Toward New Drugs That Turn Genes On And Off

Scientists found a group of molecules that act like an "on-off switch" and could be used to develop medicines against various diseases. (Credit: The American Chemical Society)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 21, 2009) — Scientists in Michigan and California are reporting an advance toward development of a new generation of drugs that treat disease by orchestrating how genes in the body produce proteins involved in arthritis, cancer and a range of other disorders. Acting like an "on-off switch," the medications might ratchet up the production of proteins in genes working at abnormally low levels or shut off genes producing an abnormal protein linked to disease.

In the study, Anna K. Mapp and colleagues discusses molecules that cause genes to be active and churn out proteins — so-called transcriptional activators. That's because they control a key process known as transcription, in which instructions coded in genes produce proteins. Malfunctions in these activators could lead to altered transcription patterns that lead to disease. For example, variations in the tumor suppressor gene p53 are found in more than half of all human cancers.

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Sunday: The Longest Day of the Year

Each year on June 20 or 21, the sun is as far north as it can get from the celestial equator, marking the solstice. Credit: Starry Night Software

From Live Science:

If you've been waiting for the chance to get more done during the day, Sunday is your day, but only by a fraction of a second.

Like a giant timepiece, Earth and sun are configured for the summer solstice once again. This year it happens June 21, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun will be up a fraction of a second longer than the day prior or the day after. (The length of the full day, including night, does not change, of course.)

To grasp how it works, one must understand Earth's cockeyed leanings and some celestial configurations that even the ancients knew something about.

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Swine Flu 'Could Infect Up To Half The Population'

A medical researcher working to produce a DNA test for swine flu, which is spreading more quickly in the UK. Photo AFP.

From The Independent:

Health authorities told to set up testing and drug distribution centres in case of autumn outbreak.

Primary care trusts are to set up anti-viral drug distribution centres and swine flu testing clinics amid fears that the infection could spread out of control.

The Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, wrote to health authorities last week urging hospitals to test all patients who show signs of flu-like symptoms. He wrote: "Transmission from person to person in this country is increasingly common. There is evidence that sporadic cases are arising with no apparent link either to cases elsewhere in the UK or to travel abroad."

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NASA's Mission To Bomb The Moon

From Scientific American:

NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet. The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target - a crater close to the Moon's south pole. Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.

Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.

The attack on the Moon is not a declaration of war or act of wanton vandalism. Space scientists want to see if any water ice or vapour is revealed in the cloud of debris.

Though the Moon mostly a dry airless desert, they believe ice could be trapped in crater shadows near the south pole which never receive any sunlight. If so it could provide vital supplies for a manned moonbase.

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Solar Sleuths Tackle Mystery Of Quiet Sun

Scientists have found that slow, eastward-moving "jet streams" (depicted in yellow) move about 7000 kilometres below the sun's surface. As this plot shows, over time they migrate from near the sun's poles toward its equator. The ones corresponding to Cycle 24 took their time reaching 22° in latitude, matching the prolonged solar minimum seen in recent years. (Illustration: Frank Hill and Rachel Howe/NSO)

From New Scientist:

For the past couple of years, our sun has been at the minimum of its 11-year activity cycle. Its face has been virtually spotless for months on end, and there've been no dire alerts of titanic solar storms about to slam into Earth.

The problem is that this "quiet sun" has continued far too long – two years ago, a special task force predicted that the transition from the just-ended Cycle 23 to the upcoming Cycle 24 would come around March 2008. It didn't. (To be fair, there was sharp disagreement within the group at that time.)

Much fanfare accompanied the appearance of a tiny high-latitude sunspot in early 2008, supposedly heralding Cycle 24's arrival. Yet for months and months afterward the sun's face remained spotless.

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Hands On Review: iPhone OS 3.0 Chock Full Of Changes

From Ars Technica:

iPhone OS 3.0 is out and it runs on all generations of iPhone and iPod touch. Ars reviews the OS and takes a look at what's in store. If you're not planning to buy a shiny new iPhone 3G S, you may find yourself quite satisfied with your 3G iPhone running the new OS.

