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Weird engineered organism has 6-letter DNA

Tanya Lewis
Live Science
Wed, 07 May 2014 12:49 UTC
DNA Alphabet
© SynthorxResearchers added new letters to the DNA alphabet of an organism, shown here as printing blocks.
The first report of a bacterium whose genome contains man-made DNA building blocks opens the door for tailor-made organisms that could be used to produce new drugs and other products.

All living creatures have a DNA "alphabet" of just four letters, which encode instructions for the proteins that perform most of the key jobs inside cells. But expanding that alphabet to include artificial letters could give organisms the ability to produce new proteins never seen before in nature.

The man-made DNA could be used for everything from the manufacture of new drugs and vaccines to forensics, researchers say.

"What we have done is successfully store increased information in the DNA of a living cell," study leader Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, told Live Science. Yet many steps remain before Romesberg and his colleagues can get cells to produce artificial proteins.
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Fireball 5

Killer ancient meteor strike carved out giant crater, evidence suggests

Tanya Lewis
Live Science
Wed, 07 May 2014 09:01 UTC
Impact Crater
© Alberta Geographic Survey/University of AlbertaThis is a map showing the structure and contour of the Bow City crater, possibly created by a giant meteorite impact. Color variation shows meters above sea level.
An ancient ring-shaped structure in southern Alberta, Canada, likely formed when a meteorite smashed into Earth, producing a 5-mile-wide (8 kilometers) crater. The impact would have produced enough energy to destroy a region the size of the land area of New York City, researchers say.

A geologist discovered the structure near the village of Bow City, although time and glaciers have mostly eroded the signs of the ancient meteorite strike. Scientists can't say for sure that a meteorite impact created the Bow City crater, but seismic and geological evidence strongly support this notion.

"An impact of this magnitude would kill everything for quite a distance," Doug Schmitt, a rock physics expert at the University of Alberta, Canada, said in a statement. If the strike happened today, the city of Calgary, which is 125 miles (200 km) to the northwest, would be "completely fried," and in Edmonton, which is 300 miles (500 km) northwest, "every window would have been blown out," he added.
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Satellite

Nearest bright "hypervelocity star" found: Speeding at 1 million mph, it probes black hole and dark matter


Phys.org
Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00 UTC
hypervelocity star
© Ben Bromley, University of UtahThis is an astrophysicist-artist's conception of a hypervelocity star speeding away from the visible part of a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way and into the invisible halo of mysterious "dark matter" that surrounds the galaxy's visible portions. University of Utah researcher Zheng Zheng and colleagues in the US and China discovered the closest bright hypervelocity star yet found.
A University of Utah-led team discovered a "hypervelocity star" that is the closest, second-brightest and among the largest of 20 found so far. Speeding at more than 1 million mph, the star may provide clues about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the halo of mysterious "dark matter" surrounding the galaxy, astronomers say.

"The hypervelocity star tells us a lot about our galaxy - especially its center and the dark matter halo," says Zheng Zheng, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and lead author of the study published recently in Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team of U.S. and Chinese astronomers.

"We can't see the dark matter halo, but its gravity acts on the star," Zheng says. "We gain insight from the star's trajectory and velocity, which are affected by gravity from different parts of our galaxy."
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Question

Surprise gamma-ray burst behaves differently than expected

Shannon Hall
Universe Today
Tue, 06 May 2014 16:26 UTC
Gamma-Ray Burst
© NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John JonesThis artist’s impression shows a gamma-ray burst with two intense beams of relativistic matter emitted by the black hole.
Roughly once a day the sky is lit up by a mysterious torrent of energy. These events - known as gamma-ray bursts - represent the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, sending out as much energy in a fraction of a second as our Sun will give off during its entire lifespan.

Yet no one has ever witnessed a gamma-ray burst directly. Instead astronomers are left to study their fading light.

New research from an international team of astronomers has discovered a puzzling feature within one Gamma-ray burst, suggesting that these objects may behave differently than previously thought.

These powerful explosions are thought to be triggered when dying stars collapse into jet-spewing black holes. While this stage only lasts a few minutes, its afterglow - slowly fading emission that can be seen at all wavelengths (including visible light) - will last for a few days to weeks. It is from this afterglow that astronomers meticulously try to understand these enigmatic explosions.
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Comet 2

New Comet - C/2014 H1 (Christensen)

Seiichi Yoshida
Aerith Net
Tue, 06 May 2014 13:58 UTC
Discovery Date: April 24, 2014

Magnitude: 17.9 mag

Discoverer: Eric J. Christensen (Mount Lemmon)
C/2014 H1
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2014-H33.
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Comet

Upcoming meteor shower in May could rival The Perseids

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Tue, 06 May 2014 13:49 UTC
Fireball
© Thinkstock
May isn't exactly known for its meteor showers. In fact, this month's Camelopardalid meteor shower, caused by dust from periodic comet 209P/LINEAR, has technically never even been seen before. However, astronomers have predicted that May 2014 could see a Camelopardalid meteor shower that rivals the year's biggest display - the Perseids of August.

