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NASA: Telescopes should be characterizing the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets by 2017 to 2020

NASA: Telescopes should be characterizing the atmospheres of habitable exoplanets by 2017 to 2020 | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

 An analysis of thousands of stars in the Kepler space telescope's database, found 95 possible planets orbiting red dwarfs. Of these, three are Earth-sized candidates in the habitable zone – the region around a star where liquid water can exist. Statistically, that means 6 per cent of all red dwarfs in our galaxy should have rocky planets in the habitable zone.

Most of the stars nearest to us are red dwarfs, including the closest, Proxima Centauri. Based on the distribution of red dwarfs in the Milky Way, Dressing estimates that a potentially habitable planet is only 13 light years away.

Due to orbital geometries, the odds that a given planet transits its star so that we can see it are just 1 in 50, so there's a chance the nearest habitable world will not be one that surveys like Kepler can see. The odds are better that we can see a habitable planet transit within 100 light years of Earth. That's still near enough for planned observatories to check its atmosphere for gases produced by life on Earth, such as a large amount of oxygen.

NASA is currently considering two planet-hunting telescopes that could help find such a nearby world: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Fast Infrared Exoplanet Spectroscopy Survey Explorer (FINESSE). One of these missions is expected to be selected this spring for launch in 2017.

Even if neither space mission goes ahead, large telescopes on the ground should also be able to detect gases like oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres. Ignas Snellen of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and colleagues think that, once a habitable planet around a red dwarf is found, planned facilities such as the European Extremely Large Telescope could detect such gases in its atmosphere within three to four years.

"We could be in the business of studying the atmospheres of habitable worlds 10 years from now," says David Charbonneau, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. If NASA launches the missions the space telescopes and we get lucky with analysis of Kepler data to confirm exoplanets, then we could be studying the atmospheres by 2017 or 2020 with space or ground based systems.

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The Cost of War Includes at Least 253,330 Brain Injuries and 1,700 Amputations

The Cost of War Includes at Least 253,330 Brain Injuries and 1,700 Amputations | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Here are indications of the lingering costs of 11 years of warfare. Nearly 130,000 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and vastly more have experienced brain injuries. Over 1,700 have undergone life-changing limb amputations. Over 50,000 have been wounded in action. As of Wednesday, 6,656 U.S. troops and Defense Department civilians have died.

 

That updated data (.pdf) comes from a new Congressional Research Service report into military casualty statistics that can sometimes be difficult to find — and even more difficult for American society to fully appreciate. It almost certainly understates the extent of the costs of war.

 

Start with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Counting since 2001 across the U.S. military services, 129,731 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with the disorder since 2001. The vast majority of those, nearly 104,000, have come from deployed personnel.

 

But that’s the tip of the PTSD iceberg, since not all — and perhaps not even most — PTSD cases are diagnosed. The former vice chief of staff of the Army, retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, has proposed dropping the “D” from PTSD so as not to stigmatize those who suffer from it — and, perhaps, encourage more veterans to seek diagnosis and treatment for it.

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UAB researchers completely cure type 1 diabetes in dogs with a single session of gene therapy

UAB researchers completely cure type 1 diabetes in dogs  with a single session of gene therapy | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Researchers at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona have succeeded in completely curing type 1 diabetes in dogs with a single session of gene therapy. This is the first time that the disease has been cured in large animals, a fundamental step towards applying the therapy in humans. The study, based on introducing a "glucose sensor" into muscle, has been published in Diabetes, the most prestigious journal in this field. 

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), led by Fátima Bosch, have shown for the first time that it is possible to cure diabetes in large animals with a single session of gene therapy. As published this week in Diabetes, the principal journal for research on the disease, after a single gene therapy session, the dogs recover their health and no longer show symptoms of the disease. In some cases, monitoring continued for over four years, with no recurrence of symptoms.
 
The therapy is minimally invasive. It consists of a single session of various injections in the animal's rear legs using simple needles that are commonly used in cosmetic treatments. These injections introduce gene therapy vectors, with a dual objective: to express the insulin gene, on the one hand, and that of glucokinase, on the other. Glucokinase is an enzyme that regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood. When both genes act simultaneously they function as a "glucose sensor", which automatically regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood, thus reducing diabetic hyperglycemia (the excess of blood sugar associated with the disease).
 
As Fátima Bosch, the head researcher, points out, "this study is the first to demonstrate a long-term cure for diabetes in a large animal model using gene therapy.”
 
This same research group had already tested this type of therapy on mice, but the excellent results obtained for the first time with large animals lays the foundations for the clinical translation of this gene therapy approach to veterinary medicine and eventually to diabetic patients.
 
The study was led by the head of the UAB's Centre for Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy (CBATEG) Fàtima Bosch, and involved the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the UAB, the Department of Medicine and Animal Surgery of the UAB, the Faculty of Veterinary Science of the UAB, the Department of Animal Health and Anatomy of the UAB, the Spanish Biomedical Research Centre in Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Disorders (CIBERDEM), the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Philadelphia (USA).
 
The study provides ample data showing the safety of gene therapy mediated by adeno-associated vectors (AAV) in diabetic dogs. The therapy has proved to be safe and efficacious: it is based on the transfer of two genes to the muscle of adult animals using a new generation of very safe vectors known as adeno-associated vectors. These vectors, derived from non-pathogenic viruses, are widely used in gene therapy and have been successful in treating several diseases.
 
