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What can DNA tell us? Place your bets now

Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake
New Scientist
Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:04 UTC
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© Chad Baker / GettyCan DNA predict the details of an organism that develops from it?
From Newton to Hawking, scientists love wagers. Now Lewis Wolpert has bet Rupert Sheldrake a case of fine port that: "By 1 May 2029, given the genome of a fertilised egg of an animal or plant, we will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that develops from it, including any abnormalities." If the outcome isn't obvious, then the Royal Society will be asked to adjudicate.

Lewis Wolpert

I have entered into this wager with Rupert Sheldrake because of my interest in the details of how embryos develop, and how our understanding of this process will progress. In my latest book, How We Live and Why We Die, I suggest that it will one day be possible to predict from an embryo's genome how it will develop, and I believe it is possible for this to happen in the next 20 years.

I am, in fact, being a little over-keen because 40 years is a more likely time frame for such a breakthrough. Cells and embryos are extremely complicated: for their size, embryonic cells are the most complex structures in the universe.

Animals develop from a single cell, a fertilised egg, which divides to produce cells that will form the embryo. How that egg develops into an embryo and newborn animal is controlled by genes in the chromosomes. These genes are passive: they do nothing, just provide the code for proteins. It is proteins that determine how cells behave. While the DNA in every cell contains the code for all the proteins in all the cells, it is the particular proteins produced in particular cells that determine how those cells behave.
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Magnify

11-Billion-Year-Old Giant Supernovae Farthest Ever Detected


PhysOrg
Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:49 UTC
Supernova
© NASAEta Carinae, a star in the Milky Way galaxy that is 7,500 light years from Earth, will become a supernova similar to those detected by Jeff Cooke and colleagues.
UC Irvine cosmologists have found two supernovae farther away than any previously detected by using a new technique that could help find other dying stars at the edge of the universe.

This method has the potential to allow astronomers to study some of the very first supernovae and will advance the understanding of how galaxies form, how they change over time and how Earth came to be.

"When stars explode, they spew matter into space. Eventually, gravity collapses the matter into a new star, which could have planets such as Earth around it," said Jeff Cooke, McCue Postdoctoral Fellow in physics & astronomy, who reports his findings July 9 in the journal Nature.
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Telescope

Phantom menace to dark matter theory

Marcus Chown
New Scientist
Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:48 UTC
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© NASAThe answer to the riddle of dark matter could be found in our own solar system
A subtle anomaly in the orbit of the planets in our solar system could prove a controversial idea that goes beyond Einstein.

The orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury, departs from what it should be under Newton's laws. A century ago, when Einstein explained this anomaly, it confirmed his theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity.

Now an Israeli physicist predicts that a similar but far more subtle anomaly in the orbits of the planets, if detected, might prove his own theory, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. This provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds too fast for conventional gravity from the mass at the heart of a spiral galaxy to hold them in their orbits, so something else must be keeping them on track.

One theory is that invisible dark matter provides that extra pull. But an alternative is MOND, devised in the early 1980s by Mordehai Milgrom, now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
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Magic Wand

Device makes objects invisible in certain light conditions


ScienceDaily.com
Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:38 UTC
A group of researchers from the Department of Physics at UAB have designed a device, called a dc metamaterial, which makes objects invisible under certain light - very low frequency electromagnetic waves - by making the inside of the magnetic field zero but not altering the exterior field. The device, which up to date has only been studied in theoretical works, thus acts as an invisibility cloak, making the object completely undetectable to these waves.

The research is based on an initial idea of the British Ben Wood and John Pendry - the latter considered the father of metamaterials - and is a step forward in the race to create devices which could make objects invisible at visible light frequencies.
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Info

Panama Canal widening opens archaeological treasure trove

Natalie Angier
New York Times News Service
Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:31 UTC
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© ReutersCargo ships await their turn to enter a lock in the Panama Canal in this 2008 file image.
The Culebra Cut, Panama - You can't leave Aldo Rincon alone for a moment.

As a small knot of scientists and visitors dressed in hard hats and orange safety vests milled around on the banks of the Panama Canal, chatting about the $5 billion expansion program now under way to widen the storied canal and so accommodate the ever-fatter freighters that ply the planet's seas, Rincon, 30, quietly pulled a few digging tools from his backpack. He squatted down near an unremarkable-looking patch of pebbles and broken rock and began methodically scraping away in the dirt.
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Info

Scientists explore the physics of bumpy roads

Kim Luke
University of Toronto
Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:22 UTC
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© Stephen Morris Lyon washboard road experiment, featuring a wheel rolling over a bed of sand, creating ripples.
Just about any road with a loose surface - sand or gravel or snow - develops ripples that make driving a very shaky experience. A team of physicists from Canada, France and the United Kingdom have recreated this "washboard" phenomenon in the lab with surprising results: ripples appear even when the springy suspension of the car and the rolling shape of the wheel are eliminated. The discovery may smooth the way to designing improved suspension systems that eliminate the bumpy ride.

"The hopping of the wheel over the ripples turns out to be mathematically similar to skipping a stone over water," says University of Toronto physicist, Stephen Morris, a member of the research team.
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Laptop

Interplanetary internet gets permanent home in space

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:20 UTC
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© STS-119 Shuttle Crew/NASAThe International Space Station is now testing a new communications protocol that could form the backbone of a future interplanetary internet
The interplanetary internet now has its first permanent node in space, aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The new software will make sending data from space less like using the telephone, and more like using the web. In the modern era of the web and information on demand, teams still have to schedule times to send and receive data from space missions.

But the newly installed system aboard the ISS could one day allow data to flow between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts automatically, creating what is being dubbed the "interplanetary internet".
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Info

Eavesdropping on the music of the brain

Nora Schultz
New Scientist
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:16 UTC
What does the human brain sound like? Now you can find out thanks to a technique for turning its flickering activity into music. Listening to scans may also give new insights into the differences and similarities between normal and dysfunctional brains.

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Info

First direct evidence of substantial fish consumption by early modern humans in China

Erik Trinkaus
Washington University in St. Louis
Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:13 UTC
Freshwater fish are an important part of the diet of many peoples around the world, but it has been unclear when fish became an important part of the year-round diet for early humans.

A new study by an international team of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, shows it may have happened in China as far back as 40,000 years ago.

The study will be published online the week of July 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Laptop

Computer reveals stone tablet 'handwriting' in a flash

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:20 UTC
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© Michail Panagopolous, et alArchaeologists have discovered more than 50,000 stone inscriptions from ancient Athens and Attica so far. However, attributing the pieces to particular cutters so they can be dated has proven tricky
You might call it "CSI Ancient Greece". A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscriptions created by different artisans, a feat that ordinarily consumes years of human scholarship.

"This is the first time anything like this had been done on a computer," says Stephen Tracy, a Greek scholar and epigrapher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who challenged a team of computer scientists to attribute 24 ancient Greek inscriptions to their rightful maker. "They knew nothing about inscriptions," he says.

Tracy has spent his career making such attributions, which help scholars attach firmer dates to the tens of thousands of ancient Athenian and Attican stone inscriptions that have been found.

"Most inscriptions we find are very fragmentary," Tracy says. "They are very difficult to date and, as is true of all archaeological artefacts, the better the date you can give to an artefact, the more it can tell you."
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