Science & TechnologyS


Magnet

Earth's magnetic field made quick flip-flop

Charles Q. Choi
OurAmazingPlanet
Wed, 24 Oct 2012 08:52 UTC
Earth's Magnetic Field
© ShutterstockThe Earth's magnetic field, magnetic poles and geographic poles.
Earth's magnetic field reversed extremely rapidly soon after modern humans first arrived in Europe, completely flip-flopping in less than a thousand years, new research suggests.

These findings, detailed Oct. 15 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters,could shed light on how and why magnetic field reversals happen, and how they leave Earth vulnerable to solar and space radiation, the study scientists said.

Earth's metal core acts like a giant magnet that emanates a magnetic field with two poles, north and south. These two magnetic poles very roughly match where the planet's geographic north and south poles lie, which mark the axis on which Earth spins.

"The Earth's magnetic field is a highly dynamic feature," said researcher Norbert Nowaczyk, a paleomagnetist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. "Its intensity pulsates between values 50 percent higher than today, or 90 to 95 percent lower than today."

In addition, every several hundred thousand years, Earth's magnetic field reverses - a compass that would have pointed north would instead aim south. These flips are captured by magnetically sensitive minerals in cooling lava that are literally set in stone pointing to where the poles were at that particular moment in Earth's history.
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Info

Could genetic diseases be cured in the womb?

Jesse Emspak
LiveScience
Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:01 UTC
Mum and Child
© Marina Dyakonova | DreamstimeA new gene therapy tested in human egg cells could lead to cures for mitochondrial diseases, though the technique hasn't been tested in human trials yet.
Efforts to develop a working gene therapy for certain inherited diseases have reached a milestone with a new method for altering a human egg cell.

If the technique, which was unveiled by Oregon Health & Science University and involves transplanting mitochondrial DNA, is ever approved for use in patients, a child's genetic makeup could be altered to cure certain genetic diseases before the baby is even born. Even so, the researchers say the treatment wouldn't likely be approved for testing in humans for a while.

The gene-tweaking technique, which is detailed online today (Oct. 24) in the journal Nature, is designed to treat diseases caused by genetic mutations in the cells' energy-making structures called mitochondria, said lead researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov of OHSU School of Medicine.

Mitochondrial diseases can lead to diabetes, degeneration of nerves, or blindness, so the diseases themselves are often mistaken for other problems. Once the disease is identified, various supportive therapies are available, but generally there is no cure because the disease is caused by genetic mutations that are locked in.
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Placebo's effect may depend on your genes

Tia Ghose
LiveScience
Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:00 UTC
Acupunture
© Doglikehorse | Dreamstime
Your response to placebos, or dummy medicine, may depend on your genes, according to a new study.

People with a gene variant that codes for higher levels of the brain chemical dopamine respond better to placebos than those with the low-dopamine version.

The findings, reported online Oct. 23 in the journal PLoS One, could help researchers design medical studies that distinguish the placebo response from the underlying effect of a medicine - the real aim of drug trials.

"This is a possible way to discern who is going to be a placebo responder or nonresponder in a clinical trial," said study co-author Kathryn Hall of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Brookline, Mass.

People report feeling better after receiving a placebo, such as a sugar pill or fake treatment, for conditions ranging from chronic pain to Parkinson's disease. But only some patients respond strongly, and there's no way to predict who will improve on a placebo.
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Comet 2

New Comet: C/2012 U1 (PANSTARRS)

Ernesto Guido, Nick Howes, Alison Tripp & Giovanni Sostero
Remanzacco Observatory
Tue, 23 Oct 2012 14:08 UTC
Cbet nr. 3264, issued on 2012, October 22, announces the discovery of a new comet (discovery magnitude 21.0) by Pan-STARRS Survey on images obtained with the 1.8-m Pan-STARRS1 telescope at Haleakala on October 18.3. The new comet has been designated C/2012 U1 (PANSTARRS).