In fact, the first gene therapy medicine ever approved by the European Medicines Agency, named Glybera®, makes use of adeno-associated vectors to treat a metabolic disease caused by a deficiency of lipoprotein lipase and the resulting accumulation of triglycerides in the blood.

Destiny Muniz's curator insight, October 24, 2013 2:27 PM

They inject numerious things into the hine legs this introduces the gene therapy vectors, with a dual objective Glucokinase and insuline. 
They say that the goal of this study is demonstrate a long term cure for diabetes in large animals using this type of method. This has been tested on mice before and now these are very good results from this test.

Angelica D. Ignacio's curator insight, December 6, 2013 11:03 AM

it is the first time autonma de barcelona have cured type 1 diabetes. They cured it in dogs with a single session of gene therapy. It is the first time it has been cured in a large animal. It is a fundamental step to humans. After the gene session the dogs recover there health and show no more symptoms of type 1 diabetes. They tested in mice aready it was the same. 

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Deep roots of catastrophe: Partly molten, Florida-sized blob forms atop Earth's core

Deep roots of catastrophe: Partly molten, Florida-sized blob forms atop Earth's core | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

This map shows Earth’s surface superimposed on a depiction of what a new University of Utah study indicates is happening 1,800 miles deep at the boundary between Earth’s warm, rocky mantle and its liquid outer core. Using seismic waves the probe Earth’s deep interior, seismologist Michael Thorne found evidence that two continent-sized piles of rock are colliding as they move atop the core. The merger process isn’t yet complete, so there is a depression or hole between the merging piles. But in that hole, a Florida-sized blob of partly molten rock -- called a “mega ultra low velocity zone” -- is forming from the collision of smaller blobs on the edges of the continent-sized piles. Thorne believe this process is the beginning stage of massive volcanic eruptions that won’t occur for another 100 million to 2100 million years.

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SETI scientists calculate that one in a million stars harbor intelligent life that can send detectable signals

SETI scientists calculate that one in a million stars harbor intelligent life that can send detectable signals | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Radio signals in narrow, focused bands are a possible indication of intelligent life, given that humans generate such signals here on Earth.

 

So, using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the team probed each star system for five minutes between February and April 2011. They examined the planets in a radio-frequency range of 1.1 to 1.9 GHz, which is between the cell phone and television bands used on Earth.

This range of frequencies includes a so-called "watering hole" between 1.4 GHz and 1.7 GHz, where hydrogen and hydroxyl (both components of water) emit signals from quantum processes detectable in radio telescopes.

"The analogy is, it's the water hole where animals go in the desert, so perhaps this band of frequencies is a common gathering place for E.T.," study lead author Andrew Siemion of the University of California, Berkeley, told SPACE.com.

 

Researchers scrutinized the data for planets transmitting signals in a narrow band of 5 Hz, which is considered too narrow for transmission from a natural source. They came up empty.


Based on their findings, the researchers calculated that fewer than one in a million stars in the Milky Waylikely harbor a civilization advanced enough to send out detectable signals. But there could still be millions of civilizations out there waiting to be found, the scientists added, sincebillions of Earth-like planets are thought to populate the Milky Way.

 

The team also cautioned that searching for one particular type of signal could have reduced their odds of finding something. "In particular, we can offer no argument that an advanced, intelligent civilization necessarily produces narrow-band radio emission, either intentional or otherwise," the study states. "Thus we are probing only a potential subset of such civilizations, where the size of the subset is difficult to estimate."

 

The researchers acknowledged that narrow radio signals are subject to interference from the interstellar medium — a thin gas floating between the stars — and the solar wind, which is a stream of particles coming from the sun. However, they did not foresee these phenomena interfering unduly with their observations in the current study, given the distance of the stellar targets.

 

The team will use the Green Bank Telescope again to refine their search in the coming months, looking particularly at stars that have two planets aligning in relation to Earth. The scientists hope to listen in as the planets communicate with each other, if the planets are transmitting signals in the first place.

 

They also plan to "piggyback" on regular observations by the telescope to automatically monitor for signals as other science teams do separate investigations.

 

This was the first time the telescope was used for such alien-hunting work, Siemion added. In the future, more sensitive radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array, might be able to find even weaker signals than we can detect now, he said.

 
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First Bionic Eye Sees Light of Day in U.S.

First Bionic Eye Sees Light of Day in U.S. | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

After years of research, the first bionic eye has seen the light of day in the United States, giving hope to the blind around the world.

 

Developed by Second Sight Medical Products, the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System has helped more than 60 people recover partial sight, with some experiencing better results than others.

 

Consisting of 60 electrodes implanted in the retina and glasses fitted with a special mini camera, Argus II has already won the approval of European regulators. The US Food and Drug Administration is soon expected to follow suit, making this bionic eye the world's first to become widely available.

 

"It's the first bionic eye to go on the market in the world, the first in Europe and the first one in the U.S.," said Brian Mech, the California-based company's vice president of business development.

 

Those to benefit from Argus II are people with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease, affecting about 100,000 people in the U.S., that results in the degeneration of the retinal photoreceptors.

