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WASHINGTON — Dec 17, `07 — A powerful jet from a super massive black hole is blasting a nearby galaxy, according to new findings from NASA observatories. This never-before witnessed galactic violence may have a profound effect on planets in the jet’s path and trigger a burst of star formation in its destructive wake.

Known as 3C321, the system contains two galaxies in orbit around each other. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory show both galaxies contain super massive black holes at their centers, but the larger galaxy has a jet emanating from the vicinity of its black hole. The smaller galaxy apparently has swung into the path of this jet.

This “death star” galaxy was discovered through the combined efforts of both space and ground-based telescopes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope were part of the effort. The Very Large Array telescope, Socorro, N.M., and the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) telescopes in the United Kingdom also were needed for the finding.

“We’ve seen many jets produced by black holes, but this is the first time we’ve seen one punch into another galaxy like we’re seeing here,” said Dan Evans, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leader of the study. “This jet could be causing all sorts of problems for the smaller galaxy it is pummeling.”

Jets from super massive black holes produce high amounts of radiation, especially high-energy X-rays and gamma-rays, which can be lethal in large quantities. The combined effects of this radiation and particles traveling at almost the speed of light could severely damage the atmospheres of planets lying in the path of the jet. For example, protective layers of ozone in the upper atmosphere of planets could be destroyed.

Jets produced by super massive black holes transport enormous amounts of energy far from black holes and enable them to affect matter on scales vastly larger than the size of the black hole. Learning more about jets is a key goal for astrophysical research.

The effect of the jet on the companion galaxy is likely to be substantial, because the galaxies in 3C321 are extremely close at a distance of only about 20,000 light years apart. They lie approximately the same distance as Earth is from the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

A bright spot in the Very Large Array and MERLIN images shows where the jet has struck the side of the galaxy, dissipating some of the jet’s energy. The collision disrupted and deflected the jet.

Another unique aspect of the discovery in 3C321 is how relatively short-lived this event is on a cosmic time scale. Features seen in the Very Large Array and Chandra images indicate that the jet began impacting the galaxy about one million years ago, a small fraction of the system’s lifetime. This means such an alignment is quite rare in the nearby universe, making 3C321 an important opportunity to study such a phenomenon.

It is possible the event is not all bad news for the galaxy being struck by the jet. The massive influx of energy and radiation from the jet could induce the formation of large numbers of stars and planets after its initial wake of destruction is complete. More at NASA.

Eminent coral scientists have given world leaders more reason to act urgently against climate change, by producing a new report that warns coral reefs will disappear within decades if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise.

Their paper, published on Dec14, in the prestigious Science magazine, is the most compelling scientific case yet that unchecked global warming will be a disaster for coral reefs and the 100 million people and one million species depending on them.

CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere is currently 380 parts per million (ppm) but the authors say if future emissions exceed 450ppm we risk losing reefs.

“This is a very ambitious target and should represent yet another reality check for world leaders meeting in Bali,” lead author UQ Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said.

The study has found serious consequences follow on from even small increases in CO2.

“The warmer and more acidic oceans caused by the rise of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels threaten to destroy coral dominated reef ecosystems, exposing people to flooding, coastal erosion and the loss of food and income from reef-based fisheries and tourism,” Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said.

“Increased CO2 not only warms the climate but also dissolves in sea water making it more acidic. “This, in turn, decreases the ability of corals to produce calcium carbonate, which is what the all-important framework of coral reefs is made of.”More at the University of Queensland.

San Francisco, Calif — Arctic sea ice shrank drastically this summer, reaching a record low, largely because warm ocean currents ate away at the base of the ice sheet, new research says. The arctic ice cap melted at an unprecedented rate in mid-2007, losing an area of ice the size of the state of Alaska, US scientists said at a conference this week.

“The average rate of loss of sea ice every summer year to year up to 2006 was equal to an area the size of West Virginia,” or about 62,800 square kilometers (24,250 square miles), said Michael Steele, the senior oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

However the decrease in ice between 2006 and 2007 “was almost equivalent to the area of Alaska,” or some 1.7 million kilometers (more than 663,000 square miles), Steele further said.

“It was a huge retreat,” said Steele, one of the researchers who discussed the subject at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco, California.

At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, some scientists argued yesterday that the end of the perennial ice is near.

“If this trend persists, the Arctic would be ice-free [in the summer] by 2013,” said Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that some of the observations had been astonishing.

“The further you go down this path, the harder it is to get back,” observed Don Perovich from the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. “Things could come back, but basically it’s the fourth quarter and we’re down two touchdowns,” he said, using an analogy from American football.

The big thin
The extent of the sea ice cover fell to a record minimum in September of 4.13 million sq km, beating the previous low mark, set in 2005, by 23%. This was well publicised at the time, but some of the other “Arctic numbers” have not been so widely reported. Scientists say they demonstrate the step changes in environmental conditions in the northern polar region.

Warmth from below
A big driver behind the melt is the current warmth of the waters in the Arctic. In the summer of 2007, Arctic Ocean surface temperatures hit new maximums.

In waters just north of the Chukchi Sea (above Alaska and Eastern Siberia), sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) were 3.5C warmer than the historical average and 1.5C warmer than the historical maximum. SSTs of 4C were recorded.

This warming was probably the result of having increasing amounts of open water that readily absorb the sun’s rays, a phenomenon known as the ice-albedo feedback: less ice means less reflection and more absorption, leading to more warming and more melting.

“Water that is now circulating just 200 meters below the main ice pack is now significantly warmer than it was just five years ago,” said John Walsh of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

New research shows that carbon dioxide, one gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, can be captured as it leaves coal-burning power plants and then permanently sequestered in rock formations thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface.

