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Stratospheric Water Vapor Is a Global Warming Wild Card


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:21 UTC
Stratospheric
© ScienceDailyWater vapor and radiative processes. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth's surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Observations from satellites and balloons show that stratospheric water vapor has had its ups and downs lately, increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, and then dropping after 2000. The authors show that these changes occurred precisely in a narrow altitude region of the stratosphere where they would have the biggest effects on climate.

Water vapor is a highly variable gas and has long been recognized as an important player in the cocktail of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons, nitrous oxide, and others -- that affect climate.
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DNA Testing on 2,000-year-old bones in Italy reveal East Asian Ancestry


Physorg.com
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:13 UTC
Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed a maternal East Asian ancestry.

The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

According to Tracy Prowse, assistant professor of Anthropology, and the lead author on the study, the isotopic evidence indicates that about 20% of the sample analyzed to-date was not born in the area around Vagnari. The mtDNA is another line of evidence that indicates at least one individual was of East Asian descent.

"These preliminary isotopic and mtDNA data provide tantalizing evidence that some of the people who lived and died at Vagnari were foreigners, and that they may have come to Vagnari from beyond the borders of the Roman Empire," says Prowse. "This research addresses broader issues relating to globalization, human mobility, identity, and diversity in Roman Italy."
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Airports Could Get Mind-Reading Scanners

Bill Christensen
Technovelgy.com
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:57 UTC
WeCU Technologies is building a mind-reading scanner that can tell if a given traveler is a potential danger - without the subject's knowledge. WeCU Technologies (pronounced "we see you") is creating a system that would essentially turn the public spaces in airports into vast screening grounds:.

"The system ... projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, company CEO Ehud Givon said.

"The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly, to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places. If you strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, Givon explained, you couldn't help but respond.
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Telescope

Fears of Cataclysm Prompt More Research into Asteroids

Stuart Tiffen
Reuters
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:44 UTC
Asteroid Impact
© Deutsche WelleAn artists depiction of an asteroid impacting the Earth.
It is only fitting that, in the 21st century, science will occasionally resemble science fiction. So it comes as no surprise that space agencies are building ships to prevent the end of the World.

There is a growing consensus among the global scientific community that the planet is under threat. The danger they warn of is by no means a new one; in fact it is the same one that many hypothesize led to the extinction of the dinosaurs approximately 65 million years ago - asteroids.

Every year more of these clusters of metal, ice, and rock hurtling through space are observed by astronomers. From its operations center in Darmstadt, the European Space Agency (ESA) is deeply involved in researching asteroids and has been cooking up a cosmic caper to pay one a visit for the better part of a decade. But why all the fuss?

According to US space agency NASA, the Solar System is host to more than one million of these so-called Near Earth Objects (NEOs), a term that includes comets and asteroids, that are greater than 40 meters in diameter, considered the threshold size for them to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. NASA is also tracking more than 1,100 asteroids at least two kilometers in diameter.
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Sherlock

Scientists map changes in science and beyond

Jen Laloup
Public Library of Science
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:48 UTC
Image
© PLoS ONEThis set of scientific fields show the major shifts in the last decade of science. Each significance clustering for the citation networks in years 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2007 occupies a column in the diagram and is horizontally connected to preceding and succeeding significance clusterings by stream fields. Each block in a column represents a field and the height of the block reflects citation flow through the field. The fields are ordered from bottom to top by their size with mutually nonsignificant fields placed together and separated by half the standard spacing. We use a darker color to indicate the significant subset of each cluster. All journals that are clustered in the field of neuroscience in year 2007 are colored to highlight the fusion and formation of neuroscience.
How has the structure of scientific research changed over the past decade? A team of researchers from Umeå University, Sweden, and the University of Washington, USA, aims to answer this question and others in a study published on January 27th in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.

Using new mathematical tools, the authors have revealed major shifts in the structure of scientific research in order to uncover structural changes in large, interconnected systems. To illustrate the power of their methods, the researchers mapped changes in the field of neuroscience and were able to track how the field evolved from an interdisciplinary specialty to a full fledged scholarly discipline.
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Info

Tobacco plant-made therapeutic thwarts West Nile virus

Joe Caspermeyer
Arizona State University
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:41 UTC
Image
© Barb Backes, Biodesign Institute at ASUQiang "Shawn" Chen and lead author Huafang "Lily" Lai arrested West Nile virus infection with a new therapeutic manufactured from tobacco plants.
A new therapeutic made from tobacco plants has been shown to arrest West Nile virus infection, according to a new study by Arizona State University scientist Qiang Chen and his colleagues.

Chen, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute and professor in the PolyTechnic Campus' College of Technology and Innovation, is the first to demonstrate a plant-derived treatment to successfully combat West Nile virus after exposure and infection. The research appears in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (advanced online edition).

There are currently no available vaccines against West Nile, nor effective therapeutics for human use, so the current findings are a considerable advancement and may offer the best hope thus far that the West Nile virus infection can be stopped, even several days after viral infection.
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Magnify

Brain Responses During Anesthesia Mimic Those During Natural Deep Sleep


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
The brains of people under anesthesia respond to stimuli as they do in the deepest part of sleep -- lending credence to a developing theory of consciousness and suggesting a new method to assess loss of consciousness in conditions such as coma.

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, led by brain researcher Fabio Ferrarelli, reported their findings in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The group gave the anesthetic midazolam, commonly used at lower doses in "conscious sedation" procedures such as colonoscopies, to volunteers.
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Magnify

How Blood Flow Force Protects Blood Vessels


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
Most people know that exercise protects against heart attack and stroke, but researchers have spent 30 years unraveling the biochemistry behind the idea. One answer first offered by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center is that athletic hearts push blood through arteries with greater force, which alone triggers reactions that protect against dangerous clogs in blood vessels.

In the latest study out of Rochester, published recently in the journal Blood, researchers demonstrated that they are very close to understanding every step in one flow-sensitive chain reaction that protects arteries. Each step provides an opportunity to mimic with drugs the proven ability of fast, steady blood flow to open up blood vessels and avert the inflammation and blood clots that come with atherosclerosis.

Past research at the Medical Center and elsewhere had determined that two genes, Krüppel-like factor 2 (KLF2) and endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), are turned on by blood flow force to reverse atherosclerosis, but not how. The current study found for the first time that flow causes a structural change in the enzyme histone deacetylase 5 (HDAC5), which in turn influences whether the two key genes are turned on.
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Sherlock

New Species of Tyrannosaur Discovered in Southwestern U.S.


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© David Baccadutre/New Mexico Museum of Natural History and ScienceThe skull of the holotype specimen (NMMNH P-27469) of Bistahieversor sealeyi on display in the Cretaceous Seacoast exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
New Mexico is known for Aztec ruins and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Paleontologists Thomas Williamson of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Thomas Carr of Carthage College is now bringing a new superstar to the state.

Bistahieversor sealeyi (pronounced: bistah-he-ee-versor see-lee-eye) is a new species of tyrannosaur discovered in the Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness of New Mexico. Tyrannosaurs include the famous meat-eating dinosaurs like T. rex, with their characteristic body and skull shape and their mouthful of ferocious teeth that make them easy for paleontologists and kids to recognize.

The skull and skeleton of Bistahieversor were collected in the first paleontological excavation from a federal wilderness area, and the specimen was airlifted from the badlands by a helicopter operated by the Air Wing of the New Mexico Army National Guard. "Bistahieversor sealeyi is the first valid new genus and species of tyrannosaur to be named from western North America in over 30 years," says Williamson.
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Rocket

Obama to drop Nasa moon mission in budget cutbacks

Sam Jones
Guardian.co.uk
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:24 UTC
Image
© ReutersAstronaut Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 lunar mission in 1969. Nasa's hopes to return people to the moon by 2020 are likely to be scuppered in Barack Obama's budget.
Reports say planned human flights to the moon and Mars likely to be ditched in effort to rein in US deficit

Nasa's plans to send a manned mission to the moon and launch the US into a bold new era of space exploration are likely to remain on the ground today when Barack Obama unveils his budget.

The president wants to cut back or abandon 120 government programmes to help rein in the US deficit - among them the funding of the US space administration - as part of the $3.8tn (£2.4tn) budget.

According to the Washington Post, Obama will seek to shelve the $81bn Constellation programme, which called for a return to the moon by 2020 and human landings on Mars by the middle of the century. The plans were laid out by his predecessor, George Bush, in 2004.
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