Starship Asterisk*

Ann wrote:Earth wasn't supposed to stand out that much from Mars and Venus.

Ann wrote:The few golden age sci-fi books about trips to Mars and Venus that I read all promised me that Mars and Venus were going to be full of life, just like the Earth. Why aren't they? Are they te ones that are strange, or is it the Earth that is exceptional? I have come to believe quite strongly in the "rarity" of the Earth.

Nature versus nurture -- better looking birds have healthier babies
A female great tits' (Parus major) appearance is shown to signal healthy attributes in offspring in a paper in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers in Zoology. The black stripe across her breast and white patches on her cheeks correlate to a chick's weight at two weeks and immune strength respectively – though the former seems to signal a genetic benefit and the latter can affect an 'adopted' chick's health, suggesting nurture is involved.

Taking two mothers with different patterning, and swapping their chicks, researchers from Palacky University in the Czech Republic were able to investigate the growth and health of the infants and the 'ornamentation' of their mothers. They compared the offspring's weight, size and immune strength and found a correlation between the chick's weight at two weeks and the size of black breast stripe on the genetic mother.

The immaculateness of both genetic and foster mother's white cheek patch was related to the strength of chick's immune response suggesting that this was due to both nurture and genetics. In contrast the body size of a chick was related only to the body size of its genetic mother and not to ornamentation at all.

In these socially monogamous birds both the males and females are brightly coloured, however neither the cheek patch nor the stripe in males affected the health of the babies.

Talking about how the ornaments can have evolved to signal reproductive fitness, Vladimír Remeš and Beata Matysioková who performed this study explained, "Bigger healthier babies are important to the reproductive success of individuals, because they are more likely to survive to adulthood - so it is useful for birds to be able to work out which potential mates will produce the best babies. Maintaining bright colouration uses up resources which could otherwise be invested in reproduction or self-maintenance - consequently the evolution and maintenance of ornamentation in female great tits is probably due to direct selection by males."

owlice wrote:

Ann wrote:Earth wasn't supposed to stand out that much from Mars and Venus.

Ann, on what do you base that statement, please?

Ann wrote:The few golden age sci-fi books about trips to Mars and Venus that I read all promised me that Mars and Venus were going to be full of life, just like the Earth. Why aren't they? Are they te ones that are strange, or is it the Earth that is exceptional? I have come to believe quite strongly in the "rarity" of the Earth.

Science fiction promised nothing. It's, by definition, fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterre ... th_century wrote:

The trend to assume that celestial bodies were populated almost by default was tempered as actual probes visited potential alien abodes in the Solar System beginning in the second half of the 20th century

Ann wrote:

owlice wrote:

Ann wrote:Earth wasn't supposed to stand out that much from Mars and Venus.

Ann, on what do you base that statement, please?

Ann wrote:The few golden age sci-fi books about trips to Mars and Venus that I read all promised me that Mars and Venus were going to be full of life, just like the Earth. Why aren't they? Are they te ones that are strange, or is it the Earth that is exceptional? I have come to believe quite strongly in the "rarity" of the Earth.

Science fiction promised nothing. It's, by definition, fiction.

I base my statement on being "promised" that Mars and Venus would not be too different from the Earth on reading about space and the solar system from the very early 1960s onwards.

Around 1962, my parents bought a book which was probably called Reader's Digest Golden Book about Nature. This book contained a chapter about Mars. The author told us that in the year 2000, people would travel as tourists in spaceships to Mars. I was incredibly impressed. The text was a mixture of fantastically optimistic prospects and cautionary warnings. For example, the writer told us that those who wanted to go to Mars as tourists had better have their wisdom teeth and apendixes out first, and I pictured shiploads of people going to Mars, all with holes in their gums and scars on their bellies. (Not to mention the fact that even trying to picture the year 2000 and myself as a 45-year-old woman made me dizzy.)