 

The photoreceptor cells convert light into electrochemical impulses that are transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve, where they are decoded into images.

 

"The way the prosthesis works (is) it replaces the function of the photoreceptors," Mech told AFP. Thirty people aged 28 to 77 took part in the clinical trial for the product, all of whom were completely blind.

 

Mech said the outcomes varied by participant. "We had some patients who got just a little bit of benefit and others who could do amazing things like reading newspaper headlines," he said.

Electroquímica Unam's curator insight, November 7, 2014 2:05 PM

El primer ojo biónico a partir de tecnología fotoelectroquímica.

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Small-molecule drug drives cancer cells to commit suicide

Small-molecule drug drives cancer cells to commit suicide | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Studies in mice show therapy is effective even in hard-to-treat brain tumors. Cancer researchers have pinned down a molecule that can kick-start the body’s own tumour-destroying systems, triggering cell death in cancerous but not healthy tissue in mice.


The molecule, TIC10, activates the gene for a protein called TRAIL (tumour-necrosis-factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand), which has long been a target for cancer researchers looking for drugs that would avoid the debilitating effects of conventional therapies.

 

“TRAIL is a part of our immune system: all of us with functional immune systems use this molecule to keep tumours from forming or spreading, so boosting this will not be as toxic as chemotherapy.


Experiments showed that TIC10 had potent effects against a variety of tumours, including breast, lymphatic, colon and lung cancer. It was especially effective at triggering cell suicide in glioblastoma, a kind of brain tumour that is notoriously difficult to treat. Mice with glioblastomas that were treated with TIC10 and bevacizumab — a drug used against diseases including brain tumours, and sold under the name Avastin — survived three times as long as untreated mice. However, they survived only 6% longer than mice treated with bevacizumab alone.

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New precise time measurements confirm: Asteroid impact was indeed 'final straw' for the dinosaurs

New precise time measurements confirm: Asteroid impact was indeed 'final straw' for the dinosaurs | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

It's been more than 30 years since UC Berkeley researchers first suggested that the extinction of the dinosaurs was probably linked to a massive comet or asteroid impact, known as Chicxulub, off the Yucatan coast. The idea was that the collision from space, which left a 110-mile-wide crater off the coast of Mexico, would have cast off debris that wrapped all the way around Earth, altering the climate and resulting in the global extinction.

 

But that story hasn't passed muster everywhere. Because different methods of estimating when the extinction and the impact occurred have yielded different answers -- some studies concluded that the asteroid hit as much as 300,000 years before dinosaurs went extinct -- some people have argued that other circumstances, including volcanic eruptions or climate change, must have had more to do with the dinosaurs' end than a whopper of an asteroid.

Now, using highly refined methods of determining the ages of rocks, another team from Berkeley has demonstrated that the extinction and the impact occurred at almost exactly the same time: just over 66 million years ago. 

 

"The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed the Earth past the tipping point," said study lead author and UC Berkeley earth scientist Paul Renne, in a statement. "We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat's eyebrow."

 

To arrive at the more accurate dates, Renne and his team looked at isotopes of argon in rocks created by the Chicxulub impact, known as tektites, found in Haiti.  The scientists also used the dating technique to assign an age to altered volcanic ash deposits from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana that are known to coincide with the boundary between the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rexand Velociraptor still roamed Earth, and the Paleogene period, when they disappeared.

 

The results showed that the impact and the extinctions happened at essentially the same time, within the range of uncertainty in the measurements.  The scientists suggested that brief cold snaps in the late Cretaceous period had already put stress on "a global ecosystem that was well adapted to the long-lived preceding Cretaceous hothouse climate." The asteroid pushed the ecosystem over the edge, they said.

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NASA: Asteroid flyby next week will be closest for a space rock so large - inside geosynchronous satellite orbits

NASA: Asteroid flyby next week will be closest for a space rock so large - inside geosynchronous satellite orbits | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

A close encounter of the rocky kind is set for Feb. 15, 2013, when an office-building-size asteroid will speed past Earth faster than a bullet and closer than some communications satellites.

 

It will be the nearest recorded brush with a space rock so large, NASA scientists said Thursday. 

 

The good news: There’s no chance of an impact. At its closest, asteroid 2012 DA14will pass about 17,000 miles above Earth inside geosynchronous satellite orbits.

 

The bad news: A million other potentially dangerous — and unknown — city-killing space rocks are out there, and one of them could be on a collision course with Earth. Critics say NASA and other space agencies are not doing enough to scan for these threats.

 

“It’s like Mother Nature sending a warning shot across our bow,” said Don Yeomans, who tracks asteroids for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.

 

Satellite operators said they were monitoring the asteroid but expected it to safely cruise through a belt of satellites that are about 23,000 miles up.

“We’re watching the situation, but there’s not a giant concern,” said Alex Horwitz, spokesman for Intelsat, which operates about 50 communications satellites.

 

The Air Force, meanwhile, is leaving the tracking to NASA.  An astronomer in Spain discovered the asteroid a year ago. Small, dim and speedy, it was a “slippery target” as it moved across a background of stars, said Jaime Nomen of the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain.

