Mighty Dons Of Science News

As­tro­no­mers have re­ported find­ing as many as six plan­ets, not many times heav­i­er than Earth, or­bit­ing two near­by Sun-like stars.
The ob­jects, which in­clude two that are about 5 and 7.5 times as heavy as Earth, are rais­ing sci­en­tists’ hopes that it will be just a few years that plan­ets very much like ours turn up.

Image from a sci­en­tists' an­i­ma­tion of the 5-Earth-mass plan­et 61 Vir B, or­bit­ing the star 61 Vir­gi­nis. This plan­et moves in a tight, 4-day or­bit around its star. Half of the plan­et sur­face is much hot­ter than the oth­er half be­cause one side al­ways faces the star. (Cour­tesy U. Hert­ford­shire)

The re­search­ers, led by Ste­ven Vogt of the Un­ivers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz, and Paul But­ler of the Car­ne­gie In­sti­tu­tion of Wash­ing­ton, said the two “super-Earths” are the first ones found around Sun-like stars.

“These de­tec­tions in­di­cate that low-mass plan­ets are quite com­mon around near­by stars. The dis­cov­ery of po­ten­tially hab­it­a­ble near­by worlds may be just a few years away,” said Vogt. As­tro­no­mers claim they’re over­com­ing past dif­fi­cul­ties in find­ing smaller plan­ets, which are more like ours in size and are con­sid­ered like­li­er to be hab­it­a­ble than large plan­ets.

The team found the new plan­et sys­tems by com­bin­ing da­ta gath­ered at the W. M. Keck Ob­serv­a­to­ry in Ha­waii and the An­glo-Aus­tral­ia Tel­e­scope in New South Wales, Aus­tral­ia. Two pa­pers de­scrib­ing the new plan­ets have been ac­cept­ed for pub­lica­t­ion in the As­t­ro­phys­i­cal Jour­nal.

Three of the new plan­ets or­bit the bright star 61 Vir­gi­nis, vis­i­ble with the na­ked eye un­der dark skies in the Spring con­stella­t­ion Vir­go. Space sci­en­tists have long been fas­ci­nat­ed with this star, which is a re­la­tive­ly close 28 light years away (a light year is the dis­tance light trav­els in a year). Among hun­dreds of our near­est stel­lar neigh­bors, 61 Vir stands out as be­ing the most nearly si­m­i­lar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and oth­er es­sen­tial prop­er­ties.

Vogt and col­leagues have found that 61 Vir hosts at least three plan­ets, weigh­ing in the range of about 5 to 25 Earths. All would be ex­treme­ly hot, though, as they are well with­in orbits equi­va­lent to that of Ve­nus.

Re­cent­ly, a sep­a­rate team of as­tro­no­mers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Tel­e­scope to dis­cov­er that 61 Vir al­so con­tains a thick ring of dust at a dis­tance roughly twice as far from 61 Vir as Plu­to is from our Sun. The dust is ap­par­ently cre­at­ed by col­li­sions of comet-like bod­ies in the cold out­er reaches of the sys­tem.

“Spitzer’s de­tec­tion of cold dust or­bit­ing 61 Vir in­di­cates that there’s a real kin­ship be­tween the Sun and 61 Vir,” said Eu­ge­nio Ri­ve­ra of the Un­ivers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz. Ri­ve­ra com­put­ed an ex­ten­sive set of sim­ula­t­ions to find that a hab­it­a­ble Earth-like world could easily ex­ist in the as-yet un­ex­plored re­gion be­tween the newly dis­cov­ered plan­ets and the out­er dust disk.

Ac­cord­ing to Vogt, the plan­etary sys­tem around 61 Vir is an ex­cel­lent can­di­date for study by the new Au­to­mat­ed Plan­et Find­er Tel­e­scope re­cently con­structed at Lick Ob­serv­a­to­ry on Mount Ham­il­ton near San Jose, Ca­lif. “Need­less to say, we’re very ex­cit­ed to con­tin­ue mon­i­tor­ing this sys­tem” us­ing that de­vice, said Vogt, who is the prin­ci­pal in­ves­ti­ga­tor for the tel­e­scope.

The sec­ond new sys­tem found by the team fea­tures a plan­et weigh­ing the equiv­a­lent of about 7.5 Earths and or­bit­ing the star HD 1461, anoth­er near per­fect twin of the Sun about 76 light-years away. The plan­et, des­ig­nat­ed HD 1461b, is about half­way be­tween Earth and Ura­nus in weight. The re­search­ers said they can­not tell yet if it’s a scaled-up ver­sion of Earth, com­posed largely of rock and iron, or wheth­er, like Ura­nus and Nep­tune, it is made mostly of wa­ter.

At least one and pos­sibly two ad­di­tion­al plan­ets al­so or­bit the star, the group said. Ly­ing in the con­stella­t­ion Ce­tus, HD 1461 can be seen with the na­ked eye in the early eve­ning un­der good dark-sky con­di­tions.

The Lick Car­ne­gie Exoplan­et Sur­vey Team led by Vogt and But­ler uses ve­locity mea­sure­ments from ground-based tel­e­scopes to de­tect the “wob­ble” in­duced in a star by the gravita­t­ional tug of an or­bit­ing plan­et. In the past year, im­prov­ing meth­ods have made it ev­i­dent that plan­ets or­bit­ing the Sun’s near­est neigh­bors are ex­tremely com­mon: cur­rent in­dica­t­ions are that fully half of near­by stars have a de­tectable plan­et with mass equal to or less than Nep­tune’s, But­ler said.

The Lick-Car­ne­gie Exoplan­et Sur­vey Team has de­vel­oped a pub­licly avail­a­ble tool, the Sys­tem­ic Con­sole, which en­ables mem­bers of the pub­lic to search for the sig­nals of ex­tra­so­lar plan­ets by ex­plor­ing real da­ta sets. This tool is avail­a­ble on­line at www.ok­lo.org.

De­spite pop­u­lar con­cep­tions about the hor­mone tes­tos­ter­one, in wom­en, at least, the sub­stance ac­tu­ally may pro­mote fair, con­cil­ia­to­ry be­hav­ior, re­search­ers say.

But the myths about tes­tos­ter­one are so pow­er­ful that wom­en in a study started act­ing less fairly if they thought they had re­ceived a dose of it, wheth­er they had or not.

Such are the find­ings of a study ap­pear­ing in the Dec. 8 ad­vance on­line is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture.

Test­os­terone is often called the “male” hor­mone and is po­pu­lar­ly asso­ciated with aggres­sion. Wom­en have some test­os­terone also, though.

Ernst Fehr of the Un­ivers­ity of Zu­rich, Switz­er­land, and col­leagues set up a bar­gain­ing game in which fe­male par­ti­ci­pants were giv­en a pill ei­ther of tes­tos­ter­one or of a neu­tral sub­stance, called a pla­ce­bo.

Those that re­ceived tes­tos­ter­one showed a “sub­stan­ti­al in­crease in fair bar­gain­ing be­haviour,” lead­ing to better so­cial in­ter­ac­tions, the re­search­ers wrote. But wom­en who thought that they re­ceived tes­tos­ter­one, wheth­er or not they ac­tu­ally did, “be­haved much more un­fair­ly” than those who thought that they re­ceived pla­ce­bo.

So, the neg­a­tive, an­ti­so­cial con­nota­t­ion of in­creas­ing tes­tos­ter­one lev­els seems to be strong enough to in­duce neg­a­tive so­cial be­hav­iour even when the bi­o­log­i­cal re­sult is ac­tu­ally the op­po­site, the sci­en­tists re­marked.

Ev­i­dence from an­i­mal stud­ies does show that tes­tos­ter­one causes ag­gres­sion to­ward oth­er mem­bers of the spe­cies, Fehr and col­leagues wrote. Pop­u­lar wis­dom tends to as­sume hu­mans work the same way. But it has been un­clear wheth­er this is cor­rect.

Stud­ies have in­deed found that male and fe­male pris­on­ers with vi­o­lent his­to­ries have high­er sal­i­vary tes­tos­ter­one lev­els than nonvi­o­lent pris­on­ers, the re­search­ers not­ed. But this does not show that the tes­tos­ter­one ac­tu­ally caused the vi­o­lence.

A com­pet­ing idea, they ob­served, is that tes­tos­ter­one mo­ti­vates peo­ple to seek high so­cial sta­tus. De­pend­ing on the situa­t­ion, they may try to achieve that ei­ther through vi­o­lence or through fair­ness.

In the con­text of the ex­pe­ri­men­tal bar­gain­ing game, fair­ness tended to help pro­tect so­cial sta­tus, ac­cord­ing to Fehr and col­leagues.

In the “ul­ti­ma­tum game,” as it was called, two play­ers are pre­sented with a sum of mon­ey, which they can keep if they can agree on how to split it. The catch is that just one play­er gets to pro­pose—and only on­ce—how it should be di­vid­ed. The oth­er play­er must ac­cept or re­ject that of­fer. “Fair” of­fers, such as an even split, tend to be more readily ac­cepted than “un­fair” of­fers where the pro­pos­er tries to keep most of the mon­ey. Fehr and col­leagues sug­gested that tes­tos­ter­one mo­ti­vat­ed play­ers to pro­pose “fair­er” of­fers in or­der to avoid the so­cial af­front of re­jection.

Humans and mice have previously unknown and potentially critical differences in one of the genes responsible for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology have found that two major features of a key DMD gene are present in most mammals, including humans, but are specifically absent in mice and rats, calling into question the use of the mouse as the principal model animal for studying DMD.

Roland Roberts led a team of researchers from King's College London, UK, and was funded by the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. The team made the discovery while studying α-dystrobrevin, a component of the dystrophin protein complex that is disordered in DMD. Roberts said, "Two previously unrecognized features (a gene switch or promoter and a novel binding site for the adaptor protein syntrophin) are encoded by the α-dystrobrevin gene of almost all four-legged animals except mice. We assume that this tardy recognition of key features of a gene that has been intensively studied since its discovery 13 years ago is due to the predominance of the mouse as the model organism for studying DMD and the specific destruction of these parts of the gene in the mouse."

A major consequence of these findings is that mice (and their rat and hamster relatives) are likely to be particularly poor models in which to study the effects of DMD on the brain. Roberts added, "The brain is the major site of α-dystrobrevin expression and we now know that the mouse is missing more than 50% of the brain α-dystrobrevins. The fact that there are fundamental differences between the brains of mice and humans potentially limits our understanding of the role of dystrobrevins and DMD-related complexes in this organ. In fact, almost all of our knowledge of the function of α-dystrobrevin has been gleaned from the mouse."

DMD is a fatal skeletal myopathy, causing loss of muscle tissue throughout the body. It is also associated with substantial neurological effects including learning difficulties, night blindness, defective color vision and a suggestion of personality disorders, so studying the mechanisms in the brain underlying these effects is crucial.

A chemical culprit responsible for the rapid, mysterious death of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic Ocean has been found by collaborating scientists at Rutgers University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). This same chemical may hold unexpected promise in cancer research.
A photomicrograph of an Emiliania huxleyi cell. The black spots within the cell are the virus, which contains a previously unknown lipid that is killing phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. (Credit: V. Starovoytov and A. Vardi, Rutgers University)

The team discovered a previously unknown lipid, or fatty compound, in a virus that has been attacking and killing Emiliania huxleyi, a phytoplankton that plays a major role in the global carbon cycle.

"Emiliania huxleyi is the rock star of phytoplankton," explains Kay Bidle, Rutgers assistant professor of marine science in the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. "It blooms all over the oceans, and we can easily see it by satellite. We know that these blooms are frequently infected with viruses, and this virus is specific to this phytoplankton."

"The lipids are the key ingredient in the virus that causes the phytoplankton to die," says WHOI scientist Benjamin Van Mooy. "We have a completely different lipid molecule that, as far as we know, is unknown to science."

E. huxleyi grows rapidly in the North Atlantic, "in these big blooms that you can actually see from outer space," Van Mooy says.

"But," adds Van Mooy, "they die just almost as quickly as they start out, and we're not sure why. They die after a few days."

Bidle and Assaf Vardi, a postdoctoral investigator in his laboratory and the study's lead author, had been examining the interaction between the virus and the dying phytoplankton and had developed ideas for how this process works. After Vardi heard lipid expert Van Mooy give a talk in Santa Fe, N.M., he suggested the collaboration between WHOI and Rutgers.

"I saw Ben's talk on marine microbes and lipids…[and] I ran after him," said Vardi. "We told him about our ideas" involving the virus's effect on the phytoplankton.

"They studied the viruses and I study lipids," Van Mooy said. "It seemed like a good mix."

Their paper is published in the Nov. 6 issue of Science., E. huxleyi performs photosynthesis -- "just like plants," says Van Mooy. "They suck up carbon dioxide." In doing so, they reduce the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere. They form a calcium carbonate shell, also helping to regulate the carbon cycle.

If viruses are killing off phytoplankton, this can increase greenhouse emissions, Van Mooy suggests. "That's important because if viruses infect a whole bunch of cells, then they can't perform photosynthesis, they can't take up carbon dioxide."

In April 2008, Van Mooy's team visited the sites of E. huxleyi blooms during a research cruise between Woods Hole and Bermuda and collected samples for lipid analysis back in the laboratory.

They immediately recognized lipids that were just like those in virally infected E. huxleyi cells grown by the Rutgers team. Helen Fredricks, a research associate with Van Mooy, carried out the lipid analyses at WHOI. "Seeing this viral lipid appear during the course of infection was amazing, and then we found it in the ocean too. We were celebrating in the lab that day."

Adds Vardi: "Viruses are really important players in regulating phytoplankton blooms. We zoom into the bloom and try to understand the interaction between the viruses and host, which is this really important, cosmopolitan, bloom-forming species."

After isolating the viral lipids, the team found that the lipids alone were able to bring about the symptoms of viral infection in the phytoplankton. "The lipids themselves act just like the virus," says Van Mooy. "We can cause the phytoplankton to die by just giving the lipids."

This alone was enough to excite the team. "Now we have a biological marker that we can go out on a ship and look for and identify where this [infection of phytoplankton] is happening and learn how to study it better," Van Mooy says.

But there may be other, even farther-reaching implications. Both the virus and the newly found lipid deal their deadly blow by causing the upper-ocean plants to commit cellular suicide. As a major focus of their research at Rutgers, Bidle's lab has found that "programmed cell death" is an important process in the fate of marine phytoplankton and in the demise of blooms in the oceans. Bidle's group had previously found that successful infection of E. huxleyi induced, and actually required, the programmed cell death pathway.

But programmed cell death is not unique to phytoplankton. It is a common and healthy process in all kinds of cells, including human cells.

According to Vardi, "These lipids can induce programmed cell death in many organisms, including animals and plants. They also enrich in plasma membrane, and they are the port of the cell, where pathogens get in and out of the cell. This is important in viral diseases."

There is also a potential connection with cancer. If a healthy cell is stressed or damaged, usually it will kill itself with programmed cell death. But cancer cells have a defect: "They don't kill themselves," says Bidle.

"It's a critical aspect of cancer research, because cancer cells have figured out a way to turn off the programmed cell death pathway," he says. "In cancer studies, they try to figure out ways to reactivate those pathways."

The lipid may help shed light on why cancer cells are unable to commit suicide. Someday, the researchers say, it might suggest ways to correct that defect. Right now, the lipid is only known to be effective in algae, but in the future, the team is hoping to test the effectiveness of their molecule in experiments with cancer cells.

"There's a long way to go between here and curing cancer," Van Mooy says, "but the potential exists that this molecule could have therapeutic applications in the treatment of human disease, including cancer. Hopefully this paper will pique the interest of other investigators."

More immediately, scientists hope to learn more about the central role phytoplankton -- and viruses -- play in regulating climate. Bidle says this is a particularly interesting virus. "It appears that the virus has…borrowed, copied actually, the genes for this lipid from the host," he says. "Similar genes are still on the host, but the virus has figured out a way to take those genes and put them into its own genome, and alter them enough to make them more toxic."

"We find the biosynthetic pathway for this unique lipid encoded in the virus genome, not only in the host, and this has never been described before in any other virus," Vardi says. "We knew that [lipids] were important, but we were really intrigued about why the virus contained these genes. And what is the role of the pathway in the co-evolution of programmed cell death in the host and virus."

Van Mooy sees it as a struggle between two mighty forces. "The phytoplankton are at one end of the boxing ring and they're taking up carbon dioxide, and the viruses are at the other end, and they're out to kill them. And how that works out controls how much carbon dioxide is taken up.

"We're very interested in understanding what controls these phytoplankton," he says. "I didn't know that much about viruses until I started working on this project and the Rutgers researchers didn't know that much about lipids. So now we're both really onto something here. We're continuing to collaborate. "We have found other interesting lipids from these viruses," says Van Mooy.

"There are probably more out there. And who knows what kind of activities they may be involved with. They may hold a cure for a human disease or they may play unknown role in…phytoplankton.

Scripps Research Institute scientist describes a new, highly pragmatic approach to the identification of molecules that prevent a specific type of immune cells from attacking their host. The findings add a powerful new tool to the ongoing search for potential treatments for autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), as well as blood cancers, such as myeloid leukemia.

The study by Thomas Kodadek, a professor in the Chemistry and Cancer Biology Departments at Scripps Florida, and colleagues was published in the journal Chemistry & Biology.

In the new study, Kodadek and his colleagues used samples from an animal model of multiple sclerosis to screen for T cells -- a type of white blood cell that plays a central role in the immune system -- with a heightened presence in the disease. The screen also identified molecules that interfere with these T cells' "autoreactivity," in other words, their attack on the body itself rather than a foreign invader such as virus or bacteria.

"Our technique simultaneously uncovers and isolates autoreactive T cells as well as inhibitors to them," Kodadek said. "It's a double whammy. At the heart of this is a comparative screening process of normal T cells versus disease-causing T cells. While the process is technically complicated and difficult, the thinking behind it is not. We wanted to simplify the process of identifying compounds that could inhibit autoreactive T cells with exceptional specificity, and we succeeded."

The scientists used a model of MS, an autoimmune inflammatory disease affecting the brain and spinal cord, for the study. In MS, the immune system attacks the myelin sheath covering and protecting nerve cells, leading to a variety of symptoms depending on which part of the nervous system is affected. Common symptoms of the condition include fatigue; numbness; walking, balance, and coordination problems; bladder and bowel dysfunction; vision problems; dizziness and vertigo; sexual dysfunction; pain; cognitive problems; emotional changes; and spasticity.

Simplifying the Process

In setting up the new method to shed light on such autoimmune diseases and other disorders, Kodadek and his colleagues created a large collection of peptoids -- molecules related to, but more stable than, the peptides that make up proteins. By arranging thousands of peptoids on a microscope slide, the pattern of binding antibodies (a type of immune molecule) and peptoids can be visualized. By looking at samples from animal models of a known disease like MS, peptoids that bind to antibodies closely associated with that disease can be easily recognized.

Better still, peptoids that bind to autoreactive T cells can be identified without knowledge of the specific antigen (molecule triggering the immune attack), providing an unbiased method with which to search for potentially useful compounds.

Most autoimmune research has focused on finding the disease-causing antigens first, Kodadek said, a Quixote-like quest that has lasted more than four decades with little success to show for it.

"With our process, it doesn't really matter what the antigen is," said Kodadek, a 2006 recipient of the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award, which is designed to support individual scientists of exceptional creativity. "That was really the breakthrough. We're setting up a system that recognizes T cell receptors that are very abundant in a sick animal and at low levels in a healthy animal. Why the abundance? Because that's what making them sick."

Potential for Therapeutic Discovery

The new process creates new potential for therapeutic discovery. Molecules that target autoreactive T cells directly, while ignoring those T cells that recognize foreign antigens, could serve as the foundation for a novel drug development program aimed at eradicating autoreactive cells without affecting the normal function of the immune system.

"Almost without exception, drugs currently used to treat autoimmune conditions either inhibit something downstream of the autoimmune response itself, like inflammation, or they moderate the immune system non-selectively and that results in significant side effects," Kodadek said.

However, the new study isn't the final answer, according to Kodadek. He noted that the recent study used a model of MS triggered by a single antigen. In humans, there could be two -- or two dozen -- antigens triggering an autoimmune disease such as MS. This calls for further research. The method may be more easily applied to blood cancers, though, since the disease-causing T cells have been fully characterized and there are very few of them.

An international team of scientists that includes an astronomer from Princeton University has made the first direct observation of a planet-like object orbiting a star similar to the sun.

The finding marks the first discovery made with the world's newest planet-hunting instrument on the Hawaii-based Subaru Telescope and is the first fruit of a novel research collaboration announced by the University in January.

The object, known as GJ 758 B, could be either a large planet or a "failed star," also known as a brown dwarf. The faint companion to the sun-like star GJ 758 is estimated to be 10 to 40 times as massive as Jupiter and is a "near neighbor" in our Milky Way galaxy, hovering a mere 300 trillion miles from Earth.

"It's a groundbreaking find because one of the current goals of astronomy is to directly detect planet-like objects around stars like our sun," said Michael McElwain, a postdoctoral research fellow in Princeton's Department of Astrophysical Sciences who was part of the team that made the discovery. "It is also an important verification that the system -- the telescope and its instruments -- is working well."

This August 2009 discovery image of GJ 758 B was taken with the Subaru Telescope's HiCIAO instrument in the near infrared, which measures and records differences in heat. Without the special technique employed here (angular differential imaging), the star's glare would overwhelm the light from the planet candidates. The planet-like object, GJ 758 B, is circled as B in the lower right portion of the image. An unconfirmed companion planet or planet-like object, C, can be viewed above B. The star, GJ 758, is located at the center of the image, at the hub of the starburst. The graphic at the top compares the orbital distances of solar system planets. (Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

Images of the object were taken in May and August during early test runs of the new observation equipment. The team has members from Princeton, the University of Hawaii, the University of Toronto, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Tokyo. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This challenging but beautiful detection of a very low mass companion to a sun-like star reminds us again how little we truly know about the census of gas giant planets and brown dwarfs around nearby stars," said Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the research. "Observations like this will enable theorists to begin to make sense of how this hitherto unseen population of bodies was able to form and evolve."

Brown dwarfs are stars that are not massive enough to sustain fusion reactions at their core, so they burn out and cool off as they age.

Aided by new varieties of viewing techniques, scientists started finding extrasolar planets (planets beyond the solar system) in 1992 and have located more than 400 planet-like objects so far. Most, however, have not been directly observed, but inferred from viewing the star around which the planet orbits. GJ 758 B is one of the first planet-like objects to be directly seen. Of the others that have been directly viewed, most have been on larger orbits than the distance between GJ 758 B and its star, or around stars with temperatures far above the average temperature of GJ 758 or our sun.

Scientists were able to spot the object even though it was hidden in the glare of the star it orbits by subtracting out that brighter light. To do this, they used the High Contrast Coronagraphic Imager with Adaptive Optics that has been attached to the Subaru Telescope. Also known as HiCIAO, it is part of a new generation of instruments specially made to detect faint objects near a bright star by masking its far more intense light. They also employed a technique known as angular differential imaging to capture the images.

"It's amazing how quickly this instrument has come online and burst into the forefront," said Marc Kuchner, an exoplanet scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved in the work. "I think this is just the beginning of what HiCIAO is going to do for the field." He added that the discovery also emphasizes that this new method of finding exoplanets -- direct detection -- is "really hitting its stride."

The planet-like object is currently at least 29 times as far from its star as the Earth is from the sun, approximately as far as Neptune is from the sun. However, further observations will be required to determine the actual size and shape of its orbit. At a temperature of only 600 F, the object is relatively "cold" for a body of its size. It is the coldest companion to a sun-like star ever recorded in an image.

The fact that such a large planet-like object appears to orbit at this location defies traditional thinking on planet formation. It is thought most larger planets are formed either closer to or farther from stars, but not in the location where GJ 758 is now. Discoveries such as this one could help theorists refine their ideas.

Telescope images also revealed a second companion to the star, which the scientists have called GJ 758 C. More observations, however, are needed to confirm whether it is nearby or just looks that way. "It looks very promising," said Christian Thalmann, one of the team's lead scientists. If it should turn out to be a second companion, he said, that would make both B and C more likely to be young planets rather than old brown dwarfs, since two brown dwarfs in such close proximity would not remain stable for such a long period of time.

Researchers from Princeton and NAOJ announced an agreement on Jan. 15 to collaborate over the next 10 years, using new equipment on the Subaru Telescope to peer into hidden corners of the nearby universe and ferret out secrets from its distant past. This research is a part of that collaboration. The HiCIAO team is led by Professor Motohide Tamura of NAOJ.

The partnership, called the NAOJ-Princeton Astrophysics Collaboration or N-PAC, provides for the exchange of scientific resources and supports a variety of long-term research projects in which the scientists from both Princeton and the Japanese astronomical community will participate on an equal basis. The collaboration builds on a decades-long tradition of scientific collaboration between Japanese and Princeton astronomers in a wide range of astronomical fields.

An important part of that partnership is the search for planets, previously hidden by the glare of stars. Finding these planets is a crucial step in answering the age-old question of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

A coating on windows or solar panels that repels grime and dirt? Expanded battery storage capacities for the next electric car? New Tel Aviv University research, just published in Nature Nanotechnology, details a breakthrough in assembling peptides at the nano-scale level that could make these futuristic visions come true in just a few years.

Operating in the range of 100 nanometers (roughly one-billionth of a meter) and even smaller, graduate student Lihi Adler-Abramovich and a team working under Prof. Ehud Gazit in TAU's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology have found a novel way to control the atoms and molecules of peptides so that they "grow" to resemble small forests of grass. These "peptide forests" repel dust and water -- a perfect self-cleaning coating for windows or solar panels which, when dirty, become far less efficient.

TAU's nanosized "forest of peptides" can be used as the basis for self-cleaning windows and more efficient batteries. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Friends of Tel Aviv University)



"This is beautiful and protean research," says Adler-Abramovich, a Ph.D. candidate. "It began as an attempt to find a new cure for Alzheimer's disease. To our surprise, it also had implications for electric cars, solar energy and construction."

 



As cheap as the sweetener in your soda

A world leader in nanotechnology research, Prof. Gazit has been developing arrays of self-assembling peptides made from proteins for the past six years. His lab, in collaboration with a group led by Prof. Gil Rosenman of TAU's Faculty of Engineering, has been working on new applications for this basic science for the last two years.

Using a variety of peptides, which are as simple and inexpensive to produce as the artificial sweetener aspartame, the researchers create their "self-assembled nano-tubules" in a vacuum under high temperatures. These nano-tubules can withstand extreme heat and are resistant to water.

"We are not manufacturing the actual material but developing a basic-science technology that could lead to self-cleaning windows and more efficient energy storage devices in just a few years," says Adler-Abramovich. "As scientists, we focus on pure research. Thanks to Prof. Gazit's work on beta amyloid proteins, we were able to develop a technique that enables short peptides to 'self-assemble,' forming an entirely new kind of coating which is also a super-capacitor."

As a capacitor with unusually high energy density, the nano-tech material could give existing electric batteries a boost -- necessary to start an electric car, go up a hill, or pass other cars and trucks on the highway. One of the limitations of the electric car is thrust, and the team thinks their research could lead to a solution to this difficult problem.

"Our technology may lead to a storage material with a high density," says Adler-Abramovich. "This is important when you need to generate a lot of energy in a short period of time. It could also be incorporated into today's lithium batteries," she adds.

Window Cleaner a thing of the past?

Coated with the new material, the sealed outer windows of skyscrapers may never need to be washed again -- the TAU lab's material can repel rainwater, as well as the dust and dirt it carries. The efficiency of solar energy panels could be improved as well, as a rain shower would pull away any dust that might have accumulated on the panels. It means saving money on maintenance and cleaning, which is especially a problem in dusty deserts, where most solar farms are installed today.

The lab has already been approached to develop its coating technology commercially. And Prof. Gazit has a contract with drug mega-developer Merck to continue his work on short peptides for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease -- as he had originally foreseen.

par­tic­u­larly well-known among ro­dents, rab­bits and their rel­a­tives, and—less often—dogs and apes.

The par­ticipa­t­ion of this last group has caused caused par­tic­u­lar shock among hu­man wit­nesses, not least be­cause apes are sup­posed to be our close ev­o­lu­tion­ary rel­a­tives.

But two new stud­ies may of­fer a meas­ure of com­fort. At least, such as can be found in such a dis­mal situa­t­ion.

The stud­ies sug­gest that chimps and bono­bos—the two spe­cies that are our clos­est ape rel­a­tives—eat po­o­p not for its own sa­ke, but in or­der to re­trieve hard, nu­tri­tious seeds from it.

Cop­roph­a­gy may be an “adap­tive feed­ing strat­e­gy dur­ing pe­ri­ods of food scarcity,” wrote Tet­suya Saka­maki of the Pri­ma­te Re­search In­sti­tute at Kyo­to Un­ivers­ity, Ja­pan, in a study pub­lished in the Oct. 31 ad­vance on­line is­sue of the jour­nal Pri­ma­tes.

Saka­maki re­ported that he spent a total of no less than 1,142 hours (48 days) watch­ing a group of about two doz­en wild bono­bos at the Lu­o Sci­en­tif­ic Re­serve in the Con­go. Among them, “at least five fe­males… prac­ticed cop­roph­a­gy and/or fe­cal in­spec­tion,” he wrote.

Samakaki found most of the episodes hard to see clear­ly, be­cause they oc­curred high in trees, but he came away with the im­pression that the apes were try­ing to get at seeds. In the most clearly vis­i­ble case, a young fe­male “used her lips to ex­tract Di­al­ium seeds from the fe­ces in her hand, ate the seeds, and dis­carded oth­er fi­brous parts in the fe­ces,” he wrote.

Di­alum plants are mem­bers of the leg­ume fam­i­ly.

A study in the April 2004 is­sue of the jour­nal sug­gested si­m­i­lar con­clu­sions re­gard­ing chim­panzees, not­ing that similar seed types were in­volved: “two types of Di­al­ium seeds were com­monly found in the fe­ces.”

The au­thors of this pre­vi­ous study added that stress, bore­dom or food scarcity did­n’t ap­pear to play a role in the cop­roph­a­gy. Saka­maki in the more re­cent study mostly agreed, except he wrote that cop­roph­a­gy did seem more com­mon when food was hard to find.

Which come first: the su­pe­r­mas­sive black holes that franti­c­ally de­vour mat­ter, or the huge ga­lax­ies where they re­side?

A new sce­nar­i­o has emerged to an­swer this con­ten­tious “‘chicken and egg’ ques­tion,” said Da­vid El­baz of the Cen­ter for Nu­clear Stud­ies of Saclay in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, one of the re­search­ers who de­vel­oped the mod­el.

the “black” mon­i­ker, but ac­tu­ally many black holes are thought to be easily vis­i­ble thanks to vi­o­lent ac­ti­vity go­ing on around them.





 Colour com­pos­ite im­age of qua­sar HE0450-2958, the bright­est ob­ject in the im­age. The im­age was ob­tained with the VISIR in­stru­ment on ES­O’s Very Large Tel­e­scope, the Hub­ble Space Tel­e­scope and the Ad­vanced Cam­era for Sur­veys. The qua­sar is be­lieved to be zap­ping the ob­ject to its low­er left, a gal­axy, with an en­er­get­ic beam of par­t­i­cles.

El­baz and col­leagues stud­ied a pe­cu­liar ob­ject some five bil­lion light years away, be­lieved to be a black hole with­out a home gal­axy and dubbed qua­sar HE0450-2958. A light year is the dis­tance light trav­els in a year.

It had been spec­u­lat­ed that the qua­sar’s host gal­axy was hid­den be­hind dust. The as­tro­no­mers thus used an in­stru­ment on the Eu­ro­pean South­ern Ob­ser­va­tory’s Very Large Tel­e­scope de­signed to de­tect so-called mid-infrared light, which would make dust clouds brightly vis­i­ble.

Yet no dust ap­peared, in­di­cat­ing there was no home gal­axy, said Knud Jahnke of the Max Planck In­sti­tute for As­tron­o­my in Hei­del­berg, Germany, who led the ob­serva­t­ions. “In­stead we dis­cov­ered that an ap­par­ently un­re­lat­ed gal­axy in the qua­sar’s im­me­di­ate neigh­bour­hood is pro­duc­ing stars at a frantic rate,” he said, the equiv­a­lent of about 350 Suns yearly.

Ear­li­er ob­serva­t­ions had shown that the com­pan­ion gal­axy is, in fact, un­der fire: the qua­sar is spew­ing a je­t of en­er­get­ic par­t­i­cles to­wards its com­pan­ion, ac­com­pa­nied by a stream of fast-mov­ing gas. The in­jec­tion in­di­cates that the qua­sar it­self might be in­duc­ing the forma­t­ion of stars and there­by cre­at­ing its own host gal­axy, ac­cord­ing to El­baz and col­leagues. In such a sce­nar­i­o, ga­lax­ies would have evolved from clouds of gas hit by the en­er­get­ic je­ts emerg­ing from qua­sars, or giant black holes.

“The two ob­jects are bound to merge in the fu­ture: the qua­sar is mov­ing at a speed of only a few tens of thou­sands of kilo­me­ters [or miles] per hour with re­spect to the com­pan­ion gal­axy and their separa­t­ion is only about 22,000 light-years,” said El­baz. “Although the qua­sar is still ‘naked’, it will even­tu­ally be ‘dressed’ when it merges with its star-rich com­pan­ion. It will then fi­nally re­side in­side a host gal­axy like all oth­er qua­sars.”

The find­ings may al­so rep­re­sent the long-sought mis­sing link to un­der­stand­ing why the mass of black holes is larg­er in ga­lax­ies that con­tain more stars, the re­search­ers added. “A nat­u­ral ex­ten­sion of our work is to search for si­m­i­lar ob­jects in oth­er sys­tems,” said Jahnke.

The findings are being pre­sented in new pa­pers pub­lished in the jour­nals Astro­nomy & Astro­physics and Astro­phys­ical Jour­nal.

Af­ter a year of trou­bles, the Large Had­ron Col­lider has be­come the world’s high­est en­er­gy par­t­i­cle ac­cel­er­a­tor, hav­ing ac­cel­er­ated its twin beams of pro­tons to an en­er­gy about 20 pe­r­cent high­er than the pre­vi­ous world rec­ord, sci­en­tists say.

“We are still com­ing to terms with just how smooth­ly” it is work­ing, said Rolf Heuer, Di­rec­tor Gen­er­al of CERN, the Eu­ro­pe­an Or­ga­niz­a­t­ion for Nu­clear Re­search near Ge­ne­va, Switz­er­land, which runs the ma­chine.

 
A work­er in­spects dam­age of the Large Had­ron Col­lider mag­nets  that oc­curred on Sept. 19, 2008. (Cour­te­sy CERN)


 It’s “fan­tas­tic,”  he added, but “there is still a lot to do be­fore we start phys­ics in 2010. I’m keep­ing my cham­pagne on ice un­til then.”
 The rec­ord-breaking pro­ton beam en­er­gy was meas­ured at 1.18 tril­lion elec­tron volts.

The de­vel­op­ments come just 10 days af­ter the par­t­i­cle smash­er restarted af­ter a year of dif­fi­cul­ties , which be­gan when the ma­chine broke down in Sep­tem­ber of last year.
First beams of pro­tons, co­re com­po­nents of atoms, were in­jected in­to the col­lider on Nov. 20, re­search­ers said. Over the fol­low­ing days, the ma­chine’s ope­r­a­tors cir­cu­lat­ed beams around the ring al­ter­nate­ly in one di­rec­tion and then the oth­er, grad­u­ally in­creas­ing the beam life­time to around 10 hours. Three days lat­er, two beams cir­cu­lat­ed to­geth­er for the first time, and the four big de­tec­tors rec­orded their first col­li­sion da­ta.

“I was here 20 years ago when we switched on CERN’s last ma­jor par­t­i­cle ac­cel­er­a­tor,” the Large Electron-Positron Col­lider, said CER­N Re­search and Tech­nol­o­gy Di­rec­tor Steve My­ers. “I thought that was a great ma­chine to op­er­ate, but this is some­thing else. What took us days or weeks with LEP, we’re do­ing in hours.”

The first phys­ics re­search at the LHC is sched­uled for the first quar­ter of 2010, at a col­li­sion en­er­gy of 7 tril­lion elec­tron volts (3.5 tril­lion elec­tron volts per beam).

Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. 

Earlier versions of quantum computers have been largely restricted to a narrow window of specific tasks. To be more generally useful, a quantum computer should be programmable, in the same way that a classical computer must be able to run many different programs on a single piece of machinery.

The new study is “a powerful demonstration of the technological advances towards producing a real-world quantum computer,” says quantum physicist Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

Researchers led by David Hanneke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., based their quantum computer on two beryllium ions chilled to just above absolute zero. These ions, trapped by a magnetic field on a gold-plated aluminum chip, formed the quantum bits, or qubits, analogous to the bits in regular computers represented by 0s and 1s. Short laser bursts manipulated the beryllium ions to perform the processing operations, while nearby magnesium ions kept the beryllium ions cool and still.

Hanneke and colleagues programmed the computer to do operations on a single beryllium ion and on both of the beryllium ions together. In the quantum world, a single qubit can represent a mixture of 0 and 1 simultaneously, a state called a superposition. A laser pulse operation could change the composition of the mixture within the qubit, tipping the scales to make the qubit more likely to become a 1 when measured.

Both of the qubits together could be entangled, a situation where the two qubits are intimately linked, and what happens to one seems to affect the fate of the other. Different combinations of one- and two-qubit operations made up various programs. “We put all these pieces together and asked, what can we do with the circuit?” Hanneke says.

Hanneke and colleagues chose 160 programs for the quantum computer to run. “We picked them, quite literally, at random,” Hanneke says. “We really wanted to sample all possible operations.”

The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper, which was published online November 15. “Getting this kind of control over a quantum system is really interesting from a physics perspective,” Hanneke says.

Earlier research has estimated that to be useful, a quantum computer must operate accurately 99.99 percent of the time. Hanneke says that with stronger lasers and other refinements, the system’s fidelity may be improved.

Experimental physicist Boris Blinov says that one of the most exciting things about the new study is that the quantum computer may be scaled up. “What’s most impressive and important is that they did it in the way that can be applied to a larger-scale system,” says Blinov, of the University of Washington in Seattle. “The very same techniques they’ve used for two qubits can be applied to much larger systems.”

SEOUL (Reuters) - A South Korean court Monday found disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk guilty of fraud and handed down a suspended sentence in a case that sent shockwaves throughout the global scientific community.

Hwang, once a scientist with rock-star like status for bringing South Korea to the forefront of stem cell studies, had faced trial on charges of fraud, misusing state funds and violating bioethics laws.

"He was guilty of fabrication," the Seoul court said in a verdict in the trial that stretched more than three years and included painstaking details about the scientific work Hwang and his team had performed at Seoul National University.

The court also said that Hwang illegally diverted a portion of the money he received for research for his personal use.

"But he has shown he has truly repented for his crime," the court said in its verdict. Hwang's supporters, who have packed the court for each hearing, broke into applause when the court sentenced Hwang to two years in jail, suspended for three years.

Prosecutors were seeking a four-year prison term, saying Hwang had set back scientific research and deeply embarrassed the country, which was at one point being groomed into a global center for stem cell studies.

Hwang and his lawyers did not speak to reporters.

Hwang's team was thought to have made two major breakthroughs by cloning stem cells and tailoring them to a specific patient, which raised hopes of generating genetically specific tissue to repair damaged organs or treat diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.

An investigation team at Seoul National University said in late 2005 that Hwang's team fabricated vital data in two papers on human embryonic stem cells. Hwang resigned his post and the government revoked his stem cell research license.

With major financial backing from his supporters, Hwang went on to form SooAm Biotech Research Foundation in 2006, which specializes in animal cloning and has produced cloned dogs.

Hwang is still regarded with scorn by many in the country but has fostered a small, devoted group of followers.

"Perhaps there is a chance that he might regain trust from people through sincere work. However, the truth has come out on his manipulated research and this has been made clear," said Park Jeong-woo, a professor of bioethics at Catholic University.

More than 30 percent of scientists surveyed expressed concern that human health may be at risk from nanotechnology, while just 20 percent of the public held such fears. Twenty percent of the scientists responding indicated a concern that new forms of nanotechnology pollution may emerge, while only 15 percent of the public thought that might be a problem.

The potential health and environmental consequences of nanotechnology are a source of greater concern to scientists than to the public at large, according to a new study published Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Arizona State University, included a national telephone survey of American households along with a sampling of 363 leading U.S. nanotechnology scientists and engineers. It found that experts with the most insight into nanotech also have more concerns as to the health and environmental problems that might be associated with the technology.

"Scientists aren't saying there are problems," said Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of life sciences communication and journalism who was lead author on the study. "They're saying, 'we don't know. The research hasn't been done.'"

Big Potential

Nanotechnology involves the manipulation of matter on the smallest scale -- on the level of molecules and atoms.
Just last month, the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two scientists who discovered the nanotechnology that has made today's tiny hard disk drives possible. Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germany won the award for their independent discoveries of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), which has revolutionized the way data is read on hard disk drives by storing information in the form of microscopically small areas magnetized in different directions.

Other applications range from new antimicrobial materials and tiny probes to sample individual cells in human patients to vastly more powerful computers and lasers. Nanotechnology is already part of consumer products including golf clubs, tennis rackets and antimicrobial food storage containers.

Health Fears First

Scientists surveyed in the study were generally optimistic about the potential benefits of nanotechnology, but they expressed significantly more concern about pollution and new health problems related to the technology than members of the public did.

One example of an environmental danger could be the effect of tiny nano particles on natural environments if lab filters don't catch them when liquids are being disposed, Scheufele told TechNewsWorld.
A health concern includes the effects of nano particles whose toxicity is unknown on lab workers who get exposed to them, he added.

More than 30 percent of scientists expressed concern that human health may be at risk from the technology, while just 20 percent of the public held such fears. Twenty percent of the scientists responding indicated a concern that new forms of nanotechnology pollution may emerge, while only 15 percent of the public thought that might be a problem.

The American public, by contrast, is more worried about a potential loss of privacy from tiny new surveillance devices and the loss of more U.S. jobs, according to the research.
 
Information Disconnect

The bottom line, the researchers say, is that there is a disconnect between the perceptions of those who understand the technology and those of the public in general. Nanotech's emergence only recently on the nation's policy agenda and the media's lack of attention to the technology are two factors behind the disconnect, the researchers said.

"The conversation that should be taking place hasn't happened yet," Scheufele said.

"What needs to happen is really a dialog between scientists and the public and also politics that involves both the scientific and the nonscientific aspects," he explained. "That means science has to participate in a way that's accessible to all audiences."

Different groups in society are looking for different answers about technology, Scheufele added. "There isn't one single public. It's important for us to do careful research about how best to engage each of these groups."

Cultural Differences

Different cultures have varying levels of sensitivity to the introduction of unnatural elements into the natural world, noted Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies.
"In Europe, for example, genetically modified foods are seen as unacceptable," Kay told TechNewsWorld. "In our highly commercial culture, on the other hand, we tend to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Sometimes we're sorry, but most of the time it works out."
All it would take for a public-relations disaster, however, is for one of the many new technologies to get out of control, Kay added.

"Then the public will say, 'Why didn't you warn us?'" he noted. "I think scientists are aware of that."

Like Alice's Restaurant in the Arlo Guthrie song, the Internet lets you get anything you want -- from views on politics or science and technology or religion to recipes and gossip. Oh, and of course, news.

However, few people do more than skim the surface -- and as they do with newspapers, most people tend to read only what interests them. Add to that the democratization of the power to publish, where anyone with access to the Web can put up a blog on any topic whatsoever, and you have a veritable Tower of Babel.

So, does the Internet make for shallowness of thought? If so, why?
 
Just a Channel

The Internet is a worldwide distribution channel, and it's based on speed and reach. Nothing shows its value more than when it's used to disseminate information in times of trouble, such as when Iranians put videos of post-election riots on the Web.

At the same time, nothing shows up its capability to give the most mean-spirited the ability to put forth their views as white-power blogs, for example -- or the case of Lori Drew, an adult woman living in Dardenne Prairie, Mo., whose cyberbullying of 13-year-old neighbor Megan Meier led the teenager to hang herself. Drew, by the way, was charged with misdemeanors -- accessing computers without authorization -- and convicted, only to have the convictions thrown out by a federal judge.

So, the Internet is a mixed blessing, and that raises the next point: Should we censor the Internet so that only wholesome material is put out there? If we do, who should be the censors, and who will watch them?

Plato, never a fan of democracy, advocated philosopher kings and control of the arts to shape the minds of children in the way the state preferred. To paraphrase his point of view, the public had, in essence, the thinking ability of comatose gnats and needed the guidance of properly trained people. That view, of course, prompts another question: Who shall decide what training is proper?

It's All in Your Head

Let us assume, for the moment, that we have no right to shut off the myriad of voices erupting onto the Internet, as that would mean restricting freedom of speech. What is it, then, that leads people to read shallowly, when they have so much information at their fingertips?

One possible explanation is our reading habits. As previously noted, people will read what interests them most, and there's little anyone can do to change that.

Information overload is another factor. We have to limit how much information we take in so that we won't get overwhelmed. The Web serves up so much information that it leaves readers little time for anything else, and often people tend to scan lots of Web sites or subscribe to several RSS feeds to assuage their hunger for news that interests them. Think of it as the reader's equivalent to a junk-food addiction.

That addiction, and the plethora of information available on any one topic, leaves little time for anything else. "Somebody who reads only newspapers and, at best, books of contemporary authors, looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses," Albert Einstein wrote in a note on classic literature for the Jungkaufmann, a monthly publication, in 1952. "He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."

That tendency is strengthened by the demands of advanced industrial societies. In such societies, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines both socially needed occupations, skills and attitudes, and also individual needs and aspirations, Herbert Marcuse said in his book, One-Dimensional Man.

Critical Thinking

"Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory," Marcuse says. People's outlooks tend to be shaped by their society and they want to fit in, to belong. Could that be why no one has questioned IBM's (NYSE: IBM) and Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) projects to harness unused computing power in the public's computers for public projects?

Last year, IBM launched the World Community Grid, which taps the computing power of the public. Last month, Intel unveiled a software program that lets Facebook users devote their spare computer processing power to research diseases or climate change.

Who benefits from these projects? Well, IBM and Intel get lots of free publicity. They possibly also get huge tax writeoffs. What do the members of the public, whose computers are being used and who pay for the electricity to power the computers get? Higher electric bills, probably, and a vague feeling of satisfaction.

Why didn't anyone ask why the blue-chip companies that came up with the projects didn't dedicate some of their own spare processing power for these worthwhile causes?

It could be because of the tyranny imposed by advanced industrial cultures that Marcuse speaks of. In advanced industrial cultures, the productive apparatus and the goods and services it offers impose their own social system on the public, Marcuse contends. Entertainment, transportation and means of communication "carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and through the latter to the whole."

Eventually, any concept that cannot be accounted for through empirical observation in terms of operations or behavior will be eradicated, Marcuse says. News is empirical observation of a sort, even though it may be misreported due to the observer's prejudices and bias, so it takes precedence over uncomfortable modes of thought that may lead to digging deeper into a question or an issue.

So, can we change people's reading habits so they can think critically about what they read on the Internet? Perhaps. Should we do so? Only if we consider ourselves appointed the guardians of the public weal. The technical term for that is "hubris."

Mars has app­par­ently un­der­gone a re­cent Ice Age, sci­en­tists say.

Re­search­ers drew the con­clu­sion based on the dis­tri­bu­tion of ice at and slightly be­low ground lev­el near the Red Plan­et’s po­lar re­gions.

Two hy­pothe­ses have been sug­gested to ex­plain this ice: that it fell there as pre­cipita­t­ion dur­ing re­cent ice ages, or that wa­ter va­por spread through the sur­face rocks, grav­el and soil.

To find out which al­ter­na­tive was cor­rect, Sam­u­el C. Schon of Brown Un­ivers­ity in Rho­de Is­land and col­leagues used da­ta from the High Res­o­lu­tion Im­ag­ing Sci­ence Ex­pe­ri­ment, or HiRISE, an im­ag­ing in­stru­ment aboard NASA’s Mars Re­con­nais­sance Or­biter space­craft.

The group ex­am­ined the struc­ture of ex­posed subsur­face Mar­tian ter­rain. The re­search­ers no­ticed that the ter­rain fea­tures lay­ered de­posits many me­ters (yards) thick that stretch over many hun­dreds of me­ters.

They sug­gest that cli­mate varia­t­ions are most likely the source of this stratifica­t­ion. The lay­ers probably formed as dust, ice, and snow were de­posited on the ground dur­ing re­cent ice ages, which oc­curred dur­ing pe­ri­ods when Mars’s ax­is of rota­t­ion was more tilted than usu­al, the sci­en­tists ar­gued.

Va­por dif­fu­sion would be un­likely to re­sult in the lay­ered struc­ture, they added. They note that the ob­serva­t­ions al­so sug­gest that sig­nif­i­cant subsur­face ice may re­main in the 30-50 de­grees mid-latitude re­gions.

The find­ings were pub­lished Aug. 6 on­line in the re­search jour­nal Geo­phys­i­cal Re­search Let­ters.

Sci­en­tists say they have man­aged to make plas­tics through “bio-en­gi­neer­ing” rath­er than through the use of fos­sil fu­els that con­trib­ute to glob­al warm­ing.

The find­ings are pub­lished in two pa­pers in the jour­nal Bi­o­tech­nol­ogy and Bi­o­en­gi­neer­ing to mark the jour­nal’s 50th an­ni­ver­sa­ry.

Poly­mers are mo­le­cules found in eve­ry­day life in the form of plas­tics and rub­bers. The re­search­ers, from Ko­rea Ad­vanced In­sti­tute of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy and Ko­re­an chem­i­cal com­pa­ny LG Chem, fo­cused their re­search on poly­lac­tic ac­id, a bi­o­log­ic­ally-based pol­y­mer.

“The polyesters and oth­er pol­y­mers we use eve­ry­day are mostly de­rived from fos­sil oils made through the re­fin­ery or chem­i­cal pro­cess,” said In­sti­tute re­searcher Sang Yup Lee. Poly­lac­tic ac­id “is con­sid­ered a good al­ter­na­tive to petroleum-based plas­tics as it is both bi­o­de­grad­able and has a low tox­icity to hu­mans.”

Un­til now the pol­y­mer had been pro­duced in a com­plex, costly two-step chem­i­cal pro­cess, he added. Lee’s team de­vel­oped a one-stage pro­cess in which en­gi­neered E. coli bac­te­ria pro­duced poly­lac­tic ac­id and as­so­ci­at­ed pol­y­mers through fer­menta­t­ion, a met­a­bol­ic pro­cess.

“This means that a de­vel­oped E. coli strain is now ca­pa­ble of ef­fi­ciently pro­duc­ing un­nat­u­ral pol­y­mers, through a one-step fer­menta­t­ion pro­cess,” he said.

“Global warm­ing and oth­er en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems are urg­ing us to de­vel­op sus­tain­a­ble pro­cesses based on re­new­able re­sources,” added Lee. “This new strat­e­gy should be gen­er­ally use­ful for de­vel­oping oth­er en­gi­neered or­gan­isms ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing var­i­ous un­nat­u­ral pol­y­mers by di­rect fer­menta­t­ion from re­new­able re­sources.”

As­tro­no­mers have found a gi­ant gal­axy sur­round­ing what they de­scribe as the old­est and most dis­tant black hole known.

The gal­axy is as large as the Milky Way gal­axy and har­bors a “su­per­mas­sive,” or giant, black hole es­ti­mat­ed to weigh the equiv­a­lent of at least a bil­lion Suns.

A black hole is an ob­ject so com­pact that its gra­vity drags in any­thing that pass­es too close by, in­clud­ing light rays. Some black holes are formed from burned-out stars, but others are too large to be ex­plained in this way and their ori­gin is some­what mys­ter­ious.

The newfound black hole and galaxy are meas­ured as lying 12.8 bil­lion light years from Earth. Since a light-year is the dis­tance light trav­els in a year, that would mean that from Earth we see the gal­axy as it was that many bil­lion years ago.

It’s “sur­pris­ing that such a gi­ant gal­axy ex­isted when the Un­iverse was only one six­teenth of its pre­s­ent age, and that it hosted a black hole one bil­lion times more mas­sive than the Sun. The gal­axy and black hole must have formed very rap­idly in the early un­iverse,” said Un­ivers­ity of Ha­waii as­tron­o­mer To­mot­sugu Goto, one of the re­search­ers.

The find­ing is con­sid­ered im­por­tant in un­lock­ing the se­cret of how ga­lax­ies evolved to­geth­er with the super­mas­sive black holes that most of them con­tain at their cores.

Un­til now, stu­dy­ing black-hole-containing host ga­lax­ies in the dis­tant un­iverse has been ex­tremely dif­fi­cult be­cause the blind­ing bright light from near the black hole makes it harder to see the al­ready faint light from the host gal­axy.

Un­like smaller black holes, which form when a large star dies, the or­i­gin of super­mas­sive black holes re­mains an un­solved prob­lem. A cur­rently pop­u­lar mod­el re­quires sev­eral mid-sized black holes to merge to form the gi­ant black hole.

The newfound gal­axy pro­vides a res­er­voir of such in­ter­me­diate black holes, ac­cord­ing to Goto and col­leagues. Af­ter form­ing, super­mas­sive black holes of­ten con­tin­ue to grow be­cause their gra­vity draws in mat­ter from sur­round­ing ob­jects. The en­er­gy re­leased in this pro­cess ac­counts for the bright light that these black holes pro­duce.

To see the super­mas­sive black hole, the team of sci­en­tists used new cam­era equip­ment in­stalled in the Sub­aru tel­e­scope on Mauna Kea, Ha­waii, and de­vel­oped by Satoshi Miyazaki of the Na­tional As­tron­o­my Ob­serv­a­to­ry of Ja­pan and col­leagues.

“We have wit­nessed a super­mas­sive black hole and its host gal­axy form­ing to­geth­er. This discovery has opened a new win­dow for in­ves­ti­gat­ing gal­ax­y-black hole co-evolution at the dawn of the un­iverse,” said You­suke Ut­sumi, al­so of the Na­tional As­tron­o­my Ob­serv­a­to­ry.

A wom­an looks fa­mil­iar, but you can’t re­mem­ber her name or where you met her. New re­search sug­gests the mem­o­ry ex­ists – you simp­ly can’t re­trieve it.

Us­ing brain im­ag­ing, neu­ro­sci­en­tists at the Uni­vers­ity of Cal­i­for­nia, Ir­vine found that a per­son’s brain ac­tiv­ity while re­mem­bering an event is very si­m­i­lar to when it was first ex­pe­ri­enced, even if spe­cif­ics can’t be re­called.

“If the de­tails are still there, hope­ful­ly we can find a way to ac­cess them,” said Jeff John­son, a post­doc­tor­al re­searcher at the uni­ver­sity and lead au­thor of the stu­dy, ap­pear­ing Sept. 10 in the sci­ent­ific jour­nal  Neu­ron.

“By un­der­stand­ing how this works in young, healthy adults, we can po­ten­tial ly gain in­sight in­to situ­a­t­ions where our mem­o­ries fail more no­tice­ably, such as when we get old­er,” he said. “It al­so might shed light on the fate of viv­id mem­o­ries of trau­mat­ic events that we may want to for­get.”

John­son and col­leagues used func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance im­ag­ing, a brain scan­ning tech­nique, to study the brain ac­tiv­ity of stu­dents.

The stu­dents were shown words and asked to per­form var­i­ous tasks: im­ag­ine how an art­ist would draw the ob­ject named by the word, think about how the ob­ject is used, or pro­nounce the word back­ward in their minds. The scan­ner cap­tured im­ages of their brain ac­tiv­ity dur­ing these ex­er­cises.

About 20 min­utes lat­er, the stu­dents viewed the words a sec­ond time and were asked to re­mem­ber any de­tails linked to them. Again, brain ac­tiv­ity was recorded.

Uti­liz­ing a math­e­mat­i­cal meth­od called pat­tern anal­y­sis, the sci­en­tists as­so­ci­at­ed the dif­fer­ent tasks with dis­tinct pat­terns of brain ac­tiv­ity. When a stu­dent had a strong rec­ol­lec­tion of a word from a par­tic­u­lar task, the pat­tern was very si­m­i­lar to the one gen­er­at­ed dur­ing the task. When rec­ol­lec­tion was weak or non­ex­ist­ent, the pat­tern was not as prom­i­nent but still rec­og­niz­a­ble as be­long­ing to that par­tic­u­lar task, the re­search­ers said.

“The pat­tern an­a­lyz­er could ac­cu­rate­ly iden­ti­fy tasks based on the pat­terns gen­er­at­ed, re­gard­less of wheth­er the sub­ject re­mem­bered spe­cif­ic de­tails,” John­son said. “This tells us the brain knew some­thing about what had oc­curred, even though the sub­ject was not aware of the in­form­at­ion.”

Sci­en­tists at a new re­search in­sti­tute are work­ing to find out how life might evolve us­ing chem­i­cals not found in Earth-based life forms.

They’re stu­dy­ing how organ­isms might emp­loy al­ter­na­tive sol­vents—that is, oth­er liq­uids that could play the role that wa­ter does in fa­mil­iar life forms.

The Un­ivers­ity of Vi­en­na es­tab­lished the re­search group Al­ter­na­tive Sol­vents as a Ba­sis for Life Sup­port­ing Zones in (Exo-)Plan­e­tary Sys­tems last May un­der the lead­er­ship of as­tron­o­mer Ma­ria Firneis. Re­search by the group was pre­sented at the Eu­ro­pe­an Plan­e­tary Sci­ence Con­gress in Pots­dam, Ger­ma­ny on Sept. 18.

Tra­di­tion­ally, plan­ets that might sus­tain life are sought in “hab­it­able zone,” the re­gions around stars in which Earth-like plan­ets with car­bon di­ox­ide, wa­ter va­pour and ni­tro­gen at­mo­spheres could main­tain liq­uid wa­ter on their sur­faces.

Sci­en­tists have been seek­ing chem­i­cal sig­na­tures pro­duced by ex­tra­ter­res­tri­al life with metabolisms re­sem­bling the ter­res­tri­al ones, where the build­ing blocks of life, ami­no ac­ids, are based on car­bon and ox­y­gen dis­solved in wa­ter.

But “it can­not be ruled out that life forms have evolved some­where that nei­ther rely on wa­ter nor on a car­bon- and ox­y­gen-based metabolis­m,” said re­search group mem­ber Jo­han­nes Leit­ner. “It is time to make a rad­i­cal change in our pre­s­ent ‘geo­cen­tric’ mind­set.”

A life-sup­porting sol­vent must re­main liq­uid over a large tem­per­a­ture range. Wa­ter is liq­uid be­tween 0 and 100 de­grees Cel­si­us, but some oth­er sol­vents are liq­uid over more than 200 de­grees. Such a sol­vent would al­low an ocean on a plan­et clos­er to the cen­tral star, re­search­ers say.

The re­verse sce­nar­i­o is al­so pos­si­ble – a liq­uid ocean of am­mo­nia could ex­ist much fur­ther from a star. Fur­ther­more, sul­phu­ric ac­id can be found with­in the cloud lay­ers of Ve­nus and lakes of meth­ane or eth­ane cov­er parts of the sur­face of the Sa­tur­ni­an moon Ti­tan.

The re­search group, with in­terna­t­ional col­la­bo­ra­tors, plans to study the prop­er­ties of a range of sol­vents oth­er than wa­ter, in­clud­ing their abun­dance in space, ther­mal and bio­chem­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics as well as their abil­ity to sup­port the or­i­gin and ev­o­lu­tion of life-sup­porting metabolisms. Al­though known most exoplan­ets, or plan­ets out­side our so­lar sys­tem, are com­posed of gas, “it is a mat­ter of time un­til smaller, Earth-size exoplan­ets are discov­ered,” said Leit­ner.

Birth con­trol pills may al­ter wom­en’s abil­i­ties to choose, com­pete for and re­tain mates, a new re­port suggests.

The pa­per pub­lished on­line on Oct. 7 in the re­search jour­nal Trends in Ecol­o­gy and Ev­o­lu­tion re­views emerg­ing ev­i­dence that oral con­tra­cep­tives af­fect these ac­ti­vi­ties by dis­tort­ing nat­u­ral hor­mo­nal cy­cles.

Wom­en are fer­tile briefly dur­ing their men­stru­al cy­cle, just be­fore ovula­t­ion. Stud­ies have found that both sex­es’ part­ner pref­er­ences vary ac­cord­ing to pre­dict­a­ble hor­mo­nal fluctua­t­ions as­so­ci­at­ed with this cy­cle. Ovu­lat­ing wom­en pre­fer more mas­cu­line, dom­i­nant and com­pet­i­tive males, as well as males more ge­net­ic­ally un­like them­selves. Mean­while men, some stud­ies sug­gest, de­tect wom­en’s fer­til­ity sta­tus, pre­ferring ovu­lat­ing wom­en in situa­t­ions where they can com­pare dif­fer­ent wom­en’s attrac­tiveness.

Con­tra­cep­tive pills al­ter the hor­mo­nal fluctua­t­ions as­so­ci­at­ed men­stru­al cy­cles and es­sen­tially mim­ic the more steady hor­mo­nal con­di­tions as­so­ci­at­ed with preg­nan­cy, ac­cord­ing to re­search­ers. “Lit­tle ef­fort has been in­vested in un­der­stand­ing the con­se­quences” of this, said study au­thor Al­ex­an­dra Alvergne of the De­part­ment of An­i­mal and Plant Sci­ences at the Un­ivers­ity of Shef­field, U.K.

Alverne and col­league Virpi Lumma re­viewed re­cent stud­ies sug­gesting use of the pill dis­rupts wom­en’s varia­t­ion in mate pref­er­ences across their men­stru­al cy­cle. The au­thors spec­u­lat­ed that the use of the pill may al­so in­flu­ence a wom­an’s abil­ity to at­tract a mate by re­duc­ing attrac­tiveness to men.

In­ter­est­ing­, wom­en on the pill don’t show the ovula­t­ion-specific at­traction to ge­net­ic­ally un­like part­ners, said Lum­maa. “The ul­ti­mate out­stand­ing ev­o­lu­tion­ary ques­tion con­cerns wheth­er the use of oral con­tra­cep­tives when mak­ing mat­ing de­ci­sions can have long-term con­se­quenc­es on the abil­ity of cou­ples to re­pro­duce.”

Tak­en to­geth­er, a grow­ing num­ber of stud­ies sug­gest the pill is likely to af­fect mat­ing de­ci­sions and thus re­pro­duc­tion, she added. “If this is the case, pill use will have im­plica­t­ions for both cur­rent and fu­ture genera­t­ions, and we hope that our re­view will stim­u­late fur­ther re­search.”

Moon, like a big sponge, ab­sorbs elec­tric­ally charged par­t­i­cles from the Sun, which in turn com­bine with ox­y­gen in some lu­nar dust to make wa­ter, sci­en­tists say.

They add that the find­ing—made us­ing the In­di­an Chan­dra­yaan-1 lu­nar or­biter—al­so sug­gests a new way to make im­ages of the Moon and oth­er air­less So­lar Sys­tem bod­ies.

Hy­dro­gen flow on the moon as meas­ured by the Chan­dra­yaan-1 lu­nar or­biter's Sub-keV At­om Re­flect­ing An­a­lyz­er. (Cour­tesy ESA) 

Re­search­ers re­ported only last month that the moon has ei­ther wa­ter or a si­m­i­lar mol­e­cule, called hy­drox­yl.
The lu­nar sur­face is a loose col­lec­tion of ir­reg­u­lar dust grains, called reg­o­lith. In­com­ing par­t­i­cles are probably trapped in the spaces be­tween the grains and ab­sorbed, ac­cord­ing to sci­en­tists.
When this hap­pens to pro­tons—elec­tric­ally charged par­t­i­cles that lie at the cores of at­om­s—the pro­tons are ex­pected to com­bine with the ox­y­gen in the reg­o­lith to pro­duce hy­drox­yl and wa­ter, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors ex­plain.

The re­search group, Stas Barabash of the Swed­ish In­sti­tute of Space Phys­ics and col­leagues, re­ported the find­ings in a pa­per to be pub­lished in the jour­nal Plan­e­tary and Space Sci­ence.

A glow­ing tooth re­gen­er­at­ed in an adult mouse mouth. (Im­age cour­te­sy  Ta­ka­shi Tsuji, PhD., To­kyo Uni­ver­si­ty of Sci­ence, Or­gan Tech­nolo­gies Inc.) The work could serve as a prel­ude to oth­er or­gan re­place­ments us­ing a si­m­i­lar tech­nique, they pro­posed.

Re­search­ers say they have en­gi­neered the growth of fully func­tion­al re­place­ment teeth in mice, with the growth oc­cur­ring in the tooth’s prop­er place.

Tech­nol­o­gy ex­ists to de­vel­op some tis­sues in the lab that can be trans­planted in­to an­i­mals. But Et­suko Ike­da of To­kyo-based Or­gan Tech­no­log­ies Inc. and To­kyo Un­ivers­ity of Sci­ence in Chi­ba, Ja­pan, and col­leagues ex­plored ways to grow an or­gan in place.

The re­search­ers de­vel­oped a bioen­gi­neered tooth germ, a seed-like tis­sue con­tain­ing the cells and ge­net­ic in­struc­tions nec­es­sary to form a tooth. They then trans­planted the germ in­to the jaw­bones of mice.

The germs reg­u­larly grew in­to re­place­ment teeth, the in­ves­ti­ga­tors said. Track­ing gene ac­ti­vity in the trans­planted germ with a flu­o­res­cent glow­ing pro­tein, the re­search­ers found that genes nor­mally ac­tivated in tooth de­vel­opment were al­so ac­tive dur­ing the en­gi­neered re­place­ment’s growth.

The en­gi­neered tooth’s hard­ness was com­pa­ra­ble to that of nat­u­ral teeth, and nerve fibers could grow through­out and re­spond to pain stimula­t­ion, they al­so found. The re­sults are re­ported in this week’s early on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­tio­n­al Aca­de­my of Sci­en­ces.

“We pro­pose this tech­nol­o­gy as a mod­el for fu­ture or­gan re­place­ment ther­a­pies,” the re­search­ers wrote.

Ob­serva­t­ions from a space tel­e­scope have re­vealed the largest-known plan­e­tary ring in the So­lar Sys­tem, as­tro­no­mers re­port.

The subtle, new­found ring sur­rounds the ga­seous plan­et, but much fur­ther out than its fa­mil­iar, more vis­i­ble rings, scientists said; if it were were vis­i­ble from Earth, the ring’s full cir­cle would ap­pear to be twice the size of the our Moon.

The ring is as­so­ci­at­ed with Sat­urn’s dis­tant moon Phoe­be, which or­bits the gi­ant plan­et about 13 mil­lion kilo­me­tres (8 mil­lion miles) away. That is roughly 200 times Sat­urn’s ra­di­us, or dis­tance from its cen­ter to its sur­face.

Un­til now, the largest-known plan­e­tary rings were Jupiter’s gos­sa­mer rings and Sat­urn’s E ring — sheets of dust that ex­tend to about 5 to 10 times the ra­di­us of their re­spec­tive plan­ets.

The new find­ings, made us­ing NA­SA’s Spitzer Space Tel­e­scope, are de­scribed in the Oct. 8 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture. As­tro­no­mers Anne Ver­bis­cer of the Un­ivers­ity of Vir­gin­ia and col­leagues, who re­ported the find, al­so pre­sented sim­ula­t­ions show­ing how dust in the ring could come from re­peat­ed im­pacts of ob­jects strik­ing Phoe­be.





The new­found ring is tilted 27 de­grees with res­pect to the main rings, re­search­ers said.

The faint but enor­mous ring may al­so ex­plain a long­stand­ing mys­ter­y: the two-tone col­ora­t­ion of an­oth­er Sat­urnian moon, Iap­e­tus, Ver­bis­cer and col­leagues pro­posed. One side of Iap­e­tus is darker than the oth­er, lead­ing to sug­ges­tions that the front face might be coat­ed with dust spi­ral­ling in from Sat­urn’s darker out­er moons, in­clud­ing Phoe­be.

Ver­bis­cer and col­leagues cal­cu­late that, over the his­to­ry of the So­lar Sys­tem, ma­te­ri­al from the ring could have sup­plied Iap­e­tus’s front face with a blan­ket of dark dust a few me­tres (yards) thick.