How Much Time Is Left?
When asked how long the perennial ice might last, many researchers here shrugged their shoulders.

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in February predicts that the summer sea ice may disappear early in the next century.

More at National Snow and Ice Data Center, BBC News.

September 9, 2007, sea ice extent compared to animation of Septembers 1979 to 2006 

BALI, Indonesia — Dec 16, `07 — A UN Climate Change Conference adopted a plan to negotiate a new global warming pact on Saturday, Dec 15, after the United States suddenly reversed its opposition to a call by developing nations for technological help to battle rising temperatures.

The adoption came after marathon negotiations overnight, which first settled a battle between Europe and the U.S. over whether the document should mention specific goals for rich countries’ obligations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The agreement launches a two-year negotiating process - the “Bali roadmap” - aiming to secure a binding deal at the 2009 UN summit in Denmark.

European and U.S. envoys dueled into the final hours of the two-week meeting over the EU’s proposal that the Bali mandate suggest an ambitious goal for cutting the emissions of industrial nations_ by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

EU Welcomes Agreement

European Commission President José Manuel Barroso: “There is only one planet. Together, developed and developing countries can reach success.”

The European Union welcomes the agreement reached at the UN climate change conference in Bali to start formal negotiations on a climate regime for the post-2012 period and on a ‘Bali Roadmap’ that sets out an agenda for these negotiations.

The conference set an end-2009 deadline for completing the negotiations to allow time for governments to ratify and implement the future climate agreement by the end of 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s first commitment period ends.

The decision explicitly acknowledges the findings of the recent scientific assessment by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and recognises that deep cuts in global emissions of greenhouse gases will be required to prevent global warming from reaching dangerous levels.

The conference also took important decisions on several other issues, including launching demonstration projects to reduce deforestation, finalising arrangements for a fund to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, and scaling up financing for transfer of technology to developing countries.

The Bali Roadmap

The conference agreed to launch formal negotiations among the 192 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on action up to and beyond 2012. These formal negotiations replace a process of informal dialogue that has taken place over the past two years. They will involve the United States, which is a Party to the UNFCCC but not the Kyoto Protocol.

The decision to launch negotiations sets out a ‘roadmap’ to guide them which includes the key building blocks of a future agreement. These are: enhanced mitigation of climate change by limiting or reducing emissions; adaptation to climate change; action on technology development and transfer; and scaling up of finance and investment to support mitigation and adaptation. Four negotiating sessions are scheduled in 2008, starting in March or April.

The decision explicitly acknowledges the findings of the IPCC’s recent Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), emphasises the urgency of addressing climate change expressed in the report and recognises that deep cuts in global emissions will be required to reach the Convention’s objective of preventing dangerous levels of climate change.

In parallel with the negotiations under the climate change Convention, the 176 parties to the Kyoto Protocol will continue negotiations already under way on new post-2012 emissions targets for developed countries that are in the Protocol. For this negotiating ‘track’ the Bali conference agreed on an intensive work schedule for 2008 to accelerate progress.

A review of the Protocol at the next UN climate conference, in December 2008, will help to inform these negotiations on future commitments by developed countries.

The negotiations under both ‘tracks’ – Convention and Protocol - will be completed at the UN climate change conference to be held at the end of 2009 in Copenhagen. The EU and many other Parties insisted on this simultaneous deadline to ensure a coherent result.

More at UN Bali Reports,  EU.

BERKELEY, Calif — In the middle of the South Pacific, about 12 miles west of Tahiti, is a tropical island that soon will emerge as a model ecosystem, thanks to the efforts of a U.S.-French research team led by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.

Moorea, home of the UC Berkeley Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research Station and France’s Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l’Environnement (CRIOBE), will be the site of an ambitious project to create a comprehensive inventory of all non-microbial life on the island. Supported by a new $5.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Moorea Biocode Project over the next three years will send researchers climbing up jagged peaks, trekking through lush forests and diving down to coral reefs to sample the French Polynesian island’s animal and plant life.

“This is the first effort to catalog and barcode an entire tropical ecosystem, from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the mountains,” said George Roderick, UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management, curator of the campus’s Essig Museum of Entomology and co-principal investigator of the project.

“We’re constructing a library of genetic markers and physical identifiers for every species of plant, animal and fungi on the island, then making that database publicly available as a resource for ecologists and evolutionary biologists around the world,” he said. Roderick is a former director of the Gump Station, where the National Science Foundation has established one of its 26 Long Term Ecological Research sites (the Moorea Coral Reef LTER).

The work will expand upon a 2005 pilot biocode project at Moorea, also funded by the Moore Foundation, which tested the feasibility of such a large undertaking. That project was limited to genetic barcoding of the fishes, geckos and selected insects.

In the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, larvae and contents of animals’ guts will be fair game in the full project. “We’ll check the gut contents of a gecko, spider or fish to find out what it’s eating,” said Chris Meyer, who managed the pilot project while he was a researcher at UC Berkeley.

There are an estimated 5,000 plant, animal and fungal species on Moorea, although that number may change as cryptic communities and organisms are sampled and genetic markers reveal novel species. “I’d be disappointed if we don’t hit at least 10,000 species,” said Meyer.

The number of species on the 51-square-mile island of Moorea is small compared with that on larger islands and continents. In California, for example, the number of insect species alone tops 30,000. Yet, the researchers say Moorea provides the right balance of being small enough to be studied manageably while being sufficiently complex to reliably serve as a microcosm of the challenges faced in larger ecosystems.

