Grey hair may be protecting us from cancer

GREY hair may be unwelcome, but the processes that produce it are now better understood and could be protecting us from cancer.

Cells called melanocytes produce the pigments that colour hair and their numbers are kept topped up by stem cells. Hair goes grey when the number of stem cells in hair follicles declines. Now Emi Nishimura of Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan and colleagues have found what causes this decline in mice.

When the researchers exposed mice to radiation and chemicals that harm DNA, damaged stem cells transformed permanently into melanocytes. This ultimately led to fewer melanocytes, as it meant there were fewer stem cells capable of topping up the melanocyte pool. The mice also went grey (Cell, vol 137, p 1088). Nishimura's team proposes that the same process leads to the reduction in stem cells in the follicles of older people, especially as DNA damage accumulates as we age.

David Fisher, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School, suggests such processes may help protect us from cancer, by discouraging the proliferation of stem cells with damaged DNA, which could pass on mutations. "One likely beneficial effect is the removal of potentially dangerous cells that may contain pre-cancerous capabilities," he says.

via Grey hair may be protecting us from cancer - health - 21 June 2009 - New Scientist.

Paleolithic Bone Flute Discovered: Earliest Musical Tradition Documented In Southwestern Germany

Researchers in Germany have unearthed new evidence for Paleolithic music in the form of the remains of one nearly complete bone flute and isolated small fragments of three ivory flutes. The discovery suggests the musical tradition was well established when modern humans colonized Europe over 35,000 calendar years ago.

Excavations in the summer of 2008 at the sites of Hohle Fels and Vogelherd produced the new evidence. The most significant of these finds, a nearly complete bone flute, was recovered in the basal Aurignacian deposits at Hohle Fels Cave in the Ach Valley, 20 km west of Ulm. The flute was found in 12 pieces. The fragments were distributed over a vertical distance of 3 cm over a horizontal area of about 10 x 20 cm. This flute is by far the most complete of all of the musical instruments thus far recovered from the caves of Swabia.

"These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe, more than 35,000 calendar years ago," the authors write in the journal Nature. "Other than the caves of the Swabian Jura, the earliest secure archaeological evidence for music comes from sites in France and Austria and post-date 30,000 years ago."

via Paleolithic Bone Flute Discovered: Earliest Musical Tradition Documented In Southwestern Germany.

'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has obtained strong evidence that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus retains liquid water.

The probe has detected sodium salts in the vicinity of the satellite, which appear to spew from its south pole.

Liquid water that is in prolonged contact with rock will leach out sodium - in exactly the same way as Earth's oceans have become salty over time.

Scientists tell Nature magazine that the liquid water may reside in caverns just below the surface of the moon.

If confirmed, it is a stunning result. It means the Saturnian satellite may be one of the most promising places in the Solar System to search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

"We need three ingredients for life, as far as we know - liquid water, energy and the basic chemical building blocks - and we seem to have all three at Enceladus, including some fairly complex organic molecules," commented John Spencer, a Cassini scientist from the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

"That's not to say there is life on Enceladus but certainly the 'feedstock' is there for life to use if it does exist," he told BBC News.

Scientists have been looking for sodium near Enceladus since the discovery in 2005 that this 500km-wide moon was active and hurling water vapour and ice particles into space.

The vapour and ice particles emerge in super-fast jets from a series of "warm" surface cracks referred to as "tiger stripes" because of their resemblance to the big cat's coat markings.

Researchers speculated that the jets could be being fed by a large sub-surface body of liquid water, even an ocean. But the best indicator remained frustratingly elusive.

If it existed, such a mass of water in contact with rock deep within Enceladus would acquire a range of dissolved salts over time and these ought to be detectable in the jets by Earth telescopes.

Indeed, sodium (which in Earth's oceans forms the dominant sea salt, sodium chloride) is one of the easiest elements for observatories to spot in space.

However, even mighty telescopes like the Keck on Mauna Kea in Hawaii could never see sodium when they looked towards Enceladus.

The latest Cassini data appears to solve this conundrum.

The Nasa spacecraft has been flying through Saturn's outer E ring which is sustained by the constant stream of material coming up from the tiger stripes.

