November 27, 2006, 4:47 AM CT

Humpback Whale Brain Cells

Cetaceans, the group of marine mammals that includes whales and dolphins, have demonstrated remarkable auditory and communicative abilities, as well as complex social behaviors. A new study published online November 27, 2006 in The Anatomical Record, the official journal of the American Association of Anatomists,compared a humpback whale brain with brains from several other cetacean species and found the presence of a certain type of neuron cell that is also found in humans. This suggests that certain cetaceans and hominids may have evolved side by side. The study is available online via Wiley InterScience at http://www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/ar.

Although the biology of the humpback whale is well understood, there have been virtually no studies published on its brain composition, leaving an open question as to how brain structure may relate to the extensive behavioral and social abilities of this mammal. Although brain to body mass ratio, a rough measure of intelligence, is lower for baleen whales such as the humpback compared to toothed whales such as dolphins, the structure and large brain size of baleen whales suggests that they too have a complex and elaborate evolutionary history.

Patrick R. Hof and Estel Van der Gucht of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY, examined the brain of an adult humpback whale and compared it with the brain of a fin whale (another baleen species) and brains from several toothed whales, including three bottlenose dolphins, an Amazon river dolphin, a sperm whale, two beluga whales, a killer whale and several other whale and dolphin species. They found that the humpback cerebral cortex, the part of the brain where thought processes take place, was similar in complexity to smaller sized cetaceans such as dolphins. The large area of cortex found in these mammals is thought to be related to acoustic capabilities and the current study shows that it is organized into a system of core and belt regions. However, substantial variability was found between the cell structure of the cortex in humpbacks compared to toothed whales. The authors suggest that these differences may indicate differences in brain function and behavior in aquatic species that are not yet understood.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:58 AM CT

Dramatic Shift In Marine Ecosystems Occurred 250m Years Ago

The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago, an event that wiped out an estimated 95% of marine species and 70% of land species. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans.

Ecologically simple marine communities were largely displaced by complex communities. Furthermore, this apparently abrupt shift set a new pattern that has continued ever since. It reflects the current dominance of higher-metabolism, mobile organisms (such as snails, clams and crabs) that actually go out and find their own food and the decreased diversity of older groups of low-metabolism, stationary organisms (such as lamp shells and sea lilies) that filter nutrients from the water.

So says embargoed research would be published in Science on November 24, 2006. An accompanying article suggests that this striking change escaped detection until now because prior research relied on single numbers--such as the number of species alive at one particular time or the distribution of species in a local community--to track the diversity of marine life. In the new research, however, researchers examined the relative abundance of marine life forms in communities over the past 540 million years.........

Posted by: Ethen      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:52 AM CT

Wheat Gene To Boost Foods' Nutrient Content

Researchers at the University of California, Davis; the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and the University of Haifa in Israel have cloned a gene from wild wheat that increases the protein, zinc and iron content in the grain, potentially offering a solution to nutritional deficiencies affecting hundreds of millions of children around the world.

Results from the study would be reported in the Nov. 24 issue of the journal Science.

"Wheat is one of the world's major crops, providing approximately one-fifth of all calories consumed by humans, therefore, even small increases in wheat's nutritional value may help decrease deficiencies in protein and key micronutrients," said Professor Jorge Dubcovsky, a wheat breeder and leader of this research group. He noted that the World Health Organization estimates that more than 2 billion people are deficient in zinc and iron, and more than 160 million children under the age of five lack an adequate protein supply.

The cloned gene, designated GPC-B1 for its effect on Grain Protein Content, accelerates grain maturity and increases grain protein and micronutrient content by 10 to 15 percent in the wheat varieties studied so far. To prove that all these effects were produced by this gene, the researchers created genetically modified wheat lines with reduced levels of the GPC gene by a technique called RNA interference. These lines were developed by research geneticist Ann Blechl of USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Albany, Calif.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:36 AM CT

New Meaning To Term 'Older Than Dirt'

A especially resilient type of carbon from the first plants to regrow after the last ice age and that same type of carbon from all the plants since appears to have been accumulating for 11,000 years in the forests of British Columbia, Canada.

