Science & TechnologyS


Better Earth

New Picture of Ancient Ocean Chemistry Argues for Chemically Layered Water


ScienceDaily
Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Chao Li/UC RiversideThe Ediacaran Doushantuo Formation and overlying Dengying Formation crop out in the background above the Yangtze River near Yichang city and the Three Gorges Dam, Hubei Province, China.
A research team led by biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has developed a detailed and dynamic three-dimensional model of Earth's early ocean chemistry that can significantly advance our understanding of how early animal life evolved on the planet.

Working on rock samples from the Doushantuo Formation of South China, one of the oldest fossil beds and long viewed by paleontologists to be a window to early animal evolution, the research team is the first to show that Earth's early ocean chemistry during a large portion of the Ediacaran Period (635-551 million years ago) was far more complex than previously imagined.

Their work is the first comprehensive geochemical study of the Doushantuo Formation to investigate the structure of the ocean going from shallow to deep water environments. It is also one of the most comprehensive studies for any Precambrian interval. (The Precambrian refers to a stretch of time spanning from the inception of the Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago to about 540 million years ago. It was in the Precambrian when the first single-celled microbes evolved 3.5 billion years ago or earlier, followed by the first multicellular animals much later, around 700 million years ago.)
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Genetic Secrets to Jumping the Species Barrier


ScienceDaily
Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
Scientists have pinpointed specific mutations that allow a common plant virus to infect new species, according to research published in the March issue of the Journal of General Virology. Understanding the genetics of the key interactions between viruses and hosts could provide insight to how some viruses manage to jump the species barrier and even give us a better idea of how animal diseases are generated.

Researchers from Saga University, Japan studied the genetic changes that took place when turnip mosaic virus (TuMV) -- a plant mosaic disease spread by aphids -- adapted to infect a new species. Genetic analysis showed TuMV had acquired an average of 140 significant mutations, on its evolutionary pathway from Brassica rapa (turnip), a host to which it is well adapted, to a new host Raphanus sativus (radish).

Interestingly, many of the mutations were found clustered in genes that code for two key viral proteins, P3 and CI. These two proteins are already known to interact with genes that help plants resist TuMV infection. Researchers think that a kind of molecular tug of war between these proteins and plant resistance mechanisms takes place, that determines not only the severity of disease following infection, but also whether the virus can infect its host in the first place.
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Newspaper

SETI Opens All Data and Coding to the Public

Ole Ole Olson
News Junkie Post
Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:22 UTC
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© Unknown
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) just announced that it is releasing all information to the public. SETIQuest.org was launched on Wednesday to facilitate the release and help coordinate an 'army of citizen scientists' to help search for anomalies in interstellar microwave patterns.

The New Scientist reports:
"SETIQuest is the product of astronomer Jill Tarter's TED Prize wish. After being awarded the TED Prize last year, Tarter was given the opportunity to make a single wish before an auditorium full of the top names in technology and design. Tarter wished that they would "empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company".

With SETIQuest, Tarter and TED are making that happen. The website will make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish the SETI Institute's signal-detection algorithm as open source code, inviting brilliant coders and amateur techies to make it even better."
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Satellite

WISE Spies Its First Comet

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:45 UTC
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© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLAThe red smudge at the center of this picture is the first comet discovered by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE is living up to expectations, as it now has discovered its first comet, shortly after finding its first asteroid. The spacecraft, just launched on Dec. 14, 2009 and first spotted the comet on January 22, 2010. WISE is expected to find millions of other objects during its ongoing survey of the whole sky in infrared light. Officially named "P/2010 B2 (WISE)," the comet is a dusty mass of ice more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in diameter.

