Nano Patents and Innovations

New Development For Invisibility Cloak

2012-01-28T03:58:00.001-05:00

A breakthrough has been made in the latest attempt to create an invisibility cloak. It’s something that’s long been coveted by Harry Potter fans and Sci-Fi geeks alike.

Contacts and sources:
Written by Gina Cook
Anchor Emily Spain
Greg Young
Newsy.com
The State Column, BBC, The Telegraph

Wonder Material Graphene Used To Distill Alcohol, Also Traps Helium Better Than Glass

2012-01-28T03:34:00.000-05:00

Wonder material graphene has revealed another of its extraordinary properties - University of Manchester researchers have found that it is superpermeable with respect to water.

Graphene is one of the wonders of the science world, with the potential to create foldaway mobile phones, wallpaper-thin lighting panels and the next generation of aircraft. The new finding at The University of Manchester gives graphene’s potential a most surprising dimension – graphene can also be used for distilling alcohol.

In a report published in Science, a team led by Professor Sir Andre Geim shows that graphene-based membranes are impermeable to all gases and liquids (vacuum-tight). However, water evaporates through them as quickly as if the membranes were not there at all.

Dr Rahul Nair

Credit: University of Manchester

This newly-found property can now be added to the already long list of superlatives describing graphene. It is the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured. It conducts electricity and heat better than any other material. It is the stiffest one too and, at the same time, it is the most ductile. Demonstrating its remarkable properties won University of Manchester academics the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.

Now the University of Manchester scientists have studied membranes from a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide. Graphene oxide is the same graphene sheet but it is randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-. Graphene oxide sheets stack on top of each other and form a laminate.

The researchers prepared such laminates that were hundreds times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and were easy to handle.

When a metal container was sealed with such a film, even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, to leak through.

Magnified image of research samples with small holes covered by one-atom-thick graphene. One can see light passing through them by the naked eye

Credit: University of Manchester

It came as a complete surprise that, when the researchers tried the same with ordinary water, they found that it evaporates without noticing the graphene seal. Water molecules diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes with such a great speed that the evaporation rate was the same independently whether the container was sealed or completely open.

Dr Rahul Nair, who was leading the experimental work, offers the following explanation: “Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one molecule thick sheets of ice which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction.

“If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules.”

“Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimetre -thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger,” comments Professor Geim. “You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us”.

“This unique property can be used in situations where one needs to remove water from a mixture or a container, while keeping in all the other ingredients”, says Dr Irina Grigorieva who also participated in the research.

“Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment”, adds Dr Nair.

The Manchester researchers report this experiment in their Science paper, too, but they say they do not envisage use of graphene in distilleries, nor offer any immediate ideas for applications.

However, Professor Geim adds ‘The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water’.
Contacts and sources:
Daniel Cochlin, Media Relations Officer University of Manchester

Citation: "Unimpeded Permeation of Water Through Helium-Leak–Tight Graphene-Based Membranes," by R. Nair, H. Wu, P. Jayaram, V. Grigorieva and A. Geim, in Science

The Amygdala And Fear Are Not The Same Thing

2012-01-27T17:48:00.002-05:00

In a 2007 episode of the television show Boston Legal, a character claimed to have figured out that a cop was racist because his amygdala activated – displaying fear, when they showed him pictures of black people. This link between the amygdala and fear – especially a fear of others unlike us, has gone too far, not only in pop culture, but also in psychological science, say the authors of a new paper which will be published in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Indeed, many experiments have found that the amygdala is active when people are afraid. But it also activates at other times, for example in response to pleasant photographs and happy faces.

Amygdala location in the brain

Credit: Wikipedia

The misconception came from how scientists first approached studying the brain. A lot of people came to the amygdala from the study of fear, says Wil Cunningham of Ohio State University, who co wrote the new paper with Tobias Brosch of New York University. “It’s a great emotion to study because it’s very important, evolutionarily, and we know a lot about fear in animals,” Cunningham says. Almost every study of fear finds that the amygdala is active. But that doesn’t mean every spark of activity in the amygdala means the person is afraid.

Instead, the amygdala seems to be doing something more subtle: processing events that are related to what a person cares about at the moment. So if you’re in a scary situation or have an anxious personality, the amygdala might be activated by a frightening image. But hungry people have increased amygdala activity in response to pictures of food and people who are very empathetic have an amygdala response to seeing other people.

“When we’re studying emotion, people want to find specific brain parts that are associated with different emotions,” Cunningham says. Especially in the early days of neuroscience, scientists hoped that soon it would be possible to use MRI and other brain-imaging techniques “to get under the hood and find out what people are really thinking.” A lot of the time, people really don’t know, or won’t say, what they’re thinking, and it would be nice to be able to look at a picture of their brain and know the answer. But the brain is too complicated for that. Cunningham also thinks many scientists have gotten too attached to a rigid definition of emotions—anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and so on.

However you may feel, it seems that many different parts of the brain are involved. ”Emotion is going to be distributed across the brain,” Cunningham says.

Contacts and sources:

Divya Menon

Association for Psychological Science
William A. Cunningham

The Pupils Are The Windows To The Mind

2012-01-27T17:41:00.000-05:00

The eyes are the window into the soul—or at least the mind, according to a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Measuring the diameter of the pupil, the part of the eye that changes size to let in more light, can show what a person is paying attention to. Pupillometry, as it’s called, has been used in social psychology, clinical psychology, humans, animals, children, infants—and it should be used even more, the authors say.

The pupil is the central transparent area (showing as black).

Credit: Wikipedia

The pupil is best known for changing size in reaction to light. In a dark room, your pupils open wide to let in more light; as soon as you step outside into the sunlight, the pupils shrink to pinpricks. This keeps the retina at the back of the eye from being overwhelmed by bright light. Something similar happens in response to psychological stimuli, says Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo, who cowrote the paper with Sylvain Sirois of Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and Gustaf Gredebäck of Uppsala University in Sweden. When someone sees something they want to pay closer attention to, the pupil enlarges. It’s not clear why this happens, Laeng says. “One idea is that, by essentially enlarging the field of the visual input, it’s beneficial to visual exploration,” he says.

Structure of the eye

Credit: Wikipedia

However it works, psychological scientists can use the fact that people’s pupils widen when they see something they’re interested in.

Laeng has used pupil size to study people who had damage to the hippocampus, which usually causes very severe amnesia. Normally, if you show one of these patients a series of pictures, then take a short break, then show them another series of pictures, they don’t know which ones they’ve seen before and which ones are new. But Laeng measured patients’ pupils while they did this test and found that the patients did actually respond differently to the pictures they had seen before. “In a way, this is good news, because it shows that some of the brains of these patients, unknown to themselves, is actually capable of making the distinction,” he says.

Pupil measurement might also be useful for studying babies. Tiny infants can’t tell you what they’re paying attention to. “Developmental psychologists have used all kinds of methods to get this information without using language,” Laeng says. Seeing what babies are interested in can give clues to what they’re able to recognize—different shapes or sounds, for example. A researcher might show a child two images side by side and see which one they look at for longer. Measuring the size of a baby’s pupils could do the same without needing a comparison.

The technology already exists for measuring pupils—many modern psychology studies use eye-tracking technology, for example, to see what a subject is looking at, and Laeng and his coauthors hope to convince other psychological scientists to use this method.

Contacts and sources:
Divya Menon
Association for Psychological Science

Mind Over Matter: Patients' Perceptions Of Illness Make A Difference

2012-01-27T17:30:00.002-05:00

Whenever we fall ill, there are many different factors that come together to influence the course of our illness. Additional medical conditions, stress levels, and social support all have an impact on our health and well-being, especially when we are ill. But a new report suggests that what you think about your illness matters just as much, if not more, in determining your health outcomes.

In the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Keith Petrie, of the University of Auckland, and John Weinman, of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, review the existing literature on patients’ perceptions of illness. The authors find that people’s illness perceptions bear a direct relationship to several important health outcomes, including their level of functioning and ability, utilization of health care, adherence to treatment plans laid out by health care professionals, and even overall mortality.

In fact, some research suggests that how a person views his illness may play a bigger role in determining his health outcomes than the actual severity of his disease.

In general, our illness perceptions emerge out of our beliefs about illness and what illness means in the context of our lives. So, we might have beliefs about how an illness is caused, how long it will last, how it will impact us or our family members, and how we can control or cure it. The bottom line, says Petrie, is that “patients’ perceptions of their illness guide their decisions about health.” If, for example, we feel like a prescribed treatment isn’t making us feel better we might stop that treatment.

Research on illness perceptions suggest that effective health care treatment plans are about much more than having a competent physician. According to Petrie, “a doctor can make accurate diagnoses and have excellent treatments but if the therapy doesn’t fit with the patient’s view of their illness, they are unlikely to keep taking it.” A treatment that does not consider the patient’s view is likely to fail, he argues.

The authors conclude that understanding illness perceptions and incorporating them into health care is critical to effective treatment. Asking patients about how they view their illness gives physicians the opportunity to identify and correct any inaccurate beliefs patients may have. Once a patient’s illness perceptions are clearly laid out, a physician can try to nudge those beliefs in a direction that is more compatible with treatment or better health outcomes. Such conversations can help practitioners identify patients that are at particular risk of coping poorly with the demands of their illness.

Research confirms that brief, straightforward psychoeducational interventions can modify negative illness beliefs and lead to improvements over a range of different health outcomes. But this research is still new and scientists don’t know much about how our illness perceptions develop in the first place. With mounting pressure to lower the costs of healthcare, continued research on illness perceptions will help practitioners design effective interventions that are able to reach a large number of patients.

