from National Geographic News
There's a mountain-size asteroid on a potential collision course with Earth, and NASA has plans to pay it a visit. The asteroid 1999 RQ36 made headlines last week with the announcement that the space rock could hit our planet in 2182. But a handful of scientists have had their eyes on this asteroid since 2007, planning a sample-return mission designed to help us better predict--and avoid--impact hazards.
The mission, called OSIRIS-Rex (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer), is one of two finalists in the current competition for funding under NASA's New Frontiers program, up against a proposed mission to land on Venus. The selected mission will be announced in summer 2011.
If OSIRIS-Rex gets the green light, the spacecraft will launch in 2016 with the goal of mapping and bringing back pieces of the asteroid. The team wants to go to RQ36 specifically because it's thought to be rich in material that's remained unchanged since the early days of the solar system--and because the asteroid's orbit makes the space rock easy to reach.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Today's microchips, communications gear, and medical diagnostics are typically made by writing nanoscale patterns over large areas of silicon wafers and other high-tech materials.
The process is either extremely expensive or painfully slow, however. Now scientists have come up with a hybrid approach that could offer researchers a way to craft prototype nanoscale devices quickly and cheaply, speeding up the already blistering pace of developments in the field.
The standard computer chip-patterning technique, called photolithography, works by shining light through a prepatterned stencil onto a light-sensitive polymer that sits atop a wafer of silicon or another electronic material. Chemicals then etch away at the polymer and the silicon, creating a pattern that matches the original stencil. Intel and other chipmakers already use photolithography to pattern features on chips as small as 32 nanometers. But the high cost of the technique--it requires multibillion-dollar clean-room facilities--keeps it out of the hands of researchers looking to prototype novel devices.
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from ScienceInsider
Hunted last year in Montana and Idaho, the Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf (Canis lupus) is once again on the federal endangered species list. Yesterday, a federal judge in Helena overturned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's (FWS's) decision last year to remove the wolves from the list in those two states but leave them on it in Wyoming.
Conservationists applauded U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy's decision, but state wildlife officials in Montana and Idaho argue that the wolves' rebounding population needs to be better managed, including being hunted.
FWS did not remove protections from Wyoming's wolves because under that state's laws, wolves are considered "vermin" and would likely fare poorly. But conservation organizations challenged the split decision last June, arguing that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) applies to a species' entire population.
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from Wired
These two spiral galaxies have been colliding for over 100 million years. The intergalactic battle has spurred the creation of millions of new stars, the most massive of which have already exploded into supernovae.
Three of NASA's space telescopes have combined forces to create the sharpest image yet of the merging Antennae galaxies, located 62 million light years from Earth. X-ray data from Chandra X-Ray Observatory is blue, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is gold and brown, and infrared data from Spitzer Space Telescope is red. The photos were taken between 1999 and 2002, and combine 117 hours of observation.
The image gives us a sneak preview of what may happen when the Milky Way collides with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy in several billion years.
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from BBC News Online
Palaeontologists working in Tanzania have unearthed fossils of a tiny crocodile-like creature with teeth resembling those of mammals. The animal, Pakasuchus kapilimai, lived between 144 and 65 million years ago--during the Cretaceous--in what is now sub-Saharan Africa.
Scientists say the find shows that crocs were once more diverse than they are today. The team reported its discovery in the journal Nature.
Paka means "cat" in Kiswahili, Tanzania's official language, and refers to the reptile's short, low skull with slicing, molar-like teeth. Patrick O'Connor, associate professor of anatomy at the Ohio University College of osteopathic medicine, led an international team of researchers.
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from The Scientist (Registration Required)
This is what happens when you cross doctoral work with improvisational acting: A line of fifteen PhD students face each other in an imaginary tug-of-war. "Make sure you're all holding the same rope," says Valeri Lantz-Gefroh, their drama coach and a theater professor at SUNY, Stony Brook.
... The line of researchers lurches back and forth across a lecture hall. ... Finally, the young researchers collapse into laughter as one side claims victory. Among theirs is the distinctive laugh of Alan Alda, who's watching the tug-of-war from the sidelines. This strange fusion of serious science and absurd play-acting is the famous actor's brainchild. He believes that it's a first step in teaching scientists how to communicate with the public.
... Alda believes scientists have been unable to make themselves understood by lay audiences. And as a result are failing to inform the public and policy makers.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Fuel may be a messy business now, as the oil spill fouling the gulf reminds us. But it might not always have to be. Scientists envision facilities that churn out black gold by enlisting engineered bacteria, yeast and algae to do all the dirty work.
