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Mammals Made By Viruses

Carl Zimmer
Discover Magazine
Tue, 14 Feb 2012 15:44 UTC
davinci fetus
If not for a virus, none of us would ever be born.

In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin.

The cells that made syncytin were located only where the placenta made contact with the uterus. They fuse together to create a single cellular layer, called the syncytiotrophoblast, which is essential to a fetus for drawing nutrients from its mother. The scientists discovered that in order to fuse together, the cells must first make syncytin.

What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.
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Bizarro Earth

Lava Formations in Western U.S. Linked to Rip in Giant Slab of Earth


Science Daily
Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:11 UTC
Image
© University of California, San Diego
A new model by Scripps researchers details a rupture inside the Farallon slab that caused a magma flow now known as Columbia River flood basalt in the Western U.S.
Like a stream of air shooting out of an airplane's broken window to relieve cabin pressure, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego say lava formations in eastern Oregon are the result of an outpouring of magma forced out of a breach in a massive slab of Earth. Their new mechanism explaining how such a large volume of magma was generated is published in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Nature.

For years scientists who study the processes underlying the planet's shifting tectonic plates and how they shape the planet have debated the origins of sudden, massive eruptions of lava at the planet's surface. In several locations around the world, such "flood basalts" are marked by immense formations of volcanic rock. A famous example is India's Deccan flood basalt, a formation widely viewed as related to the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Such eruptions are thought to typically occur when the head of a mantle plume, a mushroom-shaped upwelling of hot rock rising from deep within Earth's interior, reaches the surface. Now Scripps postdoctoral researcher Lijun Liu and geophysics professor Dave Stegman have proposed an alternative origin for the volcanic activity of Oregon's Columbia River flood basalt.
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Mars

Venus Could Be Shifting Gears: Planet's Rotation Appears to Have Slowed Down


Phenomenica
Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Venus shifting gears
© NASA
A spacecraft orbiting Venus has revealed that Earth's cloud-covered neighbour is rotating a little slower than previously measured.

Peering through the dense atmosphere in the infrared, the ESA's Venus Express spacecraft found surface features were not quite where they should be.

Using the VIRTIS instrument at infrared wavelengths to penetrate the thick cloud cover, scientists studied surface features and discovered that some were displaced by up to 20 km from where they should be given the accepted rotation rate as measured by NASA's Magellan orbiter in the early 1990s.

These detailed measurements from orbit are helping scientists determine whether Venus has a solid or liquid core, which will help our understanding of the planet's creation and how it evolved.
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Magic Wand

The birds in the Iliad strengthened warriors


University of Gothenburg
Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:42 UTC
Image
© Museum of Fine Arts
Krater painted by the Tyszkiewicz Painter, c 480BC
The birds in the Iliad help warriors and kings make difficult decisions and satisfy the basic human need for self-esteem and security. This is the conclusion of a new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, that analyses 35 bird scenes in Homer's Iliad from around 700 B.C.

In the Iliad, gods use birds to disguise themselves and as transmitters of messages to humans. Similarly, humans use birds as signs and symbols that they interpret to acquire knowledge about the presence and identities of gods and their intentions for the future. Birds therefore have a very important function as intermediaries between humans and their gods.

'The birds are central in the event structure of the Iliad. They often appear in dangerous and important war situations and prior to risky journeys. Receiving a positive bird sign from the gods in those situations strengthened the warriors' fighting spirit and ability to fight, but it also evoked a sense of relief since it indicated that the god was with them,' says the author of the thesis Karin Johansson.

In her thesis, Johansson identifies the different bird species that are included in the Iliad and shows that they are carefully selected to fit into the particular situations and environments where they appear. The most common species are the peregrine falcon, the rock dove and the golden eagle, but also the so-called bearded vulture, with is very uncommon today.
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Beaker

New power source discovered


RMIT University
Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:18 UTC
electric sparks
© Unknown
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RMIT University have made a breakthrough in energy storage and power generation.

The power generated relative to the energy source size is three to four times greater than what is currently possible with the best lithium-ion batteries.

While on sabbatical from RMIT in 2009 and 2010, Associate Professor Dr Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, joined MIT Associate Professor Michael Strano's nanotechnology research group.

The team was working on measuring the acceleration of a chemical reaction along a nanotube when they discovered that the reaction generated power.

Now the two researchers are using their combined expertise in chemistry and nanomaterials to explore this phenomenon.

Their work titled "Nanodynamite: Fuel-coated nanotubes could provide bursts of power to the smallest systems" is in the December IEEE Spectrum Magazine, the publication of the IEEE, the world's largest professional technology association.
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Beaker

Most Lethal Known Species of Prion Protein Identified


Science Daily
Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© pandasthumb.org
Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have identified a single prion protein that causes neuronal death similar to that seen in "mad cow" disease, but is at least 10 times more lethal than larger prion species.