Contacts and sources:
Divya Menon
Association for Psychological Science

Restless Sun: Space Weather Center To Add World's First 'Ensemble Forecasting' Capability

2012-01-27T17:09:00.002-05:00

Improved Forecasting to Coincide with Peak in Solar Activity.

After years of relative somnolence, the sun is beginning to stir. By the time it's fully awake in about 20 months, the team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., charged with researching and tracking solar activity, will have at their dispoal a greatly enhanced forecasting capability.

Goddard's Space Weather Laboratory recently received support under NASA's Space Technology Program Game Changing Program to implement "ensemble forecasting," a computer technique already used by meteorologists to track potential paths and impacts of hurricanes and other severe weather events.

Chief space weather forecasters Yihua Zheng and Antti Pulkkinen are helping to implement a computer technique — ensemble forecasting — that will improve NASA’s ability to predict the path and impact of severe solar storms, which can disrupt power grids on Earth, knock out satellites, and threaten the health and safety of astronauts.

Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

Instead of analyzing one set of solar-storm conditions, as is the case now, Goddard forecasters will be able to simultaneously produce as many as 100 computerized forecasts by calculating multiple possible conditions or, in the parlance of Heliophysicists, parameters. Just as important, they will be able to do this quickly and use the information to provide alerts of space weather storms that could potentially be harmful to astronauts and NASA spacecraft.

"Space weather alerts are available now, but we want to make them better," said Michael Hesse, chief of Goddard's Space Weather Laboratory and the recently named director of the Center's Heliophysics Science Division. "Ensemble forecasting will provide a distribution of arrival times, which will improve the reliability of forecasts. This is important. Society is relying more so than ever on space. Communications, navigation, electrical-power generation, all are all susceptible to space weather." Once it's implemented, "there will be nothing like this in the world. No one has done ensemble forecasting for space weather."

The state-of-the-art capability, which Hesse's group is implementing now and expects to complete within three years, couldn't come too soon, either.

Sun Growing Restless

Since the sun reached its solar minimum in 2008 — the period when the number of sunspots is lowest — it has begun to awaken from its slumber. On Aug. 4, the sun unleashed a near X-class solar flare that erupted near an Earth-facing sunspot. Although flares don't always produce coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — gigantic bubbles of charged particles that can carry up to ten billion tons of matter and accelerate to several million miles per hour as they erupt from the sun's atmosphere and stream through interplanetary space — this one did.

The CME overtook two previous CMEs — all occurring within 48 hours — and combined into a triple threat. Luckily for Earthlings, the CMEs produced only a moderate geomagnetic storm when solar particles streamed down the field lines toward Earth's poles and collided with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere. Even so, "it was the strongest storm in many years," said Antti Pulkkinen, one of the laboratory's chief forecasters.

However, the repercussions could be far worse in the future. As part of its 11-year cycle, the sun is entering solar maximum, the period of greatest activity. It is expected to peak in 2013. During this time, more powerful CMEs, often associated with M- and X-class flare events, become more numerous and can affect any planet or spacecraft in its path. In the past, solar storms have disrupted power grids on Earth and damaged instrumentation on satellites. They can also be harmful to astronauts if they are not warned to take protective cover.

"No one knows exactly what the sun will do, Pulkkinen said. "We can't even tell in a week, let alone a year or two, what the sun will do. All we know is that the sun will be more active."

Given the expected uptick in activity, Hesse, Pulkkinen, and Yihua Zheng, another chief forecaster, were anxious to enhance their forecasting acumen. They partnered with the Space Radiation Analysis Group at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is responsible for ensuring that astronauts' exposure to deadly radiation remains below established safety levels, and won NASA funding to develop the Integrated Advanced Alert/Warning Systems for Solar Proton Events.

Weaknesses in Current System

"Ensemble forecasting holds the key" to an enhanced alert system," Hesse said. "We agreed that this was the way to go."

Currently, the laboratory is running one CME model — calculating one set of parameters — at a time. The parameters are derived from near real-time data gathered by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, among others. "But since all of these are scientific research missions, we have no guarantee of a continuous real-time data stream," Zheng said.

Furthermore, imperfections exist in the data. These imperfections grow over time, leading to forecasts that don't agree with the evolution of actual conditions. For NASA, the Air Force, and other organizations, which use Goddard's forecasts to decide whether steps are needed to protect space assets and astronauts, uncertainty is as unwelcome as the storm itself.

Ensemble forecasting, however, overcomes the weaknesses by allowing forecasters to tweak the conditions. "Generating different parameters is easy — just varying a little bit of all parameters involved in characterizing a CME, such as its speed, propagation direction, and angular extent," Zheng explained. In essence, the multiple forecasts provide information on the different ways the CME can evolve over the next few hours. "We'll be able to characterize the uncertainties in our forecasts, which is almost as important as the forecast itself," Pulkkinen added.

Space Weather Services at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is made up of scientists who track solar disruptions and predict their impact on Earth. Shown here are a few of those experts (from left to right): Hysook Lee, Antti Pulkkinen, M. Leila Mays, and David Berrios.
› Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn

The team has already installed new computer systems to run the varying calculations and hopes to develop the ability to generate more specialized forecasts.

"We recognize there is a huge gap in our current capability," Pulkkinen continued. "We certainly don't want to miss the solar maximum with this capability. We're really pushing the envelope to have it done. When we do, we'll be the first in the world to have it."

When this forecasting technique is verified and validated by NASA's Space Weather Laboratory, the capability will be made available to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, which is responsible for issuing national space weather alerts. NASA's goal to understand and track space weather activity will enable a greatly enhanced forecasting capability for U.S. interests.

Contacts and sources:
Lori Keesey
Susan Hendrix
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

For more information about Goddard’s space weather efforts and access to its space weather analysis system, visit:
http://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/about.php
http://iswa.gsfc.nasa.gov/iswa/iSWA.html

For more information about NOAA’s space weather efforts, visit:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/For more information about technology development at the Goddard Space Flight Center, visit: http://gsfctechnology.gsfc.nasa.gov

SwRI-Led RAD Measures Radiation From Solar Storm

2012-01-27T16:32:00.004-05:00

The largest solar particle event since 2005 hit the Earth, Mars and the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft travelling in-between, allowing the onboard Radiation Assessment Detector to measure the radiation a human astronaut could be exposed to en route to the Red Planet.

On Sunday, a huge coronal mass ejection erupted from the surface of the sun, spewing a cloud of charged particles in our direction, causing a strong "S3" solar storm. A NASA Goddard Space Weather Lab animation of the CME illustrates how the disturbance impacts Earth, Mars and several spacecraft. Solar storms can affect the Earth's aurorae, satellites, air travel and GPS systems; no harmful effects to the Mars Science Laboratory have been detected from this solar event.

Movie/Measuring radiation on Mars

http://youtu.be/2x99mFg_Jyc

â€œWe only have a few hours of data downloaded from the RAD so far, but we clearly see the event, said RAD Principal Investigator Don Hassler, science program director in the Space Studies Department at Southwest Research Institute. The Mars Science Laboratory, launched Nov. 26, will land a sophisticated car-sized rover called Curiosity on the surface of the planet in August. Loaded with 10 instruments including RAD, Curiosity will traverse the landing site looking for the building blocks of life and characterizing factors that may influence life, such as the harsh radiation environment expected on Mars. "This SPE encounter is particularly exciting in light of the alignment between the Earth, MSL and Mars right now and for the next few months. It will be very interesting to compare the RAD data, collected from inside the capsule, with the data from other spacecraft."

This event has also been seen by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, Geostationary Operational Environment Satellites, the Advanced Composition Explorer, and the twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft in Earth orbit as well as the Solar Heliospheric Observatory flying between Earth and the sun.

"RAD was designed to characterize radiation levels on the surface of Mars, but an important secondary objective is measuring the radiation during the almost nine-month journey through interplanetary space to prepare for future human exploration," said Hassler. "RAD is an important bridge between the science and exploration sides of NASA.

"Not only will this give us insight into the physics of these giant clouds, but like an astronaut, RAD is tucked inside the MSL 'spacecraft,'" Hassler continued. "Measurements from RAD will give us insight about the shielding provided by spacecraft for future manned missions in deep space."

Movie/Measuring radiation en route to Mars

http://youtu.be/v5WSnxyjvJk

RAD will collect data nearly continuously during cruise and will downlink data every 24 hours. Positioned in the front-left corner of the rover, the instrument is about the size of a coffee can and weighs about three pounds, but has capabilities of an Earth-bound instrument nearly 10 times its size. When MSL arrives at Mars, RAD will detect charged particles arriving from space and will measure neutrons and gamma rays coming from Mars' atmosphere above, or the surface material below, the rover.

SwRI, together with Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, built RAD with funding from the NASA Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and Germany's national aerospace research center, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt.

The Mars Science Laboratory is a project of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech. The mission's rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

Contacts and sources:
Deb Schmid
Southwest Research Institute

Drive-By Scanning: Officials Expand Use And Dose Of Radiation For Security Screening

2012-01-27T15:16:00.000-05:00

by Michael Grabell, ProPublica
U.S. law enforcement agencies are exposing people to radiation in more settings and in increasing doses to screen for explosives, weapons and drugs. In addition to the controversial airport body scanners, which are now deployed for routine screening, various X-ray devices have proliferated at the border, in prisons and on the streets of New York.

Not only have the machines become more widespread, but some of them expose people to higher doses of radiation. And agencies have pushed the boundaries of acceptable use by X-raying people covertly, according to government documents and interviews.

While airport scanners can show objects on the surface of the body, prisons have begun to use X-rays that can see through the body to detect contraband hidden in cavities. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is in the process of deploying dozens of drive-through X-ray portals to scan cars and buses at the border with their passengers still inside.