We performed some follow-up measurements of this object, while it was still on the neocp. Stacking of 5 R-filtered exposures, 120-sec each,obtained remotely, from Haleakala-Faulkes Telescope North on 2012, Oct. 22.45, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD under good seeing conditions, shows that this object is a comet: diffuse coma nearly 5" in diameter.

Our confirmation image:
C/2012 U1
© Remanzacco Observatory
M.P.E.C. 2012-U66 (including prediscovery Mount Lemmon Survey observations from Oct. 17.4) assigns the following preliminary parabolic orbital elements to comet C/2012 U1: T 2014 June 30.96; e= 1.0; Peri. = 58.03; q = 6.31 AU; Incl.= 66.73.
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Earth's magnetic and gravity fields are going through some changes

Lee Rannals
RedOrbit
Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:51 UTC
Earth's Magnetic Field and Solar Wind.
© daulon/ShutterstockEarth's Magnetic Field and Solar Wind.
Scientists writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) said the magnetic gravity fields of Earth are going through some changes.

Earth's magnetic field is generated by flows of liquid iron in the outer core. The Earth's magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation particles.

By understanding these processes in the outer core, scientists are able to have a better grasp of the terrestrial shield. A key to this is measuring the geomagnetic field itself, and also by measuring minute changes in gravity caused by the flow of the liquid Earth's core.

The team has succeeded in providing the first evidence of such a connection of fluctuations in the Earth's gravity, and magnetic field.

They used field measurements of the GFZ-satellite CHAMP and extremely accurate measurements of the Earth's gravity field derived from the GRACE mission.

"The main problem was the separation of the individual components of the gravity data from the total signal," said Vincent Lesur from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.
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Wolf

Puppies only pick up yawns when they're old enough to understand empathy

Rebecca Boyle
PopSci
Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:34 UTC
Yawning Husky
© Wikimedia CommonsYawning Husky.
Dogs catch yawns from humans, but not if they're too young. To perform this study, Danish scientists cuddled with puppies all day.

Dogs catch contagious yawns just like people, baboons and chimps, which can be used as a measure of empathy. But this is a behavior they learn after they emerge from youngest puppyhood, a new study says. Like people, young dogs show a developmental trend in their likelihood of catching yawns. This is the first time anyone has studied young-organism yawning in a species other than people.

Anyone who owns a dog knows you can catch a yawn from your pet, and vice versa. My dog, a 5-year-old border collie rescue, has this piercing yawn-peak squeal and head shiver that literally makes it impossible not to catch it. And I have seen her watching me, yawning after I do.

She would have started this after about seven months of age, according to this new study, authored by researchers at Lund University in Denmark. Elainie Alenkær Madsen and Tomas Persson took 35 Danish dogs between four and 14 months old and played and cuddled with them.

Then they either yawned at the dogs' faces or gaped, mimicking a yawn. They wrote down what the dogs did in response, and found that puppies younger than seven months of age didn't really do anything.
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Info

Cooking food could be what made people smart

Randy Astaiza
Business Insider
Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:39 UTC
Cooking
© Marie-Astrid Peltier
The data keeps mounting to suggest that the development of cooking played an integral part in human evolution and the development of intelligence.

The new study, published in the journal Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, shows that the diet of ancient humans and primates imposes a tradeoff between body size and the number of brain cells the body can support.

Generally, larger animals have larger brains, but primates are different. The largest primates, like the gorilla, do not have the largest brains - humans do. Our brains are about three times larger than those of orangutans or gorillas.

Big brains

Humans first developed their big brains about 2 million years ago, around the same time we developed fire and cooking, though the evidence for fire is limited until about 1 million years ago. Cooking and processing food helps our bodies get more calories from it.

The researchers, led by Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, wondered if this difference in diet could have led humans down the path to big brains. They analyzed data on body size and feeding habits from 11 primate species.