This year could be such a historic display, NASA's head of its Meteoroid Environment Office, Bill Cooke, said, adding that he plans to head out and see the display with his own two eyes, instead of simply reviewing images of the meteor shower captured by the space agency's nationwide network of fireball cameras.

"There could be a new meteor shower, and I want to see it with my own eyes," Cooke said. "Some forecasters have predicted more than 200 meteors per hour."

When a comet crosses Earth's orbit as it circles the Sun, it leaves behind streams of debris for the Earth to plow through around the same time every year. The relatively faint comet behind the Camelopardalids, Comet 209P/LINEAR, was discovered in 2004 and was found to orbit the Sun once every five years.
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Comet

Comet Jacques brightens: How to see it in May

David Dickinson
Universe Today
Mon, 05 May 2014 14:41 UTC
Comet Jacques_6
© Efrain Morales RiveraComet Jacques as imaged on March 18th, shortly after discovery.
A recently discovered comet is headed northward and is set to put on one of two fine performances for binocular observers in 2014 starting this week.

Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques was discovered on March 13th 2014 by Cristóvão Jacques, Eduardo Pimentel and João Ribeiro de Barros while observing from the Southern Observatory for Near Earth Asteroids Research (SONEAR) facility located near Oliveira, Brazil.

The comet was just about at +15th magnitude at the time of discovery as it glided across the southern hemisphere constellation of Centaurus.

While a majority of comet discoveries are destined to remain small and faint, Comet Jacques was immediately shown to be something special. Upon discovery of any new comet, the first task is to gain several observations hours or nights apart to accurately gauge its distance and orbit. Are astronomers looking at a small, garden variety comet close up, or a large, active one far away?
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Arrow Down

Mouse study reveals that young blood rejuvenates older mice, will it work on humans?

Meeri Kim
Washington Post
Sun, 04 May 2014 12:00 UTC
young mouse old mouse
© Tony Wyss-CorayAn old mouse, left, and a young mouse together. A recent study suggests that young blood rejuvenates the brain.
The rodent fountain of youth may not be filled with water, but with blood. A trio of new studies has discovered that the blood of young mice appears to reverse some of the effects of aging when put into the circulatory systems of elderly mice.

After combining the blood circulations of two mice by conjoining them - one old, the other young - researchers found dramatic improvements in the older mouse's muscle and brain. After four weeks, stem cells in both those areas got a boost of activity and were better able to produce new neurons and muscle tissue.

They later discovered that injections of a special protein found abundantly in young blood - or even transfusions of whole young blood - gives the same advantages as sharing a blood supply.
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Laptop

F.C.C. reverts to fast lanes for web traffic - only the wealthy will qualify

Edward Wyatt
The New York Times
Wed, 23 Apr 2014 13:04 UTC
Image
© Daniel Rosenbaum/New York TimesThe proposed rules, drafted by Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and his staff, would allow Internet service providers to charge companies different rates for faster connection speeds.
The principle that all Internet content should be treated equally as it flows through cables and pipes to consumers looks all but dead.

The Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday that it would propose new rules that allow companies like Disney, Google or Netflix to pay Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon for special, faster lanes to send video and other content to their customers.

The proposed changes would affect what is known as net neutrality - the idea that no providers of legal Internet content should face discrimination in providing offerings to consumers, and that users should have equal access to see any legal content they choose.

The proposal comes three months after a federal appeals court struck down, for the second time, agency rules intended to guarantee a free and open Internet.
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Robot

Stephen Hawking warns of possible dire threat to mankind from artificial intelligence

David Ferguson
Raw Story
Sat, 03 May 2014 10:08 UTC
Stephen Hawking
© Featureflash/ShutterstockStephen Hawking.
Author, physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking co-wrote a dire warning to the human race about the danger of unintended consequences from our current fascination with artificial intelligence (AI).

In an open letter with three other scientists published in The Independent, Hawking contended that dismissing "the notion of highly intelligent machines as science fiction" could be "our worst mistake in history."

Consumers use AI each day in the form of the iPhone's personal assistant Siri, Google Now and other programs.

Breakthroughs like newly developed self-driving cars herald a generation of products and services to come as computers become more and more adept at solving problems quickly.

"The potential benefits are huge," wrote Hawking. "Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history."
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