Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

With DNA Discovery, 'Human Soup' Gets More Complex


Fox News
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00 UTC
DNA
© unknownAn illustration of the double-helix structure of a strand of DNA.
The human recipe just got complicated: It turns out there are more ingredients in us than we thought.

In high school science, we were taught of the four basic units that make up DNA -- adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. When scientists talk of DNA sequencing, it's written as strings of these units: ATCGGTGA, and so on.

In recent years, scientists expanded that list of nucleotides from four to six. And in a study published online in the most recent issue of Science magazine, researchers from the University of North Carolina School's medical school have discovered the seventh and eight bases of DNA.

But the meaning of this extra ingredient in the alphabet soup that makes us who we are isn't as simple as A, B, C.

"Before we can grasp the magnitude of this discovery, we have to figure out the function of these new bases," said Yi Zhang, biochemistry and biophysics professor at UNC.'s Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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Bizarro Earth

Paleoecologists Suggest Mass Extinction Due to Huge Methane Release

Bob Yirka
PhysOrg.com
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:00 UTC
earth
© PhysOrg.comThis wide angle view of the Earth is centered on the Atlantic Ocean between South America and Africa.
Micha Ruhl and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen's Nordic Center for Earth Evolution have published a paper in Science where they contend that the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the Triassic period, was due to a "sudden" increase in the amount of methane in the atmosphere due to the effects of global warning that resulted from the spewing of carbon dioxide from volcanoes.

Prior to this research, most scientists have believed that the sudden extinction of nearly half of all life forms on the planet was due solely to the emissions from that were occurring in what was to become the Atlantic Ocean. Ruhl et al contend that instead, what happened, was that the small amount of atmospheric heating that occurred due to the exhaust from the volcanoes, caused the oceans to warm as well, leading to the melting of ice crystals at the bottom of the sea that were holding on to methane created by the millions of years of decomposing . When the ice crystals melted, methane was released, which in turn caused the planet to warm even more, which led to more methane release in a , that Ruhl says, was the real reason for the that led to the next phase in world history, the rise of dinosaurs.
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Info

Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists


Agence France-Presse
Sun, 24 Jul 2011 13:30 UTC
Time Travel
© iStockPhotoBy proving a single photon can't travel faster than light, scientists say they have proven time travel is impossible.
Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein's theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light -- demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, "obeys the traffic law of the universe."

"Einstein claimed that the speed of light was the traffic law of the universe or in simple language, nothing can travel faster than light," the university said on its website.

"Professor Du's study demonstrates that a single photon, the fundamental quanta of light, also obeys the traffic law of the universe just like classical EM (electromagnetic) waves."
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Magic Wand

Gardening in the brain: Specialist cells prune connections between neurons


European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 02:24 UTC
Image
© EMBL/R.PaolicelliThis is microglia (green) in a mouse brain. The nuclei of all cells in the brain are labeled blue
Gardeners know that some trees require regular pruning: some of their branches have to be cut so that others can grow stronger. The same is true of the developing brain: cells called microglia prune the connections between neurons, shaping how the brain is wired, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy, discovered. Published online today in Science, the findings could one day help understand neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

"We're very excited, because our data shows microglia are critical to get the connectivity right in the brain," says Cornelius Gross, who led the work: "they 'eat up' synapses to make space for the most effective contacts between neurons to grow strong."
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Telescope

Deep Space Water Reservoir Discovered

Mark Dunphy
Irish Weather Online
Sat, 23 Jul 2011 21:47 UTC
Image
© NASA/ESAThis artist's concept illustrates a quasar, or feeding black hole where astronomers discovered huge amounts of water vapour.
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.

Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar - one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos - the researchers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have found a mass of water vapour that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.

Because the quasar is so far away, its light has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth. The observations therefore reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old.

"The environment around this quasar is unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and a visiting associate at Caltech."It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."
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Info

CERN Officials May Have Witnessed 'God Particle'


redOrbit
Sat, 23 Jul 2011 05:40 UTC
LHC
© redOrbit

Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) may have gotten their first look at the so-called "God particle" -- the fabled massive elementary particle known as the Higgs boson -- according to BBC News reports published Friday.