Using its Cosmic Dust Analyser (CDA), Cassini has analysed thousands of ice grains and directly "tasted" the missing salt - principally sodium chloride and sodium bicarbonate ("baking soda").

The amounts, though, are tiny - less than 2% of the mass of the sampled grains.

The low abundance helps explain why the telescopes had overlooked the salt. The fact that the sodium is bound into the water-ice molecules also effectively hides its light signature from the observatories' instruments.

However, scientists say the Cassini and telescope observations taken together give hints about what the water reservoir on Enceladus might look like.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon.

'Ark of the Covenant' about to be unveiled? (Update: No, it isn't.)

The patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia says he will announce to the world Friday the unveiling of the Ark of the Covenant, perhaps the world's most prized archaeological and spiritual artifact, which he says has been hidden away in a church in his country for millennia, according to the Italian news agency Adnkronos.

Abuna Pauolos, in Italy for a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI this week, told the news agency, "Soon the world will be able to admire the Ark of the Covenant described in the Bible as the container of the tablets of the law that God delivered to Moses and the center of searches and studies for centuries."

The announcement is expected to be made at 2 p.m. Italian time from the Hotel Aldrovandi in Rome. Pauolos will reportedly be accompanied by Prince Aklile Berhan Makonnen Haile Sellassie and Duke Amedeo D'Acosta.

"The Ark of the Covenant is in Ethiopia for many centuries," said Pauolos. "As a patriarch I have seen it with my own eyes and only few highly qualified persons could do the same, until now."

- via WND

The Ark above is the Hollywood version from the Indiana Jones movie.  Are you sure you want to look at the real one? Here is what happens when you look at the Hollywood Ark:



Well, good thing that it won't be unveiled after all.  Just think if something like this fell into the wrong hands, entire wax museums could get melted.

"Dog-kangaroos" turn heads in the Philippines

Dog lovers, meet Cute and Bambi, who have been dubbed "dog-kangaroos" by those who have encountered the pair in Quezon City, Philippines.

Cute and Bambi were apparently both born with only their two rear legs and are the pets of Lope Tulipas, a Quezon City street vendor. Many passersby are understandably taken by the pair -- some have even offered to buy them, but Tulipas has turned down all offers.

-- Lindsay Barnett

Photo: Alanah Torralba / European Pressphoto Agency

via "Dog-kangaroos" turn heads in the Philippines | L.A. Unleashed | Los Angeles Times.

Dead Sea peril: sinkholes swallow up the unwary

Eli Raz was peering into a narrow hole in the Dead Sea shore when the earth opened up and swallowed him. Fearing he would never be found alive in the 30-foot- deep pit, he scribbled his will on an old postcard.

After 14 hours a search party pulled him from the hole unhurt, and five years later the 69-year-old geologist is working to save others from a similar fate, leading an effort to map the sinkholes that are spreading on the banks of the fabled saltwater lake.

These underground craters can open up in an instant, sucking in whatever lies above and leaving the surrounding area looking like an earthquake zone.

The phenomenon, Raz said, stems from a dire water shortage, compounded in recent years by tourism and chemical industries as well as a growing population. "This is the most remarkable evidence of the brutal interference of humans in the Dead Sea," he said.

The parched moonscape, famous as the site of biblical Sodom and Gomorra, is the lowest point on earth and runs more than 60 miles through Israel and the West Bank.

Large sections of the coast are fenced off and signposted in Hebrew and English: "danger, open pits" and "sinkhole area ahead." But it's too expensive to inspect every place for danger. Just two months ago an Israeli hiker wandered into an area that had no warning signs and was critically injured when he fell into a sinkhole.

While such accidents are rare, Raz says there are up to 3,000 open sinkholes along the coast and likely just as many that haven't burst open yet. And they're having a big impact on Israeli development plans.

The collapsing terrain has forced authorities to close a campground, date groves and a small naval base, and to scrap plans for 5,000 new hotel rooms, said Galit Cohen, director of environmental planning at the Ministry of the Environment.

