[ROBERT]

" Device records smells to play back later
29 July 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Paul Marks

IMAGINE being able to record a smell and play it back later, just as you can with sounds or images.

Engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan are building an odour recorder capable of doing just that. Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals.

"Point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie and it will reproduce the odour"The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis.

While a number of companies have produced aroma generators designed to enhance computer games or TV shows, they have failed commercially because they have been very limited in the range of smells they can produce, says Pambuk Somboon of the Tokyo team.

So he has done away with pre-prepared smells and developed a system that records and later reproduces the odours. It's no easy task: "In video, you just need to record shades of red, green and blue," he says. "But humans have 347 olfactory sensors, so we need a lot of source chemicals."

Somboon's system will use 15 chemical-sensing microchips, or electronic noses, to pick up a broad range of aromas. These are then used to create a digital recipe from a set of 96 chemicals that can be chosen according to the purpose of each individual gadget. When you want to replay a smell, drops from the relevant vials are mixed, heated and vaporised. In tests so far, the system has successfully recorded and reproduced the smell of orange, lemon, apple, banana and melon. "We can even tell a green apple from a red apple," Somboon says. "

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/mg19125586.300-device-records-smells-to-play-back-later.html

[neilep (OP)]

IT'S HOT HOT HOT !!

Britain is experiencing the hottest day of the year so far with temperatures forecast to rocket to 36C (96.8F).

Experts said the heatwave will show no sign of relenting as hot winds from France boost temperatures further.

Monday and Tuesday have already seen the two hottest days of the year so far with temperatures of up to 33.2C (91.8F).

Weathermen said the highest temperatures will be recorded in the area west of London, north of Bristol and south of Birmingham.

If the mercury does reach 36C it will match the hottest July day, set on July 22, 1911, in Epsom, Surrey.

The highest UK temperature ever recorded was 38.5C (101.3F) in Faversham, Kent, on August 10, 2003.

British temperatures this week have outstripped popular holiday destinations including Athens, Bermuda, Rio de Janeiro and Rome.

Forecasters expect a bank of showers coming in from the South West to offer some respite tonight and tomorrow, but the weekend should still be very warm.

The heatwave has sparked a series of health warnings over fears for the safety of elderly and vulnerable people.

And police have issued a safety warning after a teenager drowned as he cooled off in a canal.

The 14-year-old boy died after jumping into the water in Glen Parva, Leicester.

Police confirmed the death was a "tragic accident" and have referred the case to the coroner.

A spokeswoman said: "The assumption is that, because of the heat, the boy entered the water to cool down."

Officers, in association with British Waterways, have issued a warning to people who might be tempted to swim in rivers and lakes as temperatures rocket.

Jeff Whyatt, general manager of British Waterways South East, said: "There are a lot of hidden dangers in open water and even the strongest swimmers can experience difficulty.

"This sad and tragic accident highlights the real risks of swimming in the canal.

"We understand how inviting the water may look on a warm day but it's important to stress that swimming in any waterways is extremely dangerous.

"The water is frequently far colder than expected and can lead to muscle cramps in even the strongest of swimmers.

"Submerged objects pose further dangers and underwater currents on rivers, or those created by passing boats, are hazardous.

"And it's particularly important over the summer to ensure that children are always supervised when near to water."

SOURCE..YAHOO.CO.UK

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[neilep (OP)]

Mystery of Explosive Star Solved
In February, a faint star a few thousand light-years away flared suddenly, beaming so brightly that for a few days it was visible to the naked eye.

The star is a stellar corpse the size of Earth, known as a white dwarf, and it is paired in a binary system with a red giant, a dying, bloated star that once resembled our Sun. The red giant has been dumping gas onto the surface of the white dwarf, and every few years, enough matter accumulates to set off a giant thermonuclear explosion.

It was one of these explosions, called a "nova," that astronomers and stargazers detected earlier this year.

The two-star system, called RS Ophiuchi, is known as a recurrent nova because five similar eruptions have been detected before. The first observation occurred in 1898; the last eruption prior to this latest one happened in 1985.

