Scientists Capture First Images of Molecules Before and After Reaction

Every chemist's dream -- to snap an atomic-scale picture of a chemical before and after it reacts -- has now come true, thanks to a new technique developed by chemists and physicists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Using a state-of-the-art atomic force microscope, the scientists have taken the first atom-by-atom pictures, including images of the chemical bonds between atoms, clearly depicting how a molecule's structure changed during a reaction. Until now, scientists have only been able to infer this type of information from spectroscopic analysis.

The ability to image molecular reactions in this way will help not only chemistry students as they study chemical structures and reactions, but will also show chemists for the first time the products of their reactions and help them fine-tune the reactions to get the products they want. Fischer, along with collaborator Michael Crommie, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, captured these images with the goal of building new graphene nanostructures, a hot area of research today for materials scientists because of their potential application in next-generation computers.

via ScienceDaily

Brain overload explains lack of memories during childhood

It is hard to understand why we don’t remember anything that happened before age 3. Even some momentous event in a toddler’s life has not left behind a wisp of memories.

Scientist call this phenomenon “infantile amnesia”. Now a new study, which was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, finds that “infantile amnesia” may be due to the rapid growth of nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for filing new experiences into long-term memory.

Normally youngsters do seem to remember important events for a short time after they occur, they lose these memories as time goes by.

Scientists have guessed that the hippocampus had something to do with the puzzle, says Dr. Eric Kandel, Kavli professor and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University and senior investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But nobody really knew the mechanism of what happens in a toddler’s brain.

They did experiment to test the theory and found that it seemed like a case of overload that cause the phenomenon. The hippocampus has two jobs: to make a sort of tape recording of each event and then to file that tape recording away in long-term storage, with flags that allow the person to retrieve it. With all the energy spent making new neurons, the filing never gets done.

Ancient Plants Reawaken: Plants Exposed by Retreating Glaciers Regrowing After Centuries Entombed Under Ice

La Farge, a researcher in the Faculty of Science, and director and curator of the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the University of Alberta, has overturned a long-held assumption that all of the plant remains exposed by retreating polar glaciers are dead. Previously, any new growth of plants close to the glacier margin was considered the result of rapid colonization by modern plants surrounding the glacier.

Using radiocarbon dating, La Farge and her co-authors confirmed that the plants, which ranged from 400 to 600 years old, were entombed during the Little Ice Age that happened between 1550 and 1850. In the field, La Farge noticed that the subglacial populations were not only intact, but also in pristine condition -- with some suggesting regrowth.

In the lab, La Farge and her master's student Krista Williams selected 24 subglacial samples for culture experiments. Seven of these samples produced 11 cultures that successfully regenerated four species from the original parent material.

La Farge says the regrowth of these Little Ice Age bryophytes (such as mosses and liverworts) expands our understanding of glacier ecosystems as biological reservoirs that are becoming increasingly important with global ice retreat. "We know that bryophytes can remain dormant for many years (for example, in deserts) and then are reactivated, but nobody expected them to rejuvenate after nearly 400 years beneath a glacier.

"These simple, efficient plants, which have been around for more than 400 million years, have evolved a unique biology for optimal resilience," she adds. "Any bryophyte cell can reprogram itself to initiate the development of an entire new plant. This is equivalent to stem cells in faunal systems."

La Farge says the finding amplifies the critical role of bryophytes in polar environments and has implications for all permafrost regions of the globe.

"Bryophytes are extremophiles that can thrive where other plants don't, hence they play a vital role in the establishment, colonization and maintenance of polar ecosystems. This discovery emphasizes the importance of research that helps us understand the natural world, given how little we still know about polar ecosystems -- with applied spinoffs for understanding reclamation that we may never have anticipated."

via ScienceDaily

Painting through the power of thought enabled by scientists

Heide Pfützner, a former teacher from Leipzig, Germany, was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Motor Neurone Disease, yet she has managed to produce a series of the paintings with the aid of a new brain controlled computer.