 

NASA-funded scientists then ran the numbers: The asteroid was about 150 feet wide. Its closest approach will occur at 2:24 p.m. Eastern time on the 15th. On the night side of the planet — mainly Asia and Australia — observers with small telescopes might see a pinpoint streaking at the rapid clip of two moon-widths per minute.

 

Further observations refined the asteroid’s path. It cruises around the sun in an orbit almost identical to Earth’s. Our year is 365 days. Its year is a day longer. Like a drunk driver weaving across lanes, asteroid 2012 DA14 crosses paths with Earth twice a year, at varying distances.

 

Despite these opportunities for disaster, scientists tracking the asteroid are confident 2012 DA14 won’t collide with us for at least the next century, which is as far as they’ve been able to project its path. Next week’s approach is the closest during that time.

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The 44 Chromosome Man And What He Reveals About Our Own Genetic Past

The 44 Chromosome Man And What He Reveals About Our Own Genetic Past | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Many people have trouble believing that chromosome number can change and stay changed in a species. Their first thought is often of Down syndrome or the other problems that usually come with missing or extra chromosomes. It can be hard to imagine how a living thing could end up with a new chromosome number without these problems.

And yet it happens all the time in creatures as varied as yeast, corn, butterflies, voles and even mice. And now it has been seen in people.

 In a recent report, a doctor in China has identified a man who has 44 chromosomes instead of the usual 46. Except for his different number of chromosomes, this man is perfectly normal in every measurable way.

His chromosomes are arranged in a stable way that could be passed on if he met a nice girl who had 44 chromosomes too. And this would certainly be possible in the future given his family history.

 

But why doesn't he have any problems? A loss of one let alone two chromosomes is almost always fatal because so many essential genes are lost. In this case, he has fewer chromosomes but is actually missing very few genes. Instead, he has two chromosomes stuck to two other chromosomes. More specifically, both his chromosome 14's are stuck to his chromosome 15's. So he has almost all the same genes as any other person. He just has them packaged a bit differently.

 

This is an important finding because it tells us about a key genetic event in human prehistory. All the evidence points to humans, like their relatives the chimpanzees, having 48 chromosomes a million or so years ago. Nowadays most humans have 46.

 

What happened to this 44 chromosome man shows one way that the first step in this sort of change might have happened in our past. Scientists could certainly predict something like this. But now there is proof that it can actually happen.

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SETI Study Of Habitable Exoplanets Concludes: No Signs of Extraterrestrial Intelligences (so far)

SETI Study Of Habitable Exoplanets Concludes: No Signs of Extraterrestrial Intelligences (so far) | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Jill Tarter, from the SETI Institute and of Contact fame, along with a group of buddies, reveal the results of their first directed search, carried out between February and April 2011.

 

These guys pointed the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia at 86 stars hosting exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. They chose their targets because they had exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone, had five or more exoplanets or had super Earths with relatively long orbits.

 

Tarter and co looked at signals in the 1-2 GHz range, the region used by terrestrial mobile and cordless phones. In particular, they hunted for signals that cover no more than 5Hz of the spectrum since there is no known natural mechanism for producing such narrow band signals. “Emission no more than a few Hz in spectral width is, as far as we know, an unmistakable indicator of engineering by an intelligent civilization,” they say. The big challenge with these kinds of observations is to rule out the false positives generated on Earth. Tarter and co developed a technique based on the simple idea that a signal can only be interesting if it appears in the data while the telescope is pointing at the target star but not when the telescope is pointing somewhere else. “This excluded 99.96 per cent of the candidate signals,” they say. That left 52 candidate signals which Tarter and co then studied for signs of a terrestrial origin.

 

That left 52 candidate signals which Tarter and co then studied for signs of a terrestrial origin. Their conclusions are forthright. “No signals of extraterrestrial origin were found,” they say. There are some important caveats, however. In particular, is the question of how strong a signal the Green Bank Telescope can pick up.

 

Tarter and co consider in particular the most powerful beam that humans could broadcast into space: the Arecibo Planetary Radar in Puerto Rico. They say that if such a beam were pointed towards Earth during their experiment, they would have spotted it at distances of up to 10,000 light years. Of course, the likelihood of such a happy coincidence is small.  

 

More advanced civilisations might have more power to play with and so be easier to see. In particular, civilisations that have harnessed all the energy from their star–so-called Kardashian Type II civilisations–ought to be easy to spot.

 

The results allow the team to put important limits on the likelihood of Kardashian Type II civilisations. Tarter and co say that the negative result implies that the number of these civilisations that are loud in the 1-2GHz range must less than one in a million per sun-like star.

 

That still leaves plenty of wiggle room. And the team points out that rapid improvements in the technology for sensing radio signals means that researchers ought to be able to tighten these limits significantly in the not too distant future.

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Electricity Gives Soap Bubbles Super Strength

Electricity Gives Soap Bubbles Super Strength | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Any kid can blow a soap bubble, but only a physicist would think to electrify one. Left to its own devices, a bubble will weaken and pop as the fluid sandwiched between two thin layers of soap succumbs to gravity and drains toward the floor. But when researchers trapped a bubble between two platinum electrodes (pictured) and cranked up the voltage, the fluid reversed direction and actually flowed up, against the force of gravity. The newly strong and stable bubbles could live for hours, and even visibly change colors as their walls grew fatter, the team reports in the current issue of Physical Review Letters. Because soap film is naturally only nanometers thick, this whimsical experiment could help scientists create more efficient labs-on-chips, the mazes of nanotunnels that can diagnose disease based on the movements of a miniscule drop of blood.