The holes, also found on the Jordanian side of the sea, are the result of the Dead Sea having shrunk by a third since the 1960s when Israel and Jordan built plants to divert water flowing through its main tributary, the Jordan River.

The holes form when a subterranean salt layer that once bordered the sea is dissolved by underground fresh water that follows the receding Dead Sea waters.

via Dead Sea peril: sinkholes swallow up the unwary - Yahoo! News.

Charlie's Angels pin-up actress Farrah Fawcett dies

Charlie's Angels star Farrah Fawcett today lost her two-year battle with cancer.

The 62-year-old actress, who became an icon to millions during the 1970s, died in a hospital in Los Angeles surrounded by her family and friends.

A devout Catholic, the Charlie's Angels star was read the last rites this morning.

It had been her last wish to marry actor Ryan O'Neal, who she had a son with during a stormy relationship that lasted for 27 years.

But the wedding was unable to take place due to the amount of medical care she needed.

The couple had been waiting months for her condition to improve in hospital to go through with the bedside ceremony.

O'Neal, 68, was at her side throughout her final days and was seen leaving the hospital this morning in tears.

Asked how he was, he quietly replied: 'No, I'm not ok,' before walking to his car and driving away.

In a statement O'Neal said: 'After a long and brave battle with cancer, our beloved Farrah has passed away.

'Although this is an extremely difficult time for her family and friends, we take comfort in the beautiful times that we shared with Farrah over the years and the knowledge that her life brought joy to so many people around the world.'

Later, he told U.S. magazine People: 'She's gone. She now belongs to the ages.

via Charlie's Angels pin-up actress Farrah Fawcett dies with Ryan O'Neal at her side after losing her battle with rectal cancer | Mail Online.

German pensioners ‘kidnap and torture their investment adviser’

Suspects: Roland K. 74, seen here with his 79-year-old wife is accused of kidnapping James Amburn - dm


A group of well-to-do pensioners who lost their savings in the credit crunch staged an arthritic revenge attack and held their terrified financial adviser to ransom, prosecutors said yesterday.

The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world.

“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, said. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”

He was freed by 40 heavily armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday. The frightened consultant was in his underwear, his body lacerated by wounds allegedly inflicted by angry pensioners.

It appears that two couples had entrusted Mr Amburn’s investment company with €2.4 million (£2 million), which he ploughed into Florida’s boom-and-bust property market. The properties became forfeit during the sub-prime mortgage crisis but the couples wanted their money back.

After being bundled into the boot of an Audi in the west German town of Speyer, Mr Amburn was driven southwards to Chieming, close to the Austrian border, where one of the couples Roland K, and his wife, Sieglinde, 79, had a holiday home.

The financial adviser claims he was held there in a cellar for four days almost naked, fed soup twice a day and beaten. Another couple, Gerhard F, 63, and his wife, Iris, 66, both retired doctors, allegedly helped to torture the prisoner.

“I was beaten. They threatened again and again to kill me,” Mr Amburn said. At least two of his ribs were fractured.

Mr Amburn says he tried to escape once when he was permitted to smoke in the garden. He scaled the wall and ran though the rain in his underpants calling for help.

The pensioners pursued him in their car, shouting: “Stop that man! He’s a burglar!” Two locals pinned him to the pavement and he was taken back to the cellar, where he claims he received another beating.

via German pensioners ‘kidnap and torture their investment adviser’ - Times Online.

Space shuttle science: 1908 Tunguska explosion a comet

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

The research, accepted for publication (June 24, 2009) by the journal Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, connects the two events by what followed each about a day later: brilliant, night-visible clouds, or noctilucent clouds, that are made up of ice particles and only form at very high altitudes and in extremely cold temperatures.

"It's almost like putting together a 100-year-old murder mystery," said Michael Kelley, the James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Cornell who led the research team. "The evidence is pretty strong that the Earth was hit by a comet in 1908." Previous speculation had ranged from comets to meteors.

The researchers contend that the massive amount of water vapor spewed into the atmosphere by the comet's icy nucleus was caught up in swirling eddies with tremendous energy by a process called two-dimensional turbulence, which explains why the noctilucent clouds formed a day later many thousands of miles away.