At the end of the three-year project, the Moorea Biocode Project will have sequenced a whole tropical ecosystem. “Like the Human Genome Project, however, this unprecedented accomplishment is, in some ways, merely a necessary first step,” said Davies. “Its goal is to accelerate progress on the larger questions: how to maintain a healthy ecosystem and what to do when things go wrong.” More at UC Berkeley, Berkeley.edu/Biocode. Photo Credits: UC Berkeley.

Cataloging an ecosystem
UC Berkeley biologist George Roderick talks about working on the South Pacific island of Moorea and an ambitious project to create a genetic inventory of all non-microbial life in the island’s ecosystem. (2:06 min. Flash video)

Nanotubes may have high-tech applications, study involving UCR engineers reports.

RIVERSIDE, Calif — Dec 07, ‘07 — Two engineers at the University of California, Riverside are part of a binational team that has found semiconducting nanotubes produced by living bacteria – a discovery that could help in the creation of a new generation of nanoelectronic devices.

The research team believes this is the first time nanotubes have been shown to be produced by biological rather than chemical means. It opens the door to the possibility of cheaper and more environmentally friendly manufacture of electronic materials.

Study results appear in today’s issue of the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team, including Nosang V. Myung, associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering in the Bourns College of Engineering, and his postdoctoral researcher Bongyoung Yoo, found the bacterium Shewanella facilitates the formation of arsenic-sulfide nanotubes that have unique physical and chemical properties not produced by chemical agents.

“We have shown that a jar with a bug in it can create potentially useful nanostructures,” Myung said. “Nanotubes are of particular interest in materials science because the useful properties of a substance can be finely tuned according to the diameter and the thickness of the tubes.”

The whole realm of electronic devices which power our world, from computers to solar cells, today depend on chemical manufacturing processes which use tremendous energy, and leave behind toxic metals and chemicals. Myung said a growing movement in science and engineering is looking for ways to produce semiconductors in more ecologically friendly ways.

Two members of the research team, Hor-Gil Hur and Ji-Hoon Lee from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Korea, first discovered something unexpected happening when they attempted to remediate arsenic contamination using the metal-reducing bacterium Shewanella. Myung, who specializes in electro-chemical material synthesis and device fabrication, was able to characterize the resulting nano-material.

The photoactive arsenic-sulfide nanotubes produced by the bacteria behave as metals with electrical and photoconductive properties. The researchers report that these properties may also provide novel functionality for the next generation of semiconductors in nano- and opto-electronic devices.

In a process that is not yet fully understood, the Shewanella bacterium secretes polysacarides that seem to produce the template for the arsenic sulfide nanotubes, Myung explained. The practical significance of this technique would be much greater if a bacterial species were identified that could produce nanotubes of cadmium sulfide or other superior semiconductor materials, he added.

“This is just a first step that points the way to future investigation,” he said. “Each species of Shewanella might have individual implications for manufacturing properties.” More at University of California, Riverside.

IRVINE, Calif — Dec 05, ‘07 — The herbal extract of a yellow-flowered mountain plant indigenous to the Arctic regions of Europe and Asia increased the lifespan of fruit fly populations, according to a University of California, Irvine study.

Flies that ate a diet rich with Rhodiola rosea, an herbal supplement long used for its purported stress-relief effects, lived on an average of 10 percent longer than fly groups that didn’t eat the herb. Study results appear in the online version of Rejuvenation Research.

“Although this study does not present clinical evidence that Rhodiola can extend human life, the finding that it does extend the lifespan of a model organism, combined with its known health benefits in humans, make this herb a promising candidate for further anti-aging research,” said Mahtab Jafari, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences and study leader. “Our results reveal that Rhodiola is worthy of continued study, and we are now investigating why this herb works to increase lifespan.”

In their study, the UC Irvine researchers fed adult fruit fly populations diets supplemented at different dose levels with four herbs known for their anti-aging properties. The herbs were mixed into a yeast paste, which adult flies ate for the duration of their lives. Three of the herbs – known by their Chinese names as Lu Duo Wei, Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang and San Zhi Pian – had no effect on fruit fly longevity, while Rhodiola was found to significantly reduce mortality. On average, Rhodiola increased survival 3.5 days in males and 3.2 days in females.

Rhodiola rosea, also known as the golden root, grows in cold climates at high altitudes and has been used by Scandinavians and Russians for centuries for its anti-stress qualities. The herb is thought to have anti-oxidative properties and has been widely studied.

Soviet researchers have been studying Rhodiola since the 1940s on athletes and cosmonauts, finding that the herb boosts the body’s response to stress. And earlier this year, a Nordic Journal of Psychiatry study on people with mild-to-moderate depression showed that patients taking a Rhodiola extract called SHR-5 reported fewer symptoms of depression than did those who took a placebo.

Jafari said she is evaluating the molecular mechanism of Rhodiola by measuring its impact on energy metabolism, oxidative stress and anti-oxidant defenses in fruit flies. She is also beginning studies in mice and in mouse and human cell cultures. These latter studies should help understand the benefits of Rhodiola seen in human trials. More at University of California, Irvine.

EAST LANSING, Mich — Dec 05, ‘07 — The data are in. Divorce is bad for the environment.

A novel study that links divorce with the environment shows a global trend of soaring divorce rates has created more households with fewer people, has taken up more space and has gobbled up more energy and water. The findings of Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University are published in this week’s online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A statistical remedy: Fall back in love. Cohabitation means less urban sprawl and softens the environmental hit.

“Not only the United States, but also other countries, including developing countries such as China and places with strict religious policies regarding divorce, are having more divorced households,” Liu said. “The consequent increases in consumption of water and energy and using more space are being seen everywhere.”