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Tiny nanoscale capsule effectively kills cancer cells without harming normal cells

Tiny nanoscale capsule effectively kills cancer cells without harming normal cells | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

The development of stimuli-responsive, nano-scale therapeutics that selectively target and attack tumors is a major research focus in cancer nanotechnology. A potent therapeutic option is to directly arming the cancer cells with apoptotic-inducing proteins that are not affected by tumoral anti-apoptotic maneuvers. The avian virus-derived apoptin forms a high-molecular weight protein complex that selectively accumulates in the nucleus of cancer cell to induce apoptotic cell death. To achieve the efficient intracellular delivery of this tumor-selective protein in functional form, we synthesized degradable, sub-100 nm, core–shell protein nanocapsules containing the 2.4 MDa apoptin complexes. Recombinant apoptin is reversibly encapsulated in a positively charged, water soluble polymer shell and is released in native form in response to reducing conditions such as the cytoplasm. As characterized by confocal microscopy, the nanocapsules are efficiently internalized by mammalian cells lines, with accumulation of rhodamine-labeled apoptin in the nuclei of cancer cells only. Intracellularly released apoptin induced tumor-specific apoptosis in several cancer cell lines and inhibited tumor growth in vivo, demonstrating the potential of this polymer–protein combination as an anticancer therapeutic.

 

The process does not present the risk of genetic mutation posed by gene therapies for cancer, or the risk to healthy cells caused by chemotherapy, which does not effectively discriminate between healthy and cancerous cells, Tang said.


"This approach is potentially a new way to treat cancer," said Tang. "It is a difficult problem to deliver the protein if we don't use this vehicle. This is a unique way to treat cancer cells and leave healthy cells untouched."


The cell-destroying material, apoptin, is a protein complex derived from an anemia virus in birds. This protein cargo accumulates in the nucleus of cancer cells and signals to the cell to undergo programmed self-destruction.


The polymer shells are developed under mild physiological conditions so as not to alter the chemical structure of the proteins or cause them to clump, preserving their effectiveness on the cancer cells.


Tests done on human breast cancer cell lines in laboratory mice showed significant reduction in tumor growth.


"Delivering a large protein complex such as apoptin to the innermost compartment of tumor cells was a challenge, but the reversible polymer encapsulation strategy was very effective in protecting and escorting the cargo in its functional form," said Muxun Zhao, lead author of the research and a graduate student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA.

 

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Tiny 3-D printed spaceship constructed: Only 125 µm long - and it took only 50 sec to produce

Tiny 3-D printed spaceship constructed: Only 125 µm long - and it took only 50 sec to produce | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

The tiny spaceship in the video above was built using a microscale 3-D printer. At 125 micrometers long, the craft is about the length of a dust mite, and it took less than 50 seconds to produce. The super-fast, high-resolution printer that made the spaceship was introduced this week at the Photonics West fair by Nanoscribe GmbH, a company based in Germany that specializes in nanophotonics and 3-D laser lithography.

 

The printer crafted the spaceship using two-photon polymerization, in which ultra-short laser pulses activate photosensitive building materials. Afterward, the ship — based on a Hellcat fighter from the Wing Commander Saga — was inspected using an electron microscope. While the spacecraft can’t fly, thereby limiting its usefulness for space exploration (unlike, say, 3-D printed astrofood), the technology’s other tiny productsinclude biological scaffolds, ultralight metamaterials, and channels that have found homes in biological research, photonics, and microfluidics.

 

Next step? We’d love to watch this thing launch into space, piloted by an army of microbes.

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ESA has indications that the ozone layer is on the road to recovery?

ESA has indications that the ozone layer is on the road to recovery? | Amazing Science | Scoop.it
ESA Observing the Earth homepage, features the latest news on Earth observation missions and satellites, including ERS 1, ERS 2, Envisat, Metop, Meteosat and Living Planet.

 

Satellites show that the recent ozone hole over Antarctica was the smallest seen in the past decade. Long-term observations also reveal that Earth’s ozone has been strengthening following international agreements to protect this vital layer of the atmosphere.

 

According to the ozone sensor on Europe’s MetOp weather satellite, the hole over Antarctica in 2012 was the smallest in the last 10 years.

 

The instrument continues the long-term monitoring of atmospheric ozone started by its predecessors on the ERS-2 and Envisat satellites.

 

Since the beginning of the 1980s, an ozone hole has developed over Antarctica during the southern spring – September to November – resulting in a decrease in ozone concentration of up to 70%. Ozone depletion is more extreme in Antarctica than at the North Pole because high wind speeds cause a fast-rotating vortex of cold air, leading to extremely low temperatures. Under these conditions, human-made chlorofluorocarbons – CFCs – have a stronger effect on the ozone, depleting it and creating the infamous hole.

Over the Arctic, the effect is far less pronounced because the northern hemisphere’s irregular landmasses and mountains normally prevent the build-up of strong circumpolar winds.

 

To understand these complex processes better, scientists rely on a long time series of data derived from observations and on results from numerical simulations based on complex atmospheric models.