X-ray scanners have been tested at ferry crossings, for visitor entries at the Pentagon and for long-range detection of suicide bombers at special events. And drawing the ire of privacy groups, Customs and the New York Police Department have deployed unmarked X-ray vans that can drive to a location and look inside vehicles for drugs and explosives.

Most federal health regulations for medical X-rays do not apply to security equipment, leaving the decision of when and how to use the scanners almost entirely in the hands of security officials.

Although the 9/11 attacks provided the impetus and prompted the spending to develop such equipment, most of the machines have been deployed only in the last few years. New attacks and ever-tighter security measures have made law enforcement officials more willing to expose the public to X-ray devices that were once taboo.

When the body scanners were introduced in prisons in the late 1990s, the Food and Drug Administration convened an advisory panel. Several of the outside scientists warned that once the longstanding practice of X-raying humans only for health reasons was ended, it was just a matter of time before the machines would become acceptable in airports, courthouses and schools.

"This is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen back when we had the FDA meetings," said Kathleen Kaufman, who as director of Los Angeles County's radiation management program served on the advisory panel.

The FDA has little authority to regulate the use of electronic products emitting radiation. Because security scanners are not classified as medical devices, the agency doesn't approve them for safety before sale. And it can go after only the manufacturers for excessive radiation -- not the users of the machines for deploying them too frequently or in other questionable ways.

Handicapping its power even more, the FDA ultimately went against the advisory panel's recommendation to adopt a federal safety standard for the new security devices. Instead, it followed congressional direction to use industry standards wherever possible and let the scanners fall under voluntary guidelines set by a nonprofit group made up largely of manufacturers and agencies that wanted to use the X-ray machines.

It is difficult to estimate the long-term health risks of low levels of radiation. At higher levels, ionizing radiation -- the energy used in the scanners -- has been shown to damage DNA and mutate genes, potentially leading to cancer. A comprehensive study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the more radiation a person gets, however little at a time, the greater their lifetime risk of dying from cancer.

The manufacturers counter that their machines emit extremely low levels of radiation, hundreds of times less than a chest X-ray. Humans are constantly exposed to background radiation from radon in the ground and cosmic rays in the atmosphere. In comparison, the radiation from security devices is trivial, they say.

Moreover, the X-ray scanners have produced a number of success stories, intercepting immigrant smugglers, unearthing tons of cocaine and other drugs, preventing contraband in jails and adding a layer of protection to the nation's transportation system, according to the agencies that use them.

But the rapid expansion raises serious questions about whether the United States is sacrificing safety in the name of security.

"Because of the wide proliferation of these things, we don't know who's using them and how frequently," said Peter Rez, an Arizona State University physicist who has criticized the use of the machines. "It's not that the radiation from these machines is very high. It's 'Does the benefit outweigh the risk?'"

X-rays on Wheels

One of the first technologies after 9/11 that would expose humans to X-rays was the Z Backscatter Van -- essentially a body scanner on a truck -- made by American Science & Engineering.

The device, which was deployed by the military to detect car bombs in war zones, uses X-rays that are designed to find organic materials such as drugs and explosives. The rays scatter back to a detector rather passing through an object as in a medical X-ray. The van can scan while driving alongside a line of vehicles or while parked as they pass by.

According to a company presentation obtained by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a backscatter van delivers a radiation dose about twice that of an airport body scanner.

Soldiers serving in Iraq nicknamed the vans "white devils." Customs officers call them "ice cream trucks."

Customs and Border Protection has purchased 75 backscatter vans for use at border crossings, ports, Border Patrol checkpoints and even the Super Bowl, according to agency records. Customs spokeswoman Jenny Burke said passengers must exit the vehicle before the scan.

CBP Provides Security Support for Super Bowl

Credit: photo by Gerald Nino

While the Transportation Security Administration hasn't bought them, it tested them at a Delaware ferry crossing in 2004 and at a Long Island ferry crossing in 2009, spokesman Greg Soule said. In the first test, passengers weren't in the vehicles. But in the second test, passengers remained in the vehicles but could opt out, he said. Another TSA test in 2009 was conducted in northern New Jersey on empty commuter train cars in a rail yard.

The X-ray vans have also shown up on American streets. In 2010, Homeland Security officials conducted an exercise scanning tractor-trailers on Interstate 20. And the New York Police Department uses the vans.

The NYPD has declined to release details about the use of the machines.

ABC News reporters Richard Esposito and Ted Gerstein provide one of the few accounts of the backscatter van in a book they wrote chronicling a year inside NYPD's bomb squad. Describing the security ahead of President Bush's motorcade to the 2004 Republican convention, they wrote that every vehicle entering the street in front of the hotel was ordered to drive between two unmarked white vans, which X-rayed each vehicle for bombs.

Such covert use of radiation, if done without informed consent, would violate the industry standard.

"The institution operating the system shall inform each person being screened that the system emits radiation," the standard states. It also requires that people be told the radiation dose and that there be a visible indicator when X-rays are emitted.

Joe Reiss, AS&E's vice president of marketing, said although the vans are designed for covert use, the vans comply with the standard because they have two lights that flashwhen a scan is in progress.

Kevin Barry, an NYPD bomb squad detective who retired in 2002, said that when he was there, the police ensured that the area was clear of people any time they used X-ray equipment and that officers wore film badges to monitor radiation exposure.

"They're very cognizant of the fact that if there's a radiation issue that they have to monitor the health issue," he said.

But even if a violation were discovered, there is little the FDA can do because the standard is voluntary and not a federal regulation.

The FDA, which said it doesn't regulate the "use" of security scanners emitting radiation, referred questions to New York State, which also said it does not regulate the scanners and referred questions to the New York City Department of Health, which also said it does not regulate the devices.

Drive-through Scanners

Customs and Border Protection is also installing 35 drive-through X-ray portalspurchased with economic stimulus money, according to a company report posted on the government's stimulus website,Recovery.gov.

A test system was installed at the San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego in 2008 and portals will soon be deployed in El Paso and Laredo, Texas, and elsewhere on the Southwest border, according to contract documents obtained by the privacy group EPIC.

The portals, made by AS&E, can scan cars and buses from the top and sides as their drivers pass through at 3 mph.

The scanners' X-rays have to penetrate metal and glass. But according to Customs and the company, the radiation dose is equivalent to an airport body scan.

The dose is low because Customs officers do not need as high a resolution to see bulk explosives or drugs as a TSA screener would need to see a tiny detonator or a razor blade, said Rez, the Arizona State physicist. He estimated the dose by analyzing the images with a computer program.

The company says the portal is safe for everyday use. But Burke, the Customs spokeswoman, said it won't be used on every driver crossing the border -- only those who raise suspicion and require additional inspection. Passengers will be allowed to opt out and have a Customs officer drive it through the portal for them.

Ginger McCall, director of EPIC's Open Government program, is skeptical.

"You know what else started out as a secondary screening mechanism?" she asked. "Airport backscatter machines. The TSA said 'don't worry' to the American public. 'These are only going to be used as secondary screening devices.' And look how that turned out."

"Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance"

There are now about 250 X-ray body scanners in airports nationwide. But government agencies are exploring additional uses for the technology.

In 2010, the military brought two TSA body scanners to the Pentagon visitors' entrance, where they were tested by Defense Department staff. But plans were put on hold pending TSA testing of new privacy software that wouldn't show an image of a person's body.

"There's now technology which makes it look like a cartoon figure," said Chris Layman, spokesman for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. "We wanted to make sure that if we did this, all the privacy concerns are taken care of."

The Department of Homeland Security has funded research for walk-through X-ray body scanners that could be used at special events, and for long-range X-ray scanners to detect suicide bombers in crowds, according to documents obtained by EPIC.

Using similar backscatter technology, the walk-through scanner would speed up checks that now require people to stand with their hands over their heads while scanned. In tests of the long-distance scanner, according to contract documents, officials wanted to see whether it could identify people with metal and dense plastic from up to 30 feet away.

"Customers need a greater capability than what is currently available for detecting IEDs on people," Homeland Security officials wrote in a statement of work for a technology dubbed the "Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance Platform." "This is especially relevant at high-volume public areas and entrances to important infrastructure."

The radiation dose for such a scanner was listed in 2006 as 10 times higher than that of an airport scanner.

Intelligence released last summer that terrorist groups are considering implanting bombsin their bodies has raised concerns that the TSA would one day deploy X-ray scanners that can see into the body. In the past, the agency has declined to say whether it had ever considered the technology, known as "transmission X-rays."

But other Homeland Security documents, also obtained by EPIC and provided to ProPublica, show that in 2010, Homeland Security's science and technology division entered into an agreement with the FDA to test such technology.

"Transmission X-ray devices are being considered by DHS for passenger screening," the statement of work says. "The proposed use of transmission methods for routine passenger screening may have significant health & safety implications and requires special study and evaluation."

John Verrico, a spokesman for the department's science and technology division, said the proposed tests never went forward and the discussion of transmission X-rays was ultimately removed from the final statement of work.

"Transmission X-ray systems have not been tested," he said in an email. "Personnel have viewed vendors' demonstrations at their locations to evaluate the maturity of the equipment and the state of the technology."

"Treating People Like Luggage"

Such machines, however, were introduced in prisons in 2011.

A transmission X-ray body scanner, the RadPRO SecurPASS, is sold by Virtual Imaging, a Florida subsidiary of Canon USA. In the last year, it has been installed at the Cook County Jail in Chicago; several jails in Florida and Alabama; and the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, a temporary detention center for inmates being transported across the country.

Passive millimeter wave image and subject being screened.

Credit: Wikipedia

The dose has two settings. The standard setting delivers a radiation dose about 10 times higher than that of an airport body scanner. But to produce a better image, the operator has the ability to switch to a higher exposure, said Kris Kessler, creative marketing manager for Virtual Imaging.

