Remaining H1N1 Questions

From Time:

The H1N1 flu seems a far cry from the mass killer it was feared to be when it first emerged in Mexico in April. While it has since infected more than 12,000 people in 43 countries, including more than 6,500 in the U.S., it has so far killed just 86 victims. Health officials are still on high alert, however; the disease continues to spread, with a batch of new cases in Japan in mid-May that could be enough to prompt the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare an official pandemic.

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First Image Of Memories Being Made

The increase in green fluorescence represents the imaging of local translation at synapses during long-term synaptic plasticity. (Credit: Science)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 19, 2009) — The ability to learn and to establish new memories is essential to our daily existence and identity; enabling us to navigate through the world. A new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University and University of California, Los Angeles has captured an image for the first time of a mechanism, specifically protein translation, which underlies long-term memory formation.

The finding provides the first visual evidence that when a new memory is formed new proteins are made locally at the synapse - the connection between nerve cells - increasing the strength of the synaptic connection and reinforcing the memory. The study published in Science, is important for understanding how memory traces are created and the ability to monitor it in real time will allow a detailed understanding of how memories are formed.

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'New' Brazilian Flu Strain Is A False Alarm

From New Scientist:

Take a jumpy media, throw in a statement hastily translated from Portuguese, and what have you got? A "new" and potentially deadly strain of H1N1 influenza in Brazil, according to a rash of news stories that appeared earlier today.

"It was not yet known whether the new strain was more aggressive than the current A(H1N1) virus which has been declared pandemic by the World Health Organization," reported Agence France Presse, setting the mood for a new round of pandemic panic.

But this "new" strain is nothing of the sort. In fact, the sequence of its gene for the haemagglutinin surface protein, deposited in the GenBank database, is the same as isolates from several other countries. "[It] has nothing surprising about it and is identical to others," Richard Webby of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, told New Scientist.

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Mammoths Roamed Britain Until Just 14,000 Years Ago ... And We Didn't Kill Them Off

Chilling end? A lone mammoth in the Ice Age as visualised on the BBC Walking With Beasts programme. But the new research shows the beasts outlived the big freeze

From The Daily Mail:

Woolly mammoths survived in Britain thousands of years later than scientists realised - and may have been killed off by climate change rather than hunters.

A study of mammoth fossils found in Shropshire suggests the gigantic beasts became extinct in north-western Europe no more than 14,000 years ago - shaving a full 7,000 years off the timespan since they were thought to be alive.

It means the species may have survived the efforts of hunters at the height of the Ice Age only to be wiped out when their grazing land was overtaken by forest.

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Get A Grip: Truth About Fingerprints Revealed

Scientists say long-held notion that fingerprints help
us grip more firmly may not be true. (/ABC News)

From ABC News/New Scientist:

Mystery Surrounding the Reason for Fingerprints Remains

The long-held notion that fingerprints marks help us grip more firmly appears to be wrong. Instead, a new study finds that the marks actually reduce the friction between skin and surfaces.

"Because there are all the gaps between the fingerprints, what they do is reduce the contact area with the surface," says Roland Ennos, a biomechanicist at the University of Manchester, UK, who led the study with colleague Peter Warman.

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Evidence Found For Ancient Supersized Sperm

Researchers used a type of holotomography to capture 3-D images of this 100 million-year-old fossil ostracod called Harbinia micropapillosa. The left arrow shows the preserved inner part of the esophagus, while the right arrow points to the two seminal receptacles, where this female stored the giant sperm cells after mating. Credit: Renate Matzke-Karasz

From Live Science:

The fossilized remains of a tiny 100 million-year-old crustacean reveal evidence of what to her at least would have been giant sperm, measuring perhaps as long as her body.

While the sperm itself was not preserved, 3-D images of the female's specialized receptacles indicate she had just finished having sex and that they were filled with sperm that has since degraded. (The oldest direct evidence of sperm comes from a springtail living some 40 million years ago, according to the researchers.)

