Science & TechnologyS


Recycle

So that's why Pontius Pilate washed his hands - it can help ease niggling doubts about decisions

Fiona Macrae
The Daily Mail
Thu, 06 May 2010 20:49 UTC
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Pontius Pilate: Washed his hands after condemning Jesus in the Bible
If you have made a difficult decision and want to stick to it, go and wash your hands.

A study has revealed that hand washing, long associated with absolving the mind of guilt, can also erase any doubts about everyday choices.

The latest research, reported in the journal Science, looked at whether the phenomenon extends to decisions with little or no moral implications by asking a set of volunteers to pick between two CDs or two jams.

Scientists found the 40 volunteers were less likely to try to justify their choice if they washed their hands just after making it.
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Telescope

Herschel reveals the hidden side of star birth


European Space Agency
Thu, 06 May 2010 18:50 UTC
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© ESA/PACS/SPIRE/HOBYS ConsortiaRCW 120 is a galactic bubble with a large surprise. How large? At least 8 times the mass of the Sun. Nestled in the shell around this large bubble is an embryonic star that looks set to turn into one of the brightest stars in the Galaxy.
The first scientific results from ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory are revealing previously hidden details of star formation. New images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and beautiful star-forming clouds draped across the Milky Way. One picture even catches an 'impossible' star in the act of formation.

Presented today during a major scientific symposium held at the European Space Agency (ESA), the results challenge old ideas of star birth, and open new roads for future research.
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Umbrella

Powerful Laser Makes Raindrops Out of Thin Air

Stephanie Pappas
TechNewsDaily
Thu, 06 May 2010 18:40 UTC
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© Jean-Pierre Wolf / University of GenevaA high-power red laser beam ionizes air and triggers the condensation of water droplets in an atmospheric cloud chamber. The droplets (green) are lit by a second, lower-powered laser
Ultra-fast pulses from a powerful laser can create droplets of water out of thin air, according to a new study. With the right conditions and large enough droplets, the researchers say, the technique could be used to make rain on demand.

Rain forms when water condenses around tiny particles in the atmosphere. Most of the time, dust or pollen do the job, but humans have long attempted to speed the process by seeding clouds with chemicals like silver iodide. Those chemicals provide the so-called "condensation nuclei" that trigger the consolidation of water into raindrops.
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Bulb

Clues to neuronal health found in tree-like nerve cell structures


American Society for Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Thu, 06 May 2010 18:16 UTC
A breakthrough about the formation and maintenance of tree-like nerve cell structures could have future applications in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and the repair of injuries in which neurons are damaged. The findings by the international team led by Prof. Benjamin Podbilewicz of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Biology are published in the May 6th issue of Science Express.

While biologists have known for years that many neurons form complicated tree-like structures, it was not known HOW the neurons form and maintain them. To unravel this mystery, the team first studied the dynamic development of two neurons (called PVDs) required for reception of strong mechanical stimuli in the round worm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans). [Prof. Podbilewicz cites Martin Chalfie, the Nobel laureate from Columbia University, as having previously shown that when a worm is hit on the body, it responds by moving away, demonstrating that the PVDs are necessary for C. elegans to sense pain.]
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Info

Neanderthal genome reveals interbreeding with humans

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 06 May 2010 17:15 UTC
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© Javier Trueba/MSF/Science Photo LibraryWelcome to the family
How closely are Neanderthals related to us?

They are so closely related that some researchers group them and us as a single species. "I would see them as a form of humans that are bit more different than humans are today, but not much," says Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, whose team sequenced the Neanderthal genome.

The common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals lived in Africa around half a million years ago. After that, the ancestors of Neanderthals moved north and eventually made it to Europe and Asia. Our ancestors, meanwhile, stuck around Africa until about 100,000 years ago before eventually conquering the globe. Neanderthals died out around 28,000 years ago.

How did they sequence the Neanderthal genome?

Bone contains DNA that survives long after an animal dies. Over time, though, strands of DNA break up, and microbes with their own DNA invade the bone. Pääbo's team found ways around both problems with 38,000 and 44,000-year-old bones recovered in Croatia: they used a DNA sequencing machine that rapidly decodes short strands and came up with ways to get rid of the microbial contamination.

They ended up with short stretches of DNA code that computers stitched into a more complete sequence. This process isn't perfect: Pääbo's team decoded about 5.3 billion letters of Neanderthal DNA, but much of this is duplicates, because - assuming it's the same size as the human genome - the actual Neanderthal genome is only about 3 billion letters long. More than a third of the genome remains unsequenced. "It's pretty darn good for something that's 38,000 years old," says Edward Green, a team member now at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Blackbox

Cosmic 'dandruff' may have brought carbon to Earth

David Shiga
New Scientist
Thu, 06 May 2010 17:11 UTC
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© J. Duprat/CSNSM-CNRSA researcher collects a snow sample near the Concordia Research Station in Antarctica
Fluffy specks of carbon-rich dust found in Antarctic snow seem to be relics from the dawn of the solar system, when the planets were still forming. The cosmic dandruff could help explain how the carbon needed for life wound up on Earth.

Researchers led by Jean Duprat of the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France, melted Antarctic snow and filtered particles from the resulting water, turning up two extraterrestrial dust particles.

The particles are relatively large, at 80 and 275 micrometres across. They also carry a lot of deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen: they have 10 to 30 times as much as typical terrestrial materials.