Recently, scientists reported a significant step toward that futuristic goal: an engineered strain of the gut bacterium Escherichia coli that can make a diesel-like mixture of hydrocarbons.
The researchers, at South San Francisco-based biotech company LS9 Inc., created their biological hydrocarbon factory using genes from water-dwelling blue-green algae that naturally make tiny amounts of the fuel. They transplanted the genes into E. coli and, with a few more genetic tweaks, adjusted the bug's metabolism so it churned out 100 times more fuel than the algae did. The finding, published in the journal Science, is the company's second announcement this year of a bacterium with fuel-production abilities.
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Scientists say that 60 percent to 80 percent of sea species remain undiscovered, even after a 10-year international Census of Marine Life involving some 2,700 researchers. The census has so far described 1,200 new species.
By the latest estimate, the fungal white-nose syndrome has killed about a million little brown bats in North America. Researchers fear it could drive the species to extinction in the northeastern U.S.
In other environmental news, a three-year wildlife census has revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The study aimed to establish the most reliable way to measure the impact on wildlife of contamination in the zone.
A Stanford University scientist spent 10 years isolating the widespread warming effects of soot from the climate effects caused by greenhouse gases. He has concluded that soot is currently the No. 2 driver of climate change--behind carbon dioxide but ahead of methane.
And, finally, a group of water-management scientists say that some of the studies of chemicals in the world's sewer systems may have fundamental flaws in sampling protocols, leading to exaggerated claims.
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It looks as though BP's leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico could be permanently sealed this week by means of a relief well. This development follows the successful pumping of heavy drilling mud and cement down the damaged well last week.
Meanwhile, some scientists questioned a government report issued last Wednesday that claimed that about three-quarters of the oil spill has either evaporated or been dispersed, captured or burned off. They say figures in the report were based on assumptions and estimates with a significant margin of error.
Also last week, the most precise estimates yet of the well's flow rate indicated that the BP spill has been by far the world's largest such accident, to the tune of some 5 million barrels.
Some scientists are saying that there's no effective way to clean up the oil-damaged wetlands in the region. The best hope may be to let Mother Nature do its own cleaning.
Finally, the New York Times looked at a principal tenet of geology: that the vast majority of the world's oil arose from tiny organisms at sea.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
And on the 106th day--after all the top kills and top hats and junk shots--the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico finally seemed close to being tamed. Or was it?
It could be "the beginning of the end," Katie Couric told viewers Tuesday on the "CBS Evening News." The same phrase, with an extra "perhaps" attached to it, was used over on "NBC Nightly News." But Diane Sawyer did away with the caveats on ABC. "Final fix," she declared Tuesday on "World News Tonight." "Tonight the permanent seal of the oil spill is under way."
Newsrooms are grappling with the same questions that the rest of the country is, after spending months watching oil gush into the water: Is the oil spill really over? And how damaging will it ultimately be to the gulf's environment and economy?
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Supercomputers may routinely defeat human chess champions these days, but sometimes regular folks still beat out fancy technology. An example published in the journal Nature this week: Lay people were better than a computer program dreamed up by scientists at figuring out how a complicated protein takes its shape.
In a broad array of disciplines--molecular biology, astronomy, archaeology and more--researchers are outsourcing their time-consuming dirty work to volunteer gamers and everyday people with some extra hours on their hands, with promising results.
Foldit, the game featured in the Nature article, lets people tackle a problem that stumps computers--how proteins fold up into complicated three-dimensional structures. Players don't need to know any science; they just need to use their spatial reasoning abilities.
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from Scientific American
Outside a grocery store in Langdon, N.D., two ecologists spotted a yellow canola plant growing on the margins of a parking lot this summer. They plucked it, ground it up and, using a chemical stick similar to those in home pregnancy kits, identified proteins that were made by artificially introduced genes. The plant was GM--genetically modified.
That's not too surprising, given that North Dakota grows tens of thousands of hectares of conventional and genetically modified canola--a weedy plant, known scientifically as Brassica napus var oleifera, bred by Canadians to yield vegetable oil from its thousands of tiny seeds.
What was more surprising was that nearly everywhere the two ecologists and their colleagues stopped during a trip across the state, they found GM canola growing in the wild. "We found transgenic plants growing in the middle of nowhere, far from fields," says ecologist Cindy Sagers of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who presented the findings August 6 at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh.
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from Nature News
Another twist has emerged in the debate over whether there is water inside the Moon. Researchers studying lunar samples from the Apollo missions have used chlorine isotope measurements to conclude that the Moon is bone dry after all--corroborating scientists' original assumptions from the 1970s, but contradicting more recent studies of the Moon's water content.
The original analysis of Apollo's samples showed that the rocks contained virtually no hydrogen--and thus no water. But in recent years, scientists have found hydrogen atoms in samples of lunar volcanic glass--an indication that the Moon once harboured deeply buried traces of water. That discovery was celebrated this spring by researchers at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston, Texas, where they began discussing the implications of the find. How did the element make it to the depths of the newly formed Moon, and what did this tell us about its origin?
According to the leading theory, the Moon was born from molten debris after a Mars-sized object struck Earth. Understanding the chemistry of the Moon's rocks could, for example, help to work out whether the Moon is mostly made of material from Earth, or from the impactor that hit it.
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from The Scientist (Registration Required)
Often the exalted scientific and medical journals sitting atop the impact factor pyramid are considered the only publications that offer legitimate breakthroughs in basic and clinical research. But some of the most important findings have been published in considerably less prestigious titles.
Take the paper describing BLAST--the software that revolutionized bioinformatics by making it easier to search for homologous sequences. This manuscript has, not surprisingly, accumulated nearly 30,000 citations since it was published in 1990. What may be surprising, however, was the fact that this paper was published in a journal with a current impact factor of 3.9 (J Mol Biol, 215:403–10, 1990). In contrast, Nature enjoys an impact factor more than 8 times higher (34.5), and Science (29.7) is not far behind.
One of the most commonly voiced criticisms of traditional peer review is that it discourages truly innovative ideas, rejecting field-changing papers while publishing ideas that fall into a status quo and the "hot" fields of the day--think RNAi, etc. Another is that it is nearly impossible to immediately spot the importance of a paper--to truly evaluate a paper, one needs months, if not years, to see the impact it has on its field.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Cell biologists often seem like modern-day alchemists. Instead of turning lead or straw into gold, they're looking for ways to turn one kind of cell into another, potentially more useful, cell. Now, one research team has found a way to turn a very common heart cell into a cell missing in injured hearts.
A healthy heart is a mix of several kinds of cells, including cardiomyocytes, the muscle cells that beat, and cardiac fibroblasts, which provide structural support and help keep all the heart cells working together. When a mammalian heart is injured, for example by a heart attack, it forms scar tissue dominated by fibroblasts instead of cardiomyocytes.
As a result, the heart doesn't fully recover its pumping capacity. Developmental biologist Deepak Srivastava and cardiovascular researcher Masaki Ieda of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, California, and their colleagues wondered whether some cellular alchemy could prompt the fibroblasts to turn into cardiomyocytes.
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from National Geographic News
About 13.7 billion years ago, the big bang created a big mess of matter that eventually gave rise to life, the universe, and everything. Now a new material may help scientists understand why. The material was designed to detect a theorized but unproven property of electrons, subatomic particles with a negative charge that orbit the centers of atoms.
If this "new" property of electrons exists, scientists say, it would help explain the current imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. "In the early stages of the universe, everything should have been symmetric," said study co-author Marjana Ležaic, a materials scientist at the Forschungszentrum Jülich Institute of Solid State Research in Germany.
Current theories of particle physics state that the big bang should have created equal amounts of particles and antiparticles, which have identical masses and spins but with opposite charges and magnetic properties.
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from Nature News
It hasn't even been found yet, but the elusive Higgs particle is already generating controversy. As feelings run high over a recent conference in France, the particle physics community is split over who should get credit out of the six theoretical physicists who developed the mechanism behind its existence.
The Higgs particle is predicted to exist as part of the mechanism believed to give particles their mass, and is the only piece of the Standard Model of particle physics that remains to be discovered. Physicists at both the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's premier particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, and the Tevatron accelerator in Batavia, Illinois, recently voiced their expectation that the particle could well be detected within the next few years.
This gave new urgency not only to the race to find the particle, but also to establishing authorship of the ideas behind it. As John Ellis, a particle physicist based at CERN, acknowledges: "Let's face it, a Nobel Prize is at stake."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Among the hidden stars of the gulf cleanup is an oil-hungry bacterium that Dr. Seuss could have named--Alcanivorax. It and fellow microbes are breaking down a significant amount of the oil that gushed into the environment from BP's runaway well, scientists say. The microbial feasting is known as biodegradation.
On Wednesday, a report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said early observations showed that the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill "is biodegrading quickly," adding that scientists were working to measure how quickly and how much of the escaped oil the microbial hordes could consume.