Noctilucent clouds are the Earth's highest clouds, forming naturally in the mesosphere at about 55 miles over the polar regions during the summer months when the mesosphere is around minus 180 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 117 degrees Celsius).

The space shuttle exhaust plume, the researchers say, resembled the comet's action.

A single space shuttle flight injects 300 metric tons of water vapor into the Earth's thermosphere, and the water particles have been found to travel to the Arctic and Antarctic regions, where they form the clouds after settling into the mesosphere.

Kelley and collaborators saw the noctilucent cloud phenomenon days after the space shuttle Endeavour (STS-118) launched on Aug. 8, 2007. Similar cloud formations had been observed following launches in 1997 and 2003.

Following the 1908 explosion, known as the Tunguska Event, the night skies shone brightly for several days across Europe, particularly Great Britain -- more than 3,000 miles away.

Kelley said he became intrigued by the historical eyewitness accounts of the aftermath, and concluded that the bright skies must have been the result of noctilucent clouds. The comet would have started to break up at about the same altitude as the release of the exhaust plume from the space shuttle following launch. In both cases, water vapor was injected into the atmosphere.

The scientists have attempted to answer how this water vapor traveled so far without scattering and diffusing, as conventional physics would predict.

"There is a mean transport of this material for tens of thousands of kilometers in a very short time, and there is no model that predicts that," Kelley said. "It's totally new and unexpected physics."

This "new" physics, the researchers contend, is tied up in counter-rotating eddies with extreme energy. Once the water vapor got caught up in these eddies, the water traveled very quickly -- close to 300 feet per second.

Scientists have long tried to study the wind structure in these upper regions of the atmosphere, which is difficult to do by such traditional means as sounding rockets, balloon launches and satellites, explained Charlie Seyler, Cornell professor of electrical engineering and paper co-author.

"Our observations show that current understanding of the mesosphere-lower thermosphere region is quite poor," Seyler said. The thermosphere is the layer of the atmosphere above the mesosphere.

via EurekaAlert

Anti-inflammatory drugs may defeat a treatment-resistant type of cancer

Effective drugs for treating a chemotherapy-resistant form of lymphoma might already be on the market according to a study that has pieced together a chemical pathway involved in the disease.

By following the trail of several molecular flags that mark this type of cancer, a team from the University of California, San Diego, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the University of Copenhagen Hospital have discovered that anti-inflammatory drugs used to treat arthritis will shrink lymphoma tumors in mice.

Their report, published in the July issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, also strengthens evidence for a link between inflammation and cancer.

"If this shows promise with early clinical experiments, the treatment would be immediately available," said Michael David, a professor of biology who leads the group at UC San Diego.

The research focused on a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. In some patients with the disease, chemotherapy works well. In a recent study of 40 patients more than 75 percent of patients with one form of this type of lymphoma survived five years or longer.

But that study also identified a group of patients whose cancer proved difficult to treat. Their tumors failed to respond to chemotherapy, and only 16 percent of patients with this form of lymphoma survived more than five years after they were diagnosed.

Several molecular flags mark this treatment-resistant lymphoma, but the links between them were unknown until now. The new paper reports that tumor cells isolated from these patients have depressed levels of a protein called SHIP1, which was known to suppress tumors. In fact, patients with the lowest levels of SHIP1 are the least likely to survive.

The resistant type of lymphoma cells also have elevated levels of miR-155, a specific example of a type of genetic material called microRNA, the team found. They demonstrated that miR-155 suppresses SHIP1 by sticking to the template for the protein, preventing its manufacture.

This raised the possibility that these patients might respond favorably to a treatment that interrupted that pathway. "It makes sense to block that loop," said Irene Pedersen, a research scientist in the Division of Biological Sciences at UC San Diego and lead author of the paper.

The final clue came from earlier reports that an inflammatory molecule called TNFα could boost levels of miR-155. Additional laboratory work confirmed the observation for this type of lymphoma cell.

"Our study strengthens the scientific link between inflammation and tumor progression," David said. "The prevailing thought is that you need two mutations to get cancer. But it might take just one mutation plus inflammation."