That dose is still a fraction of the radiation received in a chest X-ray or cross-country flight. But it's more than 50 times higher than that of an airport scanner.

Even with the standard setting, the quality of the image produced by the SecurPASS is so good that people don't have to take off their jackets or shoes, as they do before going through the airport scanners, Kessler said.

"It's almost like we're treating people like luggage," he said.

The device has already made some interesting finds. One inmate was found to have swallowed 10 pouches of heroin, Steve Patterson, then the Cook County Sheriff's Office spokesman, told ProPublica last year. Another inmate, he said, was found to have kidney stones.

Jails use the SecurPASS mostly on prisoners as they leave and come back from work detail, Kessler said. But some facilities are considering using it on employees as well, he added, to prevent them from bringing in contraband.

Dennis Wolfe, Virtual Imaging's national sales manager for security products, said he has had conversations with the TSA and that a test lasting several months was overseen by Homeland Security science and technology staff in 2010 and 2011. The department denied that.

The device, which was initially used to prevent theft in diamond mines, has already been used at London's Heathrow Airport to scan suspected drug mules. (Customs officials in the United States and other countries can, with a traveler's consent, order a medical X-ray, which would deliver a higher radiation dose.)

For now, however, Virtual Imaging is focusing on corrections facilities.

Chris Burke, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said the system is running a pilot test of various scanners but has not made a decision.

Still, Wolfe said he expects many federal prisons and larger jail systems to be using the SecurPASS in the next few years. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist," he said. "If somebody's hiding something up their butt, which technology are you going to use?"

The rapid growth of X-ray scanning for security and the limited authority granted to regulators make it difficult to keep track of the equipment.

Two airport body scanners, for example, were recently auctioned off by the General Services Administration. A new scanner typically sells for $170,000. But these scanners, which had been in storage, were sold for a total of $600.

Under FDA regulations, sellers would normally be required to keep records of who purchases their X-ray products. But because the FDA never adopted a mandatory safety standard for the airport body scanners, this rule does not apply.

To help determine the extent of the use of these devices, Propublica is seeking stories from those who have had personal experience. Please share your stories in a private email to xray@propublica.org.

They are especially interested in the following:
Have you seen the NYPD backscatter vans? If so, where and how were they being used?
Have you gone through a Z Portal at the border? What was your experience?
If your car was scanned by a backscatter van by Customs or Border Patrol, were you asked to get out of the car or did you remain inside?
If you work in a prison or jail with an X-ray body scanner, how are they used?
Have you seen these technologies anywhere we didn't mention in the story?
Do you know of other security X-ray products that are being used or developed?

Any information is appreciated.

Contacts and sources:
Michael Grabell
ProPublica

80% Of 'Irreplaceable' Habitats In Andes Unprotected

2012-01-27T14:59:00.001-05:00

Hundreds of rare, endemic species in the Central Andes remain unprotected and are increasingly under threat from development and climate change, according to a Duke University-led international study.

"These species require unique ecological conditions and are particularly vulnerable to changes in the environment or climate. Yet our analysis shows that region-wide, about 80 percent of the areas with high numbers of these species lack any protection," said Jennifer Swenson, assistant professor of the practice of geospatial analysis at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

Central Andes in Bolivia

Credit: Wikipedia

The study, published today in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal BMC Ecology, identifies and maps the geographic ranges of hundreds of species of plants and animals – including mammals, birds and amphibians – that are found nowhere in the world outside the Andes-Amazon basin in Peru and Bolivia.

The threat to these species has become especially severe in recent years, Swenson said, as oil and gold mining, infrastructure projects, agriculture and other human activities encroach farther into the region's biologically rich landscapes.

"This is one of Earth's most rapidly changing areas," she said.

To conduct their study, Swenson and her colleagues collected more than 7,000 individual records of endemic species locations for 115 species of birds, 55 mammals, 177 amphibians and 435 plants. They combined these with satellite images and climate, topography and vegetation data to create models, detailed to one kilometer, that mapped endemic species distributions across the entire basin – from the forested slopes and dry inter-mountain valleys of the Andes all the way to the low-lying Amazonian wetlands and savannas.

By overlaying this data with maps showing modern political boundaries in the Andes-Amazon basin, the researchers found that only about 20 percent of the areas with high numbers of endemic species or high levels of irreplaceability fell within national parks or protected areas, and that 226 rare endemic species lacked any national-level protection at all. Irreplaceability is a term used by conservationists to denote biodiversity hotspots where high numbers of endemic species with very small ranges live. These are often among the most vital – and vulnerable – habitats in a region.

"Interestingly, one of the areas we identified with the highest number of bird and mammal species and one of the highest levels of irreplaceability was an unprotected region surrounding the World Heritage Site of Machu Picchu, one of the most heavily visited tourist destinations in the region," Swenson noted.

As the effects of development and climate change continue to shrink or shift geographic ranges in coming decades, some species may literally be running out of ground, she said.

"Conservation strategies across the Andes urgently need revising," she said. "There is already evidence of species migrating upslope to keep up with climate change. We hope our data will help protect this incredibly unique region."

Bruce E. Young, director of species science at the nonprofit conservation organization NatureServe, was principal co-author of the study. Twenty additional collaborators from conservation agencies and organizations in Peru and Bolivia helped gather data.

Contacts and sources:
Tim Lucas
Duke University

Brainiac Babies

2012-01-27T14:51:00.003-05:00

Northwestern University study has found that the evidence for intuitive physics occurs in infants as young as two months – the earliest age at which testing can occur.

Intuitive physics includes skills that adults use all the time. For example, when a glass of milk falls off the table, a person might try to catch the cup, but they are not likely to try to catch the milk that spills out. The person doesn't have to consciously think about what to do because the brain processes the information and the person simply reacts.

The majority of an adult's everyday interactions with the world are automatic, and researchers believe infants have the same ability to form expectations, predicting the behavior of objects and substances with which they interact.

But the world is not made up of objects alone, and Northwestern researchers looked at whether babies can distinguish between objects that can be held or thrown versus substances such as liquids that can flow and are drinkable.

According to a review of literature, infants show an understanding that unsupported objects will fall and that hidden objects do not cease to exist. Scientific testing also has shown that by five months, infants have an expectation that non-cohesive substances like sand or water are not solid.

"I think liquid is the best example of a non object that you interact with --- a baby has to drink liquid every single day," said lead author Susan J. Hespos, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "It's a universal experience with milk or water. We did studies on whether babies expected water to pour or tumble from an upended cup. By five months of age, babies expect both water and sand to pour, so we have clear evidence that this type of physical knowledge is available early in development."

While the intuitive physics knowledge is believed to be present at birth, co-author Kristy vanMarle, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, believes parents can assist skill development through normal interaction, such as playing and talking with the child and encouraging him or her to interact with objects.

"Natural interaction with the child, such as talking to hi or her, playing peek-a-boo and allowing him or her to handle safe objects, is the best method for child development," vanMarle said. "Natural interaction with the parent and objects in the world gives the child all the input that evolution has prepared the child to seek, accept and use to develop intuitive physics."

Contacts and sources:
Hilary Hurd Anyaso
Northwestern University

The study, "Physics for Infants: Characterizing the Origins of Knowledge About Objects, Substances, and Number," is published in the January issue of WIREs Cognitive Science.

The Moon's Alternative Power Source

2012-01-27T14:41:00.001-05:00

Research supports theory that the moon’s molten core was likely sustained by an alternative power source.

New evidence from an ancient lunar rock suggests that the moon once harbored a long-lived dynamo — a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago. The findings, published in Science, point to a dynamo that lasted much longer than scientists previously thought, and suggest that an alternative energy source may have powered the dynamo.

Image: NASA

“The moon has this protracted history that’s surprising,” says co-author Benjamin Weiss, an associate professor of planetary science at MIT. “This provides evidence of a fundamentally new way of making a magnetic field in a planet a new power source.”

The new paper is the latest piece in a puzzle that planetary scientists have been working out for decades. In 1969, the Apollo 11 mission brought the first lunar rocks back to Earth — souvenirs from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s historic moonwalk. Since then, scientists have probed the rocky remnants for clues to the moon’s history. They soon discovered that many rocks were magnetized, which suggested that the moon was more than a cold, undifferentiated pile of space rubble. Instead, it may have harbored a convecting metallic core that produced a large magnetic field, recorded in the moon’s rocks.

Exactly what powered the dynamo remains a mystery. One possibility is that the lunar dynamo was self-sustaining, like Earth’s: As the planet has cooled, its liquid core has moved in response, sustaining the dynamo and the magnetic field it produces. In the absence of a long-lived heat supply, most planetary bodies will cool within hundreds of millions of years of formation.

A dynamo still exists within Earth because heat, produced by the radioactive decay of elements within the planet, maintains the core’s convection. Models have shown that if a lunar dynamo were powered solely by cooling of the moon’s interior, it would have been able to sustain itself only for a few hundred million years after the moon formed — dissipating by 4.2 billion years ago, at the very latest.

Heavy metal rock

However, Weiss and his colleagues found some surprising evidence in a bit of lunar basalt dubbed 10020. The Apollo 11 astronauts collected the rock at the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility; scientists believe it was likely ejected from deep within the moon 100 million years ago, after a meteor impact. The group confirmed previous work dating the rock at 3.7 billion years old, and found that it was magnetized — a finding that clashes with current dynamo models.

Weiss collaborated with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Geochronology Center, who determined the rock’s age using radiometric dating. After a rock forms, a radioactive potassium isotope decays to a stable argon isotope at a known rate. The group measured the ratio of potassium to argon in a small piece of the rock, using this information to ascertain that the rock cooled from magma 3.7 billion years ago.

