Amazing Science

An international team of astronomers has discovered 165 new ultracool brown dwarfs — objects that have a size between that of a gas giant and that of a small star — within about 160 light-years of the Sun. The paper reporting these results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

Brown dwarfs are cool, dim objects that are difficult to detect and hard to classify. Sometimes called failed stars, they are too small to sustain hydrogen fusion reactions at their cores, yet they have star-like attributes. Typically, brown dwarfs have masses between 13 and 80 Jupiters — too massive to be planets, yet they possess some planet-like characteristics.

Their temperatures can range from nearly as hot as a star to as cool as a planet. Discovering new brown dwarfs will help astronomers to better quantify the frequency at which they occur both in the solar neighborhood and beyond.

Knowing the abundance and distribution of these objects provides key information on the distribution of mass in the Universe, and on the mechanism of brown dwarf formation, for example, whether they form in isolation or instead are ejected from larger planetary systems.

To that end, Dr. Jasmin Robert of the Université de Montréal and his colleagues from Canada and the United States believed that although hundreds of ultracool brown dwarfs have already been discovered, the techniques used to identify them were overlooking those with more-unusual compositions, which would not show up in the color-based surveys generally used.

So the scientists surveyed 28% of the sky and discovered 165 ultracool brown dwarfs (M, L and T types, with temperatures under 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,930 degrees Celsius) in the solar neighborhood.

“Everyone will benefit from the study of brown dwarfs, because they can often be found in isolation, which means that we can more easily gather precise data on their properties without a bright star blinding our instruments,” said team member Dr. Jonathan Gagné, from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and the Institute for Research on Exoplanets at the Université de Montréal.

The majestic auroras have captivated humans for thousands of years, but their nature -- the fact that the lights are electromagnetic and respond to solar activity -- was only realized in the last 150 years.

Thanks to coordinated multi-satellite observations and a worldwide network of magnetic sensors and cameras, close study of auroras has become possible over recent decades. Yet, auroras continue to mystify, dancing far above the ground to some, thus far, undetected rhythm. Using data from NASA's Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms, or THEMIS, scientists have observed Earth's vibrating magnetic field in relation to the northern lights dancing in the night sky over Canada.

THEMIS is a five-spacecraft mission dedicated to understanding the processes behind auroras, which erupt across the sky in response to changes in Earth's magnetic environment, called the magnetosphere.

These new observations allowed scientists to directly link specific intense disturbances in the magnetosphere to the magnetic response on the ground. A paper on these findings was published in Nature Physics on Sept. 12, 2016.

"We've made similar observations before, but only in one place at a time - on the ground or in space," said David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who did not participate in the study. "When you have the measurements in both places, you can relate the two things together."

Understanding how and why auroras occur helps us learn more about the complex space environment around our planet. Radiation and energy in near-Earth space can have a variety of effects on our satellites - from disrupting their electronics to increasing frictional drag and interrupting communication or navigation signals. As our dependence on GPS grows and space exploration expands, accurate space weather forecasting becomes ever more important.

The space environment of our entire solar system, both near Earth and far beyond Pluto, is determined by the sun's activity, which cycles and fluctuates through time. The solar system is filled with solar wind, the constant flow of charged particles from the sun. Most of the solar wind is deflected from Earth by our planet's protective magnetosphere.

The second-largest meteorite ever found has been exhumed outside the small Argentinian town of Gancedo. The 30-ton rock, named after the town, was discovered on September 10 and dug up by an excavation team which was shocked by its massive size.

"While we hoped for weights above what had been registered, we did not expect it to exceed 30 tons," Astronomy Association of Chaco president Mario Vesconi said. It is believed to have crashed to earth about 4,000 years ago as part of an iron meteorite shower covering hundreds of square kilometers, 1,000km north-west of Buenos Aires at a site now known as Campo del Cielo.

The original asteroid is estimated to have weighed about 600 tons and entered Earth's atmosphere at 14,000 kilometers per hour, where it broke up into a shower of smaller meteorites, according to Scientific American.

HD 133131, also known as HIP 73674, is located approximately 163 light-years from Earth. This binary system was discovered in 1972 by University of Chile astronomers Jurgen Stock and Herbert Wroblewski.

Scientists estimate its age at 9.5 billion years, compared to 4.6 billion years for our Sun. The two components of this binary, HD 133131A and HD 133131B, are ‘twins’ of identical spectral type, G2V, which is the same as the Sun.

The stars are separated by only 360 AU (astronomical units), making them the most closely separated ‘twin’ pair with detected planets. The next-closest binary system that hosts planets is comprised of two stars that are about 1,000 AU apart.

This system is even more rare in that both ‘twins’ host planets. HD 133131A hosts two moderately eccentric planets, labeled b and c. The planets are about 1.4 and 0.6 times the mass of Jupiter, respectively, and orbit their parent star at 1.44 and 4.79 AU.

HD 133131B hosts one moderately eccentric planet, labeled b. The planet has 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star at a distance of 6.4 AU.

The HD 133131 system is also unusual because both components are ‘metal poor,’ meaning that most of their mass is hydrogen and helium, as opposed to other elements like iron or oxygen.

Most stars that host giant planets are ‘metal rich.’ Only six other metal-poor binary systems with exoplanets have ever been found, making this discovery especially intriguing.

The temperature of the Earth’s crust ranges considerably. At its outer edge, where it meets the atmosphere, the crust’s temperature is the same temperature as that of the air. So, it might be as hot as 35 °C in the desert and below freezing in Antarctica. On average, the surface of the Earth’s crust experiences temperatures of about 14°C.

However, the hottest temperature ever recorded was 70.7°C (159°F), which was taken in the Lut Desert of Iran as part of a global temperature survey conducted by scientists at NASA’s Earth Observatory. Meanwhile, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was measured at the Soviet Vostok Station on the Antarctic Plateau – which reached an historic low of -89.2°C (-129°F) on July 21st, 1983.

That’s quite the range already. But consider the fact that the majority of the Earth’s crust lies beneath the oceans. Far from the Sun, temperatures can reach as low as 0-3° C (32-37.5° F) where the water reaches the crust. Still, a lot balmier than a cold night in Antarctica!

The University of Toronto today launched a massive project to sequence the whole genomes of 10,000 people per year, positioning Toronto as a leader in the global race to understand complex diseases.

With the population of Toronto among the most diverse in the world, the project will provide an unusual breadth of genetic material to study, said Professor Stephen Scherer, director of U of T’s McLaughlin Centre and the Centre for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids). He said the move will accelerate the big data revolution and create a new generation of precision therapies.  

“With sequencing now married to large-scale computation, I believe we in Toronto can help lead the way for precision medicine. Genomic information is the new oil. It’s the resource that’s going to drive technology in the new era.

“We’re generating the oil that researchers will use to enable discoveries and to create new products in software, biotechnology and information management that will realize precision medicine.”

Information is the new oil.

Geologic strain of tides during full and new moons could increase magnitude of tremors.

Big earthquakes, such as the ones that devastated Chile in 2010 and Japan in 2011, are more likely to occur during full and new moons — the two times each month when tidal stresses are highest.

Earth’s tides, which are caused by a gravitational tug-of-war involving the Moon and the Sun, put extra strain on geological faults. Seismologists have tried for decades to understand whether that stress could trigger quakes. They generally agree that the ocean’s twice-daily high tides can affect tiny, slow-motion tremors in certain places, including California’s San Andreas fault1 and the Cascadia region2 of the North American west coast.

But a new study, published on 12 September in Nature Geoscience3, looks at much larger patterns involving the twice-monthly tides that occur during full and new moons. It finds that the fraction of high magnitude earthquakes goes up globally as tidal stresses rise.

Satoshi Ide, a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues investigated three separate earthquake records covering Japan, California and the entire globe. For the 15 days leading up to each quake, the scientists assigned a number representing the relative tidal stress on that day, with 15 representing the highest. They found that large quakes such as those that hit Chile and Tohoku-Oki occurred near the time of maximum tidal strain — or during new and full moons when the Sun, Moon and Earth align.

For more than 10,000 earthquakes of around magnitude 5.5, the researchers found, an earthquake that began during a time of high tidal stress was more likely to grow to magnitude 8 or above.

An international team including Rice University researchers has discovered a way to fight the overexpression of a protein associated with the proliferation of breast cancer. Dialing down the level of the protein NAF-1 and the activity of the iron-sulfur clusters it transports may be key to halting tumor growth, they reported.

In a study this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers suggest a drug that is typically used to treat type 2 diabetes, pioglitazone, has proven effective at controlling NAF-1 levels. They also discovered that a single mutation to NAF-1 almost completely blocked the ability of cancer cells to proliferate, a result they said supports the idea that lowering NAF-1 expression can help stop tumors.

Fine-tuning the drug to specifically address tumors could bring a new weapon to the battle against breast cancer and other cancers, the researchers said. Overexpression of NAF-1 also has been associated with prostate, gastric, cervical, liver and laryngeal cancer, they said.

José Onuchic, Rice’s Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Chair of Physics and professor of physics and astronomy and co-director of the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), worked with Rice research scientist Mingyang Lu, Rice postdoc Fang Bai and scientists from Israel, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of North Texas on a multifaceted approach to define the role of NAF-1 in breast cancers.

Understanding the mechanism will help the Rice researchers improve computer simulations to aid in the rapid design and testing of novel drugs, Onuchic said. NAF-1 is a member of the NEET family of proteins; these proteins transport clusters of iron and sulfur molecules inside cells. The clusters help regulate processes in cells by controlling reduction-oxidation (redox) and metabolic activity. They naturally adhere to the outer surface of the mitochondria, the “power plant” that supplies cells with chemical energy.

Experiments demonstrated that the overexpression of NAF-1 in breast cancer tumors enhanced cancer cells’ ability to tolerate oxidative stress. That enhancement allowed the tumors to become much larger and more aggressive, said Ron Mittler, a professor of biological sciences at the University of North Texas.

“Now that we know tumors that overexpress this protein are more sensitive to this type of drug, we can design new drugs in a way that will attack the clusters,” Mittler said.

The most stunning panoramic vistas likely ever snapped by NASA’s Curiosity rover reveal spectacularly layered Martian rock formations in such exquisite detail that they look and feel just like America’s desert Southwest landscapes. They were just captured a week ago and look like a scene straight out of the hugely popular science fiction movie ‘The Martian’ – only they are real !!

Indeed several magnificent panoramas were taken by Curiosity in just the past week and you can see our newly stitched mosaic versions of several – above and below. The rock formations lie in the “Murray Buttes” region of lower Mount Sharp where Curiosity has been exploring for roughly the past month. She just finished a campaign of detailed science observations and is set to bore a new sampling hole into the Red Planet, as you read this.

While scouting around the “Murray Buttes,” the SUV sized rover captured thousands of color and black and white raw images to document the geology of this thus far most unrivaled spot on the Red Planet ever visited by an emissary from Earth.

So the image processing team of Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo has begun stitching together wide angle mosaic views starting with images gathered by the high resolution mast mounted Mastcam right color camera, or M-100, on Sept, 8, 2016, or Sol 1454 of the robots operations on Mars.

For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries.

The NCI-supported Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a consortium of biomedical investigators who share anonymized data on cancer biomarkers, chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers. Their goal is to pool all their research data into a single, searchable network, with the goal of translating their collective work into techniques for early diagnosis of cancer or cancer risk.

In the time they’ve worked together, JPL and EDRN’s efforts have led to the discovery of six new Food and Drug Administration-approved cancer biomarkers and nine biomarkers approved for use in Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments labs. The FDA has approved each of these biomarkers for use in cancer research and diagnosis. These agency-approved biomarkers have been used in more than 1 million patient diagnostic tests worldwide.

“After the founding of EDRN in 2000, the network needed expertise to take data from multiple studies on cancer biomarkers and create a single, searchable network of research findings for scientists,” said Sudhir Srivastava, chief of NCI’s Cancer Biomarkers Research Group and head of EDRN. JPL had decades of experience doing similar work for NASA, where spacecraft transmit hundreds of petabytes of data to be coded, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe.

Dan Crichton, the head of JPL’s Center for Data Science and Technology, a joint initiative with Caltech in Pasadena, California, helped establish a JPL-based informatics center dedicated to supporting EDRN’s big data efforts. In the renewed partnership, JPL is expanding its data science efforts to research and applying technologies for additional NCI-funded programs. Those programs include EDRN, the Consortium for Molecular and Cellular Characterization of Screen-Detected Lesions, and the Informatics Technology for Cancer Research initiative.

A New York neuroscience summit aims to coordinate big money brain projects around the world, but will delegates agree on the field's top priorities?

As brainy gatherings go, it takes some beating. Neuroscientists are meeting in New York today to agree on a global mission to understand the workings of the human brain and how to fix it when something goes wrong. The lofty aim of the Coordinating Global Brain Projects meeting is to unify worldwide efforts to study the brain, in the same way that international collaborations have spurred on astronomy, physics and genetics.

“Neuroscience is coming of age, and it’s now ready for big science,” says Rafael Yuste at Columbia University in New York, who organised today’s meeting with Cori Bargmann at Rockefeller University, also in New York. “This is the first real meeting with all the players in the same room together,” says Yuste.

Among those invited are representatives from charities, private companies and national brain research initiatives. The Global Brain Initiative they want to develop will decide which projects and goals to prioritise, as well as how they should be funded.

”We hope to learn what all the active and planned brain projects are around the world,” says Bargmann. “And we want all leaders of these projects to meet in person, so there’s a human connection for future collaboration,” she says. Yuste hopes that the meeting will establish a standing committee made up of representatives from all the main players. <

Many big, long-term brain research projects have been established worldwide in recent years, including the $6 billionUS BRAIN Initiative, and Europe’s €1 billion Human Brain Project.

Other regions are now entering the fray, with China and Japan both launching major initiatives earlier this year thatseek to understand the human brain by studying monkeys. “China is the big player that hasn’t yet put its cards on the table,” says Yuste.

Reconciling these programmes’ priorities and methods may prove a challenge. There is vociferous opposition to research on primate research in several Western nations, where neuroscientists now tend to work with flies, worms, mice and fish instead. But in China and Japan, research is more focused on primates, our closest animal relatives.

China’s top priority is to discover the basis of human cognition, with new medical treatments and spin-off benefits for computing as secondary goals. The US BRAIN Initiative, by contrast, is focused firmly on providing better resources and tools for experiments, rather than dictating research priorities.

Whatever the differences, the imperative to come together is strong, says Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who will wrap up the meeting later today. “We need to unite behind a coordinated international brain project bringing together the world’s best and brightest scientists and engineers,” he says.