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Massive Black Holes Caught in Death Spiral

2015-10-15T06:53:00.001-07:00

BY DENNIS OVERBYE

The apocalypse is still on, apparently-at least in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from here.

Last winter, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology reported that two supermassive black holes appeared to be spiraling toward a cataclysmic collision that could bring an end to that galaxy.

The evidence was a rhythmic flickering from the galaxy’s nucleus, a quasar known as PG1302-102, which Matthew Graham and his colleagues interpreted as the fatal mating dance of a pair of black holes with a total mass of more than a billion suns. Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosions, mostly in the form of violent ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves that would blow the stars out of that hapless galaxy like leaves off a roof.

The supermassive black holes are all that remains of galaxies once all protons decay, but even these giants are not immortal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now a new analysis of the system by Daniel D’ Orazio of Columbia University in New York and his colleagues has added weight to that conclusion. Mr. D’ Orazio, a graduate student, and Zoltan Haiman and David Schiminovich propose that most of the light from the quasar is coming from a vast disk of gas surrounding the smaller of the two black holes.

As the black holes and their attendant disks swing around each other at high speeds, the light from the disk that is coming toward us receives a boost from relativistic effects-a so-called Doppler boost-the way a siren grows louder and more high-pitched as it approaches, giving rise to a periodic increase in brightness every five years.

The Columbia astronomers ‘model predicts that the variation would be two or three times greater in ultraviolet light than in visible light. And that is exactly what they found when they compared archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Galex space telescope to the visible-light data previously analyzed by Dr. Graham’s group.

“What’s big is that the Doppler boost is inevitable,” Dr. Haiman said in an email. Given reasonable assumptions about the masses of the black holes, their model predicts the right ultraviolet data.

“This is rare in ‘messy’ astronomy,” he said, “to have an indisputable clean effect, which explains the data.”

Follow-up observations of ultraviolet and visible light emissions in the coming years could help clinch the case, the authors said. Their paper was published last month in the journal Nature.

Their model suggests that the black holes are orbiting each other at a distance of some 320 billion kilometers, less than tenth of a lightyear, a cosmic whisker. At that distance, the black holes would be rapidly losing energy by radiating gravitational waves and could spiral together into the final bang in as little as 100,000 years, Dr. Haiman said, depending on their relative masses.

An artist's conception of a supermassive black hole and accretion disk. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Basically, the more massive the holes, the faster gravitational waves drive them together, and we do require them to be as massive as allowed to be ,” he said in an email. For their model to hold up, the larger of the black holes has to be a billion solar masses or more.

(Because the galaxy is so far away, the cataclysm might well have already happened more than three billion years ago, but the news still won’t reach us for another 100,000 years or so. So it is still in the future, as far as earthlings-whoever they will be by then-are concerned.)

E.Sterl Phinney, a Caltech astronomer and expert on supermassive black holes, agreed that Dr.Haiman’s model explained the quasar variations. “So Occam’s razor makes it attractive,” he said, referring to the long-held principle that physicists should adopt the simplest theory that fits the facts. But it was surprising, he said, to find two supermassive black holes that have gotten so close.

Black holes, predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are objects so dense that not even light can escape from them. Every galaxy of note seems to have a supermassive black hole, weighing millions or billions of times as much as the sun, burping sparks of half-eaten stars and gas.

“A scientific theory is only as good as the tests which it has passed,” Mr. D’ Orazio said.

Einstein’s theory has passed all of the observational and experimental tests thrown at it so far. But some of its predictions can be tested only in the most extreme gravitational environments, namely black holes.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, October 3, 2015

A New Science Fiction Radiates a Rosier View

2015-08-01T00:49:00.000-07:00

November 1931 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY NICK BILTON

Imagine living in a weird science-fiction story where everything you dreamed up actually came true.

Well, for decades science-fiction writers have been making bold predictions. But now writers are starting to realize that in predicting the future, they have helped shape it.

For example, sci-fi authors first envisioned credit cards, which go all the way back to 1888 when Edward Bellamy wrote about them in his novel “Looking Backward.”

Additionally, solar power and radar were envisioned by Hugo Gernsback in his 1911 magazine stories; H.G. Wells anticipated voice mail in 1923; in- ear headphones and large flat-screen TVs were in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, “Fahrenheit 451”; virtual reality was dreamed up by Arthur C. Clarke in 1956; Jules Verne told stories about electronic submarines all the way back in 1870; and Martin Cooper, who created the first mobile phone, said the idea came to him after watching “Star Trek.”

But not all of the predictions have been rosy. Atomic bombs first appeared in Wells’s 1914 novel “The World Set Free”; George Orwell aptly predicted -- and maybe contributed to -- a surveillance state in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”; and writers have been envisioning destructive weapons of all shapes and sizes, including biological warfare, for centuries.

Now some of these visionaries have banded together to offer stories that are more utopian, which they hope will contribute to a more positive future.

In 2011, Arizona State University’s president, Michael Crow, challenged Neal Stephenson, the author of several sci-fi novels, to stop writing dystopian stories, and offer ideas with a brighter outlook. The concept caught on and last month a group of writers, in collaboration with the university, released “Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future,” which hopes to be a blueprint for these new concepts.

“Sci-fi stories have helped shape technology at crucial points,” said Kathryn Cramer, co-editor of Hieroglyph. “But a lot of the past was dystopian. We’re hoping to show that there are a lot of things we can do better.”

Writers are pushing back in particular against Hollywood’s depiction of the future -- you know, where robots roam the earth killing puppies and enslaving humans.

For example, “Transcendence, “an action film this year, stars Johnny Depp, who plays a brilliant scientist who is resurrected as an artificial intelligence program that becomes evil. Or “12 Monkeys,” in which a man-made virus wipes out most of the planet’s population.

“I got into a little bit of a rut thinking that the way to be cool was to be cynical and dark,” Mr. Stephenson said. “I don’t regret that at all. Now I have a license to go out and try something with a different tone.”

His story in the new collection is about an engineer’s effort to build a 20-kilometer-tall skyscraper. Other tales envision an alternative Internet that is free from government snooping and corporate tracking, and is powered by thousands of homemade drones. Another story is about a group of hardware hackers and Burning Man devotees who build an autonomous 3-D printing robot that goes to the moon. A third imagines a future world without border fences.

The stories still offer plenty of drama, death and destruction, but many have a sort of happy ending. Cory Doctorow, a contributor to Hieroglyph, wrote that the stories are not “optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Instead they are hopeful about it.”

Last month, the editors of the collection took a trip collection took a trip around Silicon Valley, giving talks at big companies, including Google- which is building a bunch of robots that may one day roam the earth, but (one hopes) won’t enslave people-to try to persuade engineers to think differently.

While Mr. Stephenson isn’t so naïve as to think that these sci-fi narratives will make the world a better place, he hopes that they can have a constructive influence.

“There’s definitely some kind of a feedback loop,” he said, “between science fiction and technological fact.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, October 11, 2014

Sea-Cloaked Mystery With Trillions of Clues

2015-07-21T07:50:00.001-07:00

An image of two fish in the family Gonostomatidae: the Elongated bristlemouth, Gonostoma elongatum (top) and Bonapartia pedaliota (bottom). From Oceanic Ichthyology by G. Brown Goode and Tarleton H. Bean, published 1896. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY WILLIAM J. BROAD

Habitats on land-rain forests, steppes, woodlands, deserts, alpine meadows, all well explored over the centuries-make up less than 1 percent of the planet’s biosphere. Why so little? The band of life is narrow. Fertile soil goes down only about a meter, and even the tallest trees stretch up only about 90 meters.

Water, however, is a different story. It covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface and goes down kilometers. Scientists put the ocean’s share of the biosphere at more than 99 percent. Fishermen know its surface waters and explorers its depths. But in general, compared with land, the ocean is unfamiliar.

Which helps explain why scientists have only recently come to realize that the bristlemouth, a fish of the middle depths that glows in the dark and can open its mouth extraordinarily wide, baring needlelike fangs, is the most numerous vertebrate on the earth.

“They’re everywhere,” Bruce H.Robison, a senior marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, said of the bony little fish. “Everybody agrees. It’s the most abundant on the planet.”

By human standards, the brute is tiny, smaller than a finger. But this strange little fish makes up for its diminutive size with staggering numbers, as well as a behavioral trick or two.

It starts life as a male and, in some cases, switches to a female. Scientists call it protandrous, a male-first hermaphrodite.

John C. Avise, the author of “Hermaphroditism, “said the adult male bristlemouth tended to be smaller than the female and had a better developed sense of smell, apparently to find mates in the darkness.

“They occupy an environment that’s hard to access,” Dr. Avise said of the fish, so there is “precious little information” about their behavior.

Though the portrait of the bristlemouth is incomplete, scientists know enough to assert that it far outstrips all other contenders for the title of most common vertebrate on the planet. Ichthyologists put the likely figure for bristlemouths at hundreds of trillions –and perhaps quadrillions, or thousands of trillions.