The new observations, made using advanced radio and X-ray telescopes not available during the last outburst, reveal the explosion to be more complex than was previously assumed.

Standard computer models had predicted a spherical explosion with matter ejected in all directions equally. The latest observations instead showed that the explosion evolved into two lobes, confirming suspicions that the nova outburst produces twin jets of stellar material that spews out from the white dwarf in opposite directions.

"The radio images represent the first time we've ever seen the birth of a jet in a white dwarf system. We literally see the jet 'turn on,'" said Michael Rupen, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who studied RS Ophiuchi using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).

As impressive as the nova are, they might just be precursors for a more violent supernova explosion that will occur in the future, scientists say.

Like the Sun, Only More Powerful
 

The white dwarf's thermonuclear blasts are similar to those that occur on the surface of the sun, but they can be over 100,000 times more powerful. During each outburst, an amount of gas equal to the mass of the Earth is flung into space. Some of this ejected matter slams into the extended atmosphere of the inflated red giant, creating blast waves that accelerate electrons to nearly the speed of light. As the electrons travel through the stars' magnetic fields, they emit radio waves that can be detected by telescopes on Earth.

The blast waves move at over four million miles (about 6.4 million km) per hour. For a few weeks during each outburst, the white dwarf becomes a red giant.

"After the [thermonuclear explosion], the white dwarf will puff up into a red giant for a few weeks as the hydrogen that has been blasted into space fuses into helium," explains Richard Barry of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

All eyes on Ophiuchi

Japanese astronomers first detected signs of RS Ophiuchi's latest nova on the night of Feb. 12. Follow-up observations by radio telescopes revealed an expanding blast wave whose diameter was already the size of Saturn's orbit around the Sun.

In the weeks following, several radio and X-ray telescopes around the world tracked RS Ophiuchi closely, including the MERLIN array in the UK, the European EVN array, the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and Very Large Array (VLA) in the United States, and NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellites.

Findings from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and the VLBA/EVN observations are detailed in two separate studies published in the July 20 issue of the journal Nature.

The red giant and white dwarf stars making up RS Ophiuchi are separated by about 1.5 astronomical units, or one and a half times the distance the Earth is from the sun. The binary star system is located in the constellation Ophiuchus, about 5,000 light-years away—very close by astronomical standards.

"We have a ringside seat for this very important event," Barry told SPACE.com. Barry is a co-author on another study on RS Ophiuchi that will appear in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal.

Supernova precursor?

When the outburst is over, gas will once again build up on the white dwarf and the explosions will begin anew, perhaps in some 20 years time. It's unknown whether the white dwarf casts off all of its accumulated matter during each eruption, or whether some of the material is being hoarded and slowly increasing the mass of the dead star.

"If the white dwarf is increasing in mass then it will eventually be ripped apart in a titanic supernova explosion and the cycle of outbursts will come to an end," said Tim O'Brien of the University of Manchester, a co-author on one of the Nature studies.

White dwarfs must attain a critical 1.4 solar masses before they can explode in what scientists call a Type 1a supernova. The white dwarf in RS Ophiuchi is near this critical limit now, but it will still probably need hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate the final bit of mass, scientists say.

Because all Type 1a supernovas emit the same amount of light at their peak, they serve as important "standard candles" which astronomers use to calculate cosmic distances.

"Our understanding of these objects is exceedingly important as any miscalculation or uncertainty in the total light of output of supernovae could have a dramatic effect on our calculations of the scale and size of the entire universe," Barry said.
SOURCE. NASA

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[ROBERT]

"Spine doctors raise hope of electric wound cure:
 scientists from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland have found a new way to heal serious wounds, including broken spinal cords. The technique - stimulating injuries with electrical currents - has been used in an operation that produced dramatic improvements in patients paralysed by spinal injuries. After inserting battery packs beside their broken spinal cords in clinical trials, many patients had feelings restored to their legs and arms after a few weeks’ treatment. Professor Colin McCaig, head of the university’s school of medical sciences, says that in a few years, everyone could have an electrical device for ‘speeding up healing’ in their first aid box.
(Source: The Observer, May 29, 2005. For further information see: www.aberdeen.ac.uk)"
http://www.educationuk.org.my/News_digest/Jun2005.html

[ROBERT]

" Gecko inspires sticky tape

By Richard Black
BBC science correspondent  

Scientists in the UK have created a sticky tape which works in the same way as gecko feet.
 
Geckos are known for their climbing prowess
The researchers say the material clings so well to a surface that by covering the palm of one hand with the tape, a person could hang from the ceiling - just like the remarkable lizard.

So far, however, Professor Andre Geim and colleagues have only been able to make a very small square of their gecko tape because of the difficulties involved in the fabrication process.

Nonetheless, the University of Manchester scientists are confident they can refine their work so that commercial quantities of the new sticky material can be produced. ".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2953852.stm

 

[ROBERT]

"Spine doctors raise hope of electric wound cure:
 scientists from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland have found a new way to heal serious wounds, including broken spinal cords. The technique - stimulating injuries with electrical currents - has been used in an operation that produced dramatic improvements in patients paralysed by spinal injuries. After inserting battery packs beside their broken spinal cords in clinical trials, many patients had feelings restored to their legs and arms after a few weeks’ treatment. Professor Colin McCaig, head of the university’s school of medical sciences, says that in a few years, everyone could have an electrical device for ‘speeding up healing’ in their first aid box.
(Source: The Observer, May 29, 2005. For further information see: www.aberdeen.ac.uk)"
http://www.educationuk.org.my/News_digest/Jun2005.html

[ROBERT]

" Gecko inspires sticky tape

By Richard Black
BBC science correspondent  

Scientists in the UK have created a sticky tape which works in the same way as gecko feet.
 
Geckos are known for their climbing prowess
The researchers say the material clings so well to a surface that by covering the palm of one hand with the tape, a person could hang from the ceiling - just like the remarkable lizard.

So far, however, Professor Andre Geim and colleagues have only been able to make a very small square of their gecko tape because of the difficulties involved in the fabrication process.

Nonetheless, the University of Manchester scientists are confident they can refine their work so that commercial quantities of the new sticky material can be produced. ".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2953852.stm

 

[ROBERT]

" Biological versus nonbiological older brothers and men’s sexual orientation "

Anthony F. Bogaert  
Departments of Community Health Sciences and Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada L2S 3A1

The most consistent biodemographic correlate of sexual orientation in men is the number of older brothers (fraternal birth order). The mechanism underlying this effect remains unknown. In this article, I provide a direct test pitting prenatal against postnatal (e.g., social/rearing) mechanisms. Four samples of homosexual and heterosexual men (total n = 944), including one sample of men raised in nonbiological and blended families (e.g., raised with half- or step-siblings or as adoptees) were studied. Only biological older brothers, and not any other sibling characteristic, including nonbiological older brothers, predicted men’s sexual orientation, regardless of the amount of time reared with these siblings. These results strongly suggest a prenatal origin to the fraternal birth-order effect ".

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0511152103v1

[ROBERT]

" The Sunday Times July 30, 2006

Beautiful people tend to have girls, say scientists

Roger Dobson and Yuba Bessaoud
 
HOLLYWOOD’S most beautiful couple, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, are in the grip of evolutionary forces that made it almost inevitable that their child would be a girl.
According to research, attractive parents are 26% more likely to have a daughter than a son as their first child. It is an inexorable process that has resulted in women becoming increasingly more attractive than men.  
 
This is because of differing “evolutionary strategies” that each sex has adopted to survive, claim researchers at the London School of Economics.

While reproductive success for males depends largely on the status of the father (as sons from higher-status families inherit their position and are in turn able to protect and invest in their offspring), daughters’ reproductive successes mostly depend on their youth and attractiveness. “We have shown two things,” said Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, who led the research. “Beautiful parents have more daughters than ugly parents, because physical attractiveness is heritable and because daughters benefit from attractiveness more than sons.