It's as if the carbon, which comes from the waxy material plants generate to protect their foliage from sun and weather, has been going into a bank account where only deposits are being made and virtually no withdrawals.

Modelers of the Earth's carbon cycle, who've worked on the assumption that this type of carbon remains in the soils only 1,000 to 10,000 years before microorganisms return it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, will need to revise their thinking if findings published in the Nov. 24 issue of Science are typical of other northern forests.

"Our results about the resilience of this particular kind of carbon suggest that the turnover time of this carbon pool may be 10,000 to 100,000 years," says Rienk Smittenberg, a research associate with the University of Washington School of Oceanography and lead author of the paper. He did the work while at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research.

Soils harbor the third-largest pool of carbon in the world behind the carbon locked deep in the Earth as fossil fuel oils and coal and the carbon that is dissolved in the world's oceans.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:23 AM CT

Heat Flow Deep In Earth

Earth's interior is not a non-cancerous world that only stores the geologic history of our planet. Geologists now see the normally assumed placid inner Earth as a dynamic environment filled with exotic materials and substances roiling under intense heat and pressures. It is an environment that continues to evolve in interesting ways and one that has an impact on what happens at its surface.

The latest evidence of this dynamic inner Earth is revealed in a recent series of measurements that peered deep within Earth, halfway to its center. The new experiments have yielded important results that help determine temperature halfway to the center of Earth. It also has implications for the age of Earth's solid inner core and how its magnetic field may be generated.

"We have found unexpected rock layering in Earth's deepest mantle," said Edward Garnero of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and one of the researchers on the team. "The implications of the layering are far reaching, with intimate connections to the rock chemistry, temperature and convective flow, all of which have been previously inaccessible".

"Understanding of Earth's core-mantle boundary environment puts us in the position of answering a host of important questions, such as how much heat from the molten outer core cooks the overlying mantle," Garnero explained. "While this might seem distant and esoteric, it actually relates to the vigor of convective mantle flow that ultimately jostles Earth's surface with volcanic and earthquake processes".........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 26, 2006, 7:07 AM CT

Unique View Of Underwater Eruption

A combination of luck and being in the right place at the right time allowed a University of Florida geologist and other researchers to capture and record an undersea volcanic eruption for the first time ever.

The eruption, which took place early this spring thousands of feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, is described in a paper set for release Thursday in Science Express, the journal Sciences online magazine.

Never before have we had instruments in place like this that recorded an eruptive event on the seafloor, said Mike Perfit, a UF professor of geology.

Perfit was among the researchers who visited the eruption shortly after it took place aboard the deep-sea submersible Alvin. The project was headed by Maya Tolstoy, a seismologist with Columbia Universitys Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and the lead author of the Science paper.

Perfit said the eruption occurred about 400 miles west of Mexico along a massive volcanic mountain range called the East Pacific Rise. Fortuitously, it was one of three active undersea volcanic areas that were selected for high-intensity research in the late 1990s as part of the National Science Foundations RIDGE research program. As a result, geologists, biologists, geophysicists and other specialists had gathered a storehouse of samples, data and photos from the site.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 23, 2006, 5:30 AM CT

On the cutting edge: Carbon nanotube cutlery

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) have designed a carbon nanotube knife that, in theory, would work like a tight-wire cheese slicer. In a paper presented this month at the 2006 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition*, the research team announced a prototype nanoknife that could, in the future, become a tabletop tool of biology, allowing researchers to cut and study cells more precisely than they can today.