“No other animal gets close,” said Peter C. Davison, a fish scientist at the Farallon Institute for Advanced Ecosystem Research, in Petaluma, Calif. “There are as much as a dozen per square meter of ocean.”

The bristlemouths are a rapacious family of fishes that include the wildly successful genus Cyclothone-Greek for “circular,” in apparent reference to the creature’s gaping mouth. They are also known as roundmouths.

The genus has 13 species, such as the shadow bristlemouth. The main distinguishing features are subtle differences in the fins and luminous organs. All members wield bristlelike teeth. Over all, the fish are 2.5 to 7.5 centimeters in length, tan to black in color, and at times display a kind of ghostly translucence.

The first hints of the fish’s ubiquity came during the voyage of the H.M.S. Challenger, a British ship that sailed the globe from 1872 to 1876 and helped lay the foundations of oceanography. It lowered nets at dozens of sites and hauled up the creatures from as deep as five kilometers.

The first scientist to view the animals in their dark habitat was William Beebe. In the early 1930s, Mr. Beebe, a senior explorer of what is now the Wildlife Conservation Society, plunged into the depths off Bermuda in a spherical submersible, gazed through its porthole- and saw aliens.

“Numberless little creatures “raced through his light beam, he wrote in his 1934 book, “Half Mile Down.” They turned out to be bristlemouths. A color plate in the book shows a group with jaws wide open while chasing a school of copepods, tiny crustaceans with long antennas.

Oceans textbooks from the 1970s to the 1990s said little about Cyclothones. Then came a new wave of research, centering on careful trawls of the deep ocean with a new generation of nets in which the mesh was much finer. No matter how far the nets plunged, up came vast numbers of bristlemouths.

Dr. Robison said bristlemouths have very small eyes that in the dim habitat seemed to play little or no role in finding prey. Instead, the fish apparently relies on sense organs that can detect movement and vibration in the surrounding water.

And the rows of glowing dots on the bristlemouth’s abdomen? Dr. Robison said they appeared to be camouflage that helped the creature hide from predators by matching the surrounding light.

It has taken roughly a century and a half, but science has finally come to know the bristlemouth fairly well, even if questions remain. Not so other creatures of the deep. If the tortuous route to identifying the dominant fish is any indication, it will take longer still to learn about the uncommon forms of life that roam the depths.

“We keep seeing lots of different critters we haven’t seen before,” Dr. Robison said of voyages in the Monterey Canyon, a deep gorge in California’s coastal seabed, and beyond. He added, “The deeper you go, the stranger things get.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, July 11, 2015

Ebola Nearly Claimed His Life, Then It Hid in His Eye

2015-07-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

Satellite image of Sierra Leone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY DENISE GRADY

ATLANTA - When Dr. Ian Crozier was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, his medical team thought he was cured. But less than two months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye.

Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.

His doctors were amazed. Months had passed since he became ill while working in an Ebola treatment ward in Sierra Leone as a volunteer for the World Health Organization. By the time he left Emory, his blood was Ebola-free.

Almost nothing was known about the ability of Ebola to lurk inside the eye, but despite the infection, Dr. Crozier’s tears and the surface of his eye were virus-free, so he posed no risk to anyone who had casual contact with him.

More than a year after the epidemic in West Africa was recognized, doctors are still learning about Ebola and Lingering effects on survivors. Now, however, with at least 10,000 survivors in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, patterns are emerging.

Dr. Crozier, 44, calls himself a poster child for “post-Ebola syndrome.” Besides eye trouble, he has had debilitating joint and muscle pain, deep fatigue and hearing loss.

At ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, run by the missionary group SIM, Dr.John Fankhauser, the medical director, said such ailments were the most common physical problems among the hundred or so people attending a special clinic for Ebola survivors.

In Sierra Leone, the picture is much the same, according to Dr. John S. Schieffelin, a physician from the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans who volunteered there. He said a well-organized survivor group met regularly in Kenema.

“The main problems they’re telling me about are lots of body and joint pains, chronic headaches and women who stopped having menstrual periods, and for some it’s been several months,” Dr. Schieffelin said.” There’s quite a bit of vision problems.”

The inside of the eye is mostly shielded from the immune system to prevent vision damage. The barriers are not fully understood, but they include tightly packed cells in minute blood vessels that keep out certain cells, along with unique biological properties that inhibit the immune system. But this “immune privilege” can sometimes turn the inner eye into a sanctuary for viruses.

The question was whether Dr. Crozier’s sight could be saved. Severe inflammation suggested that the barriers that normally protect the eye from the immune system had been breached. So what was damaging Dr. Crozier’s eye? The virus, the inflammation or both?

The usual treatment for inflammation is steroids. But they can make an infection worse.

“What if it unleashed the virus?” Dr. Crozier said. “We were on a tightrope.”

Though Dr. Crozier was the patient, he was also part of his own medical team, and his focus on the scientific details helped counter his mounting fear that he was going blind. As he and his physicians struggled to balance treating the inflammation with fighting the infection, his eyesight continued to deteriorate.

He also had significant hearing loss on the same side. “The whole left side of your life is gone, “he said. “It was a very dark and depressing time.”

The biggest shock came when he glanced in the mirror one morning and saw that his eye color had changed from bright blue to a vivid green.

“It was like an assault,” he said. “It was so personal.”

Dr. Jay Varkey, an infectious-disease specialist who had handled much of Dr. Crozier’s care, got special permission from the United States Food and Drug Administration to use an experimental antiviral drug taken in pill form. (The doctors declined to name it.)

At first, there seemed to be no effect. But a week or so later, Dr. Crozier realized that if he turned his head this way and that, he could find “portals” through the obstructions in his eye.

His sight returned in a few months, and his eye turned blue again.

Was it the antiviral drug? He cannot be sure, but he think so.

Dr. Varkey said, “I think the cure was Ian’s own immune system.” He said he suspected the treatments had reduced Dr. Crozier’s symptoms and helped preserve his sight long enough for his immune system to kick in and clear out the virus-just as supportive care during the worst phase of his initial illness had kept him alive until his natural defenses could take over.

Dr. Crozier believes information from his case may help prevent blindness in Ebola survivors in West Africa. In April, he headed to Liberia with Dr. Steven Yeh, an ophthalmologist, and several other Emory physicians to see patients who had recovered from Ebola and examine their eyes.

“Maybe we can change the natural history of the disease for survivors,” Dr. Crozier said. “I want to start that conversation.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, May 23, 2015

When the Mind’s Eye Is Blind, It’s Hard to Picture an Image

2015-07-07T04:43:00.003-07:00

English: Main regions of the vertebrate brain, shown for a shark and a human brain (the human brain is sliced along the midline). The two brains are not on the same scale. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY CARL ZIMMER

In 2005, a 65-year-old retired building inspector paid a visit to the neurologist Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter Medical School in England. After a minor surgical procedure, the man-whom Dr. Zeman and his colleagues refer to as MX-had suddenly realized he could not conjure images in his mind.

Dr. Zeman could not find the condition in medical literature. He was intrigued. For decades, scientists had debated how the mind’s eye works, and how much we rely on it to store memories and to make plans for the future.

MX agreed to a series of exams. He proved to have a good memory for a man of his age, and he performed well on problem-solving tests. His only unusual mental feature was an inability to form mental images.

Dr. Zeman then scanned MX’s brain as he performed certain tasks. First, MX looked at faces of famous people and named them. The scientists found that certain regions of his brain became active, the same ones that become active in other people who look at faces.

Then the scientists showed names to MX and asked him to picture their faces. In normal brains, some of those face-recognition regions again become active. In MX’s brain, none did.

Yet MX could answer questions that would seem to require a working mind’s eye. He could tell the scientists the color of Tony Blair’s eyes, for example, and name the letters of the alphabet that have low-hanging tails, like g and j. These tests suggested his brain used some alternate strategy to solve visual problems.

Since then, scientists have surveyed other people who say they cannot summon mental images-as if their mind’s eye were blind. Many of the survey respondents differed from MX in an important way. While he originally had a mind’s eye, they never did.

Reported in the journal Cortex, the condition has received a name: aphantasia, based on the Greek word phantasia, which Aristotle used to describe the power that presents imagery to our minds.

If aphantasia is real, it is possible that injury causes some cases while others begin at birth.

Thomas Ebeyer, a 25-year-old Canadian student, discovered his condition four years ago while talking with a girlfriend. He was shocked that she could remember what a friend had been wearing a year before. She replied that she could see a picture of it in her mind.

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” he said. He was then surprised to discover that everyone he knew could summon images to their minds.

Like many other survey subjects, he could count his windows without picturing his house.

It’s weird and hard to explain,” he said. “I know the facts. I know where the windows are.”

Dr. Zeman is trying to ascertain how common aphantasia is. He has sent the questionnaire to thousands of people and wants to hear from more. He can be reached at a.zeman@exeter.ac.uk.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, July 4, 2015

Planet Mercury Is Shown To Be More Than a Little Bore

2015-05-25T04:15:00.002-07:00

English: Artist's rendering of the MESSENGER spacecraft orbiting Mercury (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By KENNETH CHANG

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, in orbit around Mercury for the past four years, came to an abrupt end on April 30 when it crashed into the surface.

