NightBlogger

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory. More

Wired
Drizzle once fell on Martian soil, according to a new geochemical analysis by Berkeley scientists, though the rain probably stopped several billion years ago. Drawing on soil data from the five missions to Mars before the current Phoenix Lander and comparing it to information collected in Earth’s driest places, the scientists concluded that water must have fallen from above, not welled up from below, as has been thought. “The soil acts as a sort of an imperfect record of climate change,” said Ronald Amundson, UC Berkeley professor of ecosystem sciences and the study’s lead author. “We can study the chemistry of the soil and extract information about climate history.” More

The Mars Phoenix Lander has found ice on the surface of the Red Planet, triumphant NASA scientists said, a key discovery for the spacecraft as it searches for water and signs of life on Earth’s closet planetary neighbour. The proof came in a series of pictures sent back by Phoenix of a trench it dug with its robotic arm at the arctic circle of Mars, showing dice-sized chunks of white material that are seen to melt away over the course of several days.

“It is with great pride and a lot of joy today that I announce we’ve found the proof we’ve been seeking that this really is water ice and not some other material,” mission principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona, said at a press conference. The presence of water on Mars is crucial because it is a key to the question of whether life, even in the form of mere microbes, exists or has has ever existed on Mars. On Earth, water is a necessary ingredient for life. More

Called the Penetrator, scientists hope to fire four of these space-faring projectiles into the Moon from spacecraft in close orbit to the lunar surface. Once deployed, they are designed to bury themselves deep into the Moon’s crust.

These projectiles aren’t loaded with explosives, instead they are packed full of scientific equipment. The thought is that by burying these probes deep under the Moon’s surface, scientists will be able to uncover hereto unknown secrets about the Moon’s composition. More

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies. On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. More

NYTimes
Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs. The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. Some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form, but others believe it is far too early to take the drug, especially using wine as its source, until there is better data on its safety and effectiveness.

The report is part of a new wave of interest in drugs that may enhance longevity. On Monday, Sirtris, a startup founded in 2004 to develop drugs with the same effects as resveratrol, completed its sale to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million. Sirtris is seeking to develop drugs that activate protein agents known in people as sirtuins.

“The upside is so huge that if we are right, the company that dominates the sirtuin space could dominate the pharmaceutical industry and change medicine,” Dr. David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, a co-founder of the company, said Tuesday. More

sfgate.com
Elated scientists probing the arctic surface of Mars with their newly-landed Phoenix spacecraft said Saturday they are convinced they have found a bright and shiny layer of real ice only inches beneath the Martian soil and directly under the body of the lander itself.

“It’s the consensus of all of us that we have found ice,” said Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson as he talked to reporters in a conference call only six days after Phoenix landed safely from Earth. “It’s shiny and smooth — it’s absolutely astounding!” But Smith did add a note of scientific caution: “It’s not impossible that it’s something else,” he conceded, “but our leading interpretation is ice. We are looking at an extended table of ice.”

And it turns out that Phoenix itself made the epochal discovery, for it was the exhaust from the lander’s twelve retrorockets — firing during the last few seconds of the spacecraft’s touchdown last Sunday -that blew a mere three to six inches inches of Martian topsoil away and uncovered the patch of ice near one of the lander’s three legs. The camera on the lander’s robotic arm snapped images of the flat gleaming slab. Smith added that the newly discovered ice is not the kind of solid carbon dioxide -we call it dry ice — that covers the Martian polar cap, Smith said. More

Latest Images, Raw Images from Surface Stereo ImagerRaw, Image Mosaics
NASA’s Phoenix Spacecraft Commanded to Unstow Arm
05.28.08 — Scientists leading NASA’s Phoenix Mars mission from the University of Arizona in Tucson sent commands to unstow its robotic arm and take more images of its landing site early today.

NASA Mars Lander Prepares to Move Arm
05.27.08 — NASA’s Phoenix Lander is ready to begin moving its robotic arm, first unlatching its wrist and then flexing its elbow.

Mission Management
The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith at the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions are provided by the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. More

Phoenix:Downlink of Data3

Phoenix Mars Lander: Entry Descent Landing
Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. But in the Martian arctic, water ice lurks just below ground level. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this circumpolar region using a robotic arm to dig through the protective top soil layer to the water ice below and ultimately, to bring both soil and water ice to the lander platform for sophisticated scientific analysis.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The historically less-than-50 percent odds of success loomed heavily as NASA scientists readied for Sunday’s landing of the 420-million-dollar Phoenix spacecraft near Mars’s frigid north pole. “I’m a little nervous on the inside. … This is not an easy thing to do,” Phoenix scientist Peter Smith said Saturday of the landing due late the following day.

