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Genetic Secrets From Tassie Tiger

Jonathan Amos
BBC News
Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:34 UTC
Keller
© Smithsonian Institution
Two thylacines in the Washington DC National Zoo, circa 1906
Scientists have detailed a significant proportion of the genes found in the extinct Tasmanian "tiger".

The international team extracted the hereditary information from the hair of preserved animal remains held in Swedish and US museums.

The information has allowed scientists to confirm the tiger's evolutionary relationship to other marsupials.

The study, reported in the journal Genome Research, may also give pointers as to why some animals die out.
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Magnify

Scientists Uncover Key Developmental Mechanisms Of The Amygdala


PhysOrg
Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:03 UTC
For the first time, scientists at Children's National Medical Center have successfully identified a key developmental program for the amygdala - the part of the limbic system that impacts how the brain creates emotional memories and responses.

This knowledge could help scientists to better understand autism and similar disorders in which altered function of this region is known to occur.

The findings, published in the February edition of Nature Neuroscience, identify a group (otherwise known as a pool) of precursor cells of neurons that are earmarked specifically for the amygdala and comprise part of a unique system of growth and development for this portion of the brain.
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People

Finger length may predict financial success

Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press
Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:53 UTC
Washington - The length of a man's ring finger may predict his success as a financial trader. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England report that men with longer ring fingers, compared to their index fingers, tended to be more successful in the frantic high-frequency trading in the London financial district.

Indeed, the impact of biology on success was about equal to years of experience at the job, the team led by physiologist John M. Coates reports in Monday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The same ring-to-index finger ratio has previously been associated with success in competitive sports such as soccer and basketball, the researchers noted.
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Cow Skull

Findings About Homo Erectus Overturn Prior Thinking About Human Brain Evolution


Exduco
Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:18 UTC
Scott W. Simpson from the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and researchers report in Science.

Between 900,000 and 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus made an evolutionary leap to develop brains closer in size to the large brains of modern-day man at birth.

Paleontologist Scott Simpson, professor of anatomy at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, is the lead author of research describing a nearly complete female of a 1.2 million-year-old H. erectus pelvic fossils found in the region of Gona, Ethiopia.
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Sun

Hazards Of Severe Space Weather Revealed


ScienceDaily
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:02 UTC
Earth
© Solar & Heliospheric Observatory
A solar storm, aurora from space, and aurora on Earth.
A NASA-funded study describes how extreme solar eruptions could have severe consequences for communications, power grids and other technology on Earth.

The National Academy of Sciences in Washington conducted the study. The resulting report provides some of the first clear economic data that effectively quantifies today's risk of extreme conditions in space driven by magnetic activity on the sun and disturbances in the near-Earth environment. Instances of extreme space weather are rare and are categorized with other natural hazards that have a low frequency but high consequences.

"Obviously, the sun is Earth's life blood," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "To mitigate possible public safety issues, it is vital that we better understand extreme space weather events caused by the sun's activity."
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Magnify

Observing the Quantum Hall Effect in 'Real' Space


PhysOrg
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:52 UTC
When water transforms into steam, or magnetized iron changes to demagnetized iron, Katsushi Hashimoto explains to PhysOrg.com, a phase transition is taking place: "Classical phase transitions...often share many fundamental characteristics near the critical point. Quantum phase transitions also show universal critical behaviors, which are affected not only by temperature but also by quantum mechanics."

"The real space observation of rather complex phenomena due to quantum mechanics is the key access to a descriptive understanding" of the world that governs quantum physics, Hashimoto continues. Hashimoto currently belongs to Tohoku University and to JST-ERATO in Sendai, Japan, but while he was at Hamburg University in Germany, he started experiments with Markus Morgenstern in a group led by Roland Wiesendanger. Getting support from theoretical groups at Universities of Warwick and Ryukyu, he and his collaborators finally succeeded in showing quantum Hall transition in "real" space. The results of the experiments are reported in Physical Review Letters: "Quantum Hall Transition in Real Space: From Localized to Extended States."
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Laptop

Why is the Mediterranean the Achilles' heel of the web?

Colin Barras
New Scientist
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:26 UTC
data cables of the Mediterranean
© TeleGeography
The data cables of the Mediterranean. The main three, recently damaged, cables that connect Europe and the Middle East are coloured. Minor cables are shown in grey.

Internet users in the Middle East and India might be glad to see the back of 2008 - it was bookended by cable breaks under the Mediterranean Sea that disrupted access across the region.

Repairs to damage caused in the most recent incident, in December, were completed last week and normal service finally restored. But more incidents are likely in what can arguably be called the internet's Achilles' heel.

The world's oceans are criss-crossed with cables to carry data, but just three span the Mediterranean in a tight bottleneck that links Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Comment: Several cables were cut in January 08, speculations as to the reasons for that 'rare' event included:

A subtle message to Iran, an example of how their communications can be affected by outside forces?

Maybe this is a prelude to an attack, or perhaps a test run for a future one?

The long-awaited Iranian Oil Bourse, a place for trading oil, petrochemicals and gas in various non-dollar currencies, was about to be opened.

Conspiracy theories and cut InterTube cables. He who controls information flow, controls pretty much everything. If the US did manage to tap into the entire middle east's net connections with these "accidents", our lives have just gotten much more complex.

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Info

Ancient supercontinent was a diamond factory

Catherine Brahic
New Scientist
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:21 UTC
Eurelia diamonds
© R Tappert
The Eurelia diamonds are the latest ultra-deep diamonds to have been found.

Talk about deep, dark secrets. Rare "ultra-deep" diamonds are valuable - not because they look good twinkling on a newlywed's finger - but because of what they can tell us about conditions far below the Earth's crust.

Now a find of these unusual gems in Australia has provided new clues to how they were formed.

The diamonds, which are white and a few millimetres across, were found by a mineral exploration company just outside the small village of Eurelia, some 300 kilometres north of Adelaide, in southern Australia. From there, they were sent to Ralf Tappert, a diamond expert at the University of Adelaide.

Tappert and colleagues say minerals found trapped inside the Eurelia diamonds could only have formed more than 670 kilometres (416 miles) beneath the surface of the Earth - a distance greater than that between Boston and Washington, DC.
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Saturn

Dead Stars Tell Story Of Planet Birth


ScienceDaily
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:50 UTC
Dead Stars
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
This artist's concept illustrates a dead star, or "white dwarf," surrounded by the bits and pieces of a disintegrating asteroid.
Astronomers have turned to an unexpected place to study the evolution of planets - dead stars.

Observations made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal six dead "white dwarf" stars littered with the remains of shredded asteroids. This might sound pretty bleak, but it turns out the chewed-up asteroids are teaching astronomers about the building materials of planets around other stars.

So far, the results suggest that the same materials that make up Earth and our solar system's other rocky bodies could be common in the universe. If the materials are common, then rocky planets could be, too.
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Saturn

Milky Way - The Galaxy - Not Snack-Sized Anymore

Seth Borenstein
The Associated Press
Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:20 UTC
Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore.

The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought - Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach.
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