That event brought to a close a mission that has painted an unexpected portrait of Mercury, once thought a boring round rock not much different from Earth’s moon. Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, is only slightly larger than the moon, although it has more drastic temperature swings – 427 degrees Celsius during the day, minus 184 degrees at night.

“It’s really been exciting to see a planet unfold, a planet that is one of our neighbors,” said Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for the mission. “Almost every aspect of Mercury has had its share of surprises.”

Messenger – a shortening of Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geo-chemistry and Ranging – discovered that Mercury shrank slightly as it cooled over billions of years; mapped ancient lava flows; found enigmatic shallow depressions that are some of the youngest and brightest features on the surface; and confirmed the presence of ice in perpetually dark crates near the poles.

The water ice, perhaps a billion tons, was not a complete surprise. Radio telescope observations from Earth had hinted at something reflective, and the shadowed craters are extremely cold. Beyond confirming the suspected, Messenger also made a new discovery: The ice was covered by an unexplained dark layer.

“We have a reasoned hypothesis,” Dr. Solomon said. The material could be carbon-rich compounds, similar to substances found in certain meteorites and in comets. “It’s tarlike in its consistency,” he said. “It’s as dark as tar.”

The biggest scientific finding of the mission, Dr. Solomon said, was that Mercury was rich in “volatiles,” elements like chlorine, sulfur, potassium and sodium that easily evaporate at moderate temperatures. Mercury is small and dense, full of iron, and the thinking about how it formed was that it must have been heated to temperatures that should have boiled off the volatiles. Yet the volatiles are still there.

Scientists now have to come up with new ideas to explain how Mercury formed. When NASA launched Messenger in 2004, knowledge of Mercury was sparse. The only close-ups had come in three flybys by NASA’s Mariner 10 in the 1970’s

For more than six years, Messenger took a circuitous route through the inner solar system, making flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury, to slow itself down enough to enter orbit around Mercury. On March 18, 2011, finally arrived.

The orbital portion of the mission was to last one year, then was extended twice.

Even the craft’s destruction could provide insights by digging up what lies beneath the surface- but it will be some time before anyone will see what that is. NASA does not have any follow-up Mercury missions set, but an ambitious European and Japanese collaboration called BepiColombo is scheduled to launch in 2017. It is to arrive at Mercury in 2024.

That mission consists of two orbiters, one focusing on the planet, the other on the surrounding space environment, in greater and finer detail than Messenger.

Johannes Benkhoff, the project scientist for BepiColombo at the European Space Agency, described Messenger as “really a fantastic mission.”

“It’s perfect that we have BepiColombo to follow on” Messenger’s findings, Dr. Benkhoff said. “They have provided a lot of new results, unexpected results.”

BepiColombo is named after Giuseppe Colombo, an Italian scientist nicknamed Bepi who came up with the orbital trajectories that enabled NASA’s Mariner10 flybys.

Dr. Solomon is looking forward to the next trip to Mercury I still want to learn more about, “he said.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, May 9, 2015

Chickens Agree: Counting From Left Works Best

2015-03-26T08:23:00.001-07:00

This is the way I view numbers, along a spatial sequence. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chicken, anyone?
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By ERICA GOODE

Asked to picture the numbers from one to 10, most people will imagine a straight line with one at the left end and 10 at the right.

This “mental number line,” as researchers have termed it, is so pervasive that some scientists have argued that the spatial representation of numbers is hard-wired into the brain, part of a primitive number system that underlies humans’ capacity for higher mathematics.

Now Italian researchers have found that newborn chicks, like humans, appear to map numbers spatially, in the same way.

The chicks, trained to seek out mealworms behind white plastic panels printed with varying numbers of identical red squares, repeatedly demonstrated a preference for the left when the number of squares was small and for the right when the number was larger. The research, led by Rosa Rugani, a psychologist who at the time was at the University of Padova, appeared in the journal Science.

The researchers said the findings supported the idea that the left-right orientation for numbers is innate rather than determined by culture or education – a possibility that was raised by some studies that found that in Arabic-speaking countries where letters and numbers are read right to left, the mental number scale was reversed. But the new research, Dr. Rugani and her colleagues wrote, indicates that orienting numbers in space may represent “a universal cognitive strategy available soon after birth.”

Tyler Marghetis, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of California, San Diego, said: “We have brains that evolved for fighting and finding food, not for doing calculus. So one of the hopes of this kind of research is that it will tell us something about the basic building blocks we have access to in building up these more human concepts.”

But Mr. Marghetis said that the studies demonstrated only that the chicks associated rough quantities that were smaller or larger with left or right, not that they represented precise numbers in a mental line. And he cautioned against leaping to the idea that chicks are capable of the same complex abilities as humans.

Judging amounts, either of how much food is available or how many predators are nearby, is an important tool for survival. And many nonhuman species – including chickens, monkeys and even some fish – have some ability to count, though these may be a capacity to distinguish rough numerical magnitude rather than precise numbers.

Human studies indicate that when presented with a task involving numbers people automatically create a mental scale, using one number as an anchor and locating smaller numbers to the left and larger ones to the right. The new research suggests that some version of this may be true for chickens. “We cannot think of any other, and simpler, explanation for the behavior of the chicks than assuming the training number is 1) remembered and 2) compared with the number seen at test,” Dr. Rugani said in an email.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, March 14, 2015

For Healthier Rice, Bacteria Deployed to Fight a Poison

2015-03-21T08:14:00.001-07:00

Mature rice panicle against blue sky. Part of the image collection of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By CARINA STORR

When Harsh Bais grows rice plants in trays of water in his greenhouse at the University of Delaware, he can easily spot the ones that have been exposed to arsenic: They are stunted, with shorter stems and shrunken leaves.

Dr. Bais is working to develop rice plants that take up less arsenic, a common contaminant in the fields of his native India and other Asian countries. Chronic exposure to arsenic has been linked to heart disease, diabetes and genetic damage associated with elevated risks for cancer.

But instead of trying to breed new strains of rice or alter its DNA, he and other scientists are looking at the vast microbial community that lives near the rice’s roots.

These bacteria are the botanic equivalent of the human microbiome – the trillions of organisms that live in our guts, many performing beneficial tasks like digesting food and fighting off infection.

The hope is to find bacteria that will somehow block arsenic. In the past three years, Dr. Bais has isolated about a dozen bacterial species, added them to plants and looked for signs of arsenic poisoning.

Now, he says, he has zeroed in on one species, Pantoea agglomerans, that seems to reduce arsenic in the stem to one-eighth its former levels.

“Research on the plant microbiome is very hot because everyone is trying to find things that can increase growth and yield,” said Dr. Bais, an associate professor at Delaware.

For scientists interested in tweaking plant traits, there is a list longer than ever of bacteria to investigate. Advances in DNA sequencing have made it possible to identify large groups of related bacteria from different plant types and soil conditions.

Agricultural companies are already using bacteria on seeds of major crops such as corn and soybeans to help them bear more fruit or require less fertilizer. This year, Monsanto entered a partnership with Novozymes, a Danish company that sells more than 200 biologic products, to test organisms from the corn and soybean microbiomes at thousands of field sites.

A study of the rice microbiome is underway in the lab of Venkatesan Sundaresan, at the University of California, Davis. Using DNA sequencing, he has found at least a quarter-million bacterial species in the rice microbiome.

Dr. Sundaresan is also interested in the functions of individual microbes. So he is collaborating with Dr. Bais, shipping him soil from rice roots in his test field in Davis.

P. agglomerans is the first microbe that has been shown to reduce arsenic in rice. While the microbe appears to keep most arsenic out of the rice’s stem and leaves, the crucial question is how it affects the grain.

“Microbes for crops have the reputation of being finicky.” said Tom Adams, vice president for chemistry technology at Monsanto. But he added that new technology could help predict which microbes would work best in different soil and environmental conditions.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, September 27, 2014

Success Is Not Just About Smarts

2015-03-06T19:20:00.001-08:00

English: Logo of One Laptop per Child (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like this article. Not that it disregards technology, but it enforces the truth, that with or without technology, our basis for success is not only intelligence. I mean, being smart gives you a headstart, but grit - fortitude and determination, coupled with persistence, and all of the other good values - these what makes the basis for making it good in life. But then again, it is not a guarantee...
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TOM BRADY

Technology has been promoted as the great equalizer in education. Initiatives like One Laptop Per Child and Massive Online Open Courses were supposed to democratize learning, but when the $400 laptops given to poor children around the world broke, and failure rates of some MOOCs were as high as 75 percent, reality set in.

Though many believe that computers can shrink the education gap, research shows that giving students from poor families online access is more likely to widen the divide, Susan Pinker reported in The Times. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd, economists at Duke University in North Carolina, tracked a million disadvantaged middle-school students for five years after they were given networked computers and found “a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” they wrote. The scores of boys and African-Americans dropped drastically because many used their machines to play games, surf social media and download entertainment.

The same thing happened in the One Laptop project, with children spending less time on their homework than before, researchers found.

New findings suggest that educators should focus more on low teacher-student ratios, early intervention and character traits.

Chicago has introduced an intensive program where black and Latino boys work two on one with a tutor, and participants have ended up as much as two years ahead of students who haven’t gotten help, David Kirp wrote in The Times. This math success also has put them on track to graduate, helped them engage in school and made them less likely to be arrested for a violent crime.

Many programs address the time between birth and age 3, but the teen years may be just as important. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, points out in his new book that neuroscientists have realized that adolescence, like early childhood, Is a “period of tremendous ‘neuroplasticity,’ ” during which the brain changes through experience.

The Time’s Nicholas Kristof wrote that early help for disadvantaged children not only reduces inequality but also can save public money. He quoted James Heckman, a University of Chicago professor and Nobel Prize-winning economists, who says the cheapest way to reduce crime is to invest in early childhood programs. Mr. Heckman has calculated that to get the same reduction in crime by adding police officers would cost five times as much.

“Early education” includes counseling at-risk pregnant women not to drink, smoke or take drugs, and then after birth, helping them breast-feed and read to the child. These help, Mr.Kristof wrote, “apparently because the first few years are the window when the brain is forming and when basic skills like self-control and grit are developed.”

At some schools, grit, self- control and curiosity are now part of the curriculum. Scientists say personality could be more important than intelligence when it comes to success in school.

Arthur E. Poropat, an Australian psychology professor, cites data showing that a tendency to be “diligent, dutiful and hardworking,” and qualities like creativity and curiosity, are more predictive of student performance than intelligence. This is good news, Dr. Poropat wrote in a paper last year, because “personality has been demonstrated to change over time to a far greater extent than intelligence.”

“We probably need to start rethinking our emphasis on intelligence,” he told The Times.

Mandy Benedix, who teaches a class on grit at Rogers Middle School in Pearland, Texas, told The Times: “We know that these non-cognitive traits can be taught. We also know that it is necessary for success. You look at anybody who has had long-term sustainable success, and every one of them exhibited at some point this grit, this tenacity to keep going.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, February 28, 2015

Making the Cells and Tissue Bigger, to Get a Better Look

2015-02-05T06:52:00.000-08:00

Microscopic view of a histologic specimen of human lung tissue stained with hematoxylin and eosin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY JOHN MARKOFF

A new laboratory technique enables researchers to see minuscule biological features, such as individual neurons and synapses, at a nearly molecular scale through conventional optical microscopes.

In a paper published recently in the journal Science, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they were able to increase the physical size of cells and tissue by as much as five times while still preserving their structure. They call the new technique expansion microscopy.

By extending the resolving power of conventional microscopes, Scientists can glimpse the protein structures that form ion channels and the outline of the membrane that holds the genome within a cell. The researchers have examined minute neutral circuits, gaining new insights into local connections in the brain and a better understanding of larger networks.

The maximum resolving power of conventional microscopes is about 200 nanometers. (A human hair is about 500 times wider.) In recent decades, scientist have struggled to push past these limits.

Last year, three scientists received a Nobel Prize for a technique in which fluorescent molecules are used to extend the resolving power of optical microscopes. But the technique requires specialized equipment and is costly.

With expansion microscopy, Edward S. Boyden of the M.I.T. Center for Neurobiological Engineering and his colleagues were able to observe objects originally measuring just 70 nanometers in cultured cells and brain tissue through an optical microscope. They were also able to produce super-resolution animations in which the viewer “flies” through a detailed three-dimensional image of a mouse hippocampus.

“We hope we have a technology that will allow you to scan the nervous system of entire animals,” Dr.Boyden said.

The idea began as a joke, according to Dr. Boyden. But he and two graduate students realized it might be feasible after exploring the work of Toyoichi Tanaka, who discovered a class of “intelligent” gels that respond to stimuli such as water.

One of those materials is a polymer used in diapers, which absorbs 200 times to 300 times its mass in water. The researchers realized it was perfect for forcing biological tissue to swell.

The researchers apply fluorescent dye to the sample. Then they infuse the tissue with the chemical building blocks of the polymer. The blocks form the polymer inside the tissue, which is then chemically “chopped up” so it can be enlarged. Then, just add water. The tissue expands, and the tiny structures traced in fluorescence burst into view.

Expansion microscopy may permit scientists to create three-dimensional models of large areas in the brain of animals, making it possible to map biological processes from one region to the next. And the technique may reveal the structures of individual proteins, structural detail inside cells and other biological features in near-molecular detail.

Dr. Boyden said the imaging technique will not directly capture dynamic processes in the brain, but it may make it possible to gain insight into brain function by taking samples before and after events.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, January 31, 2015

Giving Up Science For a Life of Writing

2015-01-23T18:24:00.001-08:00

University of Iowa logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kids, this is an example of how you can be someone other than what you studied in school. You do what you like, and where your passion is, put all your heart into it. Be the best that you can be!
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BY LARRY ROHTER

OAKLAND, California – Growing up in Beijing as the daughter of a physicist, Yiyun Li seemed destined for science. But she would surreptitiously read from Tang dynasty poetry while “pretending to do math.” Years later, studying for a Ph.D. in immunology at the University of Iowa, she read short stories clipped from The New Yorker as she did lab work.

“My parents were very much against writing and even very much against me reading literature, which they thought put wrong thoughts in your head,” she recalled. “I don’t think they liked me reading anything but science.”

About a dozen years ago, Ms. Li abandoned medicine and enrolled in the renowned writing program at Iowa. Since then, she has published two highly praised short-story collections, written a pair of novels, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” (a no-strings attached stipend of $625,000, paid in quarterly installments over five years) and been named to lists of “ best young American writers.”

Yet, when she arrived in the United State in 1996, she had written nothing in either Chinese or English, a language she could speak, if not yet colloquially.

“She’s an interesting case for a writer writing in a second language,” said John Freeman, a former editor of Granta, the British literary magazine that named Ms. Li, now 41, to its best young novelist list.

“There’s an elegance and smoothness to her writing that is actually disguising the quite passionate and intense feelings of equivocation and loss that her characters feel.”

Ms. Li’s latest novel, “Kinder than Solitude,” from Random House, shifts between China and the United States. Its four main characters start out as adolescent friends growing up around a Beijing courtyard in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. After the oldest is poisoned, perhaps by one of the others, the survivors drift apart: One becomes a prosperous but soulless businessman riding China’s economic boom, while the other two flee to America, settling in college towns like Berkeley, Madison and Cambridge but never quite learning how to fit in.

Because of these immigrant touches, Ms. Li is often grouped with novelist like Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart and Daniel Alarcon as a first-generation “new American” writer. But she points out that she came to the United State as an adult, and did not grow up bilingual.

“I actually don’t know what an immigrant writer should be written about,” she said, “and if you look at my characters, they don’t struggle as immigrants. They actually do fairly well. If they want, they can have a good life. It’s more that they have to deal with their internal struggles” and the problems they bring from China.

Ms. Li seems to have adapted smoothly to America. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and described ferrying her sons, Vincent and James, to music lessons and sports; her husband, Dapeng Li, who was her college sweetheart in China, is a software engineer at the Pandora music service.

Ms. Li said that in China she did not write anything in Chinese, except a journal she kept as a teenager. Though most of her characters are Chinese, when she hears them talking in her head, they are speaking English. English “felt very natural to me very fast,” she said. “I think in English, I dream in English. I came to English as a grown-up, which is probably to my advantage. The disadvantage is that you don’t have that intimacy with the language.”

The writer Amy Leach, a classmate at Iowa and still a close friend, said, “We’ve talked about how it can be an advantage not to have all those ready-made clichés springing to your mind and precluding more original thinking and wording.”

Ms. Li said, “You miss a lot of idioms, cultural things,” if you don’t go to middle school or high school in the language. “On the other hand, I think if you do approach a language as a grown-up and then use it to write, you also bypass a lot of silliness.”

Taken from The New York Times International Weekly, TODAY Saturday Edition, March 8, 2014

The Artificial Leaf Unfurled… Yet Again

2015-01-13T06:29:00.001-08:00

Macro of Wet Leaf (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY JACK HITT

General Electric is promoting a feel-good collection of videos these days.

Each film chronicles an innovative idea, like Daniel Nocera’s. This Harvard chemist has pioneered the artificial leaf, an invention that generates energy the way a tree does. Light strikes a container of water and out bubbles hydrogen, an energy source.

The short film about his idea has Mr. Nocera saying that his device will one day be in people’s homes, pumping out energy.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and “think about your house being its own power station.”

Such artificial-leaf optimism could also be found a year ago in a Los Angeles Times article that held the artificial leaf “could create enough clean fuel to power a home for a day in developing countries.” And the year before that, in The New Yorker. Or go back one more year, to The New York Times, where Mr. Nocera said, “Our goal is to make each home its own power station.”

So, where are the power stations?

Prowl the edges of contemporary invention, and you experience a lot of this frustration. A scientist announces a breakthrough in battery technology or algae biofuel, and the talk ramps up quickly.

But there always seems to be an obstacle between the big idea and self-sufficiency. Sometimes, it’s the idea itself – a technological bug that seems fixable turns out to be weird and inscrutable. But in this case, the technology is sound, say researchers including David Tiede of the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago.

Mr. Nocera’s idea is based on Photosynthesis. When light bombards a leaf, it splits water in the leaf into oxygen, and then binds the hydrogen with carbon dioxide to make carbohydrates, its food.

Mr. Nocera’s leaf mimics this process. A vessel of water is exposed to light. A silicon strip coated in catalysts breaks down the water molecule such that on one side oxygen bubbles up, and on the other, hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel.

The issue isn’t the invention – it’s how to use it.

“If I give you a canister of hydrogen that we got from the artificial leaf, you can’t use it right away,”
Mr. Nocera said.

You need a fuel cell, which can turn hydrogen into electricity.

There are efforts to begin incorporating such energy technology into daily life, such as the development of hydrogen-powered cars.

“If we had fuel cells in your house and your car, then everybody would be trying to implement the artificial leaf right now,” Mr. Nocera said.

The other obstacle is the market place.

A few years ago, he was asked to produce the energy equivalent of a gallon (3.78 liters) of gasoline and keep costs around $3. As he neared that number, the fossil-fuel industry upset his plans with a surge in cheap natural-gas extraction, driven by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

But therein lies a glimmer of hope. Hydrogen can be produced by fracking, but it comes at a cost of carbon pollution. Still, widespread fracking might lead to widespread hydrogen use.

“Fracking could drive the establishment of an infrastructure for using hydrogen at the home,” Mr. Nocera said. “And then the next thing everybody might say is, yeah, but that hydrogen is making CO2. Then the artificial leaf would show up.”

Unable to resist, he said, “Your house will be its own gas station.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 12, 2014

Ripples From Space Dating to the Big Bang

2014-12-19T07:24:00.002-08:00

English: Shows slices of expansion of universe without an initial singularity (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An example of simulated data modelled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Here, following a collision of two protons, a is produced which decays into two jets of hadrons and two electrons. The lines represent the possible paths of particles produced by the proton-proton collision in the detector while the energy these particles deposit is shown in blue. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, this is a bit too scientific for me, but it is good to know. Just to avoid scientism - the belief that everything can be explained by science.

Read on...
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BY DENNIS OVERBYE

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – When scientists jubilantly announced last month that a telescope at the South Pole had detected ripples in space from the very beginning of time, the reverberations went far beyond the potential validation of astronomer’s most cherished model of the Big Bang.

It was the second time in less than two years that ideas thought to be radical just decades ago had been confirmed (so the optimists think) by experiment.

The first was the discovery of the Higgs boson, associated with an energy field that gives mass to other particles, announced in July 2012.

Now the South Pole telescope team, led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has presented physicists with another clue from what the Russian cosmologist Yakov B. Zeldovich once called the poor man’s particle accelerator – the universe itself.

The ripples detected by the telescope, Bicep2, were faint spiral patterns from the polarization of microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang.

These gravitational waves are the long-sought markers for a theory called inflation, the force that put the bang in the Big Bang: an antigravitational swelling that began a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the cosmic clock started ticking. Scientists have long incorporated inflation into their standard model of the cosmos, but proving it had long been elusive.

Astronomers say they expect to be studying the gravitational waves from mountaintops, balloons and perhaps satellites for the next 20 years, hoping to gain insight into mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

The question before astronomers and physicists now is understanding what caused inflation. What is this stuff that “turns gravity on its head” – as Alan Guth of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a founder of inflation theory, has put it – and blew up the universe?

Einstein introduced the notion of antigravity into physics. For him it was known as the cosmological constant, a factor he used to account for the fact that the universe didn’t collapse.

He later abandoned the cosmological constant, calling it a mistake, but it was resurrected 15 years ago when astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up because of the mysterious force called dark energy. As with inflation, the repulsion is part of space itself: The bigger the universe gets, the more powerfully it pushes apart, resulting in an exponential runaway expansion.

Assuming they are confirmed, the Bicep2 results would eliminate most versions of inflation that have been proposed, including the Higgs, according to Andrei Linde, a physicist at Stanford University in California.

Knowing inflation’s identity could be crucial if scientists are to unwind cosmic history to the beginning, when they suspect the universe was ruled by a single unified force instead of the four we know today: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

The Bicep2 waves seem to date from the time that theorists suspect electromagnetism and the weak force divorced the strong force, gravity having already gone its own way, but Dr.Linde says that could be a coincidence.

If the chain of evidence and reasoning holds up, however, the Bicep2 waves do bear witness to the most fervently hoped-for unification of all, or what John A. Wheeler of Princeton University in New Jersey once called “the fiery marriage “ of Einstein’s gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum theory, which governs the behavior of atoms inside it.

According to inflation theory, the Bicep2 waves are magnified images of the hypothetical particles called gravitons that would transmit gravity in quantum theory. The gravitons, theory says, are produced by the same process by which black holes leak. It is known as Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, the renowned black hole theorist, who discovered it in 1973.

If the Bicep2 results are confirmed, and if astronomers agree that the ripples were gravitational waves from inflation, the discovery of Hawking radiation could win a Nobel Prize for Dr. Hawking.

Hawking radiation has been part of the physics firmament for decades; it’s the best-known prediction of quantum gravity.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted that some physicists had wondered whether gravity obeyed the dice-playing quantum principles that Einstein had disdained.

He said, “Now we know that gravity is indeed quantized, involving graviton particles.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 5, 2014

Genetic War on Pests May Hurt Benign Bugs

2014-12-17T05:41:00.003-08:00

Mechanism of RNA interference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One molecule of the Dicer-homolog protein from Giardia intestinalis, colored by domain (PAZ domain yellow, platform domain red, connector helix blue, RNase and bridge domains green). Dicer is an RNase that cleaves long double-stranded RNA molecules into short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) as a first step in the RNA interference response, and also initiates the formation of the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Left: (Image:1u04-argonaute.png) A full-length argonaute protein from the archaea species Pyrococcus furiosus. Right: (Right:Image:1ytu_argonaute_dsrna.png) The PIWI domain of an argonaute protein in complex with double-stranded RNA. The base-stacking interaction between the 5' base on the guide strand and a conserved tyrosine residue (light blue) is highlighted; the stabilizing divalent cation (magnesium) is shown as a gray sphere. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY ANDREW POLLACK

Scientists and Biotechnology companies are developing what could become the next powerful weapon in the war on pests – one that harnesses a Nobel Prize-winning discovery to kill insects and pathogens by disabling their genes.

By zeroing in on a genetic sequence unique to one species, the technique has the potential to kill a pest without harming beneficial insects. That would be big advance over chemical pesticides.

“If you use a neuro-poison, it kills everything,” said Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the technology, which is called RNA interference, or RNAi. “But this one is very target-specific.”

But some specialists fear that releasing gene-silencing agents into fields could harm beneficial insects, especially among organisms that have a common genetic makeup, and possibly even human health.

“To attempt to use this technology at this current stage of understanding would be more naïve than our use of DDT in the 1950s,” the National Honey Bee Advisory Board said in comments submitted to the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates pesticides.

The approach is of interest to bee keepers because one possible use, under development by Monsanto, is to kill a mite that is believed to be at least partly responsible for the mass die-offs of honeybees in recent years.

Monsanto also has applied for regulatory approval of corn that is genetically engineered to use RNAi to kill the western corn rootworm, one of the costliest of agricultural pests. The company is also trying to develop a spray that would restore the ability of its Roundup herbicide to kill weeds that have grown impervious to it.

Some bee specialists said they would welcome attempts to use RNAi to save honeybees. Groups representing corn, soybean and cotton farmers also support the technology.

For a decade, corn growers have been combating the rootworm by planting so-called BT crops that are genetically engineered to produce a toxin that kills the insects when they eat the crop. But rootworms are now evolving resistance.

RNA interference is a natural phenomenon that is set off by double-stranded RNA. DNA, which is what genes are made of, is usually double stranded, the famous double helix. But RNA, which is a messenger in cells, usually consists of a single strand of chemical units representing the letters of the genetic code. When a cell senses a double-stranded RNA, it acts as if it has encountered a virus. It activates a mechanism that silences any gene with a sequence corresponding to that in the double-stranded RNA.

Scientists quickly learned that they could deactivate virtually any gene by synthesizing a snippet of double-stranded RNA with a matching sequence.

The scientists who first unraveled this mechanism won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and it was initially assumed that most of the use would be in medicine – for example, drugs that could turn off essential genes in pathogens or tumors.

So far, researchers have found it difficult to deliver the RNA through a person’s bloodstream into the cells in the body where it is needed.

But beetles like the corn rootworm can simply eat the double-stranded RNA to set off the effect. One way to get insects to do that is to genetically engineer crops to produce double-stranded RNA corresponding to an essential gene of the pest.

Monsanto’s rootworm-killing corn is one of the first in which the crop has been engineered specifically to produce a double-stranded RNA.

