In the ongoing quest to identify the genetic factors involved in disease, scientists have increasingly turned to genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, which enable the scanning of up to a million genetic markers in thousands of individuals.
These studies generally compare the frequency of genetic variants between two groups - those with a particular disease and healthy individuals. Differences in the frequency of a given variant suggest the variant may be involved in the disease.
Science & Technology
© Colin A. Hope/ Monash University
Pottery decorated in a distinctive pale blue color was in vogue in New Kingdom Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II.
Pottery decorated in a distinctive pale blue color was in vogue in New Kingdom Egypt, particularly during the reign of Amenhotep III and Ramesses II.
Jennifer Smith, PhD, associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was belly crawling her way to the end of a long, narrow tunnel carved in the rock at a desert oasis by Egyptians who lived in the time of the pharaohs.
"I was crawling along when suddenly I felt stabbed in the chest," she says. "I looked down and saw that I was pressing against the broken end of a long bone. That freaked me out because at first I thought I was crawling over bodies, but I looked up and saw a sheep skull not too far away, so I calmed down. At least the bones weren't human."
Cells have two different protection programs to safeguard them from getting out of control under stress and from dividing without stopping and developing cancer. Until now, researchers assumed that these protective systems were prompted separately from each other. Now for the first time, using an animal model for lymphoma, cancer researchers of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) Berlin-Buch and the Charité -- University Hospital Berlin in Germany have shown that these two protection programs work together through an interaction with normal immune cells to prevent tumors.
The findings of Dr. Maurice Reimann and his colleagues in the research group led by Professor Clemens Schmitt may be of fundamental importance in the fight against cancer. The research appears in the journal Cancer Cell.
Researchers have known for some time that -- paradoxically -- oncogenes themselves can activate these cell protection programs in an early developmental stage of the disease. This may explain why some tumors take decades to develop until the outbreak of the disease. The Myc oncogene triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death), inducing damaged cells to commit suicide in order to protect the organism as a whole. By means of chemotherapy, physicians activate this protection program to treat cancer.
The findings of Dr. Maurice Reimann and his colleagues in the research group led by Professor Clemens Schmitt may be of fundamental importance in the fight against cancer. The research appears in the journal Cancer Cell.
Researchers have known for some time that -- paradoxically -- oncogenes themselves can activate these cell protection programs in an early developmental stage of the disease. This may explain why some tumors take decades to develop until the outbreak of the disease. The Myc oncogene triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death), inducing damaged cells to commit suicide in order to protect the organism as a whole. By means of chemotherapy, physicians activate this protection program to treat cancer.
© NASA
Gliese 710
Gliese 710
A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.
The Solar System is surrounded by thousands of stars, but until recently it wasn't at all clear where they were all heading.
In 1997, however, astronomers published the Hipparcos Catalogue giving detailed position and velocity measurements of some 100,000 stars in our neighbourhood, all gathered by the European Space Agency's Hipparcos spacecraft. It's fair to say that the Hipparcos data has revolutionised our understanding of the 'hood.
In particular, this data allowed astronomers to work out which stars we'd been closer to in the past and which we will meet in the future. It turns out that 156 stars fall into this category and that the Sun has a close encounter with another star (meaning an approach within 1 parsec) every 2 million years or so.
© High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA
Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae, like the one visible in the lower left corner of this galaxy, to explore the past and future expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy.
Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae, like the one visible in the lower left corner of this galaxy, to explore the past and future expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy.
Cosmologists use Type Ia supernovae-the violent explosions of dead cores of stars called white dwarfs-as a kind of cosmic ruler to measure distances to the supernovae's host galaxies and, as such, to understand the past and future expansion of the universe and explore the nature of dark energy.
Until recently, it was thought that white dwarfs could not exceed what is known as the Chandrasekhar limit, a critical mass
equaling about 1.4 times that of the Sun, before exploding in a supernova. This uniform limit is a key tool in measuring distances to supernovae.
Since 2003, four supernovae have been discovered that were so bright, cosmologists wondered whether their white dwarfs had surpassed the Chandrasekhar limit. These supernovae have been dubbed the "super-Chandrasekhar" supernovae.
© Peters, et al. 2010
This is a simulated observation of a massive star viewed along the plane of the disk. This visualization of dust emission traces the density and temperature of the gas cloud that surrounds the star. The regions that are currently ionized (in red) and have been ionized in the past (blue structures) show how the nebula flickers.
This is a simulated observation of a massive star viewed along the plane of the disk. This visualization of dust emission traces the density and temperature of the gas cloud that surrounds the star. The regions that are currently ionized (in red) and have been ionized in the past (blue structures) show how the nebula flickers.
New simulations by researchers affiliated with the University of Heidelberg, American Museum of Natural History, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics show that as the gas cloud collapses, it forms dense filamentary structures that absorb the star's radiation when it passes through them.
A result is that the surrounding heated nebula flickers like a candle flame. The research is published in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
"To form a massive star, you need massive amounts of gas," says Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a co-author and curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the Museum. "Gravity draws that gas into filaments that feed the hungry baby stars."
© ESA and the HFI Consortium, IRAS
The image spans about 50 degrees of the sky. It is a three-colour combination constructed from Planck's two highest frequency channels (557 and 857 GHz, corresponding to wavelengths of 540 and 350 micrometres), and an image at the shorter wavelength of 100 micrometres made by the IRAS satellite. This combination visualises dust temperature very effectively: red corresponds to temperatures as cold as 10 degrees above absolute zero, and white to those of a few tens of degrees. Overall, the image shows local dust structures within 500 light-years of the Sun.
The image spans about 50 degrees of the sky. It is a three-colour combination constructed from Planck's two highest frequency channels (557 and 857 GHz, corresponding to wavelengths of 540 and 350 micrometres), and an image at the shorter wavelength of 100 micrometres made by the IRAS satellite. This combination visualises dust temperature very effectively: red corresponds to temperatures as cold as 10 degrees above absolute zero, and white to those of a few tens of degrees. Overall, the image shows local dust structures within 500 light-years of the Sun.
Planck is principally designed to study the biggest mysteries of cosmology. How did the Universe form? How did the galaxies form? This new image extends the range of its investigations into the cold dust structures of our own Galaxy.
The image shows the filamentary structure of dust in the solar neighbourhood - within about 500 light-years of the Sun. The local filaments are connected to the Milky Way, which is the pink horizontal feature near the bottom of the image. Here, the emission is coming from much further away, across the disc of our Galaxy.
The image has been colour coded to discern different temperatures of dust. White-pink tones show dust of a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, whereas the deeper colours are dust at around -261 degrees C, only about 12 degrees above absolute zero. The warmer dust is concentrated into the plane of the Galaxy whereas the dust suspended above and below is cooler.
"What makes these structures have these particular shapes is not well understood," says Jan Tauber, ESA Project Scientist for Planck. The denser parts are called molecular clouds while the more diffuse parts are 'cirrus'. They consist of both dust and gas, although the gas does not show up directly in this image.
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This artist's conception illustrates one of the most primitive supermassive black holes known (central black dot) at the core of a young, star-rich galaxy.
This artist's conception illustrates one of the most primitive supermassive black holes known (central black dot) at the core of a young, star-rich galaxy.
"We have found what are likely first-generation quasars, born in a dust-free medium and at the earliest stages of evolution," said Linhua Jiang of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Jiang is the lead author of a paper announcing the findings in the March 18 issue of Nature.
Black holes are beastly distortions of space and time. The most massive and active ones lurk at the cores of galaxies, and are usually surrounded by doughnut-shaped structures of dust and gas that feed and sustain the growing black holes. These hungry, supermassive black holes are called quasars.
As grimy and unkempt as our present-day universe is today, scientists believe the very early universe didn't have any dust - which tells them that the most primitive quasars should also be dust-free. But nobody had seen such immaculate quasars - until now. Spitzer has identified two - the smallest on record - about 13 billion light-years away from Earth. The quasars, called J0005-0006 and J0303-0019, were first unveiled in visible light using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
© Prof. N. Ch. Stampolidis
Excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis at the entrance to a recently excavated eighth-century B.C. tomb of an important high priestess and her three female protégés, with ARCHAEOLOGY's Eti Bonn-Muller and budding archaeologist Baki Agelarakis.
Excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis at the entrance to a recently excavated eighth-century B.C. tomb of an important high priestess and her three female protégés, with ARCHAEOLOGY's Eti Bonn-Muller and budding archaeologist Baki Agelarakis.
For a quarter century, Greek excavation director Nicholas Stampolidis and his dedicated team have been unearthing the untold stories of the people buried some 2,800 years ago in the necropolis of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete. Until now, the site has perhaps been best known for the tomb its excavators dubbed "A1K1," an assemblage of 141 cremated individuals, all but two of whom were aristocratic men who likely fell in battle in foreign lands. Excavated between 1992 and 1996, this elaborate rock-cut tomb was brimming with fantastic burial goods that date from the ninth to the seventh century B.C., including bronze vessels, gold and silver jewelry, and military regalia, as literally befits the burial of Homeric war heroes. Now, two unprecedented discoveries since 2007--three lavish jar burials that contained the remains of a dozen related female individuals and a monumental funerary building where a high priestess and her protégés, also all related, were laid to rest--are adding to our knowledge of Eleutherna's women, and forcing the scholarly community to reevaluate their importance and role in the so-called "Dark Ages" of Greece (see "Top 10 Discoveries of 2009").
Cairo - Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a colossal ancient statue of the pharaonic deity of wisdom, Thoth, in the shape of a baboon, the council of antiquities said in a statement on Tuesday.
The four-metre tall statue was discovered in four pieces along with two statues while workers were lowering ground waters beneath Luxor to help preserve the city's pharaonic temples, the statement said. It dates back to the 18th Dynasty, which ruled Egypt until 1292 BC.
'It is the first time that a statue of Thoth, depicting him as a monkey, of this magnitude has been discovered,' Mansur Boraik, head of pharaonic antiquities in Luxor, told AFP.
The statues were discovered near the temple of Amenhotep III, who ruled until 1372 BC.
The four-metre tall statue was discovered in four pieces along with two statues while workers were lowering ground waters beneath Luxor to help preserve the city's pharaonic temples, the statement said. It dates back to the 18th Dynasty, which ruled Egypt until 1292 BC.
'It is the first time that a statue of Thoth, depicting him as a monkey, of this magnitude has been discovered,' Mansur Boraik, head of pharaonic antiquities in Luxor, told AFP.
The statues were discovered near the temple of Amenhotep III, who ruled until 1372 BC.
Comment: Yes everyone, keep calm. Another article of of the "Relax! Anything bad that might happen to the Big Blue Marble is a long way off'." variety.
Perhaps not? Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls