Genes talk to themselves and to each other to control how a given cell manufactures proteins. But variation in the control of the same gene in two different tissues may contribute to certain human traits, including the likelihood of getting a disease, said a team of geneticists and neuroscientists at Duke University Medical Center.
Using a genome-wide screen to look for single-nucleotide changes, the researchers found that the expression of a given gene -- the amount of protein it is producing -- can vary widely. They also found that genetic variation leading to alternative splicing, a process that can create different proteins from the same gene, might in general be more relevant to disease than the effects of genetic variation on the general amount of gene expression.
Science & Technology
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An academic from Huddersfield University believes the standing stones had the right acoustics to amplify certain sounds
An academic from Huddersfield University believes the standing stones had the right acoustics to amplify certain sounds
Mr Till, an expert in acoustics and music technology at Huddersfield University, West Yorks., believes the standing stones had the ideal acoustics to amplify a "repetitive trance rhythm".
The original Stonehenge probably had a "very pleasant, almost concert-like acoustic" that our ancestors slowly perfected over many generations
Fasten your seat belts -- we're faster, heavier, and more likely to collide than we thought. Astronomers making high-precision measurements of the Milky Way say our Galaxy is rotating about 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously understood.
© NASA
This photograph from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the young star cluster NGC 2362. By studying it, astronomers found that gas giant planet formation happens very rapidly and efficiently, within less than 5 million years, meaning that Jupiter-like worlds experience a growth spurt in their infancy.
This photograph from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the young star cluster NGC 2362. By studying it, astronomers found that gas giant planet formation happens very rapidly and efficiently, within less than 5 million years, meaning that Jupiter-like worlds experience a growth spurt in their infancy.
Smithsonian astronomers examined the 5 million-year-old star cluster NGC 2362 with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which can detect the signatures of actively forming planets in infrared light. They found that all stars with the mass of the Sun or greater have lost their protoplanetary (planet-forming) disks. Only a few stars less massive than the Sun retain their protoplanetary disks. These disks provide the raw material for forming gas giants like Jupiter. Therefore, gas giants have to form in less than 5 million years or they probably won't form at all.
For, without doubt, another great physicist, who is worthy of ranking up alongside Newton, is an Iraqi scientist born in AD 965 who went by the name of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham.
Most people in the West will never have even heard of him.
As a physicist myself, I am quite in awe of this man's contribution to my field, but I was fortunate enough to have recently been given the opportunity to dig a little into his life and work through my recent filming of a three-part BBC Four series on medieval Islamic scientists.
Yet, the truth is rather grayer; and I feel it important to point out that, certainly in the field of optics, Newton himself stood on the shoulders of a giant who lived 700 years earlier.
It is incredible that we are only now uncovering the debt that today's physicists owe to an Arab who lived 1,000 years ago
© BBC News
An artist's impression of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham
An artist's impression of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham
Most people in the West will never have even heard of him.
As a physicist myself, I am quite in awe of this man's contribution to my field, but I was fortunate enough to have recently been given the opportunity to dig a little into his life and work through my recent filming of a three-part BBC Four series on medieval Islamic scientists.
Yet, the truth is rather grayer; and I feel it important to point out that, certainly in the field of optics, Newton himself stood on the shoulders of a giant who lived 700 years earlier.
It is incredible that we are only now uncovering the debt that today's physicists owe to an Arab who lived 1,000 years ago
NASA's plans to ship people to the moon and some day Mars are very much up in the air these days, with debate over Barack Obama's plans for the space agency a hot water cooler topic in the aerospace industry. Budget battles aside, one new study asks, how should these future astronauts steer their way around our solar system?
Brain waves, suggests the current Acta Astronautica journal report. Fans of Neuromancer may recall the story's hero using brain implants to navigate around cyberspace, but the researchers led by Carlo Menon of the European Space Agency, see astronaut brain-machine interfaces as a the way to get around outer space.
Brain waves, suggests the current Acta Astronautica journal report. Fans of Neuromancer may recall the story's hero using brain implants to navigate around cyberspace, but the researchers led by Carlo Menon of the European Space Agency, see astronaut brain-machine interfaces as a the way to get around outer space.
© NASA/JPL
Elysium Planitia
Elysium Planitia
Using cameras on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Matt Balme of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and his colleagues mapped the Elysium Planitia, a region near the equator. They saw rings up to 23 metres across made up of stones sorted by size into concentric bands.
On Earth, similar structures form via repeated freezing and thawing of ice, but with the stones sorted into layers. Water in soil under stones freezes faster than in surrounding soil, and the expanding ice pushes the stones upwards. Larger stones rise faster, and so layers sorted by size form.
© ALAMY
Pluto: 'More like Earth than Earth is like Jupiter'
Pluto: 'More like Earth than Earth is like Jupiter'
The number nine has a special significance for Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. Nine is the number of planets in the Solar System, and Sykes is one of several leading astronomers who want to keep it that way.
Unfortunately, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which adjudicates on these matters, has ruled there are no longer nine planets in the Solar System, after a decision two years ago to downgrade Pluto to the lowly status of a "dwarf planet".
But in 2009, Dr Sykes and his like-minded colleagues hope to get the ruling overturned at the next general assembly of the IAU, to be held in Rio de Janeiro in August.
© D. Modha, IBM
But University of Wisconsin-Madison research psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, who was recently selected to take part in the creation of a "cognitive computer," says the goal of building a computer as quick and flexible as a small mammalian brain is more daunting than it sounds.
Tononi, professor of psychiatry at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and an internationally known expert on consciousness, is part of a team of collaborators from top institutions who have been awarded a $4.9 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.
© Unknown
Comment: Click here for a PDF article about the Clovis comet.