from the Telegraph (UK)
One whole face of the Moon can never be seen from Earth because it constantly faces away from our planet. But now one of the twin GRAIL spacecraft launched by NASA last September has returned its first video of the Moon's hidden side after being pulled into orbit at New Year.
The video scans the barren, dusty face--the oldest part of the moon--all the way from north to south poles, revealing a landscape scarred by countless collisions with comets and asteroids.
Among the geographical features it picks up are the 93 mile (149km) wide Drygalski crater, which features a star-shaped formation in its centre and can be seen to the left of centre near the bottom of the screen as the video reaches the south pole.
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from CBS News
Alzheimer's disease spreads through the brain like an infection, jumping from one cell to another, according to a new study.
The study found that tau protein--which is indicative of the fibrous tangles found in brains of people with Alzheimer's--spreads along the brain's neurons from one region to the other, resulting in severe dementia. The new clues on the neurodegenerative brain disorder might help scientists find a way to stop the disease from getting worse.
For the study--published in the Feb. 1 issue of PLoS One--researchers genetically modified mice to have a human gene for the abnormal tau protein in the entorhinal cortex--an area of the brain's temporal lobe where tau buildup is thought to begin to accumulate in people. The researchers analyzed the mice's brains over a 22-month period to map the protein's spread and found that as mice aged, the tau spread to different regions of their brains across synapses--the junctions neurons use to communicate with each other.
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from BBC News Online
Meadows of seagrass found in the Mediterranean Sea are likely to be thousands of years old, a study shows.
Researchers found genetically identical samples of Posidonia oceanica up to 15km apart, which suggested that the species was extremely long-lived.
The team added that the organism--which provides food and shelter for many species--is under threat from climate change. They report their findings in the open access journal Plos One.
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from Nature News
A scramble to buy African land is threatening the continent's sustainable development, according to reports launched today at the Royal Society in London.
Of the 203 million hectares of land deals reported worldwide between 2000 and 2010, two-thirds were in Africa. The acquisitions are dispossessing millions of Africans of their land, to make way for expansive forestry and mineral projects and plantations, say a series of briefs2 and a report3 published by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an international coalition of groups working to increase community ownership of forests, based in Washington DC.
"The global report shows the scale of the issue as never before: three-quarters of Africa's population and two-thirds of the landscape are at risk," says Andy White, who coordinates the RRI.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
As the father-to-son exchange in the old Cat Stevens song advised, "take your time, think a lot, ... think of everything you've got." Turns out the mellow '70s folkie had stumbled upon what may explain a key feature of our brains that sets us apart from our closest relatives: We unhurriedly make synaptic connections through much of our early childhoods, and this plasticity enables us to slowly wire our brains based on our experiences.
Given that humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of the same genes, researchers have long wondered what drives our unique cognitive and social skills. Yes, chimpanzees are smart and cooperative to a degree, but we clearly outshine them when it comes to abstract thinking, self-regulation, assimilation of cultural knowledge, and reasoning abilities.
Now a study that looks at postmortem brain samples from humans, chimpanzees, and macaques collected from before birth to up to the end of the life span for each of these species has found a key difference in the expression of genes that control the development and function of synapses, the connections among neurons through which information flows.
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from Science News
After surviving a bout of virulent bird flu, mice's brains show short-term reductions of a key brain chemical and long-lasting signs of infection, a new study finds. The research suggests this type of flu might leave people more vulnerable to brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
While most people think of influenza as a disorder of the body, certain kinds of flu also infect the brain. Recent studies have found that the bird flu virus known as H5N1, which kills about half the people it infects, can set up shop in the brain. But exactly what happens next has been a mystery.
In the new study, scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., examined the brains of mice that had survived an initial H5N1 infection. As in people, the virus kills about half of mice affected.
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from BBC News Online
A huge crustacean has been found lurking 7km down in the waters off the coast of New Zealand. The creature--called a supergiant--is a type of amphipod, which are normally around 2-3cm long.
But these beasts, discovered in the Kermadec Trench, were more than 10 times bigger: the largest found measured in at 34cm.
Alan Jamieson, from the University of Aberdeen's Oceanlab, said: "It's a bit like finding a foot-long cockroach. I stopped and thought: 'What on Earth was that?' This amphipod was far bigger than I ever thought possible."