Monsanto is also looking at putting RNA into sugar water fed to honeybees to protect them from the varroa mite. The way to fight the mite now is to spray pesticides that can also harm bees.

“We were trying to kill a little bug on a big bug,” said Jerry Hayes, the head of bee health at Monsanto.

If the RNAi is directed at a genetic sequence unique to the mite, the bees would not be harmed.

Some scientists are calling for caution, however. In a paper published last year, two entomologists at the United States’ Department of Agriculture warned that because genes are common to various organisms, RNAi pesticide might hurt unintended insects.

One study at the University of Kentucky and the University of Nebraska found that a double-stranded RNA intended to silence a rootworm gene also affected a gene in the ladybug, killing that beneficial insect.

In a paper prepared for a meeting earlier this year, E.P.A. scientists said RNAi represented “unique challenges for ecological risk assessment that have not yet been encountered in assessments for traditional chemical pesticide.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, March 22, 2014

Astronomical Encounter That May Test Theory of Relativity

2014-12-16T06:10:00.002-08:00

larger animation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The supermassive black holes are all that remains of galaxies once all protons decay, but even these giants are not immortal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The ratio between the black hole Schwarzschild radius and the observer distance to it is 1:9. Of note is the gravitational lensing effect known as an Einstein ring, which produces a set of two fairly bright and large but highly distorted images of the Cloud as compared to its actual angular size. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY RON COWEN

Black holes, the ultradense objects predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, have extraordinary gravity: Everything is sucked in, even light, and virtually nothing leaks out.

Now, for the first time, astronomers may have a chance to watch as a gas cloud that has been hurtling toward the center of the Milky Way collides with a black hole that lies just 26,000 light-years from Earth. (While scientists expect to observe the event beginning in March or April, it occurred 26,000 years ago.) The gas cloud is as massive as three Earths – but no match for the black hole, Sagittarius A**, which has the mass of four million suns.

“This is a rare opportunity to witness spoon-feeding of a black hole,” said Avi Loeb, a theoretical astro physicist at Harvard. “Will the gas reach the black hole, and if so, how quickly? Will the black hole throw up or spit the gas out in the form of an outflow or a jet?

If the black hole devours a sizable chunk of the cloud, a digestive process that could take many months to years, fireworks could ensue. Heated to billions of degrees as it spirals inward, the doomed gas cloud may emit a last gasp of radiation, ranging from radio waves to X-rays.

“We will learn something, no matter what happens,” said Andrea Ghez, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has monitored the galactic center since 1995. Black holes are believed to be at the center of nearly every large galaxy.

The action is likely to unfold in two acts, said Stefan Gillessen of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

His team discovered the gas cloud, G2, in 2011.

After the cloud, already stretched into a spaghetti-like strand by the black hole’s gravity, makes its closest approach to Sagittarius A*, its distance from the black hole will be about 200 times Earth’s distance from the sun. Nonetheless, the passage of G2 near Sagittarius A* might be near enough to plow into the outer edge of the swirling disk of matter believed to surround the black hole.

The shock wave generated by that encounter might create X-rays and radio waves that could be detected by telescopes.

If the cloud contains a star at its center, as some astronomers have proposed, it may generate more light, said Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam.

The encounter could have another effect: Disruptions in the cloud might alter the direction in which radio waves vibrate as they travel through. Simultaneous observations with telescopes tuned to different radio wavelengths might discern the waves’ twists, giving astronomers new details about the cloud’s properties, said Geoffrey Bower, a radio astronomer with the Taiwanese organization Asiaa, in Hilo, Hawaii.

But most of the potential fireworks are at least a year away, perhaps decades. That is how long it may take material torn from G2 to spiral inward through the black hole’s feeding disk, coming 100 times closer to the hole than it is now. At that location, gas becomes hot enough to radiate before it is swallowed.

Next year, the Event Horizon Telescope, an array of radio telescope, will gain enough acuity to discern the light that just misses being dragged into Sagittarius A*, but is bent into a halo. (That level of acuity could make out an orange on the surface of the moon, said the project’s leader, Sheperd Doeleman, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory.) Deviations from the predicted shape of the halo would indicate Einstein’s theory of gravity needs revision.

For now, Professor Loeb said, astronomers are looking forward to the encounter. “The experience is as exciting for astronomers as it is for parents taking the first photos of their infant eating.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, March 8, 2014

Imaginings of the Cosmos Through the Ages

2014-11-28T04:59:00.001-08:00

English: Artist's conception of the spiral structure of the Milky Way with two major stellar arms and a central bar. "Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms." (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Exterior of the Chora Church in Istanbul, today a museum. It is famous for it Byzantine mosaics. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Kraków, by Professor Cyprian Godebski. Esperanto: Monumento pri Koperniko ĉe la Malnova Universitato de Krakovo. Polski: Pomnik Mikołaja Kopernika w Krakowie. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

MICHAEL BENSON

Four elegantly cloaked gentlemen in idiosyncratic caps peer through what seems to be a porthole at distant Earth – a planet as spiky with spires as to look machine-made.

The tenor of the scene – the brilliant sun above, a pale crescent moon below the terrestrial sphere – suggests that these are the great astronomers of history, engaged in discussions about the design of the universe. They’re positioned, however, on a weedy slope, which raises a question: Where are they, exactly?

The picture comes from a 15th-century French translation of the 1240 work “De Proprietatibus Rerum” (“On the Properties of Things”), by one Bartholomeus Anglicus, among the earliest forerunners of the modern encyclopedia.

The image, by an anonymous artist, was revelatory: at once enigmatic and precise, a 600-year-old proto-science-fiction rendering of the cosmos. It is one of about 300 in my new book, “Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time,” a survey of many in about 4,000 years of attempts to represent the universe in graphic form, whether in manuscripts, paintings, prints or books, all the way up to 21st-century supercomputer simulations of galaxy groups in flux and sunspots in bloom.

In “Laniakea Supercluster,” for example, the astronomer R. Brent Tully uses a supercomputer to visualize gravitational flow lines knitting together an echoing expanse of space-time more than 500 million light-years in diameter. In this, the image was the discovery.

Perhaps the most extraordinary set of pictures depicting space-time’s origins dates from 1573. Discovered in the mid-20th century in an obscure notebook in the National Library of Spain, it was painted by the Portuguese artist and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student and lifelong friend of Michelangelo.

In one image, a set of elongated triangles represents the holy trinity, with the Greek letters alpha and omega on top and “Fiat Lux” (“let there be light “) just below. Swathed in flames, they extend down to a kind of clay vessel. The images are startlingly modern.

On another page, the Creator, belted by stars, has assumed a material form, centered on a single planet. It has become the multiple nested crystalline spheres that for more than 15 centuries were thought to carry the planets, the sun and moon on their courses, with Earth at their nucleus. This cosmological design was first proposed by Aristotle, and later modified and expanded by Ptolemy in the second century A.D.

Finally, de Holanda depicts a geometry of turning forms set in motion by God’s luminescent command. A giant sun pinions tiny Earth in a shadow-casting ray. This work contains a remarkable insight: Although the sun nominally rotates around Earth, in fact it dominates the picture, suggesting that the artist has grasped that it is the true center of our planetary system.

The image is one of several medieval and Renaissance depictions of cosmic design that seem to exhibit a kind of precognitive intuition of what Nicolaus Copernicus proposed in 1543 – the revolutionary notion of a heliocentric planetary system. (While de Holanda painted 30 years after Copernicus’s death, heliocentrism didn’t become accepted for at least another century, and it’s unlikely the artist meant to advocate it, if he even knew of it.)

We have had a gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness about the cosmos and our place within it, rising across millenniums.

Among the narrative threads are the 18th-century visual meditations on the possible design of the Milky Way – including the work of the English astronomer Thomas Wright, who in 1750 reasoned his way to the flattened-disk form of our galaxy. Wright also conceived of another revolutionary concept: a multigalaxy cosmos.

We now have our contemporary understanding of space-time, in which whirling star-spirals glint all the way to the fading edge of the visible. But while the center doesn’t hold in this vision, neither does anarchy: We’re left with a spongiform universe of galaxy clusters foaming along weblike filaments of dark matter. It all looks rather like a visualization of the Internet.

So where will it all end? Maybe a 14th-century vision of weightlessness provides a clue: A fresco on the ceiling of the Chora Church in Istanbul depicts a human figure (evidently wearing a supernatural kind of space helmet). It has become known as “The Angel of the Lord Rolling Up the Scroll of Heaven at the End of Time.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, November 1, 2014

Taking Ride On Air Remains Elusive

2014-11-25T05:07:00.002-08:00

English: A Hoverboard (or hover board) is a fictional hovering board used for personal transportation Français : Le Hoverboard est un skateboard volant du futur (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: I drew this diagram using xfig. It's a crude schematic of how to assemble my next hoverboard prototype. I do not have a version posted online. I release this image into the public domain. -- WillWare 18:26, 18 July 2006 (UTC) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY CONOR DOUGHERTY

LOS GATOS, California – A lot of things can hover. There are helicopters. There are hovercraft. But for the last three decades, a generation of engineers and movie fans have been waiting for something else: a hovering skateboard like the one in “Back to the Future Part II.”