The one-word summary for iPhone 3.0 should be "subtle." But don't go thinking that subtlety means boring—the changes that come with Apple's latest mobile OS are plentiful and hidden in many corners of the device. Apple previewed iPhone OS 3.0 to the world in March of this year and again in June at WWDC 2009, but there's no greater experience than playing around with the software and discovering all the surprises yourself. We did just that with iPhone OS 3.0 and discovered that while the cool big changes may get all the press, there are also numerous updates to smaller details should be anything but ignored.

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Big Particle Collider Restart Delayed Till October

Large Hadron Collider

From Yahoo News/AP

GENEVA – The world's largest atom smasher will likely be fired up again in October after scientists have carried out tests and put in place further safety measures to prevent a repeat of the faults that sidelined the $10 billion machine shortly after startup last year, the operator said Saturday.

The Large Hadron Collider was meant to restart in late September, but that will probably be pushed back two to three weeks, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research said.

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US Couple To Have World's First Weightless Wedding

The bride's wedding dress was designed to billow out in all directions as she tumbles and twirls about in zero gravity (Image: Bonnie Veronico)

From The New Scientist:

It's T-minus one day until Erin Finnegan and Noah Fulmor say "I do" in zero gravity, becoming the first couple to have a weightless wedding. The US couple will exchange vows aboard G-Force One, the "vomit comet" operated by the Zero Gravity Corporation.

Finnegan and Fulmor, who live in New York City, are self-professed space fanatics – as children, both wanted to be astronauts. Finnegan attended space camp, while Fulmor volunteered at a local planetarium. Today Finnegan works in animation production and Fulmor is a legal secretary (see an image of the couple).

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My Comment: What can I say but best wishes.

Ancient Ice Age, Once Regarded As Brief 'Blip' Found To Have Lasted For 30 Million Years

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) — Geologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years.

Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil – including the 'hot shales' of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world's most productive oil source rock.

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Dads Are Key to Making Us Human

From Live Science:

Some 95 percent of male mammals have little to no interaction with their children. Homo sapiens are one of the most notable exceptions, leading some scientists to think fatherhood is an important part of what makes us human.

Most theories for the family involvement of fathers invoke the familiar "Man the Hunter" characterization, in which dad protects and provides for his young.

While fathers do play key roles in securing the physical health of their children, they also can be important for the optimum development of psychological and emotional traits considered to be primarily human, such as empathy, emotional control and the ability to navigate complex social relationships.

Unlike many other animals, humans need their fathers well beyond the act that leads to conception, researchers are coming to realize.

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Out Of This World: New Mexico Poised To Break Ground In Construction Of Virgin Spaceport

On it's way: This conceptual image shows how Spaceport America
is expected to look at completion in 2010

From The Daily Mail:

The tantalising prospect of escaping the Earth’s atmosphere and experiencing weightlessness has been in the pipeline for two years. And now it’s officially arrived.

Workers in New Mexico have broken ground in the construction of a terminal and hanger facility for the world’s first rocket spaceport for sending wealthy customers to the edge of space.

Members of the general are being tempted with the ‘most incredible experience of their lives’ for $200,000 (£122,000) from as early as 2010.

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Bears And Other Predators Invade U.S. Neighborhoods

From Popular Mechanics:

As once-threatened animal populations including black bears, mountain lions and alligators rebound and people move into former wildlands, predators are showing up precisely where they don't belong: in backyards. And the wildlife isn't as afraid of us as we might think. Welcome to the food chain.

It was the perfect ending to a perfect afternoon. Gary Mann and his girlfriend Helen were watching the sun go down after a satisfying day clearing brush in the backyard of Mann’s home in Sutter Creek, Calif. A pile of branches and twigs was burning merrily, throwing shadows into the growing darkness as the couple’s three dogs—a 50-pound Shar-Pei named Tigger and a pair of Rottweiler mixes, Takota and Tenaya—played at their feet.

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Herschel Space Telescope's First Images Give Promising Glimpse Of What's To Come

Figure A: Herschel Composite : Herschel's test view of M51 ESA

From PopSci.com:

Test images show M51 galaxy in more detail than predecessors could

Herschel, the largest infrared space telescope yet flown, was launched a month ago by the ESA and was not expected to deliver images for another few weeks. It has, however, already produced images- in three colors- of M51, ‘the whirlpool galaxy,’ from a test observation run. The goal of the test was to get a large image and a sense of what Herschel will deliver in the future.

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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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