Latest Posts by contradictiontonature - Page 2

Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was the first-ever female winner of the prestigious Fields Medal prize and the first Iranian to be honoured with the award.

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She attended Farzanegan School, which was part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. In both 1994 and 1995 she won the International Mathematical Olympiads for high-school students. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals.

Mirzakhani continued her education at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where she earned a BSc in Mathematics. After this, she undertook a  a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen, and her dissertation focused on Simple Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces and Volume of the Moduli Space of Curves. She had a unique way of working, and “would spend hours on the floor with supersized canvases of paper, sketching out ideas, drawing diagrams and formulae, often leading Anahita [her daughter] to say, “Oh, Mommy is painting again!” Mirzankhani said that “I don’t have any particular recipe [for developing new proofs] … It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck you might find a way out.”

From 2004 to 2008 she was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. She then became a professor at Stanford University where she specialized in theoretical mathematics including moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.” 

In 2014, Mirzakhani was awarded the Fields Medal prize for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems, becoming the first-ever female winner and the first Iranian to be honoured with the award. During her lifetime, she won a number of awards including the 2009 Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics and the 2013 Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society. She worked up until her death in 2017, and was still producing amazing mathematics during her battle with cancer over the last few years.

Sources here, here, here, here and here

history meme (french edition) → 7 inventions/achievements (2/7) the first vaccine for rabies by Louis Pasteur & Émile Roux

“Pasteur had, in the early 1880s, a vaccine for rabies, but he was a chemist and not a licensed physician, and potentially liable if he injured or killed a human being. In early july 1885, Joseph Meister, a nine year-old-boy, had been badly mauled and bitten by a rabid dog (…). Pasteur injected young Meister with his rabies vaccine: the boy did not develop rabies and recovered fully from his injuries. Pasteur became a hero, and the Parisian Institue which came to be named in his honour, and of which he was the first director, became the global prototype bacteriological and immunological research institute. By demonstrating beyond doubt that many diseases were transmitted by bacteria and could be prevented from becoming active by pasteurization techniques, Pasteur indeed changed the course of history.” – G. L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur.

WHAT??? Time to update those textbooks.

Did life begin on land rather than in the sea?

Stromatolites are round, multilayered mineral structures that range from the size of golf balls to weather balloons and represent the oldest evidence that there were living organisms on Earth 3.5 billion years ago.

Scientists who believed life began in the ocean thought these mineral formations had formed in shallow, salty seawater, just like living stromatolites in the World Heritage-listed area of Shark Bay, which is a two-day drive from the Pilbara.

But what Djokic discovered amid the strangling heat and blood-red rocks of the region was evidence that the stromatolites had not formed in salt water but instead in conditions more like the hot springs of Yellowstone.

The discovery pushed back the time for the emergence of microbial life on land by 580 million years and also bolstered a paradigm-shifting hypothesis laid out by UC Santa Cruz astrobiologists David Deamer and Bruce Damer: that life began, not in the sea, but on land.

Stromatolites.Credit: © Ints / Fotolia

New Approach to Treating Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most common form of dementia. In search for new drugs for AD, the research team, led by Professor Mi Hee Lim of Natural Science at UNIST has developed a metal-based substance that works like a pair of genetic scissors to cut out amyloid-β (Aβ), the hallmark protein of AD.

The study has been featured on the cover of the January 2017 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and has been also selected as a JACS Spotlight article.

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death among in older adults. The exact causes of Alzheimer’s disease are still unknown, but several factors are presumed to be causative agents. Among these, the aggregation of amyloid-β peptide (Aβ) has been implicated as a contributor to the formation of neuritic plaques, which are pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

As therapeutics for AD, Professor Lim suggested a strategy that uses metal-based complexes for reducing the toxicity of the amyloid beta (Aβ). Althought various metal complexes have been suggested as therapeutics for AD, none of them work effectively in vivo.

The research team has found that they can hydrolyze amyloid-beta proteins using a crystal structure, called tetra-N methylated cyclam (TMC). Hydrolysis is the process that uses water molecules to split other molecules apart. The metal-mediated TMC structure uses the external water and cut off the binding of amyloid-beta protein effectively.

In this study, the following four metals (cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc) were placed at the center of the TMC structure. When the double-layered cobalt was added to the center, the hydrolysis activity was at the highest.

