Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Mysteries of Lake Vostok on Brink of Discovery

Olivier Dessibourg
New Scientist
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 20:38 UTC
Lake Vostok
© unknownLake Vostok, Antarctica
For 14 million years, Antarctica's vast Lake Vostok has remained tantalisingly sealed off from the rest of the world, hidden under 4 kilometres of ice. What unique forms of life might have evolved in the hidden depths?

After years of speculation we are about to find out, as a Russian drill nears the lake. The Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, the body set up to preserve the continent, has approved the comprehensive environmental evaluation carried out to ensure the reservoir is not polluted. Researchers from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg expect to reach the water in late January.

The AARI's Valery Lukin says they have devised a clever method for sampling the lake without contaminating it. "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again," Lukin says. The following season, the team will go back to bore in that frozen water, take the sample out and analyse its contents.

"The Russians really did a good job in giving answers to all the fears raised that their actions would contaminate this unexplored environment," says Manfred Reinke, head of the ATS.
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Info

Building the Components of Life


AstroBiology Magazine
Fri, 07 Jan 2011 13:57 UTC
Michael Hecht
© Brian WilsonMichael Hecht, a professor of chemistry at Princeton University, has led a team of researchers who have for the first time constructed artificial proteins that enable the growth of living cells. The synthetic proteins were designed from scratch and expressed from artificial genes. He is holding samples of living bacteria containing the synthetic proteins.

In a groundbreaking achievement that could help scientists "build" new biological systems, Princeton University scientists have constructed for the first time artificial proteins that enable the growth of living cells.

The team of researchers created genetic sequences never before seen in nature, and the scientists showed that they can produce substances that sustain life in cells almost as readily as proteins produced by nature's own toolkit.

"What we have here are molecular machines that function quite well within a living organism even though they were designed from scratch and expressed from artificial genes," said Michael Hecht, a professor of chemistry at Princeton, who led the research. "This tells us that the molecular parts kit for life need not be limited to parts -- genes and proteins -- that already exist in nature."

The work, Hecht said, represents a significant advance in synthetic biology, an emerging area of research in which scientists work to design and fabricate biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world. One of the field's goals is to develop an entirely artificial genome composed of unique patterns of chemicals.
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Sun

Famous Crab Nebula Shoots Off Mysterious Flares

Clara Moskowitz
Space.com
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:30 UTC
Image
© Enzo SantinCrab Nebula 2004
One of the most well-known celestial objects still has some tricks up its sleeve, according to a new discovery of surprising gamma-ray flares coming from the famous Crab Nebula.

The Crab, long-considered such a steady celestial light that it was used to calibrate other sources, has now had three flare-ups where it brightened significantly in the gamma-ray range for a few days, astronomers report. [Hubble photo of the Crab nebula]

"Our belief of a stable Crab got smashed completely - now we have to think again," said Marco Tavani, an astronomer at the INAF-IASF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica-Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica) in Rome. Tavani was lead author of one of two papers announcing the discovery of the flares in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal Science.

Tavani's team used the Italian Space Agency's AGILE satellite to observe flares in October 2007 and September 2010. Another team, led by Stefan Funk and Rolf Buehler at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, observed the September 2010 flare as well, along with one in February 2009, using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
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Footprints

Standing tall: The 1,500-year-old mutant giant gene that is still causing excessive growth in Northern Ireland


MailOnline
Fri, 07 Jan 2011 05:50 UTC
Image
© Press AssociationGigantic genes: Brendan Holland observes the skeleton of 'Irish Giant' Charles Byrne, who shares the same mutant gene

Standing tall: The 1,500-year-old mutant giant gene that is STILL causing excessive growth in Northern Ireland

A race of giants may have sprung from a mutant gene that first emerged around 1,500 years ago and causes uncontrolled body growth, scientists believe.

The 'gigantism gene' was identified in the DNA of an 18th century man known as the Irish Giant who stood almost eight feet tall.

The gene is still causing excessive growth in families in the same area of Northern Ireland where Charles Byrne was born.

He found fame in the 1780s by exhibiting himself as a curiosity or 'freak' in London and died aged just 22 after his celebrity saw him develop a drink problem.
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Sun

Geomagnetic Storm Sparks Spectacular Auroras Around Arctic Circle


Spaceweather
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 22:08 UTC
As expected, a solar wind stream hit Earth's magnetic field in the early hours of Jan. 7th. The impact sparked a G1-class (Kp=5) geomagnetic storm and bright auroras around the Arctic Circle. "It was just amazing," says Kjetil Skogli, who sends this picture from Tromsø, Norway:

Aurora
© Kjetil SkogliA classic start with a faint band in the north who ended in several spectacular waves with extreme high speed rays, sharp lines and band. Just amazing Canon EOS 5D mkII, EF24mm/f1.4 . ISO 800, f1.6, 0,8 - 5 sec.
"The display began with a faint band in the north and quickly developed into several spectacular waves with extreme high speed rays," says Skogli. The lights were so intense, they could be seen as far away as Northern Ireland. "The glow was faint, but definitely there," reports Martin McKenna of Maghera, Co. Derry.

High latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras as the solar wind continues to blow.
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Telescope

Stanford researchers try to solve satellite mystery

Wayne Freedman
KGO-TV/DT
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:51 UTC
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Sun

Sun's Super-Hot Shell Cooked by Plasma Jets

Denise Chow
Space.com
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:59 UTC
Plasma Jets
© NASA/Solar Dynamics ObservatoryNarrow jets of material, called spicules, streak upward from the solar surface at speeds often greater than 60 miles per second. Some of the spicules' plasma (ionized gas), which can reach temperatures in excess of one million degrees kelvin, is inserted into the corona (the sun's outer atmosphere).

Physicists who train their thoughts on the sun have long been perplexed by why its outer atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface. While theories abound, no direct observations have been made of the mysterious processes that heat the sun's atmosphere ... until now.

With the help of some state-of-the-art technology, a team of scientists thinks it has discovered an important piece of the puzzle. The results of the new study suggest that the scorching heat of the solar atmosphere is continuously replenished by jets of plasma that scream upward from the surface of the sun at supersonic speeds.

These plasma jets, called spicules, are "long, elongated fin features at the edge of the sun," Bart De Pontieu, the study's lead researcher, told SPACE.com. The motion of the heated spicules could explain how the sun's atmosphere, or corona, is a few million degrees hotter than the surface, which has a temperature of about 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius).

"The gas or plasma is originally pretty cool, but as the spicules are propelled upwards, some fraction of that gas gets heated to a few million degrees," said De Pontieu, a solar physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California.
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Info

Acoustic, Underwater Cloak Makes Objects Invisible to Sonar

Tiffany Kaiser
Daily Tech
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:43 UTC
Nicholas Fang
© L. Brian StaufferNicholas Fang

University of Illinois researchers have developed a cloak that can be used underwater to hide objects from sonar and other ultrasound waves.

Nicholas Fang, study leader and mechanical science and engineering professor at the University of Illinois, along with fellow researchers at the university, have created an acoustic, underwater cloak as a way of controlling sound waves.

Up until this point, scientists have been trying to push the use of materials that wrap sound around objects instead of absorbing or reflecting it. But turning the concept into a reality has been difficult.

Now, Fang and his team have made a prototype of a cloak that can make an object seem invisible to a variety of different sound waves.

"We are not talking about science fiction," said Fang. "We are talking about controlling sound waves by bending and twisting them in a designer space. This is certainly not some trick Harry Potter is playing with."

To make this cloak, researchers used metamaterial, which is a class of artificial materials that are engineered to have altered properties. The cloak is two-dimensional and cylindrical, and has 16 concentric rings of acoustic circuits, where each ring has a different index of refraction. This allows the cloak to help guide sonar and other ultrasound waves.
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Laptop

Global Spam E-Mail Levels Suddenly Fall


BBC News
Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:14 UTC
Image
The amount of junk e-mail being sent across the globe has seen a dramatic fall in recent months.

The volume of spam has dropped steadily since August, but the Christmas period saw a precipitous decline.

One security firm detected around 200 billion spam messages being sent each day in August, but just 50 billion in December.

While the reasons for the decline are not fully understood, spam watchers warn the lull may not last.

Around the Christmas holidays, three of the largest spam producers curtailed their activity, Paul Wood, a senior analyst at Symantec Hosted Services told BBC News.

"But it's hard to say why," he added.
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Info

In a Giant's Story, a New Chapter Writ by His DNA

Gina Kolata
The New York Times
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 14:44 UTC
Charles Byrne Skeleton
© Ronan McCloskeyThe skeleton of the famous Irish Giant Charles Byrne, who lived from 1761 to 1783, exhibited at the Hunterian Museum in London.

He was a giant of a man, 7 feet 7 inches tall, who left his home in Ireland when he was 19 and traveled to London to make his fortune as a freak. There Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, garnered wealth and fame. But, suffering from tuberculosis and an excessive love of gin, he died a few years later, in 1783. A surgeon - John Hunter - bought Mr. Byrne's corpse, boiled it in acid to remove the flesh, and exhibited the skeleton in his museum in London.

And there the bones remained, studied in 1909 by the renowned American surgeon Harvey Cushing, who removed the top of the skull and pronounced that Mr. Byrne had had a pituitary tumor. Other than that, Mr. Byrne remained a curiosity, a famous giant, the subject of a 1998 novel by the British writer Hilary Mantel, yet, with only a skeleton remaining, of little interest to science.

Until now: researchers in Britain and Germany have extracted DNA from Mr. Byrne's teeth and solved the mystery of his excessive height.

It turned out to be a rare and mysterious gene mutation, discovered only in 2006. The researchers then found the mutation in four families from Northern Ireland, near where Mr. Byrne was born. Following a hunch, they decided to ask whether Mr. Byrne had had the mutation, too, and whether the mutation indicated that the four families were related to him. Their hunch was right.
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