Liu and his research assistant Yu started with the obvious – that divorce rates across the globe are on the rise. Housing units, even if they now have few people in them, require resources to construct them and take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. A refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to a family of four or a family of two.

When they calculated the cost in terms of increased utilities and unused housing space per capita, they discovered that divorce tosses out economy of scale. Among the findings:

* In the United States alone in 2005, divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households. Thirty-eight million extra rooms were needed with associated costs for heating and lighting.

* In the United States and 11 other countries such as Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Greece, Mexico and South Africa between 1998 and 2002, if divorced households had combined to have the same average household size as married households, there could have been 7.4 million fewer households in these countries.

* The numbers of divorced households in these countries ranged from 40,000 in Costa Rica to almost 16 million in the United States around 2000.

* The number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households.

To track what happens when divorced people returned to married life, the study compared married households with households that had weathered marriage, divorce and remarriage. The results: The environmental footprint shrunk back to that of consistently married households.

This new work also acknowledges that divorce is not the only lifestyle trend changing family living structures – the demise of multigenerational households and people remaining single longer are examples.

“Solutions are beyond a single idea,” Liu said. “Consider the production of biofuel. Biofuel is made from plants, which also require water and space. We’re showing divorce has significant competition for that water and space. On the other hand, more divorce demands more energy. This creates a challenging dilemma and requires more creative solutions.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station. More at Michigan State University.

Dec 04, ‘07 — In support of its upcoming special, Dino Death Trap, National Geographic has launched Dino Central Park.  Featuring a hidden “webcam” in Central Park , the website allows users to scare the pants off of unsuspecting New Yorkers walking through the park by controlling a virtual Dino hidden in the bushes.

Dino Death Trap , premiering Sunday December 9^th at 8:00 pm, digs up brand new species of dinosaurs from a lost age of the early Jurassic. Be there and join National Geographic as they travel to western China , deep in the dry and desolate Junggar Basin , when the graves never-before-seen Dinos are uncovered.

Some scientists are calling it “The Pit of Death”, others, “Dinosaur Pompeii”.  Envision dinosaur corpses stacked one on top of each other, piled four and five high.  A bizarre T. Rex ancestor, a Triceratops ancestor, an ancient Crocodilian, and nearly 40 more different species dating back 160 million years ago are uncovered in front of National Geographic cameras.

On Dino Death Trap you can follow a team of paleontologists, led by Dr. Jim Clark, of George Washington University , and Dr. Xu Xing, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as they unearth answers to a virtual black hole in dinosaur evolution.  Watch as the bones are examined, reconstructed and brought back to life, using high resolution CGI, and slowly probe the mystery of who these dinosaurs were, how they died and what they can tell us about the Lost Age of the Dinosaurs.

Want more Dinosaurs?  From DinoCentralPark, head over to NGCDinos where you’ll find 3-D Dino renderings, a fossil hunt game, a Dino mummy timeline, and six video previews of the show.

Dino Death Trap Previews, Dino Central park, NGCDinos. [ Thanks ‘Brian Ries’ ]

Dec 03, ‘07 — Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests. Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.

The research, published in Current Biology, suggests we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives. Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.

“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said lead researcher  of Kyoto University.

“No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of 5 - have a better performance in a memory task than humans,” he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday’s issue of the journal Current Biology.

One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who’d been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster. One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.

This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.

When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.

But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.

That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.

Dr Lisa Parr, who works with chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta, US, described the research as “ground-breaking”. She said their importance of these primates for understanding the skills necessary for the evolution of modern humans was unparalleled.

“They are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to inform us about our evolutionary heritage,” said Dr Parr.

“These studies tell us that elaborate short-term memory skills may have had a much more salient function in early humans than is present in modern humans, perhaps due to our increasing reliance on language-based memory skills.” More at BBC News.

Dec 03, ‘07 — Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of a dinosaur that has much of its soft tissue still intact. Skin, muscle, tendons and other tissue that rarely survive fossilisation have all been preserved in the specimen unearthed in North Dakota, US.

The 67 million-year-old dinosaur is one of the duck-billed hadrosaur group. The preservation allowed scientists to estimate that it was more muscular than thought, perhaps giving it the ability to outrun predators like T. rex.

While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilized into stone. Unlike the collections of bones found in museums, this hadrosaur came complete with skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, according to researchers.

The study is not yet complete, but scientists have concluded that Hadrosaurs were bigger - 3 1/2 tons and up to 40 feet long - and stronger than had been known, were quick and flexible and had skin with scales that may have been striped.

“Oh, the skin is wonderful,” paleontologist Phillip Manning of Manchester University in England rhapsodized, admitting to a “glazed look in my eye.”

“It’s unbelievable when you look at it for the first time,” he said in a telephone interview. “There is depth and structure to the skin. The level of detail expressed in the skin is just breathtaking.”

The fossil was found in 1999 and is now nicknamed Dakota. It is being analysed in the world’s largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing corporation.

The machine usually is used for space shuttle engines and other large objects. Researchers hope the technology will help them learn more about the fossilised insides of the creature.

The reptile had no chest cavity, suggesting it had been partially eaten by predators before being “mummified” in unusual conditions: acidic, waterlogged sediments collected around the dinosaur, triggering the rapid deposit of minerals and trapping organic molecules before they decayed.

Dakota was discovered by Tyler Lyson, then a teenager who liked hunting for fossils on his family ranch. Lyson, who is currently working on his doctorate degree in paleontology at Yale University, founded the Marmarth Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to the excavation, preservation and study of dinosaurs. More at National Geographic, BBC News.

