Flowing lava can carve or build paths very much like the riverbeds and canyons etched by water, and this probably explains at least one of the meandering channels on the surface of Mars. These results were presented on March 4, 2010 at the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Jacob Bleacher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Whether channels on Mars were formed by water or by lava has been debated for years, and the outcome is thought to influence the likelihood of finding life there.

“To understand if life, as we know it, ever existed on Mars, we need to understand where water is or was,” says Bleacher. Geologists think that the water currently on the surface of Mars is either held in the soil or takes the form of ice at the planet’s north and south poles. But some researchers contend that water flowed or pooled on the surface sometime in the past; water in this form is thought to increase the chance of some form of past or present life.

One of the lines of support for the idea that water once flowed on Mars comes from images that reveal details resembling the erosion of soil by water: terracing of channel walls, formation of small islands in a channel, hanging channels that dead-end and braided channels that branch off and then reconnect to the main branch. “These are thought to be clear evidence of fluvial [water-based] erosion on Mars,” Bleacher says.

Details from the Ascraeus channel (red), meandering across the surface of Mars. The insets in the black boxes show close-ups of some of the structures that lava can form: (left) branched channels, (middle) a snaking channel and (right) rootless vents; the rootless vents are also marked by yellow spots on the main image.

Lava is generally not thought to be able to create such finely crafted features. Instead, “the common image is of the big, open channels in Hawaii,” he explains.

Bleacher and his colleagues carried out a careful study of a single channel on the southwest flank of Mars’ Ascraeus Mons volcano, one of the three clustered volcanoes collectively called the Tharsis Montes. To piece together images covering more than 270 kilometers (~168 miles) of this channel, the team relied on high-resolution pictures from three cameras — the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), the Context Imager (CTX) and the High/Super Resolution Stereo Color (HRSC) imager — as well as earlier data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). These data gave a much more detailed view of the surface than previously available.

Because the fluid that formed this and other Ascraeus Mons channels is long-gone, its identity has been hard to deduce, but the visual clues at the source of the channel seem to point to water. These clues include small islands, secondary channels that branch off and rejoin the main one and eroded bars on the insides of the curves of the channels.

But at the channel’s other end, an area not clearly seen before, Bleacher and colleagues found a ridge that appears to have lava flows coming out of it. In some areas, “the channel is actually roofed over, as if it were a lava tube, and lined up along this, we see several rootless vents,” or openings where lava is forced out of the tube and creates small structures, he explains. These types of features don’t form in water-carved channels, he notes. Bleacher argues that having one end of the channel formed by water and the other end by lava is an “exotic” combination. More likely, he thinks, the entire channel was formed by lava.

To find out what kinds of features lava can produce, Bleacher, along with W. Brent Garry and Jim Zimbelman at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, examined the 51-kilometer (~32 mile) lava flow from the 1859 eruption of Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. Their main focus was an island nearly a kilometer long in the middle of the channel; Bleacher says this is much larger than islands typically identified within lava flows. To survey the island, the team used differential GPS, which provides location information to within about 3 to 5 centimeters (1.1 to 1.9 inches), rather than the roughly 3 to 5 meters (9.8 to 16.4 feet) that a car’s GPS can offer.

“We found terraced walls on the insides of these channels, channels that go out and just disappear, channels that cut back into the main one, and vertical walls 9 meters (~29 feet) high,” Bleacher says. “So, right here, in something that we know was formed only by flowing lava, we found most of the features that were considered to be diagnostic of water-carved channels on Mars.”

The new results make “a strong case that fluid lava can produce channels that look very much like water-generated features,” says Zimbelman. “So, we should not jump to a water-related conclusion when we see such channels on other planets, particularly in volcanic terrain such as that around the Tharsis Montes volcanoes.”

Further evidence that such features could be created by lava flows came from the examination of a detailed image of channels from the Mare Imbrium, a dark patch on the moon that is actually a large crater filled with ancient lava rock. In this image, too, the researchers found channels with terraced walls and branching secondary channels.

The conclusion that lava probably made the channel on Mars “not only has implications for the geological evolution of the Ascraeus Mons but also the whole Tharsis Bulge [volcanic region],” says Andy de Wet, a co-author at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Penn. “It may also have some implications for the supposed widespread involvement of water in the geological evolution of Mars.”

Bleacher notes that the team’s conclusions do not rule out the possibility of flowing water on Mars, nor of the existence of other channels carved by water. “But one thing I’ve learned is not to underestimate the way that liquid rock will flow,” he says. “It really can produce a lot of things that we might not think it would.”

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

Students at The University of Findlay are helping Michael Edelbrock, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, study canine cells using a process originally developed using human cells and perfected by Alexander Vaglenov, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences.

According to Edelbrock, dogs respond to toxicity much like humans. When humans are exposed to environmental pollution, the genome can be affected, which causes mutations that can lead to diseases such as cancer. Edelbrock’s research is looking at the possibility of studying the canine population in a defined geographical area to determine how the same environment may affect humans.

Edelbrock plans to compare cells from pets and strays, and build depth from there. “The questions are endless,” said Edelbrock. “We could look at environmental differences such as smoking versus non-smoking homes, rural versus urban animals, and eventually compare results from different cities.”

If consistencies are found in the dogs’ cells, canines could be used in studying an overall city’s health and environment.

Students and faculty members at the University conduct research in $450,000 state-of-the-art science laboratories, which were completed prior to the 2007-2008 academic year.

Source: The University of Findlay.

The new process causes the polymer to conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction, unlike metals, which conduct equally well in all directions. This may make the new material especially useful for applications where it is important to draw heat away from an object, such as a computer processor chip. The work is described in a paper published on March 7 in Nature Materials.

The key to the transformation was getting all the polymer molecules to line up the same way, rather than forming a chaotic tangled mass, as they normally do. The team did that by slowly drawing a polyethylene fiber out of a solution, using the finely controllable cantilever of an atomic force microscope, which they also used to measure the properties of the resulting fiber.

This fiber was about 300 times more thermally conductive than normal polyethylene along the direction of the individual fibers, says the team’s leader, Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and director of MIT’s Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering Laboratories.

The high thermal conductivity could make such fibers useful for dissipating heat in many applications where metals are now used, such as solar hot water collectors, heat exchangers and electronics.

Chen explains that most attempts to create polymers with improved thermal conductivity have focused on adding in other materials, such as carbon nanotubes, but these have achieved only modest increases in conductivity because the interfaces between the two kinds of material tend to add thermal resistance. “The interfaces actually scatter heat, so you don’t get much improvement,” Chen says. But using this new method, the conductivity was enhanced so much that it was actually better than that of about half of all pure metals, including iron and platinum.

Producing the new fibers, in which the polymer molecules are all aligned instead of jumbled, required a two-stage process, explains graduate student Sheng Shen, the lead author of the paper. The polymer is initially heated and drawn out, then heated again to stretch it further. “Once it solidifies at room temperature, you can’t do any large deformation,” Shen says, “so we heat it up twice.”

Even greater gains are likely to be possible as the technique is improved, says Chen, noting that the results achieved so far already represent the highest thermal conductivity ever seen in any polymer material. Already, the degree of conductivity they produce, if such fibers could be made in quantity, could provide a cheaper alternative to metals used for heat transfer in many applications, especially ones where the directional characteristics would come in handy, such as heat-exchanger fins (like the coils on the back of a refrigerator or in an air conditioner), cell-phone casings or the plastic packaging for computer chips. Other applications might be devised that take advantage of the material’s unusual combination of thermal conductivity with light weight, chemical stability and electrical insulation.

So far, the team has just produced individual fibers in a laboratory setting, Chen says, but “we’re hoping that down the road, we can scale up to a macro scale,” producing whole sheets of material with the same properties.

Ravi Prasher, an engineer at Intel, says that “the quality of the work from Prof. Chen’s group has always been phenomenal,” and adds that “this is a very significant finding” that could have many applications in electronics. The remaining question, he says, is “how scalable is the manufacturing of these fibers? How easy is it to integrate these fibers in real-world applications?”

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The phenomenon, described as thermopower waves, “opens up a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says Michael Strano, MIT’s Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, who was the senior author of a paper describing the new findings that appeared in Nature Materials on March 7. The lead author was Wonjoon Choi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering.

Like a collection of flotsam propelled along the surface by waves traveling across the ocean, it turns out that a thermal wave — a moving pulse of heat — traveling along a microscopic wire can drive electrons along, creating an electrical current.

The key ingredient in the recipe is carbon nanotubes — submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a chicken-wire-like lattice of carbon atoms. These tubes, just a few billionths of a meter (nanometers) in diameter, are part of a family of novel carbon molecules, including buckyballs and graphene sheets, that have been the subject of intensive worldwide research over the last two decades.

In the new experiments, each of these electrically and thermally conductive nanotubes was coated with a layer of a highly reactive fuel that can produce heat by decomposing. This fuel was then ignited at one end of the nanotube using either a laser beam or a high-voltage spark, and the result was a fast-moving thermal wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse. Heat from the fuel goes into the nanotube where it travels thousands of times faster than in the fuel itself. As the heat feeds back to the fuel coating, a thermal wave is created that is guided along the nanotube. With a temperature of 3,000 kelvins, this ring of heat speads along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction. The heating produced by that combustion, it turns out, also pushes electrons along the tube, creating a substantial electrical current.

Combustion waves — like this pulse of heat hurtling along a wire — “have been studied mathematically for more than 100 years,” Strano says, but he was the first to predict that such waves could be guided by a nanotube or nanowire and that this wave of heat could push an electrical current along that wire.

In the group’s initial experiments, Strano says, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire.

After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.

The amount of power released, he says, is much greater than that predicted by thermoelectric calculations. While many semiconductor materials can produce an electric potential when heated, through something called the Seebeck effect, that effect is very weak in carbon. “There’s something else happening here,” he says. “We call it electron entrainment since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity.”

The thermal wave, he explains, appears to be entraining the electrical charge carriers (either electrons or electron holes) just as an ocean wave can pick up and carry a collection of debris along the surface. This important property is responsible for the high power produced by the system, Strano says.

Because this is such a new discovery, he says, it’s hard to predict yet exactly what the practical applications will be. But he suggests that one possible application would be in enabling new kinds of ultra-small electronic devices — for example, a devices the size of grains of rice, perhaps a sensor or treatment device that could be injected into the body. Or it could lead to “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust in the air,” he says.

In theory, he says, such devices could maintain their power indefinitely until used, unlike batteries whose charge leaks away gradually as they sit unused. And while the individual nanowires are tiny, Strano suggests that they could be made in large arrays in order to supply significant amounts of power for larger devices.

One area the researchers plan to pursue is the fact that their theory predicts that using different kinds of reactive materials for the coating, the wave front could oscillate, thus producing an alternating current. That opens up a variety of possibilities, Strano says, because alternating current is the basis for radio waves such as cell phone transmissions, but present energy-storage systems all produce direct current. “Our theory predicted these oscillations before we began to observe them in our data,” he says.

Also, the present versions of the system have low efficiency, because much power is being given off as heat and light. The team plans to work on improving that efficiency.

Funding was provided by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A team of engineers from the University of Seville (US) has created a system for monitoring historical monuments by remote control and detecting possible damage. Five years ago the researchers placed various sensors on the Giraldillo, the sculpture that crowns the Giralda, and now they are publishing the results in the journal Structural Health Monitoring.

“The system has been connected to the Giraldillo to register different variables associated to the mechanical response of this sculpture, such as meteorological actions or conditions that it is subjected to, but it could be used to monitor other historical monuments,” says Mario Solís, main author of the study and professor at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros (Advanced Technical College for Engineers) of the US.

Monuments Monitored from a Distance

The Giraldillo, a Renaissance sculpture that acts as a weather vane on the top of the Giralda, was taken down and restored between 1999 and 2005, at which point the researchers took the opportunity to put on sensors which have allowed them to monitor it up until now.

The results of the study, published in the last edition of the journal Structural Health Monitoring, indicate that the weather vane sculpture requires a wind speed of 10 m/s to move and positions itself according to this meteor 40% of the time, the temperature fluctuates from 0ºC registered on the exterior to 48 ºC measured by an internal probe, and no abnormal values are recorded in the vibration frequencies and the mechanical response.

“The system provides information of great interest for studying the behaviour and state of preservation of the Giraldillo,” Solís highlights, which confirms that this technique “could not only be applied to detect structural damage in other monuments of historical heritage, but also in machinery and aero spatial components.”

How to monitor the Giraldillo

To determine the environmental conditions surrounding the statue, the scientists installed two temperature and humidity probes (one external and another on the inside of the ball on which it stands), and a third to calculate the corrosion of the bronze pieces that it is composed of.

