SCIENCE 1701

The Nobel Prize for Medicine has just been announced for Elizabeth Blackburn(University of California), Carole Gredier(Johns Hopkins)  and Jack Szostak(Harvard) for their research into telomeres.

Telomeres are molecules that mark the ends of chromosomes and maintain their integrity. What they discovered is that as cells divide the lengths of these telomere molecules decreases. Their decreasing length marks the age of the cell and its eventual death. The groundbreaking discovery is that an enzyme, telomerase, stops the telomere from getting shorter, hence prolonging the age of the cell.

Cancer cells cause damage in our bodies without fear of death. It is a little known fact that cancer cells grow and divide without ageing, hence the link to this research.

So the new fountain of  youth may be telomerase. Theoretically, if the telomere’s length is arrested humans could live for thousands of years or  become immortal.

Spintronics is the new buzword to do with the development of quantum computers.

This is all about ’spin’ and how a ‘1′ or ‘0′ can be stored by an atom having a clockwise or anti-clockwise rotation. This rotation determines whether the atom itself is magnetic and how it will align along a magnetic field direction.  Hence we have the two states 1 and 0 and a way of storing data and processing information. The research centres around the silicon isotope Si 29.

This video explains the details and estimates that you may have a quantum computer on your desk by 2020, if not sooner.

Technorati Tags: computer, computers, Keio University, magnetic, magnetism, Moores Law, quantum, silicon, spintronics

Image of the molecule pentacene courtesy of IBM Research in Zurich.

Technorati Tags: benzene ring, IBM, molecule, organic chemistry, pentacene, research, resonance imaging, Zurich

Daddy Long Legs

Technorati Tags: arthropod, combinezm, images, insect, insects, microbiology, microscopy, photomicrography

female jumping spider(Phidippus Putnami)

I came across this amazing  image by Opo Terser on Flickr.

This species of spider has probably been around for at least a couple of hundred million years, and  will  most likely be here in another two hundred million. It seems to put the human race in some perspective, don’t you think? We have only been here for about forty thousand years? I wonder what the likelihood is of our species continuing with such success.

It just begs the question: is it better to be the sharpest pencil in the box,  when the pencil is only a short one?

Technorati Tags: anthropology, jumping spiders, opo terser, spiders

This is the first of many high definition micrographs I will be putting on the site.
The image is of a thin slice of a seedling leaf.
I have a second-hand binocular microscope, which has been infrequently used over the years. Luckily earlier this year I came into a some money and decided to treat myself(a very infrequent occasion) and bought my first DSLR camera. Anyway my birthday came and went earlier this month. So I spent £25($41) on an adaptor to marry the two together and the image above is the result.

For the technically minded among you the camera is a Sony Alpha 350k. The settings were 1/25 sec. , F 5.6, ISO 3200. The image size was originally 14 Megapixels but has been resized for the web.

The lighting was from below at full strength, while the image was cleaned up using Adobe’s PhotoShop. The brightness and contrast were optimized using ‘curves’ from the ‘image’ menu. Sharpening was done by using ‘unsharp mask’ in the  ’filter’ menu. The edges were cleaned  up using the erasor tool and the image cut from the background. A blue background was added as another layer underneath the original image layer.

So in the coming months my hope is that ‘Micro-Nature’ will be of  interest to my readers not just for  its natural history content but also for the photo techniques and post production work involved.

Technorati Tags: biology, camera, cells, dslr, micro, photography, sony alpha

recent global temperature readings show a large deviation from the IPCC prediction

You must be a true believer for the latest figures on Global Warming not to shake your faith.

Like it or not, it IS getting colder, and that is official.

The beginning of September has been an important time for the IPCC.  They have just been having their World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. There they have just had to take note of  some rather unpalatable news. Climate modeller and scientist, Mojib Latif, told approximately 1,500 of his colleagues to prepare themselves for some heavy flak. He reckons that we may be on the cusp of one, or may be two, decades of global cooling.