“There’s a lot of uncertainties left. … Mars is always there to throw those uncertainties at us,” added Doug McCuistion, Mars Exploration Program Director, of what NASA calls “the scariest seven minutes of the mission” — the period of hyper-deceleration and descent onto the Red Planet. Mission specialists were reviewing data to decide whether a course-correction maneuver would be needed eight hours ahead of touch-down to keep the Phoenix on track for landing in a relatively rock-free, flat region in the Mars arctic after its 679-million-kilometer (422-million-mile) journey from Earth. Read more

Rob Manning, chief engineer for JPL’s Mars Program, walks us through a simulation of the Mars Phoenix

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Turbulent storms leaving spots on big planet, ice caps retreating on red planet
WorldNetDaily
According to Philip S. Marcus, a professor of fluid dynamics at UC Berkeley, analysis of the Hubble and Keck images may support his 2004 conjecture that Jupiter is in the midst of global climate change that will alter temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, getting warmer near the equator and cooler near the south pole. He predicted that large changes would start in the southern hemisphere around 2006, causing the jet streams to become unstable and spawn new vortices.

Mars, too, is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, according to scientists. Scientists from NASA say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period. Read more

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Kate Douglas
NewScientist.com
To accompany the article So you think humans are unique? we have selected six articles from the New Scientist archive that tell a similar story. We have also asked the researchers involved to update us on their latest findings. Plus, we have rounded up six videos of animals displaying ‘human’ abilities.
Read more

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Lewis Smith
Timesonline
Hot springs capable of sustaining life once bubbled away on the surface of Mars, researchers say after Spirit, a robotic explorer vehicle, detected tell-tale deposits of silica on the surface of Mars. Jack Farmer, a professor of astrobiology at Arizona State University, said: “On Earth, hydrothermal deposits teem with life and the associated silica deposits typically contain fossil remains of microbes.”

But we don’t know if that’s the case here because the rovers don’t carry instruments that can detect microscopic life. What we can say is that this was once a habitable environment where liquid water and the energy needed for life were present.” The silica was in the Gusev Crater and would have been formed when volcanic stream or hot water burst through the surface. Nasa’s Phoenix probe is due to land on Mars on Sunday.

Photo DerrickT
Sara Reistad-Long
Hearld Tribune
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong. Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit. The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age, through Alzheimer’s disease, for example. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. Read more

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David Shiga
Newscientist
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is an ancient, hurricane-like storm that may have been raging for 340 years or more, based on early observations with telescopes. At three times the width of Earth, it is the largest storm in the solar system. It was recently joined by a similar, but smaller storm called Red Spot Junior. Red Spot Junior grew out of the merger of three smaller, white storms between 1998 and 2000 and turned red in 2006. It is about the size of Earth.

Now, a third red spot, about half the size of Red Spot Junior, has broken out on the giant gaseous planet. The spot, previously a white storm, now appears red in Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 9 and 10 May. Read more

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BBCNews
A nasal spray which increases our trust for strangers is showing promise as a treatment for social phobia, say scientists from Zurich University. They found that people who inhaled the “love hormone” oxytocin continued to trust strangers with their money - even after they were betrayed.

Brain scans showed the hormone lowered activity in the amygdala - a region which is overactive in social phobics. Drug trials are under way and early signs are promising say the scientists. Nicknamed the “cuddle chemical”, oxytocin is a naturally produced hormone, which has been shown to play a role in social relations, maternal bonding, and also in sex. Read more

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SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
In a stroke of cosmic luck, astronomers for the first time witnessed the start of one of the universe’s most fiery events: the end of a star’s life as it exploded into a supernova. On Jan. 9, astronomers used a NASA X-ray satellite to spy on a star already well into its death throes, when another star in the same galaxy started to explode. The outburst was 100 billion times brighter than Earth’s sun. The scientists were able to get several ground-based telescopes to join in the early viewing and the first results were published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

“A star exploded right before my eyes,” lead author Alicia Soderberg, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, said Wednesday in a teleconference. She likened it to “winning the astronomy lottery. We caught the whole thing from start-to-finish on tape.” Read more

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Bob Unruh
WorldNetDaily
‘Mr. Gore’s movie has claims no informed expert endorses’
More than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. – including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties – have signed a petition rejecting “global warming,” the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth’s climate.

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate,” the petition states. “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” Read more

CNN
Opponents of controversial plans to use hybrid human-animal embryos for research spoke out Tuesday, calling the practice unnecessary, unnatural, and reprehensible a day after British lawmakers voted to allow it.