Weiss and graduate student Erin Shea then measured the rock’s magnetization, and found that the rock was magnetized. However, this didn’t necessarily mean that the rock, and the moon, had a dynamo-generated magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago: Subsequent impacts may have heated the rock and reset its magnetization.

To discard this possibility, the team examined whether the rock experienced any significant heating since its ejection onto the moon’s surface. Again, they looked to isotopes of potassium and argon, finding that the only heating the rock had experienced since it was ejected onto the lunar surface came from simple exposure to the sun’s rays.

“It’s basically been in cold storage for 3.7 billion years, essentially undisturbed,” Weiss says. “It retains a beautiful magnetization record.”

Stirring things up

Weiss says the rock’s evidence supports a new mechanism of dynamo generation that was proposed last year by scientists at University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC). This hypothesis posits that the moon’s dynamo may have been powered by Earth’s gravitational pull. Billions of years ago, the moon was much closer to Earth than it is today; terrestrial gravity may have had a stirring effect within the moon’s core, keeping the liquid metal moving even after the lunar body had cooled.

Francis Nimmo, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at UCSC and one of the researchers who originally put forth the new dynamo theory, says Weiss’ evidence provides scientists with a new picture of the moon’s evolution.

“We generally assume that cooling is the main mechanism for driving a dynamo anywhere,” says Nimmo, who was not involved in the current study. “This lunar data is telling us that other mechanisms may also play a role, not just at the moon, but elsewhere, too.”

Contacts and sources:
Story by Jennifer Chu

MIT News Office

Citation: A Long-Lived Lunar Core Dynamo
Shea, et al.Science 27 January 2012: 453-456.DOI:10.1126/science.1215359

Chemical Measurements Confirm Official Estimates Of BP Gulf Oil Spill Rate

2012-01-27T09:43:00.000-05:00

By combining detailed chemical measurements in the deep ocean, in the oil slick, and in the air, NOAA scientists and academic colleagues have independently estimated how fast gases and oil were leaking during the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill in 2010. New analysis shows subsurface plumes mostly gases, not as much oil.

The new study, “Chemical data quantify Deepwater Horizonhydrocarbon flow rate and environmental distribution,” was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The improved chemistry-based estimate – an average of 11,130 tons of gas and oil compounds per day – is close to the official average leak rate estimate of about 11,350 tons of gas and oil per day (equal to 59,200 barrels of liquid oil).

A view of the oil source as seen during an overflight on May 20, 2010.

Credit NOAA

“This study uses the available chemical data to give a better understanding of what went where, and why”, said Dr. Thomas Ryerson, a research chemist at NOAA and lead author of the study. “The surface and subsurface measurements and analysis provided by our university colleagues were key to this unprecedented approach to understanding an oil spill.”

Elliot Atlas, professor of Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science and co-author of the article was among those providing data to NOAA. Along with colleague Donald Blake and his research team at the University of California at Irvine, Atlas collected air samples, which were then analyzed for the chemical composition of organic trace gases in the Gulf of Mexico atmosphere.

“A very distinct pattern of trace gases was observed over the spill area that provided a fingerprint of oil components that escaped from the Gulf waters to the atmosphere. Combined with other measurements of the same components in the bulk oil, the air measurements could put some constraint on the rate of oil flow to the surface,” said Atlas.

The underwater plume was enhanced with gases known to dissolve readily in water, the team found. This includes essentially lightweight methane (natural gas) and benzene present in the spilling reservoir fluid. The surface oil slick was dominated by the heaviest and stickiest components, which neither dissolved in seawater nor evaporated into the air.

The team also found that the leaking gas and oil quickly separated into three major pools – the well-known underwater plume about 3,300-4,300 feet below the surface, the visible surface slick, and an airborne plume. Each pool had a very different chemical composition.

The analysis further showed a majority of the leaking gas and oil, by weight, was retained in the deep subsurface plume. The visible surface slick represented about 15 percent of the total leaked gas and oil; the airborne plume accounted for about another 7 percent.

The chemical measurements made from mid-May through June showed that the composition of the atmospheric plume changed very little, suggesting little change in the makeup of the leaking gas and oil.

The new chemistry-based estimate of about 11,130 tons per day (8,900 to 13,300 tons, including uncertainty) compares well with the official estimate of 11,350 tons per day (10,000 to 12,700 tons, including uncertainty). This information about the transport and fate of different components of the spilled gas and oil mixture could help resource managers and others trying to understand environmental exposure levels.

The new analysis follows on another NOAA-led study in which scientists estimated a lower limit to theDeepwater Horizon leak rate based on two days of airborne data and the chemical makeup of the reservoir gas and oil determined before the spill. This updated analysis adds in many other sources of data, including subsurface and surface samples taken over six weeks during the spill and including a direct measure of the makeup of the gas and oil actually leaking into the Gulf.

Contacts and sources:
University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science

Co-authors of the new paper, “Chemical data quantify Deepwater Horizon hydrocarbon flow rate and environmental distribution,” are R. Camilli (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), J.D. Kessler (Texas A&M University), E.B. Kujawinski and C.M. Reddy (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), D.L. Valentine (University of California, Santa Barbara), E.L. Atlas (University of Miami), D.R. Blake (University of California, Irvine), J.A. de Gouw (NOAA and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, CIRES), S. Meinardi (University of California, Irvine), D.D. Parrish (NOAA), J. Peischl (NOAA and CIRES), J.S. Seewald (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), and C. Warneke (NOAA and CIRES).

About NOAA
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources.

About the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School
The University of Miami’s mission is to educate and nurture students, to create knowledge, and to provide service to our community and beyond. Committed to excellence and proud of the diversity of our University family, we strive to develop future leaders of our nation and the world. Founded in the 1940’s, the Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science has grown into one of the world’s premier marine and atmospheric research institutions. Offering dynamic interdisciplinary academics, the Rosenstiel School is dedicated to helping communities to better understand the planet, participating in the establishment of environmental policies, and aiding in the improvement of society and quality of life. For more information, please visit www.rsmas.miami.edu.

Grape Seed Extract Kills Head And Neck Cancer Cells, Leaves Healthy Cells Unharmed

2012-01-27T09:34:00.000-05:00

Nearly 12,000 people will die of head and neck cancer in the United States this year and worldwide cases will exceed half a million.

A study published this week in the journal Carcinogenesis shows that in both cell lines and mouse models, grape seed extract (GSE) kills head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.

Grape seed extract kills head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed

Image courtesy of Flickr user Anders Ljungberg

“It’s a rather dramatic effect,” says Rajesh Agarwal, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

It depends in large part, says Agarwal, on a healthy cell’s ability to wait out damage.

“Cancer cells are fast-growing cells,” Agarwal says. “Not only that, but they are necessarily fast growing. When conditions exist in which they can’t grow, they die.”

Grape seed extract creates these conditions that are unfavorable to growth. Specifically, the paper shows that grape seed extract both damages cancer cells’ DNA (via increased reactive oxygen species) and stops the pathways that allow repair (as seen by decreased levels of the DNA repair molecules Brca1 and Rad51 and DNA repair foci).

“Yet we saw absolutely no toxicity to the mice, themselves,” Agarwal says.

Rajesh Agarwal, PhD, investigator at the University of Colorado Cancer Center and professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Credit: University of Colorado Cancer Center

Again, the grape seed extract killed the cancer cells but not the healthy cells.

“I think the whole point is that cancer cells have a lot of defective pathways and they are very vulnerable if you target those pathways. The same is not true of healthy cells,” Agarwal says.

The Agarwal Lab hopes to move in the direction of clinical trials of grape seed extract, potentially as an addition to second-line therapies that target head and neck squamous cell carcinoma that has failed a first treatment.

This work was supported by the R01 grants AT003623 from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and CA91883 from the National Cancer Institute, NIH.

Contacts and sources:
Garth Sundem
University of Colorado Denver

What Really Happened Prior To 'Snowball Earth'?

2012-01-27T09:17:00.000-05:00

In a study published in the journal Geology, scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggest that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which occurred prior to the major climatic event more than 500 million years ago, known as 'Snowball Earth,' are unrelated to worldwide glacial events.

Global ice sheets may have delayed or prevented the establishment of multicellular life

Credit: Wikipedia

"Our study suggests that the geochemical record documented in rocks prior to the Marinoan glaciation or 'Snowball Earth' are unrelated to the glaciation itself," said UM Rosenstiel professor Peter Swart, a co-author of the study. "Instead the changes in the carbon isotopic ratio are related to alteration by freshwater as sea level fell."

In a study published in the January 2012 issue of Geology, Swart suggests that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which occurred prior to the major climatic event more than 500 million years ago, known as "Snowball Earth," are unrelated to worldwide glacial events.

Credit: UM/RSMAS

In order to better understand the environmental conditions prior to 'Snowball Earth', the research team analyzed geochemical signatures preserved in carbonate rock cores from similar climactic events that happened more recently — two million years ago — during the Pliocene-Pleistocene period.

The team analyzed the ratio of the rare isotope of carbon (13C) to the more abundant carbon isotope (12C) from cores drilled in the Bahamas and the Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The geochemical patterns that were observed in these cores were nearly identical to the pattern seen prior to the Marinoan glaciation, which suggests that the alteration of rocks by water, a process known as diagenesis, is the source of the changes seen during that time period.

Prior to this study, scientists theorized that large changes in the cycling of carbon between the organic and inorganic reservoirs occurred in the atmosphere and oceans, setting the stage for the global glacial event known as 'Snowball Earth'.

"It is widely accepted that changes in the carbon isotopic ratio during the Pliocene-Pleistocene time are the result of alteration of rocks by freshwater," said Swart. "We believe this is also what occurred during the Neoproterozoic. Instead of being related to massive and complicated changes in the carbon cycle, the variations seen in the Neoproterozoic can be explained by simple process which we understand very well."