Is it me, or is the doomsday scenario of Global Warming  beginning to look even more dodgy? To add insult to injury, at the conference, Vicky Pope, from the Met Office, in the U.K.,  broke the news that recent summer Arctic ice loss was probably not caused by Global Warming, suggesting that it was a consequence of natural cycles.

Confused? Well there is a lone light in the darkness who might have a handle on what is really going on. His name is Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu and he was until just recently, prior to retirement, Professor of Geophysics at the University of  Alaska Fairbanks. His graph, taken from his paper(link below) really tells it all. Yes, there is Global Warming, but it is a very small effect and probably will not have any impact on human-kind for millenia. He contends that on a relentless (small) temperature increase are superimposed periods of warming and cooling.

 I believe his graph to be most convincing, especially in the light of reports from the IPCC conference last week, regarding decades of cooling.

Read the whole scientific paper by Dr. Sakasofu here,

http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/pdf/two_natural_components_recent_climate_change.pdf

You can read a bio of  Dr. Sakasofa here,

http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu/

What do the IPCC have to say? Check out their website here,

http://www.ipcc.ch

Technorati Tags: Akasofu, Climate Change?, global warming, ipcc, multidecadal cooling

image courtesy of Harvard Medical School

The quiet ones are always the worst(or best) as they say. Well the almost  unheard of  ’synthetic biology’ or synbio is coming to a chemist or gas station near you soon. We are almost accepting that the manipulation of genes is routine these days. For years now scientists have had the ability to cut DNA and splice it across species boundaries to obtain a variety of useful results.

However, the science of synthetic biology is something else. It is a completely new  ball-game. This is all about making life (i.e. cells) from chemicals. Yes, you heard it right first time. Genesis II will soon be upon us. Mankind will  have the capability to create life – but not as we know it.

The scientist leading the research at Harvard Medical school is professor of Genetics, George Church.  The project to build synthetic life is well advanced, with hopes that a truly artificial lifeform will be created in about a year.   

The making of artificial life does promise great benefits, especially in the field of medicine. This is truly another revolution in the making with further spin-offs  expected for fuels, materials science and food technology.  

Read more from,

 http://www.synbioproject.org/

  http://www.ia-sb.eu/go/synthetic-biology/  

http://www.synbiosafe.eu/

Technorati Tags: dna, genes, genetics, George Church, Harvard Medical School, synbio, synthetic biology

When I was born the nurse said “he will be a brilliant swimmer”, an observation that two of my toes on each foot were joined at the first knuckle; and she was right. I grew up enjoying swimming and especially swimming under water – 30 metres(1 length) on one breath, as I remember.
Experts in the field of anthropology have always insisted that mankind evolved by coming down from an existence in the trees to roam the savannas. I have always had a problem with this for a number of common-sense reasons, and I find that I am not alone.

There is a fine old lady, called Elaine Morgan, who metaphorically speaking has ’upset the applecart’ of modern anthropology by proposing that man’s early ancestors lived in a watery environment. She was a lone light in the darkness when she first published her book called The Aquatic Ape, a few years ago. Even with more(and growing support) she still finds it difficult to get here ideas accepted by ‘conventional thought’ and ‘the powers that be’. See what you think.

Technorati Tags: anthropology, elaine morgan, the aquatic ape, water apes

image courtesy of mptvimages.com

Coming up to yet another birthday, I am ever more mindful of the passage of time.
So when I read the latest on Dark Matter and Dark Energy and their connection with time, I became just a little interested.
Spanish Professor Jose Senovilla proposes that we have all been fooled. The expansion of the universe is not accelerating. The reality is that time itself is slowing down and will eventually stop!
I know this is a lot to swallow, but on further reading the idea does have some merit. With Dark Energy and Dark Matter continuing to be elusive, this could be the break-through everyone is looking for.

New Scientist Magazine
Daily Telegraph

Technorati Tags: astrophysics, cosmology, dark energy, dark matter