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New 'Underwater Plane' To Explore Ocean Depths


TechNewsDaily
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:09 UTC
Image
A new "underwater plane" will plunge wealthy riders down into the ocean depths for a hefty fee.

U.K. company Virgin Limited Edition recently announced the Necker Nymph, a three-person "aero-submarine" that can dive to depths of 36,000 feet - which is deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

The Necker Nymph vehicle is designed and built by San Francisco-based Hawkes Ocean Technologies and is based on the company's DeepFlight series of submersibles
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Telescope

Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Trailing Debris


NASA
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:36 UTC
Image
© NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.
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Pills

Drug could turn soldiers into super-survivors

Linda Geddes
New Scientist
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:06 UTC
A lucky few seem to be able to laugh in the face of death, surviving massive blood loss and injuries that would kill others. Now a drug has been found that might turn virtually any injured person into a "super-survivor", by preventing certain biological mechanisms from shutting down.

The drug has so far only been tested in animals. If it has a similar effect in humans, it could vastly improve survival from horrific injuries, particularly in soldiers, by allowing them to live long enough to make it to a hospital.

Loss of blood is the main problem with many battlefield injuries, and a blood transfusion the best treatment, although replacing lost fluid with saline can help. But both are difficult to transport in sufficient quantities. "You can't carry a blood bank into the battlefield," says Hasan Alam of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "What we're looking for is a pill or a shot that would keep a person alive for long enough to get to them to a hospital."
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Eye 1

US plans crewless automated ghost-frigates

Lewis Page
The Register
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:37 UTC
Mary Celeste class robot X-ships to prowl seas

Those splendid brainboxes at DARPA - the Pentagon's in-house bazaar of the bizarre - have outdone themselves this time. They now plan an entirely uncrewed, automated ghost frigate able to cruise the oceans of the world for months or years on end without human input.

The new project is called Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), and is intended to produce "an X-ship founded on the assumption that no person steps aboard at any point in its operating cycle". The uncrewed frigate would have enough range and endurance for "global, months long deployments with no underway human maintenance", being able to cross oceans largely without any human input - communications back to base would be "intermittent", according to DARPA.
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Sherlock

Super Hard Diamonds Found in Meteorite

Larry O'Hanlon
Discovery News
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:17 UTC
Image
© iStockPhoto
It didn't look quite this dramatic, but ultra hard diamonds were discovered in a meteorite that fell over Finland in 1971.
The ultra hard rocks may not end up on your finger, but they could help scientists learn how to create harder diamonds in the lab.

Researchers using a diamond paste to polish a slice of meteorite stumbled onto something remarkable: crystals in the rock that are harder than diamonds.

A closer look with an array of instruments revealed two totally new kinds of naturally occurring carbon, which are harder than the diamonds formed inside the Earth.

"The discovery was accidental but we were sure that looking in these meteorites would lead to new findings on the carbon system," said Tristan Ferroir of the Universite de Lyon in France.

Ferroir is the lead author of a report in the new diamond in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

The researchers were polishing a slice of the carbon-rich Havero meteorite that fell to Earth in Finland in 1971.
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Magnify

Cell Growth Regulates Genetic Circuits


Medical Health Today
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:00 UTC
Max Planck researchers discover an explanation for different growth rates of genetically identically cells

Genetic circuits control the activity of genes and thereby the function of cells and organisms. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam and the University of California at San Diego have shown how various genetic circuits in bacterial cells are influenced by growth conditions. According to their findings, even genes that are not regulated can display different activities - depending on whether they are translated into proteins in slow or fast growing cells. The results provide researchers with new insights into gene regulation and will help them in the design of synthetic genetic circuits in the future (Cell 139, 1366-1375, 2009)

Control circuits do not only exist in CD players, coffee makers, or cars, but also in living cells in this case as "genetic circuits". They consist of a network of different genes which can mutually stimulate or inhibit each other. With the help of these circuits, a cell can switch genes on or off and thus control what proteins it produces.
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Magnify

Hunger for Stimulation Driven by Dopamine in the Brain According to New Brain Research

Sandra Szivos
Medical Health Today
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:00 UTC
Our need for stimulation and dopamine's action upon the brain are connected, which explains why people who constantly crave stimulation are in danger of addictive behaviour such as drug abuse and gambling.

The urge to actively seek out new experiences is a personality trait that psychologists have known about for years, but up until now scientists have been unable to prove how this urge relates to hormonal activities in the brain.

Now, an international research team made up of scientists from the University of Copenhagen, University of Aarhus and University of Tokyo have been able to prove for the first time that this hunger for stimulation is greater on average among people who possess more of the gratification hormone - dopamine in the brain.
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Magnify

Skin Cells Transformed Directly into Neurons

Tina Hesman Saey
Science News
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Thomas Vierbuchen, M. Wernig
These neurons were made directly from mouse fibroblasts infected with a three-gene cocktail.
Researchers sidestep conversion to an embryonic state

One small step for skin cells could mean one big leap for regenerative medicine. For the first time, scientists have converted adult cells directly into neurons.

If the technique, performed on mouse cells, works for human cells, the achievement may bypass the need to revert a patient's cells to an embryonic state before producing the type of cell needed to repair damage due to disease or injury.

Researchers at Stanford University transformed skin fibroblast cells from mice into working neurons by inserting genes that encode transcription factors. Transcription factors are proteins that help regulate gene activity, usually by turning genes on. To convert skin cells into neurons, only three genes for regulatory proteins needed to be added, the team reported online January 27 in Nature. The three transcription factors, called Ascl1, Brn2 and Myt1l, normally appear while new neurons are being born.
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Info

Stratospheric Water Vapor Is a Global Warming Wild Card


ScienceDaily
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:21 UTC
Stratospheric
© ScienceDaily
Water vapor and radiative processes. (Credit: Image courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
A 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth's surface has had a big impact on global warming, say researchers in a study published online January 28 in the journal Science. The findings might help explain why global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last ten years as they did in the 1980s and 1990s.

Observations from satellites and balloons show that stratospheric water vapor has had its ups and downs lately, increasing in the 1980s and 1990s, and then dropping after 2000. The authors show that these changes occurred precisely in a narrow altitude region of the stratosphere where they would have the biggest effects on climate.

Water vapor is a highly variable gas and has long been recognized as an important player in the cocktail of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane, halocarbons, nitrous oxide, and others -- that affect climate.
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Info

DNA Testing on 2,000-year-old bones in Italy reveal East Asian Ancestry


Physorg.com
Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:13 UTC
Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed a maternal East Asian ancestry.

The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

According to Tracy Prowse, assistant professor of Anthropology, and the lead author on the study, the isotopic evidence indicates that about 20% of the sample analyzed to-date was not born in the area around Vagnari. The mtDNA is another line of evidence that indicates at least one individual was of East Asian descent.

"These preliminary isotopic and mtDNA data provide tantalizing evidence that some of the people who lived and died at Vagnari were foreigners, and that they may have come to Vagnari from beyond the borders of the Roman Empire," says Prowse. "This research addresses broader issues relating to globalization, human mobility, identity, and diversity in Roman Italy."
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