The research team reported that the cobalt-based metal complex (Co(II)(TMC)) had the potential to penetrate the blood brain barrier and the hydrolysis activity for nonamyloid protein was low. Moreover, the effects of this substance on the toxicity of amyloid-beta protein were also observed in living cell experiments.

“This material has a high therapeutic potential in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease as it can penetrate the brain-vascular barrier and directly interact with the amyloid-beta protein in the brain,” says Professor Lim.

This study has also attracted attention by the editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “Not only do they develop new materials, but they have been able to propose details of the working principles and experiments that support them,” according to the editor.

“As a scientist, this is such a great honor to know that our recent publication in JACS was highlighted in JACS Spotlights,” says Professor Lim. “This means that our research has not only been recognized as an important research, but also has caused a stir in academia.”

Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA

In a first, researchers converted a movie into a DNA sequence and inserted it into bacteria. They hope to someday use the technology to record cell behavior.

It was one of the very first motion pictures ever made: a galloping mare filmed in 1878 by the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who was trying to learn whether horses in motion ever become truly airborne.

More than a century later, that clip has rejoined the cutting edge. It is now the first movie ever to be encoded in the DNA of a living cell, where it can be retrieved at will and multiplied indefinitely as the host divides and grows.

The advance, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature by researchers at Harvard Medical School, is the latest and perhaps most astonishing example of the genome’s potential as a vast storage device.

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Trillion-Ton Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica

Even though the towering berg weighs more than 1.1 trillion tons (1 trillion metric tons), it won't have a direct impact on sea-level rise. That's because the ice was already floating on the sea. Even so, when an iceberg like this one calves, it can speed up the collapse of the rest of the ice shelf.

One of the largest icebergs ever recorded, packing about a trillion tons of ice or enough to fill up two Lake Eries, has just split off from Antarctica, in a much anticipated, though not celebrated, calving event.

A section of the Larsen C ice shelf with an area of 2,240 square miles (5,800 square kilometers) finally broke away some time between July 10 and today (July 12), scientists with the U.K.-based MIDAS Project, an Antarctic research group, reported today.

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Crystals of the female hormone oxytocin

In women this hormone is secreted naturally by the pituitary gland. Oxytocin causes contractions of the uterus during labour, and it also stimulates the flow of milk in women who are breast-feeding.

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Completes Flyby over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

NASA’s Juno mission completed a close flyby of Jupiter and its Great Red Spot on July 10, during its sixth science orbit.

All of Juno’s science instruments and the spacecraft’s JunoCam were operating during the flyby, collecting data that are now being returned to Earth. Juno’s next close flyby of Jupiter will occur on Sept. 1.

Raw images from the spacecraft’s latest flyby will be posted in coming days.

“For generations people from all over the world and all walks of life have marveled over the Great Red Spot,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Now we are finally going to see what this storm looks like up close and personal.”

The Great Red Spot is a 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm that has been monitored since 1830 and has possibly existed for more than 350 years. In modern times, the Great Red Spot has appeared to be shrinking.

Juno reached perijove (the point at which an orbit comes closest to Jupiter’s center) on July 10 at 6:55 p.m. PDT (9:55 p.m. EDT). At the time of perijove, Juno was about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) above the planet’s cloud tops. Eleven minutes and 33 seconds later, Juno had covered another 24,713 miles (39,771 kilometers), and was passing directly above the coiling crimson cloud tops of the Great Red Spot.

The spacecraft passed about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the clouds of this iconic feature.

On July 4 at 7:30 p.m. PDT (10:30 p.m. EDT), Juno logged exactly one year in Jupiter orbit, marking 71 million miles (114.5 million kilometers) of travel around the giant planet.

Juno launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. During its mission of exploration, Juno soars low over the planet’s cloud tops – as close as about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers). During these flybys, Juno is probing beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and studying its auroras to learn more about the planet’s origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

Early science results from NASA’s Juno mission portray the largest planet in our solar system as a turbulent world, with an intriguingly complex interior structure, energetic polar aurora, and huge polar cyclones.

JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the Science Mission Directorate.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

Carl Sagan

Atomic-level motion may drive bacteria’s ability to evade immune system defenses

A study from Indiana University has found evidence that extremely small changes in how atoms move in bacterial proteins can play a big role in how these microorganisms function and evolve.                                

The research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a major departure from prevailing views about the evolution of new functions in organisms, which regarded a protein’s shape, or “structure,” as the most important factor in controlling its activity.

