science and faith.

"There are people who say there is no God," the physicist told a friend, according to the biography. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."
In a later letter he wrote, "The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses' – cannot hear the music of the spheres."

Einstein was by no means a Christian. He had grown up as a German Jew, later leaving that faith. He did not believe in the Judeo-Christian concept of free will, but rather, that people were predetermined to act a certain way.

Despite, he still felt that people should act as if there was free will.

"I am compelled to act as if free will existed, because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsibly," explained Einstein in Isaacson’s book. “I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime, but I prefer not to take tea with him.”

In the biography, the author also shows how Einstein did feel compelled by the story of Jesus, seeing him as an integral part of history.

When asked whether he accepts the historical existence of Jesus, Einstein replied, “Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus.
“His personality pulsates in every word,” he added. “No myth is filled with such life."
Current scientists today are also bridging the gap that many see between science and religion.

In an Apr. 6 commentary featured in CNN, Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Human Genome Project, shared about his Christian faith. He is also coming out with his own book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, to show how the two are related.

“I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments,”
explained Collins in the commentary, “and was astounded to discover, initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds.”

In contrast to Einstein, however, the Human Genome director noted that reason alone is not enough to understand God or to prove his existence.

“Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind,” Collins wrote. “You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page. Ultimately, a leap of faith is required.”

When asked how he could both be a scientist as well as a Christian, Collins noted that the two are more than compatible with each other.

“Actually, I find no conflict here, and neither apparently do the 40 percent of working scientists who claim to be believers,” he explained. “I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome.”

New planets around Gliese 581

2007-05-01T14:35:00.000+08:00

Category: planets

Posted on: April 25, 2007 12:26 PM,
by Chris Rowan

Unsurprisingly, there's lots of fuss about the new planet discovered around the red dwarf Gliese 581 (read the European Southern Observatory press release here). Planets, I should say, because they've actually confirmed two more in a system where they'd detected one already. The Gliese 581 system is now known to consist of:

One 15 Earth-mass planet, orbiting the host star in 5.4 days.

One 5 Earth-mass planet orbiting in 13 days.

One 8 Earth-mass planet, orbiting in 84 days.

(new discoveries in bold; more details here)
It's the smallest of the two new discoveries which is hogging the limelight, because its orbit is within the zone where temperatures allow the presence of liquid water. It doesn't mean that there is any there, of course.

In fact, a mass doesn't give us much to go on in terms of what it's actually like.

What I find more interesting is the more general trend we're seeing in exoplanet discoveries.

It's only been a decade or so since we knew for sure that other planetary systems besides our own actually existed, although our instruments were only sensitive enough to detect "hot Jupiters" whose orbits grazed the surfaces of their host stars.

But as we've gradually developed more sensitive detection techniques, we're discovering less massive planets, with larger orbits, and even multiple bodies within the same system (although the lower relative mass of the star also made things easier in this case).

Clearly, what we've seen up to this point is a very selective view of what's out there, biased by the limitations of our telescopes; and suggests that as soon as we get the ability to detect smaller bodies in planetary systems more like our own, there's a real prospect that we will indeed start finding them.

Diabetes mystery... Geneti clues

2007-05-01T14:25:00.000+08:00

Researchers uncover new risk factors
Boston Globe

Decades after scientists first realized that the risk of getting diabetes was partially inherited, discoveries of real genetic defects are suddenly coming rapid-fire.

Thursday, four separate scientific teams, including one led by Harvard researchers, reported three new genetic risk factors and confirmed five others identified over the last few years. An additional risk factor identified by one group has not yet been confirmed by others.

The discoveries open up new avenues to explain what breaks down in the body to cause type 2 diabetes. More than 20 million Americans suffer from diabetes and another 54 million are at risk. In the future, scientists said, the genetic findings may also help predict who will get the illness and lead to treatments tailored to each individual's genetic makeup.

"This is a milestone," said Dr. Larry C. Deeb, president for medicine and science of the American Diabetes Association, who was not involved in the research. "We're moving out of the darkness into understanding a lot more about diabetes."

The researchers identified some genetic areas that are not connected to any known mechanism behind diabetes, which harms the body's ability to control blood sugar and can lead to heart disease, blindness, and early death.

"No one had the first clue that these genetic changes were involved in the disease," said David Altshuler, associate professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and a leader of one of the three collaborating teams.

Some of the genetic changes are in what scientists previously called "junk DNA," he said, areas of the genetic code that they previously thought were meaningless. "Our whole view of which parts of the human genome contribute to disease is being augmented."

Genetics accounts for about half the risk of getting type 2 diabetes, according to Altshuler. Environment and such behaviors as obesity and lack of exercise account for the remaining risk.
The eight confirmed genetic defects together account for about 5 percent of the risk of getting the illness, he said. "The picture that is emerging is of multiple genes, each with a modest effect" on diabetes, he added.

However, scientists from the National Institutes of Health found that in one group of subjects, people with the most defects had a four times higher risk of having diabetes than people with the fewest defects.

Scientists said much work remains before genetic testing for diabetes becomes useful for patients. Researchers also expect it may be up to a decade before new treatments result from the work.

"The pharmaceutical industry is absolutely salivating at all of these studies" because they suggest targets for new drugs, said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and a leader of another of the teams. "But there is a long lead time."

The results were published Thursday in the online editions of the journals Science and Nature Genetics. They are based on a new research technique called genomewide association studies, in which scientists compare genetic samples from thousands of individuals who have a specific illness with those who don't.

The work is also unusual because three of the four scientific groups collaborated to confirm their results, drawing on the largest database of DNA ever used to study diabetes and making the findings extremely solid.

"Only five years ago this work would have been unthinkable," said Collins.

Each of the four groups used genetic material from a different population, totaling tens of thousands of subjects.

The three groups that coordinated to confirm each other's results were led by scientists from Britain; the National Institutes of Health and Finland; and the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT, Sweden, and the pharmaceutical company Novartis.

The three variations they found are near genes that appear to be related to regulation of insulin, which controls blood sugar, and to growth of the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. In diabetes, the body becomes resistant to insulin or fails to make enough insulin, causing a problematic build-up of sugar in the blood stream. The actual effect of the genetic defects has yet to be determined.

'Einstein: His Life and Universe' by Walter Isaacson; 'Einstein: A Biography' by Jürgen Neffe

2007-04-26T14:25:00.000+08:00

By George Johnson, George Johnson is the author of "Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics." His latest book, "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments," will be published in 2008.
April

IN late 19th century Munich, the multivolume "Popular Books on Natural Science" was required bookcase furniture in middle-class German homes, and its ebullient author, Aaron Bernstein, was the Carl Sagan of his day. "Praised be this science!" he cried. "

Praised be the men who do it! And praised be the human mind, which sees more sharply than does the human eye." It seemed the perfect gift for a 10-year-old boy who (contrary to later legend) was doing quite well in school.

In the very first pages of the series, given to him by a family friend, young Albert Einstein would have read about a thought experiment in which a bullet is fired at a passing train. For the gunner standing at the side of the tracks, the bullet appears to fly straight through. But from the perspective of a passenger inside a moving railroad car, the projectile cuts across at an angle. Motion, after all, is relative.

The same is true, Bernstein went on to explain, for starlight striking Earth as it moves through its orbit — an astronomer must lead with his telescope as a duck hunter does with his gun — but with a crucial difference. Whether Earth is approaching the star or receding from it, the velocity of the light beam is the same. "Since each kind of light proves to be of exactly the same speed," Bernstein wrote, "the law of the speed of light can well be called the most general of all of nature's laws."

And so a meme was planted in Einstein's brain.Years later, he acknowledged Bernstein's books as an inspiration, but it is jarring to learn, in new biographies by Walter Isaacson and Jürgen Neffe, how specific the influence may have been. Elsewhere in the series, Bernstein asked his readers to imagine being conveyed through space by an electromagnetic wave — the seed, perhaps, of Einstein's famous fantasy of riding bareback on a light beam.

The contradictions this notion posed — what can a light wave be when you're waving along with it? — inspired his special theory of relativity.Later on, as Einstein assembled the pieces, he may have recalled another early favorite: Felix Eberty's "The Stars and the Earth," in which extraterrestrial observers viewing this planet at various distances in space see different stages of our history. Since light travels at a finite speed, looking out through a telescope is like looking back in time. As Neffe puts it, "The young Einstein had his lifelong topics handed to him on a platter." Even ideas as startling as special relativity come with a pedigree. Einstein's was the brain where certain thought beams happened to collide. Genius, if there is such a thing, lies in knowing what to do with the debris.

A great strength of both these biographies is to show, as Neffe puts it, "why Einstein had to discover the theory of relativity."

Einstein's story of his boyhood reaction to a compass ("Something deeply hidden had to be behind things") has been told many times. Just as influential may have been the dynamos and other equipment that his father and uncle were installing to bring electricity to towns in Germany.

A moving magnet generates electricity, and moving electricity generates a magnetic field — another relativistic knot whose untying led to special relativity.

Einstein's early exposure to electromagnetic gadgets made him a natural for a job in the Swiss patent office — just as industrial Europe was seeking ways to synchronize clocks for coordinating military maneuvers and making the trains run on time.

As the Harvard historian Peter Galison has written, Einstein had a front-row seat at a parade of new technologies involving space and time. Happenstance by happenstance, he was being edged into position to make his great discoveries.

There are many good biographies of this man, ranging from Ronald Clark's accessible, encyclopedic "Einstein: The Life and Times" to Abraham Pais' idiosyncratic and demanding "Subtle Is the Lord," with several stops along the way (Jeremy Bernstein, Philipp Frank, Banesh Hoffmann).

Their somewhat sanitized nature, glossing over Einstein's messy divorce and womanizing, was remedied by Dennis Overbye in "Einstein in Love." It's a welcome surprise to find there is still room for not one but two more life stories.

The take by Isaacson, known for his lives of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, is likely to get the most attention. Occasioned by the release of more Einstein papers, his book re-creates events with a richness not possible before.

Isaacson, who cut his teeth as a political correspondent for Time magazine, does a fine job of explaining some difficult science. Neffe's book, covering almost exactly the same ground, was published first in Germany in 2005.

You would never know you were reading a translation. Converted into evocative, idiomatic English by Shelley Frisch, the book abandons the traditional chronological framework to make oblique swipes across Einstein's timeline — like those bullets flying through a train.

One chapter is on his psychological makeup, another on the scientists who influenced him, another on "The Physicist and the Women." Occasionally leaping to the present, Neffe tells the story behind the story, the literary forensics by which modern-day Einstein sleuths piece together what he knew when.

Sometimes this jumping around can be disorienting. Isaacson's traditional approach is probably better for Einstein beginners. But if you already know the story, Neffe's book might tell you something new.

As Einstein's life unfolded, special relativity led to general relativity, linking gravity and the tug of acceleration as neatly as the earlier theory had linked space and time. Because of the politicking of the Nazi physicist Philipp Lenard, Einstein was denied a Nobel Prize for this "Jewish physics."

As a compromise, he got one for explaining the photoelectric effect, his contribution to a quantum mechanics whose vision of a dice-rolling deity he came to hate and reject.In the late 1920s we find him, pushing 50, trying to overthrow quantum physics by subsuming it into an all-encompassing theory.

"The highest and ultimate aim of our science," he had read in the Bernstein books, "will always be to adopt the most straightforward possible approach for all things, to trace back all facts to one explanation." But this time his instincts led him astray."Einstein Reduces All Physics to 1 Law," proclaimed the New York Times on Jan. 25, 1929. "Hypothesis Opens Visions of Persons Being Able to Float in Air…. " But that theory crashed and burned, as did each version thereafter.

Einstein died a quarter-century later, in Princeton, N.J.; his ashes were scattered on the Delaware River, but not before a pathologist had swiped his brain. Neurological studies were inconclusive, suggesting that there was nothing organically special in there. "The relevant question," Isaacson writes, "was how his mind worked, not his brain." He was curious, tenacious, rebellious, with a passion to know — the right man, in the right place, at the right time.

Many promises of stem cell research

2007-04-26T14:19:00.000+08:00

By Sade Oguntola

Stem cells have been dogged by political and ethical controversies because some are derived from discarded human embryos, and because of fear and confusion about links with human reproductive cloning.

The future of stem cell therapies was thrown deeper into doubt in late 2005, when a leader of the field - Woo Suk Hwang, South Korea’s stem cell king” - was found to have forged key discoveries and flouted ethical protocols. So has the stem cell miracle been postponed? No.
There exists a widespread controversy over stem cell research that emanates from the techniques used in the creation and usage of stem cells. Embryonic stem cell research is particularly controversial because, with the present state of technology, starting a stem cell line requires the destruction of a human embryo and/or therapeutic cloning.

Opponents of the research argue that this practice is a slippery slope to reproductive cloning and tantamount to the instrumentalisation of a human being. Contrarily, some medical researchers in the field argue that it is necessary to pursue embryonic stem cell research because the resultant technologies are expected to have significant medical potential, and that the embryos used for research are only those meant for destruction anyway (as a product of invitro fertilisation).

This, in turn, conflicts with opponents in the pro-life movement, who argue that an embryo is a human being and therefore entitled to dignity even if legally slated for destruction. The ensuing debate has prompted authorities around the world to seek regulatory frameworks and highlighted the fact that stem cell research represents a social and ethical challenge. However, there still exists a great deal of social and scientific uncertainty surrounding stem cell research, which could possibly be overcome through public debate and future research.

Medical researchers however believe that stem cell therapy has the potential to radically change the treatment of human diseases. A number of adult stem cell therapies already exist, particularly bone marrow transplants that are used to treat leukemia. In the future, medical researchers anticipate being able to use technologies derived from stem cell research to treat a wider variety of diseases including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries, and muscle damage, amongst a number of other impairments and conditions.

Many achievements of stem cell research no doubt will help overcome the uncertainty around these researches , including the replacement teeth that was grown from scratch and implanted into the mouths of adult mice. A similar technique to this might one day help to replace missing teeth in humans. Takashi Tsuji at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan and his colleagues extracted single tooth mesenchymal and epithelial cells - the two cell types that develop into a tooth - from mouse embryos. They persuaded these cells to multiply and injected them into a drop of collagen gel. Within days, the cells formed tooth buds, the early stage of normal tooth formation.

The team extracted teeth from adult mice and transplanted the tooth buds into the cavities, where they developed into teeth with a normal structure and composition. The engineered teeth also developed a healthy blood supply and nerve connections. Other researchers have previously grown intact teeth from engineered tooth buds implanted in the kidneys of mice.

They stopped short of showing that engineered buds could develop into teeth in the jaw. Adult stem cells can be made to turn into blood or any of the body’s tissues, too. Doubts have grown, but now a prominent skeptic has shown that the claim seems to be true. They formed all the cell types found in blood.

Catherine Verfaillie of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis demonstrated the existence of Multipotent Adult Progenitor Cells (MAPCs) in 2002, isolated from bone marrow, a class of stem cells that normally form muscle and bone. Insulin-secreting cells created from human embryonic stem cells for the first time is also raising hopes of a limitless supply of cells that could be transplanted into people with type 1 diabetes. Emmanuel Baetge and his colleagues at Novocell in San Diego, California, used a cocktail of chemicals to coax the stem cells to form pancreatic. The cells produce as much insulin as normal pancreatic islet cells, but unlike adult islet cells, these do not appear to be regulated by sugar levels. Baetge is confident they can overcome this problem.

If they succeed, the company has also developed a way to coat the cells in a polymer called polyethylene glycol, which would prevent them from being rejected by the recipient’s immune system, thus allowing sugar, insulin and other signaling molecules to filter in and out. A leading cause of blindness could one day be treatable using stem cell therapy. Rats with a degenerative eye disease similar to macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness in older people, have had their vision rescued by implants derived from human embryonic stem cells.