According to BBC Science Correspondent Ian Sample, officials at the Geneva-based particle physics laboratory announced the possible discovery during the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics (HEP 2011), which opened Thursday in Grenoble, France.

"Speaking at the meeting, teams working on two of the collider's huge detectors, Atlas and CMS, independently reported unusual bumps in their data that could be the first hints of the particle," Sample reported.

"Physicists stressed that it was too early to know whether the signals were due to the missing particle," he added. "Bumps that look like new discoveries can be caused by statistical fluctuations in data, flaws in computer models and other glitches, they said."

"We cannot say anything today, but clearly it's intriguing," Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the 3,000-strong Atlas team, told BBC News, adding that they would know more after CERN personnel from both the Atlas and CMS teams were able to obtain more information and compare their results.
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2 + 2 = 4

How to be in Two Places at the Same Time

Michael Brooks
New Scientist
Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:00 UTC
Bilocation of glass
© Jekaterina Nikitina/GettyGetting around
An ambitious experiment to make a glass sphere exist in two places at once could provide the most sensitive test of quantum theory yet. The experiment will place a sphere containing millions of atoms - making it larger than many viruses - into a superposition of states in different places, say researchers in Europe.

Physicists have questioned whether large objects can follow quantum laws ever since Erwin Schrödinger's thought-experiment suggested a cat could exist in a superposition of being both alive and dead.

The idea is to zap a glass sphere 40 nanometres in diameter with a laser while it is inside a small cavity. This should force the sphere to bounce from one side of the cavity to the other. But since the light is quantum in nature, so too will be the position of the sphere. This forces it into a quantum superposition.

The experiment will have to be carried out in high vacuum and at extremely low temperatures so that the sphere is not disturbed by thermal noise or air molecules, says lead author Oriol Romero-Isart from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
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Beaker

150 human-animal hybrids grown in UK labs: Embryos have been produced secretively for the past three years

Daniel Martin and Simon Caldwell
The Daily Mail, UK
Sat, 23 Jul 2011 06:42 UTC
Scientists have created more than 150 human-animal hybrid embryos in British laboratories.

The hybrids have been produced secretively over the past three years by researchers looking into possible cures for a wide range of diseases.

The revelation comes just a day after a committee of scientists warned of a nightmare Planet of the Apes scenario in which work on human-animal creations goes too far.
Image
© Getty ImagesUndercover: Scientists have been growing human animal hybrids in secret for the last three years (Posed by models)
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Attention

Frequent TV Viewers More Likely to Vote on Looks

Marianne English
Discovery News
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 08:36 UTC
TV Debate
© scriptingnews / Flickr.comPresidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon debate on television for the first time in 1960.
The 1960 debate between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon altered America's view of political competition. Expectations grew, as candidates not only needed to say the right thing, but also look the part. In addition, the event marked the first time a debate could be watched within the comforts of home -- and viewers liked what they saw from one Democratic hopeful.

It's obvious that physical appearances still influence viewers' perceptions of political candidates. But are some people easier to charm than others?

A recent study published in the American Journal of Political Science suggests that people who are less informed about politics and those who are heavy TV watchers tend to make more political decisions based on the attractiveness of candidates.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology drew data from two U.S. surveys of more than 36,000 people that measured respondents' political knowledge, TV behavior and voting preferences when shown candidates with differing appearances.
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Info

DNA Evidence: Neanderthals Had Sex With Humans

Stephanie Pappas
Live Science
Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:49 UTC
Neanderthals
© Michael Hofreiter and Kurt Fiusterweier / MPG EVASome Neanderthals may have had pale skin and red hair similar to that of some modern humans.
Many modern-day humans may be carrying around a fragment of Neanderthal DNA on one of their sex chromosomes, a new study finds.

The research adds a piece of corroborating evidence to the theory that Neanderthals and humans interbred sometime after humans migrated out of Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. The DNA fragment, found on the human X chromosome, is present in 9 percent of humans across the world from Asia to Europe to America - except in Africa, where it does not appear.

"It's in the Middle East, it's in Europe, it's in Eurasia, it's in America, it's in Australia," study researcher Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal told LiveScience. "This one event which led to this on the human X chromosome has to occur very early after modern man left Africa."
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