“This study gives us a significant answer to the following question: How do different organisms evolve different functions with proteins whose structures all look essentially the same?” said David Giedroc, Lilly Chemistry Alumni Professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Chemistry, who is senior author on the study. “We’ve found evidence that atomic motions in proteins play a major role in impacting their function.”

Daiana A. Capdevila et al, Entropy redistribution controls allostery in a metalloregulatory protein, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017).  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620665114

The scientists conducted their experiments in Staphylococcus aureus, a common cause of skin, sinus and lung infections. Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention      

The Hubble Space Telescope captured this picture of the wispy remains of a supernova explosion. The dust cloud in the upper center of the picture is the actual supernova remnant. The dense concentration of stars in the lower left is the outskirts of star cluster NGC 1850. Full resolution picture here. More info here. Credit: NASA, ESA, Y.-H. Chu (Academia Sinica, Taipei)

Organic Chemistry, Part 2/6

Reaction Mechanisms: Electrophilic addition to double bonds, SN2, SN1, E1, E2, and the decision tree

Next week: EAS, NAS, pericyclic reactions, Claisen rearrangements, and radical reactions!

Part 1

(Image caption: An fMRI scan shows regions of the brain that become active when devoutly religious study participants have a spiritual experience, including a reward center in the brain, the nucleus accumbens. Credit: Jeffrey Anderson)

This is your brain on God

Religious and spiritual experiences activate the brain reward circuits in much the same way as love, sex, gambling, drugs and music, report researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine. The findings were published in the journal Social Neuroscience.

“We’re just beginning to understand how the brain participates in experiences that believers interpret as spiritual, divine or transcendent,” says senior author and neuroradiologist Jeff Anderson. “In the last few years, brain imaging technologies have matured in ways that are letting us approach questions that have been around for millennia.”

Specifically, the investigators set out to determine which brain networks are involved in representing spiritual feelings in one group, devout Mormons, by creating an environment that triggered participants to “feel the Spirit.” Identifying this feeling of peace and closeness with God in oneself and others is a critically important part of Mormons’ lives — they make decisions based on these feelings; treat them as confirmation of doctrinal principles; and view them as a primary means of communication with the divine.

During fMRI scans, 19 young-adult church members — including seven females and 12 males — performed four tasks in response to content meant to evoke spiritual feelings. The hour-long exam included six minutes of rest; six minutes of audiovisual control (a video detailing their church’s membership statistics); eight minutes of quotations by Mormon and world religious leaders; eight minutes of reading familiar passages from the Book of Mormon; 12 minutes of audiovisual stimuli (church-produced video of family and Biblical scenes, and other religiously evocative content); and another eight minutes of quotations.

During the initial quotations portion of the exam, participants — each a former full-time missionary — were shown a series of quotes, each followed by the question “Are you feeling the spirit?” Participants responded with answers ranging from “not feeling” to “very strongly feeling.”

Researchers collected detailed assessments of the feelings of participants, who, almost universally, reported experiencing the kinds of feelings typical of an intense worship service. They described feelings of peace and physical sensations of warmth. Many were in tears by the end of the scan. In one experiment, participants pushed a button when they felt a peak spiritual feeling while watching church-produced stimuli.

“When our study participants were instructed to think about a savior, about being with their families for eternity, about their heavenly rewards, their brains and bodies physically responded,” says lead author Michael Ferguson, who carried out the study as a bioengineering graduate student at the University of Utah.

Based on fMRI scans, the researchers found that powerful spiritual feelings were reproducibly associated with activation in the nucleus accumbens, a critical brain region for processing reward. Peak activity occurred about 1-3 seconds before participants pushed the button and was replicated in each of the four tasks. As participants were experiencing peak feelings, their hearts beat faster and their breathing deepened.

In addition to the brain’s reward circuits, the researchers found that spiritual feelings were associated with the medial prefrontal cortex, which is a complex brain region that is activated by tasks involving valuation, judgment and moral reasoning. Spiritual feelings also activated brain regions associated with focused attention.

“Religious experience is perhaps the most influential part of how people make decisions that affect all of us, for good and for ill. Understanding what happens in the brain to contribute to those decisions is really important,” says Anderson, noting that we don’t yet know if believers of other religions would respond the same way. Work by others suggests that the brain responds quite differently to meditative and contemplative practices characteristic of some eastern religions, but so far little is known about the neuroscience of western spiritual practices.