They found that our diet sets humans apart from the primate pack.

Primates that only eat uncooked food need more to get the same amounts of energy - cooking the food helps make the calories more accessible to our digestive systems. This means humans eat less and invest less time in eating and hunting, which not only helped us develop culture but let our brains think harder, the researchers suggest.
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The mystery of human blood types

Erin Wayman
Smithsonianmag.com
Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:48 UTC
Blood Test
© U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jake Berenguer/WikicommonsBlood banks run blood type tests before blood is sent to hospitals for transfusions.
Everyone's heard of the A, B, AB and O blood types. When you get a blood transfusion, doctors have to make sure a donor's blood type is compatible with the recipient's blood, otherwise the recipient can die. The ABO blood group, as the blood types are collectively known, are ancient.

Humans and all other apes share this trait, inheriting these blood types from a common ancestor at least 20 million years ago and maybe even earlier, claims a new study published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But why humans and apes have these blood types is still a scientific mystery.

The ABO blood group was discovered in the first decade of the 1900s by Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner. Through a series of experiments, Landsteiner classified blood into the four well-known types. The "type" actually refers to the presence of a particular type of antigen sticking up from the surface of a red blood cell.

An antigen is anything that elicits a response from an immune cell called an antibody. Antibodies latch onto foreign substances that enter the body, such as bacteria and viruses, and clump them together for removal by other parts of the immune system. The human body naturally makes antibodies that will attack certain types of red-blood-cell antigens.

For example, people with type A blood have A antigens on their red blood cells and make antibodies that attack B antigens; people with type B blood have B antigens on their red blood cells and make antibodies that attack A antigens. So, type A people can't donate their blood to type B people and vice versa. People who are type AB have both A and B antigens on their red blood cells and therefore don't make any A or B antibodies while people who are type O have no A or B antigens and make both A and B antibodies. (This is hard to keep track of, so I hope the chart below helps!)
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Comet

Update on Comet 168P/Hergenrother

Giovanni Sostero, Nick Howes, Alison Tripp & Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Observatory
Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:09 UTC
Our team performed follow-up observations of comet 168P/Hergenrother on 2012, Oct. 22.4, remotely through the 2m, f/10 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of Faulkes Telescope North (Haleakala) under good seeing conditions, and a scale of 0.3"/px. Comet 168P has recently undergone an outburst with its magnitude increasing from ~14-15 to magnituide ~9.5. For more info about the recent outburst of this comet, see our previous post here.

Recent observations posted on comet-images ml were showing a "cloud" of material trailing the nucleus in the anti-solar direction. In our image (stacking of 9 x 30-second exposures) is visible an unresolved and diffuse trail about 6" long and 3" wide in PA145.

Comet 168P
© Remanzacco Observatory
Below you can see a graph showing recent magnitude estimates of comet 168P.
Comet 168P Magnitude
© Remanzacco Observatory
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Researchers show how junk DNA influences face development

Amber Moore
Medical Daily
Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:10 UTC
Out of billions of people, no two faces are exactly the same. How d
Girl Face
© Medical Daily
oes this happen? Researchers from Stanford School of medicine say that "enhancers" present in the junk DNA follow an origami-like design while constructing the face, using simple instructions to make an intricate object.

During the early stages of the embryo development, a set of cells called neural crest cells drives a process that is required to make the head and face of the baby. Initially an embryo looks like a sheet of flat cells. This sheet eventually folds to form a tube, much of which becomes the spinal column and the brain. The face of the infant develops from an end of this tube. Researchers were studying what guides this specific process.

"We were interested in identifying the portions of the human genome that are responsible for the behavior of the neural crest," said one of the study authors Joanna Wysocka, PhD, from Stanford School of Medicine.

Wysocka and her colleagues discovered that certain genetic modification can determine which cells become the face. These DNA modifications called "enhancers" can change the shape of a face by manipulating the activity of the genes that are involved in the face-making process.
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