Science & TechnologyS


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New stem cell study raises hope of baldness cure

Agence France-Presse
The Raw Story
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:47 UTC
Bald Japanese man
Japanese researchers have successfully grown hair on hairless mice by implanting follicles created from stem cells, they announced Wednesday, sparking new hopes of a cure for baldness.

Led by professor Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science, the team bioengineered hair follicles and transplanted them into the skin of hairless mice.

The creatures eventually grew hair, which continued regenerating in normal growth cycles after old hairs fell out.
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The World's First Transgenic, 'Handmade' Cloned Sheep is Alive and Well in China

Clay Dillow
PopSci
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:25 UTC
Lamb
© Donald Macleod via Wikimedia This is Not Peng Peng but's it's adorable, no?
The world's first transgenic sheep produced via a simplified cloning technique, known as handmade cloning (seriously), is here. Peng Peng, named for the two principal scientists doing the cloning (who happen to have the same name), was successfully delivered back on March 26 and is developing so well that researchers have deemed him ready for the spotlight.

Peng Peng was more than two years in the making. Chinese researchers BGI Ark Biotechnology working with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shihezi University were working in some adverse conditions in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where climate and laboratory conditions were not ideal for conventional cloning.

So they opted for a simplified method of cloning, known as handmade cloning (or HMC), that requires fewer sophisticated lab implements and simplified procedures.

The donor cells were collected from Chinese Merino sheep back in 2009, and a transgenic cell line was established. It took several tries, but in October of last year a successful procedure for HMC sheep cloning was developed. From that point, Peng Peng was the next step.

HMC was first introduced in 2001, so the procedure itself is nothing new. Success with the procedure, however, is both new and proliferating. Successful clones have been previously made with cows, goats, pigs, and water buffalo, and with Peng Peng the world has its first HMC sheep. Which means two things. For one, scientists are getting better at this technique of animal cloning. And secondly: We're likely going to see more of this going forward.
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Dinosaurs Put Eggs in Wrong Evolutionary Basket


Agence France Presse
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
Zurich: The fact that land-bound dinosaurs laid eggs is what sealed their fate of mass extinction millions of years ago while live birthing mammals went on to thrive, scientists said Wednesday.

In a new explanation for mammals' evolutionary victory over dinosaurs, researchers said a mathematical model has shown that infant size was the clincher.

Given physical limitations to egg size, dinosaurs had comparatively small young. Some came out of the egg weighing as little as two to 10 kilogrammes (4.4 to 22 pounds), yet had to bulk up to a hefty 30 or 50 tonnes.

Growing up, the youngsters had to compete in several size categories with adults of other animal groups for food, University of Zurich scientist Marcus Clauss told AFP.

This meant that all the small and medium animal size categories supported by the natural environment were "occupied", leaving no room for smaller dinosaur species in which to thrive, according to the findings published in Biology Letters, a journal of Britain's Royal Society.

"There is a lot of room in the ecosystem for small species, but (in such a scenario) that room is taken up by the young ones of the large species," Clauss explained.

"That was not a problem for 150 million years but as soon as something happens that takes away all the large species so that only small species remain, if there are no small species to remain you are gone as a whole group."

The catastrophic event that wiped out all larger life forms some 65 million years ago meant the end for terrestrial dinosaurs.
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Jurassic Lark? Expedition to Seek Living Dinosaurs in Africa

Benjamin Radford
Life's Little Mysteries
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:39 UTC
Camarasaurus
© DreamstimeAn artist's depiction of a Camarasaurus.
A young Missouri man has turned to the Internet in search of investors for his expedition into the remote jungles of Africa seeking to document undiscovered flora and fauna. That is not so unusual, but one of the creatures he hopes to find is: a living dinosaur.

The region Stephen McCullah, the organizer of the expedition, has chosen to explore is the reputed home of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, a dinosaur-like creature said to be up to 35 feet long (11 meters), with brownish-gray skin and a long, flexible neck. Many locals believe that it lives in the caves it digs in riverbanks, and that the beast feeds on elephants, hippos and crocodiles.

McCullah posted his pitch on Kickstarter.com asking for $27,000 in donations so that he and his friends can launch the Newmac Expedition, "one of the first expeditions in this century with the goal of categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo." The preliminary four-man venture is slated to launch June 26.

Though the team members largely lack formal education in biology or zoology, they "anticipate discovering hundreds of new insect, plant and fish species during the course of our research. There is also the legitimate hope of discovering many reptile and mammalian species. We have received reports...in the region of eyewitnesses seeing canine-sized tarantulas, large river dwelling sauropods [dinosaurs], and a species of man-eating fish," McCullah wrote on the website.

Never mind dinosaurs, which have been extinct for millions of years, for a moment. Finding a spider the size of a dog would be remarkable enough, as the largest-known tarantula, the Goliath birdeater, lives in South America and has a leg span of "only" a foot.
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How Humans Grew Fruitful by Devouring Meat

Jennifer Welsh
LiveScience
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:00 UTC
Meat Eater
© Poulsons Photography | ShutterstockWhen early humans became carnivores, their higher-quality diet allowed mothers to wean babies earlier and have more children, altering the course of human evolution.
Humans' meat-eating habits help separate them from other great apes, new research suggests. A meat-heavy diet lets people wean younger babies and have more offspring, which may have contributed to the population explosion, the researchers say.