The British parliament debated the issue Monday as part of its discussion of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, which will update legislation on reproduction and embryos.

“Crossing the species barrier in this way is deeply, deeply reprehensible, undesirable,” said Josephine Quintavalle, a bioethicist who founded Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE).

The research involves emptying an animal egg and filling it with human cells. The resulting embryo is allowed to develop for 14 days — during which time scientists harvest the stem cells — before being destroyed. Read more

Sky News
Critics have slammed a US doctor who runs a clinic where children as young as seven can begin treatment for a sex change. Dr Norman Spack opened his clinic at Boston’s Children’s Hospital last year and says he has patients from the US and the UK.

The clinic prescribes drugs that delay the onset of puberty, thus giving transgender kids a few more years to identify as either male or female. The effects of these puberty-halting drugs are reversible.

Teenagers who wish to continue with the therapy are later given hormones which alter their bodies in ways that cannot be changed, for example by adjusting their height or halting breast development. Dr Spack told The Boston Globe that transgender kids that got such help were less likely to commit suicide. Read more

Christine Dell’Amore
National Geographic News
In the minutes before a massive earthquake shook central China on Monday, captive pandas near the epicenter began acting strangely, according to an eyewitness account released today. (Watch video.)

The observation, made by a British tourist who had been watching the pandas at the famous Wolong National Nature Reserve near Chengdu, mirrors previous accounts of animals “sensing” disasters before they occur. Diane Etkins told the Associated Press that the pandas “had been really lazy and just eaten a little bit of bamboo, and all of a sudden they were parading around their pen.

“Looking back they must have sensed something was wrong.” Read more
Click here for “The man who predicts earthquakes”

CBCNews
A surgical team in Calgary on Friday extolled the virtues of using a robotic arm to perform groundbreaking surgery to remove a woman’s brain tumour.

The two mechanical hands of the robot, known as NeuroArm, mimic the movements of the surgeon with incredible precision while sensors and microphones recreate the sights, sounds and touch of surgery.

A surgeon is able to control the robot using levers at a computer workstation in a room next to the surgery. Sutherland said human ability to manipulate robotic surgery techniques can be credited, at least in part, to the explosion in popularity of video games. Read more

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Dr David Whitehouse
BBC
It is not just the plot for a far-fetched science-fiction disaster movie. Something unexplained really is happening to the Earth’s magnetic field. In recent years, the field has been behaving in ways not previously seen in the admittedly short time it has been monitored.

Some researchers think it may presage a geomagnetic reversal when the north and south magnetic poles flip. Such speculation takes place as the science-fiction movie The Core [2003] goes on release. In the film, the Earth’s core stops rotating and our planet’s magnetic sheath collapses. A manned mission is despatched to the centre of the Earth to “jumpstart” the planet.

Scientists admit there are things going on way beneath our feet that they do not understand, and which could have profound consequences for life on the surface. Read more

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Govert Schilling
ScienceNow Daily News
Imagine a star more massive than the sun yet hardly larger than a small city. Now twirl it around as fast as a kitchen blender spins. Such millisecond pulsars are fairly common in the Milky Way, but astronomers have found one that stands out. Pulsar J1903+0327, some 20,000 light-years from Earth, appears to be orbiting the wrong kind of star in the wrong way. Figuring out what’s up with this outlier may shed light on how the most extreme objects in the universe form.

Pulsars are the incredibly dense remains of massive stars that have died in catastrophic supernova explosions. If the star were paired with another star, the pulsar may suck in matter from its companion, causing it to twirl hundreds of times per second. This occurs when its companion becomes a big, cool star known as a red giant, before ending its life as a small and compact white dwarf star. Due to their mutual gravity, the millisecond pulsar and white dwarf enter into a perfectly round orbit around each other. Read more

Go here for live map
Worldwide earthquakes with M4.0+ located by USGS and Contributing Agencies.

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France24
“Animals sense pre-earthquake micro-tremors”
Two days before the quake thousands of toads suddenly decided to move across a bridge in Taizhou, a town in the Jiangsu province (see photos). Chinese web users are wondering why the local authorities didn’t relate the event to the imminence of an earthquake, and why scientists didn’t take notice of the bizarre disappearance of a lake in Enshi, in the Hubei province, on April 26.