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New Nanoparticles Could Lead To End Of Chemotherapy

Dr. Manuel Perez and his team have been investigating the use of nanoparticles for medicine for years. (Credit: Jacque Brund)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) — Nanoparticles specially engineered by University of Central Florida Assistant Professor J. Manuel Perez and his colleagues could someday target and destroy tumors, sparing patients from toxic, whole-body chemotherapies.

Perez and his team used a drug called Taxol for their cell culture studies, recently published in the journal Small, because it is one of the most widely used chemotherapeutic drugs. Taxol normally causes many negative side effects because it travels throughout the body and damages healthy tissue as well as cancer cells.

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NASA Probes Possibility Of Shuttle Sabotage

From MSNBC/Space.com:

Agency expects technical glitch, but some may have motive to delay launch.

NASA does not suspect sabotage was behind the glitch that twice delayed the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour recently. But, as with any problem without an apparent solution, the space agency is investigating all possible explanations, including intentional tampering, officials said.

Endeavour's STS-127 mission was supposed to lift off June 13, but a leak of hydrogen gas from a pipe attached to the shuttle's fuel tank kept the vehicle grounded. NASA tried to launch Endeavour a second time on Wednesday, but again the leak appeared, even after workers replaced the leaky seal between the pipe and the shuttle.

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Back To The Moon: NASA To Launch New Lunar Scouts

Atlas 5 rocket. Photo: Justin Ray/Spaceflight Now

From Yahoo News/Space:

Nearly 40 years after humans first set foot on the lunar surface, NASA is gearing up to go back with the planned launch today of two unmanned scouts, the robotic vanguard for the first U.S. return to the moon in a decade.

An Atlas 5 rocket is poised to launch the two probes, a powerful lunar orbiter and a smaller spacecraft that will hunt for water ice by crashing into the moon, at about 5:12 p.m. EDT (2112 GMT) today from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission, NASA hopes, will lay the foundation for its plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

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Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats, Research Shows

From The Telegraph:

The thought processes of 15 cats were tested by attaching food to the end of lengths of string and observing whether they could figure out that pulling the line brought the treats closer.

The cats had no problem with tackling single pieces of string. However, when faced with two options, experts discovered that unlike their canine counterparts, cats were unable to consistently pick a baited string over a dummy.

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University Of Colorado Team Finds Definitive Evidence For Ancient Lake On Mars

This is reconstructed landscape showing the Shalbatana lake on Mars as it may have looked roughly 3.4 billion years ago. Data used in reconstruction are from NASA and the European Space Agency. Credit: Image credit: G. Di Achille, University of Colorado

From Eurekalert:

First unambiguous evidence for shorelines on the surface of Mars, say researchers.

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.

Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. The shoreline evidence, found along a broad delta, included a series of alternating ridges and troughs thought to be surviving remnants of beach deposits.

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Betelgeuse, Red Supergiant In Constellation Orion, Has Shrunk By 15 Percent In 15 Years

UC Berkeley physicist Charles Townes, who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for invention of the laser, cleans one of the large mirrors of the Infrared Spatial Interferometer. The ISI is on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California. (Credit: Cristina Ryan (2008))

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2009) — The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley's Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet' el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.

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Could Life Be 12 Billion Years Old?

From Live Science:

Much of the search for life outside of Earth's biological oasis has focused on examining the conditions on the other planets in our solar system and probing the cosmos for other Earth-like planets in distant planetary systems.

But one team of astronomers is approaching the question of life elsewhere in the universe by looking for life's potential beginning.

Aparna Venkatesan, of the University of San Francisco, and Lynn Rothschild, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements – those essential to life as we know it – might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form.

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What Is the Future of Humans in Space?

Photo: Humans in space: Astronaut Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper performs space-station maintenance during the Shuttle Endeavour’s visit to the ISS in late 2008. Credit: NASA

From The Technology Review:

Independent review of human-spaceflight plans gets under way today.

A 10-person committee charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight will hold its first public meeting today, beginning a process that must cover a lot of territory in very little time.