 

Although ozone has been observed over several decades with multiple instruments, combining the existing observations from many different sensors to produce consistent and homogeneous data suitable for scientific analysis is a difficult task.

 

Within the ESA Climate Change Initiative, harmonised ozone climate data records are generated to document the variability of ozone changes better at different scales in space and time.

 

With this information, scientists can better estimate the timing of the ozone layer recovery, and in particular the closure of the ozone hole.

 

Chemistry climate models show that the ozone layer may be building up, and the hole over Antarctica will close in the next decades.

RichardXTyler's curator insight, May 13, 2013 3:10 PM

The natural cycle continues

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New Coal Technology Harnesses Energy Without Burning, Nears Pilot-Scale Development

New Coal Technology Harnesses Energy Without Burning, Nears Pilot-Scale Development | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

A new form of clean coal technology reached an important milestone recently, with the successful operation of a research-scale combustion system at Ohio State University. The technology is now ready for testing at a larger scale.

For 203 continuous hours, the Ohio State combustion unit produced heat from coal while capturing 99 percent of the carbon dioxide produced in the reaction.

 

Liang-Shih Fan

Liang-Shih Fan, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of Ohio State’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory,pioneered the technology called Coal-Direct Chemical Looping (CDCL), which chemically harnesses coal’s energy and efficiently contains the carbon dioxide produced before it can be released into the atmosphere.

 

“In the simplest sense, combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat,” Fan said. “Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment. So we found a way to release the heat without burning. We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the coal never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor.”

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Oceanic Neon Squid Can Fly More Than 100 Feet Through The Air

Oceanic Neon Squid Can Fly More Than 100 Feet Through The Air | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

The Neon Flying Squid propels itself out of the ocean by shooting a jet of water at high pressure, before opening its fins to glide at up to 11.2 metres per second, Jun Yamamoto of Hokkaido University said. Olympic Gold medallist Bolt averaged 10.31 metres a second when he won at the London Games last year. "There were always witnesses and rumours that said squid were seen flying, but no one had clarified how they actually do it. We have proved that it really is true," Yamamoto told AFP. Researchers say is the first time anyone has ever described the mechanism the flying mollusc employs. Yamamoto and his team were tracking a shoal of around 100 squid, part of the Japanese Flying Squid family, in the northwest Pacific, 600 kilometres (370 miles) east of Tokyo, in July 2011. As their boat approached, the 20-centimetre (eight-inch) creatures launched themselves into the air with a powerful jet of water that shot out from their funnel-like stems.

"Once they finish shooting out the water, they glide by spreading out their fins and arms," Yamamoto's team said in a report. "The fins and the web between the arms create aerodynamic lift and keep the squid stable on its flight arc. "As they land back in the water, the fins are all folded back into place to minimise the impact." A picture researchers snapped shows more than 20 of the creatures in full flight above the water, droplets of water from their propulsion jet clearly visible.

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Artificial bone using stem cells and a new lightweight plastic could soon be used to heal shattered limbs

Artificial bone using stem cells and a new lightweight plastic could soon be used to heal shattered limbs | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

The use of bone stem cells combined with a degradable rigid material that inserts into broken bones and encourages real bone to re-grow has been developed at the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton.


Researchers have developed the material with a honeycomb scaffold structure that allows blood to flow through it, enabling stem cells from the patient's bone marrow to attach to the material and grow new bone. Over time, the plastic slowly degrades as the implant is replaced by newly grown bone.


Scientists developed the material by blending three types of plastics. They used a pioneering technique to blend and test hundreds of combinations of plastics, to identify a blend that was robust, lightweight, and able to support bone stem cells. Successful results have been shown in the lab and in animal testing with the focus now moving towards human clinical evaluation.

Richard Oreffo, Professor of Musculoskeletal Science at the University of Southampton, comments: "Fractures and bone loss due to trauma or disease are a significant clinical and socioeconomic problem. This collaboration between chemistry and medicine has identified unique candidate materials that support human bone stem cell growth and allow bone formation. Our collaborative strategy offers significant therapeutic implications."


Professor Mark Bradley, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Chemistry, adds: "We were able to make and look at a hundreds of candidate materials and rapidly whittle these down to one which is strong enough to replace bone and is also a suitable surface upon which to grow new bone. "We are confident that this material could soon be helping to improve the quality of life for patients with severe bone injuries, and will help maintain the health of an ageing population."

Denise Yang's curator insight, August 6, 2014 8:50 PM

Technology is amazing!

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Australian Wind Energy Now Cheaper Than Coal And Gas

Australian Wind Energy Now Cheaper Than Coal And Gas | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Wind is now cheaper than fossil fuels in producing electricity in Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm in Australia at a cost of A$80 ($84) per megawatt hour, compared with A$143 a megawatt hour from a new coal-fired power plant or A$116 from a new station powered by natural gas when the cost of carbon emissions is included, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. Coal-fired power stations built in the 1970s and 1980s can still produce power at a lower cost than that of wind, the research shows.

 

Relying on fossil fuels to produce electricity is getting more expensive because of the government’s price on carbon emissions imposed last year, higher financing costs and rising natural gas prices, BNEF said. The cost of wind generation has fallen by 10 percent since 2011 on lower equipment expenses, while the cost of solar power has dropped by 29 percent.