A team led by Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, was able to persuade human embryonic stem cells to grow into cells resembling retinal pigment epithelial cells. These are the cells which support the photoreceptors in the retina, and without them the photoreceptors do not survive. When injected into rats with failing vision, the cells boosted the thickness of their degraded retinas. The visual acuity of the treated rats seemed to be around 70 per cent of normal - about twice as good as if they had not been treated.

The promise by stem cell to combat childhood brain disease, the first clinical safety trial of a purified human fetal stem cell product, was tried out. The trial could pave the way for neural stem cell transplants to treat a range of brain and spinal cord disorders. A team from the Oregon Health and Science University Doernbecher Children’s Hospital actually treated six children suffering from the inherited neurodegenerative condition, Batten’s disease – also known as neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (NCL)with this neural stem cell transplant technology. The children had injections of neural stem cells that have been purified – isolated from other cell types – and grown from donated human fetal tissue. The stem cell product and isolation technique was developed by Stem Cells Inc, of Palo Alto, California, which is sponsoring the trial.
Could stem cells help heal damaged livers? This was the result that a pioneering treatment that used bone marrow cells from bodies of nine Japanese patients with cirrhosis is saying is really possible. The procedure could potentially ease the symptoms of cirrhosis and make a liver transplant unnecessary. “None of the patients was cured, but evidence from blood samples and liver scans suggested that their organs were functioning better six months after treatment,” said Isao Sakaida, head of the team at Yamaguchi University in western Japan that developed the treatment. “Another six patients show similar results, but haven’t been followed up yet for six months, and so weren’t included in our report,” he says.

Spinal cord damage promises to benefit from stem cells, a study carried out in injured rats with spinal cord damage suggested.

The team, led by Michael Fehlings at the Toronto Western Research Institute, Canada, used stem cells taken from mice brains. They injected a finely tuned cocktail of growth hormones, anti-inflammatory drugs and the cells into rats with crushed spines.

Although those rats not given the stem cell treatment naturally regained some of their hind limb function two weeks after the injury, they were however extremely uncoordinated. The stem cell treatment improved limb function, although it did not completely restore it.

Fehlings and his teammate found that while 30 per cent of the transplanted cells survived if the procedure took place two to three weeks after the rats suffered spinal cord damage, this number plummeted to five per cent transplantation that occurred between six and eight weeks after the injury.

No doubt stem cell is of immense importance to man’s existence, but the ethical issues must be resolved just as the several disreputes associated with the research need to be attended to properly.Will medical care be tranformed by this technology, time will tell.

Scientists discover new genus of frogmouth bird in Solomon Islands

2007-04-21T14:50:00.000+08:00

A new genus of frogmouth bird is seen in the top right of this photograph taken April 18, 2007. It was found in the Solomon Islands by Florida Museum of Natural History ornithologists Andrew Kratter and David Steadman. New bird genera are rare discoveries --- only one per year is typically announced globally. Steadman believes the newly named Solomon Islands Frogmouth bird (Rigidipenna inexpectata) may be closely related to a genus of frogmouth bird found in the Philippines, (Batrachostomus), shown in the lower left. Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History

New genera of living birds are rare discoveries — fewer than one per year is announced globally. David Steadman and Andrew Kratter, ornithologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, turned up the surprising new discovery on a collecting expedition in the Solomon Islands. Theirs is the first frogmouth from these islands to be caught by scientists in more than 100 years. They immediately recognized it was something different.

Kratter and Steadman are co-authors to a study analyzing the frogmouth’s morphology, or physical form, and DNA in comparison to two other living genera of frogmouths. The findings are published in the April print edition of Ibis: The International Journal of Avian Science, in a paper that describes the bird as a new genus and species, now named Rigidipenna inexpectata.

“This discovery underscores that birds on remote Pacific islands are still poorly known, scientifically speaking,” Steadman said. “Without the help of local hunters, we probably would have overlooked the frogmouth.” Originally, the bird was misclassified as a subspecies of the Australian Marbled Frogmouth, Podargus ocellatus.

The blunder went undetected for decades, until a collecting trip led by Kratter in 1998 turned up a specimen on Isabel, a 1,500-square-mile island in the Solomons. Today, the only museum specimen of this bird in the world, with an associated skin and skeleton, is housed at the Florida Museum. Frogmouths are predatory birds named for their strikingly wide, strong beak that resembles a frog’s mouth; but their beak also sports a small, sharp hook more like an owl’s. Steadman said their beaks are like no other bird’s in the world.

They eat insects, rodents, small birds — and yes, even frogs. For perspective on the scale of evolutionary difference between genera, consider that modern humans and Neanderthals are different species within the same genus (Homo), while chimpanzees are our living relatives from a closely related genus (Pan), but that we share the same taxonomic family (Hominidae) with our chimp cousins.

The Solomon Islands Frogmouth differs from other frogmouths in a number of significant ways. First, it is probably not as accomplished of a flier because its eight tail-feathers, instead of the typical 10 to 12 on other frogmouths, curtail its lift potential, and its much coarser feathers reduce maneuverability.

These are island adaptations that work to keep the bird on the island,” Steadman said. Second, it has distinct barring on the primary wing feathers and tail feathers, where other frogmouths are more uniform. Its speckles are larger, and the white spots on its breast and underbelly are more pronounced than on other frogmouths. Two other genera of frogmouths exist: one in southeast Asia and the other in Australia and New Guinea.

The Solomon Islands Frogmouth is known to inhabit three islands: Isabel, Bougainville and Guadalcanal. Van Remsen, curator of birds at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, said that this new frogmouth genus serves as a poignant reminder that birds of the tropics, particularly from southeast Asia to Melanesia, have been paid scant attention by science.

“They’ve barely been studied, much of what we know comes from antiquated or casual observations,” Remsen said. “The biology of birds in these regions is, to a great extent, obscured by stale, hand-me-down classifications from an earlier era.

A combination of detailed morphological and genetic analyses reveal that this frogmouth — formerly dismissed as just a race of an existing species — actually cannot be placed confidently in any existing genus, and so the data demand naming a new one.” Storrs Olson, a senior zoologist with the Smithsonian Institution, said that frogmouths are an enigmatic group of birds to begin with.

“That this should prove to be such a distinctive new genus, which it unquestionably is, has profound biogeographical implications and represents a real breakthrough in elucidating the evolutionary history of the family,” Olson said. Nigel Cleere of the The Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom is the lead author for the paper and additional co-authors include: Michael Braun and Christopher Huddleston of the Smithsonian Institution, Christopher Filardi of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum and Guy Dutson.
Source: University of Florida

Embryonic stem cell pioneer chose to publish, not patent

2007-04-20T16:15:00.000+08:00

By Terri Somers
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Ariff Bongso has spent years studying days-old human embryos created through test-tube fertilization.

In the early 1990s, Bongso, a National University of Singapore scientist, figured out how to help these embryos grow for days outside the womb. That discovery almost doubled the success rate of the procedure.

Then one day, as he inspected some embryos – which look like globes of gel with an outer cluster of 100 to 200 stem cells and a dark, inner mass of about 40 to 50 cells – an idea came to him “like a flash.”

If all 210 cell types of the human body come from that inner cell mass, could he extract those cells and grow them in a petri dish? Could he control how they grew and evolved, and direct them to become a specific cell type? Similar work had been done on mice; why not humans?
That inspiration in 1994 led Bongso, now 60, to become the first scientist to derive human stem cells from an embryo. In the process, he laid the foundation for a field that many people hope will lead to new therapies for diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and cancer – and that others oppose because it destroys embryos.

“Bongso made the connection between his area of expertise, human embryology, and stem cells, and just went for it,” said Jeanne Loring, a stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla. “That's how great scientific discoveries are made, for the sake of curiosity.”

But Bongso never patented his work.
For almost a decade, the fame and financial benefit of being the first to derive human embryonic stem cells has been heaped upon James Thomson and the University of Wisconsin.

In 1998, the university received its first U.S. patents for Thomson's work growing monkey and human embryonic stem cells. The university's three patents give it control of all human embryonic stem cells used in the United States. Anyone in the nation who wants to conduct research using the cells must receive a license from the university, which is reported to charge as much as $250,000.

On April 2, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a ruling that may invalidate the Wisconsin patents. Bongso's work was identified as proof that what Thomson did was not new and unique.

Loring and two nonprofit groups, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica and the New York-based Public Patent Foundation, had filed a challenge of the Thomson patent in July.

The university, which can appeal the ruling at the patent office and also could take its appeal to federal court, has said it is confident the patents will be upheld and that the challenge is fueled by scientists who want to use groundbreaking science without paying a fee.

Bongso had not been following the debate very closely. During a rare interview in his office in Singapore last year, Bongso said he did not want to get involved.

“All I would hope for is that someone find a beneficial use for these mysterious cells in the form of a treatment for some of the incurable diseases that plague mankind,” he said.
Recently, he seemed pleased to hear of the patent office decision.

“My group and I feel elated that our work has been recognized because we were toiling in obscurity in a tiny lab in Singapore for many years, trying to make a difference to mankind,” Bongso said.
Stem cell research is a hot topic right now. But in the early 1990s, the hot field was in vitro, or test-tube, fertilization. Bongso was in the thick of it.
When Bongso figured out how to pull stem cells out of donated human embryos, he thought it was “hot stuff.”

He wrote a scientific paper describing his methods and results. Then he sent the article to the journal Human Reproduction.

“It is the journal in the IVF world, and I thought only people in IVF would be interested in my discovery,” Bongso said.

He never considered broader-circulation scientific publications such as Nature or Science.
He also never considered patenting his discovery.

“The climate in Asia at that time was publish, not patent,” Bongso said. “Publish for scientific glory.”

In October 1994, his article was published – but it failed to generate much interest.
Bongso forged ahead, concentrating on growing the stem cells on fallopian tube cells, which had proved to be the trick with embryos. His method never allowed the stem cells to grow past two generations.
“Through 1995, 1996 and 1997, no one seemed interested in my work,” Bongso said. “A scientist gauges his work based on the interest that other scientists show in carrying forward his work. When there was no interest, I lost interest. I moved on.”
He redirected his focus to human fertilization.

The lack of interest in human embryonic stem cells was a result of several things, primarily the fact that scientists were immersed in mouse embryonic stem cells, said Loring, from the Burnham Institute.

“There were so many things you could do with mouse stem cells at the time; no one was really thinking about humans,” she said. “And there was also an issue of access to human embryos.”
Long before Bongso made his stem cell discovery, Thomson visited his department at the National University of Singapore to see what Bongso's team was doing in in vitro fertilization.
Both scientists had a background in veterinary science.

Thomson worked with primates. Bongso had done notable work at the behest of the United Nations, figuring out what was causing infertility among water buffalo, a crucial work animal in South Asia.

As a result, Bongso said he considers Thomson a friend.

In the late 1990s, Thomson began applying for a U.S. patent on his technique for deriving stem cells from a primate (monkey) embryo. After several initial denials and revisions, Thomson received his first patent in 1998. In that patent, he said that a few months after pulling stem cells out of a nonhuman primate embryo, he did it with a human embryo.

Thomson's work went further. He figured out how to grow several generations of stem cells, creating stem cell lines.

“The steps he used are mine,” Bongso said.

“But there was no patent on the process, and the culture of science in the U.S. is patent or perish: Create wealth from your research. Only recently has the life science drive in Singapore changed our culture.”

Thomson declined to be interviewed for this story.

Bongso was quick to credit Thomson for growing several generations of stem cell colonies in 1998. And he reflected on what his lab did wrong.

“We were (separating) our embryonic stem cells into single cells (in separate dishes) for further propagation not realizing that these cells had the unique behavior of being 'social,' ” Bongso said. “This means they preferred neighboring cells of their same type in close contact with them for further successful propagation.”

In retrospect, Bongso had the crucial material – embryos – but did not have the technique that Thomson mastered working with primates and stem cells, Loring said.

“But Thomson's work was an advance, not an invention,” said Loring, summing up the core argument of the patent challenge.

“Thomson made a very important contribution to science,” said John Simpson of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. “It just wasn't something that was patentable.”

Thomson grew his embryonic stem cells on feeder cells that included mouse cells. The exposure to animal cells has meant the stem cells could never be used in therapies to treat humans.

When Bongso returned to stem cell research, he started trying to develop a method of growing embryonic stem cells on all-human feeder cells, which would erase the contamination concern.
In 2002, Bongso discovered a way to grow stem cells on human feeders. This time, he patented his discovery.

He also wanted to make stem cell lines, or families of stem cells.

Thomson was concurrently doing the same work, said Martin Pera, who runs the stem cell program at University of Southern California.

“Ariff is a delightful person, very pleasant and open, good to work with,” Pera said. “The fact that he published his initial attempts is important. He didn't establish permanent cell lines, but he was a real pioneer in the field.”

Whether that makes Thomson's work an invention rather than an advance is a question better posed to intellectual property experts, Pera said.
Bongso doesn't begrudge Thomson his acclaim.

“My objective is not commercialization,” he said. “I very sincerely hope that some day this science will lead to treatments for diabetes or heart disease. That would be my greatest joy.”
Terri Somers: (619) 293-2028; terri.somers@uniontrib.com

Staunching the brain drain

2007-04-16T11:06:00.000+08:00

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

When Israel's academic and research institutions find themselves in crisis, they needn't try to reinvent the wheel. Many other nations have experience in dealing with similar contingencies, and there is much to be learned from them.

Since educational systems can also learn from each other, a recent symposium on reforming the higher educational system in Israel - held at the Israel Academy of Science and featuring several outstanding people from abroad - was very useful.

Prof. Benno Schmidt, chairman of the board of trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY), nodded at former finance minister Avraham Shochat at the end of his speech and said: "Good luck to you, sir. You have an important assignment. It's time to think boldly in Israel."
Shochat, who since October has been chairing a committee on the reform of higher education, smiled knowingly at Schmidt - former president of Yale and an expert on constitutional law. Shochat's as-yet-unannounced reforms have already provoked a strike by students who fear he will raise tuition.

Schmidt told the audience of several dozen university and college presidents and other academics that he recommended a "fundamental reassessment" of the direction of higher education here, given the current ageing of university faculties, the brain drain of young scholars and scientists, and the decaying research infrastructure due to cutbacks in state financing.
A DECADE ago, then-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani asked Schmidt to head a task force to reform CUNY, the network of public colleges in New York City.

As a visitor from abroad, Schmidt told the symposium that he could "only marvel at productivity and excellence of universities here, especially in scientific and technological research. I'm stunned that your universities have accomplished so much on the budgets they have. But when I hear about the decline in public funding, the superannuation of your faculty [average age 53] and the brain drain, it made me think of times at Yale and CUNY [when reform was needed]."

The US lawyer and academic leader said that during the past quarter century in the US, there has been a "fundamental shift in thinking about the role of universities." As established businesses lost hundreds of thousands of jobs, innovative new businesses coupled with top research have thrived.

"Young people educated at research universities are the driving force behind US economic growth, and such higher education is seen as the only real source of future prosperity. Thus the federal government has made a massive investment in research universities, with $30 billion a year spent by the US National Institutes of Health alone."

Aware that raising tuition is a politically sensitive subject, Schmidt said: "We had riots at CUNY when we announced tuition hikes, but the students came around because there is substantial student support through loans and scholarships. I don't know why the beneficiaries of education should not contribute to its cost."

Schmidt said all New York universities have set up technology transfer companies to make deals with industry for implementing research and sharing profits with researchers.

"At Columbia University alone, the discoveries of just one investigator have brought in over $1 billion in royalties in 12 years."

He also recommended the establishment of teams bringing together scientists in various fields, and endorsed the idea of Hebrew University president Prof. Menachem Magidor to concentrate efforts in a small number of campuses.

Magidor stressed the importance of the universities in carrying out research, as opposed to regional colleges, whose focus is on degrees and vocations.