The study is the first initiative of the Religious Brain Project, launched by a group of University of Utah researchers in 2014, which aims to understand how the brain operates in people with deep spiritual and religious beliefs.

Separation of a highly fluorescent anthranilic acid derivative from the reaction mixture.

The upper organic layer dissolved almost completely my compound from the reaction mixture and could be separated in one step. A good point was that the compound had a really strong fluorescence and if I placed an UV lamp next to the separation funnel it was easily observed that the water phase contained almost none of the title compound. 

Meet the obscure microbe that influences climate, ocean ecosystems, and perhaps even evolution

Penny Chisholm has had a 35-year love affair—with a microbe. For her, it’s been the perfect partner—elusive during courting, a source of intellectual fulfillment, and still full of mystery decades after their introduction during an ocean cruise.

To look at, the object of her passion is just a green mote, floating in vast numbers in the world’s oceans. But Chisholm has found hidden complexity within Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacterium that is the smallest, most abundant photosynthesizing cell in the ocean—responsible for 5% of global photosynthesis, by some estimates. Its many different versions, or ecotypes, thrive from the sunlit sea surface to a depth of 200 meters, where light is minimal. Collectively the “species” boasts an estimated 80,000 genes—four times what humans have, and plenty to deal with whatever the world’s oceans throw at it. “It’s a beautiful little life machine and like a superorganism,” Chisholm says. “It’s got a story to tell us.”

It’s #InternationalWomensDay! Here are twelve pioneering female chemists. Larger image & downloadable poster: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-2ra

Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about creationism, science celebrities and kids on National Geographic. Watch the full video here.

Molecule of the Day: VX

VX (C11H26NO2PS) is a colourless, odourless, oily liquid under room temperatures. It is a member of the V-series of nerve agents, and is an extremely potent poison - only 0.01 grams of it is needed to kill a person by skin contact. VX was recently implicated in the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in Malaysia.

VX is a potent inhibitor of acetylcholinesterase, which breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine into acetic acid and choline. The normal function of the enzyme is to regulate the concentration of acetylcholine within the synaptic cleft, so as to control the frequency of binding of acetylcholine to cholinergic receptors on the postsynaptic cell membrane and hence the transmission of impulses across the synapse.

Consequently, the inhibition of acetylcholinesterase results in a rapid increase in the synaptic concentration of acetylcholine, as the presynaptic knob continues to synthesise it and secrete it into the synaptic cleft. As a result, the cholinergic receptors on the postsynaptic cell membrane are continually stimulated, and a rapid series of action potentials are triggered. This results in muscle spasms and eventual paralysis, leading to death by asphyxiation due to paralysis of the diaphragm.

VX exposure is usually treated using an injection of atropine and pralidoxime. Atropine inhibits certain cholinergic receptors, reducing the binding of acetylcholine to receptors and thus the triggering of action potentials. On the other hand, one end of pralidoxime binds to acetylcholinesterase and the other binds to the phosphate group of VX, which causes the VX molecule to detach from the enzyme together with the pralidoxime molecule (see below). This restores the ability of acetylcholinesterase to hydrolyse acetylcholine, hence reducing its synaptic levels.

VX is synthesised from phosphorus trichloride over multiple steps; first, it is methylated, reacted with ethanol, then transesterified with N,N-diisopropylaminoethanol to produce QL. This is then oxidised with sulfur, and isomerised via heating to produce VX.

Largest Batch of Earth-size, Habitable Zone Planets

Our Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in an area called the habitable zone, where liquid water is most likely to exist on a rocky planet.

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system.

Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

This is the FIRST time three terrestrial planets have been found in the habitable zone of a star, and this is the FIRST time we have been able to measure both the masses and the radius for habitable zone Earth-sized planets.

All of these seven planets could have liquid water, key to life as we know it, under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets. To clarify, exoplanets are planets outside our solar system that orbit a sun-like star.

In this animation, you can see the planets orbiting the star, with the green area representing the famous habitable zone, defined as the range of distance to the star for which an Earth-like planet is the most likely to harbor abundant liquid water on its surface. Planets e, f and g fall in the habitable zone of the star.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated.

For comparison…if our sun was the size of a basketball, the TRAPPIST-1 star would be the size of a golf ball.

Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces.