For years, biologists have wrestled with conventional diamond or glass knives, which cut frozen cell samples at a large angle, forcing the samples to bend and sometimes later crack. Because carbon nanotubes are extremely strong and slender in diameter, they make ideal materials for thinly cutting precise slivers of cells. In particular, researchers might use the nanoknife to make 3D images of cells and tissues for electron tomography, which requires samples less than 300 nanometers thick.

By manipulating carbon nanotubes inside scanning electron microscopes, 21st-century nanosmiths have begun crafting a suite of research tools, including nanotweezers, nanobearings and nano-oscillators. To design the nanoknife, the NIST and CU researchers welded a carbon nanotube between two electrochemically sharpened tungsten needles. In the resulting prototype, the nanotube stretches between two ends of a tungsten wire loop. The knife resembles a steel wire that cuts a block of cheese.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 22, 2006, 5:12 AM CT

The Power Behind Insect Flight

Scientists from Rensselaer and the University of Vermont have discovered a key molecular mechanism that allows tiny flies and other "no-see-ums" to whirl their wings at a dizzying rate of up to 1,000 times per second. The findings were reported in last week's online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"We have determined important details of the biochemical reaction by which the fastest known muscle type - insect flight muscle - powers flight," said Douglas Swank, assistant professor of biology at Rensselaer and lead author of the PNAS paper.

The findings will help researchers gain a better understanding of how chemical energy is converted into muscle movements, such as human heart muscle pumping blood. The research also could lead to novel insights into heart disease, and might ultimately serve in the development of gene therapies targeted toward correcting mutations in proteins that detrimentally alter the speed at which heart muscle fibers contract.

Since insects have been remarkably successful in adapting to a great range of physical and biological environments, in large part due to their ability to fly, the research also will interest researchers studying the evolution of flight, Swank noted. The project is supported by a three-year $240,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health and a four-year $260,000 grant from the American Heart Association.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 22, 2006, 4:40 AM CT

NASA Nanotechnology Comes to Market

Finding affordable ways to make technology available to everyone is a common challenge. Now, NASA has done that with the process that creates "nanotubes".

A nanotube is a tiny, hollow, long, thin and strong tube with an outside diameter of a nanometer that is formed from atoms such as carbon. A hair from a person's head is around 50,000 nanometers wide. If you split a hair into 50,000 strands, that would be the width of a nanometer.

Nanotubes are really important in technology, because when they are made a certain way, a nanotube can conduct (allow movement of) electricity as well as copper does. When they are made a slightly different way, nanotubes are electrical semiconductors, which mean they can be switched between insulating from electricity to conducting electricity. Semiconductors make it possible to miniaturize electronic components. Nanotubes can be either semiconductors or conductors depending on how they are made.

Nanotubes are also stronger than steel, so long filaments can be used to create super-tough lightweight materials. To understand how strong a nanotube is, think of a hair holding up a barbell.

Although the carbon nanotubes were discovered 15 years ago, their use has been limited due to the complex, dangerous, and expensive methods for their production.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

November 21, 2006, 9:05 PM CT

Safer Ways To Detect Uranium Minerals

The threat of 'dirty' bombs and plans to use nuclear power as an energy source have driven Queensland University of Technology scientists to discover a new, safer way of detecting radioative contamination in the ground.

Professor Ray Frost, from QUT's School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, has found a way of identifying, from a remote location, uranium deposits that have leached into the soil and water.

"The ability to be able to easily and readily detect uranium minerals, especially secondary minerals, is of great importance especially in today's current climate of terrorism and increased uranium mining," Professor Frost said.

"What is not commonly known is that many uranium minerals, especially the secondary minerals, are soluble and can translocate or move in water to areas far away from where uranium sites are found.

"This means that uranium minerals could arise in soils and sediments from unknown origins and in locations far from their origins".

Professor Frost said using a technique known as near infrared spectroscopy, radioactive minerals could be detected by scientists located far away from a contaminated site.

"Using a fibre optic probe and the near infrared spectroscopy technique, we have found that we can detect whether uranium minerals are present in soil.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source