The hoverboard is fiction, the vision of screenwriters who created the film about Marty McFly, a teenager who travels from 1985 to 2015, and uses a floating skateboard to flee a gang of bullies.

Ever since, various garage tinkerers and physics professors – and more recently, top engineers at Google – have tried to replicate it.

In California, Greg and Jill Henderson allowed a reporter to stand atop a magnetic skateboard that can float a couple of centimeters above a copper surface. The Hendersons have poured their life savings into the technology and are hoping to create industries based on this science.

Dustin Rubio, 39, an electrician who grew up skateboarding and saw “back to the Future Part II” when he was a teenager, is not thinking quite that big. This year, Mr. Rubio turned “a leaf blower, some plywood, some plastic and duct tape” into a small hovercraft that his daughters used to glide down the driveway at his home in Napa, California. “I was like I’m just gonna make something funny and see if it works,” he said.

But Mr. Rubio’s invention is not really a hoverboard. Bob Gale, who wrote the “Back to the Future” trilogy, said that in his imagination the hoverboard floats on a magnetic field similar to magnetic levitation trains.

This has been extremely difficult, mostly because of Earnshaw’s theorem, which states, more or less, that repelling magnets are tough to balance. One way is to use a track to hold the magnetic skateboard in place.

Last year, Rich DeVaul, a senior engineer at Google X, the company’s research division, and Dan Piponi, a Google mathematician, got as far as a fingernail-size piece of carbon that could hover above a lattice of small magnets.

They remain confident they could have built a board, but are less confident they could have found a use for it. “We weren’t sure exactly what big problem we were solving except for this global lack of hoverboard skate,” Mr.DeVaul said.

It turns out Mr.Henderson was working on this very thing. In the back of his office, there is a copper halfpipe that may be the first hoverboard skate park.

Mr. Henderson became enamored of hover technology in 1989 after the Loma Prieta earthquake, thinking that if you could make buildings float, you could build cities to better withstand earthquakes.

Two years ago, he started his company, Arx Pax, hoping to develop magnetic technologies and license patents. The Hendo hoverboard is not yet for sale. But the Hendersons have started a campaign to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site.

Mr. Gale said that when he and Robert Zemeckis wrote “Back to the Future II,” they envisioned a future of pedestrian-friendly downtowns ad flying skateboards.

Mr. Zemeckis told an interviewer that the technology was real, prompting an avalanche of letters from boys like Dave Mertes.

Mr. Mertes, now a 36-year-old clothing designer in Seattle, said he was crushed when it turned out that Mr. Zemeckis was joking. “I was like, oh, the director just said it was real. How can I get one?”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, November 1, 2014

Mystery Solved

2014-11-04T04:57:00.003-08:00

Pablo Picasso 1962 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I must say that this article is a year late, and even more than a year actually. But the insight to the creativity - or rather - method, of the artist, is known only just now, after decades. His style? Maybe. And maybe just one of his many styles. Whatever, let this be a new discovery - for the good.
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Prints offer insight into Picasso’s creative process

SINGAPORE – We tend to think of Pablo Picasso as a painter. The Singapore Tyler Print Institute’s latest show hopes to expand that.

Coming from archives of his son, Claude, the works have never been exhibited in Asia before and each series of prints offers some insight into Picasso’s creative process. In The Bull, he successively re-worked an image of a bull, starting from a fairly naturalistic treatment and gradually reducing it to a collection of sinuous lines. Two Nude Women, on the other hand, also begins naturalistically, but presents a more additive take on the process of abstraction. If anything, for those less familiar with abstract art, it’s an eye-opening look at how artists can abstract their subject.

The photographs of David Douglas Duncan, a close friend of Picasso’s, continue the overall theme of finding different perspectives of the artist and offer us a candid look at the man behind the art.

It’s not unusual for an aura of mystery to build up around a figure as significant as him. But in a welcome breath of fresh air, this show offers us a rare look behind the scenes, at intriguing, intimate, and engaging perspective on the life and work of Pablo Picasso.

BRUCE QUEK

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, June 29, 2013

Dinosaur Eating Habits

2014-10-31T15:59:00.000-07:00

Size comparison between the carnosaurian theropod dinosaur Allosaurus and a human (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Model of allosaurus in Bałtow, Poland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Allosaurus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by SINDYA N. BHANOO

Allosaurus, a smaller cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex, was a dexterous hunter that tugged at prey like a modern-day falcon, showing far more refined table manners than T. rex, researchers are reporting.

“While T. rex was like an angry gorilla with an ice pick, Allosaurus was like a surgeon with a scalpel,” said Eric Snively, a mechanical engineer at Ohio University and an author of a new study on the smaller dinosaur, published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, based on 150-million-year-old bones. Using a CT scanner and a method called multibody dynamics, developed originally for robotics, the researchers modeled Allosaurus’s neck and jaw muscles and simulated its muscle movement.

“The skull is loaded with scars where muscles attach, and we were able to reconstruct the dinosaur by making comparison to modern day birds,” said another author, Lawrence M.Witmer, a paleontologist at Ohio.

Though more than six meters long and twice as heavy as a polar bear, Allosaurus probably drove its teeth downward into its prey. Like such small falcons as the American kestrel, it held its head steady and then pulled flesh up; T.rex, by contrast, used more of a side-to-side thrashing action.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, June 15, 2013

Keeping Babies Warm

2014-10-31T15:49:00.001-07:00

Jaap Vermeulen, Jacoplane in a Neonatal intensive care unit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: A new mother holds her baby who was born 10 weeks premature at Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by DONALD G. McNEIL JR.

In the United States, some very premature babies are swaddled in sterile plastic wrap to keep to their body temperature from dropping dangerously. Now a study of newborns in Zambia suggests that the technique can be duplicated cheaply and effectively in poorer countries – using simple plastic bags.

“These are regular plastic bags, similar to grocery bags,” said an author of the study, Dr. Waldemar A. Carlo, a neonatal care specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The skin of premature babies is very thin, and water evaporates quickly through it, sometimes leading to life-threatening heat loss, especially in a poor country where heat in neonatal wards can be unsteady.

In a hospital in Lusaka, Zambia, babies were placed on their mothers’ chests right after birth in typical “kangaroo care,” he said. But kangaroo care is not always enough to warm a child, and when babies were taken to be weighed or observed or because the mother fell asleep or needed medical treatment, putting them in a plastic bag before wrapping them in a blanket did a better job of keeping them warm than a blanket alone.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, June 15, 2013

The Dragonfly as Nature's Drone, Both Pretty and Deadly

2014-07-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

Fiery Skimmer Dragonfly ? (Photo credit: aussiegall)

Dragonfly. Libelulă (Photo credit: Cost3l)

A Dragonfly. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Emperor Dragonfly (Anax imperator). Français : Un Anax empereur en vol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Dragonfly (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dragonfly (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

22-July-2014
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by Natalie Angier

African lions roar and strut, but they're lucky to catch 25 percent of the prey they pursue. Great white sharks have 300 slashing teeth, and still nearly half their hunts fail.

Dragonflies, by contrast, look dainty, and they're often grouped with butterflies and ladybugs on the short life of Insects People Like. Yet they are also voracious aerial predators, and new research suggests they may well be the most brutally effective hunters in the animal kingdom.

When setting off to geed on other flying insects, dragonflies manage to snatch their targets in midair more that 95 percent of the time, often wolfishly consuming the fresh meat without bothering to alight.

"They'll tear up the prey and mash in into a glob, munch, munch, munch," said Michael L. May, an emeritus professor of entomology at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

"It almost looks like a wad of snuff in the mouth before they swallow it," he said.

Next step: grab more food. Stacey Combes, who studies dragonfly flight at Harvard University, once watched a laboratory dragonfly eat 30 flies in a row. "It would have happily kept eating," she said, "if there had been more food available."

In recent papers, scientists have pinpointed key features of the dragonfly's brain, eyes and wings that allow it to hunt so unerringly. One research team has determined that the nervous system of a dragonfly displays an almost human capacity for selective attention, able to focus on a single prey as it flies amid a cloud of similarly fluttering insects, just as a guest at a party can attend to a friend's words while ignoring the background chatter.

Other researchers have identified a kind of master circuit of 16 neurons that connect the dragonfly's brain to its flight motor center in the thorax. With the aid of that neural package, a dragonfly can track a moving target, calculate a trajectory to intercept that target and subtly adjust its path as needed.

The scientists found evidence that a dragonfly plots its course to intercept through a variant of "an old mariner's trick," said Robert M. Olberg of Union College in Schenectady, New York, who reported the research with his colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If you're heading north on a boat and you see another boat moving, say, 30 degrees to your right, and if as the two of you barrel forward the other boat remains at that 30-degree spot in our field of view, vector mechanics dictate that your boats will crash: better slow down, speed up or turn aside.