BRUSSELS — Nov 27, ‘07 — Almost one in five European Union households has gone wireless, cutting off their landline cables to use a mobile telephone only, a study by the EU statistical office showed on Tuesday, reports Reuters.

Eurostat said that last year 18 percent of households had mobile phone access only as subscriptions for wireless handsets soared to 95 per 100 habitants in 2005 from eight in 1996.

The study showed that the number of households relying only on a mobile telephone tended to be higher in EU newcomers from central and eastern Europe — 42 percent in the Czech Republic, compared with 11 percent in Germany.

In Finland, home of mobile giant Nokia, 47 percent of households had mobile phones and no fixed lines. Still, in Sweden, where rival Ericsson is based, zero percent of households relied only on mobile telephony.

Luxembourg had the highest number of mobile subscriptions per 100 people — 158, followed by Lithuania with 127 and Italy with 122. More at Reuters, Eurostat (in pdf).

Emily Singer at TechnologyReview writes an in-depth article on  The emerging field of connectomics could help researchers decode the brain’s approach to information processing.

“New technologies that allow scientists to trace the fine wiring of the brain more accurately than ever before could soon generate a complete wiring diagram–including every tiny fiber and miniscule connection–of a piece of brain. Dubbed connectomics, these maps could uncover how neural networks perform their precise functions in the brain, and they could shed light on disorders thought to originate from faulty wiring, such as autism and schizophrenia.

“The brain is essentially a computer that wires itself up during development and can rewire itself,” says Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist at MIT. “If we have a wiring diagram of the brain, that could help us understand how it works.” For example, scientists previously identified the part of the songbird’s brain that is important in the birds’ ability to generate songs. Seung would ultimately like to develop a wiring diagram of this structure in order to elucidate the features underlying its unique capability.

Only one organism’s wiring diagram currently exists: that of the microscopic worm C. elegans. Despite containing a mere 302 neurons, the C. elegans mapping effort took more than a decade to complete, in the 1970s. It has been an invaluable research resource and earned its creators a Nobel Prize.

With an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, creating an all-encompassing map of even a small chunk is a daunting task. Using standard methods, it would take roughly three billion person years to generate the wiring diagram of a single cortical column, a narrow functional unit of neurons in the cortex, estimates Winfried Denk, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany.

Denk, Seung, and their collaborators are now developing sensitive new imaging techniques and machine-learning algorithms to automate the construction process. They have already generated a partial wiring diagram of part of the rabbit retina. But they’ll need to make their technique a million times faster to finally bring larger maps–like that of a cortical column–into the realm of reality.

Previous efforts to map the wiring of the brain have focused on larger anatomical features, such as the thick wiring tracts that connect different parts of the brain, or on the paths of single neurons, stained a particular color to distinguish them from their tangled multitude of neighbors.

But to truly understand how a network of neurons can perform a particular function, scientists need a new kind of map. “A lot of properties of brain function are at the level of the circuit–information is being integrated, processed, extracted,” says Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at MIT who is not involved with the research. “To understand what that means, you need to be able to see who connects to who.”

Denk and his colleagues developed a new technique to make more fine-scaled wiring maps using electron microscopy. Starting with a small block of brain tissue, the researchers bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers in that slice. They then take a very thin–30-nanometer–slice off the top of the block and repeat the process. Scientists go through the images slice by slice to trace the path of each nerve fiber. “Repeat this [process] thousands of times, and you can make your way through maybe the whole fly brain,” says Denk.

Seung and Denk aim to dramatically speed up the tracing process, which takes a single graduate student weeks to complete, with automated machine-learning algorithms. The researchers use data from a manually generated wiring diagram to train an artificial neural network to emulate the human tracing process. They can then use the resulting algorithm to analyze new chunks of brain tissue. To date, they’ve been able to speed the process about one hundred- to one thousand-fold.

The researchers presented their initial findings to an awed crowd at the Society for Neurosciences meeting in San Diego earlier this month. They showed the three-dimensional reconstruction of part of the rabbit retina called the inner plexiform layer, which is a piece of neural tissue at the back of the eye that senses light and sends visual information to the brain. (See a movie of the reconstruction here.) “But we need to improve 10⁶-fold or more,” says Denk, who estimates that this would shrink the three billion person years it would take to trace a cortical column down to about two years. “I’m confident in the end that we will be able to do it,” he says. “But I don’t know how long it will take us–if we’re lucky, maybe a year or so.”

Earlier this month, scientists at Harvard described a new method of tracing neurons in the living brain by labeling them with up to a hundred different colors. (See “The Technicolor Brain.”) “We’re starting to think about wiring diagrams as being fundamental,” says Jeff Lichtman, one of the researchers who developed the technique.

Researchers say that the two approaches will likely be complementary, allowing scientists to look at neural circuits of different dimensions. Eventually, Seung aims to generate maps of the complete fly connectome, as well as partial wiring diagrams of interesting locations in larger brains, such as the hippocampus, olfactory bulb, and retina.

Just exactly how much light these maps will shed on the brain is still somewhat controversial. “Just knowing the [wiring] data won’t take us far if we don’t put it in the framework of processing and transferring data in the brain,” says David van Essen, a neuroscientist at Washington University, in St. Louis, and president of the Society for Neurosciences. Seung and others eventually hope to generate maps that incorporate the biochemical and physiological properties of various cells into the wiring diagrams.” TechnologyReview.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee are leading a new study involving 500 scientists worldwide to find, analyze, and prove the existence of gravitational waves in order to learn even more about our universe.

Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein, but so far, it has not been proven that they exist.

A new window on the universe

“Galileo was the first person to use the telescope to view the cosmos,” says Brady, a UWM professor of physics. “His observations with the new technology led to the discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter and lent support to the heliocentric model of the solar system.”

Just such an opportunity exists today with a unique observatory that is scanning the skies, searching for one of Einstein’s greatest predictions – gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are produced when massive objects in space move violently. The waves carry the imprint of the events that cause them. Scientists already have indirect evidence that gravitational waves exist, but have not directly detected them.

UWM researchers, backed by considerable funding from the National Science Foundation, are taking a leadership role in the quest.

It is an epic undertaking involving about 500 scientists worldwide, including Brady and other members of UWM’s Center for Cosmology and Gravitation: associate professors Alan Wiseman and Jolien Creighton, and assistant professor Xavier Siemens.

Two UWM adjunct physicists, who work at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, also are involved – former UWM professor Bruce Allen and scientist Maria Alessandra Papa.

“It’s an unimaginable opportunity to be on the forefront of scientific discovery,” says Creighton.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, consists of detectors at two U.S. sites managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

UWM’s physicists are analyzing the data generated by the LIGO facilities.

The project is supported with a sizable investment of grant money from both federal and UWM sources.

Last year, UWM’s LIGO group brought in $3 million in grant funding. Since 1999, UWM has received more than $9 million for the project, with much of it going toward a supercomputer called Nemo that operates unobtrusively on the second floor of the Physics Building.

Stretching and squeezing

The LIGO observatories use lasers to accurately monitor the distance between a central station and mirrors suspended three miles away along perpendicular arms. When a gravitational wave, a traveling ripple in space-time, passes by, the mirror in one arm will move closer to the central station, while the other mirror will move away.

The change in distance caused by stretching and squeezing is what LIGO is designed to measure, says Wiseman.

Those changes will be inconceivably tiny. LIGO can record distortions at a scale so small, it is comparable in distance to a thousandth of the size of an atomic nucleus.

LIGO records a series of numbers – lots of them – and feeds them to several supercomputer clusters around the country, including UWM’s Nemo cluster.

Think of a modern hard disk on a desktop computer, which stores about 100 gigabytes. LIGO fills up about 10 of those at Nemo in a single day, says Brady.

The computer’s job is to sort out the numerical patterns representing gravitational waves buried in ambient noise produced by lots of other vibrations – from internal vibrations of the equipment itself, to magnetic fluctuations from lightning storms, to seismic vibrations from trains rolling along the tracks a few miles from the observatory, or from earthquakes on the other side of the world.

“There are thousands or even millions of different signals that could be emitted from space,” says Wiseman. “So you have to take each segment of data individually. That turns out to be a formidable computational problem.”

Nemo performs many billions of calculations per second in its search for these signals.

Space sounds

The strings of numbers from LIGO are like tracks on a compact disk, says Brady. That means, once detected, gravitational-wave signals can be converted into sound.

In fact, scientists have already simulated, based on mathematical predictions, what certain events in space will sound like.

When two black holes are merging, for example, you might expect to hear a “chirp” that represents the spiraling together of the black holes just before they collide. “The spiral can go on for tens of thousands of years,” says Brady. “The sound is the identifying signal of the last few seconds of the process!”

Those analyzing the data from space could actually listen to the data. Instead, scientists look for the signals using computers like Nemo.

To augment the computing capacity, UWM is hosting a way for anyone with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection to join the astrophysical treasure hunt. Called “Einstein@Home, the program borrows computer power available when participants are not using it, and pool those resources to aid in filtering the massive amounts of data from LIGO.

Possible secrets

Scientists concede that the current LIGO facilities will need to be improved to increase the chances of detecting gravitational waves. More NSF funding to do that is requested in the 2009 U.S. budget currently winding its way through the approval process.

For now, the best hope is to detect events relatively close to Earth.

So what is the likelihood of success”

“The events we are looking for may only happen once every million years in our galaxy,” says Wiseman, “but if your instrument is sensitive enough to see such events in, say, one million galaxies, then the probability of detecting something is much larger.”

Gravitational waves may hold secrets to the nature of black holes, the unknown properties of nuclear material, and maybe even how the universe began.

“We’ve only been able to find out about the universe since it became cool,” says Siemens. “But with gravitational waves, we’ll see the universe when it was much younger – and hotter.”

But then again, scientists don’t really know.

“I think we’re in for a surprise,” says Siemens. “We have all these ideas about what we think we will find, but it could be something completely different.” UWM.

Nov 21, ‘07 — The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two-and-a-half meters long, much taller than the average man.

This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.

Dr Simon Braddy from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find, said, ‘This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were.’

The research is published online today in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters. The claw was discovered by one of Dr Braddy’s co-authors, Markus Poschmann, in a quarry near Prüm in Germany.

Poschmann described finding the fossil: ” I was loosening pieces of rock with a hammer and chisel when I suddenly realised there was a dark patch of organic matter on a freshly removed slab. After some cleaning I could identify this as a small part of a large claw. Although I did not know if it was more complete or not, I decided to try and get it out. The pieces had to be cleaned separately, dried, and then glued back together. It was then put into a white plaster jacket to stabilise it.”

The claw is from a sea scorpion (eurypterid) Jaekelopterus rhenaniae that lived between 460 and 255 million years ago. It is 46 centimetres long, indicating that the sea scorpion to which it belonged was around 2.5 metres (8 feet) long – almost half a metre longer than previous estimates for these arthropods and the largest one ever to have evolved.

