January 8, 2009, 7:45 PM CT

Historic Mission to Measure Greenhouse Gases

One of the nation's most advanced research aircrafts, Harper, is scheduled to embark on an historic mission spanning the globe from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

Starting Jan. 7, 2008, the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) mission will cover more than 24,000 miles as an international team of researchers makes a series of five flights over the next three years sampling the atmosphere in some of the most inaccessible regions of the world.

The goal of the mission is ambitious--the first-ever, global, real-time sampling of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses across a wide range of altitudes in the atmosphere, literally from pole-to-pole.

To date, much of our understanding of global atmospheric greenhouse gasses has been acquired from distant satellites, balloon launches, or highly sophisticated supercomputer models. HIAPER's pole-to-pole mission will, for the first time, give researchers real-time global observation data to correlate with those climate models.

HIAPER is short for the National Science Foundation's High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platfrom for Environmental Research. A modified Gulfstream V jet, it can fly at high altitudes for extended periods of time and can carry 5,600 pounds of sensing equipment, making it a premier aircraft for scientific discovery......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 03:30:16 GMT

A Very Darling Christmas

This is what went down today at our place…


A Very Darling Christmas. Lots & lots of ridiculous love from our family to yours!

I hope you have an amazing 25th of December, regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas or not! Huge kisses! Be safe! Posted by: Gala      Read more     Source

December 18, 2008, 10:34 PM CT

Next Generation Microscopy

Microscopes have revolutionized the practice of science, particularly in the fields of biology and medicine. Just a few hundred years ago, gaining the ability to study what was previously unobservable opened up an entirely new world. Today, imaging techniques remain indispensable to clinicians and scientists who regularly diagnose medical conditions and work to develop new therapys.

Test results can often take hours or even days because cells or tissues must be subjected to lengthy fixation and labeling processes, sometimes called staining, in order to visualize and distinguish cellular components. In addition to long processing times, staining procedures often include harsh therapys or conditions that alter the tissues themselves, making interpretation of results difficult.

A newly developed label-free imaging technique called stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) will likely revolutionize biomedical imaging in research and diagnostic laboratories. A team lead by Sunney Xie at Harvard University reported this new technique in the December 19 issue of Science.

"It is a big step forward in terms of biology," said Xie. "SRS is a powerful imaging modality with widespread applications on a number of fronts of biology and medicine. This work compliments an earlier technique we developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, adding a new imaging modality to the vibrational microscopy field"......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

November 25, 2008, 10:19 PM CT

Bright idea illuminates LED standards

The lack of common measurement methods among light-emitting diode (LED) and lighting manufacturers has affected the commercialization of solid-state lighting products. In a recent paper,* scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed a new, economical method to allow LED and lighting manufacturers to obtain accurate, reproducible, and comparable measurements of LED brightness and color.

The quality of the light that high-power LEDs produce depends on their operating temperature. To speed production, LED manufacturers typically use a high-speed pulsed test to measure the color and brightness of their products. However, because pulsed measurements do not give the LED chip time to warm to its normal operating temperature, the measured light output quality is not the same as would be realized in actual lighting products.

The lighting industry uses a steady-state DC measurement approach similar to that used for traditional incandescents and fluorescents. This method involves turning the light on, letting it warm up, and measuring the characteristics of the light produced. Eventhough time-consuming, DC measurement provides a more realistic test of how the lighting product will perform in a consumers living room. The problem was that scientists did not understand how the DC measurement results correlated with the pulse measurement results that LED manufacturers use......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

October 29, 2008, 10:29 PM CT

Sniffing out a better chemical sensor

Marrying a sensitive detector technology capable of distinguishing hundreds of different chemical compounds with a pattern-recognition module that mimics the way animals recognize odors, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new approach for electronic noses. Described in a recent paper,* their electronic nose is more adept than conventional methodologies at recognizing molecular features even for chemicals it has not been trained to detect and is also robust enough to deal with changes in sensor response that come with wear and tear. The detector could be a potent tool for applications such as sniffing out nerve agents, environmental contaminants, and trace indicators of disease, in addition to monitoring industrial processes and aiding in space exploration.

In animals, odorant molecules in the air enter the nostrils and bind with sensory neurons in the nose that convert the chemical interactions into an electrical signal that the brain interprets as a smell. In humans, there are about 350 types of sensory neurons and a number of copies of each type; dogs and mice have several hundreds more types of sensory neurons than that. Odor recognition proceeds in a step-by-step fashion where the chemical identity is gradually resolved: initial coarse information (e.g. ice-cream is fruit-flavored vs. chocolate) is refined over time to allow finer discrimination (strawberry vs. raspberry). This biological approach inspired the scientists to develop a parallel divide and conquer method for use with the electronic nose......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

October 29, 2008, 8:44 PM CT

Declining Amphibian Species

Amphibians around the world are on the decline from disease. In an article in this week's issue of the journal Nature, Jason Rohr of the University of South Florida (USF) and his colleagues revealed that chemical pollution can increase often deadly trematode (parasitic flatworm) infections in the northern leopard frog, a declining amphibian species.