The author also described Mars in some detail. There will be no intelligent aliens on Mars, he explained, because the atmosphere on Mars is too thin to support such life forms. There will be no animals either, at least no animals large enough for us to see them. But, he went on, there will be and there is vegetation. We can see from the Earth how Mars changes color with the seasons, he explained, which is a sure sign of vegetation (he wrote). And if there is vegetation on Mars, as indeed there is (he said), then there must necessarily be water there as well. So the Martian canals that most of us have heard about are really there, except they are natural rivers and not waterways built by a technological civilization.

There was an illustration in the book of a Martian landscape. The landscape was quite flat, but softened by some kind of vegetation that looked a bit like algae or moss. A river meandered through the landscape. As I pictured shiploads of human tourists milling about near the river, this Martian scene really seemed quite Earthlike to me.

So in around 1962, I became convinced that Mars was a planet relatively similar to the Earth, with water and vegetation. You could argue that I should have known better than to believe in that kind of nonsense. However, I had no access to any kind of information that contradicted the text in my parents' Reader's Digest book. Back then I didn't speak a word of English, and would have been totally unable to read any of the prestigious English-language astronomy journals or any of their articles based on Mariner 4's flyby in 1965, which showed a cratered, barren and dry Mars. There were one or two Swedish-language journals that I could theoretically have read, but I didn't know they existed, and my parents didn't either, I'm sure.

In around 1970, I read a shocking piece of news in my local newspaper - well, it was shocking to me, because it was obviously shocking to the reporter who had written the text. The reporter wrote that Venus had been found to be hellishly hot and completely unsuitable for life as we know it. He confessed to us that he had believed for years that Venus might be a possible abode for life. Based solely on the distance between Venus and the Sun, the average temperature of the Venusian surface should be just below the boiling point of water, or just below 100C. There should be microorganisms which should be able to stand that heat, or so the reporter had believed anyway. Now Venus had changed from a planet with microorganisms into a dead, schorching 400C desert from the reporter's point of view, and he felt bereft.

To me, the reporter's optimistic belief and his subsequent disappointment were enormously significant. When the Viking landers sent back pictures of Mars, I remembered the text in my parents' Reader's Digest book which had promised vegetation and water-filled rivers. When I started buying Sky&Telescope Magazine and Astronomy Magazine in the 1980s, I came across several articles which claimed that the habitable zone of the solar system included Venus and Mars. So Venus and Mars should have been possible abodes for life. Why weren't they? Isn't it because many people have been defining the expression "´habitable zone" too optimistically, as if any planet in a star's habitable zone would automatically be actually inhabited?

I'm very well aware that Mars and even Venus may still turn out to have microbial life. But the vegetation and the plentiful liquid surface water that I was made to believe in when I was seven just aren't there at all. The "just below the boiling point of water" Venus that the reporter believed in isn't there, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterre ... th_century wrote:

The trend to assume that celestial bodies were populated almost by default was tempered as actual probes visited potential alien abodes in the Solar System beginning in the second half of the 20th century

So I think that it is no exaggeration to say that the belief in an Earthlike Mars (and even a moderately Earthlike Venus) has been really widespread.

Most certainly there have been various scientists and astronomers who have disputed the Earthlike qualities of Mars, ever since 1894, when U.S. astronomer William Wallace Campbell showed that there was neither oxygen nor water in the Martian atmosphere.

But all in all, I think it is correct to say that "the western mindset" has been promoting the idea that there is life on Mars. And this "promoting" has been going on from more than a century.

By the way, I googled the word "Martians". I got 5,200,000 hits.

Ann

American Chemical Society
Explaining how extra virgin olive oil protects against Alzheimer’s disease

The mystery of exactly how consumption of extra virgin olive oil helps reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may lie in one component of olive oil that helps shuttle the abnormal AD proteins out of the brain, scientists are reporting in a new study. It appears in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.