The sun at the center of this system is classified as an ultra-cool dwarf and is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun.

 The planets also are very close to each other. How close? Well, if a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.

The planets may also be tidally-locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong wind blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.

Because most TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky, and they are very close to one another, scientists view the Galilean moons of Jupiter – lo, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede – as good comparisons in our solar system. All of these moons are also tidally locked to Jupiter. The TRAPPIST-1 star is only slightly wider than Jupiter, yet much warmer. 

How Did the Spitzer Space Telescope Detect this System?

Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing (aka transits) of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. 

Every time a planet passes by, or transits, a star, it blocks out some light. Spitzer measured the dips in light and based on how big the dip, you can determine the size of the planet. The timing of the transits tells you how long it takes for the planet to orbit the star.

The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets. Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using our upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone and other components of a planet’s atmosphere.

At 40 light-years away, humans won’t be visiting this system in person anytime soon…that said…this poster can help us imagine what it would be like: 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Viruses support photosynthesis in bacteria: An evolutionary advantage?

Viruses propagate by infecting a host cell and reproducing inside. This not only affects humans and animals, but bacteria as well. This type of virus is called bacteriophage. They carry so called auxiliary metabolic genes in their genome, which are responsible for producing certain proteins that give the virus an advantage. Researchers at the University of Kaiserslautern and the Ruhr University Bochum have analysed the structure of such a protein more closely. It appears to stimulate the photosynthesis of host bacteria. The study has now been published in the journal The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Raphael Gasper, Julia Schwach, Jana Hartmann, Andrea Holtkamp, Jessica Wiethaus, Natascha Riedel, Eckhard Hofmann, Nicole Frankenberg-Dinkel. Auxiliary metabolic genes- Distinct Features of Cyanophage-encoded T-type Phycobiliprotein Lyase θCpeT. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 2017; jbc.M116.769703 DOI: 10.1074/jbc.M116.769703

The association between the virus protein and bacterial pigment is incredibly stable. Furthermore, the complex is highly fluorescent. Credit: AG Frankenberg-Dinkel

If you dropped a water balloon on a bed of nails, you’d expect it to burst spectacularly. And you’d be right – some of the time. Under the right conditions, though, you’d see what a high-speed camera caught in the animation above: a pancake-shaped bounce with nary a leak. Physically, this is a scaled-up version of what happens to a water droplet when it hits a superhydrophobic surface. 

Water repellent superhydrophobic surfaces are covered in microscale roughness, much like a bed of tiny nails. When the balloon (or droplet) hits, it deforms into the gaps between posts. In the case of the water balloon, its rubbery exterior pulls back against that deformation. (For the droplet, the same effect is provided by surface tension.) That tension pulls the deformed parts of the balloon back up, causing the whole balloon to rebound off the nails in a pancake-like shape. For more, check out this video on the student balloon project or the original water droplet research. (Image credits: T. Hecksher et al., Y. Liu et al.; via The New York Times; submitted by Justin B.)

If it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

Carl Sagan (from Contact)

NASA Just Found A Solar System With 7 Earth-Like Planets

Astronomers just announced a breaking discovery that has a monumental impact on life beyond Earth: A planetary system with a number of Earth-sized planets that could host liquid water and, thus, life.

Today, scientists working with telescopes at the European Southern Observatory and NASA announced a remarkable new discovery: An entire system of Earth-sized planets. If that’s not enough, the team asserts that the density measurements of the planets indicates that the six innermost are Earth-like rocky worlds.

And that’s just the beginning.

Three of the planets lie in the star’s habitable zone. If you aren’t familiar with the term, the habitable zone (also known as the “goldilocks zone”) is the region surrounding a star in which liquid water could theoretically exist. This means that all three of these alien worlds may have entire oceans of water, dramatically increasing the possibility of life. The other planets are less likely to host oceans of water, but the team states that liquid water is still a possibility on each of these worlds.

Summing the work, lead author Michaël Gillon notes that this solar system has the largest number of Earth-sized planets yet found and the largest number of worlds that could support liquid water: “This is an amazing planetary system — not only because we have found so many planets, but because they are all surprisingly similar in size to the Earth!”

Co-author Amaury Triaud notes that the star in this system is an “ultracool dwarf,” and he clarifies what this means in relation to the planets: “The energy output from dwarf stars like TRAPPIST-1 is much weaker than that of our Sun. Planets would need to be in far closer orbits than we see in the Solar System if there is to be surface water. Fortunately, it seems that this kind of compact configuration is just what we see around TRAPPIST-1.”