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from National Geographic News
A new prehistoric croc sporting an odd head "shield" has been found in Morocco, according to a study published Tuesday. Dubbed ShieldCroc, the animal's head appendage was surrounded by blood vessels and covered with a sheath like those seen in frilled dinosaurs, including Triceratops.
At 30 to 35 feet long, the river-dwelling monster would have preyed on other giant animals of the late Cretaceous, such as 13-foot-long (4-meter-long) coelacanths. But ShieldCroc--formally Aegisuchus witmeri--likely boasted relatively weak jaws, at least compared with those of today's crocodiles.
"It's fairly certain that it belonged to a group of crocodyliforms--including the flat-headed crocs--that had really thin, weak jaws and weak chin joints," said researcher Casey Holliday, a paleontologist at the University of Missouri. Crocodyliforms are part of a group known as the crocodilians, which includes modern-day alligators, caimans, and more.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
Cells live longer than their internal components. To keep their cytoplasm clear of excess or damaged organelles, as well as invading pathogens, or to feed themselves in time of nutrient deprivation, cells degrade these unwanted or potentially harmful structures, and produce needed food and fuel, using a process they have honed over millions of years.
Known as autophagy, this catabolic process involves the selection and the sequestration of the targeted structures into unique transport vesicles called autophagosomes, which then deliver the contents to lysosomes where they are degraded by lytic enzymes. This conserved eukaryotic pathway plays a central role in a multitude of physiological processes, including programmed cell death, development, and differentiation.
In addition, it plays a protective role against aging, tumorigenesis, neurodegeneration, and infection. Given all this, it is not surprising that an impairment of autophagy is correlated with various severe pathologies, including cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, neuro- and myodegenerative disorders, and malignancies.
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from Smithsonian Magazine
A telomere is like an aglet. Aglets are those plastic or metal tubular thingies at the end of your shoe laces that keep the end of the shoelace from becoming frayed and facilitate inserting the lace into the eyelet. A telomere is a sequence of base pairs at the end of a chromosome.
A chromosome zips apart during cell division so that it can be replicated, and a small number of base pairs typically get lost during replication. This is because the molecular machinery that duplicates the chromosome can't read through to the end of the strand, so it just skips the last bit.
Any meaningful genetic information at the end of the chromosome would be lost or garbled. A nice long telomere at the end of the chromosome allows for multiple duplications without the loss of meaningful information, but over time even the telomere may be lost through attrition, and further replication of that chromosome would be a problem.
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from the Columbia Journalism Review
Just how scarce was climate-change coverage in 2011? It's hard to get a fix on the details,
but the broad conclusion that it was even scarcer than in the year before seems to hold up.
Last week, I wrote a post about an analysis by The Daily Climate--a website that produces and
tracks news about climate change--which found that the number of articles, blog posts,
editorials, and op-eds "declined roughly 20 percent from 2010's levels and nearly 42 percent from
2009's peak," based on a review of its own archives of aggregated climate stories.
The conclusion about the downward trend "felt right" to journalists that sent me e-mails
responding to the piece. But they were miffed at my decision to report The Daily Climate's
rankings of specific outlets' year-to-year productivity. I did point out--by way of update that
should've been included from the outset--that The Daily Climate's analysis was based on a review
of its archives, which are "meant to provide broad sampling of the day's coverage, not a
comprehensive list," according to its editor, Douglas Fischer. Therefore, the rankings did not
reflect the various outlets' actual productivity.
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from Discovery News
A NASA robotic probe sampling particles flowing into our solar system from the galactic
neighborhood shows we're living in a cloud--and likely to stay that way for hundreds or even
thousands of years.
The measurements from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft include the
first direct samplings of hydrogen, oxygen and neon that didn't come from the sun or anywhere
else in the solar system.
Instead, the gases, along with helium, which was previously detected by NASA's Ulysses
spacecraft, streamed into our solar system from the galactic neighborhood, which right now
includes a tenuous wispy cloud.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
"Men in Black" was flickering on the screen, and Laura Cossolotto and her husband were
enjoying a rare night at the movies in their home town of Centerville, Iowa, when her
brother-in-law rushed into the darkened theater.