"What is a research university? It is for promoting new knowledge. It must not only train future leaders of a profession, but also teach students to think out of the box and ask difficult questions. Not all institutions of higher education can do it, so the role of research universities is essential to the future existence of the country."

Admitting that as HU president he was "somewhat biased," Magidor said he advocated the "concentration of research effort in the universities. If not, research will be spread too thinly." He noted that in the US, only 109 academic institutions, out of thousands, can be considered - by Israeli criteria - research universities.

PROF. RICHARD ATKINSON, a psychologist and memory expert at Stanford who is now president of the entire University of California higher education system, described the setup in California, in which 50% of the state's high-school graduates now go to university, college or community college, compared to only 12% a few decades ago.

Those whose school and state-wide test grades are in the highest 12.5% are accepted into university; in the top third by the state university system, and the bottom two-thirds by community colleges. Research programs get little money from the state, but much from the federal government's many agencies and some from private foundations.

Atkinson recommended California's peer-review system, in which grants are given to individuals and groups and not to whole universities, so that the best people are recruited and tenure isn't given to the unproductive.

"If you look at our state's biotech industry, all our top companies are within 25 miles of our great research universities," said Atkinson, who used to be chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, and after whom a mountain in Antarctica has been named. Another important milestone, he noted, was the Bayh-Dole Act, which gave intellectual property rights to the universities in which research was conducted, and not to the government that funded the research - with royalties going to the scientists.

Israel Academy president Prof. Menachem Ya'ari said for decades there were only seven academic universities (plus the Open University) and very few academic colleges. "Budget allocations used to be very haphazard. When a university president wanted a budget increase, the finance minister offered to take him for a ride to the office."

Then the Council of Higher Education's powerful planning and budgets committee was founded, which made the decisions more systematic.

Until the 1990s, Ya'ari continued, Israeli universities enjoyed expansion and relative prosperity. But then there was a change in the political arena, and a demand for more access to higher education. Fifty academic colleges have been established around the country, where little research is conducted. Meanwhile, an "anti-intellectual atmosphere" reduced academia's prestige, and the Treasury took advantage of this by deep budget cuts. "We are at the tail end of that crisis, but still grappling on how to get out of it," Ya'ari said. It was the crisis that led to the appointment of the Shochat Committee.

UNIVERSITY TUITION levels had been examined by a committee every five or six years, but then the Winograd Committee, under pressure from student demonstrations, cut it by 28%. "It was a very significant reduction," said Shochat, "and the government compensated somewhat but not enough."

His committee, he said, has many more issues to discuss than tuition, including how to promote research, the division of labor between teaching and research, and the relationship between academic institutions in the center and in the periphery. Ya'ari heads a sub-committee focusing on how to promote research in academic institutions.

Shochat, a former finance minister and mayor of Arad, said that if nothing major is done, the quality of Israeli universities and research will decline. There is almost no money to hire promising young lecturers, he said. "We must encourage excellence in research and promote the addition of young teaching staff." By the end of April, the subcommittees will bring recommendations, which will be integrated into a single report by June.

While not revealing what his committee will recommend, he said he would not have taken the temporary job unless he felt there was a real intention to increase higher education funds.

Prof. Shlomo Grossman, chairman of the planning and budgeting committee, said that in 2006, its budget was only $1.6 billion. The bright side is that there are many more academic college students in north and south (but unfortunately, a decline in the Jerusalem region). "There are more going to higher education in the Arab and haredi sectors than we ever expected."

But he noted that 48% of university faculty are over 55. Grossman also revealed that half of Israelis doing doctorates or post-doctoral work in the US have no firm plans to return to Israel. "This is a very worrisome warning sign. Israel must bring back and attract the best minds."

Natural discoveries made in New Guinea forest

2007-04-15T10:08:00.000+08:00

by: John Yeld

We were like kids let loose in a candy store! That is how co-leader Dr Bruce Beehler has described a November 2005 expedition by a team of natural scientists to a "Lost World" in the great tropical island of New Guinea.

The team, from the United States, Europe, Australia and Indonesia, was flown in by helicopter to the mist-shrouded Foja Mountains in the least-explored western province of Indonesian New Guinea.

They emerged after 15 days, having made a series of discoveries and re-discoveries, that rocked their respective scientific communities.

"It's a bit of an adventure story and a mystery story and a natural history story," ornithologist and tropical ecologist Beehler told a rapt audience at the Sasol Scifest 2007 science festival in Grahamstown last week.

The vice-president of the Washington-based Conservation International explained that the remote Foja Mountains were extremely difficult to get to.

The closest community, where the scientific community had their base camp and from where they flew out into the mountains, was a small coastal village occupied by about 150 people.

"They are a forest people - virtually everything they have and use is taken from the forest which is a very rich tropical rainforest. It's not an easy life but it's a rich life, and it's a nice place to be."

It took us about 18 months to get permission from the local stewards, the people who own this forest, to be able to go in."

"They had to get to trust us, think of us as partners and not as exploiters who are going to take something away. And that's not an easy explanation for these local people because most of the foreigners who come to a place like this are there looking for something - gas, oil, gold, copper or nickel!

The forest is all they have - it's their patrimony, and they take this patrimony and any trespassing very seriously."There's not a single village above about 70m in the Foja Mountain region, Beehler explained."

So basically there's no-one living in the foothills or the uplands, and in fact we could find no evidence of any trail or hunting camp where we went, there's no human impact. "It was really quite stunning. Essentially, you have a 300 000ha virgin forest with no people, no trails, no trash and no trouble. That's what really makes it remarkable to us."They established a camp on the edge of a natural clearing - a moss bog wetland - at a height of 2 000m."

We were very happy to be there because basically we were in a place that very few people had ever seen. It was a beautiful fairyland, what we call elfin forest or cloud forest or moss forest.

They're very pleasant, interesting places to be - very peaceful, not too hot."For most of the 15 days, their camp was shrouded in mist, rain and fog, but this did not prevent them making discoveries that included what was possibly a new species of forest dragon (like an iguana) and 40 species of frogs of which 20 are new to science. "We really hit the ball out of the park with the frogs!" commented Beehler.

They also found four new butterfly species; a series of previously undescribed plants that included five new palm species; a white-flowered rhododendron with the largest flower of this genus on record.

They also came across new breeding locations for both the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo - described as the rarest creature in the entire Pacific region. They also encountered the giant echidna, an extremely strange egg-laying mammal known as a monotreme (similar to Australia's duck-billed platypus) that also has a pouch like a marsupial and is now also one of New Guinea's rarest mammals because of hunting pressure.

They also secured the first photographs of the previously "lost" Golden-fronted Bowerbird displaying at its incredibly complex bower - a 2m high love tower that it uses to attract a mate - and found the formerly unknown breeding ground of another "lost" bird, the spectacular Six-wired Bird of Paradise.

Both birds were originally known to science only through dried specimens sent to Europe during the 19th century plume trade when the use of exotic feathers, and even whole birds, on women's hats was all the rage.

"The male and female (Bird of Paradise) came into our camp on the third day we were there and did a display right in front is us, which really was mind-boggling," said Beehler.

Probably their most remarkable scientific find was the discovery of a new species of Honeyeater, the first new bird species for New Guinea since 1942 and which Beehler is naming after his wife Carol.

Beehler, who is planning a return expedition later this year, commented in an earlier radio interview:"It's really as close as you can get to nirvana for an ornithologist or a tropical ecologist. It's really very special."

Dust storms causing global warming on Mars?

2007-04-05T19:36:00.000+08:00

By Ker Than

Shifting dust storms on Mars might be contributing to global warming there that is shrinking the planet's southern polar ice caps, scientists say.

Computer simulations similar to those used to predict weather here on Earth show that the bright, windblown dust and sand particles affects Mars’ albedo—the amount of sunlight reflected from the planet’s surface.

The research, detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Nature, suggests these albedo variations play an important role in the climate of Mars. It could also potentially explain how global dust storms are triggered on the red planet.

A darkening world

Researchers from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey fed two albedo maps of the Martian surface into a computer model called the Mars general circulation model (MGCM).

The model calculated the surface temperature and wind intensity on Mars at the times the maps were made. Both maps show the same area on Mars, but one was made using Viking data collected in the late 1970s, while the other was created with Mars Global Surveyor data collected in recent years.

Across the past two decades, the model showed the surface temperature of Mars has increased by about 0.65 degrees Celsius (1.17 degrees Fahrenheit).

“That magnitude of change is comparable to what we’ve estimated for global warming on Earth over the last 100 years,” said study participant Paul Geissler of the USGS.

The model also found that winds have strengthened over regions with the lowest albedo.

The researchers think all these events are related and have proposed a mechanism by which lower albedo drives wind circulation, creating even lower albedo. They think it works like this: In regions where winds blow away dust, the exposed dark ground absorbs sunlight and heats up; some of this heat is transferred into the atmosphere and heats up the air. Just like on Earth, the imbalance in the atmosphere’s heat increases wind circulation above those regions.

“This could lead to a positive feedback effect in which the surface changes strengthen the winds that are producing the surface changes,” Geissler said in a telephone interview.

Winds of change

The wind speeds could ramp up until a threshold is reached, at which point conditions are ripe for a dust storm that swamps the entire planet, the researchers speculate.

“A dust storm is kind of like a big party that picks up dust and tosses it everywhere,” said study leader Lori Fenton of the NASA Ames Research Center in California. “It takes forever to clean up after a party.”

Once the dust storm subsides, particles fall out of the atmosphere and are redistributed over a large portion of the planet. “You can almost think of a big dust storm as a resetting mechanism,” Fenton told SPACE.com.

The researchers think they are on the right track because the computer model predicts a build-up of heat in the atmosphere above Mars’ southern hemisphere that is roughly equal to the amount of energy necessary to account for the diminishment of the planet’s southern polar ice caps that has been observed in recent years.

Scientists have struggled to explain the shrinkage and have blamed it on everything from fluctuations in the sun’s output to natural variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt.

“We haven’t really had a really good explanation for this in the past,” Geissler said. “We found that this mechanism could contribute or possibly explain the rapid sublimation of the south polar cap.”

Pluto discovery, again?

2007-04-04T10:53:00.000+08:00

Just August last year, a meeting was held by the International Astronomical Union, around 424 astronomers voted out Pluto as a planet, thus excluded from our solar system.

This action was reached after group of astronomers and researchers did not come up with the real definition of a planet.

Now Pluto will not be included as a planet, what could be the effect on our science world? to the astronomy in particular.

This question will remain unanswered as long as these think-tank mind of astronomers do not settle their debates.

So much for our science learning during our primary years in school, surely it would go to
waste....

Secret language of whales revealed

2007-04-02T20:09:00.000+08:00

Deep below the ocean’s surface, blue whales are singing and for the first time, scientists think they know why.Researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recorded the sounds and say they offer new insight into the behavior of the passenger jet-sized animals.

Using tags suctioned to the whales’ bodies, researchers tracked the whales and found that as they feed, they send out calls to let each other know where they are, each group employing a different sound.

The noises play a similarly important role during mating season when males sing long, low-pitched songs to indicate their reproductive fitness to females. Females select mates based on size and estimate that by evaluating males’ songs: Larger males can take in more air and hold notes longer.

The research appeared in the January issue of the Marine Ecology Progress Series journal.A related study, also by Scripps researchers, found that there are distinct “dialects” of whale-speak in different regions of the ocean. The finding could have implications for preservation efforts.

Can We Survive on the Moon?

2007-04-01T00:17:00.000+08:00

Overcoming the hazards of lunar life may depend on exploiting the paradoxical potential of the moon's gritty dust.

by Guy Gugliotta

When Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind” onto the surface of the moon in 1969, his booted foot sank into a layer of fine gray dust, leaving an imprint that would become the subject of one of the most famous photographs in history. Scientists called the dust lunar regolith, from the Greek rhegos for “blanket” and lithos for “stone.” Back then scientists regarded the regolith as simply part of the landscape, little more than the backdrop for the planting of the American flag.

No more. Lunar scientists have learned a lot about the moon since then. They’ve found that one of the biggest challenges to lunar settlement—as vexing as new rocketry or radiation—is how to live with regolith that covers virtually the entire lunar surface from a depth of 7 feet to perhaps 100 feet or more. It includes everything from huge boulders to particles only a few nanometers in diameter, but most of it is a puree created by uncountable high-speed micrometeorites that have been crashing into the moon unimpeded by atmosphere for more than 3 billion years. A handful of regolith consists of bits of stone, minerals, particles of glass created by the heat from the tiny impacts, and accretions of glass, minerals, and stone welded together.

Eons of melting, cooling, and agglomerating have transformed the glass particles in the regolith into a jagged-edged, abrasive powder that clings to anything it touches and packs together so densely that it becomes extremely hard to work on at any depth below four inches.

For those who would explore the moon—whether to train for exploring Mars, to mine resources, or to install high-precision observatories—regolith is a potentially crippling liability, an all-pervasive, pernicious threat to machinery and human tissue. After just three days of moonwalks, regolith threatened to grind the joints of the Apollo astronauts’ space suits to a halt, the same way rust crippled Dorothy’s Tin Man. Special sample cases built to hold the Apollo moon rocks lost their vacuum seals because of rims corrupted by dust. For a permanent lunar base, such mechanical failures could spell disaster.

A site near the south pole is favored for a lunar base because of the area’s relatively moderate temperatures and abundant sunlight.

Regolith can play havoc with hydraulics, freeze on-off switches, and turn ball bearings into Grape Nuts. When moondust is disturbed, small particles float about, land, and glue themselves to everything. Regolith does not brush off easily, and breathing it can cause pulmonary fibrosis, the lunar equivalent of black lung. There is nothing like it on Earth. “Here you have geological processes that tend to sort and separate,” says geologist Douglas Rickman of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “On the moon you have meteorite impacts that mix everything together.”

But space planners also see a brighter side to the story. Forty-two percent of regolith is oxygen by weight. Extract that and it will help make breathable air, rocket fuel, and, when mixed with hydrogen, water. Heat up regolith and it will harden into pavement, bricks, ceramic, or even solar panels to provide electricity. Cloak a living area in a thick enough blanket of it and it will enable astronauts to live radiation-free. If regolith is the curse of lunar exploration, it may also prove to be a blessing.

These issues lay dormant for three decades until January 2004, when President Bush announced his “Vision for Space Exploration” and gave NASA a new mandate: Return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them on to Mars. More details of this plan emerged last December at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Houston.

Scientists are now thinking about what is needed to make the vision a reality. While there is debate about the political will to sustain lunar exploration (see “The Future of NASA,” DISCOVER, September 2006), the technical hurdles are beyond dispute. The next person to step on the moon again will be taking humanity where it has never gone before, because that person will be settling in to stay—and that will be extremely hard to do.

NASA’s current plans call for a series of “precursor” robotic lunar missions to test technologies and gather information. These will begin next year, long before NASA’s new Orion spaceship is ready to loft its four-astronaut crew moonward. By the time that happens, perhaps around 2018, planners hope to have resolved some key unknowns: whether there are ice deposits at one of the lunar poles, whether a space suit can be made that can survive multiple journeys across the dust-ridden landscape, and whether the human body can survive dust, lengthy stays in reduced gravity, and prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation.

Burrowing Dinosaurs Uncovered

2007-03-31T21:55:00.000+08:00

Fossils from a family of the first known burrowing dinosaurs have been found by scientists in Montana. The fossils are from an adult and two juveniles. The bones are 95 million years old and were unearthed in a chamber at the end of a 2.1 meter long tunnel that was filled with sediment. The researchers say their discovery is the first definitive evidence that some dinosaurs dug dens and cared for their young in them.

"Burrowing also represents a mechanism by which small dinosaurs may have exploited the extreme environments of polar latitudes, deserts and high mountain areas," David Varricchio and colleagues write their paper.

