Science & TechnologyS


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Gene Behind Malaria-Resistant Mosquitoes Identified by Scientists

Lena Raditsch
Medical News Today
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 04:00 UTC
For many years, the mosquitoes that transmit malaria to humans were seen as public enemies, and campaigns to eradicate the disease focused on eliminating the mosquitoes. But, as a study published in Science shows, the mosquitoes can also be our allies in the fight against this common foe, which kills almost one million people a year and heavily impairs the economies of affected countries. In this study, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) in Strasbourg, France, discovered that variations in a single gene affect mosquitoes' ability to resist infection by the malaria parasite.

"Malaria parasites must spend part of their lives inside mosquitoes and another part inside humans, so by learning how mosquitoes resist malaria, we may find new tools for controlling its transmission to humans in endemic areas", says Stephanie Blandin from INSERM, who carried out the research at EMBL in collaboration with Lars Steinmetz's group and with Rui Wang-Sattler (now at the Helmholtz Zentrum in Munich, Germany).
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Blackbox

Asteroid-hunting telescope in the repair shop

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:58 UTC
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© Brett SimisonTemporary blindness
The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes will be taken apart today in an effort to solve problems with image quality.

The 1.8-metre PS1 telescope is the first of a suite of instruments - the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System - designed to find asteroids and comets with orbits that could bring them close to Earth. Sited atop a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, PS1 is the prototype for a planned four telescopes that will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times each month.

To scan so much sky, PS1 boasts a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and specially designed software to process the terabytes of data collected by the telescope each night.

But since the camera was installed in 2007, the telescope team has been struggling to get PS1's image quality to its targeted level. "There have been problems that we just didn't anticipate," says Pan-STARRS principal investigator Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Big bananas

PS1's first problem was a misalignment of the optics. "When we switched the telescope on two years ago we had terrible-looking images. We could get sort-of round stars in the middle of the field, but they were big and fuzzy. But the stars at ends of the field looked like telephone handles or big bananas," Kaiser told New Scientist.
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Bizarro Earth

Cosmic rays reveal erupting volcano's guts


New Scientist
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:10 UTC
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© Kiyoshi Ota/GettyCould have seen it coming
Cosmic radiation has been used to peer inside an erupting volcano, a technique that could allow eruptions to be predicted.

Short-lived particles called muons are produced in Earth's atmosphere when charged particles from space slam into gas molecules. These muons can travel through solid rock, though some get absorbed, and the percentage lost depends on the mass of material along their path.

A team led by Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo, Japan, had already shown that muons can reveal the mass of material inside a volcano. Now the team reports observations of Japan's mount Asama during an eruption on 2 February that spewed ash up to 20 kilometres away (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: link). Measurements from before and after the eruption show that between 11,000 and 70,000 tonnes of material left the volcano, agreeing with estimates of the total ash fall at 50,000 tonnes.
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Satellite

Herschel scans hidden Milky Way

Jonathon Amos
BBC
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:21 UTC
Image
© ESA / PACS / SPIRE1. Image from the Photodetector Array Camera & Spectrometer (Pacs) instrument, at 70 and 110 micrometre wavelengths
2. Image from the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (Spire) instrument at 250, 350 and 500 micrometres
3. Combining the two images gives unprecedented far-infrared detail
A remarkable view of our Galaxy has been obtained by Europe's billion-euro Herschel Space Observatory.

The telescope was put in a special scanning mode to map a patch of sky.

The images reveal in exquisite detail the dense, contorted clouds of cold gas that are collapsing in on themselves to form new stars.

Herschel, which has the largest mirror ever put on an orbiting telescope, was launched in May as a flagship mission of the European Space Agency.

It is tuned to see far-infrared wavelengths of light and is expected to give astronomers significant insights into some of the fundamental processes that shape the cosmos.

Herschel's great advantage is that its sensitivity allows it to see things that are beyond the vision of other space telescopes, such as Hubble.

A prime goal is to understand the mechanisms that control the earliest phases of stellar evolution.
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Before Lucy came Ardi: new earliest hominid found

Randolph E. Schmid
Associated Press
Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:17 UTC
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© J. H. MatternesAbout 4.4 million years ago, our ancestors were already upright, omnivorous and cooperative. That's the implication of a newly unveiled fossil of a stocky Ardipithecus ramidus female – Ardi for short – and fragmentary remains of another 35 individuals of the same species.

The first bones of Ardipithecus ramidus were found in an eastern Ethiopian desert in the early 1990s. Yet it has taken almost two decades to excavate, assemble and study all the fossils, which represent some of the oldest wood on the human evolutionary branch.

Humans last shared an ancestor with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, around 6 million years ago. Though Ardipithecus is not that ancestor, they probably had many characteristics in common.
The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about "Ardi," a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.

This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.

Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor - but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

"This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come," said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.

But Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor.
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Rocket

Dangerous Missile Battle In Space

Rick Rozoff
Global Research
Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:17 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Fifth Act In U.S. Missile Shield Drama

Wars have brought untold horrors upon Europe over the centuries, especially the two world wars of the last one. Until now, though, the continent has been spared the ultimate cataclysm of a missile war.

Though twenty years after the end of the Cold War recent news articles contain reports that would have been shocking even during the depths of the East-West conflict in Europe that followed World War II.

A dispatch quoting a Finnish defense official two days ago bore the title "US could launch missiles from the Baltic Sea" and a U.S. armed forces website yesterday spoke in reference to proposed missile shield plans of "a big, complex, dangerous battle in the space over Europe."

On September 28 a feature called "BMD fleet plans Europe defense mission" appeared in the Navy Times which reported that "Ballistic-missile defense warships have become the keystone in a new national strategy....Rather than field sensors and missiles on the ground in Poland and the Czech Republic, the U.S. will first maintain a presence of at least two or three Aegis BMD ships in the waters around Europe, starting in 2011."1
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Archeologists say they've found remains of world's oldest human brain

Gayane Abrahamyan
Eurasianet.org
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:33 UTC
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© Gayane AbrahamyanThe 500-square-meter, three-chamber cave where the human brain and winery remains were found may have been used as a ritual burial site.
An Armenian-American-Irish archeological expedition claims to have found the remains of the world's oldest human brain, estimated to be over 5,000 years old. The team also says it has found evidence of what may be history's oldest winemaking operation. The discoveries were made recently in a cave in southeastern Armenia.

An analysis performed by the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine confirmed that one of three human skulls found at the site contains particles of a human brain dating to around the first quarter of the 4th millennium BC.
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Stone Age Village Found Under Sea

Martin Neville
Isle of Wight County Press Online
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:23 UTC
Momber
© IWCPGarry Momber with some worked timber discovered in the excavation.
A Stone Age settlement under The Solent is in danger of being lost forever.

In a desperate race against time, marine archaeologists say the remains of a submerged mesolithic community found at Bouldnor Cliff, off Yarmouth, could be lost to the sea if money is not found soon to continue vital excavation work.

Garry Momber, director of The Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology, has been excavating the site for more than a decade and believes the latest finds this summer are the most significant to date.

"This is more comprehensive than anything I thought we would ever find and I'm sure there is a lot more to be uncovered," he said.

"This really is of national and international significance - there is nothing else like it in the UK and the race is on to save what we can now. If we don't act now, these findings could be lost forever."
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Polychrome mural found in archaeological complex of Chotuna


Andina
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:18 UTC
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© Silvia DepazArqueólogo Carlos Wester muestra mural polícromo hallado en complejo arqueológico Chotuna, en Lambayeque.
Chiclayo - A polychrome mural was found in the facade of a ceremonial temple located in the northern part of the Chotuna archaeological complex, 10 miles west of Lambayeque city, which features friezes with circular designs and the anthropomorphic wave, icon of Lambayeque's culture.

The religious building dates from 9th and 10th centuries AD, corresponding to the Lambayeque culture, said the leader of excavations at the Chotuna-Chornancap camp, Carlos Wester, who presented the findings today.

According to Wester, a platform emerged only after the systematic removal of a dune higher than 15 meters.

Evidences of polychrome surfaces - with red and cream colored chess designs- were found at the north facing top level of this platform.
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Network

What Network Neutrality Is REALLY About

Karl Bode
DSLreports.com
Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:48 UTC
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© Unknown
If you've paid attention, you know the modern "network neutrality" debate took off in 2005, when then AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proudly, though dumbly, proclaimed that Google got a "free ride" on his network. According to Ed, this unfairness could only be rectified by charging companies who already pay for bandwidth money to ensure their traffic reaches AT&T consumers quickly. Such a bizarre statement obviously resulted in fear that phone companies planned to act as trolls under the metaphorical Internet bridge, grumpily extorting passers by. That created a desire by content companies and consumers for laws that would prevent this from happening.

The entire concept of network neutrality is really very simple. It was born out of phone company executive greed, and remains driven by legitimate fear of market abuses by companies with a long history of them. Unfortunately, over the years the debate has been so badly mutilated by PR folk, shoddy journalism and policy wonks that it has become a nonsensical mess. Thanks to said wonks, we're still having the exact same debate we were back in 2005, as this painful editorial in the Wall Street Journal pretty clearly illustrates. Say hello, Mr. Holman W. Jenkins Jr.:
...everything you need to know was contained in the first act, when AOL began bleating about "open access" when broadband first threatened its dial-up empire. AOL's business model depended on free riding on the infrastructure paid for by phone users. AOL users were dialing up and keeping a line open for days or even weeks at a time - yet faced no cost for the disproportionate capacity they used up.
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