 

“The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,” Michael Liebreich, chief executive officer of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said in a statement today.

 

AGL Energy Ltd., Australia’s largest developer of renewable energy projects, said in November that it expected the A$1 billion ($1.03 billion) Macarthur wind farm in Victoria state to begin operating fully this month. AGL in October suspended the development of the first stage of its 1,000-megawatt Dalton gas- fired power station in New South Wales after reviewing the economic viability for several months.

 

Driven by hydro- and wind-power projects, renewable energy contributed 9.6 percent of Australia’s electricity production in 2011, up from 8.7 percent the prior year, according to the Clean Energy Council, an industry group.

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Rare 'Strobe Light' Star May Actually Be Twins

Rare 'Strobe Light' Star May Actually Be Twins | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

An odd flashing star may actually be a pair of cosmic twins: two newly formed baby stars that circle each other closely and flash like a strobe light, scientists say.

 

Astronomers discovered the nascent star system, called LRLL 54361, with the infrared Spitzer observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, and say the rare cosmic find could offer a chance to study star formation and early evolution. It is only the third such "strobe light" object ever seen, researchers said.

 

The celestial oddity is located about 950 light-years from Earth and lets out a bright pulse of light every 25.34 days. Hubble telescope scientists said the baby star object (or protostar) is the most powerful such stellar strobe found to date. But understanding what's causing the flashing light is difficult, because the system is hidden behind opaque dust and a dense disk of material.

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A detailed tree of life maps out the evolution of placental mammals

A detailed tree of life maps out the evolution of placental mammals | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

After six years of collaboration between over twenty scientists from research institutions across the country, researchers have completed the most comprehensive picture of mammalian ancestry to date. Using a combination of physical and genetic data, the researchers reconstructed the family tree of placental mammals--a group that now comprises over 5,100 species--and traced its many branches back to a common ancestor.

 

The tree's huge wealth of anatomical data allowed the researchers to reconstruct what that common ancestor probably looked like:

It was mouse-size and grey-brown, with a furry tail. It ate insects. It gave live birth to naked, squirmy babies, and its descendants diversified to fill all the ecological vacancies left by the recently-departed dinosaurs. There were a lot of vacancies, and within just a few hundred thousand years--a blink of the evolutionary eye--the mammalian lineage branched into a wide array of creatures that, in time, would become the ancestors to every placental mammal--from whales to horses to bats to humans--living today.

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Recent study shows clear evidence that moles can smell in stereo

Recent study shows clear evidence that moles can smell in stereo | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Most mammals, including humans, see in stereo and hear in stereo. But whether they can also smell in stereo is the subject of a long-standing scientific controversy.

 

Now, a new study shows definitively that the common mole (Scalopus aquaticus) – the same critter that disrupts the lawns and gardens of homeowners throughout the eastern United States, Canada and Mexico – relies on stereo sniffing to locate its prey. The paper that describes this research, “Stereo and Serial Sniffing Guide Navigation to an Odor Source in a Mammals,” was published on Feb. 5, 2013 in the journal Nature Communications.

 

“I came at this as a skeptic. I thought the moles’ nostrils were too close together to effectively detect odor gradients,” said Kenneth Catania, the Stevenson Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University, who conducted the research.

 

What he found turned his assumptions upside down and opened new areas for potential future research. “The fact that moles use stereo odor cues to locate food suggests other mammals that rely heavily on their sense of smell, like dogs and pigs might also have this ability,” Catania said.

 

Catania’s interest in the common mole’s sense of smell dates back ten years when he was studying the remarkable sense of touch of the common moles’ cousin, the star-nosed mole, which uses a set of fleshy tentacles surrounding its nose to detect edible objects as it burrows. He decided to test the common moles’ capability to find prey for comparison purposes. “I expected the common mole, which is virtually blind and doesn’t have a very good sense of touch, to be a lot worse than the star-nosed mole. So I was quite surprised when they turned out to be very good at locating prey. At the time, I figured that they must be using their sense of smell, but I didn’t pursue the matter.”

 

When the neuroscientist began seriously studying the common moles’ sense of smell last year, he discovered that it was even more remarkable than he had expected.

 

He created a radial arena with food wells spaced around a 180-degree circle with the entrance for the mole located at the center. He then ran a number of trials with the food (pieces of earthworm) placed randomly in different wells. The chamber was temporarily sealed so he could detect each time the mole sniffed by the change in air pressure. “It was amazing. They found the food in less than five seconds and went directly to the right food well almost every time,” Catania said. “They have a hyper-sensitive sense of smell.”

 

The definitive evidence that the moles rely on stereo sniffing came from yet another test. Catania inserted small plastic tubes in both of the moles’ nostrils and crossed them, so the right nostril was sniffing air on the animal’s left and the left nostril was sniffing air on the animal’s right. When their nostrils were crossed in this fashion, the animals searched back and forth and frequently could not find the food at all.

 

As for humans, Catania remains skeptical. “In humans, this is easier to test because you can ask a blindfolded person to tell you which nostril is being stimulated by odors presented with tubes inserted in the nose.” Such studies suggest it is only when an odor is strong enough to irritate the nostril lining that humans can tell which side is most strongly stimulated.