Comet and asteroid hunter Robert Holmes, who we have written about previously on Universe Today (whose Astronomical Research Observatory and Killer Asteroid Project in Illinois is not far from where I live) made the first ground-based confirmation of WISE's comet discovery, with his home-built 0.81-meter telescope. Many large observatories attempted to confirm this discovery more than 7 days earlier including the Faulkes 2.0m telescope in Hawaii, without success. And due to poor weather, Holmes had to wait several days to get a look at the WISE comet himself. Holmes produces images for educational and public outreach programs like the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC), which gives students and teachers the opportunity to make observations and discoveries, and a teacher actually assisted in the confirmation of this new comet.
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Saturn

Saturn's aurorae offer stunning double show

Colleen Sharkey
ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:44 UTC
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© NASA, ESA and Jonathan Nichols (University of Leicester)This unique Hubble image from early 2009 features Saturn with the rings edge on and both poles in view, offering a stunning double view of its fluttering aurorae.
An enormous and grand ringed planet, Saturn is certainly one of the most intriguing bodies orbiting the Sun. Hubble has now taken a fresh look at the fluttering aurorae that light up both of Saturn's poles.

It takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit the Sun, with the opportunity to image both of its poles occurring only twice in that period. Hubble has been snapping pictures of the planet at different angles since the beginning of the mission in 1990, but 2009 brought a unique chance for Hubble to image Saturn with the rings edge-on and both poles in view. At the same time Saturn was approaching its equinox so both poles were equally illuminated by the Sun's rays [1].
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Cell Phone

Teens Text 10 Times Per Hour


TechNewsDaily
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:39 UTC
American teens send more than 3,000 text messages a month - or more than 10 times every hour that they are not sleeping or in school, according to a new study.

Meanwhile, children 12 years old and younger send about 1,146 text messages a month - or about four text messages per waking hour that they are not in school.

Research firm Nielsen reached these conclusions after analyzing more than 40,000 cell phone bills every month to determine what consumers actually spent their money on.
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Selective Brain Damage Modulates Human Spirituality

Cathleen Genova
Medical News Today
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:00 UTC
New research provides fascinating insight into brain changes that might underlie alterations in spiritual and religious attitudes. The study, published by Cell Press in the February 11 issue of the journal Neuron, explores the neural basis of spirituality by studying patients before and after surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, true empirical exploration of the neural underpinnings of spirituality has been challenging. However, recent advances in neuroscience have started to make the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible.

"Neuroimaging studies have linked activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking," explains lead study author, Dr. Cosimo Urgesi from the University of Udine in Italy.
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Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Brain Functioning Different than Previously Thought


Medical News Today
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:00 UTC
What goes on in your brain when you're sleep deprived and how does it affect your ability to process information and make decisions?

A research study conducted at Washington State University into the effects of sleep deprivation on executive functioning the ability to initiate, monitor and stop actions to achieve objectives has yielded surprising results and caused a shift in the current thinking on this topic.

Published in the January 2010 issue of the journal Sleep, the study found that sleep deprivation affects distinct cognitive processes in different ways. The researchers found that working memory a key element of executive functioning was essentially unaffected by as much as 51 hours of total sleep deprivation. Instead, they saw a degradation of non-executive components of cognition, such as information intake, that accounted for the overall impairment in subjects' performance on cognitive tasks. In other words, the sleep deprived brain appears to be capable of processing information, but this information may be distorted before it can be processed.
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Happy Memories Tracked By Brain Scans

Karl Leif Bates
Medical News Today
Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
In a novel study that used historical tape of a thrilling overtime basketball game between Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brain researchers at Duke have found that fans remember the good things their team did much better than the bad.

It's serious science, aimed at understanding the links between emotion and memory that might affect Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how well people recall their personal histories.

Struggling to find a way to measure a person's brain while subjecting them to powerful emotions, Duke scientists hit on the idea of using basketball fans who live and die with each three-pointer. Using game film gives researchers a way to see the brain deal with powerful, rapid-fire positive and negative emotions, without creating any ethical concerns.
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Stuttering Linked to Cell Waste Recycling Genes


Reuters
Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:06 UTC
Three genes linked to a rare metabolic disorder may also cause some cases of stuttering, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that could lead to a new treatment for the speech condition.

Two of the genes are used by brain cells as part of a waste recycling process, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. A third has no other known role.

"This is the first study to pinpoint specific gene mutations as the potential cause of stuttering, a disorder that affects 3 million Americans," Dr. James Battey, director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, said in a statement.
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