She has been trained to master the device that uses brain waves to take control of a palette of colours, shapes and brushes to produce digital artworks.

Building on decades of knowledge about the meaning of the tiny electrical impulses created by the brain during thought, scientists have been able to create a computer programme which translates thoughts into electronic images.

The system works by detecting changes in the pattern of the user’s brain waves to allow them to select options in software and to move a cursor around a screen in front of them.

The current technology uses a cap with electrodes embedded in it. These detect tiny changes in the electricity coming from the user’s brain that occur as they think.

By concentrating on one of a series of options – such as a tool to draw a circle or a line, to select a colour and to alter its transparency – the software can detect what the user would like to do.

This works as each option flashes in turn and the user must count each time the option they want to select flashes.

The mother-of-four has tested the brain painting device to create a collection of abstract colourful shapes and patterns, which she now sells online. In July she is due to exhibit her work in Easdale, near Oban.

Why the Internet Sucks You in Like a Black Hole

"Checking Facebook should only take a minute."

Those are the famous last words of countless people every day, right before getting sucked into several hours of watching cat videos, commenting on Instagrammed sushi lunches, and Googling to find out what ever happened to Dolph Lundgren.

If that sounds like you, don't feel bad: That behavior is natural, given how the Internet is structured, experts say.

People are wired to compulsively seek unpredictable payoffs like those doled out on the Web. And the Internet's omnipresence and lack of boundaries encourage people to lose track of time, making it hard to exercise the willpower to turn it off. "The Internet is not addictive in the same way as pharmacological substances are," said Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. "But it's compulsive; it's compelling; it's distracting."

For those who want to loosen the viselike grip of the Web on their lives, a few simple techniques may do the trick.

Web-blocking tools that limit surfing time can help people regain control over their time. Another method is to plan ahead, committing to work for 20 minutes, or until a certain task is complete, and then allowing five minutes of Web surfing, Stafford said.

"Technology is all about eroding structure," Stafford told LiveScience. "But actually, psychologically, we need more structure, and those things are in tension."

via LiveScience

The youngest patient to benefit from experimental treatment

A 2-year-old girl born in South Korea without a windpipe now has a new one grown from her own stem cells, the youngest patient in the world to benefit from the experimental treatment.

She has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul where doctors told her parents it is no hope and she was expected to die.

The stem cells derived from Hannah's bone marrow, extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip bone. They were cultivated in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to multiply and create a new windpipe.

About the size of a 3-inch tube of penne pasta, it was transplanted April 9 in a nine-hour procedure.

Early signs indicate the windpipe is working but she was still relying on on a ventilator. But doctors believe she will eventually be able to live at home and lead a normal life.

Only about one in 50,000 children worldwide are born in defect of the windpipe . The stem-cell technique has been used to make other body parts besides windpipes and holds promise for treating other birth defects and childhood diseases, her doctors said.

The speed of light may be not constant

Scientists propose that the speed of light is not constant, compared to the textbook saying, the speed of light is constant. They conclude this from understanding of the nature of the vaccum of space.

The speed of light is not a conception of velocity but also is linked to the strength of the electromagnetic force. A varying light speed would effect the strengths of molecular bonds and the density of nuclear mater itself. And a varying speed of light could mean that the measuring of the size of the universe might be not proper.

So the definition of the speed of light is more important to fields such as cosmology and astronomy, which assume a stable velocity for light over time.

Two papers, published in the European Physics Journal D recently, try to explain the implications in the perceptive of the quantum properties of space itself. Though they both propose somewhat different mechanisms, they base it on the idea that the speed of light might change as one alters assumptions about how elementary particles interact with radiation. They both consider that space is not empty, but a great big soup of virtual particles that come into and out of existence in tiny fractions of a second.

However some scientists are a little skeptical about the idea. A particle physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, said he was he wasn't confident about the mathematical techniques used, and that it seemed in both cases the scientists weren't applying the mathematical tools in the way that most would.

