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New Technique Detects Proteins That Make Us Age


ScienceDaily
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:00 UTC
Image
© University of Bath
The new method (right) distinguishes between the sugar-modified and unmodified proteins much better than the traditional gel electrophoresis method (left).
Chemists and biologists from the University of Bath have developed a new technique that could be used to diagnose and develop treatments for age-related conditions like Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and cancer.

In these diseases, proteins in the body react with sugars in a process called glycation. This modifies the protein's function and can trigger complications such as inflammation and premature aging.

The team at Bath, led by Dr Jean van den Elsen and Dr Tony James, has developed a technique that can detect glycated proteins and could in the future be used for diagnosing a whole range of diseases in patients.

They used a technique called gel electrophoresis, where samples are put into a thin gel layer and an electric current is applied. The gel acts like a molecular sieve, sorting proteins from the samples according to their size and shape, allowing scientists to identify whether specific proteins are present in the blood.
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New Bacterial Behavior: Puzzling 'Dance' of Electricity-Producing Bacteria Near Energy Sources


ScienceDaily
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:00 UTC
Image
© Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Shewanella oneidensis
Bacteria dance the electric slide, officially named electrokinesis by the USC geobiologists who discovered the phenomenon.

Their study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Early Edition), describes what appears to be an entirely new bacterial behavior.

The metal-metabolizing Shewanella oneidensis microbe does not just cling to metal in its environment, as previously thought. Instead, it harvests electrochemical energy obtained upon contact with the metal and swims furiously for a few minutes before landing again.

Electrokinesis is more than a curiosity. Laboratory director and co-author Kenneth Nealson, the Wrigley Professor of Geobiology at USC and discoverer of Shewanella, hopes to boost the power of microbe-based fuel cells enough to produce usable energy.
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Info

DNA of Jesus-era shrouded man in Jerusalem reveals earliest case of leprosy

Rebecca Zeffert
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:14 UTC
Image
© Prof. Shimon Gibson
This is part of the tomb where the shrouded man was found. Note the remains of plaster around the entrance.
Burial shroud proves Turin Shroud not from 1st century C.E. Jerusalem.

The DNA of a 1st century shrouded man found in a tomb on the edge of the Old City of Jerusalem has revealed the earliest proven case of leprosy. Details of the research will be published December 16 in the PloS ONE Journal.

The molecular investigation was undertaken by Prof. Mark Spigelman and Prof. Charles Greenblatt and of the Sanford F. Kuvin Center for the Study of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Prof. Carney Matheson and Ms. Kim Vernon of Lakehead University, Canada, Prof. Azriel Gorski of New Haven University and Dr. Helen Donoghue of University College London. The archaeological excavation was led by Prof. Shimon Gibson, Dr. Boaz Zissu and Prof. James Tabor on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
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Telescope

Scientist Uncovers Relics Of Ancient Cosmos


Space Daily / SPX
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:13 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The distinctiveness of the particles, plus the timing of their collection after the Earth's passing through the comet trail, point to their source being the Grigg-Skjellerup comet.
A University of Manchester scientist, working as part of an international team, has uncovered an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos.

Dr Henner Busemann from The School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences has uncovered minute grains in stratospheric dust that may have formed inside stars that lived and died long before the birth of our sun.

Dust samples collected by high-flying aircraft in the upper atmosphere have also yielded material from molecular clouds in interstellar space, reports Dr Busemann and colleagues in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

This 'ultra-primitive' material is likely to have wafted into the atmosphere after the Earth passed through the trail of the Grigg-Skjellerup comet in 2003.

The interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) used in the study were collected by NASA aircraft in April 2003, after the Earth passed through the dust trail of the comet.
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Telescope

Trough Deposits On Mars Point To Complex Hydrologic Past


Mars Daily / SPX
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:57 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Noctis Labyrinthus
Catherine Weitz, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, has reported new evidence for multiple, water-related geologic processes on Mars.

She and her colleagues studied light-toned deposits (LTDs) within troughs of the Noctis Labyrinthus region in western Valles Marineris using data gathered by three Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the Context Camera (CTX) and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM).

Weitz presented the research results during a morning session of the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco, Calif.

"We analyzed ten troughs containing well-exposed LTDs, and we found a lot of variability that we didn't expect to see," she said.

"We found that each of the troughs with LTDs has a unique mineralogy, and, therefore, the processes occurring in each trough were very localized."
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Sun

Images of Chi Cygni reveal Sol's fate


Space Daily / SPX
Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:51 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Chi Cygni changes brightness dramatically and regularly every 408 days due to in-and-out pulsations. Using interferometry to image the star's surface at four separate times, astronomers found that the star grows to a diameter of 480 million miles -- large enough to engulf the asteroid belt -- before shrinking to a minimum diameter of 300 million miles. Chi Cygni also shows significant hotspots near minimum radius.
About 550 light-years from Earth, a star like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system. Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart. New close-up photos of the surface of this distant star show its throbbing motions in unprecedented detail.