This toxic single molecule or "monomer" challenges the prevailing concept that neuronal damage is linked to the toxicity of prion protein aggregates called "oligomers."

The study was published this week in an advance, online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"By identifying a single molecule as the most toxic species of prion proteins, we've opened a new chapter in understanding how prion-induced neurodegeneration occurs," said Scripps Florida Professor Corinne Lasmézas, who led the new study. "We didn't think we would find neuronal death from this toxic monomer so close to what normally happens in the disease state. Now we have a powerful tool to explore the mechanisms of neurodegeneration."
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Info

Milky Way Humming with Microwave Mystery

Ian O'Neill
Discovery News
Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:59 UTC
Galatic Haze
© ESA/Planck Collaboration
All-sky image shows the distribution of the Galactic Haze seen by ESA's Planck mission at microwave frequencies superimposed over the high-energy sky as seen by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

A European space observatory has discovered something peculiar about our galaxy: it's humming in microwaves and, for the moment, the source of the radiation is a complete mystery. Also, the Milky Way is home to previously unknown "islands" of cold carbon monoxide gas, helping astronomers uncover the distribution of star-forming regions.

The Planck space observatory was launched in 2009 to analyze small fluctuations in the ubiquitous cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- complementing data gathered by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. To understand the structure of the CMB is to open a window on the conditions immediately after the Big Bang. This extremely faint radiation is the ancient "echo" of the creation of the Universe over 14 billion years ago.

However, Planck's toolkit isn't restricted to measuring ancient microwaves from the dawn of time, it is also building an all-sky map of our own galaxy. To remove the microwave radiation being emitted from the Milky Way, a very accurate survey of microwave sources within our cosmic backyard needs to be carried out.

And it is this survey that's turning up some surprises.

On Monday, at an international conference in Bologna, Italy, Planck scientists have presented the intermediate results from the mission ahead of its first cosmological dataset expected to be released in 2013.
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Magnify

Jungle Fungus Eats Plastic, Beats Cancer

Rady Ananda
Activist Post
Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:04 UTC
Image
© Yale University
Pestalotiopsis microspora
Researchers have found the first endophytic fungus that eats plastic, and can use it as its sole food source even in an oxygen-free environment.[1]

Pestalotiopsis microspora presents a massive bioremediation opportunity for landfills, where buried and surface plastics can be degraded naturally.

More likely, though, the enzyme responsible for degrading polyurethane (PUR) will be tweaked, patented and commercialized. There will be no mad escape into urban centers where the mold will eat all our plastics, like medical scientist Kit Pedler envisioned in his sci-fi classic, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters.

One hopes, anyway.
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Info

'Woolly Mammoth' Video a Hoax, Original Footage Proves

Benjamin Radford
Life's Little Mysteries
Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:24 UTC
Mammoth?
© The Sun/Michael Cohen/Barcroft Media
Screen grab of video showing alleged woolly mammoth crossing a river in Siberia.

Last week, a new video surfaced claiming to show a live woolly mammoth - an animal scientists think has been extinct for at least four millennia - crossing a river in Russia. The suspiciously blurry footage was allegedly "caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia," according to a story in The Sun newspaper.

The video became an Internet sensation, making headlines around the world. Some Bigfoot believers and Loch Ness Monster lovers murmured their tentative approval, hoping it proved that large unknown (or assumed extinct) animals still exist in Earth's remote wilds.

While most people didn't believe that the animal in the video was really a woolly mammoth as claimed, viewers were sharply divided about what exactly it was.

Some suspected the video is an outright hoax - a computer-generated mammoth digitally inserted into a real river scene. Many others, however, were convinced that the animal was real: not a mammoth, but instead a bear with a large fish hanging from its mouth. That would explain its relatively small size, the shape of the "trunk" on its head, and the color. Experts cast doubts on the video's authenticity; Derek Serra, a Hollywood video effects artist, concluded that it "appears to have been intentionally blurred."
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Frog

The Frog of War

Dashka Slater
Mother Jones
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:14 UTC
Image
© Annie Tritt
The frog depicted here isn't Xenopus laevis, but another species studied in Hayes' lab.
When biologist Tyrone Hayes discovered that a top-selling herbicide messes with sex hormones, its manufacturer went into battle mode. Thus began one of the weirdest feuds in the history of science.

Darnell lives deep in the basement of a life sciences building at the University of California-Berkeley, in a plastic tub on a row of stainless steel shelves. He is an African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, sometimes called the lab rat of amphibians. Like most of his species, he's hardy and long-lived, an adept swimmer, a poor crawler, and a voracious eater. He's a good breeder, too, having produced both children and grandchildren. There is, however, one unusual thing about Darnell.

He's female.

Comment: In addition to the information provided by Biologist Tyrone Hayes, read the following articles for More Stark Evidence of the Hazards of Atrazine:

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