"The combination of atrazine, a widely used herbicide, and phosphate, a primary ingredient in fertilizers, accounted for 74 percent of the variation in larval trematode abundance in the frogs," said Rohr. "These agrochemicals increase trematode infections by augmenting snail intermediate hosts--the source of trematodes that infect amphibians--and suppressing amphibian immune responses." The research was funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture grants.

As per Rohr, identifying the main risk factors and predictors for disease in amphibians is important. This study showed that atrazine and phosphate concentrations in the Minnesota wetlands they investigated were the best of over 240 plausible predictors of trematode abundance in frogs. In a manipulative experiment conducted in outdoor, 300 gallon tanks, Rohr and his colleagues verified that atrazine increased snail abundance, caused amphibian immuno-suppression, and elevated amphibian trematode loads......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

October 29, 2008, 8:39 PM CT

Deprived of a sense of smell, worms live longer

A number of animals live longer when raised on low calorie diets. But now scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that they can extend the life spans of roundworms even when the worms are well fed - it just takes a chemical that blocks their sense of smell.

Three years ago, the researchers, led by Kerry Kornfeld, M.D., Ph.D., reported they observed that a class of anticonvulsant medications made the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans live longer. But until now, they didn't quite know what the drugs did to give the worms their longevity. They report their latest findings in the Oct. 24 issue of the Public Library of Science Genetics.

"We've learned that the drugs inhibit neurons in the worm's head that sense chemicals in their surroundings - the neurons are like the worm's nose," says Kornfeld, professor of developmental biology. "Like roundworms that are grown in a food-scarce environment, the worms exposed to the anticonvulsant ethosuximide lived longer. But these worms ate plenty of food. That suggests that the worms' sensation of food is critical to controlling their metabolism and life span."

If roundworms sense that food is abundant, their metabolism adjusts accordingly. Their bodies respond to promote rapid ingestion, rapid growth and rapid aging, Kornfeld explains. In contrast, when the worms sense a shortage of food, they make "metabolic decisions" to delay growth, delay energy use and extend lifespan......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

October 28, 2008, 5:02 AM CT

Stress affects older adults more than young adults

Life can be stressful, whether you're an individual watching the stock market crash or a commuter stuck in traffic. A new study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, examines how stress affects decision-making and finds that elderly adults alter their behavior more than young adults when under stress especially in situations involving risk.

"People haven't looked at how stress affects decision making, even though so a number of of our decisions are made under stress," explained Mara Mather of USC Davis School of Gerontology, lead author of the study. "There's very little information about this whole topic, and, when you get to age differences, there's even less".

Mather and her colleagues Marissa Gorlick, of the USC Emotion and Cognition Lab, and Nichole Kryla-Lighthall, a USC doctoral student, exposed young adults (18 to 33) and elderly adults (65 to 89) to a stressful event, in this case, holding a hand in ice-cold water for three minutes.

Participants were then asked to play a driving game correlating to a real-life situation in which taking a small amount of risk is common: whether to go for it on a yellow light. Participants started at a green light, and points were awarded for every second spent driving during a yellow, but lost if the light turned red while driving. The length of time for the yellow lights was determined randomly......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:14:31 GMT

David C. Lam Asian Garden

I''m on vacation, so please accept my apologies for the brief entries. -- Daniel.

While I''m on vacation in Manitoba, these are the sorts of scenes I''m missing back in Vancouver -- the foggy afternoons with warm low sunlight in the David C. Lam Asian Garden. This photograph is from a couple years ago, taken while slightly leaning out my office window. Posted by: Daniel Mosquin      Read more     Source

October 15, 2008, 5:29 PM CT

As Sticky as a Gecko, but Ten Times Stronger!

The gecko's amazing ability to stick to surfaces and walk up walls has inspired many researchers to manufacture materials that mimic the special surface of a gecko's foot. The secret behind the gecko's ability to stick so well is a forest of pillars at the micro-/nano-scale on the underside of the gecko's foot. Because there are so many pillars so close together, they are held tightly to the surface the gecko is walking on by a molecular force called the Van der Waals force. This relatively weak force causes uncharged molecules to attract each other.

In an unprecedented feat, Liming Dai, at the University of Dayton, and colleagues report in the October 10th issue of Science successful construction of a gecko-inspired adhesive that is ten times stronger than a gecko, at about 100 newtons per square centimeter.

The researchers constructed their adhesive out of two slightly different layers of multi-walled carbon nanotubes. The lower layer is composed of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes, while the upper segment--which comes into contact with the surface it is sticking to--is curly, like a mess of spaghetti.

As shown in the figure, the adhesive sticks best when it is pulled down parallel to the surface it is sticking to--this is called shear adhesion. This action arranges the tips of the curly nanotubes so they have maximum contact with the substrate, thereby maximizing the Van der Waals force. Pulling the adhesive off in a motion perpendicular to the substrate is much easier--at this angle the sticking force is ten times weaker......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source