The couple's third child, 6-month-old Michaela, had just suffered a serious seizure and was at
a nearby hospital. As Cossolotto raced to be with the baby, she immediately remembered that
Michaela had been running a fever after receiving a vaccine against diphtheria, pertussis and
tetanus (DPT) three days earlier.
"I thought the shot must have something to do with it," Cossolotto recalled. "I had three
kids, and nothing like this had ever happened, so what else could it have been?"
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from BBC News Online
Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves
of patients thinking of those words. The technique reported in PLoS Biology relies on
gathering electrical signals directly from patients' brains.
Based on signals from listening patients, a computer model was used to reconstruct the sounds
of words that patients were thinking of. The method may in future help comatose and locked-in
patients communicate.
Several approaches have in recent years suggested that scientists are closing in on methods to
tap into our very thoughts; the current study achieved its result by implanting electrodes
directly into a part of participants' brains.
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from the Guardian (UK)
The first plants to take root on dry land may have cooled the Earth enough to bring on a
series of ice ages, scientists claim. As plants spread across the continents, they extracted
minerals from the rocks they clung to and drew down levels of atmospheric carbon, causing
temperatures to drop markedly, the researchers say.
The scenario explains puzzling glaciations that saw ice sheets advance in the Ordovician
period between 488m and 444m years ago. At the time, Earth's continents were clustered over the
South Pole and stretched as far north as the equator.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team led by Timothy Lenton at Exeter
University describes experiments to investigate the environmental impact of Earth's first land
plants. They took rocks and covered some with moss to mimic the simple plant life that thrived in
the Ordovician, then incubated them for three months.
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from Nature News
Over the years, Robert Daum has learned to respect his adversary. In 1995, he and his
co-workers at the University of Chicago children's hospital in Illinois were investigating
infections that had affected two dozen children in their emergency department.
Three children had fast-moving pneumonia. A fourth had an abscess the size of his fist buried
in the muscle of one buttock. In a fifth, the bacterium had infiltrated the bones of one foot.
The infections were resistant to many common antibiotics, including methicillin. To Daum's
surprise, the culprit was MRSA--methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus--a bacterium that was
thought to spread only among hospital inpatients.
But none of these kids had been to the hospital for months before becoming ill. Few
researchers were willing to accept the implications. Daum wrangled for 18 months with editors at
the Journal of the American Medical Association over a paper reporting the cases and
showing that this strain was dangerous, acquired in the community and differed genetically from
hospital strains.
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from ScienceNOW
Massage's healing touch may have more to do with DNA than with good hands. A new study has
revealed for the first time how kneading eases sore muscles--by turning off genes associated with
inflammation and turning on genes that help muscles heal. The discovery contradicts popular
claims that massage squeezes lactic acid or waste products out of tired muscles and could bring
new medical credibility to the practice.
Despite massage's widespread popularity, researchers know surprisingly little about its
effects on muscles. Past studies have managed to show only that a well-administered rub can
reduce pain, but none has ever pinpointed how. The scant evidence makes many physicians unsure,
if not outright skeptical, of the method.
Mark Tarnopolsky, a neurometabolic researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, was
one of those physicians--until he suffered a severe hamstring injury in a waterskiing accident 4
years ago. Massage therapy was part of his rehabilitation regimen, and it was so effective at
easing his pain that he became determined to track down the mechanism that made him feel so good.
"I thought there has to be a physiologic basis for this," he says. "And being a cellular
scientist, my interest's in the cellular basis."
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from ScienceNOW
Sebastian the crab may have been wrong about the deep sea. In Disney's The Little
Mermaid, the orange crustacean famously touted the tranquility of life well below the waves,
singing "it's better down where it's wetter." But the ocean's depths can get stormy, too,
researchers say. New observations taken from a canyon in the Mediterranean Sea during an epic
storm reveal that surface weather can shake up even the bottom-most ocean habitats.
Of course, it was one big storm. The gale pounded the coast of northeast Spain on 26 December
2008, with winds hitting speeds of more than 70 kilometers per hour, while waves topped off over
10 meters high. In all, residents hadn't seen a tempest that fierce in at least 25 years.