The ability to burrow would have given it many advantages, said Anthony Martin, a co-author, such as surviving harsh climatic conditions or catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions -- rocks found in the sediment suggest there were active volcanos nearby. "Burrows have a nice way of evening out environmental conditions, like maintaining a stable temperature and humidity."

The researchers note that dinosaurs' snout, shoulder girdle and pelvis have structures that one would expect to see in an animal that dug into the ground. The burrow was a sloping twisting tunnel more than two metres (6.5 feet) long and about 70 centimetres (28 inches) wide. It is similar to burrows made today by striped hyenas and puffins.

"At first it seemed too big for the burrow," says Varricchio. However, modern mammals squeeze into tight places for protection, he reasons. "A tight fit precludes anyone meaner or bigger from getting in there," he said.

These burrowing dinosaurs represent a new species and has been given the scientific name Oryctodromeus cubicularis, which is a mix of Greek and Latin meaning "digging runner of the lair". They were hypsilophodonts, a group that includes the much larger duck-billed hadrosaurs. Based on the preserved vertebrae, the adult would have been about 2.1 meters (6.8 feet) from nose to tail, most of which was the tail itself. The whole animal probably weighed 22 to 32 kilograms, Varricchio estimates. So its body was approximately the size of a german shepard.

The tunnel ended in a chamber, where the skeletal remains of an adult and two juveniles were found. Unfortunately, the bones were disarticulated.

"It's not like they were sitting in the burrow and a flooding event filled the chamber with sediment and they were entombed. They must have died, undergone decay and then the burrow was filled."

The juveniles are more than half grown, suggesting that the parents cared for their young for a significant period.

This find is reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a journal of Britain's academy of sciences.

Is the Placebo Effect a Myth?

2007-03-29T14:27:00.000+08:00

by Josie Glausiusz

Taking a swipe at conventional wisdom, medical philosophers Asbj#248;rn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche of the University of Copenhagen recently proclaimed the placebo effect— one of the best-known but least understood curative processes— a myth.

After analyzing 114 placebo-controlled trials, they concluded that placebos are generally no more effective at relieving disease symptoms than no treatment at all. Now the attackers are under fire from placebo researchers who say the public is being misled.

"That article was a travesty," says neurobiologist Howard Fields of the University of California at San Francisco, who in the 1970s demonstrated that placebos appear to relieve pain by inducing the body to release opiates.

A new study coauthored by neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin Medical School in Italy bolsters this notion. Benedetti found that patients who were informed they were receiving an intravenous analgesic experienced more pain relief than those who received it automatically via an infusion machine.

The painkiller's action was enhanced by the knowledge it was being given— a clear placebo effect. In a little-publicized portion of their paper, even Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche concede that placebos can relieve pain.

Fields is especially irate that Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche lumped together disparate trials, some of which found a placebo effect, some of which did not. In effect, the trials cancelled each other out. Why, then, have reporters rushed to embrace their results? Benedetti blames a reluctance to accept the power of the mind. "It is a sort of sigh of relief: 'Aah, we knew medicines were real and not the result of some psychological stuff.'

Why We Sleep

2007-03-28T14:31:00.000+08:00

Does sleep allow us to cull out and delete the throngs of ordinary, unimportant memories from each day?

by Anne Wootton

Our need for sleep is somehow tied to our ability to remember. Slumber is known to improve recall in creatures from fruit flies to humans, and the reigning theory among neuroscientists has been that the waves of brain activity during deep sleep reactivate neurons that were triggered during the day, strengthening neuronal connections and cementing them into solid memories. Now Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, says sleep scientists have it all wrong: We don't sleep to remember, we sleep to forget.

About 1,000 times a night, billions of neurons undergo a synchronous one-second burst of non-REM electrical activity. The longer a person has been sleep-deprived, the bigger the initial burst. Throughout the night the bursts become progressively smaller, until they finally disappear completely just before waking. Most researchers interpret this activity as the brain slowly reinforcing synaptic connections that already exist, but Tononi noticed that after each wave, the brain goes completely silent, which never happens when we're awake.

As we sleep, says Tononi, the brain isn't building but rather downscaling, and these silences between waves play a key role. "Going up and down, up and down, basically all the neurons fire and then all are silent—it's a wonderful way for the brain to tell the synapses to get weaker," Tononi explains. He suspects the progressive weakening allows only the strong connections to survive.

The theory is unorthodox, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Without the ability to pare away unneeded information as we sleep, our brains would face a serious energy shortage as well as a space crunch: Stronger synapses are typically bigger, and real estate in the brain is precious. By proportionally weakening synapses, the brain ensures that they retain the same strength relative to each other. So when we wake up each morning, all of our synapses are weaker, and some have vanished. With them, our smallest memories from each day may be lost forever.

Grace in Space

2007-03-27T20:43:00.000+08:00

A pair of satellites map subtle variations in Earth’s gravitational field, revealing secret craters, undersea mountains, and the impact of climate change.

by Sam Flamsteed

If the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne came back to life, the 18th-century Astronomer Royal of Great Britain would probably have no trouble grasping the idea behind NASA’s remote sensing GRACE mission. Maskelyne proposed a remarkably similar experiment himself in a presentation to the Royal Society in 1772. “If the attraction of gravity be exerted, as Sir Isaac Newton supposes, not only between the large bodies of the universe, but between the minutest particles of which these bodies are composed . . . it will necessarily follow, that every hill must, by its attraction, alter the direction of gravitation in heavy bodies in its neighbourhood . . . .”

That’s exactly what GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, detects. Every 94 minutes or so, twin satellites whip once around Earth at an altitude of 310 miles, taking 30 days to cover the planet’s entire surface, then they do it again and again, sensing variations in local gravity. GRACE maps local variations in the force of gravity over Earth’s surface, revealing mountain ranges and ocean trenches as well as underground watersheds and other hidden concentrations of mass. A joint venture by NASA and the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, or German Aerospace Center), GRACE looks right past the familiar oceans, continents, and clouds, showing our planet in a fresh light—as a knobby, blobby globe of gravitational ups and downs.

Among other things, GRACE may have found a crater deep under the Antarctic ice that may mark an asteroid impact greater than the one that doomed the dinosaurs, measured the seafloor displacement that triggered the tsunami of 2004, and quantified changes in subsurface water in the Amazon and Congo river basins. “This is really an entirely new kind of remote sensing,” says project scientist Michael Watkins, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s like when radar or photography was first invented—you start realizing that it can be applied in all sorts of unanticipated ways. We’re still discovering them.”

The notion that Earth’s gravity field could be measured with satellites dates back to the dawn of the space age. In 1958 ground controllers tracking the first American satellite, Explorer 1, noted that its path faithfully traced the planet’s equatorial bulge (created by centrifugal forces generated by the planet’s rotation). By the 1960s rocket scientists realized that smaller, local variations in gravity could have further, unforeseen effects. Missiles carrying nuclear warheads, for example, could be thrown off course if no allowance was made for mountain ranges or valleys.

If Earth were a perfect sphere, perfectly uniform in density and covered to a uniform depth with ocean, the geoid—a word coined by geologists to refer to an imaginary plane located at the average level of the sea’s surface—would be a perfect sphere as well. Since the geoid would be evenly perpendicular to the pull of gravity in all places, that force would always pull you directly toward the precise center of the Earth. But Earth is nowhere near perfect or uniform, which means that gravity doesn’t always point straight down; a mountain range, for example, might divert it slightly to the left.

Understanding the subtleties of Earth’s gravitational field would be useful in many ways. Scientists could learn a lot about the structure of the planet, what it’s made of, and where the crust is thick or thin. A deposit of high-density underground rock, or an undersea mountain, is utterly invisible—yet they, too, skew the geoid away from perfect flatness. Even when the ocean is utterly calm, it isn’t flat. Measurements reveal that some parts of the ocean are a remarkable 390 feet lower than average, and others are 300 feet higher.

While scientists began to appreciate just how useful a map of the geoid could be, engineers were realizing that the most sensible way to measure the variations would be with a pair of satellites, instead of just one. A single orbiter would bob and weave with the gravity field just fine—but monitors would have to measure the ups and downs from the ground continuously by beaming radio waves back and forth. That would require an enormous network of ground stations. Yet two satellites flying far enough apart would experience different gravitational effects, so that only the distance between them must be measured. As the lead satellite approaches a place with more mass than average, it speeds up just a bit from the extra gravitational pull. Shortly thereafter, so does the second. Then, as the higher-mass region falls behind, each satellite is held back a little—again, first the leading, then the trailing satellite. By sending microwaves between the two, it would be possible to calculate that staggered acceleration, and thus infer the change in gravitational pull on Earth’s surface.

New species found in bioblitz

2007-03-25T21:32:00.000+08:00

An intense investigation of a small part of Wellington has uncovered hundreds of previously unknown species.

A 24-hour "bioblitz" in Otari-Wilton's Bush reserve has revealed 1345 new species of animals, plants, fungi and bacteria.

The bioblitz, which has previously been held in Auckland, involved 80 scientists.

Science director Phil Garnock-Jones says the biggest discovery is a new species of cave weta. Professor Garnock-Jones says once scientific tests prove the weta is of a new genus - family - those who discovered it will have to give it a name.

Garnock-Jones says if tests confirm it is a world first discovery it will be used for various research projects. He says it is likely to attract international attention from entomologists.

Source: Newstalk ZB

Researchers hot on the trail of brain cell degeneration

2007-03-21T19:30:00.000+08:00

March 20, 2007 - A research team headed by Academy Research Fellow Michael Courtney has identified a new molecular pathway in neurons. The pathway is a factor in the degeneration of brain cells, which in turn plays an important role in neurological conditions and diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and stroke. Courtney and his team, based at the A. I. Virtanen Institute of the University of Kuopio, joined forces with Docent Eleanor Coffey’s team at the Turku Centre for Biotechnology to carry out the study as part of a series of successful collaborations between the two teams. The results of their study are published in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience.

In a number of neurodegenerative diseases, neurons in the brain are over-stimulated, which triggers programmed cell death, or apoptosis. The study shows that the Rho protein, which has long been recognised as an important player in cancer formation, also plays a key role in the destruction of neurons in disease.

“These surprising findings add an entire pathway to the map of neurodegenerative signalling processes,” says Courtney. “This area of investigation could therefore offer novel therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative diseases”.

Targeting molecular signals

How neurons actually die has been unclear. It is likely that it is associated with a variety of different mechanisms. Research has shown that the destruction of cells be over-stimulation depends on excess entry of calcium into the cells. Researchers have long been trying to map how cells generate destruction signals in response to the calcium, in the hope of finding new targets for drug design.

The object of the study, the Rho protein, belongs to a family of proteins able to influence signals that had been linked to cell degeneration. The two teams’ analysis demonstrated that over-stimulation causes activation of Rho as well as cell destruction signals. Blocking Rho activity by genetic modification keeps the protein in an inactive state, and the nerve cells thus survive a previously toxic level of over-stimulation.

The study identifies a new factor provoking cell degeneration. It is more than likely that future research will uncover more such factors interacting with each other. Investigating these will benefit new forms of treatment and advance research that aims to alleviate symptoms. The researchers behind the study hope that the results can be used in planning new targets for drugs to reduce the cell destruction signals caused by calcium entry. Finding new targets for medicine development is also significant in terms of the economy, owing to the costly treatment of these diseases, both in Finland and globally.

Cooperation between biocentres gets research going

The teams’ study is a perfect example of the cooperation between biocentres in Finland (Biocenter Finland) and international networking. The research was funded mainly by the Academy of Finland and the European Union. The two research teams are part of a Europe-wide consortium, STRESSPROTECT, within the EU Sixth Framework Programme. The consortium aims at generating the basis for novel neuroprotective drugs for neurodegenerative conditions involving over-stimulation of neurons – http://www.neuroprotect.eu

Academy of Finland

Researchers Hot On The Trail Of Brain Cell Degeneration

2007-03-20T15:44:00.000+08:00

Science Daily — A research team headed by Academy Research Fellow Michael Courtney has identified a new molecular pathway in neurons. The pathway is a factor in the degeneration of brain cells, which in turn plays an important role in neurological conditions and diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and stroke. Courtney and his team, based at the A. I. Virtanen Institute of the University of Kuopio, joined forces with Docent Eleanor Coffey's team at the Turku Centre for Biotechnology to carry out the study as part of a series of successful collaborations between the two teams. The results of their study are published in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience.

In a number of neurodegenerative diseases, neurons in the brain are over-stimulated, which triggers programmed cell death, or apoptosis. The study shows that the Rho protein, which has long been recognised as an important player in cancer formation, also plays a key role in the destruction of neurons in disease.

"These surprising findings add an entire pathway to the map of neurodegenerative signalling processes," says Courtney. "This area of investigation could therefore offer novel therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative diseases".

Targeting molecular signals
How neurons actually die has been unclear. It is likely that it is associated with a variety of different mechanisms. Research has shown that the destruction of cells be over-stimulation depends on excess entry of calcium into the cells. Researchers have long been trying to map how cells generate destruction signals in response to the calcium, in the hope of finding new targets for drug design.

The object of the study, the Rho protein, belongs to a family of proteins able to influence signals that had been linked to cell degeneration. The two teams' analysis demonstrated that over-stimulation causes activation of Rho as well as cell destruction signals. Blocking Rho activity by genetic modification keeps the protein in an inactive state, and the nerve cells thus survive a previously toxic level of over-stimulation.

The study identifies a new factor provoking cell degeneration. It is more than likely that future research will uncover more such factors interacting with each other. Investigating these will benefit new forms of treatment and advance research that aims to alleviate symptoms. The researchers behind the study hope that the results can be used in planning new targets for drugs to reduce the cell destruction signals caused by calcium entry. Finding new targets for medicine development is also significant in terms of the economy, owing to the costly treatment of these diseases, both in Finland and globally.

Cooperation between biocentres gets research going

The teams' study is a perfect example of the cooperation between biocentres in Finland (Biocenter Finland) and international networking. The research was funded mainly by the Academy of Finland and the European Union. The two research teams are part of a Europe-wide consortium, STRESSPROTECT, within the EU Sixth Framework Programme. The consortium aims at generating the basis for novel neuroprotective drugs for neurodegenerative conditions involving over-stimulation of neurons
(http://www.neuroprotect.eu).

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Academy of Finland.

Could crazy technology save the planet?

2007-03-18T13:38:00.000+08:00

By SETH BORENSTEIN,
AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - Crazy-sounding ideas for saving the planet are getting a serious look from top scientists, a sign of their fears about global warming and the desire for an insurance policy in case things get worse.

How crazy?

There's the man-made "volcano" that shoots gigatons of sulfur high into the air. The space "sun shade" made of trillions of little reflectors between Earth and sun, slightly lowering the planet's temperature. The forest of ugly artificial "trees" that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. And the "Geritol solution" in which iron dust is dumped into the ocean.

"Of course it's desperation," said Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider. "It's planetary methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. It does come out of the pessimism of any realist that says this planet can't be trusted to do the right thing."

NASA is putting the finishing touches on a report summing up some of these ideas and has spent $75,000 to map out rough details of the sun shade concept. One of the premier climate modeling centers in the United States, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has spent the last six weeks running computer simulations of the man-made volcano scenario and will soon turn its attention to the space umbrella idea.

And last month, billionaire Richard Branson offered a $25 million prize to the first feasible technology to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the air.

Simon "Pete" Worden, who heads NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., says some of these proposals, which represent a field called geoengineering, have been characterized as anywhere from "great" to "idiotic." As if to distance NASA from the issue a bit, Worden said the agency's report won't do much more than explain the range of possibilities.

Scientists in the recent past have been reluctant to consider such concepts. Many fear there will be unintended side effects; others worry such schemes might prevent the type of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are the only real way to fight global warming. These approaches are not an alternative to cutting pollution, said University of Calgary professor David Keith, a top geoengineering researcher.