At cold temperatures, deuterium atoms are incorporated into solid materials more readily than hydrogen atoms are, suggesting the particles formed in the frigid outer reaches of the cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to our solar system.
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Info

Airport Screening Technology Could Unlock Mummy Secrets

Naomi Seck
VOA News.com
Wed, 05 May 2010 18:21 UTC
Mummy
© p_a_h flickr Scientists say looking back can help them look forward, by revealing how the disease evolved over time.
Back in 2005, when Frank Ruhli was trying to figure out how ancient Egypt's famous boy Pharaoh, King Tut, died, he used CT scans of Tut's mummified remains. Now, says the renowned mummy expert, the new technology to screen some airline passengers for explosives can provide even more information.

"By applying this technology on top of another technology, it may help you to look differently at the specimen," he explains, adding that the Terahertz imaging - also known as "full body scan" technology - does not use any sort of radiation, which could destroy DNA remnants of the mummies.

"And finally, by using this Terahertz imaging, you eventually may be able to look at the substances within the mummy, for example, the embalming liquid used in the Egyptian way of embalming. There you can actually do sort of substance analysis which you can't really do by conventional x-ray."

Ruhli and his team of researchers at the Swiss Mummy Institute have just completed the first feasibility study of how they could use the technology to reveal a mummy's secrets, without damaging the mummy. He says the images they have gathered with the terahertz scans are very promising.

And he says the results are not just interesting for historians. "More and more, there are actually people aware of the fact if we want to know more about medicine or actually how to treat patients with all these health care issues, we have to look to the past as well."
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Telescope

AKARI Produces Two New Infrared All-Sky Catalogues


Science Daily
Wed, 05 May 2010 16:57 UTC
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© JAXAAKARI's view of the infrared sky: sources found at 9 micrometres are represented in blue, at 18 micrometres in green, and at 90 micrometres in red.
Two new infrared catalogues, containing more than 1.3 million celestial sources, have been made public. The AKARI All-Sky Catalogues, based on the first all-sky infrared survey in more than a quarter of a century, will provide important new data for a wide range of studies that cover topics ranging from the properties of nearby stars, to the formation of planetary systems, and the star formation history of the distant Universe.

All-sky surveys are an essential tool for astronomers. The large numbers of objects that are detected in these surveys lend themselves to classification and statistical analyses of celestial bodies. The astronomical census that results from a multi-wavelength, all-sky survey provides a firm framework on which to build a deeper understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies, stars and planetary systems. For more than 25 years astronomers have relied on the IRAS all-sky atlas, based on observations made in 1983 with the InfraRed Astronomical Satellite, to provide this type of information at infrared wavelengths. Today, the scientific community has an important new tool for this work: the AKARI all-sky catalogues.
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Telescope

Astronomers Spot Mega-Star Cradle


Science Daily
Wed, 05 May 2010 16:48 UTC
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© NASA/JPL-CaltechMid-infrared image of BYF 73 from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The yellowish wisps to the right are remnants of gas that have been heated and are being driven off by the massive young stars within them (seen in blue). The large-scale collapse of colder gas to form a massive cluster is centred around the bright stars just to the left of the heated wisps.
Using an Australian radio telescope, an international team of researchers has caught an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust in the process of collapsing in on itself -- a discovery which could help solve one of astronomy's enduring conundrums: 'How do massive stars form?'

Dr Peter Barnes from the University of Florida says astronomers have a good grasp of how stars such as our Sun form from clouds of gas and dust, but for heavier stars -- ten times the mass of the Sun or more -- they are still largely in the dark, despite years of work.

"Astronomers are still debating the physical processes that can generate these big stars," Dr Barnes says.

"Massive stars are rare, making up only a few per cent of all stars, and they will only form in significant numbers when really massive clouds of gas collapse, creating hundreds of stars of different masses. Smaller gas clouds are not likely to make big stars."

Accordingly, regions in space where massive stars seem to be forming are also rare. Most are well over 1000 light-years away, making them hard to observe.
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Telescope

A Cluster and a Sea of Galaxies


Science Daily
Wed, 05 May 2010 16:45 UTC
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© ESO/J. DietrichThe Cluster of Galaxies Abell 315: This wide-field, deep image reveals thousands of galaxies crowding an area on the sky roughly as large as the full Moon.
A new wide-field image released by ESO displays many thousands of distant galaxies, and more particularly a large group belonging to the massive galaxy cluster known as Abell 315. As crowded as it may appear, this assembly of galaxies is only the proverbial "tip of the iceberg," as Abell 315 -- like most galaxy clusters -- is dominated by dark matter. The huge mass of this cluster deflects light from background galaxies, distorting their observed shapes slightly.

When looking at the sky with the unaided eye, we mostly only see stars within our Milky Way galaxy and some of its closest neighbours. More distant galaxies are just too faint to be perceived by the human eye, but if we could see them, they would literally cover the sky. This new image released by ESO is both a wide-field and long-exposure one, and reveals thousands of galaxies crowding an area on the sky roughly as large as the full Moon.

These galaxies span a vast range of distances from us. Some are relatively close, as it is possible to distinguish their spiral arms or elliptical halos, especially in the upper part of the image. The more distant appear just like the faintest of blobs -- their light has travelled through the Universe for eight billion years or more before reaching Earth.
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