And marine habitats took a beating, too. The storm, for instance, whipped up sand and silt
along shallow waters, burying many sea grass beds that are home to a range of fish,
invertebrates, and other organisms, and scouring countless others. Still, whether such a squall
could shake up marine communities in deeper water--such as in Blanes Canyon, which juts from the
Spanish coast and plumbs depths of up to 1500 meters--hadn't been clear.
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from Science News
Long-slumbering volcanoes can jolt to life faster than students drinking Red Bull, a new study
suggests.
Studies of millennia-old rocks that erupted at Santorini, Greece, show that the chemical
composition of its magma changed just a few decades before the volcano blew its top around 1600
B.C. That blast came after 18,000 years of relative calm.
"All this happens at a very late stage relative to this long period of repose," says Tim
Druitt, a volcanologist at the Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France. "There's
kind of a rapid wake up."
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from National Geographic News
Last week NASA's Kepler mission added 26 new planets in 11 star systems to the roster of
confirmed extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. The find tripled the number of known planet systems
with multiple worlds that transit--or pass in front of--their stars.
Now, a new study based on Kepler data says that such multiplanet hauls will become more
common, because multiple-planet systems are much less likely than single candidates to turn out
to be false positives.
"What we are finding is that, if you see more than one planet candidate in a system, then it's
really likely that those are all real planets," said study co-author Elisabeth Adams, an
astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"So, of the 170 systems that Kepler has found with multiple planet candidates"--representing a
total of 408 possible planets--"probably all but one or two of the planets are real."
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
Federal regulators Monday approved the first drug for people with advanced forms of basal cell carcinoma, the most common kind of skin cancer, as well as the most common cancer in general in the United States.
The drug, made by South San Francisco's Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, is designed for patients whose basal cell cancer has spread either locally or to other parts of the body.
Basal cell carcinoma, which forms in the lower part of the outer layer of the skin or epidermis, affects some 2 million Americans each year. While basal cell carcinoma is rarely fatal and is generally considered curable, in a small percentage of patients it can spread and in some cases cannot be treated with surgery or other methods. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, which is called Erivedge, after an expedited six-month review in advance of the March 8 approval deadline.
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from New Scientist
"A better, richer and happier life for all our citizens." That's the American dream. In practice, it means living in a spacious, air-conditioned house, owning a car or three and maybe a boat or a holiday home, not to mention flying off to exotic destinations.
The trouble with this lifestyle is that it consumes a lot of power. If everyone in the world started living like wealthy Americans, we'd need to generate more than 10 times as much energy each year. And if, in a century or three, we all expect to be looked after by an army of robots and zoom up into space on holidays, we are going to need a vast amount more. Where are we going to get so much power from?
It is clear that continuing to rely on fossil fuels will have catastrophic results, because of the dramatic warming effect of carbon dioxide. But alternative power sources will affect the climate too. For now, the climatic effects of "clean energy" sources are trivial compared with those that spew out greenhouse gases, but if we keep on using ever more power over the coming centuries, they will become ever more significant.
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from Nature News
Informing clinical-trial participants of the risks they face is a cornerstone of modern medical research, and it is enshrined as a human right in international codes of ethics. But an influential group of ethicists and medical researchers warned at a meeting in Brussels last week that the process has become a box-ticking exercise focused more on offering legal protection to a trial's organizer than actually protecting patients.
"We clearly identified there is an urgent need to do informed consent better," says Ingrid Klingmann, chairman of the European Forum for Good Clinical Practice, a think tank based in Brussels and the organizer of the meeting. "The pressure is really huge on all those involved to better enable patients to understand the implications of their study participation, their benefits, risks and obligations."
The European Clinical Trials Directive, which sets minimum standards for clinical trials conducted in the European Union's member states, says that trial participants must be duly informed of the "nature, significance, implications and risks" of the clinical trial. Yet delegates at the meeting detailed a host of ways in which the system fails to meet those criteria.
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from BBC News Online
Non-native Burmese pythons are the likely cause of a dramatic mammal decline in Florida's Everglades. A team studied road surveys of mammals in the Everglades National Park before and after pythons became common.
Researchers found a strong link between the spread of pythons and drops in recorded sightings of racoons, rabbits, bobcats and other species. In PNAS journal, they report that observations of several mammal species have declined by 90% or more.
The national park covers the southern 25% of the original Everglades--a region of subtropical wetlands that has been drained over the last century to reclaim it for human use. The origins of Burmese pythons in south Florida are unknown, but many were imported into the US through the pet trade.