Curiosity Rover Resumes Science Operations With Second Drilling

After being stuck behind the sun for most of April, Curiosity’s science adventures on Mars have resumed, with another drilling operation: On May 20, the rover drilled into a rock named Cumberland, creating a hole measuring a bit more than half an inch across.

According to USGS scientist Ken Herkenhoff, the drilling went perfectly.

Cumberland is pale and veiny, a flat rock with a bumpy surface located about 9 feet west of Curiosity’s first drilling target, a rock called John Klein. Results from that first experiment suggested ancient Mars environments were potentially microbe-friendly; scientists are hoping data from Cumberland will confirm the original finding. 

Curiosity drilled into Cumberland on its 279th Mars day and is planning on feeding the samples recovered from 2.6 inches down into an on-board instrument in a few days. That second instrument, called SAM, will sift through the samples and sort out what the rock is made from, providing scientists with more clues about the planet’s history and whether it had the ability of hosting past life. Cumberland’s erosion-resistant bumps will be crucial for the analysis: They’re chunks of minerals that clumped together as water drenched the area, trapping information about the area’s building blocks in the rock.

via wired

100 trillion bacteria in your body , a good thing

The human body is inhabited by kinds of bacteria and microorganisms — for every cell, there are around 10 resident microbes, which form on the surface of your skin, on your tongue, and deep inside your body. But bacteria in or on a body are good to human and may help digest food or absorb nutrients.

As research into the human microbiome continues to develop, scientists are discovering how a person's appetite, physical and mental development, and resistance to disease can be affected by such microorganisms. In a revealing New York Times article, University of California professor Michael Pollan highlights the most recent research into the 100 trillion bacteria that help form our "metagenome" — explaining how our immune systems are shaped the minute we are born, why antibiotic use can lead to chronic illnesses like asthma and diabetes, and illustrating how the microbiomes of rural inhabitants in West Africa are almost identical to the indigenous people of Venezuela. Know more www.oalib.com

Invasive Crazy Ants Are Displacing Fire Ants

Invasive “crazy ants” are taking up areas where fire ants live across the southeastern United States, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. It’s the latest one in a history of ant invasions from the southern hemisphere of the Earth and may prove to have varieties of influence on the ecosystem of the region.

The “ecologically dominant” crazy ants are dwindling diversity and abundance across a range of ant and arthropod species — but their spread can be limited and led if people are careful not to transport them inadvertently, according to Ed LeBrun, a research associate with the Texas invasive species research program at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory in the College of Natural Sciences

The study by LeBrun and his colleagues was published in Biological Invasions recently.

“When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back,” said LeBrun. “Fire ants are in many ways very modest. They live in your yard not to go into your house. They form mounds and stay there, and they only get your noticed if you step on their mound.”

The UT researchers studied two crazy ant invasion sites in one of which the crazy ant population is denser than the other on the Texas Gulf Coast and found that in those areas where the Tawny crazy ant population is densest, fire ants were eliminated. In regions where the crazy ant population is less dense, fire ant populations were drastically reduced. Other ant species, particularly native species, were also found to be eliminated or diminished.

Experiment suggests world’s smallest liquid droplets made in the lab

The smallest drops of liquid may have been created in the lab. Evidence of the minuscule droplets came from data and information resulted from particles collision.

According to the scientists' measurement, these tiny short-lived droplets are in the size as three to five protons that is about one-100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a virus.

“Regardless of the material that we are using, collisions have to be violent enough to produce about 50 sub-atomic particles before we begin to see collective, flow-like behavior. “ said Velkovska, professor of physics at Vanderbilt who serves as a co-convener of the heavy ion program of the CMS detector.

These tiny droplets “flow” in the same way as quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that is a mixture of the sub-atomic particles that makes up protons and neutrons and only exists at extreme temperatures and densities. Cosmologists conjecture that the entire universe once consisted of this strongly interacting elixir for fractions of a second after the Big Bang when conditions were dramatically hotter and denser than they are today. After billions of years the universe expanding and cooling, there is litter probability of these droplets occurring only to bang atomic nuclei together with tremendous energy.

The new observations are contained in a paper submitted by the CMS collaboration to the journal Physical Review D and posted on the arXiv preprint server.

Observations of a supermassive back holes

Two papers about the astronomy were published in the May 10, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and in the October 20, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

According the two papers, there is a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy which is located some 850 million light years from Earth.

The researchers caught the the radio emission comeing from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from the black hole.It is estimated that mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun.

The bright X-rays which can be observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. The optical light that can be seen is from the stars in the galaxy.

The Observer can come with it from images and data that most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas, probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, or torus blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole.

Origins of our hips already existed in fish

It was about 395 million years ago that four-legged animals, first moved onto land. The formation of strong hipbones and a connection through the spine via an ilium which were features that were not present in the fish ancestors of tetrapods made it possible for the great change.

In a study published in the journal Evolution and Development, Dr Catherine Boisvert of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, MacQuarie University's Professor Jean Joss and Professor Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University examined the hip structures of some of human's closest fish cousins.

They found the differences between human beings and them are not as great as they appear -- most of the key elements necessary for the transformation to human hips were actually already present in our fish ancestors.

Dr Boisvert and her collaborators compared the hip development -- bones and musculature -- of the Australian lung fish and the Axolotl, commonly known as the Mexican Walking Fish. The results showed that, surprisingly, the transition from simple fish hip to complex weight-bearing hip could be done in a few evolutionary steps.

"Many of the muscles thought to be 'new' in tetrapods evolved from muscles already present in lungfish. We also found evidence of a new, more simple path by which skeletal structures would have evolved," Dr Boisvert said.

The researchers found that the sitting bones would have evolved by the extension of the already existing pubis. The connection to the vertebral column could have evolved from an illiac process already present in fish.

"The transition from ocean-dwelling to land-dwelling animals was a major event in the evolution of terrestrial animals, including humans, and an altered hip was an essential enabling step," Dr Boisvert said.

"Our research shows that what initially appeared to be a large change in morphology could be done with relatively few developmental steps."

What will happen to the future hotter world ?

The carbon concentrations in the atmosphere finally pass 400-part-per-million, which is higher than they have been for at least 800,000 years. This is not a surprise for human being, but it matters for the rest species living on the same planet earth. We believe that we can survive 4-5 degrees warmer on average, While many species can’t. That is really we should be worried and concerned.

We had destructed the habitat of plants and animals that share with the same planet as us, as we crowded out them. A new study in Nature Climate Change, tells us: they will run out of habitable space, and many of them will die.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that 20% to 30% of species would be at increasingly high risk of extinction if global temperatures rise more than 2˚C to 3˚C above preindustrial levels.

In the Nature Climate Change paper, they found that almost two-thirds of common plants and half of animals could lose more than half their climatic range by 2080 if global warming continues unchecked, with temperatures increasing 4˚C above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. Generally the species near the equator will suffer most, but biodiversity will suffer across the whole planet. But the good news is that a much hotter future isn’t a certainty.

A new system to verify identification

A new technology can recognize people using real-life biometric system. 

Anyone can do a electrocardiogram (ECG)- the five peaks and troughs, known as a PQRST pattern, that record each heartbeat. The shape of this pattern is affected by the heart’s size, its shape and its position in the body. Cardiologists have known since 1964 that everyone’s heartbeat is thus unique, and researchers around the world have been trying to turn that knowledge into a viable biometric system.

Now a group may have been success. They devise a system which ceaselessly measures a person’s PQRST pattern, conforms this corresponds with the registered user’s pattern, and can thus verify to various devices that the user is who he says he is.

ECGs are difficult to clone. Cloning a biometric marker takes two steps. First it must be “skimmed”. In the case of an ECG, this means duping someone into touching a surface that can record his heartbeat. That makes ECGs more secure than, say, fingerprints, which can be recovered from nearly anything that has been touched.