Because human females wean their young so quickly, they "can potentially contribute a larger number of individuals to the human population during their reproductive years," study researcher Elia Psouni, an associate professor at Lund University in Sweden, told LiveScience. "We are suggesting that this has had a very big impact on the survival and spreading of the species and the way it happened."

Studies of "reproductively natural" populations (that is, societies that don't use birth control) showed that mothers stop giving breast milk to their baby when the baby reaches about 2 years and 4 months of age.

That surprised the researchers, since other great apes take about four times as long to wean their offspring (proportionate to their maximum lifespans).

These other apes have diets dominated by fruits, vegetables and other plant materials. Chimpanzees, humans' closest living ancestors, get only about 5 percent of their calories from meat, compared with about 20 percent for humans.
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Mysterious Cosmic Rays Leave Scientists in the Dark

Charles Q. Choi
Space.com
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:01 UTC
Cosmic Rays
© NSF/J. YangLittle is known about the ultra high-energy cosmic rays that regularly penetrate the atmosphere. Recent IceCube results challenge one of the leading theories, that they come from Gamma Ray Bursts.
The mystery of the origin of the strongest cosmic rays has deepened as new clues into key suspects, the most powerful explosions in the universe, suggest they are likely not potential culprits, researchers say.

Cosmic rays are charged subatomic particles that streak to Earth from deep in outer space. A few rare cosmic rays are extraordinarily powerful, with energies up to 100 million times greater than any attained by human-made particle colliders, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The sources of these cosmic rays are a mystery.

"Nature is capable of accelerating elementary particles to macroscopic energies," said study co-author Francis Halzen at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, principal investigator at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive telescope designed to find the tiny subatomic particles.

"There are basically only two ideas on how she does this - in gravitationally driven particle flows near the supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies, and in the collapse of stars to a black hole, seen by astronomers as gamma-ray bursts."
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The Case of the Missing Dark Matter

Jason Major
Universe Today
Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:25 UTC
Missing Dark Matter
© ESO/L. CalçadaArtist's impression of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way.
A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery.

Dark matter is an invisible substance that is suspected to exist in large quantity around galaxies, lending mass but emitting no radiation. The only evidence for it comes from its gravitational effect on the material around it... up to now, dark matter itself has not been directly detected. Regardless, it has been estimated to make up 80% of all the mass in the Universe.

A team of astronomers at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile has mapped the region around over 400 stars near the Sun, some of which were over 13,000 light-years distant. What they found was a quantity of material that coincided with what was observable: stars, gas, and dust... but no dark matter.
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Heart

Study: Empathy Genes Overcomes Threats and Fear

Maia Szalavitz
Healthland.time.com
Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:10 UTC
People who are hard-wired to show empathy and kindness do so even in the face of a threatening or untrustworthy world.

Image
© opus / a.collectionRF / Getty Images
What makes people behave kindly? Is it the result of having been nurtured in an environment of love and kindness that makes you more likely to treat others the same way? Or perhaps personal experiences of threat and deprivation make you more attuned to the suffering of others? Or maybe it's just a matter of genes?

As with so many human tendencies, displays of kindness are likely to be influenced by both environment and genes. People who have genes that predispose them to empathy and kindness, for example, are steadfast in their charitable behavior, regardless of their current environment, a new study finds. But people with genes that are linked to a weaker inclination toward altruism tend to reduce their charitable behavior and commitment to civic responsibilities, such as political action or jury duty, when they have heightened feelings of fear or being threatened.
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Rogue Planets Can Find Homes Around Other Stars

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:43 UTC
Rogue Planet
© Christine Pulliam (CfA)In this artist's conception, a captured world drifts at the outer edge of a distant star system, so far from its Sun-like host that the star's disk is barely resolvable at upper right. New research shows that one in 20 stars within our galaxy might have captured a free-floating planet.
As crazy as it sounds, free-floating rogue planets have been predicted to exist for quite some time and just last year, in May 2011, several orphan worlds were finally detected. And earlier this year, astronomers estimated that there could be 100,000 times more rogue planets in the Milky Way than stars. Now, the latest research suggests that sometimes, these rogue, nomadic worlds can find a new home, and go into orbit around other stars. Scientists say this finding could explain the existence of some planets that orbit surprisingly far from their stars, and even the existence of a double-planet system.

"Stars trade planets just like baseball teams trade players," said Hagai Perets of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Astronomers now understand that rogue planets are a natural consequence of both star and planetary formation. Newborn star systems often contain multiple planets, and if two planets interact, one can be ejected in a form of planetary billiards, kicked out of the star system to become an interstellar traveler.

But, later if a rogue planet encounters a different star moving in the same direction at the same speed, be captured in to orbit around that star, say Perets and Thijs Kouwenhoven of Peking University, China, the authors of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Question

Can cooling explain 'miracle' baby found alive after 10 hours in morgue refrigerator

Madison Park
CNN
Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:25 UTC
argentine miracle baby
© Canal 9
A premature baby - who was declared dead shortly after birth - was later discovered to be alive after spending 10 hours in a morgue refrigerator. How did this happen?

Doctors at the Perrando Hospital in northeast Argentina can't explain how several doctors pronounced the child dead or how the premature infant born three months early survived for so many hours inside a chilly coffin. The baby, Luz Milagros Veron, was reported Friday in "very serious" condition after doctors detected an infection.
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