Last month, Ralph Cicerone, president of the
National Academy of Sciences' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> National Academy of Sciences, told the nation's largest science conference that more research must be done in this field, but no action should be taken yet.

Here is a look at some of the ideas:

The Geritol solution

A private company is already carrying out this plan. Some scientists call it promising while others worry about the ecological fallout.

Planktos Inc. of Foster City, Calif., last week launched its ship, the Weatherbird II, on a trip to the Pacific Ocean to dump 50 tons of iron dust. The iron should grow plankton, part of an algae bloom that will drink up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The idea of seeding the ocean with iron to beef up a natural plankton and algae system has been tried on a small scale several times since 1990. It has both succeeded and failed.

Planktos chief executive officer Russ George said his ship will try it on a larger scale, dumping a slurry of water and red iron dust from a hose into the sea.

"It makes a 25-foot swath of bright red for a very short period of time," George said.

The concept gained some credibility when it was mentioned in the 2001 report by the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which cited it as a possible way to attack carbon emissions.

Small experiments "showed unequivocally that there was a biological response to the addition of the iron," the climate report said. Plankton used the iron to photosynthesize, extract greenhouse gases from the air, and grow rapidly. It forms a thick green soup of all sorts of carbon dioxide-sucking algae, which sea life feast on, and the carbon drops into the ocean.

However, the international climate report also cautioned about "the ecological consequences of large-scale fertilization of the ocean."

Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said large-scale ocean seeding could change the crucial temperature difference between the sea surface and deeper waters and have a dramatic effect on marine life.

Cicerone, a climate scientist who is president of the National Academy of Sciences and advocate for more geoengineering research, called the Geritol solution promising. However, he noted that such actions by a company, or country, can have worldwide effects.

George, Planktos' CEO, said his company consulted with governments around the world and is only following previous scientific research. He said his firm will be dropping the iron in open international seas so he needs no permits. Most important, he said, is that it's such a small amount of iron compared to the ocean volume that it poses no threat.

He said it's unfair to lump his plan in with geoengineering, saying his company is just trying to restore the ocean to "a more ecologically normal and balanced state."

"We're a green solution," George said.

Planktos officials say that for every ton of iron used, 100,000 tons of carbon will be pulled into the ocean. Eventually, if this first large-scale test works, George hopes to remove 3 billion tons of carbon from the Earth's atmosphere, half of what's needed. Some scientists say that's overstated.

Planktos' efforts are financed by companies and individuals who buy carbon credits to offset their use of fossil fuels.

Man-made volcano

When Mount Pinatubo erupted 16 years ago in the Philippines it cooled the Earth for about a year because the sulfate particles in the upper atmosphere reflected some sunlight.

Several leading scientists, from Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen to the late nuclear cold warrior Edward Teller, have proposed doing the same artificially to offset global warming.

Using jet engines, cannons or balloons to get sulfates in the air, humans could reduce the solar heat, and only increase current sulfur pollution by a small percentage, said Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

"It's an issue of the lesser of two evils," he said.

Scientists at the Center for Atmospheric Research put the idea into a computer climate model. The results aren't particularly cheap or promising, said NCAR scientist Caspar Ammann. It would take tens of thousands of tons of sulfate to be injected into the air each month, he said.

"From a practical point of view, it's completely ridiculous," Amman said. "Instead of investing so much into this, it would be much easier to cut down on the initial problem."

Both this technique and the solar umbrella while reducing heating, wouldn't reduce carbon dioxide. So they wouldn't counter a dramatic increase in the acidity of the world's oceans, which happens with global warming, scientists said. It harms sea life, especially coral reefs.

Despite that, Calgary's David Keith is working on tweaking the concept. He wants to find a more efficient chemical to inject into the atmosphere in case of emergency.

Solar umbrella

For far-out concepts, it's hard to beat Roger Angel's. Last fall, the University of Arizona astronomer proposed what he called a "sun shade." It would be a cloud of small Frisbee-like spaceships that go between Earth and the sun and act as an umbrella, reducing heat from the sun.

It really is just like turning down the knob by 2 percent of what's coming from the sun," he said.

The science for the ships, the rocketry to launch them, and the materials to make the shade are all doable, Angel said.

These nearly flat discs would each weigh less than an ounce and measure about a yard wide with three tab-like "ears" that are controllers sticking out just a few inches.

About 800,000 of these would be stacked into each rocket launch. It would take 16 trillion of them — that's million million — so there would be 20 million launches of rockets. All told, Angel figures 20 million tons of material to make the discs that together form the solar umbrella.

And then there's the cost: at least $4 trillion over 30 years, probably more.

"I compare it with sending men to Mars.I think they're both projects on the same scale," Angel said. "Given the danger to Earth, I think this project might warrant some fraction of the consideration of sending people to Mars."

Artificial trees

Scientifically, it's known as "air capture." But the instruments being used have been dubbed "artificial trees" — even though these devices are about as treelike as a radiator on a stick. They are designed to mimic the role of trees in using carbon dioxide, but early renderings show them looking more like the creation of a tinkering engineer with lots of steel.

Nearly a decade ago, Columbia University professor Klaus Lackner, hit on an idea for his then-middle school daughter's science fair project: Create air filters that grab carbon dioxide from the air using chemical absorbers and then compress the carbon dioxide into a liquid or compressed gas that can be shipped elsewhere. When his daughter was able to do it on a tiny scale, Lackner decided to look at doing it globally.

Newly inspired by the $25 million prize offered by Richard Branson, Lackner has fine-tuned the idea. He wants to develop a large filter that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Another chemical reaction would take the carbon from the absorbent material, and then a third process would change that greenhouse gas into a form that could be disposed of.

It would take wind and a lot of energy to power the air capture devices. They would stand tall like cell phone towers on steroids, reaching about 200 feet high with various-sized square filters at the top. Lackner envisions perhaps placing 100,000 of them near wind energy turbines.

Even if each filter was only the size of a television, it could remove about 25 tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is about how much one American produces annually, Lackner said. The captured carbon dioxide would be changed into a liquid or gas that can be piped away from the air capture devices.

Disposal might be the biggest cost, Lackner said.

Disposal of carbon dioxide, including that from fossil fuel plant emissions, is a major issue of scientific and technological research called sequestration. The idea is to bury it underground, often in old oil wells or deep below the sea floor. The Bush Administration, which doesn't like many geoengineering ideas is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on carbon sequestration, but mostly for power plant emissions

On the Net:

The Earth Engineering Center of Columbia University: http://www.seas.columbia.edu/earth/

The National Center for Atmospheric Research: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/

Planktos Inc.: http://www.planktos.com/

Evolution and Extension revealed!

2007-03-18T00:01:00.000+08:00

Study Challenges Theories on Species
Washington Post, DC - RANDOLPH E. SCHMID. AP. WASHINGTON -- More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? It turns out the longtime answer _ the ...

More species develop in cooler climates
Baltimore Sun, MD - Mar 16, 2007
By Randolp E. Schmid. AP. Do more species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? It turns out the longtime answer - the tropics ...

Study Challenges Theories on Species
Forbes, NY - Mar 15, 2007
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID . More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? It turns out the longtime answer ...

Study challenges theories on species
Houston Chronicle, TX - Mar 15, 2007
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID AP Science Writer. © 2007 AP. WASHINGTON — More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? ...

Study challenges theories on species
USA Today - Mar 15, 2007
WASHINGTON (AP) — More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? It turns out the longtime answer — the tropics — may be wrong. ...

Study Challenges Theories on Species
Wyoming News, WY - RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Saturday, March 17, 2007.
WASHINGTON - More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? ...

Researchers debunk theory that species evolve faster in tropics
DailyIndia.com, FL - Mar 16, 2007
Washington, Mar 16: University of British Columbia researchers have found that contrary to common belief, species do not evolve faster in warmer tropical ...

A different take on the diversity of species
Philadelphia Inquirer, PA - Mar 16, 2007
Tropical areas may only seem to have more types because of longer life spans, a study suggests. By Randolph E. Schmid. Associated Press ...

Chill Out To Evolve
Science a Gogo - Mar 15, 2007
Species don't evolve faster in warmer climes as had been thought; rather, it appears to be cooler, more temperate, regions that crank-up speciation rates ...

Study Challenges Theories on Species
AND, South Africa - Mar 15, 2007
By (AND) - www.andnetwork.com. WASHINGTON (AP) -- More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? It turns out the longtime ...

Study challenges theories on species
The Westfall Weekly News, Canada - Mar 15, 2007
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
. WASHINGTON - More species develop in warm, tropical climates or cooler, temperate areas? ...

Species do not evolve faster in warmer climates
HULIQ, NC - Mar 15, 2007
University of British Columbia researchers have discovered that contrary to common belief, species do not evolve faster in warmer climates. ...

The cooler, the better
News24, South Africa -
True, there are more different types of animals in the tropics than in places farther from the equator. But new research suggests that is because tropical ...

Researchers dispute more species in tropics theory
Xinhua, China - Mar 15, 2007
BEIJING, March 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Two researchers in the zoology department at the University of British Columbia are challenging the commonly held theory ...

Life is faster in the temperate zone
Nature.com (subscription), UK - Mar 15, 2007
Most people tend to think of the tropics as the hottest scene on the planet when it comes to spawning new life. But Canadian zoologists have found that it ...

Species evolve faster in cooler climes
New Scientist (subscription), UK - Mar 15, 2007
A male masked tityra (Tityra semifasciata), one of the tropical species included in the study, at a nesting hole in a snag. It diverged from its sister ...

High on Speciation
Science Now, DC - Mar 15, 2007
By John Simpson.
It seems like a no-brainer: To find out where most new species arise, see where most of them live. Take the tropics, home of more than half ...

The Why Files -- whyfiles.org
Why Files - Mar 15, 2007
Ask any conservation biologist, and you'll get the same message: The tropics have at outsize number of species. And you'll probably hear the same ...

Cold climates a hotbed for species turnover, UBC researchers say
CBC Saskatchewan, Canada - Mar 15, 2007
Long-term climate changes have led to a higher turnover of species in northern regions like Canada than in more diverse regions like the Amazon, ...

Evolution is faster in temperate zones
Mongabay.com - Mar 15, 2007
A new study argues that temperate zones are hotbeds of evolution, not tropical areas as conventionally held. The research, published in the March 16 issue ...

Surprising Pace of Evolution and Extinction Revealed
LiveScience.com, NY - Mar 15, 2007
By Ker Than.
New species of birds and mammals evolve faster at high latitudes than in the tropics, but they also go extinct faster, a new study suggests. ...

Pig DNA Sheds Light on Human Migration

2007-03-14T17:26:00.000+08:00

Anna Salleh, ABC Science Online

Ancient pig remains from the hobbit cave on Flores are helping researchers piece together how humans moved from Southeast Asia to the Pacific thousands of years ago.

Most scientists think humans spread east from Taiwan to the Pacific. But an international team, including Professor Alan Cooper of Australia's University of Adelaide, argues the pattern of humans moving out of Southeast Asia with their animals is more complex.

The researchers report their DNA study of domesticated pigs in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Humans have been domesticating pigs as a source of meat for so long that tracking their movement is a good way to trace human migration routes.Cooper, an expert in ancient DNA, and colleagues analyzed mitochondrial DNA from pigs in a number of Southeast Asian countries. They then compared it with the DNA of pigs that historically populated the Pacific.

Cooper said the oldest pig DNA they studied came from the tooth of a pig found in the hobbit cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, dated to 6000-7000 years old.

Route Pinpointed

Previous studies have found genetic similarities between Southeast Asian pigs and Pacific ones, suggesting the pigs moved from one to the other.

But Cooper said this latest research has identified the exact route they took.

"Pigs which go out across the Pacific and become the Polynesian pig, appear to originate around Laos, Cambodia and southeast China," he said. "We can actually see them coming down the Malaysian peninsula and across the Sunda island chain [Indonesia and New Guinea]."

Cooper said while most scientists think humans spread to the Pacific from Taiwan, this pig DNA evidence suggests they have a more complex origin.

"The trouble is we don't find any pigs from Taiwan going east," he said. "So we've got quite a different route."

Houses of the Holy

2007-03-13T14:29:00.000+08:00

Nine Neolithic houses excavated near Stonehenge are astounding archaeologists and opening up a radical new interpretation of the purpose of the 4,600-year-old circular stone monument. The houses were excavated nearby a “timber henge” of enormous postholes at Durrington Walls, a 1,500-foot-wide site that lies two miles northeast of Stonehenge along the river Avon. Recent excavations led by University of Sheffield archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson have led him to suggest the two sites were built as a single complex of complementary stone and wood circles linked by a river route.

Parker Pearson has found that, like Stonehenge, Durrington Walls had a wide, well-worn avenue to the river. But so far, houses have been found only at Durrington Walls. The structures contain central hearths, appear to have been inhabited, and may even have been part of a larger, town-size community, but it’s not clear whether they were occupied year-round or only at key seasonal times. Because the two sites have complementary alignments—Stonehenge faces the midsummer sunrise, Durrington Walls faces the midwinter sunrise—Parker Pearson and his colleagues have suggested that a voyage on the river route between the circles represented a journey between the realms of the living and the dead. Chunks of flint found at the site in shapes resembling male and female genitalia suggest that the voyage may have been undertaken to obtain help with fertility from ancestors.

Tim Darvill, an archaeologist at England’s Bournemouth University, thinks Stonehenge was a sort of Stone Age healing center. As evidence, he points out that many of the monument’s stones were brought from an area 160 miles away that was associated with healing properties. Past studies of skeletal remains from the many prehistoric burials in the Stonehenge area have also shown higher than normal rates of disease. The presence of dwellings would also be consistent with the possibility that ailing  pilgrims from distant reaches once flocked to the monuments.

Shield of Dreams

2007-03-13T14:10:00.000+08:00

The handful of people who would be the first to detect a nuclear missile attack against the United States work just outside the town of Colorado Springs. Their daily commute takes them down a sloping mile-long tunnel, past baffled steel blast doors that are 20 feet high, three feet thick, and weigh 25 tons each, into the heart of Cheyenne Mountain. There, surrounded on all sides by at least 2,000 feet of granite, they spend eight-hour shifts in the missile-warning center, one of 15 subterranean buildings arrayed along a three-dimensional tic-tac-toe grid of intersecting tunnels. This is the central coordination facility for the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense) command.

Data from satellites and a global network of radar stations flow into computers at the missile-warning center, where eight or nine people during a typical shift sit in front of 17-inch monitors. Hardly a day passes without the detection of a launch somewhere around the world, such as the Russians firing SCUD missiles at Chechens or the French lofting a satellite into orbit. But in the 36-year history of Cheyenne Mountain, there is one type of launch the staff has never seen and doesn't want to see: an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on its way to the United States. From training sessions, they know exactly what to expect.

First, on the center of their monitors, a grid map would appear showing the part of the world from which the missile was launched. A small red circle represents the launch point of the missile. Next, a computerized voice says "Quick alert! Quick alert!" Then an alarm sounds and a light flashes, signaling everyone in the missile-warning center that a desperate race against the clock has begun. A missile launched from a site halfway around the world can reach the United States in less than 25 minutes.

Within a few seconds, computers plot the missile's trajectory. If it is headed for North America, an officer at NORAD alerts a Pentagon task force and the White House. Major Barry Venable, an Army spokesman for the Cheyenne Mountain operations center, says the President has exactly two options at that point. He can order a massive nuclear counterattack against the aggressor nation. Or he can wait as the incoming missile, or many missiles, vaporizes a city, or many cities, which will happen whether he retaliates or not. Given the current state of technology, no other option exists. The United States cannot shoot down one ICBM, let alone hundreds of them. There are no weapons that can hit a slender projectile traveling at nearly 15,000 miles per hour, about 10 times faster than a bullet. So the obvious question has long been: Can such a defensive weapon be built?

President Bush is betting it can. In a speech at the National Defense University in Washington this past May, the President announced his intention to deploy a system that "could provide limited, but effective, defenses" against ballistic missiles armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The defense system, advocates say, is not really intended to thwart an all-out attack by a major nuclear power, which might involve advanced weaponry such as multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), missiles that bear many warheads. At best they say it could shoot down a few missiles launched by a rogue nation such as North Korea, Iran, or Iraq, as well as missiles accidentally fired from Russia.

The President hopes to make such a missile shield a central accomplishment of his administration. He envisions a complex, multilayered defense that counterattacks with ground-based and sea-based interceptor missiles and aircraft equipped with lasers powerful enough to destroy a rocket in flight. The administration has declared it wants to begin building an interceptor missile base in Alaska that could be operational as early as 2004.

As desirable as even a limited shield might be in an uncertain world, physicists and independent defense analysts who have carefully studied the problem of missile defense argue that the President's plan is deeply flawed, more a product of wishful thinking than sound scientific analysis. "The proponents of missile defense are for the most part totally nontechnical. Or they are defense contractors," says Richard Garwin, a physicist who, with Edward Teller, helped create the world's first hydrogen bomb 50 years ago. "The top levels of the Defense Department are political and managerial, not technical."

And the scientific and technical challenges are far greater than those of any offensive or defensive weapons system ever built. For a missile shield to be effective, every component--radar systems, satellites, missiles, communication networks--would have to perform flawlessly in the heat of combat, says Philip Coyle, who directed the Defense Department's office of testing and evaluation during the Clinton administration. "All the pieces of the system--which are major systems in themselves--have to achieve reliabilities that military equipment rarely ever has."

The flight of an ICBM is a tragic drama that unfolds in three relentless acts: boost phase, midcourse, and reentry.

The boost phase is by far the best chance to shoot down an enemy ICBM, but it lasts at most 300 seconds, the time a missile takes to clear the atmosphere. A rocket rising into the air presents a clear target, and satellites can easily spot its hot exhaust plume. Two very different sorts of weapons are being considered for this stage of defense, and neither will be ready for at least several years: ship-launched interceptor missiles and an exotic airborne laser.

Of these two weapons, only the airborne laser is in active development. Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and TRW are trying to equip a modified 747 jumbo jet with up to 17 lasers. In theory, several of these aircraft would fly constant patrol above pariahs like Iraq and North Korea, ready to shoot down a missile within a minute or two of its launch.

Unlike the colored, flashing death rays of science-fiction movies, the airborne laser consists of infrared light, invisible to human eyes. A reaction between rather ordinary chemicals--hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide, the ingredients in hair bleach and Drano--generates the laser. But to produce the megawatt beam that would be needed to bring down a rocket requires linking many such lasers together in a series and sparking them with tons of the chemicals. Plans call for a 747 equipped with 14 laser modules, each weighing about 6,000 pounds when full. The aircraft would also carry three more lasers: one to track the missile, a second to measure atmospheric turbulence, and a third to illuminate the exact target. To compensate for atmospheric effects, a flexible, mechanically controlled mirror that can change its shape every few thousandths of a second will focus and aim the killer beam.

The beam would not immediately explode its target. Instead, after several seconds, heat from the laser would crack the outer surface of one of the three stages of the booster rocket that propels the warhead into space, weakening it. Pressure from the liquid fuel within the stage would then rupture the rocket, causing a catastrophic explosion. No one knows if the idea can be made to work. The first test is not scheduled until 2003, and the project is not expected to be operational for at least seven years.

In the meantime, the sheer bulk of the laser equipment that must be installed on the 747 poses daunting problems. Since the atmosphere would partially absorb and scatter the laser beam, the 747 would have to fly quite high to make sure the beam remained powerful enough to destroy the missile. "A 747 that is heavily loaded doesn't like to fly high," says Philip Coyle. "And you've also got to get close to the forward edge of battle, because your laser power isn't going to be such that it can propagate through many miles of atmosphere. If you're close to the enemy, you make a pretty inviting target yourself."The chemicals that fuel the laser present other problems, says Coyle: "The laser puts out caustic gases in the chemical process. The compatibility of all these materials with an aircraft has yet to be worked out."

If the airborne laser can be built and made to work, it's reasonable to assume an enemy will build defenses to protect its missile from just such an attack. "We're an open society, and we tell people what we're doing," Coyle says. "If the enemy saw that we were doing tests of such a system, and it looked as if it might work, they could foil us pretty easily by just putting a reflective surface of paint on the missile." The reflective surface would need to withstand the laser's heat for just a minute or so, providing enough time for the missile to move into space, well beyond the laser's range.

"One of the dilemmas involved in creating a missile-defense system is that the offense always has the advantage," says Coyle. "They can always figure out how to beat it."

Ted Postol, a nuclear physicist at MIT and a former advisor to the Pentagon on ballistic missile technology, says there is little chance the airborne laser will be ready in 2008 as its developers say. "There are lots and lots of technical questions that are unresolved," he says. "My guess is that it is decades away--if it can be built at all." Still more dubious are plans for space-based lasers mounted on remote-controlled satellites designed to attack ICBMs during the boost phase. Even the most die-hard supporters of that research say space-based lasers won't be defending the United States in the foreseeable future.

The one means of defense that stands the best chance of actually destroying an ICBM in flight--interceptor missiles launched from Navy warships--is still on the drawing board. An interceptor is designed to destroy an ICBM simply by crashing into it. But the deployment of ship-based interceptors is rife with practical problems. For a ship's missiles to have a chance to catch up with and hit an enemy missile, the ship would have to be stationed within a few hundred miles of enemy territory, making it vulnerable to attack. And the interceptors themselves would have to be much faster than any missile in existence, which means they would also be much larger in order to carry the fuel needed to power their five-mile-per-second flight. "It would take whole new rockets that are fatter, longer, and faster than anything the Navy has now," says Coyle. "In addition, this stuff won't fit in the launch tubes on existing Navy ships."

Like airborne lasers, a ship-launched interceptor would have less than 300 seconds to destroy a missile before it went completely out of range. That leaves little time--perhaps no time--for the President to be consulted about a decision to fire. Coyle says: "You might have to shoot it down within as little as two minutes, certainly within three or four. Otherwise the enemy rocket has cleared the atmosphere. So the decision to fire has got to be computerized, because there just isn't enough time to contemplate what you're doing. The President isn't going to be in the loop; the secretary of defense or the national security advisor wouldn't be in the loop."

The lack of civilian or even human control over such a decision would be unprecedented. The destruction of an enemy warhead could cause debris--including chemical and biological weapons, if aboard--to rain down on neighboring countries. And there is a far greater danger: The interceptor could hit and destroy the enemy rocket without destroying the warhead. In that case the warhead would career off course and land who knows where.

Furthermore, there is little guarantee that an interceptor could hit the target. Coyle emphasizes how hard it is to shoot down combat aircraft that travel at a fraction of an ICBM's speed. "With air defenses--shooting down planes--you're doing really good if you can hit 25 percent of your targets," he says.

When the targets are missiles instead of planes, the statistics are sobering. After the Gulf War against Iraq, Postol analyzed the Army's claims about the Patriot missile's performance against Iraqi missiles launched at Israel. Although the exact number of SCUD- Patriot encounters during the war is classified, there are thought to have been about 80. The Army initially claimed that Patriots hit 96 percent of their targets. Postol found, as did the Government Accounting Office in a separate study, that the Patriots hit at most 6 percent--fewer than five out of 80. In fact, Postol could not confirm that any Patriot missile ever actually hit any SCUD missile.

When an ICBM's booster rocket burns out and falls back to Earth, the warhead travels through the vacuum of space solely under the influence of gravity. This midcourse phase, which lasts about 15 minutes, is the longest of the three phases of an ICBM's flight. To shoot down an ICBM in midcourse, President Bush would field as many as 250 missiles in Alaska and North Dakota, possibly complemented by sea-launched interceptors. Ground-based radar and space-based infrared satellites would guide each interceptor part of the way toward its target. Onboard tracking systems would take over during the final seconds as the interceptor homed in on the enemy warhead. As with the sea-based interceptors proposed for the boost phase of defense, 51-inch-long missiles would destroy the warhead simply by colliding with it.

What if an interceptor misses? Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, head of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, argued in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee recently that there should be sufficient time during the midcourse phase to fire additional interceptors at a warhead. "Multiple shots at the target give a higher probability of being able to hit it," he said.

But critics argue that Kadish underestimates enemy countermeasures. During the midcourse phase, the tracking systems guiding an interceptor would probably have to cope not with a single target but with hundreds. The warhead is housed during its ascent in a protective shell called a bus. Once in space, the bus opens, releasing not only the warhead but also numerous decoys to fool satellites and radar networks. Without air to slow them down, all the objects, regardless of size, shape, or weight, travel at about 15,000 miles per hour, clustered around the warhead. Instead of having to destroy an individual missile, as in the boost phase, the interceptor must pick out the real warhead.

Kadish insists that the critics are too pessimistic. "I do not share the assessment that what we are attempting to accomplish with our system is in any way impossible," he told Senate Armed Services Committee members. "Over the coming months and years, I believe program results can speak for themselves in responding to the criticism that the [missile shield] cannot operate as designed against the projected countermeasure threat that a state of concern might pose."

Coyle, Postol, and other experts do not share Kadish's faith. Both the United States and Russia have designed missiles that contain decoys. There is no reason, says Coyle, why North Korea, Iran, or Iraq could not equip missiles with decoys too. "If they're smart enough to make ICBMs with sophisticated guidance systems and all the rest, I think they can figure out how to make decoys," says Coyle.

The simplest decoys are Mylar balloons, just like those sold in supermarkets, except that each one is about the size of a house. They reflect radar and present tracking stations with hundreds of signals. Besides balloons, the bus might spew out millions of pieces of half-inch-long radar-reflecting wires. Clouds of this chaff, as it is called, would envelop the warhead, making its exact location very difficult to determine. An interceptor could sail through the cloud without touching the warhead. Other chaff clouds would be empty, creating more false targets.

The radar stations and satellites the United States uses can track the launch and flight of a missile very accurately, but they cannot distinguish decoys from targets. To do that, the missile-defense system must rely on a powerful new radar, called X-band, now being tested on Kwajalein Atoll in the western Pacific. Like all radar, it sends out electromagnetic pulses and detects pulses that reflect back off the targets. X-band radar has a much shorter wavelength than any existing radar--just over an inch long--which allows it to resolve details of range, size, and shape that remain invisible to standard radar. The prototype is reported to be able to detect objects as far away as 1,200 miles. When the radar is fully developed, that range is expected to increase to about 2,400 miles. Several X-band radar stations would have to be built around the world.

Coyle points out that the X-band radar's high resolution will create problems of its own. The wavelength is so short, he says that it will reflect off rain or hail in the line of sight between the radar and the objects it tracks. And the radar has been anything but foolproof in early tests (see "Anatomy of a Test,"

Plans call for X-band radar to work in concert with a fleet of two dozen or so new infrared satellites, which have yet to be built. The program is behind schedule and over budget. In theory, X-band radar would be able to tell a warhead from decoy balloons because the round balloons and cone-shaped warhead would all create unique radar reflections. The satellites would find the target by measuring the amount of infrared radiation--heat--emitted by the warhead and the decoys; a 1,000-pound warhead would remain warmer as it traveled through the cold vacuum of space than would the light balloon decoys, which would rapidly cool. All of this information would be sent to a command center, most likely Cheyenne Mountain, which would automatically relay it to the computers on board the interceptor missile.

But even the most advanced detectors could be foiled by the simplest of countermeasures. Instead of using round balloons, an enemy might make cheap, detailed balloon replicas of the warhead, so the radar reflections from the decoy and the warhead would look identical to the X-band receivers. Small, battery-powered heaters placed inside the decoys could trick infrared satellites into believing they had spotted a real, warm warhead. Alternatively, the warhead itself could be cooled by sheathing it with an insulating aluminum shell filled with liquid nitrogen, hiding it from the infrared satellites (see "How to Hide a Missile," below). An enemy could even enclose the real warhead in a balloon, which would inflate when released from the bus, making the warhead indistinguishable from the decoys. Even if the interceptor managed to hit the house-sized balloon containing the refrigerator-sized warhead, it might just puncture the balloon and sail right past the warhead.

Postol points out another potential obstacle. Should the X-band radar somehow manage to single out the warhead from a herd of decoys, that information might be useless for the interceptor. "If the radar correctly identifies an object as a warhead, it doesn't mean that the kill vehicle will know which object to home in on," he says. The problem is that once the radar has relayed its information to the interceptor, the targets, traveling at about five miles per second, will have moved. "By the time the kill vehicle encounters the targets, they will have been remixed up," says Postol.

Closing on the flock of balloons, chaff, and warhead at more than 15,000 miles per hour, the interceptor would have to rely on its own sensors and would likely miss the warhead. Moreover, an enemy would not have to arm its missiles with nuclear warheads and decoys to defeat a defense shield. Instead, it could opt to load one warhead with a hundred or more small "bomblets," each packed with a biological weapon like anthrax spores. Dropped on a city and dispersed by the wind, they might be more devastating than any nuclear weapon. One hundred bomblets could release 440 pounds of anthrax over a city, enough to kill more than 100,000 people. A nuclear weapon built with third-world technology might kill 60,000. A missile-defense shield would be utterly helpless against such a threat--the bomblets would be far too small and numerous for any interceptors to destroy or even see.

A brief but climactic third act--reentry--follows the midcourse phase of the ICBM's flight. This final phase lasts only 40 seconds, and the chance of a successful interception at this point is nil. Although the light decoys will have burned up in the atmosphere, leaving the enemy warhead alone at last, the interceptors probably would not see it. Below a height of 80 miles, the heat of friction with the atmosphere blinds heat-seeking sensors. In any case, interceptors might still face hundreds of germ-bearing bomblets, not a lone warhead.

In describing the technical challenge of destroying an ICBM hurtling through space, some scientists have likened the task to hitting a bullet with a bullet. "We know how to hit a bullet with a bullet," Coyle says. "So that's not really the analogy. It's like when you were a kid and somebody threw a ball at you. You could stop that. But if they threw a handful of rocks you couldn't stop them all. That's the problem. We won't have enough bullets."

When the Cheyenne Mountain complex was completed in 1965, it was designed to withstand the nearby explosion of a 30-megaton warhead. Today's weapons are many times more powerful, and the operations center is no longer impregnable. These days, as the staff at Cheyenne Mountain continues to watch for the unthinkable, just as they have since the height of the cold war, they don't bother to close the blast doors anymore. If the unthinkable missile is spotted, the doors can be shut within 30 seconds, locking 800 people inside with enough food, water, heat, electricity, and filtered air to enable them to survive for about 30 days.

"During the cold war we used to keep them closed all the time--except during shift changes," says Venable. Now he and his colleagues hope they will never be closed again.

What is the threat?

By far the greatest threat of an attack is still posed by Russia, which possesses about 5,200 warheads mounted on missiles, probably 2,000 fewer than the United States. An accidental launch--or an unauthorized one by a rebellious officer--would probably involve at least a few dozen warheads, and possibly thousands. The commander of a single Russian submarine, for example, could fire as many as 64 warheads at the United States, enough to kill tens of millions of people. Such an attack would completely overwhelm any missile-defense system being contemplated.

China is believed to have no more than 20 ICBMs that could reach the United States. For now, because China apparently stores its warheads and rocket fuel separately from its missiles, there is little chance of an accidental launch. China also has one submarine armed with nuclear weapons, but it usually remains close to the Chinese mainland, and its missiles don't have the range to reach American territory. But the construction of an American missile-defense system could make China adopt a more aggressive policy and place fully armed missiles on high-alert status.

Among third-world countries considered hostile to the United States, only North Korea has actually launched a multistage rocket--the Taepo Dong I, which flew over Japan in 1998 before crashing into the Pacific. Unclassified U.S. government intelligence reports speculate that within 10 years North Korea, Iran, and Iraq might be able to build missiles that could hit the United States, but no one knows whether those countries will actually pursue such a program. ICBMs are expensive to develop, so a hostile third-world country might choose instead to smuggle biological weapons into the United States and then release them. Or a rogue state could stow a nuclear weapon on a cargo ship and detonate the weapon in an American harbor. Any of these strategies could be anonymous as well as potentially more destructive than an ICBM.
— T. F.

How to hide a missile

To find and destroy an ICBM traveling 10 times faster than a bullet 140 miles above Earth's surface requires exquisite timing. With an interceptor and an ICBM approaching each other at closing speeds measured in miles per second, a half-second delay in spotting the target could make the interceptor miss by thousands of feet. For most of its flight, the interceptor will be guided toward the ICBM by radar stations on Earth and by satellites. Although the exact capability of the interceptor's infrared instruments is classified, in flight tests the interceptor apparently detected its target at a range of about 450 miles. Those targets, however, were warm and stood out against the cold background of space. But an enemy could enclose a warhead in a thin metallic shell filled with liquid nitrogen; physicist Richard Garwin says such technology is not challenging. The liquid nitrogen would cool the warhead to 77 Kelvin, or -321 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, the interceptor's sensors wouldn't see the target until it was only about half a mile away. Could the interceptor use its small maneuvering rockets to correct its course at such a short distance and hit the ICBM? As the diagram above shows, assuming the interceptor needed to change course by just 60 feet, it would need to accelerate at a rate of more than 400 g's, far beyond its ability.
— T. F.

Anatomy of a test

At 10:40 p.m. eastern time on July 14, a Minuteman II ICBM carrying a dummy warhead took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Los Angeles. Exactly 21 minutes later an interceptor missile roared into the sky from Kwajalein Atoll in the western Pacific, some 4,800 miles away. When a flash of light indicating that the missiles had collided appeared on closed-circuit televisions in the Pentagon at 11:09 p.m., supporters of the missile-defense program were jubilant. What went largely unreported was that the dummy warhead had a target beacon on board. "That's not a bad thing to do for a first test, but it was not a demonstration of something you could deploy," says Philip Coyle, who headed the Pentagon's department of testing and evaluation during the Clinton administration. "Presumably a country that attacks us wouldn't put beacons on their missiles."

More problematic was the performance of the new X-band radar station on Kwajalein, which was supposed to track the last leg of the target's flight, up to and including the collision with the interceptor. Debris completely confused the radar. "Every time there's a stage separation, there are belts and straps and different objects that come loose," says Coyle. Reflections from that debris prompted the X-band radar to indicate that the interceptor had missed the target. This raises questions about how well X-band radar would deal with simple enemy countermeasures, such as dumping millions of pieces of radar-reflecting wire, or chaff, around the warhead. "A chaff cloud would be a great countermeasure," says Coyle. "Lord knows the North Koreans are smart enough to do that."
— T. F.

Targeting Rogue Missiles

If Iraq, Iran, or North Korea launched an ICBM toward the United States, the best time for an in-flight interception would be during the 300-second-long boost phase. And the best way to do that, says physicist Richard Garwin, would be for the United States to have ground-based interceptor missiles in Turkey ready to shoot down Iraqi ICBMs, have interceptors located near the Caspian Sea to destroy Iranian missiles, and place missiles in Russia to foil any launches from North Korea. That would of course entail a joint effort with Russia. But one clear advantage of the plan is that Russia is not likely to feel threatened by interceptors clearly targeted at rogue nations. Moreover, ground-based interceptors in Russia and Turkey would not involve exotic, unproven technologies like the airborne laser that is a key element of the Bush administration's proposed missile shield. The interceptors now being developed for the national missile-defense system are designed to have a top speed of 5.3 miles per second--compared with an ICBM's speed of 4.7 miles per second--so boost-phase interceptors would have to be modified to reach their top speed within 100 seconds of an ICBM's launch. Such a system is far more likely to be successful than an exotic infrared laser system. With such a system in place, the United States might have a chance of defending itself and other countries against a rogue-nation missile attack. And, as Garwin wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "it would be far less costly than the proposed national missile-defense system."
— T. F.

Web sources

The Center for Defense Information has an informative site on some of the basics behind national missile defense: www.cdi.org/hotspots/issuebrief/default.asp.

The Union of Concerned Scientists reports on a number of possible countermeasures to a national missile defense, as well as the viability of the proposed program: www.ucsusa.org/arms/CM_toc.html.

Neural Implant Empowers Paralyzed Man

2007-03-12T03:10:00.000+08:00

Neuroscientist John Donoghue of Brown University has brought us a big step closer to the day when people can interact with computers directly through the power of thought. In July he and his team published a paper in Nature outlining remarkable progress in picking up brain signals with implanted electrodes and using those signals to control a range of devices.

The experiments were conducted on a 25-year-old Massachusetts man paralyzed from the neck down. In 2004, surgeons placed a tiny 100-electrode array in his primary motor cortex, the brain region that controls voluntary movement, to collect electrical impulses from nerve cells and send them to a series of signal processors. Donoghue and his colleagues then supervised as the computer translated the man's thoughts of moving his arm and hand into the actual movement of external devices. On the first day the system was up and running, he was able to master the technique. He could move a computer cursor, play a video game, open e-mails, draw a crude circle, operate a television remote control, and even move a prosthetic hand and arm—using nothing other than his will.

The same basic brain-computer interface system had been tested earlier in monkeys, and a group in Georgia implanted electrodes in people as far back as the 1990s. But no other group has used implanted electrodes to monitor so many human neurons at once or had such impressive results.

The system was removed from the original subject after 14 months. It is now being tested on three other patients, including one with ALS. Neurologist Leigh Hochberg, the lead author on the paper with Donoghue, hopes that the current trials are the first step toward giving severely disabled people an unprecedented degree of independence. "The participants in these trials are pioneers," he says.

Like Water for Mars

2007-03-11T16:30:00.000+08:00

Evidence of water flowing on our most similar neighbor
by Alex Stone

Pictures taken by the camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor suggest that rivulets of liquid water were flowing on the Red Planet within the past few years and may still be flowing today, welling up from beneath the Martian surface and streaming down gullies along the sloping walls of impact craters.

Two craters in particular caught the attention of NASA scientists. Both are in the planet's southern hemisphere, and both looked unremarkable at first glance. That changed when the Surveyor team reimaged the craters over several years and spotted two brightly streaked gullies with branched endings—a hallmark of flowing water—that were not visible in earlier pictures. The researchers speculate that the streaks formed when water bubbled up from a subsurface reservoir and ran down the gullies, leaving behind a pale-toned trail of sedimentation that is seen in the Surveyor snapshots as a bright line against a darker background. "We reimaged it several times at different sun angles to be sure it wasn't just a trick of different illumination conditions," says Ken Edgett, a member of the research team that made the discovery. More than just a geologic curiosity, finding water on Mars has major implications for the search for life, because the presence of H2O greatly increases the odds that living organisms once thrived on the planet, and perhaps still inhabit it today. "We didn't expect this to happen in our lifetime, let alone our 10-year mission," Edgett says.

But is the liquid flowing down these gullies really water? Probably, say experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but more evidence is needed to seal the case. "You can never be certain from orbit," Edgett says. "But this is the best evidence yet of liquid water being present on Mars right now."

Neutrinos of the Sea

2007-03-11T16:20:00.000+08:00

Scientists hope to find rare high-energy particles in the sea.
by Kathy A. Svitil

Giorgio Gratta, a physicist at Stanford University, is going fishing for high-energy neutrinos, ghostly subatomic particles that bombard Earth from unknown objects in deep space. These particles can interact with water, emitting a shudder of light, albeit under such rare circumstances that just a few of them strike each square mile of ocean each year.

But neutrinos can also heat the water, generating acoustic waves. The Navy's Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center, a 100-square-mile hydrophone array used to track ships and weapons during undersea naval exercises, could pick up these tiny vibrations. "You can put hydrophones in the water and listen to the neutrinos," Gratta says.

During the past several months, Gratta and his students have begun collecting data from seven of the array's 52 hydrophones. He is using computer software to filter out noise from wind, surf, ship engines, snapping shrimp, and echolocating dolphins. "Things look good," he says.

Next he hopes to plug into the rest of the hydrophones, start tallying the neutrinos, and begin to zero in on the strange, energetic objects that emit them.

The Titanic's Revenge

2007-03-11T12:47:00.000+08:00

Butterfly effect breaks up the world's biggest icebergby
by Jeffrey Winters

The largest icebergs usually hug the Antarctic coast for decades before wandering into deep ocean water, where they melt and fall to pieces. To listen for clues about how such icebergs eventually break apart, geophysicists Douglas MacAyeal of the University of Chicago and Emile Okal of Northwestern University planted seismographs on the surface of iceberg B15A, a 71-mile-long block of ice with the distinction of being the world's largest free-floating object. Their recording turned up the sounds of the iceberg being battered to bits against the Antarctic shore over a couple days in October 2005. The big surprise came when the researchers tracked down the origin of that battering.

By measuring ocean swells of different wavelengths, the duo traced the destructive turbulence to a storm in the Gulf of Alaska that, a few days earlier, had kicked up 40-foot-high seas. Like the proverbial butterfly that flapped its wings in Beijing and caused a hurricane halfway around the world, the Alaskan storm's waves spread out across the Pacific Ocean and broke apart an iceberg more than 8,000 miles away. "It was jaw dropping," says MacAyeal.

If global warming leads to an increase in monster storms, MacAyeal adds, then the entire Antarctic ice skirt could be in jeopardy: Larger sea swells could pulverize its huge icebergs and floating ice shelves. The ice skirt plays a critical role in keeping the land-based Antarctic ice cap in place. Destroy the floating ice and the ice cap (which holds enough water to raise sea levels by 200 feet) would collapse unimpeded into the sea.

Whatever Happened to... Project Blue Book?

2007-03-11T12:45:00.000+08:00

The government gave up on alien tall tales.
by Stephen Ornes

From 1948 until 1969, the U.S. government collected about 80,000 pages of first-hand reports—including descriptions, drawings, and diagrams—on more than 12,000 sightings of UFOs.

Begun as Project Sign, it was quickly renamed Project Grudge, then Project Blue Book in early 1952. The new moniker, inspired by the blue books college students use to take written exams, was supposed to indicate the seriousness with which the study was being undertaken.

With 1,500 reports, 1952 was also the year with the most sightings. All in all, 701 remain "unidentified" to this day. The rest were attributed to a variety of sources, including bright planets, auroras, aircraft, searchlights, and birds. Project Blue Book was shut down in 1969 after a rigorous study led by the physicist Edward Condon concluded that UFO sightings all had mundane, nonthreatening explanations.

Since that time, the U.S. government no longer investigates claims of "flying saucers"—a term that dates back to the first widely reported UFO sighting by an American businessman in 1947. Independent groups of civilians still maintain that the government intentionally withholds information about UFO sightings, both past and present.

The Top 6 Archaeology Stories of 2006

2007-03-09T00:30:00.000+08:00

A tattooed iceman, figs as first farming, the Temple of the Fox, and more...

New Tomb Found In Valley of the Kings
Archaeologists uncovered the first new tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since 1922...

Oldest Writing In New World Found
Workers digging in Mexico unearthed the oldest script ever found in the Western Hemisphere...

Peruvian Dig Uncovers First Western Observatory
The Temple of the Fox, located in the Chillón Valley in Peru, probably served as a rough farmers' almanac...

Old Beads Hint at Dawn Of Culture
Grape-size shell beads dated between 100,000 and 135,000 years old are the world's oldest known jewelry...

Mongolian Ice Yields Scythian Mummy
Last summer researchers recovered a 2,200-year-old Scythian mummy from permafrost...

Did Figs Beget Agriculture?
New research has pegged the fig as the first crop...

The First Computer

2007-03-08T08:48:00.001+08:00

A mysterious device found in Greek waters was not brought by aliens, but it was used by ancient Greeks to track distant stars.

by Stephen Ornes

In 1901, divers recovered a shoebox-size, gear-filled box from a 2,000-year-old shipwreck on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. Ever since, the enigmatic box—known as the Antikythera Mechanism—has spawned its share of bizarre theories. "Some people thought it came from outer space," scoffs Athens University physicist Yanis Bitsakis. "And since the mechanism has Greek writing on it, the other ridiculous story is that Greeks themselves came from outer space and brought the mechanism with them." More sober minds suggested the box was a clock or a navigational device, but even those interpretations rested on skimpy evidence.

Now an international team of researchers claim they have found the answer. Three-dimensional scans of the machine's innards, taken last year by an eight-ton "microfocus" X-ray machine built around the mystery object, revealed ancient inscriptions and complicated gear trains that gave away the machine's purpose. "It's an all-in-one astronomical device," says Bitsakis, who spends up to 15 hours daily deciphering the inscribed text. "In a single machine, the designer tried to put all the knowledge he had about astronomical phenomena."

The 30-odd bronze gears and 2,000 inscribed Greek characters in the Antikythera Mechanism helped ancient Greek scientists track the cycles of the solar system and calculate the motions of the sun, the moon, and the planets. According to Cardiff University astrophysicist Michael Edmunds, the box technically qualifies as a computer. "To build one of these is not trivial," he says. "It shows how technically advanced the Greeks were."

The Top 7 Technology Stories of 2006

2007-03-08T08:48:00.000+08:00

Good News For Light Sleepers
Gravity-defying beds are no longer a figment of Stanley Kubrick's imagination. 12.8.2006

Peer Review: Fighting the Terrorist Virus
If terrorism is cultivated by modern media, how do we fight it? 12.4.2006

How to Build an Invisibility Cloak
Using strange new materials not found in nature, physicists can make an object disappear. 11.20.2006

Science in the Crosshairs
Iraq's legacy as a mecca of learning falls casualty to chaos. 11.8.2006

Faster, Sleeker, Smaller
A quarter century's worth of DISCOVER advertisements reveals a radically changing world. 11.2.2006

The Truth About Liquid Bombs
Promising new technologies could sniff out liquid bombs. But can their limitations be overcome? 11.1.2006

Map: What Does the Internet Look Like?
Why China has as many IP addresses as an American university, which ISP should be called "Spamalot," and more. 10.30.2006

The No-Touch Pat-Down
One of the latest—and most amusing—gizmos in airport security: the air puffer 10.23.2006

Peer Review: Too Clear for Comfort
The increased detail of HDTV may decrease our viewing pleasure. 10.9.2006

Faster, Sleeker, Smaller
Discover advertisements reveal a radically changing world. 10.1.2006

Peer Review: Invading Our Own Privacy
We grumble about prying eyes, yet we love to upload our identities onto the Web. 9.2.2006

Neighborhood Watch Goes High Tech
Monitor your neighbors—or the Texas-Mexico border—right from your computer. 9.1.2006

Seconds From Disaster
Japan installs the world's first nationwide earthquake-detector system. 9.1.2006

Going Atomic... Again
America plans its first new nuclear warhead in two decades 9.1.2006

Jaron's World: The Murder of Mystery
How Silicon Valley joined the superstitious fringe as the enemy of open inquiry. 9.1.2006

The Hole Story

2007-03-06T19:11:00.001+08:00

The Top 13 Space Stories of 2006

2007-03-04T16:02:00.000+08:00

The Top 13 Space Stories of 2006

The makings of life in space, dark matter in the spotlight, the first inflatable space station, and more

3 Cosmic Collision Brings Dark Matter Into View A violent collision has turned up the most direct evidence yet of dark matter...

10 Pluto DemotedPluto now falls under the quaint designation "dwarf planet"...

13 Probe Snaps Baby Picture of the Cosmos
A detailed snapshot of what the universe was like as a trillionth-of-a-second-old newborn...