One obvious worry is that a person’s PQRST pattern might change beyond recognition in response to exercise or—over a longer period—as he aged. But according to Karl Martin, neither of these things is actually a problem. An elevated heartbeat does not change the shape of an ECG, just its frequency. And five years’ data collected by Dr Agrafioti’s group suggest age does not change it much either.

Mothers has traumatic experience tend to avoidance of interactint with their children

A study from the university of Notre Dame shows that mothers who have experienced childhood abuse, neglect or other traumatic experiences show an unwillingness to talk with their children about the child’s emotional experiences. According to the study, some of the low-income mothers selected as a sample, who had experienced their own childhood traumas exhibited ongoing ”traumatic avoidance symptoms,” which is characterized by an unwillingness to address thoughts, ,emotions, sensations or memories of those traumas. This avoidance interfered with mother’s ability to talk with their children about the child’ emotion leading to shorter, less in-depth conversations, those mothers also used closed-end questions that did not encourage child participation.

“Traumatic avoidance symptoms have been shown to have a negative impact on the cognitive and emotional development of children,” said Kristin Valentino, Notre Dame assistant professor of psychology who specialize the development of at-risk and maltreated children. Valentino conducted the research with Notre Dame undergraduate Taylor Thomas “This research is important because it identifies a mechanism through which we can understand how maternal trauma history relates to her ability to effectively interact with her child. This relates to her ability to effectively interact with her child. This finding also has implications for intervention work, since avoidance that is used as a coping mechanism is likely to further impair psychological functioning," Valentino said.

In a related study published recently in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect, Valentino found that maltreating parents, many of whom had experienced childhood trauma, could successfully be taught to use more elaborative and emotion-rich reminiscing with their preschool-aged children, which has been linked to a children's subsequent cognitive abilities in a number of areas including memory, language and literacy development.

Europeans are a big family

A professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis has found in his study that Europeans are basically one big family, closely related to one another for the past thousand years. The study will be published May 7 in the journal PLoS Biology.

"What's remarkable about this is how closely everyone is related to each other. On a genealogical level, everyone in Europe traces back to nearly the same set of ancestors only a thousand years ago," Coop said.

"This was predicted in theory over a decade ago, and we now have concrete evidence from DNA data," Coop said, adding that such close kinship likely exists in other parts of the world as well.

Coop and co-author Peter Ralph, now a professor at the University of Southern California, set out to study relatedness among Europeans in recent history, up to about 3,000 years ago. Drawing on the Population Reference Sample (POPRES) database, a resource for population and genetics research, they compared genetic sequences from more than 2,000 individuals.

As expected, Coop and Ralph found that the degree of genetic relatedness between two people tends to be smaller the farther apart they live. But even a pair of individuals who live as far apart as the United Kingdom and Turkey -- a distance of some 2,000 miles -- likely are related to all of one another's ancestors from a thousand years ago.

New Analysis Suggests Wind, Not Water,Formed Mound On Mars

Scientists found new evidence that suggests a roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound, which is considered to preserve evidence of a massive lake, might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet’s famously dusty atmosphere.

If this assumption is true, the research could leave less focus on expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water.

The definition of water existence on Mars would have important implications for understanding Mars’s past habitability.

Researchers based at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology suggest that the mound, known as Mount Sharp, most likely emerged as strong winds carried dust and sand into the 96-mile-wide crater in which the mound sits. They report in the journalGeology that air likely rises out of the massive Gale Crater when the Martian surface warms during the day, then sweeps back down its steep walls at night. Though strong along the Gale Crater walls, these "slope winds" would have died down at the crater's center where the fine dust in the air settled and accumulated to eventually form Mount Sharp, which is close in size to Alaska's Mt. McKinley.

