Science & Technology

Mysterious circular DNA may contribute to childhood cancer

Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
Mon, 16 Dec 2019 16:14 UTC

© Henssen/Charité
DNA of a neuroblastoma cell: Between the chromosomes (blue) there are numerous small DNA rings (green). The centromere of chromosome 2 is stained red.

Cancer development is associated with the gradual accumulation of DNA defects over time. Thus, cancer is considered an age-related disease. But why do children develop cancer? An international team of researchers, led by Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, now reveal that mysterious rings of DNA known as extrachromosomal circular DNA can contribute to cancer development in children. Producing the first detailed map of circular DNA, the scientists have shed new unanticipated insights on long standing questions in the field of cancer genetics. The work has been published in Nature Genetics*.

Every year, nearly half a million people in Germany develop cancer. Approximately 2,100 cancer patients are children under the age of 18. The fact that the majority of cancers develop in old adults is due to the mechanisms contributing to cancer development. A range of exogenous factors, including tobacco smoke and radiation, can cause damage to cellular DNA. If this type of DNA damage is left to accumulate over many years, affected cells may lose control over cell division and growth. This results in cancer development. Children, however, are not old enough to be affected by this mechanism of cancer development. What, then, is the reason for childhood cancers? A team of researchers, led by Dr. Anton Henssen of Charité's Department of Pediatrics, Division of Oncology and Hematology and the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC,) an institution jointly operated by Charité and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), are a large step closer to finding an answer. Working alongside a team of scientists led by Dr. Richard Koche from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and other international partners, the groups of researchers were able to show that rings of DNA can cause disruption of our cells' genetic information, which can contribute to cancer development.

Conscious visual perception occurs outside the visual system

Dartmouth College
Medical Xpress
Sat, 14 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC

© Sirui Liu and Patrick Cavanagh.
One of the stimuli from the fMRI experiments illustrates the remarkable difference between the perceived (illusory) path versus the real (physical) path of the Gabor patch.

A Dartmouth study finds that the conscious perception of visual location occurs in the frontal lobes of the brain, rather than in the visual system in the back of the brain. The findings are published in Current Biology.

The results are significant given the ongoing debate among neuroscientists on what consciousness is and where it happens in the brain.

"Our study provides clear evidence that the visual system is not representing what we see but is representing the physical world," said lead author, Sirui Liu, a graduate student of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. "What we see emerges later in the processing hierarchy, in the frontal areas of the brain that are not usually associated with visual processing."

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Scientists map Mars' global wind patterns for the first time

University of Maryland Baltimore County
Phys.org
Thu, 12 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC

© NASA Goddard/MAVEN/SVS/Greg Shirah
Computer-generated visualization of the orbital paths (white dots) taken by the MAVEN spacecraft as it mapped winds (blue lines) in the Martian upper atmosphere. Red lines coming from the white dots represent local wind speed and direction, measured by MAVEN's Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer instrument.

Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth's upper atmosphere. But it didn't happen on Earth: it happened on Mars. On top of that, all the data came from an instrument and a spacecraft that weren't originally designed to collect wind measurements.

In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could "swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough," to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data.

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Hotspots of mysterious "superbolt" lightning shown in new map

Stephen Ornes
Science for students
Mon, 09 Dec 2019 06:45 UTC

© Jurkos/iStock /Getty Images Plus
This striking array of lightning is zapping the open Mediterranean, a superbolt hotspot.

Not every lightning strike is the same. Some skip from cloud to cloud. Others strike the ground, delivering a shocking wallop to anything that gets in the way. Lightning differs by how strong it is, too. Scientists have observed mega-strikes of lightning that carry 1,000 times more energy than ordinary bolts. They're so intense that, about four decades ago, a scientist had to coin a new word to describe them: Superbolts!

Scientists don't yet know how these mega-bolts amass so much energy. But they don't strike equally everywhere, a new study finds.

Superbolts seem to strike mostly at sea, it finds. And they don't occur at the same rate throughout the year. Few, for instance, develop from April to October.

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Ocean acidification occurred during last great marine mass extinction

Leoma Williams
Discover Wildlife
Wed, 23 Oct 2019 15:37 UTC

A long-held theory about the marine mass-extinction during the dinosaur die-off has been confirmed.

A new study has revealed the first direct evidence that the marine mass-extinction known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event coincided with a rise in ocean acidity.

This change in the pH of the oceans is thought to have affected the development of animals with shells and skeletons, which had devastating effects for predators up the food chain, leading to mass die-offs.

The team of researchers from Yale University and the Universities of St Andrews and Bristol used boron isotope analysis and modelling techniques to confirm the long-suspected theory.

Comment: It was not 'behind' the last mass extinction - it coincided with it. Ergo, today's ocean acidification is not man-made either.