The cables for the sensors are centralised in a terminal with a 40 metre cable leading into the data acquisition system. This is located in the Body of the Clock of the Giralda, the highest point of the tower, which can be easily accessed to carry out programming and maintenance tasks. From there, through an internet connection or via traditional remote control information can be sent to any control centre.

The magnitudes registered are velocity and direction of the wind (this is the main mechanical action that impacts the monument), the degree of flexion of the rod that supports the statue on the tower (to detect curvatures), and the measurement of vibrations, through six accelerometers and four levels.

Source: FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology

Writing in the Journal of Coastal Research, Gary P. Shaffer, Southeastern professor of biological sciences, notes that the Maurepas Swamp complex, the second largest coastal forest in Louisiana, has been radically reduced over the years due to excessive logging, development, changing water levels, nutrient deprivation and saltwater intrusion. The paper was co-authored with several other scientists from Southeastern and LSU.

“Much of the remaining swamp is in a severe state of deterioration,” Shaffer said.

He explained that the establishment of levees over the last century along the Mississippi River to eliminate natural flooding removed a once reliable source of fresh water, sediments and nutrients that swamps require for healthy growth.

“This has enabled salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to make further inland intrusions,” he said. “Combined with rising sea levels and the construction of massive canals, such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), the intensity and frequency of saltwater intrusions has only grown worse. Consequently, most of the Maurepas Swamp appears to be in transition to marsh and open water.”

The scientists’ findings are based on comparisons of selected groupings of sites in the southern wetlands of Lake Maurepas. The sites had three different levels of water quality: including stagnant and nearly permanently flooded areas, sites with severe saltwater intrusion, and sites that receive some freshwater runoff. Salinity levels appeared to be the major factor causing sites to rapidly deteriorate, with the most degraded areas located near Lake Pontchartrain or along the margin of Lake Maurepas.

“The Maurepas Swamp is in a steady state of rapid decline, and that’s evident by the loss of much of the baldcypress and water tupelo forests that were a mainstay of the swamp,” Shaffer said. “Over the past seven years, nearly 20 percent of the original 1,860 trees in our study plots have died.”

A Mississippi River diversion — under study for several years now by the Environmental Protection Agency and scientists at Southeastern and LSU — would decrease the salinity, increase the levels of nutrients, and provide much needed sediment necessary to rebuild the subsiding swamp, Shaffer explained.

“It is likely that the influences of freshening would be felt in wetlands as distant as Lake Pontchartrain,” he said. “Even the smallest proposed diversion would replace all of the water in Lake Maurepas twice each year and it can only exit to Lake Pontchartrain through Pass Manchac and North Pass.”

Mississippi River reintroductions have been considered at Violet, Bonnet Carre, La Branch and two in the Maurepas Swamp, Shaffer said

The study also evaluated the region following the 2005 hurricanes, with the scientists concluding that the extensive lateral root systems of baldcypress and water tupelo can hold an entire ecosystem together, while also serving as valuable natural storm buffers.

“If we want to reverse the decline of coastal Louisiana swamps, we have to find and use sources of fresh water that currently are being wasted, including water from the Mississippi River, as well as treated sewage effluent,” he said. “The proper freshening of the region should enable restoration of the swamps in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin.”

Co-authors of the study included Thais E. Perkins, William B. Wood and Jason Zoller of Southeastern; Susan S. Hoeppner of the LSU Department of Oceanography and Coastal Science; and Demetra Kandalepas of the LSU Department of Biological Sciences. Shaffer also credited the efforts of numerous undergraduate and graduate students who performed much of the field work.

Source: Southeastern Louisiana University

Benzyl Alcohol Lotion 5% (known as Ulesfia^TM) works by suffocating lice, a method which has been attempted by treating with household items such as mayonnaise, olive oil and petroleum jelly. Studies have shown that overnight treatments with these home remedies may initially appear to kill lice, but later a “resurrection effect” occurs after rinsing, because lice can resist asphyxiation.

This is accomplished by the louse’s ability to presumably close its spiracles, the external entry points to the breathing apparatus, when submerged. Unlike commonly used asphyxiant remedies, scanning electron microscopy appears to indicate that benzyl alcohol lotion effectively asphyxiates lice by “stunning” the spiracles open, allowing the lotion, comprised of mineral oil and other inactive ingredients, to infiltrate the “honeycomb” respiratory apparatus and kill lice.

The phase III trials were comprised of two multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, conducted among ten geographically diverse sites which assessed the clinical effectiveness and safety of benzyl alcohol lotion. 250 participants took part in the trials and were randomised to treatment or vehicle (lotion but with no active ingredient) groups, treatment was given at day one and day seven, and participants were checked for success at day eight and day 14. On day eight the treatment group had a success rate of 91.2% as an average of both trials, and a 75.6% success rate on day 14; in the vehicle group the success rates were 27.9% and 15.5% respectively.

“Existing over-the-counter head lice treatments contain neurotoxic pesticides as active ingredients, resulting in potential toxicity and other problems, including lengthy applications, odor, ineffective treatment. Resistance has also become a problem now that lice have had such prolonged exposure to these products,” said study author Terri L Meinking, PhD, of Global Health Associates of Miami, USA. “This leaves practitioners, parents and patients hoping for a safe, non-neurotoxic cure.”

“Since the most popular products have been made readily available, their overuse has caused lice to become resistant just as bacteria have become resistant to many antibiotics,” added Meinking. “Because benzyl alcohol lotion kills by suffocation, resistance should not be an issue.”

Source: Wiley-Blackwell

Cell phone users are leery of putting banking accounts, identification and other sensitive information onto a device that gets left in cars, buried in the bottoms of purses and lost between sofa cushions, said Esther Swilley, a K-State assistant professor of marketing.

“I think what’s going to happen for consumers to accept a wallet phone is that it’s going to have to go in stages,” Swilley said. “So now we have everybody’s telephone number on our phones. Next you will be doing airline tickets and things like that on your phone. Next thing you know, everything in your wallet is going to be on the phone.”

She surveyed both college students and a segment of the general population about their readiness to use wallet phones. The results for both groups were the same — they didn’t want them.

“It was the risk that was involved, and people didn’t want to take the risk,” Swilley said.

The research will appear in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Marketing.

“I would say something in my classes about wallet phones, and just the look on students’ faces said no,” Swilley said. “I would ask them why, and everybody said, ‘because I lose my phone.’”

Her students conceded that if their phone had the same information as their wallet they would keep better tabs on it. But they still said it wasn’t worth the risk, even with password protection.

Swilley predicts that consumers will be more willing to accept keeping an airline, movie or sports ticket on their phone. For instance, Fandango is testing a system for sending movie theater tickets to cell phones.

“With something like a ticket, all you have to do is swipe the phone, so it’s easy and people aren’t as concerned about it,” Swilley said. “If somebody stole the phone, you’d be mad, but your identification would be intact.”

In Europe, Swilley said consumers are using their cell phones to purchase items from vending machines with a swipe of their phone. The difference is that the money isn’t deducted from the user’s bank account. Rather, the phone works like a gift card, in which the user places a set amount of money on it.

Swilley said the wallet phones wouldn’t look any different from other cell phones. It’s the chip inside that would allow users to store the type of information that goes in their wallets.

“What was interesting is that most cell phone technologies start in Asia,” Swilley said. “So they started the wallet phone in Japan, and it didn’t catch on there. If it didn’t catch on in Japan, it probably won’t catch on here, either. If it does, I do think it’s going to take a while for Americans to cozy up to the idea.”

Source: Kansas State University

Two separate research groups, one located in the US and the other in the UK, are reporting dramatic advances in the development of phonon lasers in the current issue of Physical Review Letters. The papers are highlighted with a Viewpoint by Jacob Khurgin of Johns Hopkins University in the February 22 issue of Physics.

Light and sound are similar in various ways: they both can be thought of in terms of waves, and they both come in quantum mechanical units (photons in the case of light, and phonons in the case of sound). In addition, both light and sound can be produced as random collections of quanta (consider the light emitted by a light bulb) or orderly waves that travel in coordinated fashion (as is the case for laser light). Many physicists believed that the parallels imply that lasers should be as feasible with sound as they are with light. While low frequency sound in the range that humans can hear (up to 20 kilohertz) is easy to produce in either a random or orderly fashion, things get more difficult at the terahertz (trillions of hertz) frequencies that are the regime of potential phonon laser applications. The problem stems from the fact that sound travels much slower than light, which in turn means that the wavelength of sound is much shorter than light at a given frequency. Instead of resulting in orderly, coherent phonon lasers, miniscule structures that can produce terahertz sound tend to emit phonons randomly.

Researchers at Caltech have overcome the problem by assembling a pair of microscopic cavities that only permit specific frequencies of phonons to be emitted. They can also tune the system to emit phonons of different frequencies by changing the relative separation of the microcavities.

The group from the UK’s University of Nottingham took a different approach. They built their device out of electrons moving through a series of structures known as quantum wells. As an electron hops from one quantum well to the next, it produces a phonon. So far, the Nottingham group has not demonstrated a true phonon lasing, but their system amplifies high-frequency sound in a way that suggests it could be it a key component in future phonon laser designs.

Regardless of the approach, the recent developments are landmark breakthroughs on the route to practical phonon lasers. Phonon lasers would have to go a long way to match the utility of their optical cousins, but the many applications that physicists have in mind already, including medical imaging, high precision measurement devices, and high-energy focused sound, suggest that sound-based lasers may have a future nearly as bright as light lasers.

Source: American Physical Society

New research from scientists in Liverpool has revealed the relationship between agility and vision in mammals. The study, published in the Journal of Anatomy, sampled 51 species to compare the relationship between agility and vision between frontal eyed species, such as cats, to lateral-eyed mammals, such as rabbits, to establish if the positioning of the eyes resulted in limitations to speed and agility.

“Footballers do it, cheetahs do it, and even sedentary academics can do it. We all have the ability to visually track an object whilst on the move and you don’t give a second thought to the effort involved,” explained co-author Dr Nathan Jeffery from the University of Liverpool. “As you walk or run your head swings up and down, tilts from side to side and rotates. Three semicircular canals of fluid found on each side of the skull sense these movements, one for each direction. These then send signals via the brain to three pairs of muscles that move the eyeball in the opposite direction and ensure that you can keep your eye on the ball, gazelle or the beer in your hand.”

Researchers sampled the relationship between agility and vision between frontal eyed species, such as cats, to lateral-eyed mammals, such as rabbits, to establish if the positioning of the eyes resulted in limitations to speed and agility.

This process, known as the vestibulo-ocular reflex, is affected by the directions sensed by the canals and the pull directions of the eye muscles. In mammals, the eyes can be on the side of the head, as with rabbits, or at the front of the head like in cats, however the position of the canals is basically the same. In some mammals the brain must do extra calculations to adjust the signal from the canals to match the different pull directions of the eye muscles.

“In our study we wanted to find out if these extra calculations placed any limitations on how fast an animal could move,” said co-author Phillip Cox. “We asked if there could be a point whereby, if an animal moves too quickly it could result in the brain being unable to adjust the signals from canal to muscle planes, which in turn would result in blurred vision.” The work was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The team used MRI scanners to analyse the arrangement of canals and eye muscles in 51 species of mammal including giraffes, camels and zebra, tree shrews, bats and sloths. Astonishingly, the team found that the position of canals and eye muscles had no effect on the ability to see clearly at speed. In theory, a Sloth could travel as fast as a Cheetah without blurring its vision.

The team also found evidence suggesting that the role of the extraocular muscles switches with changes of eye position. For instance, muscles that make up-down compensatory movements in frontal-eyed species appear aligned for torsional movements in lateral-eyed species. Before this, scientists had assumed that major rewiring of the connections was essential to adapt the reflex to changes of eye position.

“Switching between muscles offers an economical way of adapting the vestibulo-ocular reflex to changes of eye position without major rewiring of the connections or changes of canal orientations,” concluded Dr Jeffery. “The mammalian brain can apparently cope with the extra demands placed on it whether the eyes are at the front, side or almost at the back of the head.”

Source: Wiley-Blackwell

The scientific team, a ‘who’s-who’ of Australian coral reef scientists, describe the findings as “a globally significant demonstration of the effectiveness of large-scale networks of marine reserves.”

“Our data show rapid increases of fish inside no-take reserves, in both reef and non-reef habitats ,” says Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, speaking February 22 at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences meeting in San Diego, California.

“Critically, the reserves also benefit overall ecosystem health and resilience,” says lead author Dr Laurence McCook of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

“Outbreaks of coral-eating, crown-of-thorns starfish are less frequent on no-take reefs, which consequently have a higher abundance of healthy corals after outbreaks.”

“In concert with other measures, the reserve network is also helping the plight of threatened species like dugongs and marine turtles,” says Dr McCook.

“There is now very strong evidence that no-take zones benefit fish populations within those zones. The numbers of coral trout doubled on some reefs within two years of closure to fishing,” reports Dr Hugh Sweatman, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

Overall, the team concluded “With 32% of GBR reef area in no-take reefs, and fish densities about two times greater on those reefs, fish populations across the ecosystem have increased considerably.” The researchers predict that as protected fish inside no-take areas grow larger and larger, they will contribute many more larvae to the whole ecosystem. Therefore, the benefits of no-take areas are expected to extend far beyond the no-take boundaries, replenishing surrounding areas that are open to fishing.

Larger, more mobile species, such as sharks, have benefited less than residential fishes, but nevertheless show clear effects of protection: grey reef sharks are much more abundant on highly protected reefs than on fished reefs.

However the team cautioned that there was evidence of some poaching in no-take zones, reinforcing the need for education and enforcement.

The researchers say that preliminary economic analysis points to considerable net benefits, both to the environment and to tourism, fishing and related enterprises.

“The Great Barrier Reef generates far more economic benefit to Australia than the cost of protecting it” they added.

“Given the major threat posed by climate change, the expanded network of marine reserves provides a critical and cost-effective contribution to enhancing the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef,” the scientists comment.

“In summary, the network of marine reserves on the GBR has brought major, sustained ecological benefits, including for target fish and sharks.

“Overall, the results demonstrate that the large-scale network of marine reserves on the GBR is proving to be an excellent investment — in social, economic and environmental terms,” they conclude.

Source: ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies

Ice shelves are retreating in the southern section of the Antarctic Peninsula due to climate change, according to new data. This could result in glacier retreat and sea-level rise if warming continues, threatening coastal communities and low-lying islands worldwide, experts say.

Research by the U.S. Geological Survey is the first to document that every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. The USGS previously documented that the majority of ice fronts on the entire Peninsula have also retreated during the late 20^th century and into the early 21^st century.

The ice shelves are attached to the continent and already floating, holding in place the Antarctic ice sheet that covers about 98 percent of the Antarctic continent. As the ice shelves break off, it is easier for outlet glaciers and ice streams from the ice sheet to flow into the sea. The transition of that ice from land to the ocean is what raises sea level.

“This research is part of a larger ongoing USGS project that is for the first time studying the entire Antarctic coastline in detail, and this is important because the Antarctic ice sheet contains 91 percent of Earth’s glacier ice,” said USGS scientist Jane Ferrigno. “The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming. We need to be alert and continually understand and observe how our climate system is changing.”

This image shows ice-front retreat in part of the southern Antarctic Peninsula from 1947 to 2009. USGS scientists are studying coastal and glacier change along the entire Antarctic coastline. The southern portion of the Antarctic Peninsula is one area studied as part of this project, and is summarized in the USGS report, "Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Palmer Land Area, Antarctica: 1947--2009" (map I--2600--C).

The Peninsula is one of Antarctica’s most rapidly changing areas because it is farthest away from the South Pole, and its ice shelf loss may be a forecast of changes in other parts of Antarctica and the world if warming continues.

Retreat along the southern part of the Peninsula is of particular interest because that area has the Peninsula’s coolest temperatures, demonstrating that global warming is affecting the entire length of the Peninsula.

The Antarctic Peninsula’s southern section as described in this study contains five major ice shelves: Wilkins, George VI, Bach, Stange and the southern portion of Larsen Ice Shelf. The ice lost since 1998 from the Wilkins Ice Shelf alone totals more than 4,000 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The USGS is working collaboratively on this project with the British Antarctic Survey, with the assistance of the Scott Polar Research Institute and Germany’s Bundesamt fűr Kartographie und Geodäsie. The research is also part of the USGS Glacier Studies Project, which is monitoring and describing glacier extent and change over the whole planet using satellite imagery.

The report, “Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Palmer Land Area, Antarctica: 1947 — 2009″ and its accompanying map is available online (http://pubs.usgs.gov/imap/i-2600-c/).

The other completed reports in the Coastal Change and Glaciological Maps of Antarctica series can be viewed online (http://pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/).

Source: U.S. Geological Survey

Unlike the sexually-transmitted form of chlamydia, Chlamydia pneumoniae is a major bacterial germ that causes widespread respiratory disease in humans.

The discovery was made by an international team of scientists from QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation and the Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who used koalas to prove the link between Chlamydia pneumoniae in animals and humans.

“We were able to sequence the genome (an organism’s hereditary information) of Chlamydia pneumoniae obtained from an Australian koala and found evidence that human Chlamydia pneumoniae was originally derived from an animal source,” Professor Timms said.

“Infections acquired from wildlife, known as zoonotic infections, are one of the most significant growing threats to global human health.

“We’ve already seen the impact of zoonotic infections with the H1N1 influenza pandemic which spread worldwide and originated from swines/pigs.”

Professor Timms said the research revealed evidence that humans were originally infected zoonotically by animal isolates of Chlamydia pneumoniae which have adapted to humans primarily through the processes of gene decay.

He said Chlamydia pneumoniae was originally an animal pathogen that crossed the species barrier to humans and had adapted to the point where it could now be transmitted between humans.

“What we think now is that Chlamydia pneumoniae originated from amphibians such as frogs,” he said.

Professor Timms said it was important to understand the origins of zoonotic infections to know the risk animal infections have to humans.

“It means we can look for solutions such as developing improved diagnostic tests, ensuring people take appropriate precautions to prevent the disease spreading and also develop vaccines,” he said.

Assistant Professor Garry Myers from the Institute for Genome Sciences said the findings indicated that the high disease burden of Chlamydia pneumoniae in humans may represent a major public health corollary of zoonotic infections.

The findings from the study have been published in the international Journal of Bacteriology.

Source: Queensland University of Technology.

A section of an ancient city wall of Jerusalem from the tenth century B.C.E. — possibly built by King Solomon — has been revealed in archaeological excavations directed by Dr. Eilat Mazar and conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The section of the city wall revealed, 70 meters long and six meters high, is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the southern wall of the Temple Mount.

Uncovered in the city wall complex are: an inner gatehouse for access into the royal quarter of the city, a royal structure adjacent to the gatehouse, and a corner tower that overlooks a substantial section of the adjacent Kidron valley.

The excavations in the Ophel area were carried out over a three-month period with funding provided by Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman, a New York couple interested in Biblical Archeology. The funding supports both completion of the archaeological excavations and processing and analysis of the finds as well as conservation work and preparation of the site for viewing by the public within the Ophel Archaeological Park and the national park around the walls of Jerusalem.

Dr. Eilat Mazar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem archaeologist, points to the tenth century B.C.E. excavations that were uncovered under her direction in the Ophel area adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem.

The excavations were carried out in cooperation with the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and the Company for the Development of East Jerusalem. Archaeology students from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as volunteer students from the Herbert W. Armstrong College in Edmond, Oklahoma, and hired workers all participated in the excavation work.

“The city wall that has been uncovered testifies to a ruling presence. Its strength and form of construction indicate a high level of engineering,” Mazar said. The city wall is at the eastern end of the Ophel area in a high, strategic location atop the western slop of the Kidron valley.

“A comparison of this latest finding with city walls and gates from the period of the First Temple, as well as pottery found at the site, enable us to postulate with a great degree of assurance that the wall that has been revealed is that which was built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the latter part of the tenth century B.C.E.,” said Mazar

“This is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon’s building in Jerusalem,” she added. “The Bible tells us that Solomon built — with the assistance of the Phoenicians, who were outstanding builders — the Temple and his new palace and surrounded them with a city, most probably connected to the more ancient wall of the City of David.” Mazar specifically cites the third chapter of the First Books of Kings where it refers to “until he (Solomon) had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the Lord, and the wall of Jerusalem round about.”

The six-meter-high gatehouse of the uncovered city wall complex is built in a style typical of those from the period of the First Temple like Megiddo, Beersheva and Ashdod. It has symmetrical plan of four identical small rooms, two on each side of the main passageway. Also there was a large, adjacent tower, covering an area of 24 by 18 meters, which was intended to serve as a watchtower to protect entry to the city. The tower is located today under the nearby road and still needs to be excavated. Nineteenth century British surveyor Charles Warren, who conducted an underground survey in the area, first described the outline of the large tower in 1867 but without attributing it to the era of Solomon.

“Part of the city wall complex served as commercial space and part as security stations,” explained Mazar. Within the courtyard of the large tower there were widespread public activities, she said. It served as a public meeting ground, as a place for conducting commercial activities and cult activities, and as a location for economic and legal activities.

Pottery shards discovered within the fill of the lowest floor of the royal building near the gatehouse also testify to the dating of the complex to the 10th century B.C.E. Found on the floor were remnants of large storage jars, 1.15 meters in height, that survived destruction by fire and that were found in rooms that apparently served as storage areas on the ground floor of the building. On one of the jars there is a partial inscription in ancient Hebrew indicating it belonged to a high-level government official.

“The jars that were found are the largest ever found in Jerusalem,” said Mazar, adding that “the inscription that was found on one of them shows that it belonged to a government official, apparently the person responsible for overseeing the provision of baked goods to the royal court.”

In addition to the pottery shards, cult figurines were also found in the area, as were seal impressions on jar handles with the word “to the king,” testifying to their usage within the monarchy. Also found were seal impressions (bullae) with Hebrew names, also indicating the royal nature of the structure. Most of the tiny fragments uncovered came from intricate wet sifting done with the help of the salvaging Temple Mount Sifting Project, directed by Dr. Gabriel Barkai and Zachi Zweig, under the auspice of the Nature and Parks Authority and the Ir David Foundation.

Between the large tower at the city gate and the royal building the archaeologists uncovered a section of the corner tower that is eight meters in length and six meters high. The tower was built of carved stones of unusual beauty.

East of the royal building, another section of the city wall that extends for some 35 meters also was revealed. This section is five meters high, and is part of the wall that continues to the northeast and once enclosed the Ophel area.

Source: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“It is these local influences which we hope our design will help mitigate. However, in addition to our rubber trailing edge, it also calls for effective sensors and control systems which can tell the system to regulate the flaps according to the local wind conditions along the blade. Right now we are looking at different types of sensors and a trailing edge made of plastic instead of rubber,” explains Research Specialist Helge Aagaard Madsen.

In December 2009, the rubber trailing edge was tested in the open jet wind tunnel at the company Velux in Denmark. The test marked the end of a development process which was initiated in 2006. It started with a GAP funding project which ran from 2007 to 2008 and confirmed the operating principle. This was followed by the current project in 2009, supported by Region Zealand, where the rubber trailing edge was tested in the wind tunnel. Along the way, many different prototypes have been developed and manufactured at the Fibre Laboratory at the Materials Research Division at Risø DTU, which also has been part of this development process.

“The operational principle which we have arrived at is very simple and robust, and we also believe that the manufacturing process will be so. The wind tunnel test showed, among other things, that the outward curve of the flap does not change markedly when subjected to wind loads similar to those on a real turbine blade. In addition, we measured the correlation between the deflection of the flap and the change in lift on the blade section. This produced figures which we can enter into our calculation models and then realistically simulate how the flap will reduce the loads on the turbine,” says Helge Aagaard Madsen.

“A further bonus of our design is that the moulded rubber trailing edge gives us a sharp edge which produces less noise and greater output. As most blades today are manufactured in two halves and afterwards joined together, the trailing edge will always have a certain thickness. The trailing edge is then ground to make it thinner, but with our design, the blade automatically gets a completely sharp edge.”

Up to a moderate gale

The test facilities at Velux have been used in the past to test wind turbine blade profiles, so it was obvious that the design should be tested here. In the wind tunnel it is possible, among other things, to regulate the wind speed, and the blade profile can be turned to simulate a change in wind direction in relation to the profile.

The test set-up consisted of a two-metre-long blade section with a total chord of one metre and a 15 cm rubber flap covering the entire span. The blade incorporated a pneumatic system for controlling the flexible silicone material which the trailing edge is made of. Finally, two sensors were attached to the front of the blade which measured wind direction and speed.

“So far there has been focus on demonstrating and testing the operating principle, but now where we can see that it is a robust and reliable model, which can withstand the strong wind loading, we can start to focus more on optimising the design and working towards a full-scale version,” says Helge Aagaard Madsen, adding that one of their concerns was whether strong gusts of wind would counteract the deflection of the rubber trailing edge, which the compressed air caused. But fortunately it was not the case.

The force which the blade is exposed to is based on measurements of the surface pressure across the blade section. The difference in the force on the upper side and lower side of the blade clearly indicates how the movements of the rubber trailing edge can regulate this force and thereby compensate for the fluctuating forces to which a blade is otherwise subjected because of wind gusts.

“Among other things, we investigated how quickly the rubber trailing edge could regulate, and we tested the flaps to a frequency above 2 Hz. Today, pitch is regulated by turning the entire blade around a bearing at the hub, but this has limitations due to the blade weight of several tons but also because a distributed, variable regulation along the blade is not possible. Consequently, we believe that the control with flaps can supplement the slower pitch regulation really well,” explains Peter Bjørn Andersen.

A step on the way to full-scale

Now that the operating principle has been thoroughly tested, the next step in the project is to develop the technology towards a stage where the rubber trailing edge flap is ready for testing in a full-scale prototype model. The researchers will work on optimising the design so the deflection will be as big as possible for a given pressure in the voids within the trailing edge. Durability is another important issue, as is developing systems for supplying compressed air or hydraulic power.

“We are in contact with a number of companies who are interested in working with us on these issues, and it is vital for the further development of the technology that we involve industry as this is where the systems will be manufactured at the end of the day. The plan is thus to launch a new development project which involves close corporation between on one side the research groups at Risoe DTU in the Wind Energy Division and in the Materials Research Division and on the other side these companies in order to bring the rubber trailing edge flap technology to a stage where it is ready for testing on a full-scale wind turbine,” concludes Helge Aagaard Madsen.

Regulatory proteins common to all eukaryotic cells can have additional, unique functions in embryonic stem (ES) cells, according to a study in the February 22 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org). If cancer progenitor cells—which function similarly to stem cells—are shown to rely on these regulatory proteins in the same way, it may be possible to target them therapeutically without harming healthy neighboring cells.

The new study, by Thomas Fazzio and Barbara Panning (University of California, San Francisco) finds that two chromatin regulatory proteins essential for ES cell survival, Smc2 and Smc4, together form the heart of the condensin complexes that promote chromosome condensation in mitosis and meiosis. Because somatic cells lacking condensins continue to proliferate with relatively minor mitotic defects, Fazzio and Panning wondered why ES cells died in the absence of Smc2 or Smc4.

Unpacking condensins' function in embryonic stem cells

ES cells lacking the condensin subunits accrued massive amounts of DNA damage that resulted in cell death. It isn’t clear why ES cells are so sensitive to the loss of condensins, but it may be connected to two other phenotypes seen in ES, but not somatic, cells. After Smc2 or Smc4 was blocked, mitotic ES cells arrested in metaphase and interphase ES cell nuclei were enlarged and misshapen.

This suggests that condensins promote mitotic progression and maintain interphase chromatin compaction in ES cells—functions that they don’t have in somatic cells. In fact, many other chromatin regulatory proteins involved in ES cell survival can be depleted in differentiated cells without affecting viability, indicating that the chromatin of ES cells—and possibly cancer progenitor cells—is fundamentally different from somatic cell chromatin.

Source:

The procedure, which uses fecal samples rather than the oft-dreaded colonoscopy, was developed by Dr. Robert Chapkin and his colleagues, who have been studying the noninvasive technique at the genetic level for more than a decade.

“Babies have many, many intestinal conditions that can threaten their lives, such as necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, in premature infants,” said Chapkin, a nutritional scientist. “Our test, we believe, may have utility for determining a baby’s risk, and then would allow a physician to take different strategies in order to abate or prevent the possibility of this life threatening disorder.”

Necrotizing enterocolitis can be fatal, Chapkin noted, and it’s very difficult to determine which babies in the premature baby intensive care unit are going to develop the disease.

The researchers examined the fecal samples of 20 healthy babies in collaborative research with clinicians at the University of Illinois-Urbana.

Just as in the original research, in which the scientists detected genetic fingerprints from adult stools as a predictor of colon cancer, the study with babies found that genetic markers in their stools could also provide a picture of medical condition of an individual baby’s intestines.

The study used fecal samples from 10 human babies that were exclusively breast-fed and 10 human babies that were exclusively formula-fed, Chapkin said.

“I think that all doctors would agree that the breast is best. But why? What is in the breast milk? How does it affect developmental biology, why are infections and complications in the intestine lower in a breast-fed baby than a formula-fed baby?” Chapkin said. “The only way to deal with that is to have a molecular signature of the intestinal cells from that baby and to follow it over time.”

The team was able to identify genetic signatures from each baby, noninvasively, he said. In other words, each baby’s diaper was the source of the samples.

Though it is early in the research, Chapkin said, the scientists found genetic pathways that appear to be induced differently by the breast milk than by formula.

“This may unlock a gold mine, allowing us to understand how that little baby’s intestine is changing and developing and whether or not that formula is meeting those needs,” Chapkin said. “That would allow formula companies to further enrich their formulas with essential molecules so that the two worlds – breast milk and formula – look very similar at some point in time.

“We have a long way to go to validate these markers, but we show it’s feasible, it can be done,” Chapkin said. “We have genetic signatures that are different in these babies’ intestines.”

The finding comes on the heels of the long-term study of colon cancer. The team had created a way to “noninvasively assess the status of a human being’s intestine,” Chapkin noted.

Adults, who at age 50 have a higher risk for developing colon cancer, have to be anesthetized while their colons are probed.

“A colonoscopy is absolutely essential as part of a surveillance process to assess your risk (for colon cancer),” Chapkin said. “Yet, many people would rather avoid the test and run the risk of developing the disease or not catching the disease early, because that test is so distasteful and unappealing to the public.”

The test Chapkin’s team developed and patented isolates the genetic material in a fecal sample focusing on the RNA to get a gene expression or signature.

“Humans have 20,000 or so of these genes. We look at them all and look for those that are informative, telling us what is going on. We’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

He said such a test, which is not yet available, might be as simple as an at-home kit. A person would put a fecal sample into a tube, seal the tube and return it to the lab, which would then use the RNA analysis developed by Chapkin’s team.

In addition to colon cancer, the test might also reveal other inflammatory bowel diseases which affect millions of people in the U.S., he said.

“We could determine if these people have a signature that could point to when they are about to flare up or they are in the process of developing a clinical symptom,” Chapkin explained. “And that might allow the doctor to intervene very early in the process and nip it in the bud, so to speak. It’s a tool for monitoring intestinal processes.”

The test could be performed periodically, much like the blood tests that people now take to see if there are changes that need further examination.

Both studies – that of the infants and the aging adults – have preliminary findings but need additional resources to pursue further. He said both need more people to enlarge the data set and prove the authenticity of the results across a larger number. That, he added, would require millions in funding.

“We think we can really revolutionize this field of noninvasive detection, in this case targeting the gastrointestinal tract in everything from a baby all the way up to an adult in determining risk for cancer or normal intestinal development,” Chapkin said.

Source: Texas A&M AgriLife Communications

Recent breakthroughs by their team at JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, have paved the way on how to build a tabletop X-ray laser that could be used for super high-resolution imaging, while also giving scientists a new way to peer into a single cell and gain a better understanding of the nanoworld.

Both of these feats could lead to major breakthroughs in many fields including medicine, biology and nanotechnology development.

“Our goal is to create a laser beam that contains a broad range of X-ray wavelengths all at once that can be focused both in time and space,” Murnane said. “If we have this source of coherent light that spans a huge region of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would be able to make the highest resolution light-based tabletop microscope in existence that could capture images in 3-D and tell us exactly what we are looking at. We’re very close.”

Murnane and Kapteyn presented highlights of their research today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, annual meeting in San Diego, during a panel discussion about the history and future of laser technology titled “Next Generation of Extreme Optical Tools and Applications.”

Most of today’s X-ray lasers require so much power that they rely on fusion laser facilities the size of football stadiums or larger, making their use impractical. Murnane and Kapteyn generate coherent laser-like X-ray beams by using an intense femtosecond laser and combining hundreds or thousands of visible photons together. And the key is they are doing it with a desktop-size system.

They can already generate laser-like X-ray beams in the soft X-ray region and believe they have discovered how to extend the process all the way into the hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

“If we can do this, it could lead to all kinds of possibilities,” Kapteyn said. “It might make it possible to improve X-ray imaging resolution at your doctor’s office by a thousand times. The X-rays we get in the hospital now are limited. For example, they can’t detect really small cancers because the X-ray source in your doctor’s office is more like a light bulb, not a laser. If you had a bright, focused laser-like X-ray beam, you could image with far higher resolution.”

Their method can be thought of as a coherent version of the X-ray tube, according to Murnane. In an X-ray tube, an electron is boiled off a filament, then it is accelerated in an electric field before hitting a solid target, where the kinetic energy of the electron is converted into incoherent X-rays. These incoherent X-rays are like the incoherent light from a light bulb or flashlight — they aren’t very focused.

In the tabletop setup, instead of boiling an electron from a filament, they pluck part of the quantum wave function of an electron from an atom using a very intense laser pulse. The electron is then accelerated and slammed back into the ion, releasing its energy as an X-ray photon. Since the laser field controls the motion of the electron, the X-rays emitted can retain the coherence properties of a laser, Murnane said.

Being able to build a tabletop X-ray laser is just the beginning, said Kapteyn.

“An analogy that is pretty close to what is going on in this field is the MRI, which started as just a fundamental investigation,” said Kapteyn. “People then started using it for microscopy, and then it progressed into a medical diagnostic technique.”

Murnane and Kapteyn were recently recognized with the American Physical Society’s Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science for “pioneering work in the area of ultra-fast laser science, including development of ultra-fast optical and coherent soft X-ray sources.” The prize, which was endowed by NEC Corporation in 1991, recognizes “outstanding contributions to basic research which uses lasers to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interaction with light.” Nobel laureates and CU-Boulder physics Professors Carl E. Wieman (1999) and John L. Hall (1993) also have won the award.

SOurce: University of Colorado at Boulder

By unraveling the mysteries that exist within the molecular composition of mosquitoes, a team of Kansas State University researchers is trying to discover how the insects survive a parasite that causes malaria in humans.

Kristin Michel, K-State assistant professor in the Division of Biology, has been leading studies involving Anopheles gambiae s.s. mosquitoes, which are the main contributing species to malaria transmission in Africa. Michel’s research team’s recent project involved characterizing genes specific to hemocytes, which are mosquito blood cells. The researchers were able to identify genes in the blood cells whose expression changed with malaria infection.

“This could be used for disease control, ultimately,” Michel said. “On a more basic level, we want to understand how the immune system works and how it recognizes a parasite and limits the infection.”

Anopheles gambiae mosquito, a vector for the malarial parasite.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2009. The other contributing K-State researchers are Chunju An, research associate in biochemistry, and Krista McKay, senior in microbiology.

Michel said the research emphasizes one part of the mosquito’s immune system that defends the insect against the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria in humans. The project is a step toward characterization of this branch of immunity.

“If you think about the immune system, it gobbles up things like bacteria,” Michel said. “Insects have cells that help the body to ultimately kill the bacteria. However, we do not know how these cells contribute to getting rid of parasites.”

While these blood cells are essential to the mosquito’s cellular immune response, little is known about their molecular composition. For the study, the researchers collected blood cells from the mosquito species and then used microarrays to identify the cells’ genes and how they are related to other insect species.

They also collected blood cells from mosquitoes that were infected with the parasite and identified genes whose expression levels changed with malaria infection.

“It could be possible through gene manipulation to create mosquitoes unable to transmit malaria,” McKay said. “This list of genes could help researchers develop new prevention strategies.”

The researchers are continuing the study and looking comprehensively at the blood cells and how they respond to the parasite. Michel said the mosquito produces many molecules that either help or prevent parasite infection. The mosquito’s cells are an important factory for these molecules, she said. The researchers are trying to discover the factors that kill the parasite within the mosquito.

The K-State group collaborated with several researchers from the faculty of natural sciences at Imperial College London in the division of cell and molecular biology: Sofia Pinto, Fabrizio Lombardo, Anastasios Koutsos, Robert Waterhouse, Chandra Ramakrishnan and Fotis Kafatos.

The project has been ongoing since 2004. The research was funded by grants from the Kansas Institutional Development Award Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, the Wellcome Trust and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Source: Kansas State University

Last year, an outbreak of a novel strain of influenza linked to swine influenza was detected in Mexico. The infection has shown sustained human-to-human transmission across the world, leading the World Health Organization to declare an influenza pandemic. Vaccines specific for pandemic influenza have been successfully developed and the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization recommended that high-risk individuals be prioritized for vaccination.

Decisions about extending vaccination to low-risk individuals are heavily debated and depend partly on the epidemiological impact and cost-effectiveness of such options. Marc Baguelin, Albert Jan Van Hoek and colleagues from the Health Protection Agency and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK describe how they fit a mathematical model to the estimated number of cases in real-time to predict the effectiveness of alternative influenza vaccination strategies. Specifically, they show that, vaccination of high risk groups was probably very cost effective. However, the cost-effectiveness of vaccinating children depended on the progress of the epidemic and may be cost-effective in countries where a flu pandemic is not so far advanced.

“Given the present debates in different European countries about the legitimacy of the different choices of vaccination our paper is very topical,” said Baguelin, “further it reinforces and expands a recent article in The Lancet (doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(09)62126-7) as it also suggests that many more people than first thought were infected in the summer wave of the swine flu pandemic.”

Source: Elsevier