Eurypterids are believed to be the extinct aquatic ancestors of scorpions and possibly all arachnids.

Some geologists believe that giant arthropods evolved due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere in the past. Others, that they evolved in an ‘arms race’ alongside their likely prey, the early armoured fish.

‘There is no simple single explanation’, explains Braddy. ‘It is more likely that some ancient arthropods were big because there was little competition from the vertebrates, as we see today. If the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere suddenly increased, it doesn’t mean all the bugs would get bigger.’ More at University of Bristol.

Nov 20, ‘07 — Human skin cells can be reprogrammed to behave almost exactly like embryonic stem cells, a discovery that provides a road map for creating personalized biological repair kits without ethical strings attached, scientists reported today.

Two separate teams of scientists say they have transformed ordinary human skin cells into ones that look and act like embryonic stem cells.

Laboratory teams at universities in the United States and Japan Tuesday announced the breakthrough, which may someday produce the medical benefits of embryo cloning without political, scientific and ethical controversies.

Both teams used a retrovirus to transport four genes into the skin cells, producing ones that mimic embryonic stem cells.

The U.S. team reported its findings in the journal Science, and the Japanese scientists reported theirs in the journal Cell.

By activating a handful of dormant genes, the researchers were able to coax the cells to go backward in time to a point in embryonic development before they had committed to becoming facial skin. The rejuvenated cells were able to grow into all the main tissue types in the body, including muscle, gut, cartilage, neurons and heart cells.

Several key hurdles remain before the technique is ready for clinical use. The viruses employed to turn on the genes cause mutations that can lead to cancer, and one of the genes itself also has a tendency to cause tumors. But scientists said solutions to these problems were already in the works.

Stem cells are coveted for their ability to grow into any kind of cell, such as the insulin-secreting islet cells that diabetes patients need or the brain tissue that could treat stroke victims. Until now, the only source of such pluripotent cells was from the inner cell mass of an early stage embryo, and the only way to harvest them was by destroying the embryo.

The prospect of creating pluripotent cells from ordinary skin cells is attractive to religious and social conservatives who consider embryos a sacred form of human life.

It is also a more straightforward way to generate stem cell lines that are genetically matched to patients.

Just last week, cloning pioneer Ian Wilmut said he planned to shift his focus from nuclear transfer – the technology he used to produce Dolly the sheep in 1997 — to cellular reprogramming.

Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues at Kyoto University spearheaded the reprogramming technique in mice. They dubbed their cells induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.

Yamanaka’s group used a retrovirus to turn on four genes that produce proteins — Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc and Klf4 — crucial for embryonic development. It took about 30 days for the cells to form colonies that resembled groups of embryonic stem cells.

The researchers grew the iPS cells in dishes and found they behaved almost exactly like embryonic stem cells. Under the right conditions, they became neural cells, or cardiac cells that beat in unison. When injected into mice, the iPS cells formed tumors containing a jumble of body parts.

Altogether, the researchers were able to create about 10 lines of iPS cells from each batch of 50,000 skin cells.

The scientist who created Dolly the sheep, a breakthrough that provoked headlines around the world a decade ago, is to abandon the cloning technique he pioneered to create her.

Nov 17, ‘07 — Prof. Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly in 1996, told The Daily Telegraph that he is abandoning cloning to pursue a new technique that can create stem cells without an embryo.

Prof Wilmut’s decision to turn his back on “therapeutic cloning“, just days after US researchers announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates, will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment.

He and his team made headlines around the world in 1997 when they unveiled Dolly, born July of the year before.

But now he has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryos, which he was awarded just two years ago, as part of a drive to find new treatments for the devastating degenerative condition, Motor Neuron disease.

Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University, believes a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells which can be used to grow a patient’s own cells and tissues for a vast range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson’s, and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as “nuclear transfer.”

His announcement could mark the beginning of the end for therapeutic cloning, on which tens of millions of pounds have been spent worldwide over the past decade. “I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer,” Prof Wilmut said.

Most of his motivation is practical but he admits the Japanese approach is also “easier to accept socially.”

His inspiration comes from the research by Prof Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, which suggests a way to create human embryo stem cells without the need for human eggs, which are in extremely short supply, and without the need to create and destroy human cloned embryos, which is bitterly opposed by the pro life movement.

Prof Yamanaka has shown in mice how to turn skin cells into what look like versatile stem cells potentially capable of overcoming the effects of disease.

This pioneering work to revert adult cells to an embryonic state has been reproduced by a team in America and Prof Yamanaka is, according to one British stem cell scientist, thought to have achieved the same feat in human cells.

This work has profound significance because it suggests that after a heart attack, for example, skin cells from a patient might one day be manipulated by adding a cocktail of small molecules to form muscle cells to repair damage to the heart, or brain cells to repair the effects of Parkinson’s. Because they are the patient’s own cells, they would not be rejected.

In theory, these reprogrammed cells could be converted into any of the 200 other type in the body, even the collections of different cell types that make up tissues and, in the very long term, organs too. Prof Wilmut said it was “extremely exciting and astonishing” and that he now plans to do research in this area.

This approach, he says, represents, the future for stem cell research, rather than the nuclear transfer method that his large team used more than a decade ago at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, to create Dolly. More at Telegraph.

Nov 12, ‘07 — A scientist at the Oregon National Primate Research Center has created for the first time dozens of viable cloned embryos from adult monkeys, according to an article today in the British newspaper, The Independent.

The report says Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov has pioneered a system of handling primate eggs that protects them during the cloning process. This would be the first documented cloning of a primate, after the rejection last year of fraudulent claims of human cloning by South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk.

