Plants detect bombs by changing colors (submitted by Andres Pereira)

A scientist at Colorado State University has developed a way to make every day plants one of the first lines of defense in the war on terror. The plants won't change before your eyes, yet, but lab work being done right now makes green plants turn white if they detect explosive, biological or chemical weapons in their environment. Looking to potential future uses, one could envision someone walking by these plants in an airport with hidden explosives and the plants changing color to alert security.

Professor June Medford and fellow scientists on the campus of CSU, located in Ft Collins, Colorado are now working with the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to develop hi-tech plants for use in airports and other public areas. "We actually modify the seed," Medford explains, "and then it's a trait that is stable and stays with it forever. It's very empowering because it will tell you that there's an explosive around, get the security guys here!"

The idea may sound like science fiction to some, but Medford says using plants to detect chemicals and pathogens makes perfect sense. Just think of bananas, which are picked green but will not ripen in northern climates unless exposed to the gas ethylene. Medford has modified her plants to react when exposed to specific agents by turning from green to white. Medford says, "It's a program we can put in any plant species."

Like most living organisms, plants have built in defense mechanisms, but "...plants can't run and hide from a threat," Medford explains, "they have to have a way to detect and respond and they do that already. But they detect things like bugs and things like that. So what we've done is teach them a new trick...to detect things we care about."

Medford's list of possibilities seems endless. In addition to explosives detection, plants can be modified to react to disease causing microbes, pollutants, even carbon monoxide or radon gases in homes. Medford also says members of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan could use these greens to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IED's).

But if you are curious about the science of all this, don't get too detailed with Medford.  During the interview with Fox News, there were numerous times when she was unable to answer a question, for security purposes.  The delicate nature of national security, she explains, means keeping some of this stuff secret.  "I think when you have a system where the bad guys don't know that there's a detector there, I think it's very very powerful," Medford says, "because it can tell our security guys, the police, where to come and and where to look.  Maybe there's a terrorist, a home grown terrorist making bombs and then we could potentially find those."

Before it can become practical, however, Medford says the time it takes for a plant to turn from green to white has to be reduced. "It works right now, but it'll work in hours, we need to cut it down to minutes and seconds and we think that's very doable and indeed we're getting some very good data to support that."

50 Interesting Science Facts (submitted by Daniel De Matheu)

As I was looking at the link Daniel sent me, I realized that there is a new app called "A+ Science Facts!" for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch on the iTunes app store.  (Very cool!)
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-science-facts/id333156919?mt=8
Here are a couple of screen shots of the app.

1 – The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second).

2 – It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to the Earth.

3 – 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

4 – The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph.

5 – Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth.

6 – When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia.

7 – Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

8 – Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

9 – In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf .

10 – If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.

11 – Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m.

12 – The Earth is 4.56 billion years old…the same age as the Moon and the Sun.

13 – The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed.

14 – Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating.

15 – When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of the space shuttle during launch.

16 – If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away.

17 – Astronauts cannot belch – there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

18 – The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level.

19 – One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a …pea.

20 – DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler.

21 – The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953.

22 – The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997.

23 – The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo.

24 – Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866.

25 – Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895.

26 – The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus – In 1872 it was measured at 435 feet tall.

27 – Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 – the patient lived for 18 days.

28 – An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts.

29 – ‘Wireless’ communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals.

30 – The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects.

31 – In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant.

32 – Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts – not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down.

33 – There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

34 – An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body.

35 – On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

36 – The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

37 – A quarter of the world’s plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010.

38 – Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime.

39 – At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet.

40 – The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies.

41 – Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection.

42 – More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing.

43 – The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph.

44 – It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean.

45 – Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence.

46 – The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet.

47 – Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.

48 – Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.

49 – Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda.

50 – A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

Solar Powered Hornet May Lead to Renewable Energy (submitted by Couloir Hanson)

A team of scientists at Tel Aviv University‘s School of Physics and Astronomy have discovered that a type of hornet is absorbing sunlight and turning it into useful energy. It’s the first animal that has ever been discovered to possess that ability, and the theory is we might be able to harness our own version of the process for alternative energy! How cool!
The Oriental hornet absorbs energy from the sun and turns it into electric power in the brown and yellow parts of its body (mainly, the hornet’s body shell or exoskeleton). In addition, its body also has a heat pump system (like those found in air conditioners) that is able to keep the hornet’s body cooler than its surroundings, which helps out when the insect is foraging around in the sun all day.

“The interesting thing here is that a living biological creature does a thing like that,” says physicist Professor David Bergman. “The hornet may have discovered things we do not yet know.”
Things that researchers hope may be applied for human use. Currently they are trying to mimic the bio-mechanisms that make the solar processing in the hornet possible, but they haven’t had much luck… Still, eventual developments could lead to new forms of solar energy collection, and that is a truly exciting discovery!

Quest for Designer Bacteria Uncovers a Spy (submitted by Andrea Garcia)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2011) — Scientists have discovered a molecular assistant called Spy that helps bacteria excel at producing proteins for medical and industrial purposes.