A seismologist tells us that the Chinese have long relied on the behaviour of animals to predict earthquakes. Although there’s no scientific study to back up the farmers’ claims, the idea that toads sensed the earthquake should not be ruled out. In the city of Mianzhu, 60 miles from the epicentre, bloggers pointed to reports just weeks before the earthquake of a mass migration of more than one million butterflies.
Read more

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MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer
News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it’s a step toward creating “designer babies.”But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

“None of us wants to make designer babies,” said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The idea of designer babies is that someday, scientists may insert particular genes into embryos to produce babies with desired traits like intelligence or athletic ability. Some people find that notion repugnant, saying it turns children into designed objects, and would create an unequal society where some people are genetically enriched while others would be considered inferior.
Read more

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Geoffrey Lean
independent.co.uk

Ministers have given permission for thousands of GM potatoes to be grown in Britain, a decision that is bound to provoke a new confrontation with environmentalists. Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for the Environment , has agreed to let scientists at Leeds University cultivate the potato, which has been engineered to resist eelworm, in a trial over the next three years in a test field near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire. The GM Freeze protest group is considering taking legal action.

The move follows repeated clashes over a different experimental GM potato, modified against blight, in Britain last year. Trials had to be abandoned following protests by environmentalists and local farmers. Read more

Two of the largest and longest studies so far show a “brain pacemaker” can effectively treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), researchers said on Friday. Dr. Ali Rezai, head of neurosurgery at the Cleveland Clinic, who led the studies, said the technique known as deep brain stimulation helped the most severely depressed patients improve significantly. Read more

After two decades, Sean Reid of Surrey, British Columbia, discovered that he had a son. Fred Turley of Des Plaines, Ill., learned he didn’t have a daughter. And Wendy Lieb of Lewis Center, Ohio, made certain she wasn’t going to be a grandmother quite yet.

In all three situations, crucial genetic information altered the lives of the people involved. And in each case, it came not from a doctor or other medical source, but from a $29.99 kit on a drugstore shelf.

Reid, Turley and Lieb are among more than 800 customers who responded to the first wave of marketing for do-it-yourself DNA paternity tests sold as Identigene by Sorenson Genomics of Salt Lake City. Read more

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers. Read more

The Daily Galaxy
Yes, you read that right. Artists, working with the SymbioticA research laboratory in the University of Western Australia, grew living tissue into the shape of a tiny leather jacket and cyborged it up with electrical parts. Presumably to give Tom Thumb either a stylish biodegradable look or nightmares for life.

There’s an important difference in attitude here - while Americans waste time on huge debates on the ethicality of using tiny clumps of non-sentient tissue, the Ozzies are just inviting random lunatics in off the street and saying “Here’s some cutting edge biological technology, what do you think we could do with it?” Read more

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Increased breast-feeding during the first months of life appears to raise a child’s verbal IQ, according to a study of nearly 14,000 children released Monday.

The study in Archives of General Psychiatry found that 6-year-olds whose mothers were part of a program that encouraged them to breast-feed had a verbal IQ that was 7.5 points higher than children in a control group.

The researchers said their findings suggested that the longer an infant is fed breast milk exclusively, the greater the IQ improvement. More

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Early child abuse may forever change the way genes are expressed in the brain, suggests a postmortem study of people who died by suicide.

It is now well established that it isn’t just what genes we inherit, but how they are turned on and off that influences our development. Most of these control switches are thrown before we are born, but some are set in early life, and to a lesser degree, throughout our lives.

Genes are switched off when methyl groups are added to our DNA. Studies have shown that diet, stress and even maternal care can influence these “epigenetic” changes. More

Photo Gaetan Lee

Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there’s no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. It turns out…that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time…: the brain represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20 percent of the body’s energy.”
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Last week, the US Senate passed a bill that would bar employers and insurance providers from considering the results of a person’s genetic tests when making hiring or coverage decisions, but in the wake of the bill’s passage, Ars Technica reports “that a number of people have questioned why it shouldn’t be an employer’s or insurer’s right to make decisions based on genetics…these questions were answered a decade ago, and the intervening progress in human genetics has only reinforced some of the reasoning of the initial decision.
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Image source: Reality Carnival

“The cell image is micrometers wide. The image of the universe is billions of light years across. The cell image shows neurons in a mouse brain. The other is a simulated image of the universe. Together the images suggest the surprisingly similar patterns found in vastly different natural phenomena.”—David Constantine.

Photo by Otis

The Pentagon has officially announced the establishment of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM). The institute will study the stem cell technology and the technology to recreate skin, muscle and bone tissue, the official website of the US Department of Defense says. The institute plans to reconstruct whole body parts in the future – fingers, noses, ears etc.The technology and methods of the institute will be used for US military men injured in battles or for those who returned from the service in Iraq and Afghanistan with amputated arms of legs.
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