The anti-inflammatory drugs etanercept and infliximab, which are currently used to treat arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease, work by suppressing TNFα, suggesting a new way to curb the malignancy of this type of lymphoma.

The team tested the idea in mice that had been injected with aggressive lymphoma cells and found that nascent tumors shrank in six days.

"It's a promising result of this whole translational path," said Pedersen, whose initial training was in cancers of the blood. "To get somewhere we had to study the mouse models and the molecular profiles. I hope it will be beneficial to patients."

Patients with lymphoma that has not responded to chemotherapy and who are ineligible for a bone-marrow transplant will be the first to receive the new treatment. The team in Copenhagen has begun recruiting patients for an initial clinical study.

via EurekaAlert

NASA moon-attack video

Get Yourself Some Electric Sheep

This thing is tripping me out:  http://electricsheep.org/index.cgi?&menu=samples (old link)

Correct current web site is  http://community.sheepserver.net/

I think it is reprogramming my brain somehow. It downloads new patterns as movie files as it runs so you can watch for hours and there is always something new.  The files seem to stitch together.  Some of them seem like microscopic views of living things. This is great for people like me who are obsessively goal driven.

Has anyone heard of any security / privacy concerns with this?

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver on the individual node computers of the distributed network. The process is transparent to the casual user, who can simply install the software as a screensaver. Alternatively, the user may become more involved with the project, manually creating sheep (video files of animated fractal flames) for upload to the server.

According to Mitchell Whitelaw in his Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life, "On the screen they are luminous, twisting, elastic shapes, abstract tangles and loops of glowing filaments."^[1]

The name "Electric Sheep" is taken from the title of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The title mirrors the nature of the project: computers (androids) who have started running the screensaver begin rendering (dreaming) the fractal movies (sheep).

The sheep motif is carried over into other aspects of the project: the 100 or so sheep stored on the server at any time is referred to as 'the flock'; creating a new fractal by interpolating or combining the sheep's fractal code with that of another sheep is called mating/breeding; changes to the code are called mutations, etc.

The parameters that generate these movies (sheep) can be created in a few ways: they can be created and submitted by members of the electricsheep mailing list, members of the mailing list can download the parameters of existing sheep and tweak them, or sheep can be mated together automatically by the server or manually by server admins (nicknamed shepherds).

Users may vote on sheep that they like or dislike, and this voting is used for the genetic algorithm which generates new sheep. Each movie is a fractal flame with several of its parameters changed over time. The individual frames of which these movies consist are rendered using 'spare' processing cycles from idle computers on the distributed network of those running the screensaver application, and finished sheep (in the form of .mpg files) are distributed to the network using BitTorrent, a Peer-to-peer filesharing application which is included as part of the Electric Sheep application.

All sheep parameters and movies are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution license and automatically downloaded by the screen saver.

The screensaver was created and released as Free Software by Scott Draves in 1999 and continues to be developed by him and a team of about five engineers. - wiki

Girl Who Does Not Age, Brooke Greenberg Baffles Doctors

Image: Brooke, 12, and Carly, 9. (Courtesy Greenberg Family)

"Why doesn't she age?" Howard Greenberg, 52, asked of his daughter. "Is she the fountain of youth?"

Such questions are why scientists are fascinated by Brooke. Among the many documented instances of children who fail to grow or develop in some way, Brooke's case may be unique, according to her doctor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine pediatrician Lawrence Pakula, in Baltimore.

"Many of the best-known names in medicine, in their experience ... had not seen anyone who matched up to Brooke," Pakula said. "She is always a surprise."

Brooke hasn't aged in the conventional sense. Dr. Richard Walker of the University of South Florida College of Medicine, in Tampa, says Brooke's body is not developing as a coordinated unit, but as independent parts that are out of sync. She has never been diagnosed with any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why.

In a recent paper for the journal "Mechanisms of Ageing and Development," Walker and his co-authors, who include Pakula and All Children's Hospital (St. Petersburg, Fla.) geneticist Maxine Sutcliffe chronicled a baffling range of inconsistencies in Brooke's aging process. She still has baby teeth at 16, for instance. And her bone age is estimated to be more like 10 years old.