“We have also shown that women on average are more attractive than men, because over evolutionary history the slight bias of beautiful parents to have more daughters has accumulated, so that girls have become more and more attractive than boys.”

Men prefer younger and physically more attractive women for their mates. A potential mate’s status or wealth is far less important for men than her youth and physical attractiveness, argues the report.

The research, in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, analysed more than 20,000 people in America. Researchers rated their beauty according to height, weight and apparent age, all factors that can be used to judge basic attraction levels without subjective viewpoints. Only first-born children were included in the analysis.

Dr Mark Thomas, senior lecturer at the biology department of University College London, said the LSE’s results appeared to “fit in” with the state of research on sexual evolution.

He said the phenomenon was rooted in men’s natural promiscuity, noting: “Females can only reproduce so many times in their lives whereas for men, theoretically, the limit is all of the females in the world times the number of reproductive opportunities (those females) have.”

Besides Pitt and Jolie, who named their daughter Shiloh Nouvel, the Hollywood couple Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, whose first-born daughter Ava is six, lend weight to the theory. "

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2291737,00.html

[ROBERT]

" Curry May Help Prevent Colon Cancer
Wed Aug 2, 11:54 PM ET

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 2 (HealthDay News) -- Chemicals found in onions and curry may help prevent colon cancer, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study suggests.
 
Published in the August issue of the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the study included five people with familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP), an inherited form of precancerous polyps in the lower bowel. FAP is characterized by the development of hundreds of colorectal polyps and eventual colon cancer.

For an average of six months, the patients received three daily oral doses of 20 milligrams of quercetin (an antioxidant found in onions) and 480 milligrams of curcumin (found in tumeric, one of the main ingredients of curry).

The average number of polyps in the patients declined by 60.4 percent, and the average size of the polyps decreased by 50.9 percent, the study said.

"We believe this is the first proof of principle that these substances have significant effects in patients with FAP," study leader Dr. Francis M. Giardiello, director of the division of gastroenterology at the university, said in a prepared statement.

He believes that curcumin is the key agent.

"The amount of quercetin we administered was similar to what many people consume daily; however, the amount of curcumin is many times what a person might ingest in a typical diet, since tumeric only contains on average three percent to five percent curcumin by weight," Giardiello said.

It's not likely that simply eating onions and curry would provide the same benefits seen in this study, he noted.

The researchers plan to conduct a randomized clinical trial with more patients. "
http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20060803/hl_hsn/currymayhelppreventcoloncancer;_ylt=AtoHk66v.GEptsaG5yH7wtLVJRIF;_ylu=X3oDMTA0cDJlYmhvBHNlYwM-

[neilep (OP)]

As you may or may not know I just luff to stroke bees so I was pleased to find this non-stroking but BEE related news article.



Bees get a buzz from warm flowers
Bumblebees prefer to visit warm flowers and can use colour to predict the bloom's temperature, research suggests.

The findings challenge the long-held belief that the insects seek out flowers that contain the most nectar or pollen.

UK researchers say the bees might use warmer blooms to help maintain their body temperatures and save energy.

The study by scientists from Cambridge University and Queen Mary College is published in the journal Nature.

Flower power

To test whether bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) could use colour to identify warmer flowers, the team used a variety of differently coloured artificial plants.

In a "foraging bout" the creatures were given a choice between four purple flowers or four slightly cooler pink ones that were placed in a random order.

In one test, 58% of the bees chose the warmer purple flowers. When the colours were switched and warm nectar was placed in the pink petals, 61.6% headed for the pink blooms.

Lars Chittka, from Queen Mary College, University of London, and a co-author of the paper, said the tests showed that bees preferred warmer plants and could learn to identify the hotter species by the colour of flowers.

  Seeking out flowers with warmer nectar is a direct metabolic reward

Professor Lars Chittka

"If we do not give the bees any cues by which they can identify the warmer flowers then they fail the task. If the flowers are visually identical then they will visit them all.