In a similar manner, as a dragonfly closes in on a meal, it maintains an image of the moving prey on the same spot. "The image of the prey is getting bigger, but if it's always on the same spot of the retina, the dragonfly will intercept its target," said Paloma T. Gonzalez-Bellido, an author of the new report who now works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

As a rule, the hunted remains clueless until it's all over. "Before I got into this work, I'd assumed it was an active chase, like a lion going after an impala," Dr. Combes said. "But it's more like ambush predation. The dragonfly comes from behind and below, and the prey doesn't know what's coming."

Dragonflies are able to hover, dive, fly backward and upside down, pivot 360 degrees with three tiny wing beats, and reach speeds of nearly 50 kilometers per hour. In many insects, the wings are simple extensions of the thoracic box and are moved largely as a unit, by flexing the entire thorax. In the dragonfly, the four transparent, ultraflexible wings are attached to the thorax by separate muscles and can each be maneuvered independently, lending the insect an extraordinary range of flight options.

Their eyes are the largest and possibly the keenest in the insect world, a pair of giant spheres each built of some 30,000 pixel-like facets that together take up pretty much the entire head.

Dragonflies can't really hear, and with their stubby antennas they're not much for smelling or pheromonal flirtations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, much dragonfly research is supported by the United States military, which sees the insect as the archetypal precision drone.

Some dragonfly species migrate long distances. Recent studies have shown that green darner dragonflies migrate in sizable swarms each fall and spring between the northern United States and southern Mexico, while the globe skimmer dragonfly lives up to its name: it has been tracked crossing between India and Africa, a round-trip, multigenerational pilgrimage that may exceed 16,000 kilometers.

Dragonflies migrate to maximize breeding opportunities, to find warm freshwater ponds in which they can safely lay their eggs. From those eggs hatch dragonfly larvae: astonishing gilled predators that will spend weeks to years hydro-jetting through water and shooting their mouthparts after aquatic prey, until they're ready to spread their wings and take the hunt to the sky.

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Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 13, 2013

Ancient Strait Is Clue To Origin of Wolf

2014-07-19T19:51:00.004-07:00

Falklandwolf (Dusicyon australis) (Original description: Canis antarcticus) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

20-July-2014
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by Sindya N. Bhanoo

The Falkland Islands wolf, long extinct, is the only land-based mammal native to the islands. European explorers in the 17th century were puzzled by the presence of this lone mammalian species, as was Charles Darwin.

Now, researchers writing in Nature Communications suggest that the wolf traveled across a thin, shallow strait from the mainland to the islands during the last glacial maximum.During this period, about 18,000 to 25,000 years ago, the strait would periodically freeze over.

"This wolf was likely tracking penguins, seals and sea birds that were hauling out onto the ice," said Dr. Alan Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

The scientists believe the wolf crossed the strait from what is now Argentina. "The question is, how did this great big mammal get over when rodents didn't?" he said.

Dr. Cooper and his colleagues compared DNA samples from the wolf with those of one of its closest mainland relatives, an extinct foxlike species called Dusicyon avus. They found that the two species separated about 16,000 years ago, coinciding with the last glacial maximum and the frozen marine strait.

Previously, it had been theorized that the wolf was semi-domesticated and brought to the island by humans.

The last Falkland Islands wolf was spotted in the late 19th century.

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Taken form TODAY Saturday Edition, April 06, 2013

Solutions to the Puzzles of Mimicry in Nature

2014-07-17T05:17:00.003-07:00

Mimicry in Butterflies Is Seen here on These Classic “Plates” Showing Four Forms of H. numata, Two Forms of H. melpomene, and the Two Corresponding Mimicking Forms of H. erato. This highlights the diversity of patterns as well as the mimicry associations, which are found to be largely controlled by a shared genetic locus [15]. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is an article lifted from TODAY's Science and Technology section, 06-April-2013; I have kept for the purpose of posting in this blog at a later date (which turns out to be more than a year later...)
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by Sean B. Carroll

Perhaps no destination has inspired more great naturalists than Brazil. Charles Darwin first made landfall at Bahia in 1832; Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates arrive at Para in 1848. Wallace roamed the Amazon for four years, and the indefatigable Bates for 11.

In 1852, a naturalist named Fritz Muller arrive from Germany. While Darwin and Wallace would conceive of the theory of evolution by natural selection, its acceptance was aided by Bates and Muller. And thanks to Bates and Muller, no creatures contributed more to the early growth of evolutionary science than butterflies.

Bates noticed species whose wing patterns resembled those of other butterfly families in the area. In puzzling this out, he realized that harmless butterflies were mimicking noxious species that were unpalatable to birds and lizards, and therefore, not attacked by predators.

A few years after Darwin published "On the Origin of Species," Bates suggested that this sort of mimicry - now called "Batesian" - was proof of the principle of natural selection.

Muller crucially observed that unpalatable butterflies were also mimicking other species of unpalatable butterflies. If they were already unpalatable, he wondered, what added advantage was there to mimicking other species?

It dawned on him that unpalatable mimics would enjoy strength in numbers: Their unpalatability had to be learned by predators, and species would share the cost of those lessons, whereas a uniquely patterned unpalatable species would bear the full cost.

Natural selection thus explained why different species' wing patterns would converge. But how were such similar but complex wing color patterns generated by different species? The answer eluded scientists for nearly 150 years, until an international team of researchers recently revealed mimicry's innermost secrets.

There are two ways in which what is still called "Mullerian mimicry" could evolve: Either each species independently evolved mutations that led to very similar wing patterns, or patterning genes were exchanged among species.

Several genes controlling the production of the wing patterns have now been identified, enabling researchers to distinguish between these alternatives. The answers? Both mechanisms have been at work.

By analyzing the DNA sequences in two mimicking Heliconius species in South America, researchers could determine that each species had independently evolved up to 20 different patterns that were nearly identical in each species. But in more closely related mimicking species, they found that color-controlling genes had been exchanged.

It is astonishing that so many patterns could be independently generated and replicated in different species. And it is surprising to have species swapping genes. After all, the inability to breed successfully with other groups has long been an operational definition of species.

Even if such interspecies matings are rare, a gene that confers a strong advantage, like mimicry, can spread quickly through a population.

Darwin referred to Muller as the "prince of observers," and although they never met, Muller considered Darwin a second father.

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Lifted from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 6, 2013; The New York Times International Weekly

A soft drink a day raises prostate cancer risk: study

2013-02-18T01:23:00.001-08:00

I wanted to post this article in the Healthy Me - At Home and Away, but I think it will serve a better purpose if kids knew about this...
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Posted: 27 November 2012

STOCKHOLM: Men who drink one normal-sized soft drink per day are at greater risk of getting more aggressive forms of prostate cancer, according to a Swedish study released Monday.

"Among the men who drank a lot of soft drinks or other drinks with added sugar, we saw an increased risk of prostate cancer of around 40 percent," said Isabel Drake, a PhD student at Lund University.

The study, to be published in the upcoming edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, followed over 8,000 men aged 45 to 73 for an average of 15 years.

Those who drank one 330-millilitre (11-fluid-ounce) soft drink a day were 40 percent more likely to develop more serious forms of prostate cancer that required treatment.

The cancer was discovered after the men showed symptoms of the disease, and not through the screening process known as Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA).

Those who ate a diet heavy on rice and pasta increased their risk of getting milder forms of prostate cancer, which often required no treatment, by 31 percent, while a high intake of sugary breakfast cereals raised the incidence of milder forms of the cancer to 38 percent, Drake told AFP.

While further research was needed before dietary guidelines could be changed, there are already plenty of reasons a person should cut back on soft-drink consumption, she noted.

The men in the study had to undergo regular medical examinations and kept a journal of their food and drink intake.

Previous studies have shown that Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the US develop prostate cancer more often than peers in their home countries.

Further research on how genes respond to different diets would make it possible to "tailor food and drink guidelines for certain high-risk groups," Drake said.

- AFP/fa

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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
A soft drink a day raises prostate cancer risk: study

Training programme may help ADHD patients: study

2013-01-25T05:39:00.001-08:00

Posted: 29 October 2012

SINGAPORE: A study has shown promising results for using a special computer-based training programme as a potential new treatment for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

The study was conducted by the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), in collaboration with the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), a research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School.

20 children with ADHD (16 males, four females) who had significant symptoms of inattentiveness were recruited.

They played a computer game three times a week for eight weeks.

In the training game, the children wore headbands around their foreheads, with an electrode clipped to the earlobes.

They controlled an avatar via the signals detected by electrodes.

In order to move the avatar, the child would need to focus.

The system would measure the attention level and the game would proceed at a proportional speed.

The higher the concentration level of the child, the higher the speed of the avatar's movement.

The training programme included academic tasks at the end of every alternate session.

The intention was to train the child to learn to focus in the same way when performing academic work.

After the eight-week training program, patients showed significant improvement.

Those with more severe symptoms were also the ones who showed greater improvement.

Principal investigator Dr Lim Choon Guan from the IMH said the team is excited by the early result.

But he added that there are limitations to the study as the number of patients involved was small with no comparison group.

The team plans to have a larger trial over the next two years.

- CNA/xq

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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Training programme may help ADHD patients: study

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