"There've been very minimal changes in Brooke's brain," Walker said. "Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected."

Brooke's mother, Melanie Greenberg, 48, sees a different picture. "She loves to shop," Greenberg said. "Just like a woman."

Brooke rides in a stroller while her mom shops for clothes in the infant sections of department stores near their home in a Baltimore suburb. That Brooke is in her mid-teens is so mind-boggling that if another mother with a toddler asks Greenberg how old Brooke is, she usually doesn't try to explain.

"My system always has been to turn years into months," Greenberg said. "So, if someone asked today, I might say, she's 16 months old."

via Girl Who Does Not Age, Brooke Greenberg Baffles Doctors - ABC News.

World's First Controllable Molecular Gear At Nanoscale Created

Scientists from A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), led by Professor Christian Joachim,* have scored a breakthrough in nanotechnology by becoming the first in the world to invent a molecular gear of the size of 1.2nm whose rotation can be deliberately controlled. This achievement marks a radical shift in the scientific progress of molecular machines and is published on 14 June 20009 in Nature Materials.

Said Prof Joachim, “Making a gear the size of a few atoms is one thing, but being able to deliberately control its motions and actions is something else altogether. What we’ve done at IMRE is to create a truly complete working gear that will be the fundamental piece in creating more complex molecular machines that are no bigger than a grain of sand.”

Prof Joachim and his team discovered that the way to successfully control the rotation of a single-molecule gear is via the optimization of molecular design, molecular manipulation and surface atomic chemistry. This was a breakthrough because before the team’s discovery, motions of molecular rotors and gears were random and typically consisted of a mix of rotation and lateral displacement. The scientists at IMRE solved this scientific conundrum by proving that the rotation of the molecule-gear could be well-controlled by manipulating the electrical connection between the molecule and the tip of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope while it was pinned on an atom axis.

Said Dr Lim Khiang Wee, Executive Director of IMRE, “Christian and his team’s discovery shows that it may one day be possible to create and manipulate molecular-level machines. Such machines may, for example, walk on DNA tracks in the future to deliver therapeutics to heal and cure. There already exists at least one international roadmap for creating such productive nanosystems.

via World's First Controllable Molecular Gear At Nanoscale Created.

The Weirdest Object in the Solar System?

Keck image of Haumea and its two moons. Hiʻiaka is above Haumea (centre), and Namaka is directly below. - wiki

The dwarf planets and other objects that litter the Kuiper belt in the far reaches of our solar system are a strange bunch, but astronomers have found what they think might be the weirdest one.

Discovered on Dec. 28, 2004 (catalogued as 2003 EL61 and nicknamed "Santa" for a time), the minor planet now known as the dwarf planet Haumea, to honor its Hawaiian discovery, is as big across as Pluto and one-third of its mass, but shaped something "like a big squashed cigar," said one of the astronomers who studies the object, Mike Brown of Caltech.

From its shape to its satellites, Haumea is a strange object, but one that could shed light on the history of collisions in the solar system, as well as the early environment of the Kuiper belt, which sits out beyond the orbit of Neptune. ...

Haumea is the fastest spinning object in the solar system. ... But Haumea's football shape and frantic spin aren't the only weird things about it. It also has an unusual satellite.

... Haumea's satellite, Hi'iaka ...[is] way too small to be [a] captured object...  It was also made of water ice.   ... Subsequent observations of Hi'iaka determined its orbit and turned up another surprise: a second satellite, Namaka. No other Kuiper belt object is known to possess more than one satellite. Namaka is another product of the collision that shattered Haumea, likely sometime during the early history of the solar system, which formed 4.5 billion years ago.

via The Weirdest Object in the Solar System? | LiveScience.

Mystery Cave dating from 1 A.D. found in Jordan Valley

An artificial underground cave, the largest in Israel, has been exposed in the Jordan Valley in the course of a survey carried out by the University of Haifa’s Department of Archaeology. Prof. Adam Zertal, who headed the excavating team, reckons that this cave was originally a large quarry during the Roman and Byzantine era and was one of its kind. Various engravings were uncovered in the cave, including cross markings, and it is assumed that this could have been an early monastery. “It is probably the site of “Galgala” from the historical Madaba Map,” Prof. Zertal says.

