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First Gamma-ray-only Pulsar Observation Opens New Window On Stellar Evolution


Science Daily
Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:21 UTC
About three times a second, a 10,000-year-old stellar corpse sweeps a beam of gamma-rays toward Earth. This object, known as a pulsar, is the first one known to "blink" only in gamma rays, and was discovered by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and international partners.
the first pulsar that beams only in gamma rays
© NASA/S. Pineault, DRAO
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered the first pulsar that beams only in gamma rays. The pulsar (illustrated, inset) lies in the CTA 1 supernova remnant in Cepheus.

"This is the first example of a new class of pulsars that will give us fundamental insights into how stars work," says Stanford University's Peter Michelson, principal investigator for the LAT. The LAT data is processed by the DOE's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and analyzed by the International LAT Collaboration.
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Network

A survey shows that old Internet addresses are not running out yet

Robert Lemos
Technology Review
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:06 UTC
Internet address map
© University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute
Internet address map: About a quarter of the address space is still unassigned (blue), a quarter appears to be relatively densely populated (green), and nearly half of the space has few servers or did not respond to queries (red).
In a little more than two years, the last Internet addresses will be assigned by the international group tasked with managing the 4.3 billion numbers. And yet, while most Internet engineers are looking to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), the next-generation Internet addressing scheme, a research team has probed the entire Internet and found that the problem may not be as bad as many fear. The probe reveals millions of Internet addresses that have been allocated but remain unused.

In a paper to be presented later this month at the Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, a team of six researchers have documented what they claim is the first complete census of the Internet in more than two decades. They discovered a surprising number of unused addresses and conclude that plenty will still be lying idle when the last numbers are handed out in a few years' time. The problem, they say, is that some companies and institutions are using just a small fraction of the many million addresses they have been allocated.
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Meteor

Italian astronomer finds new comet


United Press International
Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:04 UTC
ROME -- An Italian astronomer said he has discovered a new comet --the fifth one he has found in less than a year.

Andrea Boattini, who is currently working at Mount Lemmon Infrared Observatory in Arizona, said he spotted the comet while scanning near-Earth objects, the Italian news service ANSA reported Wednesday.

The comet, technically named P/2008 T1, will also be known as Boattini T1. The astronomer said it was easy to spot because of its unusual blaze and fan-like tail.
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Fish

Fossil Fish Shows Complexity of Transition to Land

John Noble Wilford
The New York Times
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 23:34 UTC
Fossil Fish
© Ted Daeschler, Academy of Natural Sciences
The head skeleton of Tiktaalik.
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.

There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size - a beginning of the bone's adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.

The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said in announcing the research on Wednesday.
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Butterfly

World's Oldest Fossil Impression Of Flying Insect Discovered: Found In Suburban Strip Mall


Science Daily
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:24 UTC
Image
© Jodi Hilton, Tufts University
Tufts geology major Richard J. Knecht holding halves of the fossil.
While paleontologists may scour remote, exotic places in search of prehistoric specimens, Tufts researchers have found what they believe to be the world's oldest whole-body fossil impression of a flying insect in a wooded field behind a strip mall in North Attleboro, Mass.

During a recent exploration as part of his senior project, Richard J. Knecht, a Tufts geology major, and Jake Benner, a paleontologist and senior lecturer in the Geology Department, set out to hunt for fossils at a location they learned of while reading a master's thesis that had been written in 1929. With chisels and hammers, the team reached the shale and sandstone outcropping described in the paper. There they delicately picked away pieces of rock before reaching a section that yielded fossils. Just below the surface, they uncovered a fossilized impression of a flying insect.
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Sun

Sunspots an omen of weather woes?

Charles Perry
Times & Transcript
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:06 UTC
More data needed before making such a 'leap,' says astronomer

The lack of sunspots this year has some scientists wondering if this could be an indicator that much colder weather is on the way.
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Magnify

Response To Immune Protein Determines Pathology Of Multiple Sclerosis


Science Daily
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:01 UTC
New research may help reveal why different parts of the brain can come under attack in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). According to a new study in mice with an MS-like disease, the brain's response to a protein produced by invading T cells dictates whether it's the spinal cord or cerebellum that comes under fire.
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Cowboy Hat

Male pattern baldness pinpointed on DNA


Globe and Mail
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:38 UTC
A McGill University researcher has found a mysterious stretch of DNA that can make men lose their hair.

The discovery could lead to new ways to prevent male pattern baldness or a quick genetic test to determine if a man is likely to hang on to his hair. But it also may help researchers better understand the human genome.

The section of chromosome 20 that Brent Richards and his colleagues have implicated in baldness isn't a gene.

It is in a gene desert, one of the many long stretches of DNA that fill the gaps between the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome.
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People

What makes an Arab an Arab?


The National
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:54 UTC
Iraqi family
© AP Photo / Yahya Ahmed
This Iraqi family can point to social and cultural factors that define them as an Iraqi, but a genome mapping programme will try to get to the bottom of the genetic factors in the Arab identity
What defines someone's identity? Cultural, geographic, historical, linguistic, religious and political factors all contribute to self-definition - but working out what it means to be an Arab on a genetic level is the goal of a far-reaching project that has the potential to influence the health of millions of people.

One hundred people who describe themselves as Arabs - half of them originating on the Arabian peninsula and the rest from the wider Arabic nations including Egypt, Syria and the Maghreb - will have their entire genetic makeup sequenced by the Arab Genome Project.
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Bulb

Unraveling The Complexity Of Human Disease


Science Daily
Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:48 UTC
Impressive advances in our understanding of the genetic basis of disease were outlined at the 3rd ESF Functional Genomics Conference in Innsbruck, Austria.

The mysteries of the human genome are slowly being revealed -- but the more we uncover the more complicated the picture becomes. This was one key message to emerge from the European Science Foundation (ESF)'s 3rd Functional Genomics Conference held in Innsbruck, Austria, on 1-4 October.
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