22 Methane Rain Falls Mainly on Titan's PlainThe Huygens probe made a splat. "It landed in mud"...

45 Alien Planets Get Smaller, Fatter, Faster, and Hotter
This year ushered some of the oddest extrasolar plaents ever found...

48 Nearby Universe MappedAstrophysicists have produced the most detailed full-sky map of the nearby universe...

51 Ice Volcanoes Seen On Saturnian Moon
NASA's Cassini probe showed a geyser shooting jets of water and fine icy particles hundreds of miles into space...

56 Comet Dust Records Solar System Chaos
One-third of a milligram of dust from comet Wild 2 landed on Earth last January...

67 Complex Organic Molecules Formed in Outer SpaceAstronomers have identified eight new complex molecules in space...

75 Astro-Hotel LaunchedBigelow Aerospace last July launched Genesis 1, the first inflatable space station...

93 Renegade Planet Pair Defy ExplanationA pair of celestial objects circling one another have fed a growing debate over the dividing line between planets and stars...

96 Strange Swirls Spotted at Venus's PoleVenus is Earth's near-twin in size and mass, yet bafflingly different in other particulars...

100 Saturn SunburstThe Cassini spacecraft captured an extraordinary backlit image of Saturn and its gossamer rings...

it is... science!

2007-03-04T15:54:00.000+08:00

it is.... science!

World's Biggest Binoculars
Astronomers open a new window onto the universe. 12.11.2006

One Giant Step for a Small, Crowded Country
Are the Japanese moving to the moon? 11.28.2006

A Death in the Solar System
Say good-bye to the old nine planets. Say hello to a whole new celestial family. 11.27.2006

Map: Space Junk
Garbage zipping through space could shatter a spececraft or crash into Earth. 11.16.2006

Did Life Begin In Space?
Interstellar organic molecules suggest that Earth may have been seeded by the cosmos. 11.9.2006

Mars Exposed
With the new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter zeroing in on its target, NASA scientists prepare for an unprecedented look at the Red Planet's ancient seas and modern ice fields—key sites in the ongoing search for life. 10.10.2006

Mars Exposed
An unprecedented look at the Red Planet's ancient seas and modern ice fields. 10.1.2006

The Buzz on NASA
The Apollo 11 pioneer charts a radical course back into space. 9.13.2006

The Future of NASA
Michael Griffin is gearing NASA up to build a moon base. Is he paving the way to Mars or jeopardizing the future of American space exploration? 9.1.2006

Map: X-Ray Vision Shows How a Galaxy Cluster Grows
New X-ray data unveils the dynamics of galaxy cluster Abell 3266. 9.1.2006

Fossils of the First Life
New fossil analysis puts the beginning of life more than 3.4 billion years ago. 9.1.2006

Sky Lights: Confused About Your Direction?
If you lack a sense of personal trajectory, astronomers can help. 9.1.2006

Blinded by Science: Hawking's Exit Strategy
Why is one of the thinking community's heavy hitters dabbling in doomsday prophecy? 9.1.2006
Map: Earth's Fourth Dimension
A gravitational rainbow points to our planet's invisible topography. 8.14.2006

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Meteors
The Perseids may be a washout this year, but that's no excuse to ignore valuable news about X-ray slaps, the Tears of St. Lawrence, and the fiddly meteor/meteoroid/asteroid/meteorite distinction.

The God Experiments

2007-03-04T15:46:00.000+08:00

The God Experiments

Five researchers take science where it's never gone before.

by John Horgan -->
Three years ago, the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a guinea pig in an experiment. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger claimed he had induced religious experiences in subjects by stimulating specific regions of their brains with electromagnetic pulses. Dawkins, renowned for his biological theories as well as for his criticism of religion, volunteered to test Persinger's electromagnetic device—the "God machine," as some journalists dubbed it. "I've always been curious to know what it would be like to have a mystical experience," Dawkins said shortly before the experiment. Afterward, he admitted on BBC that he was "very disappointed" that he did not experience "communion with the universe" or some other spiritual sensation.

Many researchers, like Persinger, view the brain as the key to understanding religion. Others focus on psychological, genetic, and biochemical origins. The science of religion has historical precedents, with Sigmund Freud and William James addressing the topic early in the last century. Now modern researchers are applying brain scans, genetic probes, and other potent instruments as they attempt to locate the physiological causes of religious experience, characterize its effects, perhaps replicate it, and perhaps even begin to explain its abiding influence.

The endeavor is controversial, stretching science to its limits. Religion is arguably the most complex manifestation of the most complex phenomenon known to science, the human mind. Religion's dimensions range from the intensely personal to the cultural and political. Additionally, researchers come to study religious experiences with very different motives and assumptions. Some of them hope that their studies will inform and enrich faith. Others see religion as an embarrassing relic of our past, and they want to explain it away.

"Even when the neural basis of religion has been identified, it remains a plausible interpretation of any conceivable neuropsychological facts that there is a genuine experience of God," notes Fraser Watts, a psychologist and theologian at the University of Cambridge and an Anglican vicar. A major funder of research on religion is the John Templeton Foundation, started in 1987 by the Christian financier John Templeton to promote "collaboration" between science and religion.

The theories described below illustrate the diversity of scientific approaches to understanding religion. All these theories are tentative at best, and some will almost certainly turn out to be wrong. The field suffers from vague terminology, disagreement about what exactly "religion" is, and which of its aspects are most important. Does religion consist primarily of behaviors, such as attending church or following certain moral precepts? Or does it consist of beliefs—in God or in an afterlife? Is religion best studied as a set of experiences, such as the inchoate feelings of connection to the rest of nature that can occur during prayer or meditation? Comparing studies is often an exercise in comparing apples and oranges. Nonetheless, the science merits close attention.

Inventing God

Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University in New York, is in the explain-it-away camp of researchers. Noting the plethora of gods that populate the world's religions, many with minds and emotions similar to our own, Guthrie argues that the belief in supernatural beings is a result of an illusion that arises from our tendency to project human qualities onto the world. Religion "may be best understood as systematic anthropomorphism," he writes in his book, Faces in the Clouds.

Anthropomorphism is an adaptive trait that enhanced our ancestors' chances of survival, he adds. If a Neanderthal mistook a tree creaking outside his cave for a human assailant, he suffered no adverse consequences beyond a moment's panic. If the Neanderthal made the opposite error—mistaking an assailant for a tree—the consequences might have been dire. In other words, better safe than sorry. Over millennia, as natural selection bolstered our unconscious anthropomorphic tendencies, they reached beyond specific objects and events to encompass all of nature, goes Guthrie's theory, until we persuaded ourselves that "the entire world of our experience is merely a show staged by some master dramatist."

Humans are not alone in this trait. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted that many "higher mammals" share the human propensity "to imagine that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living essences." As an example, he recalled watching his dog growl at a parasol lifted off the ground by a gust of wind.

Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has focused on the tendency of people from different religious traditions to report similar mystical experiences, which typically involve sensations of self-transcendence and "oneness." These commonalities indicate that the visions stem from the same neural processes, Newberg hypothesizes. To test his theory, Newberg has scanned the brains of more than 20 adherents of spiritual practices, including Christian prayer and Tibetan Buddhist meditation. He uses a technique called single-photon-emission-computed tomography, or SPECT, a variant of the better-known positron-emission tomography, PET.

The chief advantage of SPECT is that it can capture the brains of meditators in a relatively natural setting. The subject meditates not in the SPECT chamber itself but in a separate room. When a subject—a Franciscan nun, in one case—feels her ordinary self "dissolving into Christ consciousness," as she describes it, a radioactive fluid is injected into her body through an intravenous tube; the fluid travels to her brain and becomes trapped in nerve cells there. The nun then goes to the SPECT chamber, where a computer-controlled camera scans her brain. The resulting image reveals levels of neural activity in the moment immediately after she received the radioactive fluid, when she presumably was still immersed in contemplation.

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Mind-Control Microbe

2007-03-04T15:25:00.000+08:00

Mind-Control Microbe

A bug in your body can give you schizophrenia, make you have a car crash, or determine the sex of your child.

by Kathy A. Svitil

Five years ago, Oxford University zoologists showed that the parasite Toxoplasma gondii alters the brain chemistry of rats so that they are more likely to seek out cats. Infection thus makes a rat more likely to be killed and the parasite more likely to end up in a cat—the only host in which it can complete the reproductive step of its life cycle. The parasite also lives in the brain cells of thousands of species, including about 60 million supposedly symptom-free Americans. Studies over the past few years have suggested that toxoplasmosis infections in humans, too, may cause behavioral changes—from subtle shifts to outright schizophrenia. Two studies this year add even weirder twists.

U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kevin Lafferty has linked high rates of toxoplasmosis infection in 39 countries with elevated incidences of neuroticism, suggesting the mind-altering organism may be affecting the cultures of nations.

Stranger still, parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague thinks T. gondii could also be skewing our sex ratios. When he looked at the clinical records of more than 1,800 babies born from 1996 to 2004, he noted a distinct trend: The normal sex ratio is 104 boys born for every 100 girls, but in women with high levels of antibodies against the parasite, the ratio was 260 boys for every 100 girls. Exactly how the parasite might be tipping the odds in favor of males isn't understood, but Flegr points out that it is known to suppress the immune system of its hosts, and because the maternal immune system sometimes attacks male fetuses in very early pregnancy, the parasite's ability to inhibit the immune response might protect future boys as well as itself.

"Our present study was rejected by eight journals, usually without any formal review," says Flegr, who had the same problem publishing an earlier one showing that infection more than doubles the odds of a person having a traffic accident. "People don't like the possibility that their behavior and life are manipulated by a parasite," he says.

If altering our culture and causing car crashes weren't bad enough, toxoplasma may actually wheedle their genes into our genomes.

There are plenty of other theories about what affects the reproductive sex ratio. Some of them are actually true.

Consciousness in a Cockroach

2007-03-04T15:20:00.000+08:00

Consciousness in a Cockroach

Neuroscientists are teasing apart the insect nervous system, looking for clues to attention, consciousness, and the origin of the brain.

by Douglas Fox -->
To Nicholas Strausfeld, a tiny brain is a beautiful thing. Over his 35-year career, the neurobiologist at the University of Arizona at Tucson has probed the minute brain structures of cockroaches, water bugs, velvet worms, brine shrimp, and dozens of other invertebrates. Using microscopes, tweezers, and hand-built electronics, he and his graduate students tease apart—ever so gently—the cell-by-cell workings of brain structures the size of several grains of salt. From this tedious analysis Strausfeld concludes that insects possess "the most sophisticated brains on this planet.

" Strausfeld and his students are not alone in their devotion. Bruno van Swinderen, a researcher at the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, finds hints of higher cognitive functions in insects—clues to what one scientific journal called "the remote roots of consciousness."

"Many people would pooh-pooh the notion of insects having brains that are in any way comparable to those of primates," Strausfeld adds. "But one has to think of the principles underlying how you put a brain together, and those principles are likely to be universal."
The findings are controversial.

"The evidence that I've seen so far has not convinced me," says Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at Caltech. But some researchers are considering possibilities that would shock most lay observers. "We have literally no idea at what level of brain complexity consciousness stops," says Christof Koch, another Caltech neuroscientist.

"Most people say, 'For heaven's sake, a bug isn't conscious.' But how do we know? We're not sure anymore. I don't kill bugs needlessly anymore."

Heinrich Reichert of the University of Basel in Switzerland has become more and more interested in "the relatedness of all brains." Reichert's own studies of the brain's origin lead to a little-known ancestor, a humble creature called Urbilateria, which wriggled and swam nearly a billion years ago. The granddaddy of all bilaterally symmetrical animals, Urbilateria is the forebear of spiders, snails, insects, amphibians, fish, worms, birds, reptiles, mammals, crabs, clams—and yes, humans.

There is, of course, good reason to view insect brains as primitive—at least quantitatively. Humans possess 100,000,000,000 brain cells. A cockroach has nearly 1,000,000 brain cells; a fruit fly, only 250,000. Still, insects exercise impressive information management: They pack neurons into their brains 10 times more densely than mammals do. They also use each brain cell more flexibly than mammals. Several far-flung tendrils of a single neuron can each act independently—boosting computing power without increasing the number of cells. Somehow that circuitry allows a honeybee, with barely a million neurons on board, to meander six miles from its hive, find food, and make a beeline directly home. Few humans could do the same even with a map and a compass.

On the surface, the brains of insects and mammals look nothing alike. Only from studies of cell-by-cell connections does the astounding similarity emerge. One afternoon Christopher Theall, one of Strausfeld's Ph.D. students, shows me his own experimental setup for tapping into a portion of the cockroach brain known as the mushroom body. This mushroom-shaped brain structure is thought to be analogous to the mammalian hippocampus, a brain component involved in forming memories of places.

"What we're trying to do," says Theall, as we enter a cramped laboratory, "is scale down the techniques that have been used in rat and primate brains—scale them down to a brain that's a thousandth the size."

Theall's experimental apparatus rests on a table that floats on vibration-absorbing pressurized air. Even a cart rattling in the hallway outside could undermine the experiment. Because Theall needs to record nerve impulses amounting to just one 1/10,0000 of a volt, the table is enclosed in a cage that blocks electromagnetic interference from the room's lights. Working under a microscope with tweezers, steady hands, and held breath, Theall fashions copper wire only twice the diameter of a red blood cell into electrodes that he will insert into the cockroach's brain.

"They're fragile," he says. "Even a breeze from a door opening can ruin a couple hours of work."

After 20 hours of prep, Theall is ready to do the experiment. Twisting a knob while gazing into the microscope, he sinks the electrode into the roach's brain until it rests in one of the mushroom bodies. During the experiment, Theall will train this cockroach to earn a reward: If the insect points its antenna toward certain landmarks, it will receive thrilling puffs of peanut-butter odor. Theall wants to eavesdrop on neurons to determine how they contribute to learning the location of those landmarks.

The final step of the experiment—dissection of the mushroom body—allows Theall to see the two or three cells he has monitored. Because the cells have absorbed copper released from the electrode, he can tell them apart from the 200,000 other brain cells in the mushroom body. Theall then traces the structure of each cell using pen, paper, and a light box. It is like drawing a gnarled oak tree down to the last twig, and reconstructing a single cell can take two days. Theall, a typical student in Strausfeld's lab, will perform hundreds of experiments like these before his Ph.D. is complete.

Theall and Strausfeld never know which of the tens of thousands of cells they're going to hit when they tap into a roach's mushroom body. By repeating the experiment over and over, however, they are assembling a picture of what types of cells exist, how those cells function during tasks of place memory, and what kinds of connections they form with other cells. Cell by cell, they hope to piece together the structure's circuitry.

Paired structures called mushroom bodies in a cockroach brain play a key role in navigation.

During a chat in his office, Strausfeld sketches a mushroom body, pointing out several parallels to the hippocampus, the brain center devoted to memory and place location in mammals. The base consists of thousands of parallel nerve fibers running together like the grain in a piece of wood. Further up from the base, the fibers send out connections in loops that look like jug handles on a freeway; this is the shape that has earned this part of the brain the name "mushroom body." The connections rejoin the fibers higher up, near the top. Strausfeld suspects these looping pathways bring together related pieces of information, like the sights and smells of various landmarks that a roach encounters, one after another, as it travels to and from its home.

"The geometry of the structure," he says, "is so strangely reminiscent of the [human] hippocampus." Strausfeld and others are looking for clues as to whether the similarities result from a deep and ancient kinship or simply from analogous solutions that evolved independently to aid survival.

In his underground laboratory at the Neurosciences Institute, van Swinderen is observing a fly suspended in what amounts to a miniature IMAX theater. The setup is designed to monitor the focus of attention in a fly's brain. An LED screen wraps around the fly, displaying a sequence of flashing objects in front of its eyes, two objects at a time. Right now, it's an X and a square. The X is flickering 12 times per second and the square 15 times per second.

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