 

 

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4.5 Billion 'Alien Earths' Calculated to Populate Our Own Milky Way

4.5 Billion 'Alien Earths' Calculated to Populate Our Own Milky Way | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Billions of Earth-like alien planets likely reside in our Milky Way galaxy, and the nearest such world may be just a stone's throw away in the cosmic scheme of things, a new study reports.

 

Astronomers have calculated that 6 percent of the galaxy's 75 billion or so red dwarfs — stars smaller and dimmer than the Earth's own sun — probably host habitable, roughly Earth-size planets. That works out to at least 4.5 billion such "alien Earths," the closest of which might be found a mere dozen light-years away, researchers said.

 

"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet," study lead author Courtney Dressing, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said in a statement. "Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted."

 

Dressing and her team analyzed data gathered by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, which is staring continuously at more than 150,000 target stars. Kepler spots alien planets by flagging the tiny brightness dips caused when the planets transit, or cross the face of, their stars from the instrument's perspective.

 

Kepler has detected 2,740 exoplanet candidates since its March 2009 launch. Follow-up observations have confirmed only 105 of these possibilities to date, but mission scientists estimate that more than 90 percent will end up being the real deal.

 

In the new study, Dressing and her colleagues re-analyzed the red dwarfs in Kepler's field of view and found that nearly all are smaller and cooler than previously thought.

 

This new information bears strongly on the search for Earth-like alien planets, since roughly 75 percent of the galaxy's 100 billion or so stars are red dwarfs. 
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Biomimetics: Synthetic cells used to bioengineer new forms of silica

Biomimetics: Synthetic cells used to bioengineer new forms of silica | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Scientists do not fully understand how nature uses proteins to develop new materials and minerals, but learning more about the natural processes could lead to bioengineering methods such as the biological synthesis of solid-state materials for electronics applications. Now researchers in the US have designed a synthetic biological platform to facilitate the study of these processes and genetically engineer new materials.

The scientists, led by Professor Emeritus Daniel E. Morse of the University of California, Santa Barbara, created synthetic cells containing a polystyrene micro-bead as a nucleus. They then created DNA segments containing genes from two related silicateins along with random mutations and attached a piece of this DNA to each plastic bead. They soaked each bead in a mixture of bacterial proteins required by the synthetic cells to manufacture silicateins, and surrounded the beads with oil to act as the cell membrane.


Silicateins are biomineralizing proteins found in marine sponges that synthesize silica (silicon dioxide) and titania (titanium dioxide) materials. The marine sponge Tethya aurantia, for example, produces silica spicules that make up 75 percent of its dry weight. Silica is commonly used in computer chips, while titania is used in photovoltaic solar cells.


The synthetic cells manufactured silicateins, which appeared on the nuclear bead’s surface attached to antibodies. The researchers then ruptured the artificial cells to release the silicateins, and soaked them in a solution containing the silica or titania precursors. The resulting minerals formed a coating on the beads.


The researchers then set out to direct the evolution of the synthetic cells. They first sorted the beads to identify those with DNA coding for proteins making particularly strong minerals. They sorted them by size, with those having the thickest layers of minerals being selected. They then shook the selected beads to break up the minerals, and selected only those beads that survived this process.


Thirty genes randomly selected from the DNA for either silica- or titania-forming enzymes in the selected beads were then sequenced. They found that the genes contained sequences common to the two original silicatein genes, but they also identified new genes that were completely different from the initial genes. The original genes coded for silicatein alpha, which manufactures silica in clumps of particles. The new genes coded for proteins that produced silica and titania in a dispersed nanoparticle form. One of the new proteins, silicatein X1, manufactured silica in the form of folded sheets of silica-protein fibers.

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Brain research provides clues to what makes people think and behave differently from each other

Brain research provides clues to what makes people think and behave differently from each other | Amazing Science | Scoop.it

Differences in the physical connections of the brain are at the root of what make people think and behave differently from one another. Researchers reporting in the February 6 issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron shed new light on the details of this phenomenon, mapping the exact brain regions where individual differences occur. Their findings reveal that individuals' brain connectivity varies more in areas that relate to integrating information than in areas for initial perception of the world.

 

"Understanding the normal range of individual variability in the human brain will help us identify and potentially treat regions likely to form abnormal circuitry, as manifested in neuropsychiatric disorders," says senior author Dr. Hesheng Liu, of the Massachusetts General Hospital.

 

Dr. Liu and his colleagues used an imaging technique called resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine person-to-person variability of brain connectivity in 23 healthy individuals five times over the course of six months.

 

The researchers discovered that the brain regions devoted to control and attention displayed a greater difference in connectivity across individuals than the regions dedicated to our senses like touch and sight. When they looked at other published studies, the investigators found that brain regions previously shown to relate to individual differences in cognition and behavior overlap with the regions identified in this study to have high variability among individuals. The researchers were therefore able to pinpoint the areas of the brain where variable connectivity causes people to think and behave differently from one another.

 

Higher rates of variability across individuals were also displayed in regions of the brain that have undergone greater expansion during evolution. "Our findings have potential implications for understanding brain evolution and development," says Dr. Liu. "This study provides a possible linkage between the diversity of human abilities and evolutionary expansion of specific brain regions," he adds.

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