April 21, 2007, 7:24 AM CT

Science at the Crossroads

Reaching across Fordham Road, long-time neighbors have forged a new bond in the name of science. Beginning in September 2008, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Fordham University's Graduate School of Education (GSE) will team up to offer a joint graduate program. The coursework will lead to a master of science in education degree and a New York State initial teacher certification in adolescent science.

education (biology grades 7 through 12).

The partnership between informal science institution and university is the first degree-granting program of its kind in the U.S. Its innovators hope the program will spawn similar collaborations elsewhere; zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, and science museums can all serve as valuable resources for science teaching.

Students in the Bronx Zoo/Fordham University Graduate School of Education will take courses at the Zoo in subjects such as conservation biology, habitat ecology, environmental science, natural resource use, ecosystem function, wildlife conservation, and population biology. At Fordham University, they will study the psychology of adolescent development and learning, learning environments for adolescents, and teaching methods for linguistically and culturally diverse adolescents, among other topics. Students in the program will also gain field experience as teaching fellows by working alongside experienced science instructors both in the school classroom and at WCS's New York City facilities (the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, and Central Park, Queens, and Prospect Park Zoos)......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 18, 2007, 11:02 PM CT

Impact Of Asian Dust And Pollution On Clouds

Scientists using one of the nation's newest and most capable research aircraft are launching a far-reaching field project this month to study plumes of airborne dust and pollutants that originate in Asia and journey to North America. The plumes are among the largest such events on Earth, so great in scope that scientists believe they might affect clouds and weather across thousands of miles while interacting with the sun's radiation and playing a role in global climate.

Known as PACDEX (PACific Dust EXperiment), the project will be led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. NCAR's main sponsor, the National Science Foundation (NSF), will provide most of the funding. The first mission will be launched in late April, depending on weather patterns in Asia. It will continue for almost two months.

"PACDEX comes at a crucial time in our efforts to understand the regional impacts of global warming," says V. Ramanathan, a PACDEX principal investigator based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "It will also help us examine how the dust and soot modifies storm tracks and cloud systems across the Pacific, which influence North American weather patterns in major ways. By focusing on these plumes, PACDEX will shed light on one of the major environmental issues of this decade"......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 17, 2007, 4:54 AM CT

Ebola outbreaks killing thousands of gorillas

Why have large outbreaks of Ebola virus killed tens of thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees over the last decade? Observations published in the recent issue of The American Naturalist provide new clues, suggesting that outbreaks may be amplified by Ebola transmission between ape social groups. The study provides hope that newly developed vaccines could control the devastating impact of Ebola on wild apes.

Direct encounters between gorilla or chimpanzee social groups are rare. Therefore, when reports of large ape die-offs first surfaced in the late 1990s, outbreak amplification was assumed to be through "massive spillover" from some unknown reservoir host. The new study, conducted by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Cambridge University, and Stony Brook University at three sites in northern Republic of Congo, suggests that Ebola transmission between ape groups might occur through routes other than direct social encounter. For instance, as many as four different gorilla groups fed in the same fruit tree on a single day. Thus, infective body fluids deposited by one group might easily be encountered by a subsequent group. Chimpanzees and gorillas also fed simultaneously in the same fruit tree at least once every seven days.

The study also provided the first evidence that gorillas from one social group closely inspect the carcasses of gorillas from other groups. Contact with corpses at funerals is a major mechanism of Ebola transmission in humans. Together with other recent observations on patterns of gorilla mortality, these results make a strong case that transmission between ape social groups plays a central role in Ebola outbreak amplification......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 16, 2007, 10:14 PM CT

Was Einstein right?

For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct. Today, at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) Relativity Mission, a collaboration of Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin, will provide the first public peek at data that will reveal whether Einstein's theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever created.

"Gravity Probe B has been a great scientific adventure for all of us, and we are grateful to NASA for its long history of support," Everitt said. "My colleagues and I will be presenting the first results today and tomorrow. It's fascinating to be able to watch the Einstein warping of space-time directly in the tilting of these GP-B gyroscopes-more than a million times better than the best inertial navigation gyroscopes".

The GP-B satellite was launched in April 2004. It collected more than a year's worth of data that the Stanford GP-B science team has been poring over for the past 18 months. The satellite was designed as a pristine, space-borne laboratory, whose sole task was to use four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure directly two effects predicted by general relativity. One is the geodetic effect-the amount by which the mass of the Earth warps the local space-time in which it resides. The other effect, called frame-dragging, is the amount by which the rotating Earth drags local space-time around with it. According to Einstein's theory, over the course of a year, the geodetic warping of Earth's local space-time causes the spin axes of each gyroscope to shift from its initial alignment by a minuscule angle of 6.606 arc-seconds (0.0018 degrees) in the plane of the spacecraft's orbit. Likewise, the twisting of Earth's local space-time causes the spin axis to shift by an even smaller angle of 0.039 arc-seconds (0.000011 degrees)-about the width of a human hair viewed from a quarter mile away-in the plane of the Earth's equator......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 12, 2007, 6:29 PM CT

Quantum dot lasers

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Stanford and Northwestern Universities have built micrometer-sized solid-state lasers in which a single quantum dot can play a dominant role in the devices performance. Correctly tuned, these microlasers switch on at energies in the sub-microwatt range. These highly efficient optical devices could one day produce the ultimate low-power laser for telecommunications, optical computing and optical standards.

How small can a laser get? The typical laser has a vast number of emitterselectronic transitions in an extended crystal, for exampleconfined within an optical cavity. Light trapped and reflecting back and forth in the cavity triggers the cascade of coherent, laser light. But about a decade ago, researchers made the first quantum dot laser. Quantum dots are nanoscale regions in a crystal structure that can trap electrons and holes, the charge carriers that transport current in a semiconductor. When a trapped electron-hole pair recombines, light of a specific frequency is emitted. Quantum-dot lasers have attracted attention as possible embedded communications devices not only for their small size, but because they switch on with far less power then even the solid-state lasers used in DVD players......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 11, 2007, 10:55 PM CT

Earthshaking Images

The powerful earthquake struck suddenly, shaking the seven-story building so hard it bent, cracked and swayed in response.

But this was no ordinary earthquake. In a groundbreaking series of tests, engineering researchers from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering jarred a full-size 275-ton building erected on a shake table, duplicating ground motions recorded during the January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, California.

To record the impact on the building, the structure was fitted with some 600 sensors and filmed as the shake table simulated the earthquake, yielding a flood of data including stress, strain, and acceleration -- so much information that engineers were having a hard time making sense of it all.

That's where visualization experts from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego came in.

"By recreating the shake table experiment in movies in a virtual environment based on the observed data, this lets engineers explore all the way from viewing the 'big picture' of the entire building from a 360-degree viewpoint to zooming in close to see what happened to a specific support," said SDSC visualization scientist Amit Chourasia. "Integrating these disparate data elements into a visual model can lead to critical new insights."........ Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 11, 2007, 10:15 PM CT

Clarifying The Behavior Of Neutrinos

New Haven, Conn. The initial data from the 10-year long "MiniBooNE" experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermilab significantly clarifies the overall picture of how the neutrino fundamental particles behave.

The project was designed to confirm or refute surprising observations from the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory's Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiments in the 1990's that were explained simply by the ability of neutrinos to transform from one type into another and back again, a process called neutrino oscillation. This research showed conclusively that there is more to the story.

A lecture by Yale Assistant Professor Bonnie Fleming, a MiniBoone project participant, will announce the results locally on Thursday, April 12 at 3:30 p.m. in room 57 of Sloane Physics Laboratories, at 217 Prospect Street. The talk is free and open to the public.

The MiniBooNE experiment mimicked the earlier Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment by looking for signs of muon neutrinos oscillating into electron neutrinos in the region indicated by the LSND observations. The team expected that the experiment would produce a distinct background and oscillation "signature"......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 10, 2007, 7:52 PM CT

NASA cloud mission April 25

A satellite carrying two University of Colorado at Boulder instruments to study silvery-blue clouds that mysteriously form 50 miles above Earth's polar regions every year is slated to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on April 25.

The spectacular clouds, known as noctilucent clouds, will be probed by NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere mission, or AIM, to determine why they form and how they change. First spotted in Earth's atmosphere in 1885, the clouds have been increasing in frequency in recent decades and may be related to increases in carbon dioxide and methane emissions tied to human activity on Earth, said Senior Research Scientist Dave Rusch of CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

The NASA mission, which consists of two CU-Boulder instruments and an instrument from Utah State University, is being managed by CU-Boulder's LASP and will be controlled from the Space Technology Building at the CU Research Park. The mission's principal investigator is Jim Russell of Hampton University in Virginia.

"We have seen a definite increase in the brightness of these clouds in the past 25 years, which gives us cause for concern," said Rusch, principal investigator for one of the three AIM instruments. "This mission will give us an unprecedented look at how the mesosphere, which is a very sensitive region of Earth's atmosphere, is changing"......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 10, 2007, 6:28 PM CT

Structural basis for photoswitching

University of Oregon scientists have identified molecular features that determine the light-emitting ability green fluorescent proteins, and by strategically inserting a single oxygen atom they were able to keep the lights turned off for up to 65 hours.

The findings, published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, likely are applicable to most photoswitchable fluorescent proteins, said S. James Remington, professor of physics and member of the UO Institute of Molecular Biology.

"This new model makes specific predictions and improves the qualities of the protein as a photo-switchable label," Remington said. "It gives us the first picture of how these molecules can be switched on and off. That allows us to design new variants to make the proteins more useful".

For more than a decade, fluorescent proteins first isolated in jellyfish and since found in a variety of colors from coral reef organisms revolutionized molecular biology, allowing scientists to use them as markers for genetic expression, to locate molecules and observe activity within cells.

The recent discovery of photoswitchable fluorescent proteins which can be manipulated with a laser has been a significant development for cellular research......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 10, 2007, 6:06 PM CT

Protein Required For Two Neighboring Cells To Fuse

Working with fruit flies, scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered a protein required for two neighboring cells to fuse and become one "super cell".

Most cells enjoy their singular existence, but the strength and flexibility of muscles relies on hundreds or even thousands of super cells that make large-scale motion smooth and coordinated, such as flexion of a bicep.

The newly discovered protein, dubbed Solitary, coordinates the movement of tiny molecular delivery trucks to a cell's surface. Cells that lack Solitary stay, well, solitary. "They refuse to fuse," says Hopkins assistant professor of molecular biology and genetics Elizabeth Chen, Ph.D., whose report on the work is online this week in Developmental Cell.

Chen and her team studied fruit fly embryo muscles to find the molecular signals that tell two neighboring cells to join as one, plucking out for further study those embryos containing cells that refused to fuse.

They then compared the genetic sequences from healthy embryos with sequences from defective embryos to locate differences and identify the genes responsible for unfused muscle cells. In the process, they identified Solitary.

Chen's team next made a tool to see the Solitary protein, enabling them to track its localization under a fluorescent microscope. At each future fusion point between cells that they examined in the fly muscles, they saw concentrations of glowing clumps of Solitary protein......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source