Amal Kaddoumi and colleagues note that AD affects about 30 million people worldwide, but the prevalence is lower in Mediterranean countries. Scientists once attributed it to the high concentration of healthful monounsaturated fats in olive oil — consumed in large amounts in the Mediterranean diet. Newer research suggested that the actual protective agent might be a substance called oleocanthal, which has effects that protect nerve cells from the kind of damage that occurs in AD. Kaddoumi’s team sought evidence on whether oleocanthal helps decrease the accumulation of beta-amyloid (Aβ) in the brain, believed to be the culprit in AD.

They describe tracking the effects of oleocanthal in the brains and cultured brain cells of laboratory mice used as stand-ins for humans in such research. In both instances, oleocanthal showed a consistent pattern in which it boosted production of two proteins and key enzymes believed to be critical in removing Aβ from the brain. “Extra-virgin olive oil-derived oleocanthal associated with the consumption of Mediterranean diet has the potential to reduce the risk of AD or related neurodegenerative dementias,” the report concludes.

The first caffeine-'addicted' bacteria

Some people may joke about living on caffeine, but scientists now have genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to do that — literally. Their report in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology describes bacteria being "addicted" to caffeine in a way that promises practical uses ranging from decontamination of wastewater to bioproduction of medications for asthma.

Jeffrey E. Barrick and colleagues note that caffeine and related chemical compounds have become important water pollutants due to widespread use in coffee, soda pop, tea, energy drinks, chocolate and certain medications. These include prescription drugs for asthma and other lung diseases. The scientists knew that a natural soil bacterium, Pseudomonas putida CBB5, can actually live solely on caffeine and could be used to clean up such environmental contamination. So they set out to transfer genetic gear for metabolizing, or breaking down, caffeine from P. putida into that old workhorse of biotechnology, E. coli, which is easy to handle and grow.

The study reports their success in doing so, as well as use of the E. coli for decaffeination and measuring the caffeine content of beverages. It describes development of a synthetic packet of genes for breaking down caffeine and related compounds that can be moved easily to other microbes. When engineered into certain E. coli, the result was bacteria literally addicted to caffeine. The genetic packet could have applications beyond environmental remediation, the scientists say, citing potential use as a sensor to measure caffeine levels in beverages, in recovery of nutrient-rich byproducts of coffee processing and for the cost-effective bioproduction of medicines.

A new look at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth’s species, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.

Led by Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the team used models that show the collision would have vaporized huge amounts of rock that were then blown high above Earth’s atmosphere. The re-entering ejected material would have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- about the temperature of an oven broiler element -- killing every living thing not sheltered underground or underwater.

• Journal of Geophysical Research (online 26 Mar 2013) DOI: 10.1002/jgrg.20018

bystander wrote:...[W]ould have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- about the temperature of an oven broiler element -- killing every living thing not sheltered underground or underwater.

Discovery opens door to efficiently storing and reusing renewable energy

Two University of Calgary researchers have developed a ground-breaking way to make new affordable and efficient catalysts for converting electricity into chemical energy.

Their technology opens the door to homeowners and energy companies being able to easily store and reuse solar and wind power. Such energy is clean and renewable, but it's available only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

The research by Curtis Berlinguette and Simon Trudel, both in the chemistry department in the Faculty of Science, has just been published in Science – one of the world's top peer-reviewed journals.

"This breakthrough offers a relatively cheaper method of storing and reusing electricity produced by wind turbines and solar panels," says Curtis Berlinguette, associate professor of chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Energy Conversion.

"Our work represents a critical step for realizing a large-scale, clean energy economy," adds Berlinguette, who's also director of the university's Centre for Advanced Solar Materials.

Simon Trudel, assistant professor of chemistry, says their work "opens up a whole new field of how to make catalytic materials. We now have a large new arena for discovery."

The pair have patented their technology and created from their university research a spin-off company, FireWater Fuel Corp., to commercialize their electrocatalysts for use in electrolyzers.

Electrolyzer devices use catalysts to drive a chemical reaction that converts electricity into chemical energy by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen fuels. These fuels can then be stored and re-converted to electricity for use whenever wanted.

The only byproduct from such a 'green' energy system is water, which can be recycled through the system.

To store and provide renewable power to a typical house would require an electrolyzer about the size of a beer fridge, containing a few litres of water and converting hydrogen to electricity with virtually no emissions, the researchers say.

Key to their discovery is that they deviated from conventional thinking about catalysts, which typically are made from rare, expensive and toxic metals in a crystalline structure.

Instead, Berlinguette and Trudel turned to simpler production methods for catalysts. This involved using abundant metal compounds or oxides (including iron oxide or 'rust'), to create mixed metal oxide catalysts having a disordered, or amorphous, structure.

Laboratory tests – reported in their Science paper – show their new catalysts perform as well or better than expensive catalysts now on the market, yet theirs cost 1,000 times less.

Declaring a truce with our microbiological frienemies

Managing bacteria and other microorganisms in the body, rather than just fighting them, may be lead to better health and a stronger immune system, according to a Penn State biologist.

Researchers have historically focused on microbes in the body as primarily pathogens that must be fought, said Eric Harvill, professor of microbiology and infectious disease. However, he said that recent evidence of the complex interaction of the body with microbes suggests a new interpretation of the relationship.

"Now we are beginning to understand that the immune system interacts with far more beneficial bacteria than pathogens," said Harvill. "We need to re-envision what the true immune system really is."

Harvill said that this reinterpretation leads to a more flexible approach to understanding how the immune system interacts with microbes. This approach should balance between defending against pathogens and enlisting the help of beneficial microbes.

While the role that some bacteria play in aiding digestion is better known, microbes assist in improving body functions, including strengthening the immune system and responding to injuries.

In some cases, attacking pathogens can harm the beneficial effects microbes have on immune system, according to Harvill. For example, patients on antibiotics have an increased risk of contracting yeast infections and MRSA.

"Viewing everything currently considered immunity, including both resistance and tolerance, as aspects of a complex microbiome management system that mediates interactions with the sea of microbes that surround us, many of which are beneficial, can provide a much more positive outlook and different valuable perspectives," Harvill said.

The system that includes bacteria and other microbes in the human body, or the microbiome, is much larger and more integrated into human health than most people suspect, according to Harvill.

"The human body has ten times more bacterial cells than human cells," said Harvill. Adding to the complexity is the adaptive capacity of the human immune system. The immune system can develop antibodies against certain pathogens, which it can reuse when threatened by future attacks from the same pathogen.

Harvill, who described his alternative viewpoint in the latest issue of mBio, said that some researchers have not yet accepted this broader approach to the immune system.

"Among immunologists or microbiologists this is an alien concept," said Harvill. "It's not part of how we have historically looked at the immune system, but it's a useful viewpoint."

Other researchers who study plant and nonhuman biology are already starting to embrace the concept. For example, plant biologists are beginning to recognize that viruses can help plants resist drought and heat.

"Within nonhuman immunology, this is not an alien concept because they have seen many examples of beneficial relationships between the host and its microbial commensals," Harvill said. Harvill said adopting this new perspective could be the first step toward new medical treatments.

"This new viewpoint suggests new experiments and results will published," said Harvill. "And, hopefully, the concept becomes more and more mainstream as supporting evidence accumulates."

Nothing fishy about it: Fish oil can boost the immune system

New research published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that instead of suppressing the body's immune response, fish oil actually enhances the function of B cells

Fish oil rich in DHA and EPA is widely believed to help prevent disease by reducing inflammation, but until now, scientists were not entirely sure about its immune enhancing effects. A new report appearing in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, helps provide clarity on this by showing that DHA-rich fish oil enhances B cell activity, a white blood cell, challenging the notion that fish oil is only immunosuppressive. This discovery is important as it shows that fish oil does not necessarily reduce the overall immune response to lower inflammation, possibly opening the doors for the use of fish oil among those with compromised immune systems.