Scientists acknowledge that multiple sea level fluctuations occurred during the Pliocene-Pleistocene glaciations resulting from water being locked up in glaciers. Similar sea-level changes during the Neoproterozoic caused the variations in the global carbon isotopic signal preserved in the older rocks, not a change in the distribution of carbon as had been widely postulated.

Contacts and sources:
Barbra Gonzalez
University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science

The study, titled "Does the global stratigraphic reproducibility of 13C in Neoproterozoic carbonates require a marine origin? A Pliocene-Pleistocene comparison" was published in the January issue of the journal Geology. Swart's co-author is M.J Kennedy of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Can Economy Bear What Oil Prices Have In Store?

2012-01-27T08:55:00.003-05:00

Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy.

That's the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in the current issue of the journal Nature (Jan. 26) that the economic pain of a flattening oil supply will trump the environment as a reason to curb the use of fossil fuels.

"Given our fossil-fuel dependent economies, this is more urgent and has a shorter time frame than global climate change," says James W. Murray, UW professor of oceanography, who wrote the Nature commentary with David King, director of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

The "tipping point" for oil supply appears to have occurred around 2005, says Murray, who compared world crude oil production with world prices going back to 1998. Before 2005, supply of regular crude oil was elastic and increased in response to price increases. Since then, production appears to have hit a wall at 75 million barrels per day in spite of price increases of 15 percent each year.

"As a result, prices swing wildly in response to small changes in demand," the co-authors wrote. "Others have remarked on this step change in the economies of oil around the year 2005, but the point needs to be lodged more firmly in the minds of policy makers."

For those who argue that oil reserves have been increasing, that more crude oil will be available in the future, the co-authors wrote: "The true volume of global proved reserves is clouded by secrecy; forecasts by state oil companies are not audited and appear to be exaggerated. More importantly, reserves often take 6 - 10 years to drill and develop before they become part of the supply, by which time older fields have become depleted." Production at oil fields around the world is declining between 4.5 percent and 6.7 percent per year, they wrote.

"For the economy, it's production that matters, not how much oil might be in the ground," Murray says. In the U.S., for example, production as a percentage of total reserves went from 9 percent to 6 percent in the last 30 years.

"We've already gotten the easy oil, the oil that can be produced cheaply," he says. "It used to be we'd drill a well and the oil would flow out, now we have to go through all these complicated and expensive procedures to produce the oil."

The same is true of alternative sources such as tar sands or "fracking" for shale gas, Murray says, where supplies may be exaggerated and production is expensive. Take the promise of shale gas and oil: A New York Times investigative piece last June reported that "the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells."

Production at shale gas wells can drop 60 to 90 percent in the first year of operation, according to a world expert on shale gas who was one of the sources for the commentary piece. Murray and King built their commentary using data and information from more than 15 international and U.S. government reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, reports from groups such as the National Research Council and Brookings Institution and association findings.

Stagnant oil supplies and volatile prices take a toll on the world economy. Of the 11 recessions in the U.S. since World War II, ten were preceded by a spike in oil prices, the commentary noted.

"Historically, there has been a tight link between oil production and global economic growth," the co-authors wrote. "If oil production can't grow, the implication is that the economy can't grow either."

Calculations from the International Monetary Fund, for example, say that to achieve a 4 percent growth in the global economy in the next five years, oil production must increase about 3 percent a year.

"Yet to achieve that will require either an heroic increase in oil production, ... increased efficiency of oil use, more energy-efficient growth or rapid substitution of other fuel sources," according to the commentary. "Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth. But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven't identified the necessary solutions: weaning society off fossil fuel."

The commentary concludes: "This will be a decades-long transformation and we need to start immediately. Emphasizing the short-term economic imperative from oil prices must be enough to push governments into action now."

Contacts and sources:
Sandra Hines
University of Washington

A Heart Of Silk: Tasar Silkworm Grub Cocoon Used To Create Artificial Cardiac Tissue

2012-01-27T07:37:00.000-05:00

Max Planck scientists use silk from the tasar silkworm as a scaffold for heart tissue

Damaged human heart muscle cannot be regenerated. Scar tissue grows in place of the damaged muscle cells. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim are seeking to restore complete cardiac function with the help of artificial cardiac tissue. They have succeeded in loading cardiac muscle cells onto a three-dimensional scaffold, created using the silk produced by a tropical silkworm.

Disks cut from the cocoon of the tasar silkworm grub provide a basic scaffold for heart muscle cells. The disks are around the same size as cent coins.

Credit: MPI for Heart and Lung Research

Of all the body’s organs, the human heart is probably the one most primed for performance and efficiency. Decade after decade, it continues to pump blood around our bodies. However, this performance optimisation comes at a high price: over the course of evolution, almost all of the body’s own regeneration mechanisms in the heart have become deactivated. As a result, a heart attack is a very serious event for patients; dead cardiac cells are irretrievably lost. The consequence of this is a permanent deterioration in the heart’s pumping power and in the patient’s quality of life.

In their attempt to develop a treatment for the repair of cardiac tissue, scientists are pursuing the aim of growing replacement tissue in the laboratory, which could then be used to produce replacement patches for the repair of damaged cardiac muscle. The reconstruction of a three-dimensional structure poses a challenge here. Experiments have already been carried out with many different materials that could provide a scaffold substance for the loading of cardiac muscle cells.

“Whether natural or artificial in origin, all of the tested fibres had serious disadvantages,” says Felix Engel, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim. “They were either too brittle, were attacked by the immune system or did not enable the heart muscle cells to adhere correctly to the fibres.” However, the scientists have now found a possible solution in Kharagpur, India.

At the university there, coin-sized disks are being produced from the cocoon of the tasar silkworm (Antheraea mylitta). According to Chinmoy Patra, an Indian scientist who now works in Engel’s laboratory, the fibre produced by the tasar silkworm displays several advantages over the other substances tested. “The surface has protein structures that facilitate the adhesion of heart muscle cells. It’s also coarser than other silk fibres.” This is the reason why the muscle cells grow well on it and can form a three-dimensional tissue structure. “The communication between the cells was intact and they beat synchronously over a period of 20 days, just like real heart muscle,” says Engel.

Despite these promising results, clinical application of the fibre is not currently on the agenda. “Unlike in our study, which we carried out using rat cells, the problem of obtaining sufficient human cardiac cells as starting material has not yet been solved,” says Engel. It is thought that the patient’s own stem cells could be used as starting material to avoid triggering an immune reaction. However, exactly how the conversion of the stem cells into cardiac muscle cells works remains a mystery.

Contacts and sources:
Dr. Felix Engel
Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research,Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Citation: Chinmoy Patra, Sarmistha Talukdar, Tatyana Novoyatleva, Siva R. Velagala, Christian Mühlfeld, Banani Kundu, Subhas C. Kundu, Felix B. Engel:Silk protein fibroin from Antheraea mylitta for cardiac tissue engineering
Biomaterials, online publication 10.1.2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2011.12.036

10 Different Monsters That Scare Children

2012-01-27T07:23:00.000-05:00

There’s something uniquely human about our need to scare ourselves silly. As far as anyone knows, no other species goes out of its way to invent reasons to wet itself from fear. Children have the best imaginations, of course, and the list of things that scare them seems to get longer with each generation. What were your biggest fears as a kid; which monsters scared you the most? Here’s our list of 10 different monsters that scare children:

1. Monster Under the Bed – It’s unseen and usually unheard, but we know it lurks … just beneath our mattress, waiting for our feet to hit the floor. Yikes!

2. Boogeyman in the Closet – The scariest of monsters are the ones we never really see, even in pictures. So this monster has reigned in the nightmares of children for as long as there have been bedroom closets.

3. Evil Clowns – What could be more terrifying than a demonic version of those circus mascots and jesters, the clown? We confess that some of these guys, like Pennywise here, give us a real bad case of the creeps.

4. Witches – Sure, sure, we know. There are good witches and bad witches, good spells and bad spells. All we know is that hags like this one scare the crap out of kids.

5. Zombies – Heck, this bunch even has adults obsessed with their imminent invasion. They’re everywhere in pop culture now – movies, books, comics, video games. They’re everywhere and they just keep coming. That makes them very, very scary.

6. Puppets – Let’s face it, even the most charming of these still has at least a little creep factor. Children (and adults like us) have a tendency oftentimes to create our monsters out of the familiar, as with our aforementioned clowns.

7. Namahage – Leave it to the Japanese to incorporate scary monsters into their culture as a way of training their kids to behave, work hard and not be lazy. Hmmm.

8. Cuco – It appears that the Japanese have not cornered the market on scaring their young’uns into submission. Seems our Hispanic cousins have an ace up their sleeves as well, in the form of this legendary bugaboo.

9. Dolls – They walk, they talk; their heads spin and their eyes follow you around the room. They are just plain ghoulishly scary, and some of them are bigger than the kids themselves. Yikes.

10. Ghosts – Sometimes the monsters are more than monsters, beyond flesh and blood. Sometimes they’re not even living. Not in the way we think of living anyway. Spirits, ghouls, poltergeists. Call them what you will, but whatever you do, don’t call upon them, lest you be haunted evermore.

Contacts and sources:
Barbara Williams

http://www.findababysitter.org/blog/10-different-monsters-that-scare-children/

Martian Wind And Dunes

2012-01-27T07:14:00.002-05:00

Some images of stark Martian landscapes provide visual appeal beyond their science value, including a recent scene of wind-sculpted features from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This enhanced-color image shows sand dunes trapped in an impact crater in Noachis Terra, Mars. Dunes and sand ripples of various shapes and sizes display the natural beauty created by physical processes. The area covered in the image is about six-tenths of a mile (1 kilometer) across.

Sand dunes are among the most widespread wind-formed features on Mars. Their distribution and shapes are affected by changes in wind direction and wind strength. Patterns of dune erosion and deposition provide insight into the sedimentary history of the surrounding terrain.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The scene shows dunes and sand ripples of various shapes and sizes inside an impact crater in the Noachis Terra region of southern Mars. Patterns of dune erosion and deposition provide insight into the sedimentary history of the area.

Sand dunes are among the most widespread aeolian (wind-formed) features present on Mars. Their spatial distribution and morphology are affected by changes in wind direction and wind strength. Patterns of dune erosion and deposition provide insight into the sedimentary history of the surrounding terrain.

This image shows sand dunes trapped in an impact crater in Noachis Terra. Dunes and sand ripples of various shapes and sizes, such as in this enhanced-color subimage, show the natural beauty created by physical processes.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been examining Mars with six science instruments since 2006. Now in an extended mission, the orbiter continues to provide insights about the planet's ancient environments and about how processes such as wind, meteorite impacts and seasonal frosts are continuing to affect the Martian surface today. This mission has returned more data about Mars than all other orbital and surface missions combined.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

More than 20,600 images taken by HiRISE are available for viewing on the instrument team's website:http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu . Each observation by this telescopic camera covers several square miles, or square kilometers, and can reveal features as small as a desk.

HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft.

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, see http://www.nasa.gov/mro .

Contacts and sources:
Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

UA Highrise

Partially Written by: Alfred McEwen and Ginny Gulick

First Time Invisibility Cloak Hides A Three-Dimensional Object Standing In Free Space

2012-01-27T06:56:00.001-05:00

Researchers in the US have, for the first time, cloaked a three-dimensional object standing in free space, bringing the much-talked-about invisibility cloak one step closer to reality.

Credit: IOP

Whilst previous studies have either been theoretical in nature or limited to the cloaking of two-dimensional objects, this study shows how ordinary objects can be cloaked in their natural environment in all directions and from all of an observer’s positions.

Published, January 26th, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, the researchers used a method known as “plasmonic cloaking” to hide an 18-centimetre cylindrical tube from microwaves.

Some of the most recent breakthroughs in the field of invisibility cloaking have focussed on using transformation-based metamaterials — inhomogeneous, man-made materials that have the ability to bend light around objects — however, this new approach uses a different type of artificial material — plasmonic metamaterials.

When light strikes an object, it rebounds off its surface towards another direction, just like throwing a tennis ball against a wall. The reason we see objects is because light rays bounce off materials towards our eyes and our eyes are able to process the information.

Due to their unique properties, plasmonic metamaterials have the opposite scattering effect to everyday materials.

“When the scattered fields from the cloak and the object interfere, they cancel each other out and the overall effect is transparency and invisibility at all angles of observation.

“One of the advantages of the plasmonic cloaking technique is its robustness and moderately broad bandwidth of operation, superior to conventional cloaks based on transformation metamaterials. This made our experiment more robust to possible imperfections, which is particularly important when cloaking a 3D object in free-space,” said study co-author Professor Andrea Alu.

In this instance, the cylindrical tube was cloaked with a shell of plasmonic metamaterial to make it appear invisible. The system was tested by directing microwaves towards the cloaked cylinder and mapping the resulting scattering both around the object and in the far-field. The cloak showed optimal functionality when the microwaves were at a frequency of 3.1 gigahertz and over a moderately broad bandwidth.

The researchers, from the University of Texas at Austin, have shown in previous studies that the shape of the object is irrelevant; oddly shaped and asymmetric objects can both be cloaked using this technique.

Moving forward, one of the key challenges for the researchers will be to demonstrate the cloaking of a 3D object using visible light.

“In principle, this technique could be used to cloak light; in fact, some plasmonic materials are naturally available at optical frequencies. However, the size of the objects that can be efficiently cloaked with this method scales with the wavelength of operation, so when applied to optical frequencies we may be able to efficiently stop the scattering of micrometre-sized objects.

“Still, cloaking small objects may be exciting for a variety of applications. For instance, we are currently investigating the application of these concepts to cloak a microscope tip at optical frequencies. This may greatly benefit biomedical and optical near-field measurements,” continued Professor Alu.

Contacts and sources:
Institute of Physics
University of Texas for related research

First Modern Humans Out Of Africa Settled In Arabia According To Genetic Analysis

2012-01-27T05:44:00.001-05:00

A new study, using genetic analysis to look for clues about human migration, suggests that the first modern humans settled in Arabia on their way from the Horn of Africa to the rest of the world about 60,000 years ago.

Led by the University of Leeds and the University of Porto in Portugal, the study is published January 26th in the American Journal of Human Genetics and provides intriguing insight into the earliest stages of modern human migration out of Africa, say the researchers.

Credit: University of Leeds

"A major unanswered question regarding the dispersal of modern humans around the world concerns the geographical site of the first steps out of Africa," explains Dr Luísa Pereira from the Institute of Molecular Pathology and Immunology of the University of Porto (IPATIMUP). "One popular model predicts that the early stages of the dispersal took place across the Red Sea to southern Arabia, but direct genetic evidence has been thin on the ground.":

The international research team, which included colleagues from across Europe, Arabia and North Africa, analysed three of the earliest non-African maternal lineages. These early branches are associated with the time period when modern humans first successfully moved out of Africa.

Using mitochondrial DNA analysis, which traces the female line of descent and is useful for comparing relatedness between different populations, the researchers compared complete genomes from Arabia and the Near East with a database of hundreds more samples from Europe. They found evidence for an ancient ancestry within Arabia.

In human genetics, the haplogroups most commonly studied are Y-chromosome (Y-DNA) haplogroups and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups, both of which can be used to define genetic populations. Y-DNA is passed solely along the patrilineal line, from father to son, while mtDNA is passed down the matrilineal line, from mother to offspring of both sexes. Neither recombines, and thus Y-DNA and mtDNA change only by chance mutation at each generation with no intermixture between parents' genetic material.

The researchers, according to Cell Press, "sequenced complete mtDNA genomes from 85 Southwest Asian samples carrying these haplogroups and compared them with a database of 300 European examples. The results show that these minor haplogroups have a relict distribution that suggests an ancient ancestry within the Arabian Peninsula, and they most likely spread from the Gulf Oasis region toward the Near East and Europe during the pluvial period 55–24 ka ago. This pattern suggests that Arabia was indeed the first staging post in the spread of modern humans around the world."

Professor Martin Richards of the University of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences, said: "The timing and pattern of the migration of early modern humans has been a source of much debate and research. Our new results suggest that Arabia, rather than North Africa or the Near East, was the first staging-post in the spread of modern humans around the world."

The research was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Leverhulme Trust, and the DeLaszlo Foundation.

Anatomical comparison of the skulls of a modern human (left) and Homo neanderthalensis (right).

Credit: Wikipedia

Professor Martin Richards is the UK's only Professor of Archaeogenetics. He is now based at the University of Huddersfield and retains a Visiting Chair at the University of Leeds. Archaeogenetics is the use of genetic data to address questions concerning archaeology and human evolution. His research has focused on studies of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome, and how results of these studies can inform our knowledge of prehistoric patterns of migration.

Contacts and sources:
University of Leeds
Professor Martin Richards, School of Applied Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH
Dr Luísa Pereira, IPATIMUPa (Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto)
Jo Kelly, Campus PR

Citation: The Arabian cradle: Mitochondrial relicts of the first steps along the southern route out of Africa The American Journal of Human Genetics , 26 January 2012

Authors: Verónica Fernandes1, 2, Farida Alshamali3, Marco Alves1, Marta D. Costa1, 2, Joana B. Pereira1, 2,Nuno M. Silva1, Lotfi Cherni4, 5, Nourdin Harich6, Viktor Cerny7, 8, Pedro Soares1,
Martin B. Richards2, 9,11, Luísa Pereira1, 10, 11.

1 Instituto de Patologia e Imunologia Molecular da Universidade do Porto, Porto 4200-465, Portugal
2 Faculty of Biological Sciences, Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
3 General Department of Forensic Sciences and Criminology, Dubai Police General Headquarters, Dubai 1493, United Arab Emirates
4 Laboratory of Genetics Immunology and Human Pathology, Faculty of Sciences of Tunis, Tunis 2092, Tunisia
5 Higher Institute of Biotechnology of Monastir, Monastir 5000, Tunisia
6 Laboratoire d'Anthropogénétique, Départment de Biologie, Université Chouaïb Doukkali, El Jadida 24000, Morocco
7 Department of Anthropology and Human Genetics, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague 128 43, Czech Republic
8 Institute for Advanced Study, Paris 75648, France
9 School of Applied Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK
10 Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto, Porto 4200-319, Portugal

Geomagnetic Storm Produces Brilliant Aurora At High Latitudes

2012-01-26T22:21:00.000-05:00

The geomagnetic storm on the night of January 24-25 produced brilliant aurora at high latitudes as seen in this image from Sweden.
Image Courtesy of Peter Rosén.

The coronal mass ejection CME collided with Earth's magnetic field a little after 10 AM ET on January 24, 2012. The influx of particles from the CME amplified the solar radiation storm such that it is now considered the largest since October 2003. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has categorized it as a "strong" -- or S3 (with S5 being the highest) – storm. Solar radiation storms can affect satellite operations and short wave radio propagation, but cannot harm humans on Earth. Auroras may well be visible tonight at higher latitudes such as Michigan and Maine in the U.S., and perhaps even lower.

Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the flare, shown here in teal as that is the color typically used to show light in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength in which it is easy to view solar flares. The flare began at 10:38 PM ET on Jan. 22, peaked at 10:59 PM and ended at 11:34 PM.

Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

The Solar Heliospheric Observatory captured the coronal mass ejection (CME) in this video (which shows the sun's activity from January 19 to January 23). The end of the movie shows the interference caused by the onslaught of fast, energetic solar particles emitted from the sun.

Credit: SOHO/ESA & NASA

Contacts and sources:
Karen C. Fox
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

New Protein Purification Alternatives Far Cheaper Than Ion Exchange Resins

2012-01-26T22:02:00.001-05:00

Protein purification, often referred to as downstream processing, is the most costly and time-consuming process in the manufacture of bio-molecules. EU-funded researchers integrated materials science with process development to produce novel low-cost materials and methods for selective purification with a focus on chromatography, membrane separation and extraction.

Purification is somewhat like passing sand and pebbles through a sieve except that separation is not dependent on gravity and relative size of components and holes. Instead, separation depends on chemical and electrical interactions between the biological fluid and specific binders (ligands) through which it passes.

Among the many proteins purified by the pharmaceutical industry are human immunoglobulin G (IgG) and monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), both important in immunity and thus disease therapy. The most common method for purifying IgG and MAbs is the use of protein A resin. However, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly concerned about the supply of protein A materials.

The ‘Advanced interactive materials by design’ (AIMS) project thus sought to develop alternatives to protein A technology for the purification of proteins. The investigators developed excellent modelling tools enabling assessment of interactions among support, linker, ligand and product promoting efficient and effective design of new materials.

The researchers created a new SartoAims protein A affinity membrane with enhanced affinity for IgG, providing an important alternative to protein A for IgG purification. In addition, the investigators studied two alternatives to protein A technology for purification of MAbs, one using much less expensive ion exchange resins in a Multicolumn Countercurrent Solvent Gradient Purification (MCSGP) form of chromatography and one using aqueous two-phase extraction.

Ion Exchange Resin Beads

Credit: Wikipedia

The researchers also developed new materials for use in ion exchange chromatography, a technique that relies on charge interactions for separation. In fact, the chromatographic resin FractoAims demonstrated superior mechanical stability and can be tailor-made based on bead size, pore size, surface area and ligand density.

The new process concepts were tested in a mini-plant to evaluate performance with respect to protein A technology. A combination of two MCSGP units operating with different parameters enabled reduction in operating costs by a factor of three in total MAb purification costs.

The AIMS project outcomes will have significant impact on the protein purification process that has until now been the most costly part of bio-molecule development in the pharmaceutical, chemical and biotechnology industries. Commercialisation of the new technologies promises to improve the European position in the huge global chemicals and pharmaceuticals market.

Contacts and sources:
CORDIS Features
TU Dortmund University

8 Most Memorable Vote Promoters Who Weren’t Even Registered

2012-01-26T18:29:00.000-05:00

Celebrities and other high-profile figures use their name to promote political campaigns and encourage people to get out and vote. But even with all the advertisements and endorsements, many of these vote promoters don't make it to the polls, or get registered for that matter. Check out these eight memorable vote promoters who weren't even registered.

Paris Hilton

It was more surprising that celebutante Paris Hilton was photographed wearing a "VOTE OR DIE!" T-shirt than her being a no-show at the polls in 2004. To make matters worse, Hilton wasn't even registered to vote in the first place.

50 Cent

50 Cent was another big shot in P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign, but like many of the other celebrity promoters, the rapper failed to follow through with voting in the 2004 presidential election. There was no record of Curtis Jackson III (aka 50 Cent) being registered or voting in any of his states of residence. However, 50 Cent may have been ineligible because of his criminal record.

Alec Baldwin

Alec Baldwin recently expressed interest in running for mayor of New York City in 2013, but forgot to mention that he's not registered to vote there. Even though Baldwin has a home in the Hamptons, the state Board of Elections has no record of him. So, before he decides to run and promote voting in one year, he should get registered right away.

Ben Affleck

Not only has Ben Affleck tossed around the idea of running for Congress in the future, but the award-winning actor also traveled with Democratic nominee, Al Gore, in 2000 to deliver a get-out-to-vote plea. Despite Affleck's avid interest in politics, he failed to vote in 2000, let alone even register until 2003!

Meg Whitman

Before Meg Whitman ran for governor of California in 2010, she was rarely exercising her right to vote. In fact, Whitman registered for the first time ever in 2002. The successful businesswoman didn't have much interest in politics for a solid 28 years. It appears that her spotty private voting record was enough to make voters wary of her eligibility.

Ludacris

Although he claims to have voted by absentee ballot in the 2004 presidential election, rapper Ludacris may have missed the mark completely. According to voting records in Christopher Bridges' (aka Ludacris') states of residence, there was no evidence that he voted or was even registered.

Heidi Montag

In 2008, The Hills star Heidi Montag publicly announced her presidential endorsement of Republican candidate John McCain before even registering to vote! McCain was much obliged and even stated that he never misses an episode of her hit show. Surprisingly, Montag got registered in time to make it to the polls on Election Day.

8. Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger may have been the governor of California for seven years, but the former actor/bodybuilder didn't always take voting so seriously. Before he was elected in 2003, Schwarzenegger missed five of the 11 statewide elections.

Contacts and sources:
Jena Ellis
http://www.onlinecertificateprograms.org/blog/2012/8-most-memorable-vote-promoters-who-werent-even-registered/

Researchers Show How New Viruses Evolve, And In Some Cases, Become Deadly

2012-01-26T17:33:00.000-05:00

Researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) have demonstrated how a new virus evolves, shedding light on how easy it can be for diseases to gain dangerous mutations. The findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science.

Ribbon diagram of the OmpF protein, Lambda's new pathway into E. coli.

Illustration courtesy of MSU.

The scientists showed for the first time how the virus called "Lambda" evolved to find a new way to attack host cells, an innovation that took four mutations to accomplish. This virus infects bacteria, in particular the common E. coli bacterium. Lambda isn't dangerous to humans, but this research demonstrated how viruses evolve complex and potentially deadly new traits, noted Justin Meyer, MSU graduate student, who co-authored the paper with Richard Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Researchers at Michigan State University demonstrate how a new virus evolves, shedding light on how easy it can be for diseases to gain dangerous mutations.

Credit: Michigan State University/Jeremy Polk, National Science Foundation

"We were surprised at first to see Lambda evolve this new function, this ability to attack and enter the cell through a new receptor--and it happened so fast," Meyer said. "But when we re-ran the evolution experiment, we saw the same thing happen over and over."

This paper follows recent news that scientists in the United States and the Netherlands produced a deadly version of bird flu. Even though bird flu is a mere five mutations away from becoming transmissible between humans, it's highly unlikely the virus could naturally obtain all of the beneficial mutations at once. However, it might evolve sequentially, gaining benefits one-by-one, if conditions are favorable at each step, Meyer added.

Through research conducted at BEACON, MSU's National Science Foundation Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Meyer and his colleagues' ability to duplicate the results implied that adaptation by natural selection, or survival of the fittest, had an important role in the virus' evolution.

Contacts and sources:
National Science Foundation
Layne Cameron, University Relations, Michigan State University

Principal Investigators
Justin Meyer, BEACON Office, Michigan State University
BEACON: http://beacon-center.org/

Scientists Map One Of Life's Molecular Mysteries

2012-01-26T17:25:00.000-05:00

Visualization of the molecular gateway across and into cellular membranes.

All living organisms are made up of cells, behind these intricate life forms lie complex cellular processes that allow our bodies to function. Researchers working on protein secretion — a fundamental process in biology — have revealed how protein channels in the membrane are activated by special signals contained in proteins destined for secretion. The results help explain the underlying mechanism responsible for the release of proteins such as hormones and antibodies into the blood stream.

The findings, published today [26 January 2012] in the inaugural issue of Cell Reports, represent a major step forward in cell biology. Until now, scientists have been frustrated by not knowing the architecture of the protein transport machinery when engaged by cargo. However, the team led by researchers from the University of Bristol as part of an international collaboration, has successfully produced and visualised such a complex.

All cells are surrounded by membranes, made up from a double layer of fatty molecules called phospholipids. These act as an ideal 'skin', keeping the cell's insides in. In the absence of other components these fatty molecules act as barriers, preventing the necessary rapid exchange of nutrients and waste products, and of larger molecules like proteins, between the environment and the cell interior. However, such movement is required for many proteins to perform their biological functions either within the membrane or the outside.

To overcome this problem, biological membranes contain a number of translocation systems that enable proteins and other useful substances to pass across the phospholipid barrier. In the case of proteins, those destined for transport are recognised by translocation systems via signals embedded in the sequence of amino acids from which they are constructed. Correct passage through or across the membrane is critical in ensuring that cells complete their lifecycle and fulfill their function.

Using electron microscopy and results from X-ray crystallography, Ian Collinson, Professor of Biochemistry at the University, and his team have described the structure of the ubiquitous Sec-complex associated with a bona fide mimic of a pre-secretory protein in the native environment of the membrane. These results reveal how the binding of the signal sequence unlocks the Sec-complex prior to channel opening and pre-protein transport.

Professor Collinson from the University's School of Biochemistry, said: "These findings are important as they address outstanding questions in one of the central pillars of biology, a process essential in every cell in every organism. The results may suggest ways in which the process can be corrupted in order to manage specific disease states or bacteria infections."

Contacts and sources:
Caroline Clancy
University of Bristol

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Wellcome Trust-funded research is a collaboration with the University of Bristol and the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, Germany.

The paper, entitled Structure of the SecY complex unlocked by a pre-protein mimic, by Hizlan, D, Robson, A, Whitehouse, S, Gold, V.A, Vonck, J, Mills, D.J, Kühlbrandt, W. and Collinson, I. is published in Cell Reports.