Bacteria are widely used to manufacture proteins used in medicine and industry, but the bugs often bungle the job. Many proteins fall apart and get cut up inside the bacteria before they can be harvested. Others collapse into useless tangles instead of folding properly, as they must in order to function normally.

A research team led by James Bardwell, who is a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and of biological chemistry, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, at the University of Michigan, developed a way to coerce bacteria into making large quantities of stable, functional proteins. Then, in exploring why these designer bacteria were so successful, the scientists discovered the molecular helper, Spy.
The research is scheduled for online publication Feb.13 in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
In the first phase of the research, the team designed biosensors that directly link protein stability to the antibiotic resistance of bacteria. When a poorly folded, unstable protein is inserted into the middle of the biosensor in a bacterium, it disrupts the bug's resistance to antibiotics. When the protein is stabilized, resistance is restored.
The researchers inserted a particularly unstable protein into Escherichia coli (E. coli), which forced the bacteria to either adapt by improving protein stability or die when exposed to antibiotics. Through a "directed evolution" experiment, in which the scientists selected colonies with increasing antibiotic resistance -- and increasing protein stability -- the team generated designer bacteria that produced up to 700 times more of the previously unstable protein.
"It is exciting to realize that if even bacteria are asked in the right way, they can come up with good solutions to hard problems," said postdoctoral fellow Shu Quan, who spearheaded the work.
In looking to see why the designer bacteria were so much better at producing proteins, the scientists found that the efficient microbes were making much more of a small protein called Spy. Further study showed that the cradle-shaped Spy aids in protein refolding and protects unstable proteins from being cut up or sticking to other proteins.
"Our work may usher in an era of designer bacteria that have had their folding environment customized so that they can now efficiently fold normally unstable proteins," Bardwell said.
The work was conducted in Bardwell's lab at U-M. Mirek Cygler's laboratory at McGill University solved the structure of the Spy protein. In addition to Bardwell, Quan and Cygler, the paper's authors are masters students Philipp Koldewey and Stephan Hofmann; undergraduate students Nadine Kirsch and Jennifer Pfizenmaier; postdoctoral research associates Tim Tapley, Linda Foit and Guoping Ren; associate professor Ursula Jakob and associate professor Zhaohui Xu; all of U-M; and Karen Ruane and Rong Shi of McGill University.
The researchers received funding from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Cargo Rocket to Supply Space Station (submitted by Alex Borbon)

An unmanned Ariane rocket is scheduled to launch a cargo vessel into orbit on Tuesday in Europe's second mission to carry supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), space officials said on Friday.
The modified Ariane launcher will lift off at 7.08 p.m. (2208 GMT) from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America, carrying a 20 tonne cargo module, the heaviest payload ever launched on an Ariane rocket.
The vessel, dubbed "Johannes Kepler" in honor of the 17th century German astronomer and mathematician, is the second Automatic Transfer Vehicle (ATV) Europe has contributed to the ISS program. The first docked with the ISS in early 2008.
The ATV is designed to deliver fuel, food, clothing and oxygen to the ISS crew as well as spare parts and is due to dock with the ISS on February 23.
Billed by the European Space Agency (ESA) as a major challenge for Europe's space program, the ATV docks with the ISS without human intervention.
"The precision of the ATV is tremendous compared to the mass of the vehicle," Nico Dettmann, ESA's ATV Programme Manager said in a television interview. "We have redesigned the (cargo) racks and every rack is 50 kg (110 lb) lighter," he said.
The ATV has three times the cargo capacity of Russia's Progress vehicle and was developed by the ESA as part of a barter arrangement with the U.S. space agency NASA.
Instead of paying cash for its share of the station's operating costs and also to secure additional astronaut access, ESA is providing the ATV and other components.
"A full ATV mission costs around 350 million Euros ($475 million), the ATV spacecraft itself accounting for around 200 million Euros ($270 million)," Pal Hvistendahl, ESA spokesman told Reuters.
"The program that led to the development, manufacturing, qualification and launch of ATV-1 (launched in 2008) cost 1.3 billion Euros ($1.75 billion)," he said.
Four more ATVs are planned for the space station, and NASA may buy more with the ESA as its space shuttle fleet is due to be retired after its next planned launch on February 24.
The space station, which is about 85 percent complete, is a $100 billion project by 15 nations.

Protecting the Coral Reef (submitted by Felipe Solera)

Extinction Predictor to Help Protect Coral Reefs

ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2011) — More than a third of coral reef fish species are in jeopardy of local extinction from the impacts of climate change on coral reefs, a new scientific study published in Ecology Letters has found.

(Local extinction refers to the loss of species from individual locations, while they continue to persist elsewhere across their range.)