Researchers are now working with monkey clones, but their stated goal — only slightly veiled by scientific lingo — seems that they’d like to figure out how to clone human beings.

On the same subject an UNU - IAS report, titled ‘Is Human Reproductive Cloning Inevitable: Future Options for UN Governance’, came out on Saturday, Nov 10, warned the international community to either outlaw human cloning or prepare for the creation of cloned humans.

Excerpts from Steve Connor’s article “Cloning: a giant step”:

“A technical breakthrough has enabled scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being used to make cloned human embryos.

It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable cloned embryos from an adult primate – in this case a 10-year-old male rhesus macaque monkey – and they are scheduled to report their findings later this month.

Scientists who know of the research said it was the breakthrough that they had all been waiting for because, until now, there was a growing feeling that there might be some insuperable barrier to creating cloned embryos from adult primates – including humans.

The development will not be welcomed in all quarters. Opponents of cloning will argue that the new technique of manipulating primate eggs to improve cloning efficiency will lead to increased attempts at creating – and destroying – cloned human embryos for research purposes.

“The focus now is going to be on therapeutic cloning and using the non-human primate as a paradigm for therapeutic cloning for what you might be able to do clinically,” he said.” More at TheIndependent here and here.

The international community faces a stark choice: outlaw human cloning or prepare for the creation of cloned humans, U.N. researchers said Saturday.

A report by the United Nations University’s Institute of Advanced Studies (UNU-IAS) says a ban on human cloning, coupled with freedom for nations to permit controlled therapeutic research, is the global community’s best option.

The UNU - IAS report, titled ‘Is Human Reproductive Cloning Inevitable: Future Options for UN Governance’ has been prepared by Chamundeeswari Kuppuswamy, Darryl Macer, Mihaela Serbulea and Brendan Tobin for UNU-IAS.

Excerpts from the UNU-IAS report:

“Despite widespread consensus amongst nations regarding the desirability of banning reproductive cloning, efforts to negotiate an international convention ground to a halt due to fundamental divisions regarding so-called research or therapeutic cloning.

Research cloning, viewed by some as a possible source of new therapeutic remedies for degenerative diseases, see by others as unethical where it involves the production of embryos as a source of stem cells upon which such therapies are based. Firm positions on both sides of the debate led to a compromise position in the form of a non-binding UN Declaration on Cloning, (A/RES/59/280).

As a result of the failure to adopt an internationally binding legal instrument to regulate reproductive cloning activity, scientists committed to carrying out research in this area can do so in many countries where domestic regulations allow it, or in countries which have not as yet regulated cloning research.

Although claims to date reporting the growth of cloned human embryos into fetal stages or beyond have not be substantiated, many predict that the birth of a human clone is inevitable. The attempted production of cloned human persons raises many ethical, moral, legal, social and cultural concerns.

The study concludes that regulators missed an opportunity to develop clear and unequivocal measures banning cloning intended for the purposes of bringing about the birth of human life.

Although it can be argued that there is overwhelming international opposition to reproductive cloning, coupled with numerous national legislation which make it a criminal offence, it is still difficult to establish that there exists a clear custom that prohibits reproductive cloning.

However, there are strong grounds to believe that if such a case were to come before the International Court of Justice, the emerging custom against reproductive cloning will be a strong argument for the prosecution. The United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning is an important milestone on the road to customary international law on cloning.”

Live Mocha, based in Bellevue, WA, aims to harness the power of online social networking to help language students learn and stay motivated. The site, launched in late September at DEMO 2007 conference, combines immersive language lessons with an international community of native speakers.

CEO Shirish Nadkarni says that the economic opportunities he gained by learning English, which is a second language for him, taught him the importance of language instruction. However, it was his personal frustration with his kids’ experience learning Spanish in school that inspired him to found Live Mocha. “My kids have good vocabulary and so forth,” he says, “but they cannot carry out a conversation in Spanish, and that’s the real goal that we’re all after.”

Centering around a social network, LiveMocha lets people help other users for the purpose of learning a new language. By providing this network alongside a set of tools that have proven useful for teaching new languages, Livemocha gives you multiple ways in which to learn whatever language you’d like. LiveMocha also has in-house tutors that will help you along the way. The lack of immersion is probably among the biggest reasons why many language-learning programs (including high school and college classes) don’t work.

LiveMocha enables users to help each other with video chat tools and structured conversation exercises, and incentivizes them with competitions and a language buddy system for encouragement. You’re probably thinking that letting users earn money for a tutoring system would be a good way to incentivize users, too. Well, so does LiveMocha. The tutoring section of this network is in the works.

Users can chat with each other through a text-based interface, or through voice or webcam. “We expect the community to come in and use their native-language proficiencies to provide more explanation–grammar tips, alternate phrases, or colloquialisms–allowing people to build a much better understanding of the language and how it might be spoken in different parts of the world,” Nadkarni says. “This is a lot more instructive and more dynamic than a static CD-ROM.”

In addition to providing real-world perspective on how a language is spoken by natives, Nadkarni says that the social-network aspect of the site will keep users motivated as they form friendships with native speakers. “I can look at people’s profiles, see how engaged they are in the process, where they are in the lesson plan, and how active they are in the community,” he says. “From there, I can truly build a list of study partners that are as motivated as I am to learn. 

Currently it offers support for six popular languages – English, Spanish, French, Hindi, German, and Mandarin Chinese and all of the content on the site is free during its beta-testing phase. Beginning next year, the 12-person company plans to start charging $10 to $20 per month for more advanced four-month courses. More you can find at LiveMocha