This dynamic counters the prevailing theory that Mount Sharp formed from layers of lakebed silt -- and could mean that the mound contains less evidence of a past, Earth-like Martian climate than most scientists currently expect. Evidence that Gale Crater once contained a lake in part determined the landing site for the NASA Mars rover Curiosity. The rover touched down near Mount Sharp in August with the purpose of uncovering evidence of a habitable environment, and in December Curiosity found traces of clay, water molecules and organic compounds. Determining the origin of these elements and how they relate to Mount Sharp will be a focus for Curiosity in the coming months.

Hawaii may be exposed to big hurricanes

A new study shows that Hawaii may experience mega hurricanes over the next 75-90 years. These hurricanes are powered by a continuing warming climate, not just frequent air stream change.

The conclusions of the study are published by the hurricanes scientific journal Nature Climate Change. According to the study although it is incredible rare that hurricanes hit Hawaii, that’s all going to change as the ocean’s surface temperature shift upward.

“Computer models based on global warming scenarios generally project a decrease in tropical cyclones worldwide, but this may not be what will happen with local communities.” A author said.

Hawaii is one such local community where climate change is expected to hit hard. “From 1979 to 2003, both observational records and our model document that only every four years on average did a tropical cyclone come near Hawaii,” Murakami said. “Our projections for the end of this century show a two-to-three-fold increase for this region.”

To make matters worse, those storms are expected to be bigger, more destructive and slower-moving than the storms of the last century, amplified by the warming climate. Researchers warned that changes in the atmosphere’s composition, driven by human activity increasing the amount of CO2 in the air, will result in wholly new moisture patterns and a shift in the jet stream that causes mega storms to drift toward the Hawaiian islands.

Weather in the North Pole of Saturn

Saturn’s rings are famous, and People are attracted by the mystery on the Solar System’s second-largest planet. From 1610, when Galileo used his primitive telescope to spot what looked like bumps protruding from either side of Saturn, to today when modern telescopes and space probes and aircrafts are created to assist unveil what’s on Saturn.

Like Earth, Saturn is surrounded by wide atmospheric gases, compared with which the solid core is so small. An those atmospheric gases, driven by powerful winds, organize themselves into massive storms which can last for decades, or even centuries.

However, when observer show what is on Saturn’s north polar, even experienced Saturn-watchers did a double-take. It is storm, which is so gigantic that it could swallow Earth, with room to spare. The eye alone is more than 1,200 miles (1,900 km) across, and wind speeds at the vast cyclone’s outer edges reach 330 mph (531 k/h).

the storm is far bigger and more powerful than anything Earth has ever experienced. it’s structurally similar to the hurricanes that batter the U.S. and Caribbean islands every year. What’s markedly different is that those storms move across the planet; Saturn’s polar storm just sits at the top of the globe without budging. That’s not because the dynamics of Saturn’s atmosphere are fundamentally different from those of Earth: the giant planet has jet streams and prevailing winds just as we do.

Imaging functions of new digital cameras inspired by bug’s view

An interdisciplinary team of researchers has created the first digital cameras with designs that mimic those of ocular insects.

The cameras apply large arrays of tiny focusing lenses and miniaturized detectors in hemispherical layouts, just like eyes found in arthropods. The devices link soft, rubbery optics with high performance silicon electronics and detectors.

Eyes in arthropods use compound designs, in which arrays of smaller eyes cooperate to provide image perception. Each small eye, known as an ommatidium, comprise a corneal lens, a crystalline cone, and a light sensitive organ at the base. The entire system is configured to provide exceptional properties in imaging, many of which lie out of the reach of existing human-made cameras.

"Full 180 degree fields of view with zero aberrations can only be accomplished with image sensors that adopt hemispherical layouts -- much different than the planar CCD chips found in commercial cameras," Rogers explained. "When implemented with large arrays microlenses, each of which couples to an individual photodiode, this type of hemispherical design provides unmatched field of view and other powerful capabilities in imaging. Nature has developed and refined these concepts over the course of billions of years of evolution." The researchers described their breakthrough camera in an article, "Digital Cameras With Designs Inspired By the Arthropod Eye," published in the May 2, 2013 issue of Nature.