"What the bees need to do is collect individual experience," Professor Chittka said. "They have to probe the flowers, learn which ones have higher temperatures and then to identify them they use colours or spatial positions."

The team suggests that the temperature can serve as an additional reward from pollinating insects in a context where there are also nutritional rewards available.

"Bees need to warm up to fly, they need to have body temperatures of at least 30C (86F)," Professor Chittka said.

If the air temperature was relatively cold, it took a considerable amount of the insects' energy reserves to reach this temperature, he added.

"In that sense, seeking out flowers with warmer nectar is a direct metabolic reward; it supplies them with energy that they would otherwise have to invest."

'Clever trick'

The researchers believe the findings could also affect the current understanding surrounding the evolutionary link between plants and pollinators.

"About 80% of flower species have a peculiar structure in their flowers; the skin is made up of little cells that are cone-shaped. It has never been fully understood what function they served," Professor Chittka said.

"But one effect it does have is that the cones act as little lenses to focus light directly into the parts of the cells that contain the floral pigment; because more light is absorbed it warms the flowers - that's a clever trick.

"We think the fact that 80% of floral species have this, it could be a broad evolutionary innovation in order to generate warmth and thus lure pollinators to collaborate with them," he suggested.

Professor Chittka's co-authors on the paper were Adrian Dyer, Heather Whitney, Sarah Arnold and Beverley Glover from Cambridge University's Department of Plant Science.


Source: BBC.CO.UK








Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[Mjhavok]

Japanese Researcher Ponders Reviving Woolly Mammoth

WASHINGTON (AP)—Descendants of extinct mammals like the giant woolly mammoth might one day walk the Earth again. It isn't exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives.

So far they've succeeded with mice—some frozen as long as 15 years—and lead researcher Dr. Atsuo Ogura says he would like to try experiments in larger animals.

"In this study, the rates of success with sperm from 15 year-frozen bodies were much higher than we expected. So the likelihood of mammoths revival would be higher than we expected before,'' Ogura said in an interview via e-mail.

While frozen sperm is commonly used by sperm banks, the team led by Ogura, at Riken Bioresource Center in Ibaraki, Japan, worked with sperm from whole frozen mice and from frozen mouse organs.

"If spermatozoa of extinct mammalian species can be retrieved from animal bodies that were kept frozen for millions of years in permafrost, live animals might be restored by injecting them into (eggs) from females of closely related species,'' the researchers said in a paper appearing in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Intact mammoth bodies have been excavated from Siberian permafrost.

Dr. Robert W. McGaughey, laboratory director at the Institute for Reproductive Studies in Scottsdale, Ariz., commented that since some of the whole frozen mice had been held for 15 years before obtaining the sperm nuclei "it clearly is possible that some day we may be able to obtain offspring from extinct animals frozen at reasonable temperatures for very long periods of time.''

The downside, added McGaughey, who was not part of the research team, is that an extinct animal probably would have to have been continuously maintained at a low temperature to avoid thawing/refreezing damage.

Elephants would be a potential candidate for insemination with frozen mammoth sperm, Ogura said. He also suggested experiments might be tried with extinct feline species and their modern relatives.

Less enthusiastic was Dr. Peter Mazur, a biologist at the University of Tennessee who has worked with frozen eggs and sperm and is a past president of the Society for Cryobiology.

Mazur thinks the chance that frozen sperm from mammoths could be used to fertilize a related species is near zero.

"The storage temperature of frozen mammoths is not nearly low enough to prevent the chemical degradation of their DNA over hundreds of thousands of years,'' he commented. And "even if the temperature were low enough to prevent chemical degradation, that would not prevent serious damage over those time periods from background radiation, which includes cosmic rays.''

Bringing back extinct species is an interesting suggestion, Dr. Douglas E. Chandler of the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences commented.

"The trick however is to find an acceptable species that would act as the mother,'' added Chandler, who was not part of Ogura's research team. If an elephant egg were used "the offspring would not be a mammoth but a hybrid between an elephant and a mammoth. If one wanted a true mammoth one would have to find a source of viable mammoth (eggs) to fertilize and implant and this is a much dicier proposition.''

McGaughey agreed, "It is unlikely eggs from such frozen animals would survive; therefore only the sperm would be available to put into eggs from an existing and appropriate modern mammal to approximate the extinct one.''

The research requires considerable technical expertise, Chandler said, adding that Ryuzo Yanagimachi, one of Ogura's researchers, "is a long time worker in this field and is highly respected. He and his colleagues clearly are experts appropriate for this work.''

Ogura's research was funded by the Japanese ministries of education and health, and the Human Science Foundation of Japan.

Steven
_______________________________________________________________
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

[neilep (OP)]

Excellent Steve...keep em coming.

Don't forget to credit the source.

Oops...sorry STEVEN !! []

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[ROBERT]

" World now has more fat people than hungry ones
Monday August 14, 10:22 AM     By Lawrence Bartlett
 
SYDNEY (AFP) - The world now has more overweight people than hungry ones and governments should design economic strategies to influence national diets, a conference of international experts have heard.

The transition from a starving world to an obese one had happened with dramatic speed, US professor Barry Popkin told the annual conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists on Monday.

"The reality is that globally far more obesity than undernutrition exists,"

Popkin said, adding that while hunger was slowly declining, obesity was rapidly spreading.

There are more than a billion overweight people in the world and 800 million who are undernourished, he said at the Gold Coast convention centre near Brisbane. The world population is estimated at about 6.5 billion.

"Obesity is the norm globally and undernutrition, while still important in a few countries and in targeted populations in many others, is no longer the dominant disease."

The "burden of obesity", with its related illnesses, was also shifting from the rich to the poor, not only in urban but in rural areas around the world, he said.

China typified the changes, with a major shift in diet from cereals to animal products and vegetable oils accompanied by a decline in physical work, more motorised transport and more television viewing.

But all countries had failed to address the obesity "boom", the University of North Carolina professor said.

Food prices could be used to manipulate people's diets and tilt them towards healthier options, he suggested.

"For instance, if we charge money for every calorie of soft drink and fruit drink that was consumed, people would consume less of it.

"If we subsidise fruit and vegetable production, people would consume more of it and we would have a healthier diet." "
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/14082006/323/world-fat-people-hungry-ones-expert.html

[neilep (OP)]

Bacteria can help predict ocean change
Marine bacteria groups vary predictably with ocean conditions

Every creature has its place and role in the oceans – even the smallest microbe, according to a new study that may lead to more accurate models of ocean change.

Scientists have long endorsed the concept of a unique biological niche for most animals and plants – a shark, for example, has a different role than a dolphin.

Bacteria instead have been relegated to an also-ran world of "functional redundancy" in which few species are considered unique, said Jed Fuhrman, holder of the McCulloch-Crosby Chair in Marine Biology in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

In The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' Early Edition, Fuhrman and colleagues from USC and Columbia University show that most kinds of bacteria are not interchangeable and that each thrives under predictable conditions and at predictable times.

Conversely, the kinds and numbers of bacteria in a sample can show where and when it was taken.

"I could tell you what month it is if you just got me a sample of water from out there," Fuhrman said.

The researchers took monthly bacteria samples for more than four years in the Pacific Ocean near the USC Wrigley Institute's marine laboratory on Catalina Island.

They used statistical methods to correlate the bacteria counts with the Wrigley Institute's monthly measurements of water temperature, salinity, nutrient content, plant matter and other variables.

The researchers found they could predict the makeup of the bacterial population by the conditions in the water more than four times in five.

A majority of bacterial species came and went predictably, Fuhrman said. A smaller "wild card" group in each sample was not predictable and could represent the bacterial equivalent of weeds and other redundant plants.

"Wherever we looked, we found predictable kinds, but within the groups there were always less predictable and more predictable members," Fuhrman said.

"They're just like animals and plants in the way they function in the system. Each one has its own place."

The findings have immediate relevance for scientists attempting to understand how the oceans are changing, Fuhrman said. If bacteria behave predictably, they can be used to improve models for ocean change.