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from the Seattle Times
CHICAGO (Associated Press) -- Officials are investigating the events surrounding a power failure at a nuclear reactor in northern Illinois, but believe they may have traced the cause to a piece of equipment at a switchyard.
After the shutdown Monday morning at Exelon Nuclear's Byron Generating Station, operators began releasing steam to cool the reactor from the part of the plant where turbines produce electricity, not from within the nuclear reactor itself, officials said. The steam contains low levels of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, but federal and plant officials insisted the levels were safe for workers and the public.
Exelon Nuclear officials believe a failed piece of equipment at a switchyard at the plant about 95 miles northwest of Chicago caused the shutdown, but they were still investigating an exact cause. The switchyard is similar to a large substation that delivers power to the plant from the electrical grid and from the plant to the electrical grid.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
The Isthmus of Tehuantapec, Mexico's narrowest point, is a powerful wind tunnel of air currents whipping through the mountains that separate the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Here, on the Pacific side, the wind shapes everything from the miles-long sandspits of Laguna Superior to the landscapes of the indigenous people's hearts.
Howling constantly through thatched roofs, the wind is powerful enough at times to support a grown man leaning back as if in a chair. Gales average 19 miles per hour, slapping waves over the bows of fishing skiffs and sandblasting anyone standing on the beach.
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from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The tip of a girl's 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins. The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.
Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.
Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. "In a sense, we are a hybrid species," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist who is the research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said in an interview.
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from Nature News
"The race is on for positions in the new oil provinces." That starting-gun quote was fired last week by Tim Dodson, executive vice-president of the Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil. The 'new oil provinces' are in the Arctic, which brims with untapped resources amounting to 90 billion barrels of oil, up to 50 trillion cubic metres of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, according to a 2008 estimate by the US Geological Survey. That's about 13% of the world's technically recoverable oil, and up to 30% of its gas--and most of it is offshore.
Oil companies see an opportunity to sate the world's demand for fossil fuels. Green groups and many scientists, however, are horrified by the prospect of drilling and production in remote, often ice-choked waters, where spills would be harder to control and clean up than in warmer regions. Memories of the devastating environmental impact of the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 in Alaska's Prince William Sound are still all too fresh--like the oil that can still be found in the area's beaches.
At last week's Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway, the oil industry insisted that it will be cautious and responsible in extracting oil and gas in the region, and it rolled out an initiative to develop ways of coping with any accidents. Dodson told the meeting that "technology will be there to clean it up."
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from National Geographic News
On an island off Britain's northern tip, new discoveries suggest a huge Stone Age ritual complex is older than Stonehenge. But age is only the half of it. Researchers say the site may have in fact been the original model for Stonehenge and other later, better-known British complexes to the south.
First discovered in 2002, the waterside site--called the Ness of Brodgar ("Brodgar promontory")--lies on Mainland, the largest of Scotland's Orkney Islands.
According to recent radiocarbon dating of burned-wood remains, the Ness was first occupied around 3200 B.C. and went on to include up to a hundred buildings within a monumental walled enclosure. By contrast, the earliest earthworks at Stonehenge date to about 3000 B.C. And it would be roughly another 500 years before the first of the famous stones were set on Salisbury Plain.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
Many mouse studies have shown that radiation treatment can cause germline mutations, which can then be passed onto subsequent generations. Now, new research in mice takes this idea one step further: this mutagenic environment can be transferred from sperm to eggs upon fertilization, doubling the mutations in the resulting embryos.
The study, published today (January 30) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises health concerns for children of young cancer survivors, most of whom have been through multiple rounds of radiation treatment. "This result is now so solid that I think we can't ignore it," said radiologist Keith Baverstock from the University of Eastern Finland, who was not involved in the research. "It is an important result because these drugs and radiation are all we really have to treat cancer."
Baby mice sired by fathers exposed to any of a variety of radiation types--chemical, ionizing, and chemotherapeutic--all have a far higher mutation rate than expected by chance. "The children of irradiated mice are unstable," said Yuri Dubrova, a geneticist at the University of Leicester "They show quite high rate by which mutations occur in the germ cells, egg and sperm, and same is true for their somatic cells."
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