A new predictive method developed by an international team of marine scientists has found that a third of reef fishes studied across the Indian Ocean are potentially vulnerable to increasing stresses on the reefs due to climate change.
The method also gives coral reef managers vital insights to better protect and manage the world's coral reefs, by showing that local and regional commitment to conservation and sustainable fisheries management improves prospects for coral recovery and persistence between storms and bleaching events.
The team applied their 'extinction risk index' to determine both local and global vulnerability to climate change and human impacts. They tested the method by comparing fish populations before and after the major 1998 El Nino climate event which caused massive coral death and disruption across the Indian Ocean.
In all, 56 of the 134 coral fish species studied were found to be at risk from loss of their habitat, shelter and food sources caused by climate change. Those most in jeopardy were the smaller fishes with specialised eating and sheltering habits. Because most of these species have wide geographic ranges and often quite large local populations, few were at particular risk of global extinction.
"The loss of particular species can have a critical effect on the stability of an entire ecosystem -- and our ability to look after coral reefs depends on being able to predict which species or groups of fish are most at risk," explains lead author Dr Nick Graham of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University. "Until now, the ability to do this has been fairly weak."
"For example, we know that the loss of seaweed-eating grazing fishes can lead to coral reefs which have suffered some other form of disturbance being replaced by weeds. Protecting these fish, on the other hand, gives the corals a much better chance to recover.
"Where there is a widespread death of corals from a climate-driven event such as bleaching, the fish most affected are the ones that feed or shelter almost exclusively on coral. However when corals die off and the reef structure collapses, small reef fish generally are much more exposed to predators.
"By understanding which species and groups of fish are most at risk, we can better manage coral reefs and fish populations to ensure their survival in times of increasing human and climate pressure," adds Dr Shaun Wilson of the Western Australian Department for Environment and Conservation.
The study does, however, offer encouragement by showing that the fish most at risk from climate change are seldom those most at risk from overfishing or other direct human impacts, pointing to scope to manage reef systems and fishing effort in ways that will protect a desirable mix of fish species that promote ecosystem stability.
"Critically, the species of fish that are important in controlling seaweeds and outbreaks of deleterious invertebrate species are more vulnerable to fishing than they are to climate change disturbances on coral reefs. This is encouraging, since local and regional commitment to fisheries management action can promote coral recovery between disturbances such as storms and coral bleaching events," explains Dr Wilson.
They conclude that identifying the fish species most at risk and most important to ecosystem stability and then managing coral reefs to maintain their populations will help 'buy time' while the world grapples with the challenge of limiting carbon emissions and the resulting climate change.
The team adds that their novel approach to calculating extinction risk has wider application to conservation management beyond coral reef ecosystems and can readily apply to other living organisms and sources of stress.

Brain Cells Start Sending Signals Early (Submitted by Antonio Maklouf)

Brain cells start sending signals early

Fetal neurons show firing patterns similar to those seen in sleeping adults

 

The kicks and somersaults of a developing baby aren’t the only in utero calisthenics. Babies also flex their mental muscles months before birth.

Nerve cells from developing brains as young as 20 weeks old fire in a pattern that persists into adulthood, researchers report February 15 in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research provides a glimpse into the behavior of extremely young brain cells and could help scientists understand what happens when brain development goes awry.

Cells from the cerebral cortices of 20- to 21-week-old fetuses exhibit bursts of electrical activity interspersed with periods of quiet, researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington found. When the adult brain is sleeping, or under anesthesia, it also displays this busy-then-quiet firing pattern, suggesting it may be an intrinsic property of human brains.

The cerebral cortex deals with sensory information, thinking, emotion and consciousness. But even when not receiving input from the outside world, the nerve cells, or neurons, in this region oscillate between firing and resting.

“In adults, we go to sleep and the cortex is disconnected from the outside environment — it sleeps alone. But you see this quiet synchronized activity,” says Igor Timofeev of Laval University in Québec. That young nerve cells behave in a similar way long before they grapple with outside input suggests that the firing pattern “is a very basic feature of the brain that occurs in very early stages of development,” says Timofeev.

Scientists still don’t understand what purpose the nerve cell activity serves so early in development. Perhaps it is a flexing of mental muscles to help keep the cells alive, says neuroscientist Srdjan Antic, who led the new study. Having a burst of activity now and again may signal other brain cells that “‘Hey I’m here, look at me, maintain a connection with me,’” Antic says. “During sleep neurons do exactly that.”

Antic and colleagues probed the activity of neurons in lab dishes one at a time. While almost all of the cells exhibited the firing pattern, the team can’t say whether the firing was synchronized. If the cells do fire in waves, that could be their way of signaling their location to other brain cells, says neuroscientist William Moody of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Such wave signaling in mice brains plays a role in wiring the nervous system during development so that adjacent brain regions correspond to adjacent body parts. If these young cells are firing in waves, that activity could be part of this mapping process, Moody says.

“This is a huge deal,” he says of the new work. “They’ve taken the first step of looking at humans.”

There are several disorders that may result when neurons don’t end up in the right place. And autism spectrum disorders may also be related to improper firing, says Moody