Researcher offers clues on the origins of life

3-year study offers new evidence about where scientists should be looking

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A structural biologist at the Florida State University College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago.

Professor Michael Blaber and his team produced data supporting the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt (halophile) environment. Such proteins would have been capable of providing metabolic activity for the first living organisms to emerge on the planet between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago.

The results of Blaber's three-year study, which was built around investigative techniques that took more than 17 years to develop, are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first living organisms would have been microscopic, cell-like organizations capable of replicating and adapting to environmental conditions — a humble beginning to life on Earth.

"The current paradigm on the emergence of life is that RNA came first and in a high-temperature environment," Blaber said. "The data we are generating are much more in favor of a protein-first view in a halophile environment."

The widely accepted view among scientists is that RNA, found in all living cells, would have likely represented the first molecules of life, hypothesizing an "RNA-first" view of the origin of living systems from non-living molecules. Blaber's results indicate that the set of amino acids produced by simple chemical processes contains the requisite information to produce complex folded proteins, which supports an opposing "protein-first" view.

Another prevailing view holds that a high-temperature (thermophile) environment, such as deep-ocean thermal vents, may have been the breeding ground for the origin of life.

"The halophile, or salt-loving, environment has typically been considered one that life adapted into, not started in," Blaber said. "Our study of the prebiotic amino acids and protein design and folding suggests the opposite."

Without the ability to fold, proteins would not be able to form the precise structures essential for functions that sustain life as we know it. Folding allows proteins to take on a globular shape through which they can interact with other proteins, perform specific chemical reactions, and adapt to enable organisms to exploit a given environment.

"There are numerous niches that life can evolve into," Blaber said. "For example, extremophiles are organisms that exist in high temperatures, high acidity, extreme cold, extreme pressure and extreme salt and so on. For life to exist in such environments it is essential that proteins are able to adapt in those conditions. In other words, they have to be able to fold."

Comet and meteorite fragments, like those that recently struck in the Urals region of Russia, have provided evidence regarding the arrival of amino acids on Earth. Such fragments predate the earth and would have been responsible for delivering a set of 10 prebiotic (before life) amino acids, whose origins are in the formation of our solar system.

Today the human body uses 20 common amino acids to make all its proteins. Ten of those emerged through biosynthetic pathways — the way living systems evolve. Ten — the prebiotic set — can be made by chemical reactions without requiring any living system or biosynthetic pathway.

Scientific evidence exists to support many elements in theories of abiogenesis (the emergence of life), including the time frame (around 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago) and the conditions on Earth and in its atmosphere at that time. Earth would have been made up of volcanic land masses (the beginning of the formation of continents), salty oceans and fresh-water ponds, along with a hot (around 80 degrees Celsius) and steamy atmosphere comprising carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Oxygen would have come later as a by-product of green plant life and bacteria that emerged.

Using a technique called top-down symmetric deconstruction, Blaber's lab has been able to identify small peptide building blocks capable of spontaneous assembly into specific and complex protein architectures. His recent work explored whether such building blocks can be comprised of only the 10 prebiotic amino acids and still fold.

His team has achieved foldability in proteins down to 12 amino acids — about 80 percent of the way to proving his hypothesis.

If Blaber's theory holds, scientists may refocus where they look for evidence in the quest to understand where, and how, life began.

"Rather than a curious niche that life evolved into, the halophile environment now may take center stage as the likely location for key aspects of abiogenesis," he said. "Likewise, the role of the formation of proteins takes on additional importance in the earliest steps in the beginnings of life on Earth."

###
Co-authors on the PNAS paper are Liam M. Longo, an FSU graduate student, and Jihun Lee, a former postdoctoral researcher now at the National Institutes of Health.

Djehuty Project discovers significant evidence of the 17th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt

The Djehuty Project, led by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has discovered on the hill of Dra Abu el-Naga in Luxor (ancient Thebes), the burials of four personages belonging to the elite of the 17th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, who lived about 3.550 years ago. These findings, discovered during the 12th campaign of archeological excavations of the project, shed light on a little-known historical period in which Thebes becomes the capital of the kingdom and the empire's foundations become established with the dominance of Egypt over Palestine and Syria to the north, and over Nubia to the south.

The project is led by the CSIC researcher José Manuel Galán, from the Institute of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (ILC), and funded by Unión Fenosa Gas and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.

The 17th Dynasty belongs to the historical period called Second Intermediate Period of Egypt (between 1800 and 1550 BC), characterized by the hegemony of rulers of Syrian-Palestinian origin settled in the eastern Delta. This is a period of great political complexity in which the monarchy did not control all the territory and the real power was in the hands of local rulers.....
....
The second tomb belongs to the high-level official Ahhotep, also called "spokesman of Nekhen", city better-know as the Greek toponym Hierakonpolis. In the burial chamber, archeologists found (as part of the grave goods) three clay funerary figurines (shabtis), painted and with the deceased's name written on the front.

Galán adds: "Two of these shabtis were found inside of both small clay sarcophagi, decorated with an inscription on the sides and on the top. The third one was wrapped in nine linen fabrics, as if it was a real mummy, and each of the fabrics had traces of writing in black ink. These figurines have a very original and naïf style, which provides them a special charm and a unique character".

Ann wrote:Thank you for these posts, Margarita. Many of them are really interesting.

Ann

University of Vermont
Sea Mammals Find U.S. Safe Harbor
In 1972, a U.S. Senate committee reported, “Many of the great whales which once populated the oceans have now dwindled to the edge of extinction,” due to commercial hunting. The committee also worried about how tuna fishing was accidentally killing thousands of dolphins, trapped in fishing gear. And they considered reports about seal hunting and the decline of other mammals, including sea otters and walruses.
In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

MargaritaMc wrote:

University of Vermont
Sea Mammals Find U.S. Safe Harbor
In 1972, a U.S. Senate committee reported, “Many of the great whales which once populated the oceans have now dwindled to the edge of extinction,” due to commercial hunting. The committee also worried about how tuna fishing was accidentally killing thousands of dolphins, trapped in fishing gear. And they considered reports about seal hunting and the decline of other mammals, including sea otters and walruses.
In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=15843

http://www.slashgear.com/iranian-scientist-claims-to-have-invented-time-machine-11277564/ wrote:

Iranian scientist claims to have invented time machine
Brittany Hillen, Apr 11th 2013

<<Iran could be home to the world’s first time machine, if claims from an Iranian scientist are to be believed (color us skeptical). According to The Telegraph, a scientist based in Tehran, Iran has registered with the Center for Strategic Inventions a device called “The Aryayek Time Traveling Machine,” which can reportedly allow individuals to peer into the future – up to 8 years into the future, that is.

The time machine isn’t of the police box or compact car variety, however, with the 27-year-old inventor Ali Razeghi stating that it can fit in a briefcase. Likewise, it doesn’t work in the conventional ways a time machine is imagined to work. Rather than whisking users away to the past or future, this device is said to make its predictions based on the touch of a user.

Supposedly by touching the time machine device, it will make a reading 5 to 8 years into that person’s future, providing a print out of the data with 98-percent accuracy. He has created 179 other inventions, and says this particular one has been a work-in-progress since he was 10-years-old. As you might suspect, the government application of such a device has already been discussed. Said Razeghi: “Naturally a government that can see five years into the future would be able to prepare itself for challenges that might destabilise it. As such we expect to market this invention among states as well as individuals once we reach a mass production stage.” The reason for why it has not been revealed yet? The inventor says China will steal it.>>

According to The Telegraph,