The enormous and striking cave covers an area of approximately 1 acre: it is some 100 meters long and about 40 meters wide. The cave is located 4 km north of Jericho. The cave, which is the largest excavated by man to be discovered in Israel, was exposed in the course of an archaeological survey that the University of Haifa has been carrying out since 1978.

As with other discoveries in the past, this exposure is shrouded in mystery. “When we arrived at the opening of the cave, two Bedouins approached and told us not to go in as the cave is bewitched and inhabited by wolves and hyenas,” Prof. Zertal relates. Upon entering, accompanied by his colleagues, he was surprised to find an impressive architectonic underground structure supported by 22 giant pillars. They discovered 31 cross markings on the pillars, an engraving resembling the zodiac symbol, Roman letters and an etching that looks like the Roman Legion’s pennant. The team also discovered recesses in the pillars, which would have been used for oil lamps, and holes to which animals that were hauling quarried stones out of the cave could have been tied.

The cave’s ceiling is some 3 meters high, but was originally probably about 4 meters high. According to Prof. Zertal, ceramics that were found and the engravings on the pillars date the cave to around 1-600 AD. “The cave’s primary use had been as a quarry, which functioned for about 400-500 years. But other findings definitely indicate that the place was also used for other purposes, such as a monastery and possibly as a hiding place,” Prof. Zertal explains.

via Discoveryon: Mystery Cave dating from 1 A.D. found in Jordan Valley.

Breeding cows that burp less + growing cow meat in a vat.

Canadian scientists are breeding a special type of cow designed to burp less, a breakthrough that could reduce a big source of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

Cows are responsible for nearly three-quarters of total methane emissions, according to Environment Canada. Most of the gas comes from bovine burps, which are 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.

Stephen Moore, a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, is examining the genes responsible for methane produced from a cow's four stomachs in order to breed more efficient, environmentally friendly cows.

The professor of agricultural, food and nutritional science completed primary tests using traditional techniques to breed efficient animals that produce 25 percent less methane than less efficient animals. But more work needs to be done before the long-term impact is known. Moore's study was published earlier this year in the Journal of Animal Science.

via Phenomenica: Canadian scientists breeding cows that burp less.

Non burping cows are not nearly as interesting to me as headless cows. Why not just grow the meat?

In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week's In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.

With a rising global middle class projected by the UN to double meat consumption (.pdf) by 2050, and livestock already responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, the symposium is drawing a variety of scientists, environmentalists and food industry experts.

"We're looking to see if there are other technologies which can produce food for all the people on the planet," said Anthony Bennett of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. "Not only today but over the next 10, 20, 30 years."

Rapidly evolving technology and increasing concern about the environmental impact of meat production are signs that vat-grown meat is moving from scientific curiosity to consumer option. In vitro meat production is a specialized form of tissue engineering, a biomedical practice in which scientists try to grow animal tissues like bone, skin, kidneys and hearts. Proponents say it will ultimately be a more efficient way to make animal meat, which would reduce the carbon footprint of meat products.

"To produce the meat we eat now, 75 to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue," Jason Matheny, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of New Harvest, a nonprofit that promotes research on in vitro meat, told Wired.com. "With cultured meat, there's no body to support; you're only building the meat that eventually gets eaten."

Cancer In Humans: Cost Of Being Smarter Than Chimps?

Are the cognitively superior brains of humans, in part, responsible for our higher rates of cancer? That's a question that has nagged at John McDonald, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Biology and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute, for a while. Now, after an initial study, it seems that McDonald is on to something. The new study is available online in the journal Medical Hypothesis and will appear in the forthcoming issue of the journal.

"I was always intrigued by the fact that chimpanzees appear to have lower rates of cancer than humans," said McDonald. "So we went back and reanalyzed some previously reported gene expression studies including data that were not used in the original analyses."

McDonald and his graduate students, Gaurav Arora and Nalini Polivarapu, compared chimp-human gene expression patterns in five tissues: brain, testes, liver, kidneys and heart. They found distinct differences in the way apoptosis — or programmed cell death — operates, suggesting that humans do not "self-destroy" cells as effectively as chimpanzees do. Apoptosis is one of the primary mechanisms by which our bodies destroy cancer cells.

"The results from our analysis suggest that humans aren't as efficient as chimpanzees in carrying out programmed cell death. We believe this difference may have evolved as a way to increase brain size and associated cognitive ability in humans, but the cost could be an increased propensity for cancer," said McDonald.

Like all evolutionary hypotheses, this can't be proven absolutely, according to McDonald. However, his lab has recently obtained additional direct experimental evidence consistent with the hypothesis that apoptotic function is more efficient in chimps than in humans.

via Cancer In Humans: Cost Of Being Smarter Than Chimps?.

Bird Migration: Toxic Molecule May Help Birds 'See' North And South

Researchers at the University of Illinois report that a toxic molecule known to damage cells and cause disease may also play a pivotal role in bird migration. The molecule, superoxide, is proposed as a key player in the mysterious process that allows birds to "see" Earth's magnetic field.

The discovery, reported this month in Biophysical Journal, occurred as a result of a "mistake" made by a collaborator, said principal investigator Klaus Schulten, who holds the Swanlund Chair in Physics at Illinois. His postdoctoral collaborator, Ilia Solov'yov, of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, did not know that superoxide was toxic, seeing it instead as an ideal reaction partner in a biochemical process involving the protein cryptochrome in a bird's eye.

Cryptochrome is a blue-light photoreceptor found in plants and in the eyes of birds and other animals. Schulten was the first to propose (in 2000) that this protein was a key component of birds' geomagnetic sense, a proposal that was later corroborated by experimental evidence. He made this prediction after he and his colleagues discovered that magnetic fields can influence chemical reactions if the reactions occur quickly enough to be governed by pure quantum mechanics.

"Prior to our work, it was thought that this was impossible because magnetic fields interact so weakly with molecules," he said.

Such chemical reactions involve electron transfers, Schulten said, "which result in freely tumbling spins of electrons. These spins behave like an axial compass."

Changes in the electromagnetic field, such as those experienced by a bird changing direction in flight, appear to alter this biochemical compass in the eye, allowing the bird to see how its direction corresponds to north or south.

"Other researchers had found that cryptochrome, acting through its own molecular spins, recruits a reaction partner that operates at so-called zero spin. They suggested that molecular oxygen is that partner," Schulten said. "We propose that the reaction partner is not the benign oxygen molecule that we all breathe, but its close cousin, superoxide, a negatively charged oxygen molecule."

When Solov'yov showed that superoxide would work well as a reaction partner, Schulten was at first dismissive.

"But then I realized that the toxicity of superoxide was actually crucial to its role," he said. The body has many mechanisms for reducing concentrations of superoxide to prevent its damaging effects, Schulten said. But this gives an advantage, since the molecule must be present at low concentrations – but not too low – "to make the biochemical compass work effectively," he said.

via Bird Migration: Toxic Molecule May Help Birds 'See' North And South.

Did giant arapaima cause duo to drown?

A giant fish that supposedly caused the deaths of two men on Tuesday could have been the highly predatory and aggressive arapaima gigas.

Fish biologist Dr Mohd Fadzil Suhaimi Ramli said the natural habitat of the fish which could reach 4.9m was the Amazon and Orinoco rivers of South America.

He said the fish that the locals dubbed as ikan naga due to its features that were similar to the mystical dragon could have been released into the lake by someone when it became too large.

“Due to its size, this fish preys on local species which are smaller in size,” he told The Star.

Mohd Fahmi said the arapaima would become aggressive when hungry.

Arapaima gigas have an elongated body covered with large, thick scales and a small tail.

Its wide mouth faces upward and the colour ranges from dark brown to black with blue highlights and red edges, particularly on the tail.

It could leap several metres into the air and its powerful head could capsize small boats on impact.

via Did giant arapaima cause duo to drown?.