"Until it is biodegraded, naturally or chemically dispersed oil, even in small amounts, can be toxic to vulnerable species," the report says in pointing to the importance of the microbes.
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from BBC News Online
New private homes could replace Europe's largest collection of fruits and berries, if a Russian court rules the land could be sold to property developers.
The Pavlovsk experimental station near the Russian city of St. Petersburg is the biggest European field seed bank and one of the largest in the world. Thousands of varieties of plants and crops there are found nowhere else.
The court hearing is scheduled for 11 August. Recently, the Global Crop Diversity Trust appealed to the Russian authorities to save the collection, which many scientists call an irreplaceable biological heritage.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
It took BP a mere five hours to pump a stream of cement down its troublesome well Thursday, completing another major step in its final push to end the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe and forever shut down the source of the nation's largest offshore oil spill.
After jamming the deep-sea well with heavy drilling mud earlier this week, the company began shooting cement down the well at 7:15 a.m. PDT. At 12:15, it issued a two-paragraph statement announcing that it had finished the task and was monitoring the well "to confirm the effectiveness of the procedure."
Although the cementing should permanently plug at least part of the well bore, federal officials have emphasized that it does not close the book on the troubled well, the cause of one of the nation's worst environmental disasters.
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from BBC News Online
A disease known as white-nose syndrome has killed approximately one million little brown bats (Myotis lucifugus) in North America, say scientists. The research team report in the journal Science that this could drive the species to extinction in the north-eastern US in as little as 16 years.
They examined 17 years' worth of data gathered from bat colonies. A fungus associated with the disease was probably brought by humans into the caves where bats hibernate. This Geomyces destructans fungus appears to thrive in the dark, damp conditions in these caves, where it grows on the bats' noses, wings and ears.
Infection makes bats restless during the winter, causing them to stir when they should be hibernating and to use up their fat reserves. Once infection takes hold in a hibernating colony it kills, on average, 73% of the animals, the scientists have calculated.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Two research reports published Friday offer novel approaches to the age-old dream of regenerating the body from its own cells. Animals like newts and zebra fish can regenerate limbs, fins, even part of the heart. If only people could do the same, amputees might grow new limbs and stricken hearts be coaxed to repair themselves.
But humans have very little regenerative capacity, probably because of an evolutionary trade-off: suppressing cell growth reduced the risk of cancer, enabling humans to live longer. A person can renew his liver to some extent, and regrow a fingertip while very young, but not much more.
In the first of the two new approaches, a research group at Stanford University led by Helen M. Blau, Jason H. Pomerantz and Kostandin V. Pajcini has taken a possible first step toward unlocking the human ability to regenerate. By inactivating two genes that work to suppress tumors, they got mouse muscle cells to revert to a younger state, start dividing and help repair tissue.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The "greatest environmental disaster" in U.S. history--which has appeared at times to leave a high-control White House powerless--seemed to have lost its power to scare. A few hours after BP's well was declared virtually dead, the Obama administration announced Wednesday that only about 26 percent of the oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico was unaccounted for.
"A significant amount of this," said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "is a direct result of the very robust federal response efforts."
But, in interviews, scientists who worked on the report said the figures were based in large part on assumptions and estimates with a significant margin of error. Some outside scientists went further: In a situation in which many facts remain murky, they said, the government seemed to have used interpretations that made the gulf--and the federal efforts to save it--look as good as possible.
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from The Scientist (Registration Required)
Jan-Åke Gustafsson never got an official retirement notice from the University. But that's because the 63-year-old chairman of the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at the Karolinska Institutet didn't wait around for it. When a recently retired colleague warned Gustafsson, who was quickly approaching Sweden's upper mandatory retirement age of 67, that emeritus professors aren't taken seriously in Sweden, he began to realize it was all too true.
Emeritus colleagues received fewer and shorter grants and were more segregated from their departments. "It was in the air," he recalls. "As far as I can understand, the word 'emeritus' doesn't mean anything meritorious. It means used, spent." He began to plan an exit strategy.
Age discrimination was outlawed in the European Union in 2000, yet many senior scientists across Europe, as well as Japan, are forced from their positions at a mandatory retirement age ranging from 60 to 70, depending on a country's laws and pension age. In 2009, the charity Age UK lost a case to abolish the mandatory retirement age in Britain when the European Court of Justice ruled the policy was legal if age-related retirement was justified by a specific employment objective, such as allowing all ages better access to employment.
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