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Last Week In Science

1. Broad Institute wins CRISPR patent battle

basically UC Berkely has rights to use CRISPR in “all kinds of cells” and Broad has rights in “eukaryotic cells” (yay legal system). Anticipate more legal battles since there are more types of CRISPR techniques

2. Human genome editing gets the OK to prevent “serious heritable diseases and conditions only” 

Bioshock likely to happen in 50 years as “serious disease” dwindles in to “mediocre disease” and finally “what the hell let’s shoot fire from our hands”

3. With the EPA at risk of being destroyed, what was life like before the EPA?

4. Congress wants to shift Earth Science away from NASA (and focus on deep space)

4.1 Coders continue to save climate data

5. This years winners of underwater photos

6. Got trash on your power lines? That’s alright just attach a flamethrower to a drone, no worries 

7. Fungicides bring us closer to figuring out why all of the bees are dying

7.1 (but who cares right? we can just make quadcopters do all the work)

8. Australia is HOT AS BALLS

9. Aztecs probably died off from salmonella outbreak

10. Our genetic past and present sanitary world lead to increased autoimmunity and allergy

10.1 Getting the right microbiome early on is so important for health

11. New Zealand on a new continent might make maps include it more often

12. Now you realize how slow the speed of light is on a cosmic scale

13. Meta-Analysis shows Vitamin D supplementation provides “modest protective effect” from respiratory infections like the flu or cold

14. Watch Yosemite’s Horsetail and its annual “FireFall” (image via Robert Minor)

15. Trump’s press conference makes people wonder if he is mentally ill and if we should start testing old ass presidents for dementia

16. He continue’s to spew more anti-vaccine bullshit, showing his ignorance of science and RFK Jr.’s scam needs “just one study” to change his mind

16.1 more than 350 organizations write to Trump to assure his feeble mind that vaccines are safe

17. Simple fractal patterns are key to Rorschach test

18. Imagine shining a light somewhere on your body and microscopic bots deliver drugs there

19. How flat can a planet be?

20. Triangulene created for the first time

Who needs carefully planned chemical reactions when you can just blast hydrogens off with electricity?

21. All of the nerdy. Valentine’s. you. will. ever. need. 

22. Help find Planet 9 in your spare time

22.1 Don’t have time? then do science while your computer is idle!

The race to map the human body — one cell at a time

The first time molecular biologist Greg Hannon flew through a tumour, he was astonished — and inspired. Using a virtual-reality model, Hannon and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge, UK, flew in and out of blood vessels, took stock of infiltrating immune cells and hatched an idea for an unprecedented tumour atlas.

“Holy crap!” he recalls thinking. “This is going to be just amazing.”

On 10 February, the London-based charity Cancer Research UK announced that Hannon’s team of molecular biologists, astronomers and game designers would receive up to £20 million (US$25 million) over the next five years to develop its interactive virtual-reality map of breast cancers. The tumour that Hannon flew through was a mock-up, but the real models will include data on the expression of thousands of genes and dozens of proteins in each cell of a tumour. The hope is that this spatial and functional detail could reveal more about the factors that influence a tumour’s response to treatment.

The project is just one of a string that aims to build a new generation of cell atlases: maps of organs or tumours that describe location and make-up of each cell in painstaking detail.

An excerpt from Time Magazines 10 Questions: Neil deGrasse Tyson.

(Time)

Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope everybody gets their share of dopamine and oxytocin today. #lovefeelings #scientificliteracy #braininlove #brainfeels

Image of the Week – February 13, 2017

CIL:40984 - http://www.cellimagelibrary.org/images/40984

Description: Montage image of a brain stem from a Brainbow transgenic mouse. In Brainbow mice, neurons randomly choose combinations of red, yellow and cyan fluorescent proteins, so that they each glow a particular color. This provides a way to distinguish neighboring neurons and visualize brain circuits. These are large caliber axons of the auditory pathway. First Prize, 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. For additional details see: Livet J, Weissman TA, Kang H, Draft RW, Lu J, Bennis RA, Sanes JR, Lichtman JW. Nature. 2007 Nov 1;450(7166):56-62.

Authors: Jean Livet and the 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®

Licensing: Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives: This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives License