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Girl with Y chromosome sheds light on maleness

Ewen Callaway
New Scientist
Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:46 UTC
A seven-year-old girl with a Y chromosome is providing new clues about a possible "master switch" of maleness.

The girl has the normal chromosome count - 46 - and should be male. Other children who have the male sex chromosome but do not appear to be boys have been found to have gene mutations that temper the Y chromosome's effects. However this child doesn't have ambiguous gonads, shrivelled testes or other developmental defects. She instead has a normal vagina, cervix and set of ovaries.

A team led by Anna Biason-Lauber, of University Children's Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, thinks the patient's normalcy is due to mutations in a poorly understood gene on chromosome 17 called CBX2.

The child's unique condition might not have been discovered were it not for tests performed before birth to check for major genetic defects, such as an extra copy of chromosome 21 that causes Down's syndrome. Those tests came up negative and indicated the child would be a boy.
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R2-D2

I, Robot - and Gardener: MIT Droids Tend Tomato Plants

Melissa Trujillo
Associated Press
Fri, 10 Apr 2009 17:46 UTC
Tomato-tending droid
© AP Photo/Steven SenneIn this March 18, 2009 photo, a robot waters a tomato plant in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
Cambridge, Massachusetts -- These gardeners would have green thumbs - if they had thumbs.

A class of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a set of robots that can water, harvest and pollinate cherry tomato plants.

The small, $3,000 robots, which move through the garden on a base similar to a Roomba vacuum, are networked to the plants. When the plants indicate they need water, the robots can sprinkle them from a water pump. When the plants have a ripe tomato, the machines use their arms to pluck the fruit.
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Study finds that biofuel threatens water supplies

Anna Sanclement
Examiner.com
Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:25 UTC
The amount of water used to make bioethanol may be three times as much as previously thought, a new study has found. A gallon of ethanol could require up to 2,100 gallons of water from the farm up to the fuel pump.

The study was conducted by Sangwon Suh and his colleagues of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul and funded in part by USDA/CSREES and the U.S. Department of Energy and the Legislative Citizen's Commission on Minnesota Resources.
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Cloud computing brings cost of protein research down to Earth


Medical College of Wisconsin
Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:02 UTC
Medical College of Wisconsin's Data Analysis Cluster makes proteomics research more accessible to scientists worldwide

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center in Milwaukee have just made the very expensive and promising area of protein research more accessible to scientists worldwide.

They have developed a set of free tools called ViPDAC (virtual proteomics data analysis cluster), to be used in combination with Amazon's inexpensive "cloud computing" service, which provides the option to rent processing time on its powerful servers; and free open-source software from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Manitoba.

Their research appears online in Journal of Proteomic Research and is funded by the NIH Heart Lung and Blood Institute's Proteomics Innovation Center at the Medical College. Proteomics is a biomedical research term used to describe the large-scale study of all the proteins expressed by an organism. It usually involves the identification of proteins and determination of their modifications in both normal and disease states.
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Three New Species Discovered -- in the Stratosphere!


Living The Scientist Life
Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:32 UTC
Image
Bacterial Colonies
According to a recently published press release, three new species of bacteria have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by Indian scientists in an experiment conducted by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This discovery lends some credence to the hypothesis that life might have originated elsewhere in the cosmos and was seeded on Earth after colliding with a foreign body, perhaps a comet or asteroid, that was carrying these ancient organisms. This is one of the basic tenants upon which the new scientific field, astrobiology, is based. However, if you think astrobiology is rubbish, this finding is nonetheless fascinating because it reveals that scientists are still learning the parameters of where life is possible.
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Uncovering 5,000 years of Malta's history

Juliet Rix
The Times
Sat, 11 Apr 2009 11:53 UTC
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© The Times
Older than the pyramids, the island's ancient temples are absurdly uncelebrated

In a striking hilltop position, with views over land and sea, stand the remains of an ancient temple.

Built of yellow limestone, it glows in the sun. Its raised forecourt leads into a central aisle flanked by semicircular apses, altars, carved bowls and faint remembrances of decorative reliefs.

This is thought to be among the oldest buildings in the world - constructed a thousand years before the Pyramids and long before Stonehenge. It is not in Egypt or Greece or anywhere in the Middle East, but in Malta. This little country of sun and package holidays has more to offer than just relaxing by the pool.
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HAL9000

Beautifully Strange: Paul Dirac

Sir John Enderby
physicsworld.com
Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00 UTC
The list of famous Bristolians is an illustrious one. The Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for example, is recognized everywhere in Bristol for his many iconic structures, even though he was not born, bred or even resident in the city. Another well-known son of the city is the Hollywood legend Cary Grant, born as Archie Leach in the suburb of Horfield and now commemorated with a striking bronze statue outside Bristol's hands-on science museum. The physicist Paul Dirac actually went to the same elementary school as Grant/Leach, and the abstract sculpture dedicated to him stands just a stone's throw away from Grant's bronze likeness. Dirac also has a building named after him: Dirac House, the headquarters of IOP Publishing (which publishes Physics World).
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Scientific Innovation: In Search of the Black Swans

Mark Buchanan
physicsworld.com
Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:14 UTC
The black swan
© physicsworld.com
The publish-or-perish ethic too often favours a narrow and conservative approach to scientific innovation. Mark Buchanan asks whether we are pushing revolutionary ideas to the margins.

In 1890 an electricity company enticed the German physicist Max Planck to help it in its efforts to make more efficient light bulbs. Planck, as a theorist, naturally started with the fundamentals and soon became enmeshed in the thorny problem of explaining the spectrum of black-body radiation, which he eventually did by introducing the idea - a "purely formal" assumption, as he then considered it - that electromagnetic energy can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta. The rest is history. Electric light bulbs and mathematical necessity led Planck to discover quantum theory and to kick start the most significant scientific revolution of the 20th century.
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Signs of earliest Scots unearthed


BBC News
Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:37 UTC
Archaeologists at Biggar in Scotland
© BBC NewsThe flints were found in a ploughed field near Biggar
Archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence of human beings ever found in Scotland. The flints were unearthed in a ploughed field near Biggar in South Lanarkshire. They are similar to tools known to have been used in the Netherlands and northern Germany 14,000 years ago, or 12,000 BC.

They were probably used by hunters to kill reindeer, mammoth and giant elk and to cut up prey and prepare their skins. The discovery conjures up a picture of wandering groups of hunters making their way across dry land where the North Sea is now, after the end of the Ice Age. The details are revealed in the latest edition of British Archaeology magazine. The editor, Mike Pitts, said the finds were "the most northerly evidence for the earliest people in Britain".
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Eye 1

How you feel the world impacts how you see it

Cathryn M. Delude
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:48 UTC
Motion illusions reveal new insights into perception

In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects -- such as rocks -- appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that this phenomenon, called motion aftereffect, occurs not only in our visual perception but also in our tactile perception, and that these senses actually influence one another. Put another way, how you feel the world can actually change how you see it -- and vice versa.

In a paper published in the April 9 online issue of Current Biology, researchers found that people who were exposed to visual motion in a given direction perceived tactile motion in the opposite direction. Conversely, tactile motion in one direction gave rise to the illusion of visual motion in the opposite direction.
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