By including bacteria, which make up the vast majority of species on land and sea, "we have some hope of predicting how changes are going to happen," Fuhrman said.

SOURCE: EUREKALERT.ORG

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[ROBERT]

" NASA Announces Dark Matter Discovery

Astronomers who used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Monday,
 Aug. 21, to announce how dark and normal matter have been forced apart in an extraordinarily energetic collision.

Shortly before the start of the briefing, images and graphics about the research will be posted at:
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/1e0657/  "

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_M06128_dark_matter.html

[neilep (OP)]

Robert !!...sorry but I was just about to paste all that is in my clipboard about the very item you have just posted about...

oooh...what to do...my clipboard is brimming with all this text...

Ok..I will paste it..

Thanks Robert...hope you don't mind:


NASA finds direct proof of that dark matter exists
NASA NEWS RELEASE
Posted: August 21, 2006

Dark matter and normal matter have been wrenched apart by the tremendous collision of two large clusters of galaxies. The discovery, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, gives direct evidence for the existence of dark matter.

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

These observations provide the strongest evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is dark. Despite considerable evidence for dark matter, some scientists have proposed alternative theories for gravity where it is stronger on intergalactic scales than predicted by Newton and Einstein, removing the need for dark matter. However, such theories cannot explain the observed effects of this collision.

"A universe that's dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking," said Doug Clowe of the University of Arizona at Tucson, and leader of the study. "These results are direct proof that dark matter exists."

In galaxy clusters, the normal matter, like the atoms that make up the stars, planets, and everything on Earth, is primarily in the form of hot gas and stars. The mass of the hot gas between the galaxies is far greater than the mass of the stars in all of the galaxies. This normal matter is bound in the cluster by the gravity of an even greater mass of dark matter. Without dark matter, which is invisible and can only be detected through its gravity, the fast-moving galaxies and the hot gas would quickly fly apart.

The team was granted more than 100 hours on the Chandra telescope to observe the galaxy cluster 1E0657-56. The cluster is also known as the bullet cluster, because it contains a spectacular bullet-shaped cloud of hundred-million-degree gas. The X-ray image shows the bullet shape is due to a wind produced by the high-speed collision of a smaller cluster with a larger one.

In addition to the Chandra observation, the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan optical telescopes were used to determine the location of the mass in the clusters. This was done by measuring the effect of gravitational lensing, where gravity from the clusters distorts light from background galaxies as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The hot gas in this collision was slowed by a drag force, similar to air resistance. In contrast, the dark matter was not slowed by the impact, because it does not interact directly with itself or the gas except through gravity. This produced the separation of the dark and normal matter seen in the data. If hot gas was the most massive component in the clusters, as proposed by alternative gravity theories, such a separation would not have been seen. Instead, dark matter is required.

"This is the type of result that future theories will have to take into account," said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, who was not involved with the study. "As we move forward to understand the true nature of dark matter, this new result will be impossible to ignore."

This result also gives scientists more confidence that the Newtonian gravity familiar on Earth and in the solar system also works on the huge scales of galaxy clusters.

"We've closed this loophole about gravity, and we've come closer than ever to seeing this invisible matter," Clowe said.

These results are being published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.


SOURCE: SPACELIGHTNOW.COM

Men are the same as women, just inside out !

[ariel]

Kangaroo Pill to thin numbers

Wednesday, August 23, 2006; Posted: 9:50 a.m. EDT (13:50 GMT)

A female kangaroo seen recently in suburban Sydney.


CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Scientists are hoping to develop an oral contraceptive for female kangaroos that will keep pouches empty as they hop around the national capital's grassy fringes.

Government ecologist Don Fletcher said Wednesday the oral contraceptive method promised to be more efficient than existing technology for curbing roo numbers around Canberra such as vasectomies for males and injections for females because the fleet-footed marsupials would not need to be captured.

"Realistically, to deal with wild animals it has to be oral," said Fletcher, who is collaborating with Newcastle University scientists on the research.