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NASA's NICER delivers precise pulsar measurements and first surface map

NASA
Thu, 12 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC

Astrophysicists are redrawing the textbook image of pulsars, the dense, whirling remains of exploded stars, thanks to NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope aboard the International Space Station. Using NICER data, scientists have obtained the first precise and dependable measurements of both a pulsar's size and its mass, as well as the first-ever map of hot spots on its surface.

The pulsar in question, J0030+0451 (J0030 for short), lies in an isolated region of space 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. While measuring the pulsar's heft and proportions, NICER revealed that the shapes and locations of million-degree "hot spots" on the pulsar's surface are much stranger than generally thought.

"From its perch on the space station, NICER is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars," said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Pulsars were discovered more than 50 years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth. With NICER we can probe the nature of these dense remnants in ways that seemed impossible until now."

Watch how NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) has expanded our understanding of pulsars, the dense, spinning corpses of exploded stars. Pulsar J0030+0451, located 1,100 light-years away in the constellation Pisces, now has the most precise and reliable size measurements of any pulsar to date. The shapes and locations of its hot spots challenge textbook depictions of these incredible objects. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Download this video in HD formats from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio

MindMatters: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Corey Schink, Elan Martin, Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC

Fragile things hate chaos, volatility and randomness. The slightest jolt can break them. But what is the opposite of fragility? Not resilience or robustness. Resilient things are neutral to stressors. They take a beating, but remain unchanged. So what likes from disorder? Our languages don't have a word for such a property, or at least they didn't, until Nassim Taleb came around.

Antifragile is the property of things that gain from disorder: like muscle, economies, creativity, and character. And today on MindMatters we delve into Taleb's book on the subject. Insightful, down to earth, witty and practical, Taleb's writing is one of a kind. Just like the man himself.

Running Time: 01:17:14

Download: MP3 — 70.7 MB

Revealing the physics of the Sun with NASA's Parker Solar Probe

Sarah Frazier, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Phys.org
Wed, 11 Dec 2019 12:00 UTC

Nearly a year and a half into its mission, Parker Solar Probe has returned gigabytes of data on the Sun and its atmosphere. Following the release of the very first science from the mission, five researchers presented additional new findings from Parker Solar Probe at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Dec. 11, 2019. Research from these teams hints at the processes behind both the Sun's continual outflow of material — the solar wind — and more infrequent solar storms that can disrupt technology and endanger astronauts, along with new insight into space dust that creates the Geminids meteor shower.

The young solar wind

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And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

NASA spacecraft spies huge new storm on Jupiter

Mike Wall
Space.com
Fri, 13 Dec 2019 12:43 UTC

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
A new, smaller cyclone can be seen at the lower right of this infrared image of Jupiter's south pole taken on Nov. 4, 2019, during the 23rd science pass of the planet by NASA's Juno spacecraft.

NASA's Juno probe discovered a giant new storm swirling near Jupiter's south pole last month, a few weeks after pulling off a dramatic death-dodging maneuver.

Juno spied the newfound maelstrom, which is about as wide as Texas, on Nov. 3, during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter. The storm joins a family of six other cyclones in Jupiter's south polar region, which Juno had spotted on previous passes by the gas giant. (Those encounters also revealed nine cyclones near Jupiter's north pole, by the way.)

The southern tempests are arrayed in a strikingly regular fashion. Previously, five of them had formed a pentagon around a central storm, which is as wide as the continental United States. With the new addition, that girdling structure is now a hexagon.

"These cyclones are new weather phenomena that have not been seen or predicted before," Cheng Li, a Juno scientist from the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement yesterday (Dec. 12).

"Nature is revealing new physics regarding fluid motions and how giant planet atmospheres work," he added. "We are beginning to grasp it through observations and computer simulations. Future Juno flybys will help us further refine our understanding by revealing how the cyclones evolve over time."

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Hubble Space Telescope records the best view of the first observed interstellar comet, Borisov

Gege Li
New Scientist
Fri, 13 Dec 2019 00:00 UTC

This image, captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows the first observed interstellar comet to enter the solar system as it speeds past the sun at 160,000 kilometres per hour. It is the closest comet 2I/Borisov has come to the sun since Hubble started tracking it in October.

The latest image from the telescope shows that Borisov is currently about 300 million kilometres away from Earth. It will approach slightly closer to our planet in late December, getting within about 290 million kilometres.

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Science & Technology

Mysterious circular DNA may contribute to childhood cancer

Conscious visual perception occurs outside the visual system

Scientists map Mars' global wind patterns for the first time

Hotspots of mysterious "superbolt" lightning shown in new map

Ocean acidification occurred during last great marine mass extinction

NASA's NICER delivers precise pulsar measurements and first surface map

MindMatters: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Revealing the physics of the Sun with NASA's Parker Solar Probe

NASA spacecraft spies huge new storm on Jupiter

Hubble Space Telescope records the best view of the first observed interstellar comet, Borisov

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