The independent panel of experts will examine NASA's Constellation Program, which plans to send humans to the International Space Station (ISS), the moon, and possibly Mars, and will consider alternatives to options already on the table.

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Microbe Found Two Miles Under Greenland Ice Is Reawakened From A 120,000-Year Sleep

The unusual bacterium could hold clues to how life might survive on other planets

From The Daily Mail:

A tiny purple bug that has been buried under nearly two miles of ice for 120,000 years has been revived in a lab.

The unusual bacterium was found deep within a Greenland ice sheet and scientists believe it holds clues to how life might survive on other planets.

Researchers coaxed the dormant frozen microbes, back to life by carefully warming the ice samples containing them over a period of 11-and-a-half months.

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The Sound Of Passion

From Scientific American:

Imagine a quiet night like any other. Suddenly, your infant’s cries break the silence. Fully loaded with emotion, the sound triggers an urge to stand up and run to your infant’s room. But, considering that your spouse is a musician and you are not, who will be the first to reach the crib?

According to Dana L. Strait and a team of researchers at the University of Northwestern in Chicago, the musician should win the race. Their latest study showed that years of musical training leave the brains of musicians better attuned to the emotional content, like anger, of vocal sounds. Ten years of cello, say, can make a person more emotionally intelligent, in some sense. So the alarm carried in a baby’s cry make a deeper impression; your spouse wins the race.

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The Future of Energy: A Realist's Roadmap to 2050

From Popsci.com:

Which technologies will finally free us from oil?

This December, when representatives from 170 countries meet at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen to replace the expiring Kyoto climate treaty, the smart money predicts unprecedented collaboration. American political change coupled with spiking carbon dioxide levels could inspire a communal project on a scale not seen since World War II. A consensus, backed by science, is emerging among the international community that by 2050 we need to reduce emissions of C02, methane and other greenhouse gases to approximately 80 percent lower than they were in 1990.

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Synthetic Cells Get Together To Make Electronics

Collections of a few protocells connected by shared membranes penetrated by pores (a) can be used in groups to perform as electronic devices (b), in this case as a rectifier, or AC to DC converter. (Image: Nature)

From New Scientist:

A network of artificial cells that work together to act as an AC/DC converter has been built. Demonstrating that synthetic cells can team up to achieve such feats is a step towards building synthetic tissues to interface biology with electronics, says the team of chemists behind the work.

Synthetic biologists have show they can reprogram living cells to make them produce drug compounds, and are even working towards building cells from scratch to create artificial life.

But that work focuses on only individual cells, says Hagan Bayley at the University of Oxford. He's more interested in making artificial tissue in which individual synthetic cells work together.

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Shuttle Launch Delayed To July By Hydrogen Leak

Space shuttle Endeavour sits on the launch pad early Wednesday morning June 17, 2009. Racing against the clock, NASA began fueling shuttle Endeavour for a Wednesday launch to the international space station after thunderstorms caused a three-hour delay. Hydrogen gas is leaking again from a vent line on space shuttle Endeavour's external fuel tank causing an additional delay and threatening to postpone the launch until July. (AP Photo)

From Yahoo News/AP:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – For the second time in four days, a potentially dangerous hydrogen gas leak forced NASA to delay shuttle Endeavour's launch to the international space station, this time until July at the earliest.

Launch officials waited almost an hour after the leak appeared during fueling, trying to fix it through remote commands, before calling off Wednesday's pre-dawn launch.

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Brazil Finds New Strain Of H1N1 Virus

From Breitbart/AFP:

Brazilian scientists have identified a new strain of the H1N1 virus after examining samples from a patient in Sao Paulo, their institute said Tuesday.

The variant has been called A/Sao Paulo/1454/H1N1 by the Adolfo Lutz Bacteriological Institute, which compared it with samples of the A(H1N1) swine flu from California.

The genetic sequence of the new sub-type of the H1N1 virus was isolated by a virology team lead by one of its researchers, Terezinha Maria de Paiva, the institute said in a statement.

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