NASA looking in wrong places for alien life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.