"This work opens a window onto the fate of our Sun five billion years from now, when it will near the end of its life," said lead author Sylvestre Lacour of the Observatoire de Paris.

As a sunlike star ages, it begins to run out of hydrogen fuel at its core. Like a car running out of gas, its "engine" begins to splutter. On Chi Cygni, we see those splutterings as a brightening and dimming, caused by the star's contraction and expansion.

Stars at this life stage are known as Mira variables after the first such example, Mira "the Wonderful," discovered by David Fabricius in 1596. As it pulses, the star is puffing off its outer layers, which in a few hundred thousand years will create a beautifully gleaming planetary nebula.
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Telescope

Martian Moon Duo


Mars Daily / SPX
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:38 UTC
Image
© ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Phobos and Deimos raw (left panel) and processed images (right panel). Phobos rests in the foreground of the image with Deimos behind. Deimos was more than twice as far from the camera.
For the very first time, the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos have been caught on camera together. ESA's Mars Express orbiter took these pioneering images last month. Apart from their 'wow' factor, these unique images will help the HRSC team validate and refine existing orbit models of the two moons.

The images were acquired with the Super Resolution Channel (SRC) of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The camera took 130 images of the moons on 5 November at 9:14 CET over period of 1.5 minutes at intervals of 1s, speeding up to 0.5-s intervals toward the end. The image resolution is 110 m/pixel for Phobos and 240 m/pixel for Deimos - Deimos was more than twice as far from the camera.

The Super Resolution Channel of the HRSC uses an additional lens, which has a very narrow field of view of just 0.5 degree, providing four times the resolution of the HRSC color stereo channel.

Phobos, the larger of the two moons, orbits closer to the Red Planet, circling it every 7 hours and 39 minutes. It travels faster relative to Mars than the Moon relative to Earth. It was 11,800 km from Mars Express when the images were taken. Deimos was 26,200 km away.
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Info

MCG scientists decode memory-forming brain cell conversations

Toni Baker
Medical College of Georgia
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:08 UTC
The conversations neurons have as they form and recall memories have been decoded by Medical College of Georgia scientists.

The breakthrough in recognizing in real time the formation and recollection of a memory opens the door to objective, thorough memory studies and eventually better therapies, said Dr. Joe Tsien, neuroscientist and co-director of MCG's Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute. He is corresponding author on the study published Dec. 16 in PLoS ONE (see http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008256).

"It's a beginning, a first glimpse of a memory," Dr. Tsien said. "For the first time it gives us the ability to look at the brain dynamic and tell what kind of memory is formed, what are the components of the memory and how the memory is retrieved at the network level." The finding could help pinpoint at what stage memory formation is flawed and whether drugs are improving it.
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Sherlock

Introns Nonsense DNA may be More Important to Evolution of Genomes than Thought


ScienceDaily
Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:00 UTC
Image
© Robert Sommer
Daphnia pulex is a model organism for genetics study. Its genome was examined for recent intron colonization and loss events.
The sequences of nonsense DNA that interrupt genes could be far more important to the evolution of genomes than previously thought, according to a recent Science report by Indiana University Bloomington and University of New Hampshire biologists.

Their study of the model organism Daphnia pulex (water flea) is the first to demonstrate the colonization of a single lineage by "introns," as the interrupting sequences are known. The scientists say introns are inserted into the genome far more frequently than current models predict. The scientists also found what appear to be "hot spots" for intron insertion -- areas of the genome where repeated insertions are more likely to occur. And surprisingly, the vast majority of intron DNA sequences the scientists examined were of unknown origin.

"The thinking has been that these insertion events are very rare because they always have bad effects," said postdoctoral fellow Abraham Tucker, a lead author of the Science paper.
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Compass

MESSENGER team releases first global map of mercury


PhysOrg
Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:17 UTC
NASA's MESSENGER mission team and cartographic experts from the U. S. Geological Survey have created a critical tool for planning the first orbital observations of the planet Mercury - a global mosaic of the planet that will help scientists pinpoint craters, faults and other features for observation. The map was created from images taken during the MESSENGER spacecraft's three flybys of the planet and those of Mariner 10 in the 1970s. A presentation on the new global mosaic is being given today at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Image
© Arizona State University
Global map of Mercury showing regions imaged by MESSENGER during three flybys. Each image block is a mosaic of multiple spacecraft images. Black areas indicate no coverage. The final mosaic portrays Mercury’s surface in an equirectangular projection at 500 meters/pixel, -180° to +180° positive east longitudes and +90° to -90° planetocentric latitudes centered at 0° longitude and latitude. Because of projection distortion, unimaged regions appear artificially enlarged.
The MESSENGER spacecraft completed its third and final flyby of Mercury on Sept. 29, concluding its reconnaissance of the innermost planet. The MESSENGER team has been busily preparing for the yearlong orbital phase of the mission, beginning in March 2011, and the near-global mosaic of Mercury from MESSENGER and Mariner 10 images is key to those plans.
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