"One of the challenges is finding kangaroo ice-cream," he said, referring to a food pellet that grass-munching roos will find irresistible.

Field tests of the contraceptive could be under way in two-to-five years, he said.

Kangaroos are an ever-present road hazard in Canberra, particularly in dry months when thousands bounce in from the surrounding countryside to feed on watered lawns and golf courses.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/08/23/kangaroo.contraceptive.ap/index.html

ariel

[ukmicky]

who responsible for going to wide and taking this page over the edge.

Michael

[Mjhavok]

How the tongue tastes sour
Receptor found that is triggered by acidic foods.

By Lucy Heady

Researchers have worked out how a mammal's tongue detects sour tastes: it's all down to a single, specialized receptor, they say.

Taste in mammals is classified into sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (the taste of monosodium glutamate, commonly found in Chinese takeaways). Until now, only the sweet, bitter and umami taste receptors had been identified, and researchers were unsure whether the other two tastes had specialized receptors for them at all.

The three tastes with known receptors are triggered by large molecules, such as sucrose, that latch on to and are recognized by specialized cells on the tongue. But salty and sour are different in that they are the tastes of very simple ions: hydrogen ions (H+) for acidity and, mainly, sodium ions (Na+) for salt. Some researchers have speculated that many cells in the tongue might be able to pick up these signals, relaying the information in a complex pattern of nerve signals to the brain. "This kind of model is very messy," says Charles Zuker of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in San Diego.

So Zuker's team — the same lab that pinned down the previous three taste receptors — set out to hunt for a sour taste receptor.

Angela Huang, a graduate student in Zuker's lab, first trawled through the mouse genome to pick out any proteins that exist in cell membranes: proteins that can pick up signals from the outside world and transmit them to nerves. That left about 10,000 candidates.

They screened these by assuming that a taste receptor would only be found in a small number of tissue types (specifically tongue taste cells). That whittled the list down to 900. They then looked for gene patterns known to exist in other taste receptors, leaving a single protein called PKD2L1 as a prime candidate.

To check on the action of PKD2L1, the team created genetically engineered mice that produced a toxin in cells expressing PKD2L1, killing these cells. Probes placed inside the mouse brains then showed that no neural activity was prompted by sour-tasting foods in these mice, they report in Nature1. And their behaviour changed to match: they kept licking sour foods, whereas normal mice would run away from acidic snacks (only humans have a taste for sour foods; other animals avoid them).

Sweet success

Zuker's team also hit upon a surprising fact about the sour receptor: it seems to show up in neurons of the spinal cord. "This is the first time that a taste receptor has been shown to respond to stimuli in another part of the body," says Zuker. This 'taste' sensor might help the body to monitor acidity in the nervous system, he says.

Another group of scientists who were similarly on the trail of a sour-taste receptor also hit upon PKD2L1 as a candidate. Hiroaki Matsunami from Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues showed PKD2L1 and PKD1L3 being activated by acid in mouse cells in the lab dish2. They also found that these proteins were well positioned on the tongue for contact with food, but were unable to confirm that there was just one dedicated receptor for sour taste. Zuker's work fills that gap.

The two studies together certainly seem to point the way to understanding sour taste, says Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Taste test

But it seems that not everything is understood. Strangely, while taste is an instantaneous perception, Matsunami's work showed a delay between the introduction of acid and the cells firing off a 'sour' signal, says Zuker. This indicates that something else might be going on inside the mouth to help mammals identify the taste.

Beauchamp adds that it is also unclear how or why a sour receptor would come to be. There is a clear evolutionary motivation for the existence of some other taste receptors: bitterness detects poison and sweetness detects sugar, an essential source of energy. "It is still not entirely convincing why we need a sour taste receptor," says Beauchamp. "None of the suggestions for sour taste, such as being able to detect unripe fruits, are entirely compelling."

For Zucker's team, what comes next is a search for the salt receptor. "It's just a case of going through those proteins that are left behind when all the other taste receptors are gone," says Zuker.


Source - Nature

(http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060821/pf/060821-9_pf.html)

Steven
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In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.